Our Operative Worldview
You are not here to verify, / Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity / Or carry report. You are here to kneel / Where prayer has been valid.
—T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”
Father Richard Rohr considers how Jesus challenges the worldviews constructed by our religions, cultures, and family upbringings:
Everybody looks at the world through their own lens, a matrix of culturally inherited qualities, family influences, and other life experiences. This lens, or worldview, truly determines what we bring to every discussion. When Jesus spoke of the reign of God, he was trying to change people’s foundational worldview. When Francis of Assisi described his “marriage to Lady Poverty,” he was using a lovely metaphor to explain his central thesis for life. When Americans identify money as “the bottom line,” they are revealing more about their real worldview than they realize.
We would do well to get in touch with our own operative worldview. It is there anyway, so we might as well know what this highly influential window on reality is. It’s what really motivates us. Our de facto worldview determines what catches our attention and what we don’t notice at all. It’s largely unconscious and yet it drives us to do this and not that. It is surely important to become conscious of such a primary lens or we will never know what we don’t see and why we see other things out of all perspective.
Until we can allow the gospel to move into that deepest level of the unconscious and touch our operative worldviews, nothing substantial is going to change. It will only be rearranging the furniture, not constructing a new room. True conversion is about constructing a new room—maybe even a whole new house!
Our operative worldview is formed by three images that are inside every one of us. They are not something from outside; they have already taken shape within us. All we can do is become aware of them, which is to awaken them. The three images to be awakened and transformed are our image of self, our image of God, and our image of the world. A true hearing of the gospel transforms those images into a very exciting and, I believe, truthful worldview. When we say Christ is the truth, that’s what we mean. Christ renames reality correctly, according to what reality honestly is, putting aside whatever we think it is or whatever we fear it is. Reality is always better than any of us imagined or feared; there is joy associated with a true hearing of the gospel.
All together, we could put it this way: “What should life be?” “Why isn’t it?” “How do we repair it?” When these are answered for us, at least implicitly, we have our game plan, and we can live with safety and purpose in this world.
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Not as Rational as We Think
We may live in the same country, the same city, or even under the same roof, but we live in different realities.
—Brian McLaren, Learning How to See
CAC faculty member Brian McLaren is concerned about the cost of our increasingly limited ability to see beyond our religious or political points of view.
Over the last decade, I have felt increasingly alarmed about the vitriol, distrust, and destructive miscommunication that are tearing people apart everywhere I turn … in nations, in religious communities, in businesses, in non-profit organizations, in friendships, even in families.
On social media, name-calling, misinformation, and propaganda squeeze out intelligent, honest, respectful conversation. In the mass media, accusations of “fake news” fly in all directions, leaving people wondering who to trust. In the world of religion, shallow, mean-spirited, or profit-hungry preachers draw huge crowds week after week, and they consistently appeal, not to the better angels of human nature, but to our unspoken fears and unacknowledged prejudices.
In the world of politics, uninformed, dishonest, and manipulative candidates keep winning elections, telling people not what they need to hear, but what they want to hear. Because of our polarization and paralysis, major problems are going unresolved, which intensifies frustration on all sides, and leaves (literally) billions of us vulnerable to populist demagogues.
The social fabric seems to be stretching so tight that it might rip apart. That scares me. “What’s going on here?” I keep asking myself….
Philosopher George Lakoff challenges the mistaken idea that arose during the Enlightenment that it is possible to see issues clearly, based entirely on reason:
Enlightenment reason says everybody reasons the same way…. Enlightenment reason says that all you need to do is get the facts, and everybody will reason to the right conclusion, since everybody has the same reason. No. If they have different worldviews, they’ll reason to different conclusions. Enlightenment reason does not recognize different worldviews. Enlightenment reason doesn’t admit framing. It doesn’t admit metaphorical thought. It doesn’t admit the way people really work. [1]
McLaren describes how bias results when our worldviews become solidified:
Here’s the simple truth I began to see as I observed the decline in reasonableness, monitored the rise in dysfunctional and even dangerous discourse, and reviewed the academic literature:
People can’t see what they can’t see.
We all, yes, even me—and more shockingly, even you, have a whole set of assumptions and limitations, prejudices and preferences, likes, dislikes and triggers, fears and conflicts of interest, blind spots and obsessions that keep us from seeing what we could and would see if we didn’t have them.
We are almost always unconscious of these internal obstacles to seeing and understanding, which makes it even harder for us to address them. We are, you might say, blind to what blinds us. The name for these unconscious internal obstacles is bias.
Bias makes us resist and reject messages we should accept and accept messages we should resist and reject. In short … we can’t see what we can’t see because our biases get in the way.
