Post date: Aug 03, 2018 12:56:7 PM
Contempt is a common subtext on social media posts. Atheists speak contemptuously of Christians, Christians spew contempt on Atheists. Contempt fills political discourse. It's American as Apple Pie. Perhaps the most popular variety of contempt historically is racial: contempt for blacks, Indians, or for the most recent wave of immigrants. There is an irony here, of course, because most of us contemptaphiles were just a wave or two before.
This irony is also telling. And spiritual. I suspect it has to do with fear and self-loathing. What if there are things about us, things inside of us, that evoke our own contempt? We demand of ourselves that we be above, or better than something, or immune from or in control of the things we fear. I do anyway, if I'm honest with myself. It is a variety of pride: not necessarily the variety that thinks highly of oneself, but the variety that demands that one measure up to one's own standards of value.
The reason I say these things is because of a simple self-observation. When I can receive grace for myself, my own feelings of contempt for others seems to evaporate. It is as if contempt were a mere side-effect or symptom of something else.
I'm using "grace" as a technical term, so I should explain myself. By grace I mean a kind of unconditional love, care, and regard that seeks my good with vulnerability (i.e. disregarding the risk of loving) and with a kind of optimism that any barriers, including my own shortcomings -- or other competitors to goodness and loving relationship -- can be ultimately overcome. I don't think we experience this grace very commonly. I think that when we do, we experience it as powerful and transformative.
Once self-contempt in me is defeated, I simply don't feel it for others. This isn't self-righteousness, it's just freedom and healing. Not that I can't experience recidivism and relapse, but having experienced an alternative makes it easier to see contempt for what it is and steer away.
I steer clear by submitting to the terms of the one who extends grace to me. I give up my demands of myself. I become open to the other's measures of value. I have faith in that person and become faithful. It is perhaps unavoidable that I'm sounding religious in speaking of faith, but we don't need to think of faith religiously. It is not some esoteric philosophy or superstitious epistemology, it is simply the normal way we do relationships and we exercise it all the time. [When I have faith in someone, I give up ]
In a relationship, faith doesn't make me less of myself, it makes me more than myself.
red flag here -- if faith doesn't decrease contempt, we have reason to be concerned if we find it in ourselves. I don't think faith is supposed to work that way, either Christian or the everyday-relational variety, so we should doubt its foundations --[fix this]