Pole Position

Humans strive for balance but tend to extremes. In fact, we all strive for balance precisely because we know we tend to extremes. Extreme right, extreme left or extremely center.
Front of the bus, middle of the road, back of the church.

Living in Japan has given me a view of the world geographically, politically and culturally polar opposite to what I have grown up with. I find here a great philosophic paradigm of balance, echoing the yin/yang (which isn’t Japanese, by the way). Many people around the world have a natural aversion and, simultaneously, attraction to one end of a spectrum or the other and therefore consistently fail the world over in balancing their passions, their time, and especially their lives. It is the drunkard who, after falling off his horse on the right then falls of the left. And this, in the view in much of the world, is an accurate description of how we should guard ourselves against our own tendencies. For we may hate too strongly or love to fiercely. We may be too optimistic or too pessimistic. We may become too excited over trifles or become rock hard heart’d towards things most pitiable. Humanity is the great balancing act, and “cool” is the most respected of attitudes.

This is one of the great reasons why I love Christ. He says,

“So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” (Rev. 3:16Rev. 3:16
English: Contemporary English Version (1999) - CEV
16 But since you are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spit you out of my mouth.

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(maybe “lukewarm” was the slang for “cool” in 60AD) Either way, it’s a pretty direct statement – God wants you passionate about things. He isn’t a half-heart’d fellow, our Captain.

So, in reading this, I start to wonder, perhaps it is not that “going to extremes” is a bad thing, but to what extremes we go. It isn’t for us to shift our balance, but to shift our focus. It isn’t that loving blindly and hating fiercely are wrong, but that they are exactly right – it is merely a question of what we love and hate. It comes to mind, that loving and hating, both of them, to extremes is just as balanced as meeting in the center, and if you know anything of balance, 100% on either end is easier to control than the minutia percents competing at the center. If you wish to balance at the center, you have to keep spinning to keep upright, never finding focus and toppling from exhaustion.

The world would have us be humble because it knows that self-love is a monster. Christianity tells us, though, not to love others and hate oneself, but to love others as yourself. Isn’t this balance? Well yes, precisely, but it is a smarter type of balance, a balance of extremes. So it is, Christianity gives us correct focus for our passions and encourages them to be fully experienced. Doesn’t this feel better, easier? More natural? G.K. Chesterton writes,

“…we want not an amalgam or compromise, but both things at the top of their energy; love and wrath both burning.(1)”

In “Present Concerns,” C.S. Lewis says the very same thing.

“The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, and almost maidenlike, guest in a hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. When Launcelot heard himself pronounced the best knight in the world, ‘he wept as he had been a child that had been beaten.(2)’(3)”

Emphasis added. (Can you tell that Chesterton and Lewis are my favorites, yet?)

And we find this, ever so natural tendency of ours for extremity, to have at its base, a fundamental Christian center as well. Chesterton goes on to say,

“But I need not remind the reader that the idea of this combination [of apparently conflicting extremes] is indeed central in orthodox theology. For orthodox theology has specially insisted that Christ was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God.(1)”

This predilection of mankind, and even nature, to surf the spectrums and ever end up on the outer rims has, at its very root, been built into the universe to display a facet of the Creator Himself. He is passionate beyond measure. He is meek to the point of absurdity, loves to death (literally) and hates with such boiling wrath the sin that separates us from Him. Christ does not, like Buddha or Confucius, tell us to overcome your passions, but to reorder them. “Repent!” means more of “reorder your way of thinking” than it does “stop sinning.” For “sin” means “to miss the mark” and that is precisely what Christ tells us to do in the phrase, “Repent and believe the good news!,”

“Change your Aim; Aim for ME!”

1. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy Dover 2004 [republication of original by Dodd, Mead & Company, New York, 1908]
2. Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur (1485)
3. C.S. Lewis, Present Concerns Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P; 1st American ed edition (April 1987)