21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S

web of life, a process of healing relationship, and they denote the quality of being worthy of honour, love, respect and affirmation.

Sharon Welch, as quoted by Grace Jantzen in Becoming Divine (first emphasis mine, others are the author’s).

Jantzen comments:

‘…the divine that is encountered is immanent in the beauty, and pain and struggle of this world and our relationships in it.’

She goes on to suggest that in order for societies to be ‘beloved’ they must be ‘performative’ rather than simply intellectual. Individuals will ‘…perform deeds and narrative stories… as embodied suffering subjects.’ All of this relates of course to Jantzen’s defining us as ‘natals’ rather than mortals. Natals are significant because they are born — they are in a process of becoming. By contrast, mortals are only defined by the inevitability of their death. Strangely, despite our society’s denial of death, we nonetheless continue with this term, perhaps because as observed in an earlier chapter, the consequence of unlimited ‘spirit’, our economy of ascendancy, is that genuine fulfilment is inevitably relegated to an abstract life after death. Whilst this was once only or mainly a religious conviction, it is now covertly embedded in our entire culture. For Western culture, things have a beginning (often out of nothing) and then an end. By contrast, as suggested by many of the authors in this work, life is better viewed as a process of becoming. The idea of narrative and performative acts is important too — they move us toward an ethic that is a lived

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