“As If” I Were Blogging

September 29, 2011 by Spencer J Smith

It’s often surprising to me that I’m not more artistically inclined. I had a great great uncle who was a cartoonist by trade. But apparently that gene was recessive or something because I didn’t get it. It’s strange though because I like to oversimplify my life into snapshots. You would think I would make a natural photographer. My close friends chide me for this. I do it with just about everything. It’s part of the reason why I crush so hard. (I haven’t really brought this up before, but I do, in fact, crush hard.) I latch on to a specific moment or a specific picture of a girl, and I construct a whole ideal and romantic story surrounding that moment or picture. It’s not entirely based on reality.

It’s not surprising, then, that I’ve always had a very definite picture in my head of my adult life. Now don’t laugh. It sounds idyllic and stereotypical and stuff, but it’s all that I really want.

This is what future me looks like. It's not a golden retriever, but everything else is pretty spot on.

I have an image of me age 30 or so. Back when I was still in high school this picture involved me being taller, maybe 5’10” or something, but at this point, I don’t think that’s going to happen. But I am a little more filled out. 30-year-old me is a regular attendee at his gym. He’s not body builder big but he’s got arms bigger than pencils. He has short hair and his skin is clear. He’s clean shaven. He’s wearing a flannel. It’s brisk outside, and he’s in the middle of a field. It’s fall and on all sides of the field are tees that are changing color. Some of the leaves are falling into the field. And there’s a golden retriever. And that dog loves 30-year-old me. And that’s it. That’s my picture of the future.

I like to live “as if” this future is true. It certainly seems attainable. This guy Hans Vaihinger constructed a whole philosophy around this “as if” thing in the 1930s. He said that because we can’t ever really know for sure what’s going on, we behave “as if” our constructs of the world are true. The psychologist Alfred Adler thought that we develop psychological problems when the “as if” of our constructs doesn’t match up with what’s really going on.

The thing about the snapshots is that they contain a lot more than they appear to. In my picture of the future, I know that the flannel-wearing 30-year-old is a good man. He cares about a lot of people, and they all know that he cares about him. Maybe he has kids who he wisely teaches. Maybe he has a wife who he loves selflessly. Maybe he has a career where he influences a lot of people or maybe he has a career where he gets to have close relationships with a few really awesome people. But I know he’s good. I know that he reads a lot, watches old movies, goes to concerts, and hasn’t played a video game since college. I know that he writes. I know that he loves God and wisely shows it.

It’s interesting because I know that he has all of these traits. I don’t perceive him “as if” he has all of these traits.

In philosophy 101 one of the first things you learn is the “is-ought” fallacy. It says that we cannot get morality or normative claims directly from descriptions of the world. Just because there is violence in the world, for instance, doesn’t mean there should be. I think Vaihinger’s “as if” is more a descriptive than a normative claim. It’s no secret that most people act “as if” the world they have created is true. But I don’t think it’s the way it has to be or even should be. What if, instead of acting as if I would one day become that person in my picture of the future, I knew that I am that person?

What are you acting “as if” is reality that you could be making a reality instead?

Unconditional Friendship

September 27, 2011 by Spencer J Smith

My parents always used to tell me that I had to be a friend to have friends. I always thought that advice was pretty lame. Popular kids had friends because people wanted to be their friends, not because they were friendly. No one wanted to be my friend, I argued. I was perfectly nice and polite and thoughtful but no one wanted to be my friend. But then I started befriending people who had a lot of friends, and I realized that they have a lot of friends precisely because they are great friends, themselves. Parents 1, Spencer 0.

Friendship is such a slippery thing. We’ve been reading this guy in my Medieval English class named Aelred of Rievaulx. The last thing Aelred ever wrote was this dialogue called Spiritual Friendship. I think that’s pretty cool because Aelred didn’t die suddenly. He kind of died of old age so he knew it was coming, and yet, he chose to compose his last piece of writing on friendship. Up to this point, ‘Red (yeah, me and ‘Red are on a nickname basis) had written histories or traditional spiritual treatises. So it was kind of a departure for him too. The really cool thing about ‘Red is that people really liked him. And who better to write a piece on friendship than someone who is well liked?

Does't 'Red look friendly?

In Book Three of Spiritual Friendship two of Father Aelred’s students are giving him a hard time about a friend who he has that does some questionable things. They ask ‘Red how it is that he continues to be his friend even though this friend has a temper every once in a while. Aelred just so lovingly says to them, “once I had received him as a friend, he could never lose my love.” I love that. I love it for two reasons. 1. It is so very contradictory to what I do and 2. It is what love is.

This is so not how I treat friendship. If someone is hard to get along with, if we fight every once in a while, if we have tough conversations, I just give up on the relationship. I find new people (or, more accurately, let new people find me), and I move on with my life. But the problem with that is that when I stop treating that person like a friend, I am assuming that I am a perfectly agreeable person to get along with. And that’s just not true. I’m a pain in the butt to get along with. I complain constantly; I behave selfishly; and about one day a week I skip showering. I am extremely difficult to get along with, but thankfully, there are some people who show me some grace. And they are all beautifully wonderful people. And so when I stop talking to a friend, I’m basically saying, “Hey, I know you showed me grace a ton in the past, but I’m not willing to do the same for you so don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” And that’s wonderfully horrible.

But grace is a really important component of what love really is. It’s a choice. It’s a verb. And people sometimes understand this with romantic relationships but almost no one ever thinks about it with friendship. We can choose to love our friends even when they are being difficult. I think that gets really hard because we don’t want to give something to someone that he or she isn’t going to return. (This is part of the reason why ‘Red thinks we should choose friends wisely.) We want to know that the time we put into a relationship is going to be returned. I don’t think we can do that though. I think we have to love first when it comes to friends.

Dancing a Sacred Song

September 18, 2011 by Spencer J Smith

I like to look around in places where we aren’t supposed to notice other people. One of my favorite places to look around is church. People do surprising things at churches. The only churches I’ve ever gone to regularly are contemporary, postmodern types where it’s not really clear what denomination anyone is. I can’t really see myself being happy anywhere else. I am too much of a pluralist to find denominational churches appealing. And one of the pluses of non-denominational churches is that they typically have really good contemporary music. I’m not much of a singer so I really like worship bands that are loud. That way the loudness can kind of drown out all of my self-conscious thoughts about being a bad singer. Plus, I just like hearing music that sounds like music I might hear on the radio. It makes it feel like I might be worshiping all the time, not just on Sundays when the worship team is leading the congregation in Psalms.

Anyway, the best time to look around at church is while everyone is singing. Everyone’s kind of into their own thing. I imagine if you were some sort of psychologist and knew what all the signals meant, you could really tell a lot about people based on what they do while they are supposed to be singing at church. Some people are spending time with God. Others are doing what they think makes them look like they are spending time with God. There are a couple of people who are more concerned with what their neighbor is doing. Some dudes are standing with their arms crossed. They can’t even soften up at church. Parents are busy trying to keep their kids from going somewhere they shouldn’t, which always kind of strikes me as silly because one of the best things about worshiping at church is when one of the small kids breaks away from her parents.

She never really goes anywhere. She just stays there right in front of her parents and starts to dance. And it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful because of the simplicity of the thing. She doesn’t comprehend all of the metaphysical things we are taught to think about when we are worshiping – raise your heart to God, let the words be a prayer to God, praising God as a community is important, and all that sort of thing. Instead, she hears music, and she dances. She probably knows that she is in God’s house and that God loves her very much. And so for her, it’s kind of like dancing in front of her grandparents. And it kind of makes me think that we spend all of this time stressing out about God’s will, and we really shouldn’t. All of that stressing out could be avoided if we just started dancing. We won’t always get it right. But that’s okay because God has our back. Sometimes the little girl tries to climb up on the pastor’s chair on the stage, and at that point, her parents have to lovingly tell her to come back.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: