Turning Off My Inner Critic

I've always been a critical person, but it took college to make me a full-time, professional critic.

I'll always remember one of my first college classes, where the professor made the offhand comment that he didn't like a lot of hymns, and in fact refused to sing certain lyrics. Before that, it had never occurred to me that the hymns of our faith could be wrong or inaccurate in any way-- I simply trusted them like I trusted my parents (who I also learned to critique from the comfortable remove of my ivory tower). In the years that followed, I learned to question everything: to apply logic, analysis, and careful research to every assumption that I could find. Not to mention the input of the -ologies: philosophy, psychology, sociology, theology, and on and on. The key to the good life, it seemed, was in my engagement of every idea and suspicious assessment of it. The things that weren't wrong were at the very least oversimplified, and I was learning how to engage the world with my intellect.

Now of course one doesn't need to go to college to learn to think, and being a critic is something that comes quite naturally to most of us. But it seems to me that education in particular raises the value of criticism to unnaturally high levels. And if one gets a religious education of some kind, then criticism gets a kind of baptism, too. Which makes criticism a burden: it is good and holy to decide what is good and holy in the world. Amen.

The challenge that I find is turning this inner critic off. I want to accept people at face value, but it's hard when these voices inside my head are chirping away as I talk to someone. I'm so steeped in cynicism and criticism that I'm starting to wonder if I'm addicted to it. Conversion stories come closest to disarming my inner critic, but even there I'm insufferable: I'll actually, unbelievably wish that a person would, for example, stick with a single metaphor for their life's transformation, or perhaps streamline their storytelling in some other way.

And it's then that I notice a whole panel of critics inside my head. There's the literary critic who clucks at someone's earnest presentation of their conversion, and then there's the counseling critic who wags his head at the insensitivity of the literary critic. The philosopher wonders what all of this is based on, and the sociologist makes some notes about milieu and sitz im leben. And don't even get me started about the gaggle of pipe-smoking theologians who grumble about almost everything, all day long.

I just want them all to shut up, at least until Easter. Because they're squeezing the life out of the gospel story that is unfolding in front of me every day.