Values

 Notes and Confessions Lent 2022

I had a conversation with my spiritual director today. It took quite a few digressions, but one is staying with me into the bedtime hour. 

What do I value? I asserted that our values were important and that we had to cultivate them, but then I also admitted that with advances in science of personality, we learn more and more that things like what kind of flora (and fauna?) we have growing in our gut can affect our mood and personality. We've long talked about chemical imbalances in our brains causing depression or manic episodes.How much free will do we have? How much can I choose what I value?

Do I have the bug to write because I have a literal, however microscopic, bug in my gut? 

All interesting questions and I have neither the training nor the desire to get trained for evaluating these things. I know some tendencies that I have and I know I work against them. My tendency to judge has been tempered, I believe, by my readings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. I still have an initial impulse to judge, but I also have a secondary impulse to analyze it. Is the impulse to judge my nature and my impulse to analyze it and temper it my choice? Are both impulses completely some animal response that I have no control over whatsoever?

There are aspects of me that I know I have no control over. My sexuality is high on that list. What I do with that sexuality, though, is a result of my values about humanity. My sexuality may push me to treat men as objects of desire and little more. The values I cultivate around how I want to treat people tempers that push. 

In our conversation today, my SD and I talked about the animal brain response to danger, the self-defense impulse, fight or flight. I suggested that maybe my decision to not carry guns is a means to adhere to my value of human life when I know I have a (often disguised) impulse to lash out at people. 

And so on. 

As we talked, I admitted that my values are not always the value of the culture I live in, and I hope that some of these values are shaped by my lifelong investigation and study in the Jesus event (to use seminary language). A couple of times today, the SD asked, "How do you think Jesus would see this?" and I finally had to say that's not a question I've ever asked myself, that it felt presumptuous to even speculate on the mind of Jesus. I did say I sometimes look at people and situations and ask, "how do I love in this situation?" He asked if there was a difference.

I said, "too-may-toe, too-mah-toe." And we laughed. 

But these questions---what do I value? How do I love in response to this or that? I suppose even what would Jesus do? They shape us beyond our animal brain, I think. I hope. 

It's an ongoing question and maybe not one I can answer. This is one of those blog posts where I'm for sure asking more questions than I can hope to answer.