I do, however, consume information. I read everything I can get my hands on. I've tried (and succeeded to some degree) in the last year or so to skip things that don't interest me. An obvious choice, I know, but a big challenge for me. I have a few blogs I read, a few preachers whose sermons I enjoy and a couple podcasts in which I regularly partake. I've got them all nicely organized and delivered to my Feedly page for efficient consumption.
I spend a lot of time reading and listening to crap. Interesting, often stimulating, occasionally important crap, but crap nonetheless.
I get Entertainment Weekly, which is a constant reminder of all the tv shows and movies I'm not watching, despite their obvious value and critical acclaim. I keep talking about getting netflix in the summer when our family has more free time - because that's exactly how we should be spending our summer: huddled on the couch watching TV!
I've only recently realized something that's probably been readily apparent to my wife for years: I'm never gonna catch up. There will always be more movies, more shows, more podcasts, more interesting, informative things to fill my mind and drive my imagination. That realization, in itself, is incredibly freeing.
I recognize it could lead to debilitating depression. There is so much out there I might know and never will. In a sense that's sad. In another sense it's wonderful. There will never be enough. The amount of things I won't experience is infinite - so if I add to it, it won't actually grow any (ask a mathematician if you didn't follow that).
I can chose, if I dare, if I have the willpower, to focus my attention on things vitally important to the rest of my life, not things that are self-important or portend some kind of intellectual completeness.
I'll be trying, over the next few weeks, to free myself from some measure of connection to my drug of choice. My Feedly link is tucked away nicely in an obscure bookmarks folder. Buried, for the time being. In a few weeks (months, maybe) I'll revisit it. There will be too much content to consume it all. I'll have to chose. I may chose to just ignore all of it.
Yes, I will be missing out on things I may never encounter. Interviews that will never happen again, words that will never be expressed in exactly the same way. But, in the end, when I really sit and think about it. There's nothing on those pages that will make any difference in my life - outside of my bizarre satisfaction in getting them done.
I shall not participate in the gospel of more. There is always more to know, more to be done, more to have. I will never have it all. As fun as trying is sometimes, it is detrimental to life - real life. Hopefully I can stop and smell the proverbial roses a bit this Spring...
...but not every rose, because that's obsessive and as satisfying as it is, it's also incredible stressful and will ultimately lead to me to shrivel up and die.
Happy Thursday!
We do tend to eat ourselves silly on Thanksgiving. It's as if we've set aside this holiday in particular to stop worrying about self-discipline. I even heard an commercial for a local nightclub boasting that the Thanksgiving Eve party is the biggest of the year.
We've even turned it into an economic feast, shopping and buying all night long. Just go crazy. Who cares what you spend, everything's on sale and you're getting a great deal.
Of course it's easy for me to rain on the consumption parade and criticize the way our culture and society is built around the consuming of things (we even design our products to break easily to ensure their quick replacement). However, I've been convicted this week about my own terrible consumption habits.
I've read every word of every ESPN Magazine since its inception - even the articles on stuff I don't care about. I've done the same thing with TIME magazine since we started getting it a few years back. I troll Facebook for interesting links and articles from my friends.
I'm a helpless consumer of information.
Now, many who know me personally understand I know a lot of useless crap. Part of that is the way my brain works - I remember lots of useless crap. But another part of it is the sheer volume of information I process on a daily basis. I'm always reading or watching or listening to something. I've cut down recently, but there's still at least one sermon, two podcasts, two magazines and a dozen blogs, and half a dozen TV shows, I come back to every week. That's not including the various links that come across my news feed and email or the (generally) 2-3 books I'm reading at any given time.
It's a lot of information.
Can I say there's nothing valuable there? No; I do get a lot out of those thing. Can I say there's enough valuable things there to make it worth the time and effort? I'm less sure about that.
But I don't think it's about the amount of information I process, so much as the process I go through to get the information.
I'm constantly busy trying to occupy the mind. I've worked a few moments of quietness and solitude into my life as a spiritual discipline, but I'm afraid they've just become part of the routine rather than an escape from it. I go from one thing to next, always nervous I'll miss something or be left out of a conversation because I'm not up on this event or that idea.
It's not about buying. I'm notoriously cheap. It's about consumption - the need for more. Our society has filled us, whether we like it or not, with an innate desire to have more, do more, know more, be more. The things we measure ourselves by are constantly growing and changing - so we have to keep consuming to keep up.
We even do it in the faith community. We push people to be more involved, more committed, a better Christian. I don't have issue with those things in the generic, but almost universally define them through consumption.
It's rarely about depth or balance; it's usually about more and the next big thing.
Why haven't I gotten to know more people? Maybe because they're low on my priority list. I'm not the kind of person to consume people or relationships, so they tend to take a back see to my information addiction.
I don't know how exactly to navigate this problem going forward (it just hit me yesterday over breakfast - and yes, I was reading), but I am determined to figure out how to keep myself informed and entertained, without being consumed by consumption.
We'll see how it goes.
And so...
I struggle with the liturgy/order of worship. I am talking about the commercialistic nature of it all and I'm sure you know what I mean... The whole mindset of, "let's have a 'good' service today" approach. I guess what messes with me is when you compare that to an Orthodox or RC mass, the mindset of most people is much different. It is purely to come to worship and receive Christ through the Eucharist. There is no evaluation of the band or if Father Joe 'connects with me or not.' At a gut level it just messes with me that the degree of people's worship has rests so heavily on a worship leader or a preacher. Again, it seems so Walmart-like... Who can present me with the best product?
My initial reaction is to say that high church traditions might be, to us low church evangelicals, a bit like the grass always being grenier on the other side of the fence. I've heard plenty of Catholics and Anglicans complain about the disconnect they have with the worship, that they don't, in fact, feel connected to anything beyond the level of familiarity.
In this, I think, we might find common ground in our complaints. It is our very familiarity with whatever liturgy our tradition embraces often leads to the desire to incorporate parts of other traditions (high church traditions can use some connection to the present and low church traditions can use some connection to the past). It is likely beneficial to broaden our horizons and include a wide variety of practices in worship drawn from beyond our own traditions. However, I'm not sure that really solves the problem expressed.
The deeper issue is likely engagement. Too often we feel as though worship is something we observe rather than something we embody. In a culture than functions to turn us from humans into consumers, it is our natural reaction to consume worship. We are defined by what we buy, eat, wear, use - and therefore our worship should be the most perfect and the coolest - so we can't do it ourselves; we're not good enough.
Despite a culture that forms us to consume, we do have an inherent, human need for connection - real connection, both with each other and with God. Corporate worship is the time we set aside to gather as God's people to be formed into the likeness of Christ. I take that purpose literally; the Church is the real body of Christ. It requires real participation - and, like our humanity, requires both physical and spiritual participation.
I think a lot of our issues in worship could be solved by honestly answering one question: what does our liturgy say about God? Not what we want it to say about God, but what our acts of worship really communicate. The answer is really into what we're being formed.
