the timboucher experience

Part of the reason I’m looking so much at this Emerging Church stuff lately is that it’s very similar to what I write about, with one important exception: the centrality of Jesus. My work on Story-Systems in particular is all about systematically deconstructing and reconstructing stories, both religious and secular, and through that process, finding meaning for your own life. I happen to see the Christian story as one of many possible choices to which you can apply this approach.

Christians, obviously, do not see it as “just another story,” and I’m reprimanded for this quite frequently via email from visitors to my site. But it is something of a misperception. I don’t think the story of Jesus is any less important just because I think other stories can also be potentially very significant for us. But still, I just can’t bring myself to say that the Jesus story is the “Greatest Story Ever Told” and that it trumps everything else.

I often wonder why and how people are able to do see it as such. Perhaps it has to do with simplification. That is, its easier just to settle down with one symbol than to combine them all. This essay on the social “Law of the Monkey” also has a useful insight, I think. It talks about how there’s only a finite number of people which your brain can biologically keep track of (the “monkeysphere”), and everyone outside that group becomes either a statistic or an enemy.

That’s one of the ingenius things about the big-time religions, by the way. The old religious writers knew it was easier to put the screws to a stranger, so they taught us to get a personal idea of God in our heads who says, “no matter who you hurt, you’re really hurting me. Also, I can crush you like a grape.”

Similarly, I think if you’re trying to focus your psycho-spiritual energy, for most people, it’s easier just to put all your eggs into one symbolic basket. In this case, Jesus. And while you’re at it, why bother sniffing around for more outlandish or arcane figures to carry your archetypal contents when you have one who’s ready-made, with a long history and broad social usage. This way, you can have a built-in community of people who are operating under the same psychic system as you. Of course, this cuts both ways though, since it means that a common broadly used story-system can then be used to control vast numbers of people by pushing symbolic buttons. Evidence for this is all too apparent in contemporary American culture.

In fact, a ready analogy for understanding why it’s useful to have such a commonly recognizable personality or face attached to something can be found in George W. Bush. At this point, just as many people are basically familiar with how he looks, what he stands for, and his basic story as are familiar with the Jesus story. For people who dig what Bush is doing (idiots, in other words) he acts as a symbolic carrier. And for people who hate him, he’s a catalyst and a vessel. Technically, a great deal of the bad shit that is going on now has been going on for years and years. But now suddenly that counter-culturalists have such a ready symbolic figure, it’s helped to launch the opposition much farther than it was able to get without him.

In any event, this is the sort of thing that requires more thought and discussion. I just wanted to put it on the table early in the game while I’m trying to wrap my mind around the implications of what these Emerging Church people are all about.

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