All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.
That’s what Shakespeare told us. I think he’s mostly right. But what can that mean for us? Stangely, I think it means that we’re all actors and actresses and that as such our task is to lie to the world. And to lie big and bold. Because the bigger and bolder we lie to the world the more honest with the world we will be. It’s just like Wilco says in their song Misunderstood. You’re honest when you’re telling a lie. So you and I owe it to the world to lie our fool heads off and to discharge the debt of honesty we owe to the world.
Just as our task—our godly task!—is to lie to the world, it is the task of the world to tell the truth, and in so doing dishonestly describe the world we inhabit. Our task is to lie—big and bold—and in so doing to honestly describe the world we inhabit. I know this all sounds crazy, and it is. It’s ridiculous. It’s lunacy. It’s foolishness. But, of course, the wisdom of God is foolishness to the likes of us.
If you listen to news reporters, politicians, and marketing executives they tell the truth: the world is a mess, and so are we. Greedy men bilk investors out of billions of dollars; selfish little countries consume disproportionately large amounts of the earth’s resources, while other parts of the world languish; middle eastern nations terrorize each other while we ordinary Western men and women amuse ourselves numb with entertainment and the acquisition of stuff, believing as we do that this is what it means to be human and to flourish. This is the truth. And yet this description of the world is less than honest even if it is true.
All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.
You and I, as Christ-followers, are called to be liturgical actors on the stage of the world. We are called to theatrically enact and incarnate the big lie—The Eschaton—the lie that the world and we human beings are not as the newspeople, politicians and advertising executives truthfully describe. The lie is that there’s another world, a new reality, another way of doing business with each other, a way characterized by peace, love, collaboration and unselfishness. And we’re being honest when we’re telling this lie.
Just as we answer the Divine invitation and gather around a table one day a week to dramatically enact and anticipate the eschaton—the heavenly meal where differences don’t divide and where though many we are nevertheless one—so are we called as liturgical creatures to go out into the world and to theatrically incarnate and anticipate this absurdity in the warp and woof of our daily lives, and so honestly describe ourselves and the world, as we quite literally put the lie on display for all the world to see.
We’ll fail of course, at this calling of ours to lie. That's because the truth is we’re horrible liars. Still, even though failure is certain, lie we must. It’s our calling.
Showing posts with label consumerism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label consumerism. Show all posts
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Wor(l)d and Sacrament
In this morning's NY Times there is a terrific article in the business section titled Warning: Habits May be Good For You. (You'll need a subscription--which is free--to be able to view the article.)
What the article does is essentially express what many of us
concerned with church and culture have been saying for a long time, namely, that the world, like the church, is in the business of formation, spiritual formation. And when you're in the business of spiritual formation, liturgy and sacrament--i.e., concrete practices-- are two very powerful means of creating, cultivating and cementing desired dispositions or characters.
In the church, it is virtues or the fruit of the spirit that we aim to form within us by cultivating various sorts of practices or disciplines. In the world, where the bottom economic line is the measure of success, it is an insatiable appetite for consumables that the prophets and priests wish to form within us.
For most of our history, we’ve sold newer and better products for habits that already existed,” said Dr. Berning, the P.& G. psychologist. “But about a decade ago, we realized we needed to create new products. So we began thinking about how to create habits for products that had never existed before.
This is a fascinating article. It tells the story, a good story, of an anthropologist with a desire to end the unnecessary spread of disease (especially in children) by getting people in certain parts of the world to wash their hands with soap. In Ghana, for example, they found that most homes have soap, but that only 4% of people used it after toilet use. After many unsuccessful educational campaigns to change the sanitary practices of the people in Ghana, the anthropologist turned to the prophets of our culture, multinational corporations, together with their priests, i.e., social psychologists and the advertising industry who consult them. The goal? To produce in the Ghana people an emotion or feeling (in this case the emotion of disgust), and then move them to cultivate a practice--handwashing--that would address the emotion and, in so doing, contribute enormously to ending or at least significantly diminishing the spread of certain diseases. And guess what? It's working.
Advertising is ubiquitous in our consumer culture. As Christ-followers, we are not immune to it or its effects. It could be argued in fact that the liturgy and sacraments of our consumer culture have more impact on our spiritual formation than the liturgy and sacraments of our churches. (Of course, part of the explanation of this fact, if it is a fact, might just be that most evangelical churches have abdicated the practice of meaningful liturgy and sacraments to our culture.)
In any case, we ought not fool ourselves. The life of consumption is, at bottom, a spiritual quest. It emerges out of the same restlessness and longing that are part of our created nature, and that drive us toward others, and God. Consuming may be a misguided quest, but it is a spiritual quest all the same.
My question is this: how can we, the church, be the counter-cultural community of Jesus that we are called to be (a community primarily of formation) in a culture whose sacraments and liturgy are more formative for us than the very society to which we claim primary allegiance?
What the article does is essentially express what many of us
concerned with church and culture have been saying for a long time, namely, that the world, like the church, is in the business of formation, spiritual formation. And when you're in the business of spiritual formation, liturgy and sacrament--i.e., concrete practices-- are two very powerful means of creating, cultivating and cementing desired dispositions or characters.
In the church, it is virtues or the fruit of the spirit that we aim to form within us by cultivating various sorts of practices or disciplines. In the world, where the bottom economic line is the measure of success, it is an insatiable appetite for consumables that the prophets and priests wish to form within us.
For most of our history, we’ve sold newer and better products for habits that already existed,” said Dr. Berning, the P.& G. psychologist. “But about a decade ago, we realized we needed to create new products. So we began thinking about how to create habits for products that had never existed before.
This is a fascinating article. It tells the story, a good story, of an anthropologist with a desire to end the unnecessary spread of disease (especially in children) by getting people in certain parts of the world to wash their hands with soap. In Ghana, for example, they found that most homes have soap, but that only 4% of people used it after toilet use. After many unsuccessful educational campaigns to change the sanitary practices of the people in Ghana, the anthropologist turned to the prophets of our culture, multinational corporations, together with their priests, i.e., social psychologists and the advertising industry who consult them. The goal? To produce in the Ghana people an emotion or feeling (in this case the emotion of disgust), and then move them to cultivate a practice--handwashing--that would address the emotion and, in so doing, contribute enormously to ending or at least significantly diminishing the spread of certain diseases. And guess what? It's working.
Advertising is ubiquitous in our consumer culture. As Christ-followers, we are not immune to it or its effects. It could be argued in fact that the liturgy and sacraments of our consumer culture have more impact on our spiritual formation than the liturgy and sacraments of our churches. (Of course, part of the explanation of this fact, if it is a fact, might just be that most evangelical churches have abdicated the practice of meaningful liturgy and sacraments to our culture.)
In any case, we ought not fool ourselves. The life of consumption is, at bottom, a spiritual quest. It emerges out of the same restlessness and longing that are part of our created nature, and that drive us toward others, and God. Consuming may be a misguided quest, but it is a spiritual quest all the same.
My question is this: how can we, the church, be the counter-cultural community of Jesus that we are called to be (a community primarily of formation) in a culture whose sacraments and liturgy are more formative for us than the very society to which we claim primary allegiance?
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