Look, I feel blessed.
- Big Sean
I’ve always found it rather curious that most people associate the word blessing with prosperity. While we may find the prosperity gospel a bit too blatant, most of us secretly hold to its tenets. We secretly hope that if we believe in God and follow his precepts then He will bless us which essentially boils down to either not being in want or having all our material desires satisfied. So, Kendrick Lamar aka Kung Fu Kenny (as Andrew Schulz calls him) recently dropped his new album and there are a number of bangers on there. The song that I really like is Man at the Garden, it has a great flow and there are also mad bars in there. The line that he repeats throughout the entire song is “I deserve it all.” The garden in the title is an allusion to Eden, the well-watered prelapsarian place Adam and Eve once called home. Basically, Kendrick says that he has earned everything he has (money, accolades, beautiful family, a community that loves him etc.) because of all the hard work that he has put in. If you have read my other essays, you know that I find “I deserve” language a little bit misguided. While not trying to take anything away from Kendrick, I believe that there is so much luck and mis-luck out there that statements that have “I deserve” in them rest on shaky ground.
Apart from that, I really like the song. He is rather pleased with the fruits of his labour and the ways through which he went about his business (integrity, honouring thy mother, keeping the promises he has made to the community, unbridled loyalty even to the point of death). He should, therefore, get VIP access into Paradise. “A close relationship with God/ Whisper to me every time I close my eyes/ He say, ‘You deserve it all.’” Without a doubt, Kendrick feels blessed by God. He has God’s stamp of approval. I guess I can see the connection between prosperity and paradise. Afterall, Adam and Eve did not want for anything in the Garden. Similarly, being prosperous could mean that you do not want for anything on this earth either. While the parallel can be drawn, I think it is way too simplistic. I have found that equating blessings with material possessions is inadequate and erroneously underplays the impact that blessings can have in our lives.
Blessings as Heart Posture
In the church I grew up in, there is a practice which involves blessing the new car of a parishioner. Having not been there in a while, I am not sure if this is something that is still being done but most likely it is. The intentions behind the practice are quite pure, in that you are bringing a material possession before God and his people in gratitude and praying over it. The snag? Depending on the heart posture of the congregant, it can quickly go from gratitude to a flex. It can devolve into a secular display of wealth which has besieged our society. I also think, because of the legacy of apartheid, a lot of black still struggle psychologically with material accumulation but that is a topic for a different day. In principle, the pastor blesses the car; the car itself is not the blessing. Except, the reality is that most of us see the car itself as a blessing.
In Lupe Fiasco’s song, Words I Never Said, with Skylar Grey, he raps, “Crooked banks around the world will gladly give you a loan today/ So if you ever miss a payment, they can take your home away.” 50% of cars bought in South Africa are financed and most homes are purchased with a bond. If, for whatever circumstances, you are not able to honour your credit agreement with the bank, your home or car will be repossessed, and you will forfeit whatever payments that you had made up to that time. So how can something that is technically not yours be a blessing? Is it not a little presumptuous to claim it before all the payments on it have been fulfilled? There is also the little problem of interest. In Christianity, charging interest is frowned upon and in Islam, it is haram. It was actually Martin Luther and other reformers who introduced the concept of charging interest within the Christian community. Iconographer Jonathan Pageau describes interest as a living monster because once you make a deal with it, it grows. And if it grows large enough such that it exceeds your ability to keep up with it, it will devour you whole and leave you with nothing. When you take out credit, you are essentially putting your reputation at stake. Credit score and blacklisting aside, your inability to pay off your debts places a lot in jeopardy. It’s one thing to fail a corporation like a bank but when it comes to friends and family, this can strain relationships to the point of collapse. Obviously, life is difficult and can require us to take credit, but I think it is something that we should really think through and try our best to avoid. Our societies are credit-based such that we are encouraged to open up clothing accounts in order to increase our credit score so that we place ourselves in a better position of being able to borrow more money than last time (shout out Greg Doucette) in the future. When you think about it, it's kinda crazy. Instead of encouraging saving, our societies encourage credit.
It is also helpful to see credit itself as a reverse sacrifice which is where I think the entire enterprise conflicts with God’s edicts. Here is my line of thinking: I've just read We Who Wrestle with God by Jordan Peterson, so the availability bias has me reaching for this example. In Genesis, God’s pleasure in Abel and displeasure in Cain’s sacrifice resulted in fratricide. Also in Genesis, God asks Abraham to sacrifice the most important thing in his life, Isaac, and He is greatly pleased with Abraham’s obedience. One book into the Bible, the take home is that God is dead serious about sacrifice. What then is sacrifice? Sacrifice involves giving up something good now, for something even better in the future. Both Abel and Abraham sacrificed or were willing to sacrifice the best they had to God. Now, credit is a reverse sacrifice because you are borrowing from the future for the present, and in turn forfeiting the full “prize” that awaits you in the future. This is an inversion of the order of reality, and from the little I know about symbolism, I know an inversion is no buena. You are essentially forfeiting something better from the future for the present. Think of it this way with a car. When you buy a car on credit, yes you enjoy the use of the car now but there are additional anxieties that come with that enjoyment. There is also the fact that by the time you make the last payment, you could have effectively bought two cars with the sum of money you eventually fork out. If the order of the sacrifice had been maintained, and you had saved towards a car, either the future arrives sooner for you to buy your car or if you wait the entire length of the loan, you could have bought a better car. While I still would not equate blessings with material possessions directly, I think the process of sacrificing a present pleasure for something that will serve you better in the future requires a certain character that would be pleasing to God.
There was an old lady at church, Ma’ Nhlapho who gave me the feeling of being blessed even though she did not have much. She was a widow and a pensioner and spent her days doing the Lord’s work. If someone in our church was in hospital or someone related to someone in our church was in hospital, she would go visit them. When my mother was hospitalized, she went to the hospital even though my mom wasn’t a parishioner, but my grandmother and I were and that was a good enough reason for her to visit my mother at her own expense. Once, I was taking a cab to uni, and she was in the same cab because she was going to visit someone at Helen Joseph, the hospital right next to UJ. She then proceeded to pay my taxi fare, with absolutely no fuss. If anything, I should have paid the fare, but the thought did not even cross my mind. What made me feel that she was blessed was her heart posture. Her posture was centred completely on God and ministry. She was living in accordance with what she knew God had called her to and there was an ease which she moved through life with. She was blessed because she embodied a quietude that gave anyone who interacted with her the impression she was completely satisfied with her life. Materially, she did not have more than what she needed, yet she was not running around like a headless chicken like most of us are making a fuss about life and being pulled in different directions. Most of us do too much, and when the dust settles, and in the grand scheme of things, we see that all of our “kicking up the dust” is insubstantial.
For me, you can be blessed with a lot of material possessions, and you can also be blessed without them. Being blessed has more to do with the posture that you adopt when you have or haven’t got the material possessions. We have to lead with humility and gratitude and live accordingly. At no point are we to turn to our material possessions as idols nor find any sort of validation in them. Our worth is also not housed in these material possessions. God reigns supreme regardless of the fluctuations in our bank accounts. As much as Kendrick’s song slaps, “I deserve” grammar can make us lose sight of the humility that keeps our dependence entirely on God and not ourselves.
Blessing as reverse miracles
About a month or so ago, American commentator Tucker Carlson spoke out about being physically attacked by demons in his sleep. The incident took place about a year and a half ago and he has only just publicly come out about it in the documentary Christianities. He sleeps with his wife and four dogs in bed and one night he woke up with bleeding claw marks on his ribcage. He spoke about feeling suffocated during the encounter and to him it was not even a question of whether his wife or dogs had clawed him, particularly because when he woke up his wife and dogs were still sound asleep. Being an Episcopalian, Carlson is not one to identify with evangelical Christianity occurrences like these. The encounter was very confusing for him, but he knew when it occurred that it was spiritual. He then felt an intense desire to start reading the Bible which He has done a couple of times and has found to be a transformative experience. I only watched a five-minute clip of him speaking on the matter so I have no idea the extent of the transformation, but I can only guess it brought him closer to God. Interestingly, while protracted in nature, Peterson has himself gone through a transformational experience that has taken him from atheism to Christianity. Clearly, there is something at work here and these road to Damascus moments are not just arbitrary. People like Carlson and Peterson have a lot of influence just like Paul did back in the day so these conversions striking the hearts of some of the most influential men in society is something to pay attention to.
I know that Peterson is a big deal and has impacted the lives of millions of people, men in particular. But it actually hit me only recently, with the American elections, how gifted he truly is. I watched Donald Trump go on the Flagrant podcast then I watched him go on the Joe Rogan Experience but it wasn’t until Peterson’s episode 492 on his own podcast that made it clear, without a doubt, that Trump would win the election. It was an endorsement that is simply unparalleled, and I would have voted for Trump after that speech if I was an American citizen. I am literally getting goosebumps thinking about that hour. I am pretty sure I went as far as physically clapping my hands after listening to A Psychological Analysis of Trump’s Personality. It was, to put it simply, masterful. Peterson not only provided an analysis of Trump’s personality, but he also did the same on Trump’s X-Men including Vivek Ramaswamy, Bobby Kennedy, J.D. Vance, Elon Musk and Tulsi Gabbard. The X in X-men does not stand for Xavier but rather for X-ceptional. Peterson presents a case of how each of their strengths complement each other and how they would lead to an effective Trump administration. Peterson doesn’t hold back with regards to weaknesses but offers solutions on how these can be mitigated. It was 57 minutes and 25 seconds of sheer genius. While the US was divided on Trump, Peterson made me a trenchant Trump supporter. This may not age well but I'll take the risk. Such is the power of words and the way that Peterson wields this particular weapon is nothing short of miraculous. In this way, he reminded me of one of the greatest Christian apologists of all time who also happens to be my favourite writer: C.S. Lewis. Mere Christianity changed my life in a way that is hard to describe; that even if that was the only book he had written, he would still occupy that number one spot. Lewis also went from atheism to Christianity and his journey has positively impacted the journeys of many a Christian.
I went on a bit of a tangent there, but I actually feel that reverse miracles are what are used to return people to a higher purpose. Perhaps, before we go into detail on what a reverse miracle is, it might be worthwhile to spend a bit of time fleshing out what a miracle actually is. We generally think of miracles as supernatural events that cannot be explained causally. It is more helpful to think of miracles as occurrences which point to meaning. A number of things line up perfectly into one event. Let me explain using an example from my own life. When I was younger, my friend’s aunt was leaving for work as usual. While she was in the taxi waiting for the taxi to fill up, she realized that she had forgotten her purse at home, at which point she got off the taxi and went home to get her purse. On her way to work, she saw the taxi she was mangled in a horrific accident where every passenger had lost their life. For me, this was a miracle, because a lot of things aligned so that my friend’s aunt’s life would be spared. Causally, everything can be explained. Car accidents, especially those involving taxis, happen all the time. People forget things all the time so there is nothing unusual there, but it was the way in which things fell into place that produced the miracle. While it is unclear why her life was spared, the event is loaded with meaning. It’s like Marian Keyes’ Dear Edward where Edward is the sole survivor in a plane crash. The cynics amongst us might provide an entirely reductionist and materialist explanation on why they survived without allocating any meaning to the event or shrugging it off as meaningless coincidence.
There is a famous example of a Mary, mother of Jesus, statue crying what looked like blood during a Sunday service. It was found that there was a hole directly in the ceiling above the statue and there was condensate and rust and other scientifically explainable things that are above my head. Anyway, people missed the point. Sure, there are causes behind all these things, but the miracle is how these causes came together when they did. That is the miracle.
For Pageau, miracles are everywhere but we miss them because of our ignorance to what they fundamentally are. He uses the analogy of a coach in sports to illustrate how miracles work. The book Eleven Rings by Phil Jackson opens up with the Lakers players gathered in the locker room about to win an NBA championship. Jackson asks the men, “What are we here for?” The men reply, “The Ring!” Jackson, a reputable coach, was highly skilled in being able to bring together a team to achieve its purpose. Pageau describes a coach as a prophet who, with will, influence and meaning, is able to bring a team back into its purpose. When a team is performing badly on the court, it is because they are essentially a multiplicity, in that each team member is playing his own game. Then with words, or chants (“The Ring”), or in Jackson’s case, meditation, the coach is able to bring the multiplicity into oneness, into a team working together. While Trump is Professor X, it is Peterson who is the prophet in this case. Trump leads like the captain of the team, but it was Peterson who united all these separate personalities into a formidable team. With words, aka logos, he breathed life into Trump’s X-Men and revealed their purpose. Magical. The same can be said of an excellent basketball team working together, it's magical to watch.
At the risk of having my black card indefinitely revoked, my favourite series is One Tree Hill. Just like Lewis’ Mere Christianity, the first five seasons of the series made me see the world differently, even if I can count the number of black cast members on one hand. Retlareng? It is what it is. The first few seasons of One Tree Hill are a build-up to season four where The Ravens finally win the State Championship. “Let’s Go Ravens! Let’s Go!” Before they win, the team is in complete disarray, but Coach Whitey is able to pull the men back into their purpose, “You have made a hell of a comeback. You played as a team. Even if we lose this thing, it’s still a damn fine moral victory. Now, maybe that’s okay with you. Maybe you want to look back and tell your grandkids about the state championship you almost won.” Co-captain Nathan Scott interjects with “No way. We are winning this game.” And they win, but it is what the commentator Mouth says that adds to the beauty of the episode. “You know, say what you will about the ravages of sports in this corporate age where overpaid athletes expect prima donna treatment, but there is still something so unifying about sport in its purest form... when athletes rise above themselves and touch greatness and, in doing so, remind us all that we also have greatness inside of us.” That is the miracle. A reorientation towards greatness and what a wonder to witness it through the poetic bodies of conditioned athletes with eyes trained on a single star in the darkened sky. Man, that episode stays with a person.
A reverse miracle is when not-so-great things come together to produce a not-so-great thing kinda like a curse and which is also loaded with meaning. Let’s return to Carlson’s example. Perhaps the dogs scratched him, and he felt suffocated because one of his dogs was on him or whatever explanation you can come up with. Perhaps, scientifically, there is a reason why he was scratched on either side of his ribs. It does not matter. What matters is that everything happened on that particular night, the way that it did, such that Carlson drew the meaning that he was attacked by demons in his sleep. This reverse miracle, however, drew him closer to God. Curses are meant to destroy life but on the other side of a curse can be redemption, restoration, renewal and r-blessing. The alliteration was not alliterating so I had to improvise.
It’s time to get personal. How personal? Date five type of personal. The year of my mother’s passing was a difficult year but it was a dealable year. The year of the Cov was difficult because I wasn’t working as much but it was dealable. The year of the Lord, 2023, almost killed me. It wasn’t so much that terrible things were happening but that all these things happened all at once, as if orchestrated. I could not even speak about most of it until a couple of months ago, the pain was blinding. I would just give the year an epithet, “Worst year of my life,” but could hardly go into the details with other people. I would tell one person one thing and another person something else. It felt unfair to unload my existential collapse on a single person especially since they were carrying their own things. I was struggling under the weight, and I think that I am pretty strong, but I was still buckling. It was a lot. I felt like I was being attacked on every level imaginable: psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, physically and any other -ally word you can think of. My life looked as bad as Greg Doucette’s Blueberry French Toast. A. Mess. But like Carlson, it brought me closer to God. Unlike Carlson, spiritually, a lot of things became clear. Where there once was confusion, now a tenable clarity. I use the word miracle instead of curse because a miracle always points to a higher purpose. A reverse miracle always reveals a purpose as well. For Carlson, it had to do with the restoration of his relationship with God and for me, it had to do with quieting the multiplicity, within, pulling me in different directions. One voice rose above the others and like I said before, there was or rather is an unassailable clarity in the aftermath of my reverse miracle.
As I was navigating my Blueberry French Toast of a life, I remember thinking that while everything that was happening sucked ass, nothing was catastrophic. My car was stolen but the tracking company managed to retrieve it before any serious damage was done to it. I developed plantar fasciitis which took me off the running track for three months but I could still hop onto an assault bike and rowing machine to get my conditioning in and I could still walk which I do a lot of. I had to move from the best cottage I’ve stayed in, by far, with just the best landlords, in the best neighborhood because of a property sale but I wasn’t homeless. There are many other blueberries I can pick off this french toast but I think I have made my point. I felt, deep in my heart, that God had bound my reverse miracle. Almost to say to the spirits that sought to harm me, “this far, and no further.” Apart from clarity, I also inherited a fearlessness that I never before had from last year. This fearlessness has translated to not being afraid to start over in new places; to try new things that I had never dreamed of doing, to blatantly reject being subjugated to the tyranny of politeness which entitled strangers use as a guise to tell you how to live your life as if you need their permission to be who you are in certain spaces. A fearlessness against intimidation, surveillance, herd mentality, malice, and blandishments of evil . When I walked through the door to the new year, the word fear was just too big and wide to fit through that narrow gate so I had to leave it on the doorstep of 2023. It is also not like fearlessness was something that I could take any credit for. I simply just leaned into God. As the bible verse in Genesis reads, “Fear not Abram: I am thy shield and great reward.”
“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” This was the question Job was asked in the Bible when life was cooking and subsequently serving him up a plate of Blueberry French Toast a la carte. Life went Michael-Jackson-bad for Job, a faithful servant of the Lord, and his suffering seemed unlimited. You know how Elon Musk described starting a business as “eating glass and staring at the abyss,” Job was going through that degree of suffering. In his humility, he had a wagwan moment with God to which God replied with, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” Job went through his own reverse miracle but he remained faithful through it all, even when the pain was at its most acute. His faithfulness was rewarded:
So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning: for he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses.He had also seven sons and three daughters. And he called the name of the first, Jemima; and the name of the second, Kezia; and the name of the third, Kerenhappuch. And in all the land were no women found so fair as the daughters of Job: and their father gave them inheritance among their brethren. After this lived Job an hundred and forty years, and saw his sons, and his sons’ sons, even four generations. So Job died, being old and full of days.
That last sentence makes me think that it is a hyperbolic description of Job dying having lived a full life, just like the hyperbolic sentencing of more than one life except when you live in places like India where a life sentence can be commuted to 14 years or 25 years in South Africa. In other countries, serving multiple lives is a symbolic way of emphasizing that unlike Job, you will die being old and empty of days. Job lived a blessed life, even when a substantial part of it was full of what seemed like unremitting torment. His blessing status was not contingent on whether he was enjoying a prosperous life or being afflicted with all manner of misfortune. To be honest, while I would not voluntarily go through what I went through in 2023 again, I am in hindsight grateful for what it made of me. God’s glory was revealed, and I feel blessed for having been seen through the entire season. The year was not without its moments of surprising joy, usually in the form of people. There were many people who injected oxygen into my bloodstream so that I could face another day. I savoured all these moments all the more for being rare and when I curl my tongue onto the roof of my mouth, I can taste their sweetness. I am blessed for the storm and its eye. I am blessed because of my strength and broad shoulders for a one rep max of snatching the globe. I feel blessed that my baseline for the things that I sweat has risen, even more things are just not worth the energy of getting worked up over. I am blessed because I am living life, or striving to live life, full of days like Job.
Blessing as the retention of the ideal
A few years ago, I read rapper ProVerb’s (Tebogo Thekisho) biography because firstly, it was written by someone I knew, shout out to co-author Paballo Rampa, and secondly, because I really like ProVerb. I have always liked the type of person he is or comes across as. I do not know him personally therefore my feelings towards him are hardly based on anything substantive. You hear things from people who know him, and everything has been aligned with the picture I have of him. I think he is one of those celebrities who are really down to earth and also, I would take it as far as saying that he gives off good guy vibes. After reading the book, I was so sad because he fell prey to something that happens to most of us: he killed his own ideal. Let me explain. Before his marriage fell apart in the devastating manner that it did, he always held marriage in the greatest light. It was his ideal and he even writes about how he strove hard for his marriage. He concludes the dissolution of his marriage by deciding that he will never get married again. I felt that this was the incorrect conclusion to draw because marriages need more honourable men like ProVerb. When you have an ideal, and you fail at attaining the ideal, then you don’t give up the ideal, but you go back to the drawing board and see what you can do differently to obtain your ideal. Being a husband and father had always been so important to him so I saw no reason for him to give up on any of these. I am not writing lightly on this because divorce can be harrowing; ProVerb himself barely made it out alive. This is a high stakes ideal but an ideal that is incredible when it works. I, for one, believe that a great marriage makes all the difference in society and societies that are characterized by great marriages are all the better for it. This is something that is highly subjective and many people may hold a different opinion with regards to marriage, but that is not the point of this section. The point is not allowing the actions of somebody else to pour water on an ideal that you hold dear.
Quick story. Just after reading the book, I shared my views with a guy friend of mine and I told him and I quote, “If I ever met ProVerb, I would tell him what I think of him giving up on marriage.” And as you have it, life called my bluff. A few days later, I am at Exclusive Books in Hyde Park Corner and Kaya FM is doing its thing from there. As I descend down the escalator, the first face I see is Tebogo’s (he doesn’t rap anymore, so we are using his civilian name now). We make eye contact and I tell him that I read his book and enjoyed it. He thanked me and I broke away from the conversation. Then, the conversation that I had earlier in the week descended upon me like a dementor and I knew that I had to honour what I said I would say to him. The idea of going back and starting another conversation was absolutely mortifying to me, so I did what I do best; I wrote him a letter. I tried to be humble and sensitive in my approach and on my “I know this is none of my business but…” I hoped that he received it in the spirit that I wrote it, but it is something I still believe to this day. I never saw him again after that, but I was very relieved that life had given me the opportunity to communicate my message to him and hoped that I would hear from Podcast and Chill (my current affairs hook-up) that Tebogo had remarried. Still hoping.
Sometimes, as we continue on our adventure, life opens itself up to us such that we have to perforce change our aim. That is ok, but what we need to avoid is the knee jerk reaction of giving up on an aim because we failed. Peterson says that the best way to know for sure that you are changing an aim for the right reasons, and that you are not just copping out is knowing that the new aim is just as daunting, if not more, than the previous one.
In Carl Jung’s essay titled The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious, provides the following example when explaining a concept known as the regressive restoration of the persona:
Take as an example a businessman who takes too great a risk and consequently goes bankrupt. If he does not allow himself to be discouraged by this depressing experience, but undismayed, keeps his former daring, perhaps with a little salutary caution added, his wound will be healed without permanent injury. But if, on the other hand, he goes to pieces, abjures all risk, and laboriously tries to patch up his social reputation within the confines of a much more limited personality, doing inferior work with the mentality of a scared child, in a post far below him, then, technically speaking, he will have restored his persona in a regressive way… Formerly perhaps he wanted more than he could accomplish; now he does not even dare to attempt what he has it in him to do.
While this is one way to understand regressive restoration of the persona, Peterson describes it as a form of sepia-coloured nostalgia. It is when we forget how bad things really were in a past situation that we have moved away from just because our new situations come with their own challenges. For Tebogo, it would be like going back to his ex wife. This is not me moralizing about whether infidelity should be forgiven or not, it's about not returning to situations that are constricting rather than expanding. You have to choose life and situations which are pro-life (see what I did there?). No doubt, there are things that will be missed, and no situation is all bad but overall it was a situation that you had to move away from, apodictically. In Emeli Sande’s I’d Rather Not, she explores the tensions that she experienced in a romantic relationship and her own struggles with fighting off the temptation to regress. Eventually, and thankfully, the present and future triumph over her past and she sings, “But I just don’t have the heart to risk what’s left of me.” This does not mean that Sande gave up entirely on romantic relationships because of what she went through with this one person.
On the flip side of the coin, in the series Tell Me Lies, the protagonist Lucy Albright (played by Grace Van Patten) ALWAYS regresses and in regressing, she slowly becomes just like the monster she is dating. To be fair, the man she fell for, Stephen DeMarco (played by Jackson White), was raised by a devouring mother who completely ruined him. He is so manipulative that he can’t help himself and Albright was in his path length, and she was completely decimated. All she cares about is retaining the attention of a man who clearly does not love her and it's just too heartbreaking to watch. I wish I could break the third wall and throw her a copy of Bill Eddy’s 5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life because then her fictional life would not have made for the great TV it did. It is easier to regress, the devil we know and what not, but what we close ourselves off from is far more worth it. Let us not be like the children in C.S. Lewis’s quote who choose to play in the mud when a holiday at sea is offered to them.
When we regress, we become the mud that we are playing with; all that is good within us is at stake. Maintaining an aim, with our chins tilted towards the sky, is also our way of making bed fellows with goodness. When we aspire to be more than what we are or rather to enter into our fullness then we automatically rope in goodness. Maintaining an aim is much more than mere ambition which does not take into account the means of fulfilling that ambition. People who lie, cheat and steal to realize their ambitions are not blessed people, they are ambitious people. There is no blessing where we emerge worse off than we were at the beginning of the undertaking. We would be rotting and degenerating albeit with all the money in the world. The blessed person, while far from perfect, is deeply in tune with what is good and fully accepts that there is a way to go about life that is an ascent and not a descent.
But if we accept the proposition that there is no real down, no real hell, no real and final moral transgression, then we also must accept the proposition that there is no real up, no real heaven, no real goal, and no hope- and in that acceptance itself there is no shortage of confusion, disorientation, abandonment in the desert, faithlessness and despair. The affects that fill life with enthusiasm, curiosity, excitement, engagement, entertainment and interest only make themselves manifest in relationships to a goal. No goal? No hope- and worse. Life does not merely become meaningless, in the absence of such positive emotion, because meaning is not merely positive. Life is also suffering, and suffering is a form of meaning. Thus, in the place where there is no up, down remains unchanged in its essential reality, being something far more than mere conception and therefore much more inescapable, regardless of reigning delusion. Suffering continues unabated, in the realm of the nihilist, continues ameliorated by mere skepticism. And that means that an untrammeled relativism- the insistence that all things are open for question- destroys both faith and hope but leaves terror and pain absolutely untouched. There is little difference between that horrible leaving and the most precipitous fall into the deepest abyss. What is life without hope but hell? And that is the end result of moral relativism, not some neutral rationality.
In the Bible, there is a verse in Revelations about being spit out of God’s mouth because we are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold. When maintaining an aim and doing our utmost to realize that aim, we cannot be lukewarm, we cannot be cynical. We have to full send our efforts, if we have any chance of succeeding. There is a misalignment between mediocrity and maintaining an aim. The blessed man is excellent and is excellent precisely because the source of his excellence is God, not himself. When God is the source, he cannot help but be excellent. Only the best sacrifice will suffice and be accepted. Enthusiasm, non-negotiable. “Walking the proper path is both the best possible strategy or defense, keeping the terrors of life and the negative emotion associated with catastrophe most effectively at bay, but also the golden road itself; leading to the eternal milk and honey” (Peterson).
Blessing as hierophany
When John Vervaeke mentioned Mircea Eliade, I raised an eyebrow. When Tom van der Linden quoted Mircea Eliade in one of his video essays, I paid attention. When Peterson quoted Eliade extensively in his new book, I decided that the next few books I would read would be Eliade’s. I’ve just read and studied The Sacred and the Profane by Eliade and I am completely taken aback by how such a short book could be an opus of insights. It’s the same feeling that I had when it dawned on me what a genius Friedrich Nietzsche was. Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion and what a historian he was. This chapter of the essay will be centred mainly around Eliade’s work.
While on Nietzsche, in 1882, he delivered the sound of the death knell for God:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
And my, did we not over two centuries give it our best shot to become gods without a God. Did we not drive the knife in to the hilt by our futile attempts of ridding ourselves of all religiosity. “I am not religious, I am spiritual,” rang across the earth. And my, did we fail. We are now suffering the consequences of killing God and we are pathetically trying to climb out the quagmire of our meaninglessness by our own bootstraps.
Then, in 2024, Peterson provides a shovel with which to dig God up with. He ends off We Who Wrestle with God with Deus Renatus Est, a proclamation which translates to God is Reborn. While I don’t technically agree with the rebirth of God, Peterson was sending a signal that I do agree with; that more and more people are reawakening to God. I’ve licked my index finger and put it to the air to find out where the winds are blowing and I can say with absolute certainty, they are blowing east, towards the source. More and more public figures are having their “Come to Jesus” moment with regards to God. Andrew Huberman recently discussed his prayer life with Peterson. Here I thought that Huberman only has a morning routine, he also has a prayer routine. Who would have thunk it? More and more people are returning to God and a more grounded religiosity. Perhaps they have had to take the path through avenues like mindfulness or meditation or yoga to get back to God, this doesn't matter. I think we have resurrection men like Peterson, Pageau and Vervaeke to name a few, to thank, directly and indirectly. And in the nick of time to be honest, with the rise of AI that comes with a host of existential problems. A week or so ago, Tom Bilyeu released a video with a title to the effect of the first AI God being here or something like that. I tried to look for the video and I could not find it, so I think it was removed. I may be wrong, and it wasn’t Bilyeu, but I don’t think that I am mistaken. Like I wrote before, God is being reborn just in time.
In The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade provides a taxonomy of how the religious man lives in comparison to the non-religious man. He paints a compelling picture of how life is expanded for the religious man in every aspect of life and how life is essentially corroded for the non-religious man by the profane. Eliade popularized the term hierophany to describe the “manifestation of something of a wholly different order to a reality that does not belong to our world.” It is when an object, in becoming sacred, becomes more or something else while still retaining its natural characteristics. For example, a tree ceases to be just a tree but in the case of the Nguni people of South Africa, it becomes something that returns the spirits of the deceased home. Another example, Christians will eat a wafer (food) and drink wine which comes to represent the body and blood of Christ. Everyday objects become imbued with meaning because they are tied to a cosmos that is much more important than the natural world. “For modern consciousness, a physiological act, eating, sex and so on is in sum only an organic phenomenon, however much it may still be encumbered by taboos,” writes Eliade. “But for the primitive; such an act is never simply physiological; it is, or can become a sacrament, that is, a communion with the sacred.”
There was a story that made the rounds recently that basically had to do with a young woman sleeping with 100 hundred men in a day. Just let that sink in for a minute. It has nothing to do with the fact that she’s a woman, it's plainly gratuitous regardless of sex. This is what happens when sex loses all its sacredness, and it becomes a physiological act in the strictest profane state. When sex is divorced from the sacred, it moves from being consummation or consecration to consumption. If consumption is the tyrant, then the only language it understands is one-upping what it did before, Jeff Bezos unlimited growth vibes. It is insatiable. Sex can’t just be sex, there has to be cosplay, toys, penetration in strange orifices, with multiple partners at one time, with violence, sadism, faecal matter etc... It is off the rails, and we risk losing the gifts of sex when we desacralize it completely. For the religious man, sex and any other physiological activity comes from God and is therefore more real. Man works because God works. Man subdues chaos because God subdues chaos. Man begets because God begets. Everything is from God and is for God.
The religious man moves with confidence because he enjoys the orienting effect of God. His life has a fixed mark that does not change with the changes around him. The non-religious man does not enjoy this privilege and he therefore has to create his own meaning for his life with each passing day. As Eliade writes, “The sacred is pre-eminently the real, at once power efficacy, the source of life and fecundity. Religious man’s desire to live in the sacred is in fact equivalent to his desire to take up his abode in objective reality, not to let himself be paralyzed by the never ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in a real and effective world, and not an illusion.” The other orienting effect that religion provides man is that man can consecrate the space in which he lives and works so that he always feels close to the fixed center of his world. When we bear this in mind, it becomes that much easier for us to understand the entire Copernican, Ptolemaic and Galilean debacle that rocked the foundations of the catholic church. Imagine how discombobulating it was for the religious man to find out that our solar system is not even the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
Regardless, the orienting effect of sacred space also informs the decisions that the religious man must make with regards to things like social media or globalization. While these make life more convenient, they also bring an array of problems when it comes to the sacred. For example, I lived in the same house for almost three decades and also my family were the first inhabitants of the home. Culturally, this home holds a lot of sacred power and is therefore a suitable place for rituals and celebrations. I have been renting for the past five years and have moved from one place to another. Apart from the trees, I have not felt any deep connection with any of these places and these are not places that are sacred to me in any significant way. I am grateful that I have lived in pretty comfortable and safe places but these places are not home. The Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier described the house as a “machine to live in” and this description leaves no doubt to how profane housing has become. Not only has it become stripped of the religious, housing has become super political. The house I grew up in is in Soweto, which is the largest township in South Africa. In the nascent years of the township, black people were sent there in droves because of the Group Areas Act of the apartheid regime. While there was little choice to where black people who came to Johannesburg to find work lived, we as a people have sanctified these places. Without this "animating spirit," houses become machines to live in.
“Hence [housing] takes place among the countless machines mass-produced in industrial societies. The ideal house of the modern world must allow men to work and to rest in order that they may work. You can change your machine to live in as often as you change your bicycle, your refrigerator, your automobile. You can also change cities or provinces, without encountering any difficulties aside from those that arise from a difference in climate. (Eliade)” For the non-religious man, a house is a habitat. I also don’t want to minimize the importance of having a home. As the neuroanthropologist John S. Allen writes, “habitat makes us human.” Home makes the religious man more human.
Exactly like the city or the sanctuary, the house is sanctified, in whole or part, by a cosmological symbolism or ritual. This is why settling somewhere, building a village or merely a house- represents a serious decision, for the very existence of man is involved; he must, in short, create his own world. The house is not an object, a “machine to live in”, it is the universe that man constructs for himself by imitating the paradigmatic creation of the gods, the cosmogony. Every construction and every inauguration of a new dwelling are in some measure equivalent to a new beginning, a new life. And every beginning repeats the primordial beginning, when the universe first saw the light of day. Even in modern societies, with their high degree of demoralization, the festivity and rejoicing that accompany settling in a new house still preserve the memory of the festival exuberance that, long ago, marked the incipit vita nova. (Eliade)
The incipit vita nova is the beginning of a new life. Living in a sanctuary is purifying and restoring and it also demarcates the places that are immune to earthly corruption. There should be places that are untouched by profanity. I also believe that, on the microscopic level, there should be places within us that are untouched by profanity. We just can't be "yonke intsipho iya washa" through life all the time. Everything is permissible but not everything is beneficial. The sacred in us, like Socrates' daimonion, will have no choice but to say "NO" to some things. When we recognize this about ourselves and attend to the sacred within us, we live differently and better. While I live a peripatetic lifestyle, I have always viewed it as a pilgrimage. These different places are rest spots for me, but I have a community I want to be a part of in mind. While my movements may seem itinerant from the outside in, they are sacred and mark the beginning of something new. Not in some chasing novelty kind of way, but that I am moving ever closer to my personal centre of the world. The hierophany in my life is the lifeblood of my existence and the reason my life is full of vitality.
Blessing as neither tyrant nor slave
In varsity, I dated a very sweet guy who was also a Christian, except a very different Christian to me. Denominationally, I grew up in an Anglican church while brotherman was a follower of Pastor Chris. Please, reserve your judgments. I have already touched on the drawbacks of the prosperity gospel earlier in the essay, so I won’t belabour the point here. What I do want to comment on, is the general attitude that Christ Embassy followers had. They refused, absolutely refused, to accept victimhood. It was just not a part of their vocabulary, regardless of the extent of misfortune that befell them. They always believed that God would pull them through anything, there is nothing too great for the Lord. I am sorry, but this disposition was attractive. The guy would never dismiss or demean what was happening, but he always believed he would get through it. While suffering was an inevitability of life for him, victimhood was a choice. He even gave me a shirt that has “Always a victor, never a victim” written on it. Yes, I know, a lot of my essays make mention of printed shirts. Big Shrug.
One of the criticisms I heard from peers growing up was that black churches were too passive. They simply allowed black people to wallow in victimhood. People were resigned to their lives and essentially did not aim up. You know how comedian Steve Harvey had a hilarious bid about how he interpreted “the turn the other cheek” bible verse? Which essentially ends with him turning the other cheek and body so he can gain the momentum he needs to slap the socks off the unsuspecting offender. For me, turning the other cheek is not a passive act, it is an act of defiance. When someone tries to rile you up, and you respond the way they wanted you to respond, then you are just a marionette on a string. But when you turn the other cheek, you are essentially asking them, "is that all you got?" Peterson’s book is titled We Who Wrestle with God because believers wrestle with God. We are humble and courageous enough to beseech God in the midst of chaos. We knock at Eden’s gate, and brave the flaming swords of the angels, asking for ingress. We reach for the hem of Jesus’ garment in the judgmental crowds insisting on our healing. We are not passive.
We all know that tyranny is something we should resist but it seems that victimhood (the extreme on the opposite side of the continuum) is something that is encouraged, particularly in our SJW times. Every minority is a victim and should be indulged. The opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympic games was a mark of this. A celebration of the amalgam of minorities which was quite chaotic. As Gen-Zs say, “It’s giving the Last Days of Caligula.” I felt like I was watching a Lil Nas X music video. It was a terrible opening ceremony particularly because it had very little to do with the Olympic games but was for me, an instance of weaponized compassion. Weaponized compassion occurs when people are made to feel bad for not doing something that the current authorities want you to do and are forced to do it only to increase the power of those authorities in the lives of others. It is a socio-economic and political power struggle. The motivation behind this compassion is power, not genuine care for the plight of minorities and those who are marginalized. This is also the reason why it comes with the threat; when an organization or individual does not play along then the profitability of the organization or the careers of the individual are placed in jeopardy. The marginalized, who seek to wield power over the majority through the imposition of compassion have, as Peterson writes, “the habits of slaves.” They are riding the wheels off victimhood. The Black Lives Matter movement, which started off with earnest and great intentions, became a machination of weaponized compassion. If a white person did not have the Black Lives Matter board on their lawn, then that made him a racist and he was shunned or cancelled. A white person HAS to denounce his privilege or is an automatic racist. Racism and white privilege are real issues, which have to be addressed compassionately and sensibly, but fundamentally, compassion cannot be imposed. We have to be very careful of power-hungry wolves in the sheepskin of victimhood.
In his book, Peterson follows the Israelites as they make their way from Egypt through the wilderness to Canaan. God’s chosen people did not put their best foot forward when they were in the wilderness. They were always carping about one thing or another like the trope of a nagging wife. They would also shirk personal responsibility at any and every opportunity. Instead of trying to solve their own problems, they would go to Moses with every single problem. Part of victimhood involves abdicating responsibility and pathologically passing the buck. This justifies the victim’s passivity and encourages the victim to sit on his hands. In this way, tyranny is not resisted in any way, and flourishes as a result. Peterson writes:
[The Israelites] did have the habits of slaves. The sloughing off of responsibility is part of the voluntary slavishness, a veritable prerequisite to domination by tyranny. This means to abandon the duty to reflect the image of God, to confront chaos, and pathological order, and to forgo the adventure and the meaning that sustains through crisis. The cost of failure to shoulder the cross to speak, is sacrifice of the relationship with what is truly highest and consequent weakness in the face of the crisis of life.
Pastor Andy Stanley used to always say that we should not practice what we don’t want to become. Therefore, practicing victimhood like the Israelites is one of the ways that we ensure we put off our empowerment. Think of it this way: the journey from Egypt to Canaan (the promised land) was 24 days by camelback. It took the Israelites 40 years to make the same peregrination, and I can’t help thinking it was because of their habits of slaves. It’s almost like the wilderness had to sand the slavish habits off them. Counterproductive dependency, forgoing the benefits of true maturity, childishness, narrow self-centredness, a refusal of destiny, resentment, derisiveness, incoherence and constant moaning are habits that the Israelites and us need to let go of. In The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, "I want to tell you that your compassion will not save you, that being a victim will not enlighten you, that it can just as easily deceive you."
Ichiro Kishimi, author of The Courage to be Disliked, and an acolyte of Adlerian psychology has a chapter in his book titled Trauma does not Exist. Trauma exists but it can be disempowering to move from places of trauma. Alfred Adler was a very practical psychologist and believed that we should place current action and agency above our past experiences. Kishima writes, “Your unhappiness cannot be blamed on your past or your environment. And it isn't that you lack competence. You just lack courage. One might say you are lacking in the courage to be happy.” If we are going to truly make the most of our lives, we cannot cling to victimhood. It may be harder to exercise agency because of all the shitty things that happened to us in the past or it may not be if we just focus on our personal agency. “A truly responsible people will take it on themselves to become their own leaders and protect themselves in that manner from slavish subservience and the despair and hopeless nihilism of the desert chaos. An educated, responsible citizenry dispenses with slavish habits, adopts the mindset of true maturity, looks to the best of the past to guide the future, and forges its own fate.”
While I have only scratched at the surface of what it means to be blessed, I hope this essay prompts a new way of living and being in the world. That, blessedness, is a cloak you can wrap around your shoulders in all seasons of life. For the religious man, i.e. the blessed man, time is not linear, but cyclical. It is Parmenidean which means that it is inexhaustible, reversible and recoverable. The beginning of a year is a restoration, and the world is created anew. Regardless the mistakes and errors you made in 2024, your world is renewed, and you can go about your aim with the Enuma Elish inscribed on your heart.
Since the New Year is a reactualization of the cosmogony, it implies starting time over again at its beginning, that is, restoration of the primordial time, the "pure" time, that existed at the moment of Creation. This is why the New Year is the occasion for "purification", for the expulsion of sins, of demons, or merely of a scapegoat. (Eliade)
Happy New Year, Dear Reader
