Share ways in which you have noticed the content, questions or insights from the previous Module showing up in your lives.
Yesterday, I heard someone sharing one of those tell-all accounts of oneself, which certain evangelicals like to call ‘testimonies’. She lamented a former time in her life in which she “didn’t know who she was.” She recalls always wanting to be like other people, and never being satisfied. She summed up this sentiment by declaring with exasperation that at that time she “didn’t even have her own favorite color!” What she meant by that line was that she would let other people’s preferences guide hers in every way—even the little ways. It struck me as a forceful and direct acknowledgment of human mimesis.
Unfortunately, she seems to believe that she has now been freed from this dependence on others. While she accurately perceived the mimetic nature of her past self, she appears to persist in blindness to the fact that people (simply because we are people) can never ‘free’ ourselves from mimesis. There is little doubt in my mind that she was probably correct to decry some of her past behavior, and she is unquestionably correct to identify mimesis (though she didn’t use this word) as an explanation for her behavior. Yet, I fear, she is woefully misguided to believe that, when she ‘met’ Jesus, she effectively jettisoned mimesis from her manner of being.