This damp, cool morning in October...

Over the past week, I have experienced five discrete clues into what the social soul sickness of contemporary culture might mean.  "Are you listening?" whispers a still-speaking God - and I wondered.  Two or three nudges have often helped me connect the dots in the past, so what to think of five?  Probably a "grab me by the collar and shake me awake" encounter with the One who more often than not shows up as a still, small voice, yes? (I Kings 19)

It began with listening to Jorma Kaukonen playing "Embryonic Journey."  Over and over again, not only did I listen to this old Jefferson Airplane song, but I started to practice it, too. Its sad beauty seemed to invite me into the song as a prelude of what was to come.

Then I started reading a book I picked up at an Anglophone book store in Montreal:  Radiohead and Philosophy.  And at the heart of their analysis, the authors state that more than any other contemporary rock band, Radiohead explores both our anxiety and fascination with living life in a cyber-culture where many of our deepest human experiences take place beyond our flesh. 

That same evening I read a NY Times review of Russel Banks' latest novel, "Lost Memory of Skin."  Janet Maslin writes, "it delivers another of Mr. Banks’s wrenching, panoramic visions of American moral life, and this one very particular to the early 21st century. It tells of a plugged-in, tuned-out Internet culture “lost in the misty zone between reality and imagery, no longer able to tell the difference.” And it explores the terrible, dehumanizing consequences of choosing to live this way."  (check it out @ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/books/russell-bankss-novel-lost-memory-of-skin-review.html)

By then I was starting to pay a little attention.  After all, St. Bobby Dylan had once taught me, "Some thing's going on and you don't know what it is, DO you, Mr. Jones?" And that was the leitmotif of my doctoral work.  A still-speaking God was at work. (Funny how sometimes we still take waaaay too long to wake up, yes?)  The review concludes:

This book expresses the conviction that we live in perilous, creepy times. We toy recklessly with brand-new capacities for ruination. We bring the most human impulses to the least human means of expressing them, and we may not see the damage we do until it becomes irrevocable. Mr. Banks, whose great works resonate with such heart and soul, brings his full narrative powers to bear on illuminating this still largely unexplored new terrain.       

So I went back to Jorma's song again - and again - and again.  Not only was the simple melody instructive to me at some level, so was the practice.  The ways my hands hurt after rehearsing a riff for the 20th time, the way I felt real frustration knowing that what I wanted to hear from my playing was not what was taking place as well as the knowledge that by week's end the music would be closer to the mark than today. All of this from a simple song: make it real - and go deeper, too. Hmmm?

That was a theme I began to hear at church, too as people called - or stopped in - or wrote me emails throughout the week.  There was a tender encouragement to keep going deeper. Keep it real. Now there's a funny thing about being a pastor: you hear more complaints than words of encouragement. That's just the nature of the beast, I suppose. Complaints are easier to express, more on the surface and we have become a complaining culture.  Maybe even a nation of whiners. No wonder a series of letters, conversations, visits and embraces took me by surprise. There was the ordinary carping too, let's not over state the case; but it was more than balanced by a different spirit of encouragement and solidarity. That was another piece of the puzzle.

So when it came to this morning's meditation wherein St. Frederich Buechner wrote about a time in which "anything goes" I was ready:

What makes this a tragic situation, I believe, is not so much that by one set of standards or another it is morally wrong, but that in terms of the way human life is, it just does not work very well. Our society is filled with people for whom the sexual relationship is one where body meets body but where person fails to meet person; where the immediate need for sexual gratification is satisfied but where the deeper need for companionship and understanding is left untouched. The result is that the relationship lads not to fulfillment but to a half-conscious sense of incompleteness, of inner loneliness, which is so much the sickness of our time. The desire to know an other's nakedness is really the desire to know the other fully as a person. It is the desire to know and to be known, not just sexually but as a total human being. It is the desire for a relationship where each gives not just of his/her body, but of the self, body and spirit both, for the other's gladness.

Radiohead expresses this in their strangely comforting and beautifully anxious music.  Jorma does, too - but in a way that helps me go deeper and make it real - practice, he smiles at me, practice man and don't quit.  Russell Banks is living into this when he becomes his best prophetic self.  Same with some of the folks at church.  Together I hear them saying: We need one another so that the very image of God for which we were created can mature within and among us. 

There is an aching for intimacy among us as a people - a hunger for real and meaning-filled connections - but all too often we settle for short-cuts.  I have come to sense that the practice and hard work of Christian community matters now in ways that are essential.  As Mother Theresa said when she visited New York City 20 years ago, "Loneliness is the disease that is killing America" and I think she was right.