By permission
conversation with John Auerbach regarding the so-called dollar tree story. In that story, a glow stick has to be broken to glow, and the analogy applied to humans.

John Auerbach writes

Perhaps it is my Jewishness, or perhaps it is the remnants of my adolescent Nietzscheanism, but I really question the theology advocated in the Dollar Tree story: "There are some people who will be content just "being" but some of us that God has chosen, we have to be ‘broken'. We have to get sick. We have to lose a job. We go through divorce. We have to bury our spouse, parents, best friend, or our child because, in those moments of desperation, God is breaking us but when the breaking is done, then we will be able to see the reason for which we were created.. so when you see us glowing just know that we have been broken but healed by his Grace and Mercy!!!”  Really?, I ask.  God is breaking us to heal us?  I hope at least someone else on the listserve besides me has a few questions about this perspective.

As for Paul Tillich, he was most definitely one of the great theologians, and The Courage to Be is undoubtedly a great book.  But the ideal religion is Protestant Principle (freedom) and Catholic Substance?  Let us leave us aside the Western bias of this statement from a great thinker, such that no Eastern religions matter, even though Eastern religions had been influencing advanced Western thought since the mid-19th Century (e.g., Emerson, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud).  And let us in all fairness note that Paul Tillich, having had to flee the Nazis on account of his socialist views, was among the least antisemitic of great Christian theologians whose origins were prior to the Shoah and that he understood the Jewish prophetic tradition as essential to Christian ethics, not to mention to his socialism.  But, really, no Judaism in his formulation?  By his later years, Tillich had had many encounters with Jews and Judaism. But still one wonders how a brilliant man who was unwilling to collaborate with a Nazi regime could come up with a formulation as tone deaf as this one appears to non-Christian readers. Yes, I know Christian-Jewish reconciliation was still in its infancy, even in the 1960s, but this is the formulation he came up with?

Jo

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Damon writes

I am ambivalent about the idea that being broken potentiates an individual. My unscientific assumption is that hardship--say combat, damages some, improves a few, and leaves most people unchanged. During my first year of graduate school, I wrote to my undergraduate advisor, carping about the inadequacies and depravations of graduate student life. Louis Lipsitt was a child psychologist. He wrote back a detailed letter about his recent research with neonates, and the finding that some stress seems to correlate with later achievement. "A little stress might be good for you," I recall him writing. Truly, the ego does grow by overcoming difficulties.  They have to be manageable difficulties.

Was there a meme of books midcentury books title a "Man's Search for .....". That existentially themes title contains the implicit idea that life is not complete without some revelatory discovery. It has work ethic built-in. What about a  counter notion, possibly more relevant today, that searches for answers, especially if ideologically driven, tend to create havoc. Best to simple emphasize basic human connections that create cohesion rather than division.  Most efforts to find personal meaning, unless highly disciplined, tend to create divisive conflict with someone else's found and championed meaning. "

Growing up Catholic, I enjoyed the rituals and bows and smells and sprinklings. I really had no idea what they were talking about. The medieval theatricality of the mass was for me the saving grace. 

Damon