Advent Conspiracy

http://www.whitworth.edu/Podcast/08_09/GregBoyd10_22_08.mp3

This is an essay by Wendell Berry, an essayist and author who also happens to be a farmer in Kentuky. His material that I read so far is a healthy critique of our culture and often hard to swallow as a Eastern Washington American, but good food for thought. This particular essay, I think, hits close to the heart of the American dream and lifestyle, boths matters that must be dealt with. After all; "the unexamined life is not worth living", maybe this could also apply to the life of a nation or culture.

Remember this is a conversation, feel free to disagree, your thoughts are welcome here.

The career of rugged individualism in America has run mostly to absurdity, tragic or comic. But it also has done us a certain amount of good. There was a streak of it in Thoreau, who went alone to jail in protest against the Mexican War. And that streak has continued in his successors who have suffered penalties for civil disobedience because of their perception that the law and the government were not always or necessarily right. This is individualism of a kind rugged enough, and it has been authenticated typically by its identification with the communal good.

The tragic version of rugged individualism is in the presumptive “right” of individuals to do as they please, as if there were no God, no legitimate government, no community, no neighbors, and no posterity. This is most frequently understood as the right to do whatever one pleases with one’s property. One’s property, according to this formulation, is one’s own absolutely.

Rugged individualism of this kind has cost us dearly in lost topsoil, in destroyed forests, in the increasing toxicity of the world, and in annihilated species. When property rights become absolute they are invariably destructive, for then they are used to justify not only the abuse of things of permanent value of the temporary benefit of legal owners, but also the appropriation and abuse of things to which the would-be owners have no rights at all, but which can belong only to the public or to the entire community of living creatures: the atmosphere, the water cycle, wilderness, ecosystems, the possibility of life.

This is made worse when great corporations are granted the status of “persons,” who then can also become rugged individuals, insisting on their right to do whatever they please with their property. Because of the overwhelming wealth and influence of these “persons,” the elected representatives and defenders of “the people of the United States” become instead the representatives and defenders of the corporations.

It has become ever more clear that this sort of individualism has never proposed or implied any protection of the rights of all individuals, but instead has promoted a ferocious scramble in which more and more of the rights of “the people” have been gathered into the ownership of fewer and fewer of the greediest and most powerful “persons.”

I have described so far what most of us would identify as the rugged individualism of the political right. Now let us have a look at the left. The rugged individualism of the left believes that an individual’s body is a property belonging to that individual absolutely: the owners of bodies may, by right, use them as they please, as if there were no God, no legitimate government, no community, no neighbors, and no posterity. This supposed right is manifested in the democratizing of “sexual liberation”; in the popular assumption that marriage has been “privatized” and so made subordinate to the wishes of the individuals; in the proposition that the individual is “autonomous”; in the legitimation of abortion as birth control – in the denial, that is to say, that the community, the family, one’s spouse, or even one’s own soul might exercise a legitimate proprietary interest in the use one makes of one’s body. And this too is tragic, for it sets us “free” from responsibility and thus from the possibility of meaning. It makes unintelligible the self-sacrifice that sent Thoreau to jail.

The comedy begins when these two rugged (or “autonomous”) individualisms confront each other. Conservative individualism strongly supports “family values” and abominates lust. But it does not dissociate itself from the profits accruing from the exercise of lust (and, in fact, of the other six deadly sins), which it encourages in its advertisements. The “conservatives” of our day understand pride, lust, envy, anger, covetousness, gluttony, and sloth as virtues when they lead to profit or to political power. Only as unprofitable or unauthorized personal indulgences do they rank as sins, imperiling salvation of the soul, family values, and national security.

Liberal individualism, on the contrary, understands sin as a private matter. It strongly supports protecting “the environment,” which is that part of the world which surrounds, at a safe distance, the privately-owned body. “The environment” does not include the economic landscapes of agriculture and forestry or their human communities, and it does not include the privately-owned bodies of other people – all of which appear to have been bequeathed in fee simple to the corporate individualists.

Conservative rugged individualists and liberal rugged individualists believe alike that they should be “free” to get as much as they can of whatever they want. Their major doctrinal difference is that they want (some of the time) different sort of things.

“Every man for himself” is a doctrine for the feeding frenzy or for a panic in a burning nightclub, appropriate for sharks or hogs or perhaps a cascade of lemmings. A society wishing to endure must speak the language of caretaking, faith-keeping, kindness, neighborliness, and peace. That language is another precious resource that connot be “privatized”

(Berry, 2004)

The hard part is that we, or at least somebody works hard for what we have. Therefore, it is my right to have anything I can afford; I am, even entitled to it and not really required to give anything back. Just given our culture, I am entitled to a car, my own bedroom and an overflowing name brand wardrobe. We wear our privatized spacious backyards and obesity (over eating and over working out) proudly. Alcoholism runs rampant destroying lives and families, when the substance is historically used as a means of celebration or religious ritual or times of prosperity or etc.

Well, I guess we could say things like; sucks to be anyone else, I live in the land of opportunity, or its human nature to be this way, we are at the top, or so what if those people are poor, its not my fault their poor, or I earned it, its mine, leave me alone. None of these are untrue. Nor does it feel good if some points out your flaws that since rather innocent.

It has occurred to me that we are not made to be self-sufficient, on the individual basis or community or cultural basis. That is rather obvious in movies I’ve watched (mainstream and otherwise) or just close check at our own history (parents, at the very least cause us to exist at all). And maybe wealth is really not the issue, maybe its that we are sick with selfness and arrogant wealth is simply a symptom or tool of selfishness I have observed.

There is the Jewish idea of shalom, translated into English as “peace”, as though there is simply an absence of conflict. More appropriate to the translation is the metaphor of a piece of fabric where pieces of thread are woven, vertically and horizontally. Shalom is when all the threads are in their true place (the vertical thread is vertical and really woven into the horizontal) and the fabric can function as it should. The fabric is a community and the threads are people or cliques of people that make up a community. What I have and what I do belongs to the make up of the whole. This does not exclude conflict, what is included is conflict resolution, without which we become stunted in character and personality growth and maturity. This might mean that no matter how hard I work, what I have essentially belongs to the whole. In turn, if I am selfish with what I have I am stealing from the community.

There is a Christian ideal/proverb held, that is rooted in the Bible that goes; the love of money is the root of all evil. As though our love for money turns us selfish and disturbs our true function within society, ultimately disrupting shalom.

***I know this doesn’t have a great flow to it but any thoughts on the content? Anyone care to respond to my accusations? Is it possible that our culture will finally grow up?

Jesus started a group of people on a path, that group of people he said was his church, he also called us the Bride of Christ. Today we build god awful buildings and call that church, or build picturesque church services with life changing sermons every week, without much change and call that church or hire really attractive or ambitious people to be on a church staff to do spiritual work for us and call that the church. This is in stark contrast to what Jesus started. Buildings and programs are not bad but our identity as the Bride of Christ, as Jesus has identified us, has been lost to inanimate objects or elitist groups.

Being interactive with God himself and engaged in the church (the bride of Christ-yes that’s vague) is beneficial. Church services with music and sermons and coffee or weird variations of those things (gathering the church) are not without purpose and cause (there are many instructions about doing that kind of stuff in the Bible), and, can be quite beautiful things but if church services and events put on by any given organization attached to the church are the beginning and end of our spirituality we are most definitely retarding the Bride of Christ.

God made people, sent us Jesus and Jesus assembles the church, among other things, then Jesus sends His Holy Spirit to His people. Every side of God is interesting in and concerned with people. It seems to me that we ought to find value in people, as God does, and not our religious, and often selfish, ambitions. Maybe, as we care about the things that God cares about, we will understand God more.

What do you think? Is going to church an essential part of maintaining a healthy relationship with God? Do I have an appropriate response?

Here are some things I didn't get to say.

In Christian circles this topic seems to always get boiled down to Evolution being right or wrong. When I say that i believe in God what I am really saying is that I believe that a god created what/who I am and the people and world around me. So I am puzzled by the boiling down. The way I see it is that Science is discovering what is out there and the interaction of them from atoms and small particles to planets and solar systems. Things like electricity and the way blood cells work is a point of awe for me which says how infinitely great this God is that I believe in. Evolution is not the central topic.

Scientists (this is so vague) are professionals; so are theologians. However, both are on the hunt for the truth. The two groups of professionals and their respective areas of study ought not be pitted against each other. There must be nothing and everything to do with each other, there must be harmony! Harmony!; different notes creating something more beautiful together than what they could achieve on their own.

So thats what I got... What do you got?

As an official group of people we do all sorts of things that have all different kinds of results. I've been having conversations with a close friend of mine about these things and the point of doing them. If church is not a bussiness where we are selling things and if church leaders are not simply manipulators (for whatever end), then the biggest question at hand is; what is the purpose of what we do...as a church. The "main event" is a Sunday gathering where we sing and listen to a sermon, drink coffee and eat cookies, talk and laugh, take communion, pray and read scripture, or very resently write prayers. We do other things like have parties or BBQs, help out with community events, remodel a building together or come together in small groups to talk about joys and pains of life or work through scripture.

To what end are these things done, if not done in vain?

The interesting thing is that what we have been taught and what we think (if we have actually thought about it) and what is "right" maybe three very separate things. I am interested in hearing other people's opinions about this stuff.