Insurrection: To Believe Is Human to Doubt, Divine by Peter Rollins

Author:Peter Rollins
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Spirituality, Religion, Theology, Philosophy, Christianity
ISBN: 9781451609004
Publisher: Howard Books
Published: 2011-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

The process of creating this mask begins at a very early age and is an important aspect of our development. We can see it at work when, for instance, a small boy is running beside his mother. His mother will often hold back and encourage him by saying, “You are such a fast boy.” Here the story that the mother is telling the child is a lie. The boy is not really very fast and does not have the ability to outrun his mother. But the story is a useful lie that helps the child to build up some positive self-esteem. It is a story that the child happily takes on and begins to believe.

As we grow, our masks become ever more elaborate and often have little connection with the truth of who we are. These masks enable us to hide the truth of our own desires from our own gaze, something that we see played out in the opening story of the landlord. The story can catch us off guard because of the way that it expresses a seemingly absurd gap between the landlord’s desire to help this struggling family and the fact that it is his very actions that are causing the problem in the first place.

Yet it would be a mistake to think that the twist in the story arises only from the fact that there is a gap between the landlord’s desire to help the family and the reality of his actions. After all there, is nothing too surprising about someone struggling between his desire to help others and his desire to make a living. Rather the anecdote derives its counterintuitive power from the fact that the landlord does not experience this gap as a conflict at all. This is not someone who is in conflict with himself—he has found a way of both having his cake and eating it: being able to show deep concern for what is taking place while at the same time profiting from it. He has found a way to maintain the pleasure of being a harsh and unyielding landlord (making money off the family) while simultaneously disavowing the pleasure so as to minimize any guilt (asking the Church to help).

While it would initially seem that this landlord is engaging in a bizarre form of hypocrisy that could only really exist in fiction, the question we must ask is whether this parable actually reflects our daily reality.

Take the example of a little girl being caught by her parents doing something bad and then adamantly proclaiming, “I’m a good girl.” The story that the child is telling both herself and her parents attempts to cover over the reality of the situation, helping the child to mask the truth of her actions. The story being told helps to cover over the trauma of facing up to the reality.

This split between what we say and what we do is a direct expression of irony. Something we see at, say, a ’70s party, where people

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