I think we like to burden ourselves to feel important. I really don’t know how to preface this idea, and I don’t mean it as an insult: it feels like a natural impulse. I can sense it in my life and can see it in others, at times. You would be right to say, “Physician, heal thyself!”, yet I don’t think that diminishes the truth of the phenomenon.
Let me break it down a little bit. What do I mean by feeling important? The highest sense is that our lives have purpose and meaning. Properly ordered, it seems to me that feelings of purpose and meaning come from God. It is not unreasonable to suggest that someone who has no reverence for God cannot well understand their role in creation. God provides the omniscient context for our lives, so without that context, it is like a unit-less number: naked, meaningless, prone to having meaning assigned to it incorrectly.
There are lesser orders of feeling important. Self Actualization is a buzzword that I run into sometimes, and to my understanding it means that we are doing everything we want to do the way we want to do it. Absent a higher order–God’s divine context–self actualization can be for good or ill. Liberalism (in the classical sense) is the idea that anything anyone wants to do they should be able to do. So a hobo living on a park bench can be self actualized if he doesn’t want anything else. This is usually where third parties enter the Liberalism equation to say that he would want something else if he had more opportunity. Yadda yadda–that’s not what I want to get into here but I wanted to note that other people have a different idea of how you should be self actualized than your own idea of your own self actualization.
Continuing the descent down orders of importance, I would say about equal are ideas of vocation or responsibility. Vocation has a couple different meanings and everyone seems to have a different idea of how exactly vocations work. I am using it in the sense of “God’s calling” for us. We all have a universal vocation to holiness, for example, but not everyone will feel equally called to, say, serve the poor. An important thing about vocations is that there is a gap between what we feel called to do and what we are doing. Responsibility functions in a similar way, but I would contrast it by saying it’s the world’s calling for us. If you have kids, you are responsible for those kids–you cannot shirk that responsibility. There can be a gap between what you are responsible for and what you are behaving responsible for.
When someone has lots of responsibilities they sometimes feel important. When someone is fulfilling their vocation they feel important. When someone is self actualized they feel important. When someone believes in the intrinsic dignity of their own life as a unique and specific of God’s creations, they feel important.
Lets talk about burdening ourselves now. A responsibility is a kind of burden: having kids is an important responsibility, and it limits the way we live because we must order our lives around satisfying that responsibility well. It is possible to take on too many responsibilities. If you have kids, are president of the Rotary club, are on the Parish Council, coach your sons baseball team, and are in charge of the Planning Committee at work–you have a lot of responsibilities. When we do not feel important enough, we are tempted to add responsibilities, seek out vocations, more perfectly self actualize until we feel important.
When our time cannot fit any more obligations, whence can we take up burdens of importance? Now we arrive at the thing on my mind when I began: We take up mental burdens.
Mental burdens are a species of burden which we worry about but cannot do anything about. Politics, the stock market, sports drafts, corporate strategy–these are all things which occupy our minds and very few of us can do anything tangibly to influence. These are things which take no time to worry about and yet which cost us greatly in terms of energy. Now, I do not mean to suggest that feeling important is the only motivation for worrying about these things. There are infinitely many reasons to worry about them. The species that I am most susceptible to is this idea of feeling important.
How does worrying about politics, the stock market, sports drafts, or corporate strategy make us feel important? Lets simplify this with an analogy. In Politics, the stock market, sports, or Corporate strategy, your “tribe” can be winning or your tribe can be losing. You naturally want your tribe to win, and so worry about the performance of your tribe. Any action taken in any of those spheres I listed will either result in a win or a loss for your tribe. A win will result in your elation, because this is something you worry about and your tribe is winning. A loss will result in your depression, because this s something you worry about and your tribe is losing. When your tribe is winning, you are winning, and so you feel more important. When your tribe is losing, you are losing, and so you become outraged, and so you feel more important.
Scenarios: Governor Dingus raises taxes: If you want higher taxes, your tribe wins; If you don’t want higher taxes, your tribe loses. A company whose stock you own releases a new brand of widget: If the stock price goes up, your tribe wins; if the stock price goes down, your tribe loses. Your sports team plays in the national championship: If they win, your tribe wins; if they lose, your tribe loses. Your company opens a Springfield branch: If you think this is a good decision, your tribe wins; if you think this is a bad decision, your tribe loses.
In every one of those examples, a person would receive emotional whiplash from external factors controlling their peace.
It is very much like we are all our own kind of Atlas and we voluntarily take these burdens on to weigh us down. What meaning would Atlas have if he didn’t have the weight of the world on his shoulders? If we have a properly ordered dignity from God, we don’t need any extraneous material things to give our lives meaning and purpose. Laying down the burden of politics frees us from the emotional whiplash of changing political fortunes. Trusting in God–beyond that, abandoning ourselves to Divine providence–frees us from all Earthly concern.
And yet: Christ calls us to pick up our cross and follow him; to accept an easy yoke and a light burden. We can shrug and lay down the world, and when we pick up our cross find importance in the only thing that really matters: glorifying God through our lives.
AMDG
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 