just thanking Jesus for what he did on the cross, instead of actually
imitating him.) Disorder or change is always to be avoided, the ego
believes, so let’s just hunker down and pretend that my status quo
is entirely good, should be good for everybody, and is always “true”
and even the only truth. But permanent residence in this stage
tends to create either willingly naïve people or control freaks, and
very often a combination of both. I have found it invariably
operates from a worldview of scarcity and hardly ever from
abundance.
DISORDER: Eventually your ideally ordered universe—your
“private salvation project,” as Thomas Merton called it—must and
will disappoint you, if you are honest. As Leonard Cohen puts it,
“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” Your
wife dies, your father loses his job, you were rejected on the
playground as a child, you find out you are needy and sexual, you
fail an exam for a coveted certification, or you finally realize that
many people are excluded from your own well-deserved “life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This is the disorder stage, or
what we call from the Adam and Eve story the “fall.” It is necessary
in some form if any real growth is to occur; but some of us find this
stage so uncomfortable we try to flee back to our first created order
—even if it is killing us. Others today seem to have given up and
decided that “there is no universal order,” or at least no order we
will submit to. That’s the postmodern stance, which distrusts all
grand narratives, ideologies, and globalism, including often any
notions of reason, a common human nature, social progress,
universal human norms, absolute truth, and objective reality. Much
of the chaos that reigns in the American culture and government
these days is the direct result of such a “post-truth society.”
Permanent residence in this stage tends to make people rather
negative and cynical, usually angry, and quite opinionated and
dogmatic about one form of political correctness or another, as they
search for some solid ground. Some accuse religious people of being
overly dogmatic, yet this stymied position worships disorder itself
as though it were a dogma: “I reject all universal explanations
except one—there are no universal explanations!” it seems to be