'#3's a Charm', or You Know the Old Saying About Assumptions...

...no- not THAT old saying. The one from the book The Four Agreements. It's a simple three word agreement that will likely take the rest of my life to master:

Don't Make Assumptions

This Agreement can look simple but in practice may surprise you with its complexity. People are hard-wired to make assumptions as it can be a skill that keeps us alive.

Pareidolia (pai-i-DOH-lee-a) is the brain's tendency to to see significance when viewing random objects, such as seeing the face of the man in the moon... or an image of a dog in the grain of a wooden plank, or Mother Teresa in a cinnamon roll.

Our brains constantly scan out surroundings, seeking everything around us an comparing it to the familiar, and also labeling that which is unfamiliar and could be a threat.

While that tendency proved useful in man's development, there is a flaw: it tends to bond us to what is familiar and label that 'not of us' as suspicious and 'other'. This happened this past weekend during the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony.

'Wait! What?"

The 2024 Games' opening ceremony was filled with lights, pageantry, shock, art, and all the pomp and circumstances that would rival the original ancient games, which National Geographic called 'the total pagan entertainment package'. Besides the eye-opening specter of headless-yet-0signing Marie Antionette, there was even the rather tame re-enactment of a bacchanalian feast...and that's where the assumptions, particularly but not limited to those viewers within the United States, started.

Many viewers, depending on how they tuned in to the hours-long event, didn't see this segment in it's entirety and they framed what they saw in the context of their 'familiar' in order to make sense of what they were seeing. And for many, what they were seeing was something that their minds identified as 'The Last Supper', a classic painting by Italian artist Leonardo DaVinci. This was, to them, a logical conclusion (aka assumption) and many weren't happy about it. Not happy at all.

United States' Speaker of the House Mike Johnson denounced it as 'mockery of the Last Supper was shocking' and 'the war on our faith and traditional values'. (I would hope that a politician in a leadership position would be more circumspect about using 'war' so freely, but there we are.)

Not to be outdone, the Conference of French bishops gave a statement calling it a 'mockery of Christianity, which we very deeply deplore'. Social media actually took a breath and a step away from the 'did he or didn't he?' couch debate, and turned out in almost-equal parts outrage/confusion/ and laughter as they puzzled out why a signing Smurf was introduced to what must assuredly be a depiction of a sacred spiritual event.

Perhaps if they could speak French, understood the history of the Olympic feasts, knew about the mythical god Dionysus (Greek god and representation of wine, feasting, and celebration) they would have guessed that the current artistic director was directly channeling the intent of the Games as National Geographic had, when he stated in a press release: ' The idea was to have a pagan celebration connected to the gods of Olympus", and while that might not soothe the offended, it certainly fits with the history of the Games.

In short (and it's not over yet), people were/are offended, assumptions were made, and like the man in the moon/Snoopy in the clouds/ doom in the tea leaves/ spiders in the Rorschach test; we see what we see and it's difficult to change our minds.

What Can We Do?

Assumptions are baked into our being, and it takes determined work to let loose that grip on our lives; they are the stories we tell ourselves when we don't know the truth. These steps may help:

1. Take a moment. You don't need to understand everything immediately. (What did I just see? Singing Papa Smurf? Last Supper? People in drag?)
2. Ask questions. (Why is there a blue singing Smurf under a domed platter on the TV?)
3. Think before reacting. (Smurfs aren't good at sports and probably aren't biblical. DaVinci was Italian, not French. What IS this?)
4. Communicate: ask questions and listen to the answers. (This might sound odd, but does anyone know why people in drag looked like the were going to devour Papa Smurf at the Last Supper? )
5. Avoid pronouncing judgement. (This is sacrilege! War on faith! Nothing to do with the Olympics! They HAD to know how we would see this!)

Conclusion

It's easier, and far more entertaining to me to write about this in the context of the latest brouhaha to blow up cyberspace instead of looking within at my own reactions to perceived threats and slights. But that is the discretion of the writer, and so here we are. My hope is that you will identify your own opportunities to avoid jumping to conclusions and making assumptions.

Links to the first two articles in the series:

If you want to purchase a copy of the Four Agreements, most local bookstores and libraries will carry it. You can order it online from @bookshop.org, too, using this link. (I am not an affiliate)

Comments welcome!