Ask A Wikkid Person

Dear Wikkid Person,

Just read your blog and the answer to the last question sounded so right. My problem is that I don't know what I actually like. I'm a brain washed depressive trying to get deprogrammed, but I automatically turn to legalistic rules I can't keep whenever I'm stressed or under pressure.
Hopefully Ex-Robot

Dear HER,

   This is a bit hard to respond to because it's more of a situation/life-long struggle than a question.  I can certainly commiserate and say a few things, though.

   "I don't know what I actually like."  In my experience, controlling groups raise people to never really grow up to be themselves in the first place.  You might have some growing to do, before you really start to want things to your full capacity, and have the ability to know about it.  You might still be "closed down."
   I think self-abnegation/erasure is a big part of any groupthink.  Unique individuals, with unique needs, responses and ideas can seem very threatening to systems.  For one thing, the stuff that's intended "for everyone" is revealed to perhaps not be.  For another, individuals may really need other stuff instead.
    "You got chocolate ice cream that's lactose free? I'm lactose intolerant."
   "Ice cream?  I don't know about lactose intolerance, but we've got twenty flavours!  (of different kinds of vanilla.) How could you not be satisfied with that..."
    You might need stuff the system in question may not even be able to provide.  It comes down to the old "Why are you different?"  "Why are you the same?" standoff.   Is is possible you don't like many things?  (Yet?)

Trials
If you're like me, you weren't raised to just go around liking things.  And I was also raised to not go around simply trying things.  "Things" were dangerous.
   But how do you ever learn what you like if you never try things to see what they're like?

   We certainly were not raised that it was important to know what we liked, and certainly not that we were to follow our dreams, wish on stars, or generally go get the desires of our hearts, with all our might.
  This, despite various scriptures which talk about good people who knew exactly what they liked, passionately pursuing that.  Hannah didn't bow to God's "decision" to not send her any children.  Not any more than men after Cain "bowed" to God's curse that the ground wouldn't bring forth the fullness of its fruit, but would take work. They put in the work, instead. Hannah didn't meekly accept her childlessness as "from God." She went and earnestly besought Him. And then: wham, bam, thank you. Sam!(uel)  The apostle Paul, for another example, wrestles and struggles with the Holy Spirit as to where he himself prefers to travel, and who he wants to visit with.  We don't know how often Paul got what he wanted, finding out that God had wanted exactly the same thing too.  We only hear about when Paul was still angling to try to, any way he could, get what he knew he wanted.  And he's unapologetic about it. As unapologetic as Jacob wrestling the Angel of the Lord and Abraham trying to talk God out of demolishing Sodom and Gomorrah for being fat, smug and complacent.

   Oh, I know that in my group they love to preach against Paul's selfish, wilful, wayward foolishness, always wanting to go up to Jerusalem (we mainly read the bible to point out all the errors of the folks in there), but on a very real level, what's better:
-to be yourself, doing something others might suspect of being somewhat dubious which may perhaps not work out well in the end (but you're hoping it does),
   or
-not being yourself, not going after anything you want, and generally doing a lot of nothing? Being a talent buried in the ground?

Default Factory Settings

I think we all "return to default factory settings" under pressure.  Surprising what those are, sometimes.  I also think we come with "buttons" installed by the grownups of our childhood, so that others can push them, as they see fit.  All of this machine/robot imagery is apt, as much of what we wrestle with is actually knowing God as a Person, rather than a faceless human system which supposedly serves Him.  We wrestle with being the person God made us to be, rather than simply a cookie-cutter, "good/nice Christian" unperson.  We cannot serve God and also a committee lady who has high standards for what's "nice."

   I think the people in the bible were colourful individuals.  I don't think Peter, James, John, Jeremiah, Joshua, David, Solomon, Ezekiel or even Jesus himself were all kind of "blank," nor that they were even anything like one another.  I don't think they all walked around with slow, blank voices, movements and faces, like in bible movies and drawings.  I think they were men who argued, lost their tempers and cared deeply about things.  Men with passion.  I think God made them vividly themselves and any system which would have tried to wash away, to bleach out some of that "colour," would have been ruining His work. Tossing Javex on His tapestry, so to speak.

   The concept of "one size fits all," along with all of this mechanistic imagery, is very post-Industrial Revolution. The writers of the bible had certainly never seen societies in which our level of identicalness was even possible. We have machines which can in an hour, produce thousands of plastic bowls which can't be told apart from each other.  Our nails, boards, windows, mats, and so on, are all standardized.  Every loaf of sliced bread you can buy is going to have slices which fit any toaster you're going to buy.  Hot dogs come in standard lengths.  For the most part, hats and sunglasses come in only one size.

   It is that very industrialism, and the advent of the assembly line, that made the First World War:

a) possible

b) so efficiently, inhumanly bloody

   Yet it was still a pretty pointless war.  And now we're apt to apply industrialization and standardization to things like education, parenting, therapy and church.  We live in a time when everyone is "supposed" to be content, and equally well served by the system, or s/he is clearly defective and needs to be adjusted/calibrated/deleted.  We set up mechanized "Standards and Practices," policies to deal with individuals.  We use forms to deal with the unexpected. 

"You're different?  Fill out this form. Question one: I am different a) like Sam, b) like Tim or c) like Jessica."

 
My Programming
My own programming is pretty obvious.  It's seen in things like a pessimistic world view.  The assumption that we have to admit it's getting worse (it's getting wors(er) all the time).  The view that the world we live in hates us and our hearts and our efforts, and hates Jesus.  So if we talk to regular folk, we've been taught to expect that of course they will oppose us and certainly won't empathize or be helpful.  We been given the idea that Things Aren't How They're Meant to Be, but that you can't really improve that situation either, in any way at all.  The idea that we ourselves are evil and depraved and therefore need to have a religious system applied to our brains so as to erase the shamefulness that is our real selves.  The habit of making choices, not based on what would work or be a good idea, but on what would "look" most properly Christian to others.  What would send the right message.  The idea that if we feel a yearning in our hearts, that's bad and the thing to do is ignore and judge and sacrifice that yearning.  The idea that things which exist mainly to be fun, or beautiful, or pleasurable (or claim to be art or expressive) are at best a waste of time and resources, and at worse, self-indulgently evil.
    In a word: Puritanism. It's etched on my heart and is inscribed at the root of my brain stem.

    Looking back, it's not exactly like I "got rid of" Brethren/Puritan programming.  What I did was I had new perspectives and responses added to it.  It broadened out and needed to get larger and embrace more reality and more kinds of situations and people.  You add the ground meal to the stew into which the toxic gourds/vines got accidentally thrown in.  You already drank the Koolaid.  So you consume some charcoal to absorb the nasty stuff that's in there with the sweetness.  And you sweat through the process of surviving whatever toxic crap was poured into you before you were old enough to understand.
    Also, you redeem your past.  You pick up what was meant, but fallen short of, what people really thought was true or would work, and you do better. You make it work.  You view it as unfinished, well-meant but perhaps unworkable, idealistic stuff, and you keep developing it until it starts to work in 2014, for you.  You and God.  You do this together.

   Your roots remain your roots, as they should.  But if you believe in and know God, and see yourself as His work, you can expect Him to have you grow.  Grow more and more into yourself, the self He designed.  We grow from our roots, rather than ripping them up.  If you are an acorn planted in a small clay pot, you will bust it wide open, without really noticing.  Yet we were raised to think so strongly that God was out to erase our "self," and that our "self" was evil.  In my experience, God designed and uses our self.  To fulfil His purposes, He "needs" what He put into us, and is not best served by uniformity.  He makes us more different, rather than more the same, when He really goes to work on us.

Growth is Possible
C.S. Lewis wrote things which made me think that evil is most often about our not having been perfected, not having "arrived" where God intends, and less about us needing to be punished and burned away.  Evil is more about missing the mark.  Falling short. Immaturity. Weakness and lack of self-control. Foolishness and lack of perspective.
  And God can make us mature.  Make us grow stronger.  Increase our wisdom over time.

  God's not done.  With the human race.  Because if everything did suck (and everything doesn't suck, really, if we're honest), then even the simple process of getting a very clear idea of it all sucking, and understanding what exactly was wrong with it all, and what it was actually supposed to be, would be good.  You could make an excellent life's work just out of that.  Better than continuing on, lacking that perspective.
   And it's better than that.  God is not limited to just imparting that kind of awareness to us, in His efforts.  Yes, He makes manifest the shortcomings and deviations of the present.  But also, He sometimes makes His future intentions known, and they really do tend to come about, eventually.  We start to function as His agents.  We can do good.  Not just point at evil and walk away from it.  We can help.  And we can enjoy things.  Doing, making, recognizing, studying and enjoying good things.  I'd love to say I effortlessly engage in all of this good stuff every single day.  Can't.

Supplements

As to supplementary programming: Talking to lots of people with other ideas, and reading stuff, really helped me.  Especially stuff that I didn't end up agreeing with wholly.
   I didn't just open my mind and heart and get ready to believe absolutely anything, though.  That would have been just as dumb as closing up my mind and heart and getting ready to believe and feel nothing.  What are hearts and minds for?  So, I didn't set out to be someone who'd read this one book one time. I set out to become someone who knew that, as my students note in my habitual language, there are almost always a number of perspectives, a number of schools of thought; there is almost always missing information, a lack of certainty, and levels of complexity that aren't convenient for snap-decision, black and white side-taking.
   So I enriched my perspective with an awareness of how many different ways to see things there can be, and are.  Even to include that there are changes in how new people are seeing things, and to try to understand them and what they're up to.  Might not be all dangerous nefariousness.
    To fellow depressives and robots alike I say "feed your head."  Not the drugs that Jefferson Airplane probably meant in the song.  I mean feed your head (and heart) with knowledge and experiences.  With conversations.  With books and documentaries.  With trips  (again, I don't use that word the way Jefferson Airplane would) With people and their stories and lives.  With music and dance.  With lovingly crafted meals. Give your brain and heart something to process, stuff to chew on.  Be careful about nothing.  "Nothing" will kill you, if you allow yourself to drown in too much of it.  And being careful isn't Christian.  At all.  Do NOT sit in quiet rooms and let heart and head slowly starve for lack of fresh input. Starving them is killing your self.

   Which is a very long-winded way of saying "Yeah.  I hear you."

All the best,
...that Wikkid Person
(Officially certified Wikkid since 1998)