How Not to Lead Our Emotions

Our emotions want to lead us.   But we need to lead them if we’re going to be responsible and live wisely and lovingly.  But how does that happen?

First,  let’s clear away two extremes:    emotionlessness, and emotionalism.

At one end of the spectrum is emotionlessness.

In this world-view, Mr. Spock is the ideal.    All emotions are filtered out and denied.   Only pure logic, pure principles devote of heart, can be used.   All expressions of emotion are suspect, and all feelings are deemed bad and are to be repressed.

In some circles, it is positively spiritual to be emotionless and emptied of all desire and passion, and then to look down with disdain on those who still have feelings.     God is the giver of fail-safe formulas and is the ultimate logician.    He is useful as a preserver of orderliness, and our plan is to use Him to tidy up our messy lives and keep things safe, predictable, and logical.

But He won’t be used, and allows disorder and pain to happen we can’t remove.    And then we lose all control.

We do a Popeye.

Popeye the Sailor man always finds himself in a situation where he’s getting pummeled but is meekly taking it, reaches his breaking point, and finally says, “I has all I can stands, and I can’t stands no more!”    Out comes the spinach and his arms increase in size and he goes nuts and fists go flying and his nemesis, Brutus, is defeated.

The cartoon pokes fun at us all  by showing how easy it is to go from emotional repression to being unable to retrain our long pent-up emotions.

Repressing our emotions and denying our emotions isn’t leading our emotions, but only delaying and even building their level of control over us.   Which is why God so frequently refuses to cooperate with our plans to bring order to the galaxy.

At the other end of the spectrum is emotionalism.  

This is where we not only express our emotions, but seek to increase the amount of feelings and increase the level of expressing them by stimulating them more.    Emotions, in the approach, are like a drug.     We need increasing amounts of stimulation to feel what we want to feel, and work harder and harder to gain an emotional state–usually of bliss.

Being ruled and led by emotions is this kind of spirituality’s trademark.    But they mistake emotions for the voice of God and fail to understand that our emotions will often lead us to destruction if allowed to rule us.

Blissing out for the sake of blissing out is the ultimate goal.    Instead of emptying ourselves of all desire as the path of nirvana, this is where gratifying all our desires is the path.      But since it takes more and more to repeat the feeling, and we have less and less feelings each time we repeat the cycle, we end up robotic on this path as well.    God, in other words, is a means to an end:    feeling great all the time right now.

What does one do when you have felt all you can feel at the highest levels, and no amount of stimulation can evoke any feeling anymore?    This is the question every kind of addict will face at the very end of their addictive, downward spiral.    At first they used to gain euphoria, then they used to feel normal, then they used just to feel bad.

Using emotions like a drug won’t help us either.

The alternative to these two false paths is found in the book of Psalms, and seen in the life of Christ.     It is to feel the full force of our feelings, and express them in the presence of God and offer them back to God as powerless, needy people.

I’ll take up this theme in the next entry….