Week 10

This post is going to expand on my post from two days ago, so if you haven't read that one, you might not follow what's to come. This is my attempt to "connect the dots," to quote Dr. Case. Fair warning: I'm not sure what kind of a picture is going to appear after all of these dots have been connected, but I'm going for it anyway.

The world is a broken place. That's clear, that's certain, and it's rather unfortunate, to be honest. I understand that that's a very depressing thought with which to begin a blog post, but it's a thought that really embodies all of what we've discussed throughout the course of this semester. For instance:

The world will be massively and dangerously overpopulated within the next fifty years. What are we going to do about it?

Climate change is imminently becoming a concern for our well-being, and we have no idea whom to blame. What are we going to do about it?

Cocoa plantations in Africa thrive off of child labor and human trafficking. What are we going to do about it?

The church has lost sight of what Sabbath-living is, and it's destroying our quality of life. What are we going to do about it?

That's been the guiding question through a lot of this: what are we going to do about it? Brokenness, after all, seems like it constitutes the need for repair, right? But does it really? Are we supposed to actually do anything about any of this?

Consider this: like I mentioned in my earlier post, I'm an RA in Nesbitt this year (one of the "dots" I'm trying to "connect"). About a week ago, one of my residents, who has great difficulty connecting with others, opened up to me about his struggles with depression. He's going through some ridiculously dark stuff, but the only thing I could do in the moment of his confession was listen. I have no special abilities to lift a man out of the "pit," to quote the Psalms, so all I had to offer was my receptivity and solidarity. Did that brokenness constitute a need for me to repair it? Certainly not.

However, since that moment, his life hasn't exactly improved all that much. Surely he has become more comfortable with me and with his life in the dorm, but none of the problems in his life have been solved. He has since come to me again and further revealed to me the depths of his depression, but I still lacked the resources to heal him. In this moment, instead, I had to advise him to seek professional help because even though I am not called to repair his brokenness, I pray that somebody out there is.

Does brokenness truly constitute a need for repair? Well, let me answer that question with another question: if it doesn't, then what are we doing with our lives? If we aren't fixing anything that needs to be fixed, then are we leaving any impact on this world around us? Are we following the call of the Gospel if we don't react to the brokenness we see?

I think maybe the biggest gray area with this debate is the definition of "repair." To go back to my example as an RA, even though I was unable to "repair" the brokenness in my resident's life in a classical sense of the term, who's to say that I didn't repair something? Surely my presence had some effect, and the fact that my heart broke for his allowed me to embrace his pain completely. That's all the repair I could offer as his RA, so maybe it's not about doing the best that I can as much as it is about being the best that I am. 

Let me relate this to Wendell Berry's Remembering so that this post actually has something to do with what we did in class this week. Andy Catlett finds no self-value because of his predicament; he's lost his hand in an accident, and now he can no longer perform his task, farming, to the best of his ability. He focuses too much on doing that he loses sight of the importance of being. It is only when he comes to the realization that life's inherent value does not lie in what he is able to do that he finally finds peace.

This is what Wirzba was trying to say in his novel. This is what Bouma-Prediger was arguing what the problem was all along. I get that, so it's not like I'm saying that I've come to this revolutionary discovery (because I haven't), but I think that I have a different answer to my original question.

Does brokenness constitute a need for repair? Berry, Wirzba, and Bouma-Prediger might argue that no, it doesn't. Like I've just established, our reaction to brokenness in the world needs to embody our innermost being, not our rashest action, so we don't need to be overly concerned with repairing what we see as broken. However, as I've discovered in my life as an RA, our innermost being can bring about repair just as our rashest action can, just only in a different sense. Like I mentioned earlier, this is a broken world; we don't need to go looking for brokenness, so if who we are as a person has any positive influence in our respective sphere of influence, then yes, I'd say that we are responsible to repair what is broken. We may not be responsible for righting the darkest wrongs of the world because our value of a person lies not in what we do; it lies in who we are.

Let me summarize the dots that I've connected:

The world is broken. This class and my life as an RA make that abundantly clear.

I can't do hardly anything about the brokenness I see in this world, and that frustrates me, which is why I'm frustrated with this class (in essence).

Berry, Wirzba, and Bouma-Prediger all say that it doesn't matter what I do; it only matters the kind of character I have, which will, in turn, affect my behavior.

My character, even though it doesn't seem to "repair" the brokenness like some people think brokenness should be repaired, does plenty good because it is all I have to offer to a broken world. Thus, I don't have to be concerned that being inactive goes against the call of the Gospel.

Those are the dots. It doesn't seem like much, but it's what I've got. What kind of picture does it make? Well, to me, it kind of looks like the cross. All I can do is be the best that I can be as a student, an RA, a Christian, and a human being and hope that the cross will repair whatever I can't.