Awakening to Socialization
Have you seen all of the vigils this week for Ruth Bader Ginsburg?
The recently deceased Supreme Court Justice is being celebrated as a secular saint, of sorts, for her extraordinary career featuring a litany of accomplishments.
In light of her death, the controversial move to immediately replace her has turned up the temperature in an already heated election season - mixed with a raging pandemic, economic uncertainty, and an ongoing racial justice awakening and we’ve got a recipe for stress and anxiety that therapists tell us is running rampant.
So what’s the cure - and why is this affecting us this way?
Certainly these events are threatening.
But the argument can be made that at many times in history, equal if not worse times have been seen.
What I think is at play here is the high priority our society puts on these events. Obviously through our own interest, but spurred on by the media that we fuel, and born out in the ways we engage in our everyday conversations, we become persuaded by many voices that we must worry, we must be anxious, we must be stressed over possible outcomes. Thus, we are groomed to take current events as life-or-death, sink-or-swim, unavoidable threats that have huge consequences.
This is an ongoing socialization, that makes us who we are - thus influencing how we feel and react.
And what we’re reminded of here - is our need to resist that worldly socialization and more deeply embrace heavenly socialization.
This Sunday we’ll hear the fourth in a series of talks I’m giving on the theme of ‘Awakening.’
We’ve talked about how we awaken to love, awaken to gratitude, and last week, how we awaken to our humanity.
This Sunday we’ll look at awakening to those things around us that make us who we are - our socialization. These are the ways we are groomed, assimilated, and enculturated, by the influences around us that have both positive and negative effects.
This Sunday we will also hear some epic words from St. Paul, who tells us time and again, that we need to conform not to the topsy turvy world around us, but to God who is inside us.
When the world is a raging chaos all around, the words of Jesus bubble up assuring us to ‘Be not afraid,’ ‘Let your hearts not be troubled,’ and 'Do not worry about your life.’ The importance these words carry for us in is direct proportion to how much air time we give them on our inner radio station.
Or course I would never suggest we remove ourselves from deep engagement with worldly matters, that we cancel our newspapers, or trash our TVs - what I am suggesting is that we look at “how" and "by whom" we are being socialized.
Do we spend more time scrolling through the news than paging through the Bible? Do we give more attention to watching news than saying prayers? It is not up to the culture to tell us who we are and how to handle things - it’s God's job, that we share, as spirit-filled believers.
God is awakening us to the myriad of possibilities that await as we get more involved in forming and conforming ourselves to God's outlook, God's opinions, God's ways.
We are not to cling to the things of this world, but cling to God - because that’s truth and that’s life.
