Context is everything, man...

This morning, before worship, I had an interesting beginning of a conversation about my recent postings re: the Spirit, the Beats and their value. My friend, a bright and very creative soul, said, "I might have to argue with you about the Beats... who really celebrated the culture of narcissism... I mean, how can that be healthy?" Good point, yes?

I wanted to explore, however, the Beat's value in unlocking our culture's fear of the body and their antidote in the politics of ecstasy. I wanted to consider how the early rock and rollers - and jazz artists, too - were the champions of incarnation who helped America and the West break out of our buttoned-down fears and repressions. And, I wanted to note that while many of the Beats and their successors often went crazy with pleasure - or encouraged those who were vulnerable to become crazy by living in a realm without limits - they also opened important doors of perception and possibility, too. NOTE TO SELF: right before the Sunday prelude is NOT the time for such a conversation... so such observation will have to wait for another time.

Robert Pirsig wrote a sequel to ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE: An Inquiry into Values called LILA: An Inquiry into Morals and it is every bit as valuable as the best selling book. One insight is particularly important to me in giving the Beats a context - especially for contemporary people of faith. Pirsig observes that prior to WWI, social class and social norms dominated culture; that is to say, Victorian social morality held the world in place and everyone acted accordingly.

+ After the so-called "war to end all wars," however, not only did the role of science come to dominate the intellectual realm, but an acquiescence to the bottom-line values of the marketplace came to drive morality.

+ For some in the generation breaking away from Victorian morality, this was liberating: intellectuals like Bertrand Russell, those of the Harlem Renaissance as well as Sartre, Camus, Freud, Jung, Auden and Tillich advocated a freedom that sought to combing responsibility with creativity and freedom. They were still shaped by the Victorian limits of their youth and thus rarely ventured into dangerous or anarchic behavior. They lived creatively in the age of anxiety and the artists of this generation gave new shape and form to the interior life.

+ Others, however, were either terrified by this new freedom or completely lost in abandon, and sought a return to the safety of the old morality. Fascism is one popular consequence of a world cut free from the confines of a moral social order. Pirsig notes that the Beat/hippie movement was another experiment that tried to find a path that was neither rigidly fearful and fascist nor defined by an immoral, market-drive science. Sadly, it degenerated quickly into little more than a quest for "biological freedom" that was base, selfish and hedonistic. Writer Joan Didion makes this clear in her brilliant and terrifying collection of short stories: The White Album (that uses both the song "Helter Skelter" and its impact on the Manson clan - as well as the entire brilliant selfish core of this Beatles' album - as a metaphor for the collapse of the Beat and hippie experiment.)

What's more, there is so much to say about how all of this plays into a contemporary Christian spirituality, yes? Some, like Athanasius of Alexandria (293-373) argue that NOTHING of the "world" can be embraced by those who follow God's light in Christ for it corrupts; therefore, people of faith can have nothing to do with culture except as formed and created by the Church. Others, like Augustine of Hippo (354-430) seem to side with St. Paul who saw everything that was good, noble, pure and beautiful as coming from God. And so the battle still rages...

My sense is closer to the Augustinian side of this and look for God's still speaking voice in all of culture - no wonder I hear the prophets of Israel in Ginsberg and Kerouac and Dylan and all the rest. Not that they weren't wounded - or flawed - or sometimes full of shit. They were... same goes for me, too. And at the same time, given a BIG context - and LOTS of grace - I still sense the loving voice of the holy within a great deal of their human music - and poetry.