Beyond the Instrumental

As my source of meaning shifts from the celestial to the earthly, I begin to cherish what I once neglected. Friendship. Family. Beauty. Reaching back into my earliest memories, I find a longing for intimacy and connection. But it was consistently displaced by an admonishing awareness that my true longing should be for intimacy and connection with the divine. Human connections were implicitly instrumental. Friendships mutually strengthened faith. Strangers were opportunities for proselytizing. The scope of my existence was eternal, and in a quiet way it seemed foolish to fill my time on this planet with transient concerns. Family was valuable, but the uniqueness of those bonds was lost on me. Their love, their attention, and their instruction were all useful insofar as they enabled me to fulfill the call. Beauty, too, was subsumed under this divine mission. A magnificent oak tree was not a source of wonder, but an argument. So too with sunsets, waterfalls, and sprawling mountain ranges. They were useful for fortifying belief and furthering the cause.

Morality, perhaps above all, was made into an instrumental matter. With heaven on the horizon and fire at our heels, we're bribed into obedience. Within this perspective, all motivation is reduced to selfishness. I don't help you because of empathy, compassion, or respect for life—I help you because such actions are required for my entrance into heaven, and my escape from hell. It is a view that, essentially, treats us like children.

These were my ideas, vivified in the corridors of my mind but impotent in the world. Instead of defining me, they haunted me. These views, though consistent with my Christian metaphysics, had little correspondence to my actual experience of life. In my own way, I always knew that friendship, family, and beauty were good in and of themselves.