How can God save me from God?: Scrupulosity and Weber's Iron Cage

I savored spoken words of Scripture like they were morsels and I was a rat — a rat that scurried through the leftovers of everything divine. It was Dan Musselman's instrumental medley as I held a neon yellow Stabilo highlighter, my right hand hovering over the silky white pages of the book of Exodus 15:11, reading "Who among the gods is like you, Lord? Who is like you — majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders?" But there was a growing chasm between me and this God above gods, this Lord of lords with His unmatched holiness and working wonders. After many days turned weeks turned months, with a heart broken and battered, and a mind on the cliff's edge of sanity, I found myself asking, "How can God save me from God?"

Max Weber's "Iron Cage" describes the limitation of human freedom by trapping individuals in a seemingly inescapable system of capitalism. But how does this manifest on a personal level? Through rationalization, in fact it was this growing notion of widespread rationalization that the rise of the "Iron Cage" was first identified. As individuals, we have developed an innate and almost natural tendency to systemize the different areas of our lives, and perhaps even life itself. We took the natural curiosity that drove learning and compartmentalized it into universities, but soon it wasn't even about learning anymore — it was about getting that uno, graduating Summa Cum Laude, and trying to add as many titles and labels to our name as possible. Passion-driven protests alit with the spirit of reform and fueled by the vision of a better, more humane world was marshalled into the frameworks of law and legal maneuvering until justice could only be served within the walls of a courtroom. And what of crafts? Of human art? What of the fine tuning of human-made and soul-filled pieces we used to devote time, attention, and our very selves to? This too we set a goal for, put in a box for, dressed up in pretty packaging for the consumerist market perfectly sculpted by hands no longer of flesh but of metal working tirelessly in factories.

It is with this same culture- and time-driven configuration that we rigidize ourselves. We place a quota over our heads when we say "I should paint an hour everyday" or "I should write one blog entry every week." We study expression and analyze each social interaction as if it were a performance requiring rehearsal, as if a script had to be prepared. We attempt to perfect our personality through constant comparison, self-scrutiny, and refinement because we find ourselves in a culture that's so driven to producing "the best version of ourselves," as if growth were a codified, computerized, linear, lifeless process. And forgive me if my words appear as if to villainize self-growth, but the danger lies not in wanting to be better itself. The danger lies when the ideal output — whether in law, the academe, in art, or the self — grows into an obsession, and it is on this obsession that I found myself falling into the cracks and potholes of the system I built, and it was dangerous, because I systemized God.

Scrupulosity is a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder characterized by pathological guilt or obsession associated with excessive religious or moral concerns. And while that's what it looked like outside, it was a different view from within. What once filled me with gladness now ran my bones dry: grace was replaced by scales I could not measure up to, and the comfort of the black ink on the pages now sounded accusing, as if a finger were constantly pointing at me, reminding me of how imperfect I was, of how I was never enough. I felt like the one sheep in the one hundred, but I was living in a different narrative. The sheep got lost, but my shepherd did not look for me. Instead, the shepherd blamed the one sheep for not staying within the bounds of the wooden fence. He blamed the one sheep for not being like the ninety-nine still in the field, punished and condemned for going astray. 

But the thing about the narrative of the one lost sheep is that there was no wooden fence to begin with. So what if the shepherd wasn't inside the fence condemning the one lost sheep, but was patiently waiting for her to step outside and join the rest of the ninety-nine in the field? In the process of stepping outside of the wooden fence, my "Iron Cage," it took much courage for me to ask myself "Who is the 'God' that I need saving from?" This single question was an open acknowledgement that the system I have built around my relationship with God was a system that is, at the present, failing. And perhaps the output of this system was an output that would destroy me before I reached it, if I even could. 

So I want to ask you something: what systems do you have in your life that are slowly chipping away at you without you even realizing it? Do you believe that you are quantified? That a drop in your grade is equivalent to a drop in your being? That you are defined by what you do, who you date, how many pop artists you know, or how charismatic you are? Maybe no one is really asking you to be all that — to constantly perform, to constantly reach for the stars, to constantly chase after a version of "you," of "us." Maybe we'd find who we really are if we quit the chasing, if we quit the performing, if we quit all our anxiety-driven striving, and be okay with the thought of being unremarkable.

My fellow sheep, greener pastures still exist — all it takes is for you to step outside of the wooden fence.