Endless Navel Gazing

I'm flipping channels today and I landed on Oprah. That was my first mistake. I shouldn’t watch Oprah. I’m pretty sure that if I had an anger management counselor, he'd probably tell me that I should quit watching Oprah.

Anyway, on today’s episode the Right Reverend Oprah was treating her live studio audience and everyone at home in TV Land to a shocking new trend. Today’s episode was about wives in heterosexual marriages that realize that they are gay. These women sit on the Oprah couch and share their “brave struggle.”

Oprah furrows her brow.

The audience nods in agreement.

Oprah asks probing questions.

The guests and sometimes their ex-husbands talk about their journey as they navigated through this tough struggle toward living a life of truthfulness.

More brow furrowing.

More nodding.

Sometimes there is some clapping from the audience. Not too much, this is a sensitive subject.

The audience grows more and more enamored with this woman’s “courage.” She’s so brave.

Oprah reads sad email from an unnamed woman who’s afraid to be as brave as the show’s other guests. She’s loves her husband. But, she’s not “in love” with him. So, she’ll probably die lonely and afraid to come out of the closet.

Oprah can’t take it anymore. It’s time for the closing homily. She exhorts the audience to “Live your own truth.”

You don’t have to watch Oprah very long to realize that “living your own truth” is her battle cry.

There’s a lot of talk these days about “getting in touch with your feelings”. Or learning how I’m “wired-together.” At the end of the day aren’t we all just trying to “get in touch” with who we are?

Self-discovery, self awareness, introspection, soul searching, self actualization. Those are just a few of the terms we hear used.

When did we start talking like this? Did your grandparents talk like that? I don’t think my grandfather ever encouraged me to get in touch with myself.

In the classic musical “The King and I” Rodgers and Hammerstein have a song with which most of us are familiar. It’s called “Getting to Know You.”

However, if the Oprah Winfrey Show was a musical that song’s lyrics might go like this:

Getting to know me,
Getting to know all about me.
Getting to like me,
Getting to hope I like me.

Getting to know me,
Putting it my way,
But nicely,
I am precisely,
My cup of tea.

In Christianity we’ve also crafted a term for “getting in touch with our true selves.” In fact, we say that you can’t come to a saving faith in Christ unless you’ve gotten in touch with who you really are deep down. We call it the Doctrine of Total Depravity. We’re sinners. Our body, mind and spirit are totally corrupt. That doesn’t mean that we are as bad as we could be. As R.C. Sproul points out: Even Hitler refrained from killing his own mother.

The Doctrine of Total Depravity states that every aspect of our nature has been compromised to one degree or another by our own sinful selfishness. We are depraved!

Welcome to my first blog. I thought at the onset, that I should teach you some terms that I’ll be using. Depravity is a term that I’m sure I’ll refer back to often. If you didn’t know what depravity meant you could look it up. However, some of the terms that I’ll use will be totally made up words. Today I’m introducing a term that is the opposite of Total Depravity. That term is Total Oprahvity.

Oprahvity is all about “living your own truth.”