To move toward greater wholeness, both groups, each in a different way,
must let go of their false innocence. Both liberals and conservatives are seeking
separateness and superiority, just in different ways. In my language, they both
must somehow be “wounded” before they give up these foundational illusions.
The Recovery movement calls this Step 1, the admission of powerlessness.
This journey from order to disorder to reorder must happen for all of us; it is
not something just to be admired in Abraham, Moses, Job, or Jesus. Our role is
to listen and allow, and at least slightly cooperate with this almost natural
progression. We all come to wisdom at the major price of both our innocence
and our control. Which means that few go there willingly. Disorder must
normally be thrust upon us. Why would anyone choose it? I wouldn’t.
I want to repeat that there is no nonstop flight from order to reorder, or from
disorder to reorder, unless you dip back into what was good and helpful but also
limited about most initial presentations of “order” and even the tragedies of
“disorder” or wounding (otherwise you spend too much of your life rebelling,
reacting, and suffocating). I’m not sure why God created the world that way,
but I have to trust the universal myths and stories. Between beginning and end,
the Great Stories inevitably reveal a conflict, a contradiction, a confusion, a fly
in the ointment of our self-created paradise. This sets the drama in motion and
gives it momentum and humility. Everybody, of course, initially shoots for
“happiness,” but most books I have ever read seem to be some version of how
suffering refined, taught, and formed people.
Maintaining our initial order is not of itself happiness. We must expect and
wait for a “second naïveté,” which is given more than it is created or engineered
by us. Happiness is the spiritual outcome and result of full growth and maturity,
and this is why I am calling it “reorder.” You are taken to happiness—you
cannot find your way there by willpower or cleverness. Yet we all try! We seem
insistent on not recognizing this universal pattern of growth and change. Trees
grow strong by reason of winds and storms. Boats were not meant to live in
permanent dry dock or harbor. Baby animals must be educated by their mothers
in the hard ways of survival, or they almost always die young. It seems that each
of us has to learn on our own, with much kicking and screaming, what is well
hidden but also in plain sight.