See the current issue (Fall 2024) of Yale Divinity School’s theological journal at https://reflections.yale.edu – “A Listening Heart: Can We Temper Polarization?”
Editor’s Column: Undivided Attention
“Our fears are always more precise than our hopes.”—Paul Valery
The “American psyche”—what is that? Journalistic references to it abound, especially during a crisis. (In other words, all the time.) The collective national psyche is customarily characterized as the mass of raw contradiction and inflammation hidden beneath the suburban quiet. A scream of apocalypse against the reassuring public platitudes. Call it an MRI of the endless interior debate about American identity: Images jostle between the hysteria of the Salem witch trials and baseball’s field of dreams. The auction blocks of the slave economy and the platform politics of joy. James Earl Ray and James Earl Jones.
Rapturous, cruel, generous, wasteful, nihilistic, spiraling—whatever it is, the agitated national psyche gets poked every second by the provocations of social media and cable news. The delivery systems of hyper-partisanship operate with impressive efficiency, but they’re getting sloppy too. News hosts barely try to hide anymore their zest as they coddle our outrage at the latest bad news. They know it’s catnip for us and incredibly good business for them. Then, after announcing the latest breaking emergency, the latest infamy that demands our undivided attention, they go to a commercial break. Every six minutes. They treat us all like saps.
What do these twitchy conditions make of religious faith, discipleship, and God? The question doesn’t quite land. The flaying of our collective nerves—a sense of permanent crisis amid runaway inequality, the doubling down of corrupt or anarchic impulses—doesn’t want to be tamed or gummed up by creeds of moral restraint or self-searching or rumors of transcendence. The exploitation of emotional conflict has a momentum of its own. When religion stands in the way, the tactic is to bend the admonishments of faith to the psyche’s own rampaging purposes.
Even so, a permanent counterrevolution carries on—the perseverance of believers, the sacred imaginations of congregations. In a way, it’s David vs. Goliath all over again. The infrastructure of anxiety is vast, with its sleepless media ecology and endless scrolling. By contrast, the daily adventure of taking the gospel to heart, tenderly supporting each other, assembling cadres to do some good in the neighborhood or the nation and pass it on—all of that can look modest and piecemeal, no match for the corporate monoliths so eager for everybody’s time and automatic monthly payment.
Yet the dynamic of faith has a way of subverting the latest fatalism. Despite failings, congregations have prevailed against the odds from the beginning. They declare news of the dream of God on earth as it is in heaven—a vector of movement cutting through the self-defeat on the ground. Open the Gospel of Mark again and feel the wind in your face: right off the bat, the Jesus of history and faith is on the move, no time to lose, reaching out, gathering, repairing, confronting the era’s contradictions and sorrows in a narrative both blunt and cinematic.
“I find again that I am a prisoner of Hope,” writes the Rev. Stephen Ray ’93 M.Div., ’00 Ph.D. in this issue. “The Hope that shaped my life since first answering God’s call. A Hope that will not allow me to give up the fight for a better world in which all of God’s creation might flourish.”
Other Reflections writers here offer their own dispatches and insights in that spirit—speaking to the faith’s resilience, its resistance to all cliches of power and elitism, its heart attuned to exhausted minds, souls, and psyches.
Reflections editor Ray Waddle is the author of “This Grand Errand”: A Bicentennial History of Yale Divinity School (YDS, 2022).