Exploring where life and story meet!

Saturday, August 17, 2013

The strange obsessions of modern life

Last night I read about a new craze that has me a tad concerned, it is not the subject itself that is disturbing but rather those who pursue it with all 'their heart and soul and mind.'  I was rather fond of it myself back in the Eighties, but then a little girl of six or eight is one who should be enamored of My Little Ponies, not guys old enough to have daughters of their own of that age.  What could drive the American supposedly adult male to dress up as their favorite animated equine and travel hundreds of miles to attend a convention for such aficionados?  It is nothing new of course, but it is a rather odd turn in the long history of idolatry.  The secular humanists can boast all they want that men are derived from slime but I argue that this trend arises not from the genes we inherited from our algal ancestors but from the basic programming hardwired into our souls.

Men were made to worship something, to enjoy community and connection with other people, to have meaning, purpose, and direction in their lives, to have a past and a future, and to live forever.  Why else would we put so much time and energy into so strange a habit?  These individuals may think themselves obsessed with a children's TV program, but they are actually looking for connection, for meaning, for relevance, and for purpose.  The Ponies are just an excuse for community and I have yet to meet a slime mold that would bother to dress up as anything, let alone an equid of any sort, yet these supposedly more evolved creatures do so with relish and enthusiasm!  We all hunger after love, belonging, meaning, and community and it is becoming ever more scarce in modern society, thus are we driven to find new and stranger excuses to gather and have conversation.

The family has dissolved into a 'lifestyle choice,' cutting us off from our past and what historically served as our greatest source of support and community even when the whole world turned against us.  We dare not introduce ourselves to our neighbors or grow too close to coworkers lest they think us weird or turn out to be so themselves.  Religion has become a quaint affectation of the rustic and inept, thus have we turned from any and all gods save the worship of self.  The greatest good has become what is best for me, yet we pursue our own happiness and find it fleeting and vain.  We are miserable, alone, and purposeless!  Our souls cry out for companionship, understanding, meaning, and comfort yet science tells us we are mere accidents in a purposeless world with our only goal to survive as long as possible and pass on our genes.  No wonder depression is at a record high and we gather for the weirdest and most banal reasons!

There is an answer, there is a liquor to slake our deepest thirst.  The urge still remains though we try to fill the void with innumerable misguided keys that do not fit the lock or deny that it is there at all.  The thirst is not the problem, it is a quite natural and intentional part of our being, but rather it is the liquids we imbibe to quench it.  The thirst is natural yet we convince ourselves that any liquid will do when it only makes things worse, like drinking sea water to quench our physical thirst.  C. S. Lewis once wrote, "we castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful," and this is just such a case.  We deny we have a soul, thus emasculating our sense of anything beyond this mortal sphere, and then cry out in misery when nothing can sooth our broken hearts.  We will do anything and everything to fill this void except that which will actually fill it yet strangely nothing seems to work.  Repainting the wall will not fix the faulty wiring, you must strip away everything and look to the wires, their connections and attachments, and fix that which is frayed or worn.  We try to put a nice coat of paint on a deteriorating house and wonder why the property value remains low.  We must look at the roots of the problem and fix it at the source.

We were made for a purpose and we are wired to desire certain things, yet in our own seeming wisdom we have wandered away from that which we need after that which we think we want only to find ourselves lonely, aimless, and miserable.  Gathering with others for any reason may help soothe our need for community but it will not fill that annoyingly persistent void in our souls.  We were made first for communion with God and then with our fellow men.  Only therein can we be content. 

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