More Important Than Learning How To Live

Memes float around the internet with pithy sayings that feel like they are Christian in nature. I am not talking about those joke memes that function like modern day comic strips. Rather I am speaking of those that usually come in one of three variations: sweet, angry, or ironic. Be it a kitten “hanging in there,” or chunky red text framing an angry animal, or Kermit drinking tea at sunset, these images flood inboxes, news feeds, and text messages. Most of these are harmless little notes of conventional wisdom passed from one person to another.

What binds these memes and sayings together is an understanding that “common sense is not so common.” These often are little notes passed from one person to another to remind or teach us how to live. Like self-help shots of wheatgrass for our minds that will help us in understanding how to live. Learning how to live It is one of the key virtues of self-help. It does not make self-help bad, but it does make self-help limited in what it can do because there is something more important to learning how to live.

That is where religion stand in contrast to self-help. Christianity, at its best, teaches us how to die more than it teaches us how to live. Christianity teaches us how to die, before we die. We cannot experience or have resurrection, new life, regeneration or new life, until we first die. Perhaps it is not a shock that self-help is more popular to pass around.

The irony of course is that only in learning how to die do we learn how to live abundantly, faithfully and eternally.

Before we go off thinking about how to live, perhaps take some time (years perhaps) to learn that which is more important.

You are Growing or Dying. Shenanigans.

We have all heard this idea that we are either growing or dying. We hear if people are learning a new skill or if they are becoming a “better” person then they are “growing”. We also hear that organizations that rake in profits or create social change are “growing.” If there is a restaurant that has a line out the door then that restaurant is “growing” in their market.

Photo by Wang Xi on Unsplash

Conversely, people who are getting older or have stopped learning are thought of as “dying.” Organizations that are not expanding then they are “dying.” Businesses that no longer have that line around the block are “dying.”

Because you are either growing or dying.

The Truth is, nothing is growing OR dying. Everything is growing AND dying at the same time.

Every person, regardless of age or stage, is growing and dying at the same time. The one who is learning a lot may be growing intellectually but they also are experiencing a death of previously understood ideas. The organization that is growing in numbers is also dying to previous ways of doing things. The business that is growing in market share is also dying to the intimacy they had.

Philosophers such as Hannah Arendt describe a “natality.” In addition to how philosophers speak of natalities, we may begin to think of natality as the other side of fatality. Where fatality is about dying, natality is about birth. For every fatality there is a simultaneous natality and for every natality there is a simultaneous fatality.

The question is not are you growing or dying but how are you growing AND dying.

The Church is beginning to embrace the very message that she has proclaimed for 2000 years in that the Church is not dying. It is dying and being born. It is declining and growing. It is contracting and expanding.