These days, the economy is on everyone’s lips. Uncertain times. The job market is stiff. Job hunting is like a bad fishing day. But this writing isn’t about tough economic times.
I’m writing about an economy of a different sort, something more than unemployment or inflation. The economy I’m writing about is harder to pin, difficult to put your finger on, but, in a way, more important than the monetary kind. I’m writing about an economy of ideas. Like money, ideas circulate, transact, and evolve. To the untrained mind, we see nothing but a normal day, anything but extraordinary, and yet, ideas have and operate in an economy.
Though talked about all the time, including politics, entertainment, culture, education, and yes, even religion, this economy of ideas is invisible to many. These domains of our earthly existence organize and compartmentalize us. They group and arrange us in where we eat, what we watch, how we vote, how we learn, and even what we believe, without us ever being aware. We “dress” in outward forms for each of these domains: a suit for business, a uniform for politics, a certain tone or style for religion. They become compartments for daily life, each with its own outfit for success. By not adhering to the dress code, we feel naked and, maybe, bound for less-than-favorable results.
But what could it mean if we are compartmentalizing according to these domains? We’re compartmentalizing ourselves – and each other – by this economy of ideas. Business and politics, though different, sometimes intermingle in ways that benefit both – though not always for the good of the public. In the political domain, democrats and republicans stand on opposite sides of the fence, each loyal to their values and policies, with little room for crossover – public servants and voters alike. Liberals mostly protest. Conservatives mostly rally. Republicans are overly stiff. Democrats are overly loose. A family divided by politics at the dinner table runs downstream from the deeply seeded arguments between politicians reported on by the legacy media circuit. In business, profit margins are precious and pried open with crowbars. If government can help, businesses are happy to reciprocate. Meanwhile, religion and entertainment often overlap more freely, but even there, boundaries of morality and ethics remain. In entertainment, money and sex and violence, by and large, make up the sparkling cocktail, generating revenue for studios and the “artists” who treat such ingredients of the cocktail as their bottom-line definition of what makes the human condition or simply as a means to wealth and opulent lifestyle. Religion, the most active and leaned upon domain of this economy of ideas, is as rich, diverse, and flavorful as 31 Flavors. Each holds a unique doctrine and a laundry list of rituals and practices that the believer must act out to mature in faith. Assuming the most passive role in this economy of ideas is education, where teachers are underpaid and underappreciated, where financial literacy is a foreign language, the teaching methods enforced are as updated as a Windows 98 laptop, and the environment for learning is as freeing for the student and technologically advanced as someone in an orange jumpsuit, handcuffed, and led to prison by a gated network of pathways to the desired career paths. In culture, all the aforementioned flow freely, circulating, transacting, and evolving according to both proven patterns and the cracking, thunderous upswing of phenomena.
Eventually, in this economy of ideas, we all feel a certain hunger. Some chase fulfillment by doubling down on politics, others through career and culture. But countless millions turn to religion, seeking something deeper: an encounter with the divine. A whisper, a nudge, a tap on the shoulder, a chance encounter – any sign that life may be more than a constant migration through this economy of ideas.
Yet here’s where we stumble: we treat the divine like another domain in our economy, applying to God the same finite rules by which we organize society. But through silence, God does not bend to human management or systematization. We only interpret his silence as a sign of no protest as we cook up doctrine for organized religion. We need to organize as a collective, but up to this point, it’s been on our terms, not his. He lives and breathes outside this economy of ideas.
We know it. We sense, deep down, that our game of religious “dress up,” while useful, is not enough. The satisfaction we crave – the fullness we’re starving for – comes only when we strip down those layers. When we stand naked before God, unadorned by the ideas that superficially integrate us – socially, economically, politically, culturally – but fail to touch our depths, then – and only then – do we discover God, and in the reflection of his eyes, our true selves.
God is not bound by ideas. Doctrine may articulate the definition of God by compiling scripture from the Bible, but God is far from contained within theology. God cannot be dressed in garments of doctrine any more than we, as adults, can still fit into our baby clothes. God dwells in the infinite, the vast dark unknown of his own presence. And in that space, our intellect – scrambling to return to the comfortable finite of ideas – becomes as put-together as a sand wall against the rising tide.
We were made for more than the rigidity of ideas and the economy that manifests from their interplay. Picture standing on the beach. The sand represents familiar structures of belief, trade, interaction, play, and infrastructure, where we feel the most stable and sure. But just a few yards away, the sand shifts and fades beneath the crashing waves as the depth rises to the shoulders and the dark depths of the ocean reside beneath your feet. Suddenly, the domains of the economy of ideas, the fabric of human society, fade and lose shape like colored dye in a glass of water. Here, the mind is gone, and the heart only feels, but the soul is wide open to hear the voice and love of God. Time and space don’t matter. Shapes and sounds are the grappling hooks.
Walking out of the ocean, the beach is never the same again. For the first time, being naked feels like a strength in this economy. It’s armor that never fails. It’s armor that is light and easy to wear. Underneath is who we truly are in God, and now, in this economy of ideas, we’re like Neo, able to read the current of society in all its facets and complexity, because God, who made it all possible, is our constant.
Finally, instead of us moving, it’s the economy of ideas moving around us. We’re still. It’s not. That’s the nakedness that Adam and Eve knew, and through Jesus, the Christ, we can go swimming.