Love is…an area of human operation almost impervious to reason and rationality, as rife with doubleness as any corner of human experience. Perhaps this is why writer Tim Kreider characterizes human beings as “sociopaths for love.” He knows that the desire to love and be loved is the single greatest motivator in human affairs and accounts for a great deal of our most absurd and nonsensical behaviors.
There is such a thing as authentic authenticity. It is simply not an active attribute; it’s more of a happy accident. You might call it a deeper set of emotional conditions. This kind of authenticity isn’t for sale, and if it were, no one would buy it. They wouldn’t buy it because it flows from defeat and surrender. It’s found on the other side of all attempts to “be” anything other than what we are. The radical acceptance of the accumulations of our lives is born in the giving up, the acknowledgement of the artifice.
I should now state directly a limitation that has been implicit for some time, that is, that gift exchange is an economy of small groups. When emotional ties are the glue that holds a community together, its size has an upper limit. The kinship network Carol Stack describes in the Flats numbered about a hundred people. A group formed on ties of affection could, perhaps, be as large as a thousand people, but one thousand must begin to approach the limit. Our feelings close down when the numbers get too big. Strangers passing on the street in big cities avoid each other’s eyes not to show disdain but to keep from being overwhelmed by excessive human contact. When we speak of communities developed and maintained through an emotional commerce like that of gifts, we are therefore speaking of something of limited size. It remains an unsolved dilemma of the modern world, one to which anarchists have repeatedly addressed themselves, as to how we are to preserve true community in a mass society, one whose dominant value is exchange value and whose morality has been codified into law.
This paragraph, like so many in Hyde’s book, is brimming with possible implications and potential lines of inquiry. As a Christian and churchgoer, though, I’m particularly interested in what implications there might be for that unique community we call the church. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how consonant Hyde’s description of the gift community is with the biblical vision of the church. Take, for instance, Paul’s description of the church in 1 Corinthians 12-14: “Gift exchange” would be exactly the right terminology for how Paul envisions Christians relating to one another within the body of Christ. (Of course, there has been fine work done on Paul’s understanding of gift and related notions of reciprocity.) But, as Hyde suggests here, there seems to be “an upper limit” to such communities, seeing as they’re held together by strong emotional ties. Does this mean that a local church cannot carry out its proper functioning beyond a certain size? Is it any coincidence that mega-churches have popped up in the same (American) soil that’s produced so much emphasis on “exchange value”? Indeed, to come at it from another angle: the New Testament often describes the church in familial language, pointing once more to a community bound by ties of affection. Such relational commerce is impossible to engineer through large-scale, top-down manipulation. But that hasn’t stopped many of us from trying…
Night Rain (2008) by Michael Mazur:
Fall Garden - 2 Chairs II (1977) by Michael Mazur:
Autumn (2000) by Michael Mazur:
Too often the church has let the world define the nature of the battle. If the foe is seen as communism or socialism, Christians are tempted to commit themselves uncritically to free enterprise. If the enemy is “dependent capitalism and neocolonialism,” Christians may fall prey to neo-Marxist ideology. If the foe is globalization, believers may turn isolationist or nationalist. If the danger is a point of doctrine, Christian turn orthodoxy into a bludgeon. If it is a specific behavior, conformity becomes a straitjacket.
An inflated estimation of human nature capsizes love for one’s neighbor. If you assume that people are basically levelheaded and evenhanded, they will exasperate you when they make odd and self-defeating decisions instead of virtuous ones. […]
Confusion and disappointment at another person’s behavior lead to judgment, judgment leads to anger, and anger leads to antagonism. Before you know it, the world has quietly divided into two groups: the honest, sensible people “like me” and the ignorant and foolish ones “over there.” The bifurcations multiply the further we travel from humility. We may even grow bitter at the world for its failure to conform to our notions of propriety.
I have preached nearly twenty years' worth of sermons at various churches across the country. With almost zero exceptions, the sermons that have garnered the most enthusiastic response—the ones that people remember years later—are the ones that assume the listener is suffering. No matter how poised the audience appears, talks on depression, betrayal, addiction, grief, loneliness, and greed resonate much deeper than those on more upbeat topics. In fact, the more you emphasize the hurts of life, the more people feel known and uplifted.
