Fernando Gros

Unlearning Theology

Quite a while back, Paul at One for the Road asked me to elab­or­ate on “unlearn­ing the habit of being right.” Every per­son­al­ity test and many life exper­i­ences have reminded me that this is a per­petual “growth oppor­tun­ity” (as the dreary busi­nessspeak­ers like to put it). It’s not some­thing I have mastered, so I write with a degree of trep­id­a­tion and diffidence.

Want­ing to be right, to win the argu­ment, to be acknow­ledged as having the best ideas is, more than any­thing else, a curse. It’s like being hard­wired for pain, both self-inflicted and imposed on others. For me, it is an imprec­a­tion with a com­plex origin.

No doubt being a young­est child (by many years) played some role. I grew up to be a hes­it­ant and cau­tious speaker, not pre­pared to make my thoughts public unless I had care­fully scru­tin­ised them first. Of course, that makes objec­tions and cri­ti­cisms harder to take, because you can’t help but feel attacked in a way that would not matter so much if your words were more pro­vi­sional and less anxiously chosen.

School didn’t help much. Sure, there were oppor­tun­it­ies to speak in formal ways — public speak­ing and debat­ing. But, in my school, being cap­tain of the debat­ing team car­ried as much kudos and being good at knit­ting and, for a guy, the same level of “sus­pi­cion.” Mine was not a school that encour­aged free think­ing and the open exchange of ideas in a col­legial envir­on­ment. It was a school that trained the sons and daugh­ters of build­ers and labour­ers to be cler­ical work­ers, trades­men and house­wives. How I ever wound up there remains a mys­tery to me and that I ever got out with an semb­lance of sanity remains a point of deep grat­it­ude and amazement.

Of course, the darker shadow of my school years was the spectre of racism. I wasn’t espe­cially big, or strong as a young kid, which made it hard to avoid fights. Towards the end of my high school years I cul­tiv­ated the per­sona of someone who was viol­ent, unhinged and unpre­dict­able (at least two of those were true). But, in my younger (and smal­ler) years I wasn’t able to do that. Thank­fully, or so I though at the time, I quickly learnt that words could hurt in ways that fists couldn’t and from a safer dis­tance. Although I used phys­ical viol­ence more as a threat and bluff, verbal viol­ence was estab­lished pattern.

Be your­self, is the mantra, but for most of the first thirty years of my life it was a myth. Being someone else always seemed a more effect­ive (and safer) strategy. I don’t believe it was a coin­cid­ence that when I moved coun­tries it became easier to be myself and in some ways, easier to make friends. Con­text matters.

It was that exper­i­ence of being in a dif­fer­ent place that made me think hard, really hard, about the ways I used lan­guage. My rhet­or­ical strategies, acquired both as a means of sur­vival and as a way of “fit­ting in” had to go.

One of the prob­lems with church is that the per­cep­tions we form of each other (and espe­cially of those in lead­er­ship) are so piece­meal and asym­met­ric, often built up from small frag­ments of con­ver­sa­tions (as well as hearsay and obser­va­tion). The prob­lem that cre­ated for me was train­ing for min­istry in a system that wor­shipped the cult of lead­er­ship. Being a good leader meant having author­ity and being author­it­at­ive means being right — doesn’t it?

I don’t know and in away, I don’t really care. I’m not in that world and not about to return to it. Lead­er­ship is not a game I play, so I’m no longer inclined to spend time defin­ing it.

Which brings me back to the curse of being “right.” These days I’m much more inter­ested in being honest that in being right. That means paying more atten­tion to where one stands, in rela­tion to the con­ver­sa­tion, rather than the out­come of it. Good con­ver­sa­tions matter more than win­ning strategies. I’m not jeal­ous of the pyrrhic vic­tor­ies of those who would rather shut down other talk­ers than let ideas form and develop. What I want, most of all to resist, is the sordid tempta­tion ot change my inter­pret­a­tion of real­ity for the sake of pop­ular­ity or approval.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 10:23 am. It is filed under Education, Theology and Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.