It took me a long while to realize that there are two core unspoken rules to NorCal God stuff:
- rugged individualism = do not get up in my sacred space
- check your exuberance at the narthex
The first rule surprisingly seems to span most expressions of God-seeking, while the second seems to be correlated to the income level and self-perceived intelligence of the group. Clearly there are exceptions - group hugs are big (especially of endangered redwoods) and PDEs (public displays of exuberance) are reserved for the really wacky, the snake-handlers, the Castro Halloween parade or excommunicated sports fans.
From Vicki &...
exuberance
n 1: joyful enthusiasm 2: overflowing with enthusiasm
For me, the exuberance embargo is particularly hard. I have an almost genetic predisposition towards enthusiasm. Years of therapy have taught me its limitations, but I still love nothing more than to give myself over to (often times irrational) exuberance, the (re)discovered enthusiasm for an idea, a person or a thing.
The source of the word enthusiasm is the Greek enthousiasmos, which ultimately comes from the adjective entheos, “having the god within,” formed from en, “in, within,” and theos, “god.” Over time the meaning of enthusiasm became extended to “rapturous inspiration like that caused by a god” to “an overly confident or delusory belief that one is inspired by God,” to “ill-regulated religious fervor, religious extremism,” and eventually to the familiar sense “craze, excitement, strong liking for something.”
The title of one of the blogs I am most enthusiastic about (Creating Passionate Users) reflects Kathy Sierra's apparent bias towards exuberance. In a recent posting, Kathy muses on how organizations seem hellbent on Knocking the exuberance out of employees, an observation that I think spans beyond commercial organizations. This portion of Kathy's post really resonated with me:
If you knock out exuberance, you knock out curiosity, and curiosity is the single most important attribute in a world that requires continuous learning and unlearning just to keep up. If we knock out their exuberance, we've also killed their desire to learn, grow, adapt, innovate, and care.
In the image below, Kathy characterizes the disconnect in what companies hope to hire vs. what they actually seem to want in practice. In my experience, her observations are spot-on for God-seeking (or justice-seeking) communities.
While I am all for maturity (I have a bald spot, we drive a mini-van), I wonder how NorCal has come to equate "God within" with an almost robotic distaste for exubernace. I worry that when we mistake the vision of Martin Luther King’s Vision Beloved Community for the status quo, when we institutionally reward the cautious, the capable, the obedient - that somehow we are bounding God in our image, domesticating God for fear of the mess that God will make in our neatly ordered lives.
One of the 10,000 reasons that I love Mike Yaconelli is that he was one of the exuberant people I've ever met. I could spend the rest f my life trying to live towards his vision of a dangerous & exuberant faith:
I want to be "dangerous" to a dull and boring religion. I want a faith that is considered "dangerous" by our predictable and monotonous culture.
okay, you've got to be sick of my comments by now, but as another battered enthusiast i could not refrain myself.
LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this!
Posted by: bobbie | Monday, October 16, 2006 at 02:27 PM