Speculative Grace: "God" as Audience

I. The Passage

I turned to philosophy after stumbling across Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death my junior year at BYU. I've never been able to set the book aside.

The fourth chapter has always mattered most to me. In this chapter, Derrida reflects at length on the Sermon on the Mount. In part, I love this book because it gave to me (for the first time?) the Sermon on the Mount as a question to be borne - and this is a gift indeed.

One passage in particular interests me today:

Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly. 

(Matthew 6:1-4)

Of the multitude of things that might be said of these verses, I'm interested here in a general problem that we might refer to as "the problem of audience."

II. The Advice

The (apparent?) problem with these verses is the variability of its advice about how one ought to relate to the presence or absence of an audience. 

Is the problem here addressed by Jesus (1) the problem of doing an action for the sake of being recognized by an audience of men, or (2) the problem of doing an action for the sake of being recognized by an audience period (even if that audience is God)?

The passage's basic advice is to act without regard for the regard of one's audience. Or, act in such a way that your course of action is not influenced by your perceived reflection of that action on your own life and character. Don't act in order to be seen. "Glory" is a name for one's being affirmatively seen. Avoid glory.

This is good advice, but there's just one tiny problem: it runs against the grain of my own deepest desires.

What impulse is Jesus' prohibition meant to countermand? 

It is, I believe, meant to countermand my deep impulse to double every one of my actions. It is meant to oppose my impulse to not only do something or think something but to double that doing or thinking by registering it with an audience (exhibit A: this post ;). I don't just want to think thoughts, I want other people to know that I've been thinking thoughts. I don't just want to do work and develop competencies, I want other people to know that I've been doing work and developing competencies!

III. The Problem 

One problem: doubling every action requires an immense amount of energy. It's hard work!

A deeper problem: doubling every action tends to make the work itself of only secondary importance. The work itself comes to be done only for the sake of some other end (i.e., the end of being seen). Which is to say: the work itself becomes unimportant in and of itself. It is a chore to be done on the way to something else. And chores, we all know, are miserable. In this sense, doubling one's actions as a performance for an audience is a sure fire way to make even the most pleasant of tasks miserable.

Why go to all this trouble? My "self" demands it. In fact, my "self" depends (almost?) entirely on the registered response of the audience. Unless registered through the loop of an audience's feedback, my "self" doesn't show up.

But I love my "self," I need my "self," I have a fantastic story I've been constructing for years about this guy (much of it patterned on sports-movie cliche's about underdogs winning the day against all odds, etc.).

But I can tell that people are suspicious about the accuracy of this story I've been peddling and it worries me. In particular, I can tell that I am more than a little suspicious about the accuracy of this story! 

The anxiety keeps me awake at night: I've got to successfully fabricate a certain series of events and have an audience register those events in order to pull this thing off. Otherwise, "I" threaten to dissolve away like so many fingerprints being Windexed off my three year-old's rear-door passenger window. (This image is relatively apt: life is like a window and my sense of "self" depends on those damn fingerprints leaving their residue as a kind of a phantom double. In other words, my sense of self depends on making sure to leave the window dirty! Then I can say: "Look at the dirt on the window! 'I' exist!" But Jesus says: "Do your work and stop leaving fingerprints!")

My "self' is this story I'm telling myself about myself and everything depends not just on manipulating this story to go along as I'd like but on getting someone to listen to the story and believe it . . . because then I just might believe it too.

IV. Shortage of Appropriate Audiences

The basic problem here: audiences are in short supply. In fact, most everything I do on a daily basis lacks an adequate audience. Why aren't people paying attention to me? Can't they tell I'm working (in order to be seen) here? Can't they tell my "self" depends on them noticing?

This brings us back to the (only apparent?) variability of Jesus' advice about one's relation to an audience. 

Fortunately (and this is a major relief!) I am never without an audience. In fact, I couldn't ask for a better, more meticulously attentive audience: God. He even knows my thoughts and intentions. Nothing gets by this audience. With my knowledge that God is watching, I need never stop performing.

And, as a matter of fact, I almost never do.

Alone in my office at school, the performance (and the doubled effort of that performance) continues. Alone in my car, the show must go on. Alone in my living room at 4:30 AM, I smile knowing that God sees the fact that, while all those other crazy (inadequate!) people are still sleeping, I've once more proven that my self/story is better than their's - and I'm pleased to know that at least God has taken appropriate note of it.

V. Insidious?

It is more and more clear to me that this is, in fact, the basic role that "God" plays in my psychic economy. God is my uber-dependable audience. I'm counting on the fact that he's keeping track and will ultimately vindicate the story I've been telling myself about myself. He sees my "heart" even when I'm a screw-up (thus knowing I'm not really a screw-up). He hears my petitions for things to turn out the way that I'd like ("Dear God, the story is supposed to go like this . . ."). And when things don't turn out that way I know that he (at the very least) has taken those petitions under serious advisement. He sees all the things about "me" that no one else has been keeping track of and knows the "truth" about "me" (i.e., my "story"!).

I can't speak for how this works (or doesn't) for anyone else. And I'm not claiming to. But all of this (increasingly) strikes me as deeply insidious. 

I'm tired of the show. I'm tired of performing. I'm tired of this endless work of fabrication, the endless pandering for votes. I want to work and think - not work to be seen working or think to be seen thinking. I want to lay down the burden that is my vanity. 

What if no one is watching? What if there is no pan-galactic mirror? What if God is not an uber-audience? What if there is no super-duper, heavenly safety net for my ego? 

What if there is just the work? Just the thinking? Just the loving? Just this? 

Could I even bear this thought? Could I even bear the idea that my fingerprints don't do anything but smudge up my own view? 

What if there is no place to go? No prize to win? No audience to impress? Could I get up tomorrow and do what I do anyway? Could I work and think nonetheless? Would I collapse in a worthless heap of nihilism? Or would I finally be able to stand-up and act, free from the dead-weight of that dopple-ganger known as "me"?

VI. Alternate Reading?

I wonder if we might read the second half of Jesus' admonition in the following way: the key is to work in such a way that not even your own left hand serves as an audience for what your right hand is doing. In short, the key is to work in such a way that the work is itself grace rather than work.

The promise that follows (that God will see in secret and reward us openly) may, then, do something other than function as "audience-insurance" for the temporarily absent minded.

Rather, if our left hand doesn't even know what our right hand did, how could we know that God knows what our right hand did? The chain has already been broken. The left hand did not itself (as that fail-safe auto-audience!) force the action to be doubled as a performance.

What then of the promise of "open" reward?  What if the reward is the opening of the action itself: completed, performed, accomplished as itself and for its own sake without the burden of its own vanity.

If so, then the reward is already (openly) given. There was no doubling of the action in a performance that could cause the action itself to be "hidden" behind the screen of the narrative that "I" am.

And if this is so, then the promised "reward" for acting in this way would not be a kind of additional supplement unveiled as the result of successfully accomplishing a truly secret action. 

Rather, the reward would be my failure to veil the action behind the screen of its doubled performance.

Comments

[Willy]

Adam, you ask "if our left hand doesn't even know what our right hand did, how could we know that God knows what our right hand did?": I fail to see you logic here. Might you say more?

Thank you for whatever further light you might shed on this.

[Bryne Lewis Allport]

Adam, thanks for this article. I've spent a lot of time with this "problem" verse too.

In The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer deals with the juxtaposition of open reward and hidden action. According to his reading, the self is the most insidious audience with its preference for "extraordinary" acts of virtue. We gear our performance toward assuring ourselves of our own righteousness, resulting in conspicuous performance. The solution that he proposes is not a disengagement from God as potential audience, but a focus on Christ as model which renders all extraordinary measures ordinary. As a result, my ability to qualify myself diminishes, possibly to the point of being non-existent.

I think this ends up potentially both nullifying self and god as audience. Like in Matthew 25. The "sheep" who are commended by Christ are unaware 1) that they performed any conspicuously virtuous acts and 2) that their acts served Christ.

As a concept, I think it works. It's a bigger problem is to try to articulate it as practice. How do you prescribe it without perpetrating the problem you are trying to solve? Don't have an answer to that one.

[Jordan]

I'm thinking once faith moves past the intellectual stage to the pragmatic stage--prayer, fasting, communal spirituality and interaction of gifts--this kind of mind-fry just dissipates as mere quibble. Let's not limit ourselves or God to constructs--let's just realize the Void of being without Him and march foward with and for Him. The rest is butter, churned by Christ after we take his yoke and he's free to work in our life.