Adults are not herd creatures; children are. To the degree you embrace conformity, to that degree you have unfinished business in your process of maturation. A godly, spiritual society of mature humans would be nearly shapeless in its diversity and flexibility. Genuine diversity needs no promotion or recognition.
When the political authorities promote diversity, you will note it is always a substitute for the real thing. It is diversity which divides, because it simply chops up any given population into groups which, if they do not antagonize each other naturally, then it must be provoked. Control is always divide and conquer, but not in the way God divides, where everyone is utterly unique, but a division into strictly defined categories which are manageable by the bureaucratic machinery.
The spiritual path is challenging orthodoxy. Even if it happens the orthodox position is factually correct, no one should be permitted to assert it for its own sake. The proper parental response to adolescent challenges to orthodoxy is to encourage the exploration, to guide them through the difficult period of human development when each of us must find our own unique path to peace with a broken world. Don’t lie to them about everything being all fine and it’s they who are messed up for daring to challenge it. Reality sucks! Let them see it painfully and clearly, and steer them away from the other falsehoods, which includes the assumption things ought to be nice. If they don’t come to a clear realization how bad it is, they won’t have any reason to grow up and try to improve things by shining the light of truth.
It requires a hard-headed realization of how nasty this world is before you can expect a sensible negotiation of balance between what you can and cannot change, and on what level you should challenge the false assumptions of your world. Yes, there are moments of sheer joy mixed with sheer terror, but most of it is downright dreary. The conventional world around you attempts to subvert this natural impulse to find yourself by offering all sorts of lies, trying to steer you into one of several manageable tracks of false individuality. This is the one thing we most need to challenge.
Let me cite a concrete example with the person I know best: myself. I suffer this persistent vision, a dream or premonition if you will, that I will be somehow swept back into government service, perhaps even some sort of military conscription. Given the wasteful expenditure of human life and productivity in our various undeclared and illegitimate wars around the globe, even someone with 50% disability rating and 55 years old could be swept back into the gaping maw of government.
In an ideal world of genuine need, such a process would naturally take into account my talents, such as they are, and deploy me where those talents were most needed. That will not happen. Should such a process be initiated which would attempt to use me again, it would surely be on the basis of the shallowest bureaucratic number crunching. They’ll want me as some kind of security guard. That’s because my last military service was in the Military Police, and I was on the fast track for promotion when I got hurt. Using me for a static security post would free up the more able-bodied as cannon fodder.
On one level, I am certainly competent for such work. On another level, it would be insulting and degrading, just about the last thing on this earth I would want to do, not to mention morally repugnant. And would I do it? Probably.
That’s because I have found my own path, my own level of negotiation between the various forces pushing and pulling me in this evil and broken world. I would submit to this awful thing because it would put me in a very good place to do what really matters most to me, that business of shining the light in the darkness of human misery. An awful lot of other folks out there will be miserable, sucked into something they don’t understand. Despite all the conventionality, each of them will be unique in their own mixture of blindness, bewilderment, certitude, sadness and resignation. A few will at least appear quite happy with things. But I would take each of them as utterly unique, even when they fall into easily recognizable psychological profile types. I would assume each of them has some divinely appointed moment with me, and me with them, and His inscrutable plans will work out as He alone can measure.
No two of us should expect to respond the same in the same situation. In spite of my commitment to pacifism and my hatred for such government service, particularly the ultimately bureaucratic and dehumanizing work of physical security, I already know God has warned me to be ready for such. Granted, if it was TSA, I’d rather be put in jail or even executed, but military style access control — gate or perimeter guard — is more tolerable. Would you call that compromise? For you, it might well be. For me, it’s a matter of context. The context includes my peculiar outlook on the difference between things which I control versus the things I do not control.
The most important thing you’ll ever do is challenge the orthodoxy of everything until you find your own answers. The title of this post is a double entendre. It’s you versus convention; kill or be killed. You can allow it to snuff out your spiritual awareness, or you can engage in the endless battle against it in your own soul.
