We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.
-Chuck Palahunik, Fight Club
As I'm sure many of you have heard by now, there was a certain pious rhetorician who graced our campus today. Propounding his rather uniquely holy version of Christianity a rather large group congregated to challenge/listen/scoff/refute/get pissed of at his ideas. Of course we can spend all day criticizing this fellow and wrestling with the validity of his message, but I'm not interested in that for now.
If we agree with him is one thing, but it's just not our place to judge him. What I'm getting at is the difference between opinion and judgment. The former is quite naturally human, and we're more than entitled to ours, respectively. The latter, however, is not our place. Furthermore, judgment, which I am guilty of every passing minute, is for God and God alone.
Personally, I'm incredibly glad he was there. Like I said, everyone has their own opinion, which is great. But because of his presence we were challenged… spiritually, mentally, intellectually. The merit of his words is not what I'm concerned about here (although that is an issue to be addressed); rather I'm grateful for someone who can stir up our emotions, bringing us into a mental state that is not so concerned with cell phone calls, superficial greetings, or the ubiquitous fraternity letters looming in the quad.
We need challenge. We need different points of views. We need to reprioritize. We need dialogue. We need urgency. We need to get pissed off. We need someone to get in our face.
In our hyper stimulated society more obsessed with quantity over quality, more attracted to style without substance, we need more people to get in our faces to wake us up. We need more people talking about the Israel/Palestine situation and less people talking about American Idol; more people knowing where priorities are and less people knowing how to beat Halo II.
We need someone to get our fucking attention.
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-Excerpt from The Sacred Romance
But we live in the Postmodern Era. For hundreds of years, our culture has been losing its story. The Enlightenment dismissed the idea that there is an Author but tried to hang on to the idea that we could still have a larger story, life could still make sense, and everything was headed in a good direction.
Western culture rejected the mystery and transcendence of the Middle Ages and placed its confidence in pragmatism and progress, the pillars of the Modern Era, the Age of Reason. But once we had rid ourselves of the Author, it didn't take long to lose the larger story.
In the Postmodern Era, all we have left is our small stories. It's not Pentecost, it's time for spring training. Our role models are movie stars, and the biggest test of transcendence is the opening of the ski season. Our best expressions are on the level of "Have a nice day."
The only reminder we have of a story beyond our own is the evening news, an arbitrary collection of scenes without any bigger picture into which they fit. The central belief of our times is that there is no story, nothing hangs together, all we have are bits and piece, the random days of our lives. Tragedy still brings us to tears and heroism still lifts our hearts, but there is no context for any of it. Life is just a sequence of images and emotions without rhyme or reason.
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