Work out your
own [profound need for] self-care.
Socrates,
Athenian Empire ▪ Paul
of Tarsus, Roman Empire ▪ Dan Seifert US Empire
Health
depends, for society and for its members, on disengaging from and relinquishing
the failed script.
The dominant script of both selves
and communities in our society, for both liberals and conservatives, is the
script of therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarism that
permeates every dimension of our common life.
That script has failed.
Health depends, for society and
for its members, on disengaging from and relinquishing the failed script.
The task of descripting,
relinquishment and disengagement is undertaken through the steady, patient,
intentional articulation of an alternative script.
Evil and all his works act subtly
and by indirection, perhaps by including us—you—in a dominant narrative that
makes promises about security and happiness that cannot be kept.
Counter-scripting requires profound
reason and agency . . . to penetrate the
embarrassment of living with/among the dominant script and entering a strange
new world, guarded against silly supernaturalism that has efficacy for profound
self-care, deliverance that can come by way of AWARENESS that most of us are
deeply ambivalent about an alternative script.
The good news is that our
ambivalence standing between scripts is precisely the primal venue for
the work of a universal spirit that is wind (not a wall). It is possibility and not coercion. It
is opportunity and not threat.
Deliverance from the failed dominant
script comes by way of truth telling (parrhesia) about the shape
we are in. And that truth telling makes us free.
