Hectic Cathexis

Cathexis is a big fat liar.

In the study of human behavior, cathexis refers to the tendency to fall in love in the worst sense. Most of us wander through life with an appetite for certain things, a sense of longing for things we don’t have. It’s an ally of temptation. Were it not for that, we would still be living in Eden. Instead, we have left the Garden of God and written a long history of humans building, destroying and killing each other. In recent times, we see an explosion of new ways to tempt that sense of longing.

Cathexis is the fundamental element in teenage romances with all the dramatic tragedy that makes up the lore of popular music. It is the very heart of self-deception, striving and giving your resources for something that cannot be. It’s gotten to the point we actually idolize the worst parts of it as normal. Your whole sense of evaluation, the very radar of your daily attention to life, is wired for seizing on things that simply do not matter. Consider the ultimate irony of a new country music act, Maddie and Tae. Their first big hit, “Girl in a Country Song,” bemoans how country girls have to be pin-up models to get much attention from country boys. It’s not that these girls have no talent, but you and I would have never heard of them unless they were able to come across as hot babes in the first place. Without those pretty faces, there would be no recording contracts. It’s all about the money and manipulating the folks into buying. It takes cathexis to sell a song bemoaning cathexis.

Do you suppose I could pull the same stunt? Would I sell more books if I played that angle? If I grew my hair long, it would curl. All I have to do is wear a hat to hide the bald spots, and let my beard cover more of my face with a more fashionable thickness. Maybe hit the gym a little harder and take more pictures with my shirt off, in dramatic poses doing manly stuff. Or maybe record videos and take advantage of some measure of acting skills and charisma, tweak the wording of my lessons to make them more dramatic. You’ll have to speculate whether I could pull it off, but I will tell you I could. And how much difference would it make? More attention for me, but not much on the message.

And I would feel worse than a big vat of raw sewage.

There is nothing more precious than a clear conscience, which itself is the symptom of obeying your heart. Not the heart of American country music, a vast wasteland of mythology for what never was, nor could ever be — never mind how much I like some of that music — but the heart of David in the Psalms we are studying.

It’ll take us several years to get through them all. Every step of the way, the core of their meaning hinges on knowing something about David the man. If there was ever a man torn between cathexis and his own spiritual nature, David is type. We are told he wasn’t all that large physically, but nobody matched his courage, born of a passion to follow God’s moral character. Sure, there was talent and personal charisma, but we’d never have heard of him without that passion for divine justice. That was his covering, the thing that kept him on the throne. He had plenty of troubles, each easily traced to some human flaw in his own character, but then we read his psalms.

You can have a silly cathexis for the Scriptures, as evidenced by the wacko behavior and writing of a huge number of evangelicals. A significant portion would tell you, for example, it’s somehow immoral to sip coffee next to your Bible, and God forbid you should splash a few drops on those precious pages! Or that you fail God somehow if you don’t memorize vast sections in their favorite English translation. The fetishism is embarrassing.

They misinterpret David’s words when he says he loves the Law. They say he’s talking about the Bible, but in their minds they pervert that to mean a cathexis for a physical object along with a jingoistic passion for the English rendering. They may not be disciples of Ruckman, but way too many of them run very close to thinking it’s all about the words, as if the words were a magic spell against primitive evil. No, David is saying that he treasures his moral awareness, that clarity of vision for God’s character woven into reality. Despite his frequent failure to obey it, David’s own instincts had been reshaped by reading the Books of Moses. He absorbed the moral impact of that Covenant into his very character.

So when David said he listened to his heart, it wasn’t just poetry, but pretty near literal. While the Hebrew people might not have said so in words, they knew instinctively that the heart was a sensory organ with a form of awareness far above that of the mind. The Hebrew language and the whole culture was given to stripping away the distractions of this world and contemplating in silence enough to still the mind so that it would obey the heart. After centuries of living in houses, the Hebrew people still idolized the nomadic shepherd’s life of pitching small tents in the rocky wilderness. We owe that to the fact David probably spent more time in a tent than in any solid structure for much of his life as a shepherd in his own family’s existence in the region of Bethlehem.

I tend to think a study of Psalms should take years, given how alien it is to our modern culture.