Several times during my reading of “The Unsettling of America” I have had to stop for days at a time. On vacation I had one of these experiences after reading this particular passage.
“And it is clear to anyone who looks carefully at any crowd that we are wasting our bodies exactly as we are wasting our land. Our bodies are fat, weak, joyless, sickly, ugly, the virtual prey of the manufacturers of medicine and cosmetics. Our bodies have become marginal; they are growing useless like our ‘marginal’ land because we have less and less use for them. After the games and idle flourishes of modern youth, we use them only as shipping cartons to transport our brains and our few employable muscles back and forth to work.
As for our spirits, they seem more and more to comfort themselves by buying things. No longer in need of the exalted drama of grief and joy, they feed now on little shocks of greed, scandal, and violence. For many of the churchly, the life of the spirit is reduced to a dull preoccupation with getting to Heaven. At best, the world is no more than an embarrassment and a trial to the spirit, which is otherwise radically separated from it. The true lover of God must not be burdened with any care or respect for His works. While the body goes about its business of destroying the earth, the soul is supposed to lie back and wait for Sunday, keeping itself free of earthly contaminants. While the body exploits other bodies, the soul stands aloof, free from sin, crying to the gawking bystanders: ‘I am not enjoying it!’ As far as this sort of ‘religion’ is concerned, the body is no more than the lusterless container of the soul, a mere ‘package,’ that will nevertheless light up in eternity, forever cool and shiny as a neon cross. This separation of the soul from the body and from the world is no disease of the fringe, no aberration, but a fracture that runs through the mentality of institutional religion like a geologic fault. And this rift in the mentality of religion continues to characterize the modern mind, no matter how secular or worldly it becomes.”
I think it is good to stop and take time for those prophetic words to form something new in me.
Another reason to stop and take some time...
arrested
Posted by David at 10:56 AM
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2 comments:
For the last couple of months, I've been reflecting on sacramental theology and more specifically the redemption of creation through symbol and sacrament. And interestingly, Gnosticism (using this right now as an ideology demonizing the physical) especially in the now runs so ramped within our cultural idioms that I struggle as how to fight. I am more convinced now that as the Kingdom comes or advances, we find that the violence against it comes in the form of minimalism. And those who are courageous enough to speak Kingdom language finds themselves at odd with such a reductionistic approach to the metaphysical that even the physical is capitulated to “can’t wait for heaven” shallow understanding of life. Truly my modern mind has difficulty praying naïve anti-minimalist prayers such as, “your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Ya Wendell, sure does sound like a prophet. Ya
Emma, her creation speaking prophetically.
Blessings to you
HOFF
Dave and Jen she is beautiful. We would love to come see you guys but we don't know where you are. Dave give Ryan a call and maybe we can come up and go to the zoo or somemthing let us know. Congrats!!! We are due for our 3rd march 31st.
Ryan and Jessica
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