Popping Bubbles

Reading Don’t Believe Everything You Think led me to consider deeply how much of our experience has nothing to do with reality, but rather with our manipulation of reality to suit who and what we are. 

Human beings need stability for existence—we need to create a firm foundation on which to built our lives. An integral part of that foundation is a set of assumptions and presumptions about how things work, why they work, and who works best within them. Collectively, we might call this conventional wisdom—the group think that guides so much of how we organize our various and assorted communities—home, neighborhood, work, church, etc. Anyone who spends any time examining conventional wisdom comes to the realization that much of it is wrong. The assumptions that seeming make sense actually make no sense whatsoever because they do not work the real human beings with whom they deal, but with our prejudices, judgments, and perspective about them. For instance, conventional wisdom may well buy into racial stereotypes—NBA team owner, Mark Cuban, recently got himself in a bit of hot water as he tried to say something good, but tangled himself in his own metaphors—he spoke what I think is a truth—all human beings work from some set of prejudices about the world around us. It is how we manage a world too large for us to fully comprehend and grasp. Mr. Cuban voiced his own predilections by saying that if confronted by a Black youth in a hoodie, he would cross to the other side of the road; and, likewise, if confronted by a white guy, fully tattooed with a shaved head, he would cross back to the other side. His judgments would lead him to flee the person before him. His point his correct, but the images earned a rebuke from those who challenged the conventional wisdom of the assertions as not dealing with the real people the images represented. 

Fair enough.

But that does not empty Mr. Cuban’s point of its essential validity. As we construct the architecture in which we exist, we all make assumptions, judgments, and assertions that do not deal with the world outside ourselves, but with the existential need to create a bubble in which to live that provides safety, security, and that longed-for stability within the world. We constantly create a safe place in which to live, move, and have our being. 

Now, because all human beings do this all the time, the stage is set for trouble. Ever watched soap bubbles interact with each other? They don’t play well with others! Bubbles bounce into one another, popping. As we enter the world, we are going to interact with others; in that interaction, we are going to run into one another; and our carefully crafted assumptions are going to be obliterated. For instance, as a pastor, I work within the confines of a theological structure built upon my own comprehensions, understandings, and working aphorisms that capture who God is, who we are before God, and what God expects of us as we learn to coexist. As I make my way within my congregation, each of them challenges those assumptions. A good many of them pop my bubble routinely.

Now, the first reaction to having your bubble burst, if you are like me, is to get angry, hurt, or offended by the popper. Mr. Cuban popped a good many bubbles with his expression of a human universality that a lot of us would like to pretend isn’t true—we are too advanced to be prejudiced, we have grown beyond judgments, and so on—he blew that bubble to pieces. So, immediately the denunciations began. That was far easier than dealing with the world without the bubble.

There is another response to having one’s bubble burst—awakening.

It has taken me decades to learn, but I have come to appreciate those who pop my bubble, for I have discovered that in that instant when the bubble is burst, clarity is there in its most powerfully profound form. In that one instant, we can see things as they actually are, freed from the carefully wrought assumptions we make. We can see ourselves as we are; we can see others as they are; we can perceive creation as it is; and we can suddenly find God. 

That last point is especially powerful to me. St. John of the Cross once asked his students, “How do you define God? How do you describe God?” Many, many definitions, delineations, and descriptions arose. St. John then intoned, “None of those are God! They are all expressions of yourselves!” Pop went the bubbles! Most of us would also say we have a working definition of God, but St. John’s point is that all of those are part of that carefully crafted conventional wisdom—they are all expressions of what we want God to be, rather than God as God is. St. John argued that the closer we draw to God, the less defined God becomes, and this is not a bad thing, but a wondrous thing—we discover the true omnipotence of God, God’s freedom from us to be completely for us, and God’s ability to transcend everything about us to transform us into what God intended us to be. 

So, too, then as we reenter the world with our bubbles popped—we can see things as they truly are, not as we want them to be; we can see ourselves as we are, not as we wish we could be—and in that clarity comes possibility. In that clarity, we can work together for a world in which no one feels the need to cross the street to get away from anyone.

It begins by not believing what we think, for most of what we think is part of that driving need to construct the bubble. Simply because we assume something to be true does not make it so. Examine it. Contemplate it. Take it apart. Most of all, converse!

In those dialogs, we give ourselves the great gift of releasing ourselves from the bubble—our partners will pop the bubbles. This will be especially true as we converse with folks different from ourselves. Pope Francis is rising on the pop charts like a rocket because of the simple premise for his work. Following Christ, he practices Christ’s model of engagement—step free of the bubble to meet whoever is there as they are, then proceed.

There hope blossoms.