A colleague of mine is extraordinarily productive: reams of articles, books, editing duties, institute-leading, fundraising. It’s the kind of performance his peers envy, all the more because lurking behind his energies and accomplishments are the realities of a troubled family: spousal illnesses, children’s suffering. I asked him once how he managed it all. “I’m good at compartmentalizing,” he said.
Most of us are pretty good at compartmentalizing, if not so spectacularly. We need to be. We are all juggling the burdens of work, family, health, politics, each of which could, if allowed, suck us dry with their emotional and intellectual demands. Were we always to ask “Is this worth it?” before some assumed task or face the full depth of a child’s agonies or wonder “Do I have the energy?” our lives would grind to a halt. We’d be swept away by the sheer power of a single challenge’s importunate mystery.
Compartmentalization is all we can do in a world we cannot comprehend. After all, everything comes to us as partial, one aspect of a whole we can never fully grasp. To live as creatures in a world that is God’s is to be willing to make do with only small corners of life and mere bits of understanding: “How great is the sum of [your thoughts]! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand” (Ps. 139:17–18).
Recognizing our incapacity to grasp the whole of things is considered a virtue in many contexts. Take the notion of “bracketing,” which, at its root, means enclosing something, to use it or put it aside. “Bracketing” has assumed certain technical meanings. Among philosophers, it often means the act of focusing, as purely as possible, on the experience of something—seeing it, feeling it, using it—without first analyzing its objective existence and relationship with other things or to truth. This notion of bracketing comes from the early-twentieth-century philosopher Edmund Husserl. It is a key element of his phenomenological method, which aims at apprehending and describing the world as we perceive it, without analysis or interpretation. Put aside what you think or intuit or have been told: Just describe what is happening when you see, when you sense or imagine. Bracketing in this sense is analogous to the ancient skeptical practice of “suspension of belief,” not in order to give up on truth, but as an essential means of accessing it by clearing our minds, as it were.
Bracketing is also used in the social sciences as an exercise in (as far as possible) value-free description—accepting the partial for the sake of not imposing a distorting, even perverting, artificial wholeness that we have concocted. Bit by bit, perhaps we can get a sense of something that is true enough in its own small way, if only we can carefully pay attention to parts in as unprejudiced a way as possible.
In the psychological realm, we are taught to hold competing demands in balance. We are asked to free ourselves from obsessions with only one thing, one experience, one tragedy. We bracket things when they are too overwhelming, too sad, too distracting. This is deemed a “healthy” response.
Bracketing may have value, but there are immense moral risks and costs to compartmentalization. By putting aside certain difficult-to-assimilate or even hard-to-survive realities for another time and place (perhaps indefinitely), we can be seduced into avoiding necessary moral choices, demanded sacrifices, or required courage. The dark image of bracketing’s willful blindness is the concentration camp commandant who hugs his children in the evening, sups with his family, and listens to Beethoven on the phonograph, while during the day he oversees the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Jews and other so-called degenerates. Auschwitz is not a parenthesis.
We all have our small versions of this moral corruption. Like Dives (Luke 16:19–21), who steps over the sore-infested beggar Lazarus, we ignore hard realities while on the way to a business lunch or work; we click away from a troublesome news story in favor of something less upsetting; we ignore the sins of colleagues, friends, or political heroes so as to move on to the “important” stuff; or we just let our young folk drift and quickly assign their tribulations—not to worry!—to a stage of life.
Practiced in this way—and we all do it—compartmentalization is corrupting. But is there an alternative? Can unbracketing be a viable virtue? Probably not in any systematic way; we cannot swallow the world whole. Nevertheless, we can take the time to lay things out before our consciousness and concern, and in this way begin to loosen the grip of self-guarding habits. Although everything must come to us in partial forms, in bits and pieces, we can nonetheless gather these fragments and stand before them. “Now we see in a mirror dimly,” St. Paul writes. Only in the next life will we see “face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). But this is not a call to harden the parceling of our attentions. Love presses forward, suffering the “all,” the “everything,” even as its fullness awaits (1 Cor. 13:7).
Paul calls the virtue of unbracketing “endurance.” To bear all things means recognizing their weight just as they are, refusing escape from what we do not understand. And we endure, as he puts it, for the sake of being known by God. When all things that come to us—good and bad, dark and light, joyful and sorrowful, tolerable and intolerable—are taken out of their respective compartments, laid out on the table together, declared for all to see, especially God, then perhaps truth begins to come into view.
To endure what comes into our lives is not a philosophical or moral technique. The gathering of all things into a single act of heart, mind, and soul makes sense, in this life, only in prayer. Consider the great seventeenth-century debates over the relative value of prayer with “images” versus imageless “contemplative” prayer. The great French bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet was a proponent of prayer using mental images. He wished to found our communication with God on the Incarnation and its scriptural articulations. The reality of the Word-made-flesh, Bossuet argued, means that our own lives, needs, experiences, questions, sorrows, and joys are rightly to be articulated and lifted up before God in concrete ways. All of them: Petitions, intercessions, fears, laments, thanksgivings for this or that, are not, he argued, secondary forms of prayer, but primary and central to our relationship with our Maker.
Prayer of this sort amounts to a Great Unbracketing, the spilling out of our worlds and lives as an offering to God, who alone can fit them all together. David (Ps. 142:2) speaks of “pouring out” his concerns before God, shed over the ground like flowing blood. He “shews” or publishes openly all that he carries within him. His purpose is not to construct a new vision, to claim an integrating truth or promote a holistic resolution to his afflictions, hopes, and problems, let alone anyone else’s. David seeks to bring all he has been carrying about within himself and upon his shoulders before God. God “knows,” and only God provides the fullness of the mature and ripened fruit of life. All is his. Jesus’s encouragement to pray for our enemies (Matt. 5:44) is not simply about developing the virtue of a kind heart; it is about the truth of God’s comprehensive being and his ordering of a world that is otherwise condemned to our manipulations. We cannot live without prejudices, we cannot think wholly outside the protected precincts of our focused certainties; but they must be unleashed from our rationalizing control and allowed to flood the land side by side with the protected scraps of our lives, before God’s face. So we pray. About everything.
I am not a bad compartmentalizer myself. But, like many, I have discovered the deception of this habit, which I require to survive. Thus, I am ever pressed to pray about all that I protect myself against—not just the often impossible-to-stem torrent of bad news I read about, but the corners of my own and others’ lives that I try hard to keep separate from one another. Prayer, I have discovered, is the safest place in which to dwell—broad, wide, God’s (Ps. 118:9).
I don’t know if my hyper-productive colleague prayed, let alone prayed with the untempered release of those parts of life that might otherwise be felt as overwhelming. If he did not, then he would have left these parts, in their unassimilable meanings, to the distortions of their singular danglings. The danger is that we allow the part to stand for the whole, whose comprehension only Another can ever offer. For God alone makes whole. We withhold the pieces of our lives from him, the Great Unbracketer, at our peril.
Ephraim Radner is professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College.
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