Entitlement vs. Gift
“Experience (is teaching us), not that life is cruel or random, arbitrary or unjust. Experience (is teaching us) that life is, unlikely, everything considered. Waking up each day and having your children do so is not written in the stars, it’s not an entitlement, it’s far from inevitable, it’s not even the fair-trade, meritocratic consequence of being careful and living right, for all that, waking up each day is a gift. It’s a gift that is not reward for playing by the rules, it is a gift (of grace), giving each living person the capacity, not just to go on, but to go on as if he or she had been gifted, to go on in gratitude and wonder that all the things of the world that keep them alive have continued while they slept. (In) Wonder, awe, and a feeling of being on the receiving end, for now, of something mysteriously good.” — Stephen Jenkinson, from Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
When I do memorial services, I often like to end with this quote — as I did in my sister’s eulogy. There is a theme running through my work of our lack of a critical mass of wise elders in our world, the predominance of people who are stuck in adolescent ways of being (neither mature adults nor wise elders, but still, essentially, children — regardless of their age), and the need for us (collectively, culturally, globally) to get ‘unstuck’ and to raise up a generation of wise elders to bring about the world that we all dream of, but that so many of us have lost hope in. One way to gain entrée into this emerging cadre of elders is to let go of (feelings of or belief in) entitlement and embrace (intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually) the perspective of gift. I call it a perspective. Once one has sufficient practice with it, I think it is more of a fact that can be viewed from multiple perspectives, while entitlement is pure-perspective without any parallel underlying reality.
Another window into this truth is the Buddhist idea that ‘the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon’. Gift and being gifted and receiving gifts and being indebted beyond all possibility of repayment by gifts… these are all fingers pointing at the truth that underlies the existence of life and consciousness as we experience it. Entitlement, on the other hand, is a finger whose moon is, at best, an immature perspective held by conscious beings at a certain developmental stage (the one we’re calling adolescence) and whose purpose is to be outgrown.
If it feels like I’m taking aim at the very heart of radical-individualism-culture, good, our fingers are now pointing at the same moon. Radical individualism, competence addiction, and death phobia are all aspects of the same phenomenon — an adolescent world view that has not grappled with the awe-inducing beauty of the gift nor the inevitable-immediacy of its withdrawal — the ubiquity and necessity of death. In intact cultures that still know how to produce wise elders — and they are sadly sparse after the global spread of colonialist expansion, an expansion of entitlement , of adolescents and adolescence — the rites of passage that move a person from adolescence to adulthood and from adulthood to elderhood are known and practiced and sacred. For the western reader I’d recommend Martin Prechtel’s Long Life, Honey in the Heart which explores his journey through these stages as a westerner adopted into a Mayan village. Also of interest are the writings of Dr. Martin Shaw — a mythologist and wilderness rites of passage guide in the UK, who (from my perspective) is trying to restore the indigenous practices of the west — his pandemic book Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass is a good place to start. Of course, Stephen Jenkinson, who (to the best of my knowledge) coined the term competence addiction, also has an outstanding contribution: Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble. The opening quote from him comes from a discussion of how modern westerners wake up each day expecting to live (an entitled perspective) and he spends some good, quality time unpacking the implications of that kind of entitlement.
Let’s be clear — we all know this stuff, deep down in our hearts in the quiet moments we know that the leaders of government and industry are — for the most part — acting like entitled children. We don’t respect it — except in that very limited “I’m glad they’re on our side!” way — except when they’re not. How is it then, that we keep promoting them? Because we’re stuck on a cultural and psycho-social-spiritual treadmill of trauma — actively handing it down from one generation to the next. And traumatized people get developmentally stuck when there are no structures of healing to help them get unstuck. And traumatized people chose comfort over growth, safety over prosperity, entitlement over gift, because they are stuck. We must step up to our own healing work of growing up, waking up, cleaning up, and showing up. When we accept that life is a gift so great that we are forever in a debt that can never be repaid, then showing up every day with that debt on your balance sheet and working just to make a dent in it by having your life be a gift to those around you, to the life — the ecology — around you… it is enough, and it is sustainable, and it is worthy of gratitude and awe and wonder.
Showing up entitled doesn’t compare. Entitled can’t tell the difference between gift and rape; everything is owed, nothing is gift, nothing is earned, nothing is taken. Entitled mistakes its own egocentric desires for the will of the universe — mistaking its own rapacity for the ‘nature of things’. When surrounded by a critical mass of others stuck in this stage — this mistaking of the ‘nature of things’ becomes a self-reifying perception — only now mistaking ‘this is how we are’ for ‘this is how the world is’. So the self-obviousness of ‘how we are’ becomes a cloak that keeps the ‘this is how the world is’ illusion intact, generation after generation, normalizing the cycles of rape, abuse, and trauma — doesn’t this feel like the stuckness of geopolitics and of economics and of this moment in history? It’s so normalized that even Gene Roddenberry — when creating his Star Trek utopia still couldn’t imagine it free of violence, free of militarism. The seeming ubiquity of murderers and rapists was so compelling that — even if the whole human race grew past that stage — surely there would be the same out there among those alien races. So we better arm those starships — the Klingons are coming!
PS. Yes, I do memorial services — mostly in my home region of Central Texas — as an Ordained Minister in the Church of Spiritual Humanism and an acknowledged Unitarian Universalist Community Lay Minister. You can connect to me on LinkedIN if you’d like to inquire about memorial services.
