Reverend Furrer preaching on recognizing the creative potential in disillusionment; how to avoid despair and re-engage.
“Creative Disillusionment”
morning I want to preach on disillusionment. Disillusionment is a common
experience the world over. Many religious liberals are disillusioned with the
growing political ascendancy of the Religious Right; environmentalists
disillusioned with discarded pollution controls; indigenous rights and labor
activists disillusioned with economic globalization. And of course peace
activists the world over are disillusioned about American foreign policy now
that it’s firmly in the hands of the demogogue-loving Donald Trump and his
no-more-kid-gloves imperial policy.
Bridges [1933
– 2013] was an American author,
speaker, and organizational consultant. He wrote
wisely about disillusionment in his book, Transitions. William Bridges
studied how people deal with difficult passages in their lives, especially
those who negotiate them creatively and with grace and renewed vitality. Having
taken disillusionment apart, Bridges proposed that instead of one
term—disillusionment—there be three:
- Dis-enchantment —often a good thing;
- Dis-engagement —disengagement is a natural response to
disenchantment
and also a good thing. And third:
is also healthy and natural, but can sometimes get
short-circuited in despair or disparagement—both of
are always sad, and sometimes even wicked.
what I’m preaching on, ultimately, is how to avoid despair. Not on how
to avoid disillusionment, mind you, since that can be (and often is) a good
thing. No; I want to preach on recognizing disillusionment as potentially destructive,
but
also as
potentially very positive.
contemplate, then, disillusionment as a three-part process: disenchantment
/ disengagement / re-engagement. This process is common to all
life transitions: moves, illnesses, deaths, job changes, divorces—any of the
many changes we all go through, sometimes willingly and sometimes not so
willingly, in our lives.[1]
seems to me that there is probably no time in a person’s life more transitional
than the teenage years. These are tough times, tough years for anyone. Those of
our young people who get lost in the despair of drugs, gangs, rigid
political/religious fringe movements, and suicide have basically become hung
up, halfway through the creative disillusionment process. They’ve let go
of their old identity—as children—be they haven’t be able to make the
transition to the new—as young adults. Our ESUC Coming of Age program is
designed to help our youth make that transition. Still, we all know that
adolescence is an up-for-grabs kind of experience that can be pretty difficult.
always a danger, for any of
us, whenever we’re in the midst of a major transition. Separated from our old
identity and former situation-in-life, we float free in a kind of limbo between
two worlds. But in many ways—most ways probably—we are still tied to our old
world more than the new. There’s still a reality in our minds (a picture of
“the way things are”), which ties us to our old world and identity with subtle
strands of assumption and expectation. The sun will rise tomorrow, we assure
ourselves; my parents have always loved me, the government would never lie to
us, God is just. These things are so, we believe, and if they are not my
world is no longer real. The realization that in some respects one’s world is
indeed no longer real is what I mean when I speak of
disenchantment.
traditional rites of passage disenchantment was a carefully arranged
