Hello –
Here’s another description of what you can expect from Transcending Contempt, my seminar that begins on January 6th and prepares us to be beacons of light and low in a deeply challenging election year:
Session Three: Separating from the Crowd and the Works of Soren Kierkegaard and Virginia Woolf
This post previews the third of six seminar sessions I will offer starting on Saturday, January 6 on how to Transcend Contempt in what’s sure to be a divisive year. On Saturday, January 20 we will explore how we get caught up in contempt through the peer pressure of going along with our crowd, whatever our crowd may be. These days the contempt of our crowd comes to us from our relentless exposure to news, which feeds our beliefs, fuels our emotions, drives our behavior. This week we try a better way.
The teaching this week comes from the thinker most regard as the source of existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard said that his whole point in writing his voluminous works was to make his readers aware that each person is a “single individual” and not part of this “monstrous abstraction,” the public. His clearest teaching against conforming to crowds comes in his essay Two Ages where he names the process of conformity “leveling.” Powerfully, he writes “servants of leveling are the servants of the power of evil, for leveling itself is not of God, and every good man will have times when he could weep over its hopelessness, but God permits it and wants to cooperate with individuals, that is with each one individually, and draw the highest out of it.”
This week, I’m going to invite us to “cooperate” with God by becoming a “single individual” in two ways. First, I’m going to encourage us to fast from media – social, print, radio, tv – either by going cold turkey on the news or restricting ourselves to less than half an hour each morning. Second, I’m going to ask us to imagine that we are surrounded by what writer Virginia Woolf calls a temporal “halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” Further, I ask us to claim the truth that our temporal halo is as unique to us as our fingerprint, our retinal scan and even our gait.
In this practice I invite us to take active stewardship of our temporal halo by identifying our pasts, rooted in family history, our present, with our webs of relationships with family and friends, and our future, particularly identifying our hopes. Having a clear and strong sense of who we each are, as a “single individual” keeps us from getting caught up in the contempt of crowds.
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 9am to 10am.
Blessings, Christopher
p: (415) 456-4842