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It’s always hard for preachers to know what to glean from sermon feedback. Unless you give a message that’s unbelievably awesome or undeniably horrible, you’ll not get much of a response at all from people, which means that you’re left sitting in small sample size theater. More than that, is a quick “thank you for that sermon” told to the preacher just minutes after the benediction a sign of genuine gratitude or merely a polite platitude? And if people don’t like what you’ve delivered, how often do they let you know?

My magic eight ball says to this question, “It is uncertain.”

At any rate, the sermon that I gave a couple weeks ago––“Dependence and Decisiveness,” link here––generated more positive feedback than normal. I guess a subject like how to make decisions in a world of seemingly limitless optionality is something on people’s minds.

In this post, I'll expand upon something I briefly mentioned that Sunday morning, namely that we receive mixed messages from our culture that create a huge amount of cognitive dissonance within us. We’re bombarded with two different sets of claims that can’t both be true at once: we’re told both that we control nothing, but that we can do anything.

Let me break that down into three sets of sevens, starting with part uno this week. Wheels within wheels!

As far as controlling nothing, here in the West we’ve gained an increasing appreciation of larger sets of forces that determine who we are and what we can hope to be. As a result, the scope and utility of our own agency is construed as much smaller than we otherwise and in earlier periods may have believed. I’ll name seven forces held to shape the course of our lives as individuals:
—Human genetics. What we assume to be choices freely made are actually predisposed by our DNA. We can even learn with ever-growing probability when we’ll die, and how.
— Upbringing and environment. Cue the creepy, German-inflected therapist voice: “Tell me about your fathhhherrrrr. . .” We are now what we were surrounded with then. (In other words, we can escape neither nature nor nurture.)
— Diet. We need to pay close attention to what we consume, or it will consume us.
— Climate change. Today as I write these words, Collingswood is in a “code red” for air quality due to forest fires in Canada (!), and so our schools will do nothing outdoors today. Climate constrains choice.
— Systemic oppression. Is a real thing!
— Personal trauma. Also a real thing, obviously, but also now leveraged as an identity determinant in ways novel to Western conceptions of personhood until recently.
–– Macro- and micro-conomics. Don't call it a comeback, but Karl Marx is on line 1!

To be clear, I’m not disagreeing that these seven forces form us as individuals in large, even huge, ways. Still, to whatever extent these factors are operative upon individuals, they come at the psychological cost of feelings of deep hopelessness and disempowerment.

Meanwhile, it’s continually signaled to us through myriad means that a) we can and should b) do and be c) anything and everything we desire to be.

In other words, we control nothing but can do and be anything. This juxtaposition doesn’t make any sense. Jersey, we have a problem.

Will continue this discussion next week.

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