Stuck In The Snapshot

Last week, sitting in a beautiful lakeside home with a group of friends, one friend, Andy, called me aside. He wanted to tell me about a trip that he had taken home, to Tennessee. This trip was important because Andy had, in some ways, confronted his family demons. I won’t tell much of his story because it is his to tell. But this is what I will share. Andy comes from four generations of religious fundamentalists important to the development of America’s religious history.

As is the case with any form of fundamentalism, there were under his relative’s ecclesiastical robes some ugly secrets, so ugly that they, for a time, turned Andy away from God. So having spent the last year writing a book about his life’s challenges with fundamentalism in many forms, Andy returned last month to Tennessee to engage his family in a discussion. Using a form of query known as affirmative inquiry, Andy asked his family members to describe who they were now as religious fundamentalists. To his amazement, to a one, they all reported that their fundamentalist views had changed. Some had changed so significantly that the label was no longer appropriate.

There is a psychological phenomenon that I formulated as a young psychology student. Not surprisingly, I was living in New York at the time. Called "emotional cockroaches", it is those ugly parts of ourselves that scurry into the dark when finally hit by the light of day. This is what Andy found with his relatives. Having expected to find them living in the dark, needing a blast of Raid to rid them of their emotional infestation, time, changes in the social structure and their willingness to let social context impact their definition of God had made an enormous change in their lives.

“Andy”, I said, “you had these folks stuck in a snapshot.” He looked at me, a bit surprised at first, then said, “Of course. I just hadn't thought of it that way.” “What was their photo of you,?” I asked. “Where or how did they have you stuck?” Andy laughed. “I was the crazy black sheep who had left the fold, lost my religion, left town.” Andy had also done something quite interesting. In his radical quest to be different than his family, Andy had become a different kind of fundamentalist. Sort of a social justice hardliner.

To preserve strong senses of ourselves, and keep our personal cockroaches at bay, we must do reverse versions of Dorian Gray. He, of course, was the fictional character whom man Oscar Wilde described as physically lovely but spiritually festering, whose portrait showed his true ugly self. Our photos don’t. They stick us in time. So we must allow ourselves the use of emotional and emotive technologies. Metaphorically speaking, we must forgo our staid and stale snapshots, put aside our peeling Polaroids and, for the moment, move into the land of digital photography where we can delete those images that incorrectly reflect what is represented by those preserved in them. Life gives us, as Andy proved, the opportunity to correct our emotional photos, our family relationships, and our internal scripts. It gives us the chance to get unstuck.

Ain’t life grand?!