Hello –
On January 27th I teach the fourth of the six sessions of Transcending Contempt. Below please find a brief description. The purpose of the seminar is to help us all be beacons of light and love in what is sure to be a difficult election year.
Also, please check out and share the one minute videos describing the class on YouTube. Here’s the link to the first one.
I’ve been putting up little posters at libraries and bookstores and folks have been very interested. Tell your friends and neighbors!
Session Four: Evil Is Privation, Goodness is Creativity; Exploring the Works of Plato
Contempt is a way of evil. But what is evil? And what is its opposite, the good?
In the tradition of Plato and most Christian thinkers, I will suggest that evil is privation during this fourth session, January 27. It has no reality or form of its own but is only like a leech that draws life from whatever it inhabits. It’s like a vampire on the natural fullness of things. Goodness, as this definition of evil suggests, is fullness of life. The Greek word for “fullness” is pleroma and I’ll be introducing that word and suggesting that our creativity is our clue to when we are living in the gift of pleroma. You may remember the verse from the prologue of John’s gospel, “from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.”
For our practices this week, we’ll be focusing on our habits. I think we each know which of our habits are life-sucking and which are life-giving. For example, from my teens into my early thirties I was an intermittent cigarette smoker. Smoking cigarettes, I can tell you from first-person experience, is an iconic evil habit. It is addictively repetitive with each Camel Light cigarette identical to the one before, each craving landing like clockwork at the same hour, and each drag on a butt slowly increasing one’s chances of cancer. Cigarette smoking hollows us out.
By contrast, I’m confident my habit of long walks gives me life. I’ve learned to often let my thoughts wander, and the gift that comes back to me is often clarity about some puzzle in my life. It will occur to me to reach out to a friend I haven’t connected with in a while. I almost always bring a pen and little pieces of paper because sentences or outlines for sermons or essays or even poems come to me. Or I’ll often bring music and use it as a time to be inspired in that way. Further, I notice that when I get long walks in, I pay better attention to people and sleep better. It’s just the opposite of cigarettes.
I often talk of and practice using a complement sandwich. We say two nice things about someone to surround one harder truth we need to convey, like surrounding meat with bread. Similarly, this week, we attend to decreasing one bad habit by increasing two of our good habits.
Our external habits point to the truth that we also have internal, mental habits. Among the bad habits we slowly learn to shrink throughout these sessions is the evil habit of thinking contemptuous thoughts of our neighbor. In the final two sessions we’ll be identifying and countering two kinds of our habitual contemptuous thoughts.
I invite you to keep reading these posts, which preview the six weekly sessions, to test whether you are called to Transcend Contempt with me beginning in person only on January 6th. The class is in Duncan Hall of St. Paul’s on 1123 Court Street. Hospitality begins at 8:30am and the sessions are from 9 to 10am.
Blessings, Christopher
p: (415) 456-4842