Signs of Spiritual Maturity Part 2: Complexity & Empathy

"However, we speak wisdom among those who are mature, yet not the wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing."

-- 1 Corinthians 2:6

Complexity & Empathy

This week we continue our Maturity Series with Father Ron Rolheiser's second sign of maturity or Christlikeness:

“Be willing to carry more and more of life's complexities with empathy.”

NAGGING QUESTION: WHY NOW?

But before we discuss this, I want to address a nagging question I've had and maybe you have as well. Anyone who reads or watches the news knows the world is a crazy place these days. We have two horrible wars raging, the US Presidential election threatening to be thrown into total chaos, and countless chaotic happenings in the lives of people all over the globe. The culture wars are raging and saying we live in a VUCA world doesn't need to be argued like it once did. At the same time, most of us go about our days like normal. We go to work, eat our meals, watch movies, spend time with friends, watch our kids play sports, celebrate holidays, pay our bills, minister to those God puts in our sphere of influence using the gifts we have, and generally live our lives. We find ourselves in a strange dynamic and here I am writing letters each week about maturing in Christ. Is this really relevant? I think so.

I pray you agree. In fact, I see the topics I'm covering as just what our world needs. What could be more important than people being little Jesuses in their worlds? My conviction is that God invites us to make space to encounter Him because this is the only way to be changed and to bring change. If you are someone or have been around someone who mirrors Jesus, then you know what I'm saying here. Therefore, I'll keep writing and hopefully keep encouraging more and more of us to enjoy Jesus, to be with Him, to experience His love, and to let it flow through us to the world. We are called above all to love God and our neighbor. Becoming like Jesus means we are doing this more and more. It comes from experiencing His love. This series is an opportunity to take that idea and create many small steps to help us move into a preferred future in which God's will is done on earth through our lives by His grace. Now, let's look at complexity and empathy.

COMPLEXITY

With technology making the world smaller and more connected the level of complexity we encounter has increased exponentially. When I write about complexity, I am referring to a concept that has received much attention in recent decades. This video of the Cynefin Framework is very helpful for understanding the idea. If you want to learn more, I recommend this article on Complexity Theory. To oversimplify it, the move from simple to complicated to complex can be thought of as a combination of the number of possible paths to a solution versus agreement on the correct path.

Examples will hopefully help:

SIMPLE: If my oven stops working it is complicated for me, but quite simple for the repairman who comes to fix it and follows the best practice. He takes off the cover, opens the control panel, uses his diagnostic tools, and determines the problem. He then orders the part, replaces it, and voila! the oven works again. That is considered a simple, technical challenge with clear best practices to solve it. The number of ways to fix it are limited and the agreement on how to do it is high.

COMPLICATED: If we choose a challenge with more possible paths to a solution and less agreement on how to solve it, we move into the complicated dimension. Perhaps for many of us, maintaining a healthy nutrition program would fall into this category. It involves understanding my personal preferences and allergies or sensitivities, understanding the basics of health and nutrition, understanding my budget both in relation to finances and time, and then making it work within my family ecosystem. This is not simple but for most of us, it is not complex either. I can follow good practices and although there is not total agreement, I feel good about what I'm doing.

COMPLEX: Now, if we move to a complex, adaptive challenge we enter the world of emergent practices. I would put parenting in this bucket. Raising a child from birth to full, healthy maturity is no doubt a complex challenge. The paths are numerous, and a quick search of parenting books shows how little agreement there is on the best way to do it. The variables to consider are countless. Parenting is all about doing and adapting as we discover how to move forward by the grace of God and none of us get it perfectly right. We just do the best we can.

Hopefully, this elucidates the concept of complexity a bit, and you are ready to continue this journey. It is probably a bit of overkill, but I find that people often want to make everything simple because they don’t have a category for truly complicated or complex issues. We worship an infinite God for whom the most complex challenge is a piece of cake but for us, His creatures, complexity is real and recognizing that is part of His glory and our humbling. And with that we can continue addressing how this relates to maturity.

EMPATHY

We see the complexity in the world and recognize no simple cause and effect but a host of variables and a fog of movements making the idea of understanding everything farcical. In the same way we look inward to our own hearts and recognize a similar complexity in which live pride and lust and greed mixed with the image of God and dignity and a "delighting in God's law" in our most inward parts (Romans 7:22), and this intersection creates empathy in us. The mature can feel the tension, feel the anxiety, know we can't fix it all, be held by God and each other in that realization, recognize and accept our finite limits, and connect deeply with, i.e. empathize, with others.

Diving deeper into this idea of being part of the problem, of feeling the tensions of the world and our own inward complexity, this wishing everything was simple, we are reminded of C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity showing how this makes clear that we are not yet in our true home. We want something we don’t have because we were made for something more. We all experience this. We all know a restlessness, a lack of peace, an inner tension because true satisfaction won't come fully in this life. This makes us empathetic. As we mature this moves us to be okay with not being perfect and even with not being okay. At a funeral recently my pastor said, "It's okay to not be okay." This is true every day. Rolheiser writes, "We carry the infinite inside ourselves. We are Grand Canyons without a bottom. Nothing, short of union with all that is, can ever fill in that void. To be tormented by complexity and restlessness is to be human. To make our peace with that is to come to peace, and we are mature to the degree that our own restlessness is no longer the center of our lives." (Sacred Fire, pg. 251)

SUMMATION

Thus, to sum up using different language and hopefully making it simple (see what I did there?), one sign of maturity is a growing peace and humility with our lack of control, and a corresponding connection with other humans as we recognize we are all in the same boat.

"Stop trying to change reality by attempting to eliminate complexity."

-- David Whyte