Whatever else we get with what sometimes get called the end-of-year holidays, there seems to come — always — an extra measure of sentimentality. For my purposes, a sentimental way of understanding and living in the world includes some rather startling truth.
Sentimentality denies, evades, or trivializes evil. Sentimentality centers on self-directed emotion. Sentimentality resists any appropriate, costly action in the world.
There is a certain perverse coherence to that short list.
First, honesty about the fact of evil in the world is overshadowed by entertainment, distraction of every imaginable description, and a preoccupation with niceness, warmth, comfort, and peace of mind. Children are told by Barney that the world is wonderful. Everybody loves them, and they can have what they want by wishing for it. Disney has given us, in the words of one scholar, a world “without dirt, without cruelty, without complexity” — and also without God — but with plenty of niceness, simplicity, optimism and superb marketing. This amounts to not facing or dealing with the brokenness that is in myself, my neighbor, and in the world. It is, from where I sit, a deep self-deception.
Second, self-directed emotion is a little harder to grasp. An example would be loving another person not for who they are, but instead loving the way that person makes me feel about myself. There is quite a difference. Sentimentality is not so much empathy for another person in their joy or pain, but an involvement in their life for the sake of enjoying the experience of my own feelings about them. Injustice toward others may be the occasion for my anger, but my anger may actually be driven more by my approval of myself for these strong feelings of righteous indignation than it is by my actual care for the victims of injustice.
Third, there is no appropriate action response to feeling, especially if the appropriate response is costly. This follows naturally if I think there is nothing seriously wrong in the world that demands change, and if I believe our lives ought to be centered on our own attempts to feel good about ourselves. Believing those things, we are unlikely to reach out very far to others. Of all the emotions that we have experienced while watching television, how often have we been moved to do anything as a result? One author has suggested that (apart from advertising) the only thing on television that we actually do anything about is the weather forecast.
What I’m saying about sentimentality leans very hard against biblical faith and practice. As a result, we might reasonably expect Christian community to be an oasis — or a shelter from sentimentality. The sad thing, in my experience, is that we Christians who have the message to confront sentimentality have instead too often been seduced by it.
Romans 12:15 tells us to “rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep,” intending our emotions to go beyond the self-directed, to be engaged and to respond to the precious dignity of another person who is real and valued and important to God. Plainly, unless or until we have a working sense of other, we may well get it exactly backwards. We might weep with the rejoicing because their rejoicing makes us feel that we have missed out on what they have — or we may rejoice with the weeping because their weeping makes us feel more successful by comparison.
James 2:15-17 also tangles with this subject of sentimentality, “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” Can James be saying it is possible to have wonderful sentiments about peace, warmth, and nourishment for others — but then to do nothing whatever to help those same people? I think James says precisely that! I’m convinced it is even possible to think very well of ourselves for even having these warm, charitable sentiments.
The irony of all this is that sentimentality does not — ever — deliver the comfort, peace or even the niceness that it promises. The poet David McCord wrote about someone he knew: “Deep down, he was very shallow.”
What better way to guarantee shallowness than sentimentality?
David A. Dobi is pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Greenville.
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Sentimentality has no place at the holidays for the Christian
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