Sigmund Freud and other early psychoanalytic thinkers distinguished between two different approaches to handling difficulty. An alloplastic adaptation seeks to change outward circumstances. An autoplastic adaptation seeks to change something within the person in response to difficulty.
That distinction is useful. The person who governs his life from the inside out tends to adapt to difficulty through self-governance and may discover the elusive state of peace of mind even in the midst of external complications.
Peace of mind is always primarily a matter of the heart. It is natural to seek it through external configurations. “If only I had the right job, the right wife, enough money…”
But things happen.
And if the internal realm of serenity depends on social forces and conditions, the periodic stormy waves of reality will toss it about.
I have witnessed persons with enviable peace of mind in the thick of poverty and chaos. Amid great wealth, I’ve witnessed deep spiritual unrest. Some have suffered the loss of everything in Category 5 hurricanes without losing their sense of serenity. I’ve also seen persons whose lives are near perfect fall apart inwardly.
The Search for Peace
I was born in the ’60s, an era when people sought peace passionately and marketed it in music and merchandising while the news churned out a whole different reality.
The evening news cycled pessimism from Vietnam, where nearly 60,000 Americans died. Little was truly settled, and the Cold War continued.
At home, widespread social and political change was afoot. A president resigns. Violence breaks out in the streets and on college campuses. Race riots commence alongside marches demanding civil liberties.
A new generation reconsidered values from the past and imagined a new paradise. I remember it well, but I do not remember it as a time of peace.
Recreational drug use was the new craze. The free expression of love without boundaries, the new mantra. Long-haired acoustic troubadours, the new prophets.
Though raised in the alternate Southern culture of moral and social conformity, even when young, these new champions of counterculture intrigued me.
It was fun, for instance, as young kids to climb into the station wagon and turn every trip to the Piggly Wiggly into a hippy hunt, hanging out the window and pointing at the most outrageous examples of the bell-bottomed band.
As trends settled, the hippies largely assimilated into broader American culture, even as they reshaped it. Social tides shifted, and the high wore off. Then the search for peace took on new skin.
Some eventually found Jesus, some found Wall Street, and some even landed in the White House.
But none, I would contend, found peace through the effort of conforming the external world to internal needs. We only find peace with all things external when we recognize the battleground originating from the heart.
The Heart and the Wide-Angle Lens
The human heart is highly capable of sharp, almost microscopic focus on single aspects of reality. It magnifies, distorts, exaggerates and widens emotional implications.
But the heart lacks the universal wide-angle lens, a dilemma beyond private remedy. We are never clear how wonderful, and in simulcast, vulnerable our lives really are because we cannot see the big picture.
In good times, we are inordinately positive. When circumstances discourage us, embellished pessimism can irrationally sweep us away.
Our only genuine hope for peace of mind is to remember there is a Sovereign who sees all there is to see concurrently and takes every anticipated mishap and misdeed into His larger redemptive, restorative, reclamation project.
Though we cannot envision the great design, by faith we can see and surrender to the One who does.
Same Search, New Generation
Now a new generation is emerging with an even deeper and deleterious commitment to social change. The mores of the past are in serious question. People are reimagining long-established institutions.
Disney actors have become merchants of obscenity. Female performers are in constant competition for the lewdness mantle. This tidal wave of cultural change is carrying away many who grew up with religious conviction. Millennials are abandoning the church and its values in droves.
Political leaders capture the youthful idealism of a new generation through simple slogans like “hope and change” and “yes we can.” Like the ’60s, these are days of historic consequence.
But there is nothing new under the sun.
Though states are legalizing some recreational drugs, those drugs will prove, as they did for previous generations, a dry cistern. Moral liberty, its own bondage.
There is no external reshaping of society that brings the inner peace only the Prince of Peace Himself can provide.
The Heart of the Matter
This is not to say that the church should not concern itself with issues of justice. But in pursuit of making things right in our communities, we must remember that the heart of the matter is the matter of the heart.
I have given my life to the efforts of exacting systemic, holistic change to the problem of poverty and will continue to do so. I believe in community development enterprises.
I know that when we pray for His Kingdom to come, social issues of equity and opportunity are paramount. But from my experience, those whose pilgrimage has led to a genuine peace of mind have first had a new alignment in their heart with who is King.
In this way, Freud was right. If one’s sense of peace depends upon the orchestration of external surroundings, he will be disappointed.
And the person who discovers and practices the art of self-governance is better equipped to make a difference in the world.