"Better to die on our feet than live on our knees." This old expression came up in a conversation I was keeping up with. Reflecting on it brought up some interesting thoughts. In human relationships, there are often three paradigms one will encounter. I experienced this recently in some counseling I was doing. One is a dynamic of infantile dependence. One person or another, or both, in a relationship is still stuck in a childish pattern of basing all they are on the decisions of another person. They have no truly developed self, but really are only an extension of the person they are with. Extreme forms of this form patterns of co-dependency. When children are dependent, it is not a bad thing. It is an expression of an essential truth: children cannot be all they can be absent a strong driving force, a parent, protecting and guiding them every step of the way. A child who is dependent is not missing out on anything: they are being all they can be. It is their experimentation with dependency, being dependent on different people in different ways at different times, that moves them into a place where they can begin to form their own identity in abstraction from that of other people. But in adults, there is a higher possibility. One can be something more than a dependent child. Something truly unique and special could be given to the world, in the form of a responsible self, but instead one runs away from the self because one fears responsibility. The degradation between what that person could be and what they are, is in a real sense sinful. Whitehead put it best, "Thus evil promotes its own elimination by destruction, or delegation, or by elevation. But in its own nature it is unstable. It must be noted that the state of degradation to which evil leads, when accomplished, is not in itself evil, except by comparison with what might have been. A hog is not an evil beast, but when a man is degraded to the level of a hog, with the accompanying atrophy of finer elements, he is no more evil than a hog. The evil of the final degradation lies in the comparison of what is with what might have been. During the process of degradation the comparison is an evil for the man himself, and at its final stage it remains an evil for others. "
At a later stage of life, in adolescence, the person begins to experiment with independence. This leads, to varying degrees to a state of immature independence. It is the sense that my life is my own, and I make it on my own terms, and I resent the seeming arbitrary limits that others place on me. This is not a bad thing, adolescent independence is a necessary 'running away' from the infantile dependence that so limited them a children. It is an awareness of responsibility and possibilities, the possibilities that self-creation can really open one to. But adolescent independence is in the final analysis incapable of genuine relationship. It can find its source of life only in its own choices, and thereby lacks the ability to experience genuine moral freedom that can only come from mutual growth. In point of fact it acts upon a misunderstanding of self. Realizing that self-creativity is possible, it takes the self to be the individuated experience of concrescence, it takes the self to be that which is taking the various strands of experience it encounters and brings them together to create something new. But individuality and selfhood are not identical. Hopefully, and I've seen this happen more often than not, this individuating period takes place within a context of experimenting with various relationships, and with more expansive conceptions of self. In other words, it takes place within a community. And that community can help shape the individuating experience into one that is more honest, more aware of its real self, and often mutes the immaturity of adolescent independence and begins the move to honest, mature INTERDEPENDENCE.
Mature interdependence is inclusive of, but also transcends, the earlier stages of relationship. It is self-creative, in the sense that it seeks a creative expression that is truly unique and not absolute dependent on any one other source. But it is a creative expression that is aware that WHAT it is helping to create is bigger than itself. It realizes that its own creativity is part of a larger creative project, of which it is one part. It realizes responsibility to others, and recognizes that its own self-fulfillment can only take place when others, too are fulfilled. It realizes that it truly needs other people, but that they also need it, him, her, whatever. But the self realizes that, in the final analysis, part of what it gives to the whole is its own real enjoyment, its own fulfillment of creative potential. And so it does not seek simply to use and to shirk responsibility, but it seeks responsibility with others. This paradigm of mature interdepenence is the goal of genuine human relationship.
But it must be remembered that this goal is always one that to varying degrees eludes us, except at moments. My teenage friends need not be offended when I talk of adolescent independence. It is not a label that implies that ALL adolescents suffer from it but only that it is in adolescence that it first becomes a real option. No, these patterns of human relationship afflict ALL people at one time or another, and we all have to continue the quest away from destructive patterns and toward the goal of mature interdependence.
And this brings me to the statement "better to die on our feet than live on our knees". The latter image, of a mealy-mouthed dependency, constantly attributing all that happens to God, begging for each and everything we have, shirking genuine responsibility, expecting from God all things and thinking we have nothing of our own to give, is the very image of childish dependence. And I agree we've had enough of that. It is the paradigm of religion that has dominated and continues to dominate in much of the world to this day. And I'm sick of it as much as anyone. But the alternative vision strikes me as better but still incomplete. "Living on our feet" is the false image of the self-sufficient person, who relies on nothing else and needs nothing else. It is the self in isolation, never dependent on anyone for anything, the atomized self only knowing its own hopes and plans and dreams for itself and the world, inclusive of as small a circle as possible. Never truly vulnerable, it lacks the full breadth of human experience, incapable of being aware of itself as part of a totality, it creates itself not knowing what it is it creates. Secular culture, the attitude that we have left God behind and no longer need anything Higher than ourselves to solve our problems, abounds in this conception. The last 300 years or so it has held primary power at least in the public forum in the west. Mankind is trapped individually by an image of total lost-ness and dependency and communally by an illusion of self-sufficiency.
But over the last 100 years or so some pockets of a new paradigm of Relationship with the Universe has emerged. It is the image of mature INTERDEPENDENCE. It recognizes that human life is lived sometimes on our feet, and sometimes on our knees. That we as a people need to recognize our interconnectendess and to find our own real good in the fulfillment of the Whole of Things. It recognizes a Higher Power, but sees that Higher Power not as totally self-sufficient. It recognizes a God who inded NEEDS human beings for things. Not for its own existence, but to make its exisitence 'more'. In the same way that I genuinely need and want my wife to make my life complete, but know I could survive and find new ways of fulfillment if I ever lost her, however changed and hurt I may be. This image of God is not completely absent in the Bible, in fact all three paradigms of relationship are present within scripture. Certainly, though, this is the most muted. But there are particularly Christian images: Simon the Cyrene, Peter walking on water, Jesus washing the feet of His disciples, the Lamb Slain From the Foundation of the World, that can help us experience and understand this new universal relationship. It finally sees life as the Cross that we have to help bare, and the Ressurection we all can share in if we do so. There is something you can give God that He can find and retain no other way, a creative act, which is a part of a Greater Creative Act, that can fulfill God is a special and unique way. Religious life at its best is recognizing that indeed I need God, but that God also needs me, and that I need God to need me, and God needs me to need Him. It is the grounding out of the highest relational value we have in the very heart of existence. For me, any other philosophy or religion is necessarily incomplete. I've found no greater form of life than this: to recognize a Higher Power that shares in my life and I in Him, in a mature relationship geared towards making this world a better place.
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