How to Live Well in the World, Pt. 1
Speculating on “Imagine Otherwise”
By Bernardo Michael, Professor of History at Messiah University.
The multiple crises afflicting the world today have triggered calls to imagine the world anew through the unfettered pursuit of vocation, cultivate new habits of the mind, and design sustainable projects of living and liberation. Such calls for reimagination are also increasingly concerned with promoting greater equity, inclusion, accountability, lament, and repair in self, society, and the world. Among Christian communities there is greater awareness of the need to understand better, for example, the constitutive role of race, mental health, discipleship, and leadership in church and society. In fact, these are four focal areas of concern for the Center for Asian American Christianity (CAAC). Thought leaders and influencers confidently assert that if we could get this right through sheer introspection and hard work, then surely, we would succeed in creating a better world. To accomplish this, we acquire knowledge, craft mission and identity statements, design strategic plans, and erect institutions that chart pathways forward into the world. While these are certainly worthy goals, these interventions do not give enough consideration to a set of preconditions that seem to be at work in everything we think and undertake. Namely: All human efforts to imagine and live in the world are constrained by the fact that they possess only a limited understanding of themselves and the world they live in? That is, our efforts to live out our vocations are shaped not just by our capacity to think and act, but also by an inability to discern the complex underside of forces that shape us and the world we live in. This is an unacknowledged dilemma that human beings have to endure throughout the course of their lives.
Knowing and Not Knowing Ourselves
Such questions are not entirely new or novel; they are quite old. Several writers have commented on them. In Psalm 139 King David captures this dilemma quite well. He notes that only God possessed this full knowledge of humans, both of what we know and don’t know about ourselves:
Lord, you have examined me. You know me. You know when I sit down and when I stand up. Even from far away, you comprehend my plans. You study my traveling and resting. You are thoroughly familiar with all my ways. There isn’t a word on my tongue, Lord, that you don’t already know completely. You surround me—front and back. You put your hand on me. That kind of knowledge is too much for me; it’s so high above me that I can’t reach it.
He ended the Psalm with an exhortation:
Examine me, God! Look at my heart! Put me to the test! Know my anxious thoughts! Look to see if there is any idolatrous way in me, then lead me on the eternal path!— Psalm 130: 1-6, 23-241
In the same spirit, St. Augustine (354-430CE), the Bishop of the North African city of Hippo observed: “I shall therefore confess both what I know of myself and what I do not know. For even what I know about myself I only know because your light shines upon me; and what I do not know about myself I shall continue not to know until I see you face to face and my dusk is noonday.”2 More recently, the feminist novelist Virginia Woolf once wrote, “I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.”3 These writers were conscious of the fact that humans live their lives at the intersection where knowing and unknowing meet.
On a very personal level, this is an astounding insight that I could have better acknowledged and incarnated in my own life. For example, in a world awash with patriarchal forces, I wasn’t very conscious of my own deep-seated investments in them. There were no survey instruments, Kelly’s Blue Books, or mirrors conveniently available to assist in auditing the power exerted by such forces in my biography, family, community, church, and nation. Some of these forces were ancient, at work for millennia, that were produced, reproduced and transformed over generations by faithful foot-soldiers like me. As an educator, administrator, churchgoer, family person, friend, and life-long learner, I realized that while I was equipped to accrue knowledge and skills in the world, there was no clearly laid out pathway to gain knowledge about the ignorance about myself that I seemed to be perpetually hosting in my life. However, opportunities to travel on such a road to self-discovery would present themselves. My own journeys of geographical and mental mobility, movement, and migration certainly helped me question long held and even cherished assumptions. They drew me outward, beyond myself presenting valuable opportunities to learn, unlearn, and relearn. Yet, the uncharted world of my ignorance was always there, resisting any easy mapping by the formal and even credentialed knowledge I had acquired during my life. In this way, my ignorance about self and the world has persisted informing my efforts to live a meaningful life. Amid this, I could only cling to the hope that God still remembers how humans suffer from a historically induced amnesia and forgetfulness about who they are and where they come from. As authors Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie remind us; “You remember me when I am a stranger to myself and an outsider at my own address. God, bring me home.”4 Indeed, his prayer can be a source of hope and inspiration.
Inward Journey for Better Living in the World
As migrants we travel outwards into the world—over time and space, from our past to our present, across cultures, nations, and expressions of belonging. We are all also called to be migrants in our own inward journeys. On this road too, there are boundaries to cross, in-betweenness to experience, borderlands to inhabit that take us outside the comfort of familiar mental landscapes, received wisdom, and travel to the edges of ourselves. We are not just life-long learners, but life-long travelers as well. What Pico Iyer noted about the value of travel might apply to our inward life as well when he wrote, “Travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty… The most valuable Pacifics we explore will always be the vast expanses within us, and the most important Northwest Crossings the thresholds we cross in the heart.”5 As a people of faith, Christians are called to explore the diverse and dimly-lit terrains of their heart while drawing on the light provided by their faith. Henri Nouwen put it in this way: “I am more and more convinced that we will find the peace and joy of Christ when we let him truly enter into the deepest places of our heart, especially those places where we are afraid, insecure, and self-rejecting”6 There are no readily available maps for undertaking this kind of inward journeying. It also comes with no easy guarantees. But undertake it we must. In faith.
For a community of faith, this puzzle about the opacity of the self and the world raises important questions for leaders and the laity. For instance, how can one be true to one’s faith in the face of these limits to our pronouncements and interventions in the world? Or, on the other hand, can this uncertainty offer new possibilities for living where we are slower to judge, a little less confident in our assertions, and more willing to listen and learn from others including those marginalized and discordant voices located beyond the edges of ourselves.7 Acknowledging and working through what we can only see “in part” (1 Cor 13: 9, CEB) could help us to be better positioned to “imagine otherwise” in ways that offer more truthful possibilities for living. This means our journey outward into the world must be accompanied by a similar journey inward where we come to acknowledge our gifts as well as those foibles, limitations, anxieties, and ignorance that have shaped our lives, especially as legacies from our past now compounded by the experiences of our lifetime. Indeed, this is a dilemma all humans must inherit, inhabit, endure, and pass on as part of the historical burden of living in the world.
Cultivating a Critical Historical Consciousness
One response to the quandaries outlined in this piece is the cultivation of a critical consciousness that is historically informed. Again, this is not a new insight. Other writers have commented on this. The philosopher Charles Taylor put it this way: “Our past is sedimented in our present, and we are doomed to misidentify ourselves, as long as we can’t do justice to where we come from.”8 Yet, examining our past is not as easy or self-evident as it seems. The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote that the “starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.”9 Discovering the traces of what remains hidden from our conscious thoughts, without a guide-book but with the help of God, might be necessary task to undertake if we are to become fully human. Cultivating such a critical consciousness might bring humans closer to their fully authentic selves in Christ. However, we don’t acknowledge enough the need for such a heightened sensitivity to the deposit of history, within ourselves and the world in all its difficult-to-grasp complexity. As a people of faith, aren’t we called to exhibit a growing awareness of how the past has shaped our self and our world? The American writer James Baldwin was keenly aware of the need to recognize the formative role of history in our lives. Like The Matrix of Hollywood fame, he saw its ubiquitous presence all around him. He reminded his readers that “the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciouslycontrolled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.”10 Baldwin’s observation is a telling reminder that the past is never dead but an active agent at work in our lives as we work our way into the future. On a very practical level, such an awareness can apply to almost every sphere of human activity. At the level of the individual, there is so much we inherit from our family of origin, stretching back many generations—some known and so much more unknown. This can be traced all the way back to the experiences of our childhood and life thereafter—inherited dispositions, socialization, our level of emotional and cultural intelligence, traumas endured, and other experiences—that while not always visible remains at work in our lives, relationships, and their legacies. This generic condition applies to all humans irrespective of their cultural or national backgrounds, identities, educational levels, or age.
This insight can be scaled up to apply to more complex human interactions. Take for example the field of modern education which in its formal and informal expressions touches so many human lives. In our varied roles as parents, partners, pastors, leaders, educators, scientists, and public officials, we are called not just to be teachers, but learners as well. More specifically we all are called to the task not just of learning—but lifelong unlearning as well. We use a host of terms such as giving up old habits, interrogating long-held beliefs and practices, or decolonizing our minds and worlds of those traces that prevent us from living a full, questioning, truthful, and authentic lives. Such a critical consciousness cannot be cultivated through the mere acquisition of knowledge. It calls for a certain stance in the world that is willing to question the dominant narratives, both known and unknown, at work in our lives. Take the term decolonization, frequently alluded to these days. The view of some writers on the stance needed for decolonizing education might be useful here. They write:
Yet, in education, the righting of wrongs is often understood as dependent on more knowledge and better analyses. The assumption may be that, with more and better information, we will be able to engineer something to right the wrongs we have identified. But what if these wrongs are not a result of ignorance but of something more collective and much deeper that we are all implicated in? What if the ‘righting of wrongs’ requires some wronging of perceived rights, like: displacing ourselves from the center of the world; interrupting our desires to look, feel and 'do' good; exposing the source and connections between our fears, desires, and denials; letting go of our fantasies of certainty, comfort, security, and control; recognizing and affirming (rather than disavowing) that we are already “entangled, vulnerable, open, non-full, more than and less than” ourselves (Moten, 2014); and reaching the edge of our knowing and being - and jumping with our eyes closed. What would decolonization look like, then?”11
The need for such critical consciousness can be life-giving, because it tempers our quest for knowledge that exercises control with the realization that not everything can be known or is knowable and that is something we must learn to live with. To inhabit that kind of life can also be a source of sobering insight.12 Cultivating such a critical consciousness goes alongside a decentering of oneself, surrendering control, acknowledging one’s limitations and vulnerabilities, and being generally less anthropocentric than we have always been. The entanglements of never fully knowing ourselves and the worlds we inhabit, the life-long pursuit of inward journeying, and the cultivation of critical historical consciousness could create new synergies for faithful living. Such journeys cannot be undertaken without incurring some cost, both individual and corporate. They may hold some possibilities for imagining otherwise intergenerational communities of faith. These themes will be explored in the second instalment of this writing.
Dr. Bernardo Michael is a Professor of South Asian and World History in the Department of History Politics and International Relations, Messiah University where he also directed the Center for Public Humanities and the Office of Diversity Affairs. He has lived and worked in India, Nepal, and the United States. He is currently working on a biography of the Anglican educator, mystic, and activist Charles Freer Andrews (1871-1940).
All references are from the Common English Bible.
St. Augustine, Confessions, Trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1961), 211. Emphasis in the original translation.
Virginia Woolf, Selected Works of Virginia Woolf (Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 2005), 676.
Kate Bowler & Jessica Richie, The Lives we Actually Live (New York: Convergent Books, 2023), 127.
Pico Iyer, “Why we Travel,” in The Best American Travel Writing, ed., Paul Theroux (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company), 142-151. The quotes are from p. 145, 151.
Henri J. M. Nouwen, You are the Beloved: Daily Meditations for Spiritual Living (New York: Convergent Books, 2017), 273.
Such questions are explored in greater detail in Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 29.
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), 324. The emphasis is mine.
James Baldwin, “The White Man’s Guilt,” Ebony (1965), 47. The emphasis is mine.
V. Andreotti, S. Stein, C. Ahenakew, & D. Hunt, “Mapping interpretations of decolonization in the context of higher education,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol. 4, no. 1 (2015), 21-40. The quote is from pp. 36-37.
Here see A. Sium, C. Desai, & E. Ritskes, “Towards the ‘tangible unknown’: Decolonization and the Indigenous future. Decolonization: Indigeneity,” Education & Society, Vol. 1, no. 1 (2012), i-xiii.
My comments..this is the second attempt..the first one was much better but can't recall ..lost in oblivion now...👇
For me the expression-- 'Unacknowledged dilemma' sums up the whole article...
Nobody can be more honest when he speaks of such a dilemma, a testimony of being brutal to one self, bordering almost upon self flaggelation of what the monks and ascetics did.
This article has been bordering and hovering between sheer academic literature and a glorious mix of journalistic writing which reflects on the towering talent of the writer himself.
Professor Bernardo Michael's words illuminate one's ties with religion but casts the genre itself in new light pushing the frontiers of human thinking into new boundaries that eventually seek people like us to evaluate ourselves and rethink with sheer honesty what lies eventually in the inner recess of ourselves... seemingly simple but a labyrinthine task we could say.
This Dr Bernardo handles with utmost ease and allows his words to produce that magic and shake us all from the comfort of our self- contained moral universes we had all built around our own religious and ethical systems. Eventually, it's an open hearted display of what lies in the crux of our hearts if we all bother to check em out. Replete with legendary domain experts Dr Bernardo has quoted..all but bolster the central theme of the seemingly surreal subject of "How to live well in the world".( Part-1)