Moral Holiday: Let Go and Let God…?

I remember Kathy’s anguished forehead that first time we went out and left our first child with a babysitter.  I don’t remember what we did, but I do recall that it was not long, despite the babysitter’s comforting and confident manner, before Kathy found a phone and called to check on the baby.  Soon after that we truncated our evening and returned home early.  There was a book around that time entitled Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche.  I could have written a sequel: “Real Moms Don’t Eat Out.”  Man has a lot to learn about ethics from good Moms.  And Kathy’s dilemma is the way I’d like to invite you to look with me at a pair of words that has troubled me since I read them a week ago: “Moral Holiday.”  You can see an earlier post, “Faithful, Free; So What?” and yesterday’s setup for this, “Leisure, Faith, and the Moral Holiday”  to see the string of thought on this.

While Freud built his psychological theories on sexual and parental relationships, a contemporary, William James, looked to relationships with God.  While he questioned (and personally rejected) the existence of God, he observed that people’s thinking and behaving was unquestionably affected by their experiences of God, their
religious experiences.  Psychologists study how the mind makes meaning.  While the philosopher studies truth and right action, the psychologist studies how we make truth, and how we decide to act.  James believed that our sense of the True and our sense of the Right are impacted by our sense of what he called the absolute, the term he used to refer to whom many call God.  In 1904 he presented one of a series of lectures, “What Pragmatism Means”  in celebration of John Stuart Mill  , the 19^th century philosopher credited with utilitarianism, the idea that value is determined by usefulness. 

James said that a person who doubted God’s existence would do what needed to be done for ethical reasons, while the person who believed (in a caring, powerful God) will be willing to “Let go and let God” as the recent saying goes, and take a “moral holiday” from such responsibility.  So imagine God, reaching out to the Mom, saying, “Trust me, I’m a Babysitter.”  And there’s Kathy, an internal message giving her words: “No offense, God, but you’re not a Mother.”  Maybe that’s why I agree with William James that one of the practical (he would say “pragmatic”)  implications of religion can be our willingness to cop out, to check out, to slide out, to sneak out of moral obligations believing that God will take care of things anyway.  Don’t we believers generally go to churches within our class and race, shielded from the poor and hungry, and from those who have a different world-view?

With regard to religion, I propose a revision to the “Let go and let God” aphorism.  I agree with James that letting go and letting God do it is a cop-out, and alluring capitulation and acceptance of Freud’s pleasure principle as an escape from a life of deeper meaning.  If we “believers” are to live lives of truth and right action, I propose we consider “Let go and let God . . . guide” as a maxim worth trying.  Perhaps especially for those of us who are retired or otherwise at leisure, taking some of our abundance of time to pay attention to what moves inside us, what guides us, is the way we can be true to both our religion and our humanity.

What originally troubled me about the words “moral holiday” is that I fear it to be a permanent illusion in retirement.  We move into “Social Security”, an enclave within an insecure world, and a nation of insecure communities.  But I realize that it is also the idea of God’s providence that I am called to reconsider, to revise.

Tomorrow: Social Security, Providence, and Responsibility

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.