Obstacles to Common Sense

Jesus, if he came today, might look bewildered at what has become of the movement he started. Would he recognize it at all? Would he think it has much to do with the message he preached? I think he would feel more at home in a twelve-step meeting than in most Christian churches, let alone in the Vatican. But this should not surprise us. Other spiritual masters of the past would be no better off. Lao Tsu would be at a loss searching for vital signs of the Tao in a Taoist temple and any philosophy department would make Heraclitus feel like the proverbial fish out of water.Yet, all three of these great teachers still have fervent followers today.As for Jesus,there are still — within the churches and without — countless men and women who are aglow with his spirit because they have understood his message. They live by common sense — in

more traditional terms, they are “led by the Spirit of God” (Romans 8:14).

Twelve-step programs rely on no other authority than common sense. Jesus would recognize his spirit alive and active today as soon as he walked into a twelve-step meeting. This should not surprise us, since the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous were fervent Christians. And there is an even deeper connection between sobriety and common sense. Don’t we call people who use common sense “sober minded”? What then is the addiction that makes most of us, again and again, fall off the wagon of common sense? It must be an enormously strong addiction to draw so many into its spell.

What is it that attracts us with such power? For many years I was searching for an answer to this question. What is the desire that draws us away from common sense? Gradually, the answer dawned on me: It is our longing to belong. But does not this deep desire in the human heart aim precisely at that all-embracing communion from which common sense springs? Isn’t our homesickness a desire for the cosmic household of which common sense is the family spirit? Indeed it is.

But we fail to go all the way.We settle too soon, settle for less, before we reach our true home.

This is true for every addiction. Our goal is something good that attracts us. The higher the good, the stronger the attraction. The stronger also the addiction if we do not go on until we reach the goal, but halfway there settle for less and cling to that. Thus, one may seek for some high value — contentment, peace of mind, fellowship — find a little bit of it in the bar at the corner, and get no further than a drunken binge and a hangover. Likewise, we may find our longing to belong partly satisfied by a community that falls far short of being all- embracing, cling to this partial fulfillment of our desire, and end up with a common narrow-mindedness that is anything but common sense. “Ra! Ra! Ra! My country — or my university, my union, my church — right or wrong!”

Let’s not be too hard on ourselves. Settling for less is a perennial temptation, and so is its opposite: restless exploring. In each of us there is the settler and the explorer. Both are driven by fear. The settler fears change; the explorer fears boredom. In our explorer mode, we are so enamored with the seeking that we fear nothing so much as finding, for this would bring the search for our heart’s desire to an end. In our settler mode, in contrast, we are so eager to find that we cut the search short.

But we are all pilgrims. In the pilgrim, explorer and settler are united. Pilgrims have a double courage: the explorers’ courage to go beyond the familiar and the settlers’ courage to be content with it. On a pilgrimage, each step is the goal, yet each goal may turn out to be just a step on the road that leads on — we must not cling to it.

Clinging is our problem as pilgrims through life. And clinging springs from fear. It is basically a healthy reflex. Newborn babies, when frightened, reach up with arms and legs in an effort to cling to their mothers — an instinct that may go back to an age when our mothers were still leaping from branch to branch and we’d better hang on when danger threatened. We retain this instinct for our entire lives.When fear takes hold of us, we grasp and cling, mentally no less than bodily. What is new always seems threatening at first. If we want to grow, expand, and go forward into new territory, we must learn to let go of the old.

No goat can butt alone.

For most of us, the communion we have with our mothers before we are born is perfect. Yet we must let go of it and be on our own before we can find communion on a new level. Whenever we move forward to a new and wider community, it is like another birth — often not less difficult and painful. What is so frightening is that we must step out, speak up, and go it alone. To push beyond the mental horizon of those with whom we felt at home and to push on towards ever wider horizons takes great courage. Fear is the great obstacle to us— fear of losing our friends, of being ridiculed, of being ostracized, of standing alone. Unless we can overcome our fear, we will cling to what is at hand and get addicted to it. In every society the pressure to conform is powerful. Many of us are cowards when it comes to going it alone.

Imagine a twelve-step program for Cowards Anonymous, meetings in which members would support one another in standing up fearlessly for common sense. Instead, we are more like the citizens in Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Emperor’s New Suit.” All it took was two swindlers who claimed to weave garments for the king that would be invisible

to anyone unfit for office or stupid beyond words.Who would admit to this? From the emperor on down, everyone claimed to see what wasn’t there and admired the beautiful clothes. One supported the other, as the whole population silently conspired to maintain the lie, and the emperor in his make-believe new suit paraded down the street stark naked. “But he has nothing on at all!” a little child called out at last, breaking the spell. “Children and fools speak the truth,” a proverb declares. Why shouldn’t they? They have nothing invested in the status quo. Unless we “become like little children” (Matthew 18:3), we will find the obstacles to common sense insurmountable. Only common sense can make you free.