Eating with Others

On Consumption, Vomiting and Eating with Others
http://peterrollins.net/?p=2840

by Peter Rollins
posted 9/5/11

One evening a young man who is returning home after a long and tiring day at work gets a call from his concerned wife, “Dear, be careful on the way home as I just heard on the radio that some crazy guy has been spotted going full speed the wrong way up the freeway.” “Sorry love” he shouts back, “can’t talk right now… there isn’t just one nutter, there are hundreds of them!!!”

...One of the interesting things to note about this little anecdote is the way that the husband does not even entertain the possibility that he might be going the wrong way. Rather he takes it for granted that he is right. This is not a belief that he is conscious of, rather all his conscious thoughts are filtered through this belief.

This situation is sadly all too common. Let us approach this idea by briefly reflecting on how we encounter people with different political, religious and/or cultural values to our own. When faced with such a confrontation (that society all too often attempts to protect us from) our primal response is often one of either,

Consumption – Attempting to dissolve their difference by integrating them into our social body (making them like us)

Vomiting – Rejecting them from our social body as a foreign agent that must be expelled (protecting the integrity of our body)

Of course, most educated and enlightened communities attempt to avoid these very natural tendences, opting instead for a more reflective position that gets beyond these extremes of consuming the other or vomiting them out. This more thoughtful position can be described as eating with the other. Here the community seeks to sit down with the other and seek out places of convergence.

However this third position still operates from the same underling belief as the others,

Consumption – We are right and you are wrong. We shall integrate you

Vomiting – We are right and you are wrong. We shall reject you

Eating with – We are both right in some substantial way. Let us reflect upon where we converge and move forward together

In each of these cases we seek to exorcise or downplay the monstrosity of the other (their bizarre practices and beliefs). But what if one of the truly transformative encounters with the other is not where we try to annihilate their monstrosity (by abolishing it, rejecting it or domesticating it), but by coming into contact with our own monstrosity through it? In this alternative type of encounter we glimpse how we look through their eyes and begin to ask whether our beliefs and practices are just as strange.

This is the subject of a book that I am currently writing.