The Slavery of Death: Part 31, Doxological Gratitude

Final post in this series. There is, no doubt, much more to be said. Thanks so much for the encouragement and insightful comments throughout the series. You've convinced me that I should try to pull all this into book form. I'll keep you posted.

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What might be the big take home point of this series? Perhaps this: We are enslaved to death because our identities are formed--consciously and unconsciously--by death. We have death-centered and death-saturated identities. This means that our identity is driven--consciously and unconsciously--by anxiety, an anxiety that causes us to turn inward and pull back from others. It's this anxiety that produces sin. It is a slavery to the fear of death.

To be sure, most of us don't live with this fear of death in day to day awareness. We don't seem particularly gripped by death anxiety (though some of us are). What we tend to do is repress death anxiety with self-esteem projects, living to succeed and have a meaningful life according to the value system of our culture. It's this hero project--whether we are succeeding, failing or just treading water relative to others--that dominates our conscious lives. Our anxiety shifts to and fuels these projects. Thus, our slavery to death largely manifests itself through what psychologists call sublimation.

Consequently, a sign that we've been emancipated from the fear of death is when we get to the point where we become indifferent to the anxieties inherent in how our culture pursues self-esteem, how our culture defines winners and losers, successes and failures. Like St. Paul, we begin to "die" to this way of forming an identity, an identity fueled by a fear of death, considering this lifeway as loss.

When I get to this place I find myself free to love others. With the anxiety draining away I'm no longer evaluating others in relation to myself, assessing the degree to which they threaten me or diminish me. I stop being envious, jealous, and rivalrous. I stop feeling ashamed, self-loathing, and small--the morbid manifestations of jealousy, envy, and rivalry. More, given that I've become disinterested in the way my culture defines the good life I can be non-anxious and hospitable to outgroup members. Thus the biblical formulation that perfect love casts out fear. We cannot open ourselves to others if we are anxious and afraid, if our identities are orbiting around a fear of death.

But how are we to purge our identities of this anxiety, particularly if much of it is unconscious and outside of awareness? Practically speaking, how are we to "die to the self"?

Again, I think the root issue involves our identity. We need to find a way to organize our identity around life rather than death, to create an identity that is no longer driven by anxiety but by gratitude, peace, love and joy.

How do I place joy at the center of my identity, how do I "drive out fear"?

I'd like to return to the analysis of Arthur McGill discussed earlier in this series. Recall that McGill argued that death controls us when we have an identity based upon possession, where I try, in an effort to fend off death (with resources or self-esteem) to control, own, possess, rule over and dominate some bit of reality. To become a petty tyrant protecting my home, neighborhood, reputation, status, nation, and ego from the attacks, threats, and encroachments of others. And the thing to note here is how the great anxiety underneath it all--all this prickly and neurotic defending of our ego and turf--is a fear of loss and diminishment, a fear of someone taking something away from me. A fear of death.

How are we to overcome this sort of identity, an anxiety-riddled identity driven to possess in order to cope with the fear of death?

McGill takes his cue from looking at the way Jesus formed his identity in the gospels:

In the New Testament portrayal of Jesus, nothing is more striking than the lack of interest in Jesus' own personality. His teachings and miracles, the response of the crowd and the hostility of the authorities, his dying and his resurrection--these are not read as windows in Jesus' own experience, feelings, insights, and growth. In other words, the center of Jesus' reality is not within Jesus himself. Everything that happens to him, everything that is done by him, including his death, is displaced to another context and is thereby reinterpreted. However, this portrayal is understood to be a true reflection of Jesus' own way of existing. He himself does not live out of himself. He lives, so to speak, from beyond himself. Jesus does not confront his followers as a center which reveals himself. He confronts them as always revealing what is beyond him. In that sense Jesus lives what I call an ecstatic identity.

In all the early testimony to Jesus, this particular characteristic is identified with the fact that Jesus knows that his reality comes from God...Jesus never has his own being; he is continually receiving it...He is only as one who keeps receiving himself from God.

In the ecstatic identity of Jesus we find an identity that is not orbiting death. Jesus cannot lose or be dispossessed of his identity because Jesus doesn't own or possess his identity in the first place. Jesus is always receiving his identity. His identity is experienced as gift and joy. In the words of James Alison, Jesus is living as if death were not. Following Jesus Christians are called to die to the self, to consider it loss, so that they can participate in the ecstatic identity of Jesus, living out of the same joy and freedom to love. McGill describing this:

[B]ecause I no longer live by virtue of the reality which I possess, which I hold, which I master and keep at my disposal, I am free to share myself and all my possession with others. Above all...I can be honest with others. I can be open before them. I do not have to draw a line to mark the boundaries of my reality where I place a sign which says "Keep Out." I do not have to conceal my being behind a wall in order to keep it mine and to prevent others from taking it from me. Since I never have myself, I can never be dispossessed of myself. In short, in all my relations with other people I am freed from the anxiety of having always to keep possession of my own reality in order to be.

For McGill, the experience of the ecstatic identity is the experience of the resurrection, right here and right now: "the resurrection is ecstatic identity, not possessed identity."

If this is so, how are we to cultivate an ecstatic identity?

I like the recommendation of David Kelsey who suggests that the heart of what he calls the eccentric identity (similar to McGill's ecstatic identity in that the eccentric identity is centered "outside" of the self) is doxological gratitude.

Empirically speaking, this makes sense. We know that gratitude is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictors of happiness. To feel grateful is to experience life as a gift, as an experience of grace and joy. This experience of gift is at the heart of the ecstatic/eccentric identity.

But this goes beyond positive psychology. The gratitude is doxological, experienced as worship and expressed within worship.

Why is that important?

While helpful, mere gratitude, what you might find recommended within positive psychology self-help books, doesn't go deep enough to root out the satanic core of the self-esteem project, the way we become beholden to the principalities and powers. At its heart, worship relativises those powers and calls them into question. Worship exposes the self-esteem project as vanity, as an idol of self-glorification. Thus, the resurrection identity is inherently religious as it must function as a prophetic critique with the Word of God speaking against the idols of this present darkness.

And we must remember, as discussed in this series, that what we take to be "God" is more often than not a cultural idol, the religious projection of the self-esteem project, the angel of death in disguise. Even "God" must be subject to prophetic critique. We are aware that religious people killed Jesus.

But the root of this is simply the idea that doxological gratitude, by experiencing life as gift, dispels the anxious need to cling and clutch onto resources and self-esteem. In dispelling fear this posture facilitates love, an opening outward of the self toward others, because giving and self-sacrifice are no longer experienced as threat, loss, or diminishment. If life is gift then sharing life becomes possible, particularly when supported by the koinonia of the community as discussed in the last post. 

So this is one positive way forward in forming a resurrection identity--doxological gratitude.

And now here at the end, perhaps it is startling--or even a let down?--to find that we must construct an identity around prayer and worship. But then again, is this really a new insight? Have not the saints, mystics and contemplatives always preached this? Did not Jesus form his own identity in just this manner?

So my hope in all this, if you've taken this journey with me, is that we come to see doxological gratitude in a wholly new and radical light. Doxological gratitude as a means, an intervention even, to overcome the fear of death. A route to liberating an identity enslaved to anxiety. A practice of dying to self so that perfect love can cast out fear. A way of allowing Christ to destroy the works of the devil in our lives so that we, who have been enslaved to the fear of death all our lives, may experience peace, joy and life.