arne grøndo.^12 “We” in the prayer refers to people being locked up in seeing each
other.
Thus, in the intricate relation of seeing and being, passivity and
activity are intertwined in complex ways. It is a matter of selfhood:
passivity and activity are ways of being a self, oneself. Although we are
the ones seeing as we do, there is passivity in our seeing. Not only in
the sense that seeing implies being affected. There is also passivity in
being the one seeing. We cannot just see differently. We see as we do,
“with ourselves,” as the selves we are. Passivity in self-relating implies
an undergoing. This becomes clear when we come to see differently.
What it means to see the world as we do (that it appears to us in this
way) is something we ourselves have to bear. We do so in our ways of
relating.
In seeking to understand what religion is about this strange passivity
in our relating can come into the foreground. Religion is about “our
take” on the world: how we see the world and how we can and should
come to see the world differently and thereby change. In the optics of
religion, the question of selfhood in self-transformation is intensified.
We cannot simply change ourselves because we are who we are. If we
are to change, we are to change, that is, to change our lives and ways
of seeing the world. But this self-transformation is only possible
“despite oneself.” It takes time and it takes “oneself”: patience and
will. Religion is about self-transformation which humans themselves
cannot just bring about, although it can only come about through
what they do: through their ways of seeing and relating. Religion can
bring this passivity in our relating to the world into the foreground
because it directs our eyes towards experiences of being overwhelmed
and being transcended ourselves.
Is religion just “about” self-transformation? Is it not about a
“beyond the self”? Indeed. That is why it can be about self-trans-
formation “despite oneself.” Religion invokes a beyond the world of
- That we are in this sense “making ourselves unfree,” also in keeping ourselves
in a state of ignorance or blindness, is a key point in Kierkegaard’s redefinition of
sin (cf. esp. Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, and The Sickness unto
Death). It is in particular to be seen in his notion of self-inclosing reserve [Indeslut-
tethed] in contrast to inwardness or interiority [Inderlighed].