Denial

“The human mind isn't a terribly logical or consistent place. Most people, given the choice to face a hideous or terrifying truth or to conveniently avoid it, choose the convenience and peace of normality. That doesn't make them strong or weak people, or good or bad people. It just makes them people.”

Jim Butcher

“I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I liked.”

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

 “How 'bout a shot of truth in that denial cocktail.”

Jennifer Salaiz

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I’ve been thinking

I know!  Shocking isn’t it!?

But I have been thinking about denial

In addictions treatment we talk a lot about denial

About that powerful mechanism that keeps us

“doing what we are doing and expecting a different outcome”

That makes denial a form of insanity

But denial isn’t really insanity

It is part of the human condition.

We don’t like the uncomfortable

We don’t like the painful

We don’t like seeing things that collide with our values systems

We don’t like feeling small, or deficit, or weak, or sinful

And so we do most anything we can to avoid

Those inconvenient truths

About our planet (its dying)

About our nation (its not exceptional)

About ourselves (I am insecure and seek to compensate by getting people to admire me, which makes me seem arrogant.  I’m also a little too tied to things, and yes, I am opinionated at a level that is probably not healthy).

Avoidance

Denial

Call it what you will

And we attempt to accomplish this profound act of lying to ourselves

In all kinds of ways

We tell ourselves that what is true is not true!

We reframe so that what is ugly and sordid is no longer ugly and sordid

We justify, and rationalize, and excuse

Caging children is about safety

Destroying the planet is just good business

Sometimes this attempt to move into an alternate reality doesn’t really work

We see the earth dying

We see ourselves behaving poorly

We feel our personal deficits at our core

And it hurts

So we medicate

We play, we drink, we smoke, we eat

We have sex

Sometimes we bring God, or the Sacred into the equation

We try to use God to excuse the inexcusable

We take one or two verses in huge book, and use them to exclude, and judge, and hate

While ignoring the huge preponderance of passages that tell us we can’t

Exclude or judge or hate

We turn a God who is love into a God who is wrathful and cruel

We turn a God who warns us about accumulation of wealth, and misuse of power

Into a God who gives us wealth and blessing our use of power

We turn a God who is revealed as a power that comes and disturbs and roils

A god of wind and fire

A god whose very nature is to uproot us from where we are

And blow us to someplace new

Into a God who simply looks on benignly as we perpetuate systems

Of inequity and injustice

There is perhaps one more form of denial

Some people see clearly what is happening

They see the hate and the fear

They see the greed and the lust for power

They see abusing immigrants as immoral

The destruction of the planet as evil

They feel real pain

When they hear lie after lie

When yet another protection for the planet is removed

When yet another policy is put in place that is intentional cruelty

They are offended (being offended is not bad)

When they see economic injustice

And racism

And they deny the fact that they are helpless

Instead they dive in

And they write their legislators

They post things on FaceBook

They speak out

They vote

They work in soup kitchens

They give time and money to non-profits

They act with kindness and generosity

Their way of medicating the pain of living in a messed up world

Is to engage in the process of trying to change that world for the better

Even when those efforts seem ineffective

Even when at times, they feel powerless

This is a profound form of denial

It denies the power of evil

It denies the power of evil people to destroy our country and our planet

It denies helplessness

And this is when denial

Becomes expectation

The expectation that God is

That God is present among us and in us

And that God can use people

People like me and you

to change the world

or at very least to change the space

which surrounds us

to change our family

our church

our community

for the better

I am in denial