Eccentricity: A Spirituality of Difference

By David Arthur Auten

The church has been inundated in recent years with literature emphasizing the relational and the value of community. David Auten provides an alternative perspective and counterbalance, bringing our attention back to the other indispensable side to the communal--the individual and the sacredness of the self.

Eccentricity is a sustained meditation on this strange and fundamental fact: there has never been, nor will there ever be, another you. You are inescapably and irrevocably different. But what does your difference mean? And who are "you" really? Weaving together insights from Calvin, Caussade, Jung, Derrida, Wolterstorff, and others, Auten guides the reader through a spiritual exploration of the difference implicit in being a self, the divine calling to make a difference, and the interconnectedness of the two. The result is an arresting bricolage reminding us of the wonderfully eccentric nature of human existence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Apr 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781630874094

David Arthur Auten

David is a writer and spiritual counselor living in San Diego, California. He is a graduate of Yale Divinity School and the author of four books, including most recently Leaving God Behind from Wipf and Stock Publishers. A former martial artist, pastor, and professor of religion and philosophy, David is known for his caring demeanor, conversational style, and appreciation for the dark asymmetries of life.

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Eccentricity

A Spirituality of Difference

•

David Arthur Auten

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ECCENTRICITY

A Spirituality of Difference

Copyright © 2014 David Arthur Auten. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

isbn 13: 978-1-62564-456-5

eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-409-4

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Auten, David Arthur.

Eccentricity : a spirituality of difference / David Arthur Auten.

viii + 120 p.; 23 cm—Includes bibliographical references.

isbn 13: 978-1-62564-456-5

1. Theological anthropology—Christianity. 2. Psychology and religion. 3. Self-acceptance. I. Title.

BT701.3 A25 2014

Manufactured in the USA.

My thanks and appreciation to Nora Gallagher

for reviewing an early draft of this manuscript.

In a world increasingly aware of diversity and pluralism,

I imagine Jesus Christ saying,

I am the difference.

David F. Ford

Introduction

Whatever else an undomesticated Christian tradition may tell us it is certain to underscore how profoundly different our lives must be.

Miroslav Volf

My wife Erin and I recently celebrated our ten-year wedding anniversary. We couldn’t believe it. Though we are young we’ve been together for ten years already, plus the three years we dated since meeting our senior year of high school. That was when we first fell in love. It was quite unexpected, as falling in love often is.

Erin was a straight-A student. She hung out with a good crowd that didn’t mess with distractions like smoking and drinking. She and her friends were focused on the future. Successfully graduating high school. Getting into a good college. Securing a decent job. Erin and I grew up in the same town and had gone to school together since we were kids. But my aspirations for the future had evaporated roundabout my sophomore year. Apathy had overcome me for more reasons than I care to name. Suffice it to say that by the time I was midway into my teenage years my goals were much more short-term and a lot less noble.

After being suspended for six months for calling in a fake bomb threat to my high school—a completely unplanned phone call intended for nothing more than getting the student body some time outside of class to order pizza and have a good laugh—I re-entered school with a sense of otherness about me. Now an outcast, I was returning to a world where one was supposed to care about grades, about fitting in, graduating, going to college, getting a job and the like. But I did not. At one time these things might have mattered to me. But not anymore. Things had changed. Indeed, I had changed. Any possible long-term goals now had a question mark stamped over them. My immediate plans, which seemed much more interesting, included getting girls, smoking weed, and sneaking beer onto the school bus to chug down before reaching my first-period class, a marvelous way to start the day, I thought. My eyes were fixed on the immediacy of things that made me feel good and that helped me to forget about myself. That’s when I met Erin.

We happened to have second-period psychology class together. By that time my buzz from whatever intoxicant I had recently enjoyed had worn off (mostly). I can recall glancing across to my left where Erin sat a few rows over. She immediately caught my eye. It wasn’t only her beauty, though she was what my friends classified as a hottie. Even more than that, I can say in retrospect that it was also very much her alterity that caught hold of me. Her lifestyle reflected something of what my own life had resembled not all that long ago. But she was now in many ways my opposite. Erin recognized this difference between us as well. It was obvious, especially since I had once been very academically inclined, and known for that, but was now returning to school a changed-for-the-worse individual, tarnished by my suspension and branded a rebel by my peers. As it turned out, Erin was attracted to me for the same reason: my alterity (in addition to my dashing good looks of course). As she would later share with me, my bad boy swagger and flippant deviance from the status quo was an alluring force for a girl who received excellent grades and did mostly what her parents expected of her. For better or worse we seemed to offer one another something that the other did not have. And most importantly, as we would discover, that was not only the satisfaction of complementarity that one finds within alterity, the harmony of yin and yang, the axiom that opposites attract. It was so much more. It was love.

I can still vividly recall standing on the soft grass Erin and I transformed into an altar area for our wedding ceremony at the Simsbury Inn in Connecticut. Watching the one with whom I had fallen madly in love with walking down the aisle to join me in the sacrament of marriage on a warm day near the end of June was, and still is, the happiest moment of my life. Holding one another’s hands there in the beauty of nature, exchanging our own personal vows, gazing deeply and honestly into one another’s eyes, I knew with crystalline clarity that we were right. It is a moment etched into the fabric of my heart like few others. And here’s the thing: the love we have come to know in each other in the years since that time, a taste I believe of something nothing less than divine, has changed me. Love has literally called me to become a different kind of person.

Ten years later Erin and I decided to return to the Simsbury Inn to celebrate our wedding anniversary. It was a wise move given that on our five-year anniversary I suffered a bout of poison ivy during what was supposed to have been a romantic getaway in Kauai. Not so romantic when you’re scratching yourself every five minutes and look as though you have the boils of Job all over your body (I stress all over). So, for our ten-year anniversary, we decided to go simple with a return to our origins. An evening stroll around the grassy altar outside the inn. Dinner for two. A bottle of wine. Reminiscing. A private celebration of our love. Altogether a most splendid evening. It was very much a time for me to remember how, without the love of my wife, I might never have left behind my old destructive habits and found my way to becoming the kind of person I really wanted to be, I am still striving to be, and which I believe God is calling me to be. I have been changed, and it was love that made the difference.

The reflections that follow in this book are essentially a sustained meditation on just this—difference—the difference that you are, and the difference that you are called to be. There has never been, nor will there ever be, another you. You are utterly unique. You are you. This is no platitude. Nor is this a tautology. This is a fundamental truth of your existence.

Above all else it has been my experience of love that has shaped my understanding of what it means to be and to become the difference that a person is. At some point along the way, actually, I realized I really don’t have anything to say that’s worth saying except about love and its difference. From a pastor and teacher that may not sound too surprising. But from someone who was an agnostic, apathetic, dreadlocked drug dealer not terribly long ago, this conviction perhaps carries additional weight. That which I have to say is nothing other than a variation on the difference of this core conviction: love. It is what I know to be the most excellent way.

¹

Many powerful forces in life have the potential to call forth the very best in us. The experience of friendship. The experience of suffering. The experience of forgiveness and new beginnings. As a Christian I have gradually come to realize over the years that by far the most formative experiences of my life, those which have truly made a difference in me and through me, have been experiences of compassion, caring, kindness, and grace. In short, they have been experiences of the great gift of love which comes from God and which indeed God is.

²

It is from this perspective that I write here, as a romantic of sorts, and as a follower of Jesus Christ who knows there is tremendous wisdom in the Christian tradition for any and all who long to live the distinction of their lives fully.

Love’s Difference

Walking down a corridor as an undergraduate student at the University of Hartford one evening, I happened to notice a flyer on one of the bulletin boards. It was a portrait of one of my favorite musical artists, Bob Marley, with the caption, Say Something, a quote from Could You Be Loved. This is a beloved tune among Marley fans. With its positive vibration, the song encourages listeners on the one hand to be free from the negative conforming influences of those who would try to change and rearrange us for their own purposes and, on the other hand, encourages listeners simply to love. Nothing sophisticated, or surprising, about the lyrics at all. Just love. Marley tells his listeners through the rhythms of reggae, aware that we all have a voice that says something to those around us—for better or worse—and quite apart from whether or not we want to say something, to say something, that is, to say something that makes a difference. Love, as I have discovered, is unequivocally my something.

The conviction of love’s difference is of course nothing novel. Love was Jesus’ greatest teaching, recapitulating and epitomizing the entirety of the Mosaic law. Love, Jesus taught his followers.

³

This great command, as it is often called, is a systemic command, even a calling on each and every one of our lives.

⁴

Jesus taught that human beings are called to love God with every aspect of their lives—heart, mind, and strength—and to love their neighbors as they love themselves. Absolutely nothing can count as an exemption from the calling on our lives