Reading notes

I find these words from Paul Levy to be true beyond true:

Bush has a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul, a sickness that is endemic to our culture and symptomatic of the times we live in. It’s an illness that’s in the soul of all of humanity.

Paul names this disease that threatens to afflict all of us “malignant egophrenia,” or ME, and I predict history will mostly confirm Paul’s extensive diagnosis. I know that historic Christian faith (as I understand it) does. Paul writes with perhaps more words than necessary, but where I have too few, of the realization that slammed into me during this past decade of study:

One of our greatest spiritual treasures [is] the act of discernment. Being a spiritual warrior embraces and includes the most extreme discernment, which is the ability to differentiate and is a function of seeing clearly. … Wielding the wisdom of discernment is an expression of having genuine compassion.

Yes, it’s one of the most jump-off-the-page characteristics of Jesus of the Gospels, I think. But many of his followers, of whom I am one, are exhibiting no discernment at all, as far as I can tell.

This disease … can manifest anywhere, through anyone and at any moment. … This awareness [of our susceptibility to fall prey to the disease] serves as an immunization that protects us from the pernicious effects of the illness, thereby allowing us to be of genuine help to others. …

We’re all susceptible. Knowing that we are is key. Pride blocks our knowing, prevents our immunization, which is why it’s Sin #1, I think.

The [present U.S.] situation is very analogous to when seemingly good, normal, loving Germans supported Hitler, believing he was a good leader trying to help them. The German people didn’t realize that the virulent pathogen malignant egophrenia had taken possession of Hitler and was incarnating itself through him. By not seeing this and supporting Hitler, they became agents used by this non-local, deadly disease to propagate itself. This was a collective psychosis, and this is what is taking place in our country right now. …

Confirming this assessment, I recently had a delightful houseguest who was, an eternity ago in his life, a Hitler youth, a Nazi who came of age in 1930s Germany, tell me he sees the sociological context in the U.S. now as too much like the 1930s German nationalism he fell into.

(One chilling line we haven’t yet crossed is, as he says, you could be — and people often were — killed for listening to or reading info from outside the Reich. State-run media, leading to a mis- and uninformed public, was the backbone of Nazi power, he says.)

I rate his observations significant because they’re from someone who was there. A lucid, bright, articulate, and keenly observant someone, I note, whose recent presence in my life enriched it and smashed a stereotype or two along the way.

Malignant egophrenia is crazy-making. It induces a very hard-to-recognize form of insanity.

We need not to be crazy-making, especially those of us called Christian. We’re called to be peace-making, which is in a sense crazy’s opposite.

While this article will sound like psychobabble to some, I recommend it because to me it echoes with remarkable precision much of what I learned during my 1990s seminary journey, my road of “faith seeking understanding.”

(Paul’s writing also accessible here.)

[via roseeriter]