And all of that leads me to this xlnt piece, everyone should take the time to read this, and perhaps print it out and give to family & friends>
Humbug or heartfelt?
Christmas is one of the most evocative holidays, but it doesn't draw the same reaction from everyone. For some, it grinds away at the spirit with the persistence of a machine.
By Louis Rene Beres. Louis Rene Beres is a professor of political science at Purdue University
Notwithstanding its annual promise of harmony and tranquility, the holiday period extending from Thanksgiving to New Year's imposes on America the breathless rhythm of a machine. Noisy and relentless, this rhythm is associated in the popular imagination with reverence and spirituality, but in reality it produces the opposite effect.
Indeed, looking over the increasingly desperate holiday effort at renewals of faith, the ironic end of all this delirium is to prevent us from remembering God. Society is essentially the sum total of souls seeking redemption, but today, in these United States--with the holidays approaching--we preoccupy ourselves with consumption, mimicry and empty ritual.
Seeking to defy the unstoppable movement of time, we are less concerned with making each life genuinely sacred and meaningful than with extending this life at all costs. There is nothing objectionable, of course, to vitamins, improved health care and exercise--quite the contrary--but at some point one does need to ask about life extension: To what purpose?
Time is a great deal more than the invented measure of clocks. It is also the unsteady duration of each individual life, an oscillating stream of experiences filled with joy, sadness, suffering and death. In the end, time may be either sacred or profane, and it is our unceasing obligation, although one generally obscured by the holidays, to choose the former.
While it is true, in the physical sense, that our time on Earth is inevitably a span of deterioration, it is also an opportunity to create life and to take each day as an indispensable challenge for renewal.
We Americans strive for many things, but two objects of desire stand out starkly above all others: status and immortality. To satisfy the first, we look primarily to money and the observable trappings of wealth. To acquire the second we turn in one fashion or another to religion.
The holiday season that can nurture these expectations and even combine them in a delicious fusion of public celebration will almost always be welcome.
And yet, at the same time, the celebration is surely inappropriate.
At all times of the year, but especially during the holidays, we should be present at the gradual unveiling of a secret. But during the holidays, what is revealed even more acutely is the distressing lack of spiritual meaningfulness.
However strenuously we shall now insist that it is important work we do and that we merit the most tangible forms of salvation, the nation ignores what is truly meaningful while attending slavishly to petty, prurient and greedy satisfactions.
The world's agonizing impact on our lives is hardly examined; lying in stupor, we Americans proceed about our day-to-day affairs with nary a marginal tic of real consciousness.
The frightening anarchy confronting our world this holiday season can seem vastly more ominous than it was even 50 years ago. It is now more far-reaching, extending not only among nations but deep within them. It is a distinctly primordial anarchy, the murderous mob of boys in William Golding's novel "Lord of the Flies," an impending chaos from which there will be no safety in arms, no help from political authority, no convenient answers from science.
Should we fail to halt this anarchy, it will rage until every flower of culture is trampled.
Now is the time for Americans to recall what is truly important. Now, together with all other residents of this endangered planet, we must promptly decide whether we shall endure as a nation and as a species, or whether, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea, we will be erased.
Unless we approach the holidays with a unique sense of awe in the world, with a sober awareness that God's promise to America is contingent on our responsibility to make the most of ourselves as persons, each and every form of salvation will elude us.
It is time to make the souls of our citizens better.
The unheroic credo of our country is "I belong, therefore I am," a not very stirring manifesto that social acceptance is overwhelmingly vital (hence the ceaseless search for status through money) and that real happiness is solely the privilege of mediocrity. One can be inconsequential anywhere, but personal sadness in America, a product of immobilizing anxieties, ritualized imitation and empty dreams, grows even more intense during the holiday season.
The specter of "loneliness" haunts the holiday period, yet all of the great religious leaders and founders sought their essential meanings "inside," in seclusion, within themselves. To achieve any sense of real spirituality in life, even at this time of year, one must be willing to endure some loneliness.
Indeed, nothing important, in science or industry or art or music or literature or medicine or philosophy can ever take place without loneliness. To be able to exist apart from the mass--from what Freud called the reconstituted "primal horde" or Nietzsche termed the "herd" or what Kierkegaard named the "crowd"--is indispensable to the very sort of intellectual breakthrough now needed to rescue an imperiled planet.
The vulgar and shallow material world has infested our solitude, especially during the holidays.
Facing an indecent alloy of banality and apocalypse, we Americans seek meaning and ecstasy in this world, but it is surely a vain effort. Rejecting all opportunities to disturb the universe, to take our God-given capacities seriously, we stubbornly insist on dying slowly even as we desperately seek not to die at all.
It is not enough to claim that God is on our side.
Living in a most unsacrosanct moment, we Americans must recognize that although we are free as a people, we are largely imprisoned as individuals. Before this can change, it will be necessary for us all to emerge from the low estate of mass society and to discover more authentic bases of status and immortality.
Should we fail, our misunderstanding of the holidays may push us unceremoniously toward even greater unhappiness. |
