Spin

Today I ran across a blog entry entitled The Sustaining Narrative on a blog I had never read before, Crunchy Con. Here is an excerpt:

I heard a very sad report on the BBC over the weekend. Their correspondent visited a Vermont family that backed the Iraq War foursquare. They had lost a son in the fighting, and the young soldier's mother said she hoped Americans didn't forget what our troops were sacrificing so that America could still live free.

This is heartbreaking. We're not asking young men and women to die in Iraq to protect American liberty. But this grieving mother needs to believe that so her son will have died in some greater cause. When I contemplate the possibility that my brother-in-law might die in Iraq -- a member of his unit was killed last week by an IED -- I can't hold on to the thought for more than half a second, not only because it's so painful for obvious reasons, but because I can't see the moral justification for it. I mean no offense to you who do, and God knows the courage of those young men and women is unquestionable. It's those who sent them to Iraq in the first place I question, and I don't see why we have to pretend the war is about American liberty to justify the decisions those leaders (with our support, it must be said) have made.

What the author is getting at is the way we construct narratives around social or political issues to help cover the tragedy that would otherwise threaten to overwhelm us, the way we sometimes become good at lying to ourselves about (or at least distracting ourselves from) uncomfortable truths. Of course, politicians have long made use of "spin doctors" to make the truth seem better than it really is, but this sort of thing is not limited to politicians.

I remember the funeral of a friend I had in college, a young woman who had been married for only a year when she was killed in a car accident. At the funeral, the preacher went on and on about how my friend had died for a reason, standing up for what was right, a martyr of sorts for the Christian faith, an example to all the sinners in the room who had better take notice of her sacrifice for their sakes. I'm guessing the preacher didn't know how, when all her fellow Holiness church members were away, my friend and her husband would put on their forbidden wedding rings, turn on a little forbidden music, and dance the night away together. If she had known, maybe the funeral sermon would have been about the danger of worldly pleasures that lead you to an early grave.

Either way, I resented the preacher's need to use my friend's death for her own ends, to bolster her appeal. My friend had not died for the audience's sake, and she hadn't died for her sins. She had just died--a wonderful, vivacious, happy life snuffed out. Maybe there was a bigger reason, but it just seemed arrogant to me for that preacher to pretend she knew what it was in order to get a response from her listeners.

Looking back, farther away from the grief of that moment, I wonder if that preacher might have been overwhelmed with grief herself--she might have been related to my friend for all I know. Maybe like that mother who lost her son in Iraq, she felt like she had to attach a deeper purpose to her tragedy so she could stand the pain, weaving a concealing narrative around the hurt to distance herself from it. I think we all do this, with our meaningless platitudes when someone loses a family member, with our sour grapes when we don't get our way, with our excuses when we fail.

And so I have to say, as my looking outward turns back inward, that, no, this isn't healthy, that it isn't helpful. Some things cannot be allowed to hide behind the protective coloration our invented narratives provide--self-pity, arrogance, hatred, prejudice, greed. If we hide these things, if we deny them to ourselves and others, we risk acting out their stories over and over again. But this propensity for spin that I find inside myself also serves to remind me of the humanity, the ache, the loss that is often behind it. It is all to easy too despise in others what lives comfortably in me, to see the lie but forget the pain that created it. This too is a kind of spin.

I am reminded of a verse from the Bible:

Mercy and truth have met together; Righteousness and peace have kissed. --Psalm 85:10

I don't know exactly what this would look like, but it is what I think is needed: compassionate truth that is able to pierce the lies we tell ourselves and others without piercing the broken heart mourning within. Perhaps generosity to our own hearts and those of others is where we must start in order to strip away the tangled narrative threads we have wound around the truth. Only when we can look unflinchingly at the painful realities we so fear can we deal with those realities and turn from the stubborn pain that imprisons us in the failures of the past to find hope and redemption in the present.