{"id":22514,"date":"2019-04-04T05:42:16","date_gmt":"2019-04-04T12:42:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=22514"},"modified":"2019-04-04T05:42:16","modified_gmt":"2019-04-04T12:42:16","slug":"how-to-train-your-elephant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/how-to-train-your-elephant\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Train Your Elephant"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first week our family was back in Canada after many years abroad, we decided to take a relaxing trip to the movies after months of stress preparing for the move. Given my children\u2019s ages at the time, the cartoon was the obvious choice and it happened to be \u201cInside Out\u201d[1]<\/span> ; a humourous tale about the inner workings of a child\u2019s mind where the core emotions were brilliantly personified. Unfortunately the narrative framing the comical interactions between the emotions was the traumatisation of a child due to her parents\u2019 decision to move; leaving the only home she\u2019d known. And all her friends. And her teammates. The result was that the child began to register core memories that were no longer joy, but also fear, sadness, disgust and anger\u2014essentially destroying her innocence and driving her towards adulthood. I cried my eyes out during that delightful little tale, fully convinced that I had just ruined my children\u2019s lives by selfishly moving them back to my home country. No amount of reason in that moment could shift my gut reaction that what we had just done was wrong. Haidt\u2019s proverbial elephant[2]<\/span> had headed off in a particular direction and it would not be redirected for quite some time.<\/p>\n

In social psychologist Jonathan Haidt\u2019s \u201cThe Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion\u201d, a similar look inside the inner workings of the mind and emotions is undertaken\u2014albeit at a more adult level. Haidt draws on personal narrative, history, science and philosophy to ultimately offer a definition of moral systems as \u201cinterlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible. [3]<\/span>\u201d While it isn\u2019t a particularly succinct definition, he illuminates how very complex the creation of our morality is to the end of encouraging us to greater respect and understanding for those who hold differing views from us. Such an endeavour was one that I found extremely useful and relevant as I continue to explore how we, within the church, might nurture love and flourishing across various types of difference. Our moral intuition (characterised as an elephant) is shaped by a multitude of influences. It is this intuition that has the greatest impact on how we evaluate or respond to people and situations. We then use moral reasoning (a rider on the elephant) to justify our leanings. In looking to influence someone we often engage in reasoning when really \u201c(i)f you want to change people\u2019s minds, you\u2019ve got to talk to their elephants\u201d [4]<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Community is not generally a guiding moral principle in the West. However Christianity has a high, countercultural, emphasis on interconnectedness. Haidt suggests that \u201c(r)eligions are moral exoskeletons. If you live in a religious community, you are enmeshed in a set of norms, relationships, and institutions that work primarily on the elephant to influence your behavior. [5]<\/span>\u201d This is not necessarily a hierarchical process whereby leadership manipulates people\u2019s intuition, rather we acknowledge \u201cour capacity to deceive ourselves. In our fragmented state, we have lost the capacity to make ethical discernments with certainty. The reliability of our discernment improves as we reach beyond our individual selves to engage others in the discerning process, and even more so as we seek to know the way of Jesus together as God\u2019s people. [6]<\/span>\u201d Such a strategy girds Christian morality not in individual faith, but by communal faith which celebrates the tension of individual roles within a communal identity under the Lordship of the eternal God to whom we are accountable.<\/p>\n

If then there arises a need to redirect the \u2018elephant\u2019 of some of the group, it is useful to have strategies that help. For example if the community is convinced that it is moral and faithful to love one\u2019s neighbour, but the people who have moved next door are unfamiliar, their may be an initial negative intuitive reaction by some. The elephant thus needs to be redirected. Haidt recounts that researcher Robert Zajong \u201cwas able to make people like any word or image more just by showing it to them several times.The brain tags familiar things as good things\u201d [7]<\/span>. Thus sharing favourable images of the neighbours or people who look like the neighbours would incline the community to receive them more warmly. If we add to the experience sharing positive news before talking about the new neighbours, we might engage in \u201caffective priming\u201d[8]<\/span> whereby a new idea is preceded by a clearly emotively positive idea. Once the community is positively prepared, a visit with the neighbours might be arranged as \u201c(e)mpathy is an antidote to righteousness\u201d[9]<\/span> , which can best be nurtured through face to face relationship building. \u201cThe main way that we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with other people. We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor.\u201d [10]<\/span>\u00a0If, as a Christian community we want to genuinely invite the Holy Spirit to change us, we can be strategic in refining our intuition to be more inline with God\u2019s truth. \u201cUnderstanding and applying truth depends upon your body-life connections. In the \u201ciron sharpening iron\u201d process and the steps lived out in relationship, we must traverse the paths of life and work together.\u201d[11]<\/span><\/p>\n

As for my initial \u2018elephant\u2019 reaction to my return home, it was indeed through community that I settled into seeing God\u2019s hand in the move. And while my children had to process emotions I would have rather protected them from, my hope is that their intuition\u2014that their sensitivity to the Holy Spirit working in them\u2014will continue to be open to doing hard things in order to be faithful to the God who sees them and loves them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1. Inside Out, by Pete Docter, perf. Mindy Kaling, Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Bill Hader, and Lewis Black (USA: Disney-Pixar, 2015), film.
\n2. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (London: Penguin Books, 2013), Google Play, 20.
\n3. Ibid., 294.
\n4. Ibid., 71.
\n5. Ibid., 292.
\n6. John Pattison and Christopher C. Smith, Slow Church (Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2016), Bluefire Reader, 29.
\n7. Robert Zajonc as quoted Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (London: Penguin Books, 2013), Google Play, 80.
\n8. Haidt 81.
\n9. Ibid., 73.
\n10. Ibid., 92.
\n11. Paul R. Ford, Moving from I to We: Recovering the Biblical Vision for Stewarding the Church (CO Springs, CO: NavPress, 2013), Bluefire, 83.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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