In an interview about his new book, The Slavery of Death, Richard Beck thinks through the question:
The answer most of us would give, shaped as we are by the culture, is this: you’re a nobody. If you’re not someone who “stands out” you’re a nobody. Brene Brown calls this the “shame-based fear of being ordinary.” Nobody wants to be ordinary. We want to be extraordinary.
And why is that? Because of existential (death) anxiety. We want our lives to matter, to be noteworthy and significant in the face of death. We don’t want to fade away, we want to leave a dent in the universe. So we grasp at anything that makes us stand out from the crowd, that allows us to make and leave a mark. And so we get caught up in the neurotic social comparison game–online, at work, and in our social relationships. The main symptom of this “shame-based fear of being ordinary” is envy/jealousy fused with a feeling of inferiority and inadequacy. The trouble with this, and here is the pastoral turn, is that everywhere we see Jesus asking us to “take the last place.” To be a servant. To be the littlest, least, and last.
But that is impossible if our egos are being driven by a neurotic and shamed-based anxiety. Because the reality of Good Friday is that if you become like Jesus–if you carry his cross–nobody will pay attention, no one will say thank you, no one will recognize your work. That’s crucifixion. Of the ego, of the self, of our aspirations to be “a somebody.”
So that’s the rub. Jesus asks us to become a “nobody” in the eyes of the world. In our own eyes. But because of our death-infected neurosis–the shamed-based fear of being ordinary–we can’t accept Jesus’s offer. We don’t want to take up the cross. It’s too embarrassing. We don’t want to be a servant. No one will applaud or like us on Facebook.
The Dish previously has featured Beck’s work here, here, and here.
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