1Pt5v7-8 - humble unanxiety
Texting One Peter
“..casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour..” 1Pt5v7-8
👐 Not-domineering sets up the humility: “..Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.’ Humble yourselves, therefore..” (1Pt5v5-6) and this humility, sets up unanxiety.
🧠 The role of humility in mindfulness. It’s not about you. As AA’s magic formula ~ there’s a higher power, submit to it and find freedom. Embracing appropriate grateful humble creatureliness is mental health.
👑 The role of humility in leadership. Humility as a qualifying characteristic. Humility as a scale of excellent effectiveness all leaders must be increasingly growing into, especially as they grow old and grow powerful. Leaders who lack humility cannot properly empower those they lead, they distort priorities because they distort credit where it is due, they stifle innovation and bottleneck decision making. Unhumble leaders create shame-cultures of self-sufficiency, teams of invulnerable and discompassionate stoicists.
🤕 The role of humility in facing suffering. Lest a bitter martyr complex corrupt you. Lest the cares of the world choke you. As JT considered last night, let the dead bury their dead ~ it is a humility. Count the cost. Allow it. Let it go. Take up a cross humbly. Don’t let your left hand know. Don’t disfigure your face when fasting. Callibrate your suffering, and consider it gain ~ because you can, because God is sufficient, but also because, the alternative is bottomless self-pity which leadth to misanthropic narcissism.
Be humble, so that you can:
😰 Be Unanxious - (because it’s possible, because he cares, because he is involved, because he affects change, because healing is possible, because death is defeated, because love wins, because hope will not disappoint, because he has proved his love, and demonstrated his interfering passion for you)
🍺 Be Sober - (because it’s worthwhile, because there is work to be done, there is meaning to pursue, there is good work, there is substantial rebuilding within our grasp, there are far reaching benefits to a community nurturing a practice of sober consideration, long looking at the problem to solve, with a clarity of vision)
🙈 Be Watchful - (because it’s urgent, because there is an enemy on the pitch, because the enterprise involves risk, because the world is corrupt, because you are corrupt, because the stakes are high, because things are not what they seem.)
So that you can be humble.
🤡 The Joker is a man devoured, a detailed portrait of a bitter narcissist, a blithe nihilist. There but for the grace for humility go I.
“Everything must go!” declares Arthur’s sign in the opening sequence. “Death makes more cents than life.” Scrawls a later diary entry. The zeitgeist loves to hate capitalism, to jealously hate the rich, to crudely blame others. So the wounded bitter denizens of a privileged but disenfranchised modernity will level the whole city with a Fight Club’s bloody zeal. This culture, that is, we, will wear our economic victimhood opaquely to Mr Robot’s impotent therapist. We will pursue an identity as victim as catharsis unto death.
Death is pervasive throughout the film. Death is alluring, death is the seductress in the hall, death is the ultimate experience, the cosmic cessation event. Celebrity culture’s worship of curated freeze-frames abstracted from life is a such a perfect simulation of death, that the Joker’s choreographed murder live on television is the logical completion of celebrity.
The Joker is a Requiem for a Dream, with Aranofsky’s potent rage detailing a bastard child of television oedipally involved with his mother. The Joker is a gangly gothic skeletal genius, he is the freakish Holy fool, with Greta Thunberg’s magnetic alterity, he is a raging revolutionary embittered at the ruination our parents rent upon the world, he is an outsider catalysing a cult railing against a system, the Joker is a dancing Napoleon Dynamite with Billie Eilish hair ~ he wants to end me.
The Joker is a long Dunkirk crescendo, a punishingly brooding cello torment of a soundtrack. The whole film is devotedly rendered in the burnt yellow and liquid blue of a police car on fire, jaundiced wallpapers and sickly mustard tiles line a sleazey neon Reagan-era New York whose schlocky PoMo pallour glowers dank through a fog of cigarette smoke.