Michigan, road trips, changes, changes, changes...
This past weekend I went to a wedding in Jackson, Michigan. My friends Ryan and Katey were tying the knot, so two friends (Mara a bridesmaid, and Ben, another pew-warmer like myself) and I drove out to participate. Ryan and Katey are part of a group of friends I took part in during my first and second years of Seminary, but who have now all decamped to various places around the country and world, save for the few of us who are still here in South Hamilton finishing school. It was very good to see everyone together again, but the normal wistful sentimentality that afflicts me at weddings was compounded by the presence of this group of friends, in toto, at this wedding. 3 seperate times in my adult life I have been forced to part fellowship with a group of close friends due to the end of a step of our respective educations, several people getting married at once, or the arising of some other opportunity far away (hence my leaving Seattle), or just plain growing in distance from one another due to laziness. I think I'm rather tired of it, and it's not over yet. I will avoid ranting (too much) about the evils of a hyper-mobile, hyper-consumptive culture and context that makes such hyper-mobility, and such self-seeking individualism (and concommitant loneliness) intelligible or even practical. I will also only mention in passing my complicit participation in this state of affairs. Don't get me wrong, I am the Quisling in this discussion, friends, not the self-righteous looney in the pulpit. In truth, I am more like the Jacob Marley of this tale. I will only say this, are we happy like this? Am I? No...I'm rather happy with my education, with the adventures involved with going to new places, but I must say I am made distinctly miserable by the consistent building up and then severing of relationships that this sort of life entails (and not just this lifestyle, but the general acceptance of hyper-mobility, career-chasing, emphasis upon the individual, or, by way of concession, upon the nuclear family torn from the life of the extended family, neighborhood, and community) and that a permanent and non-optional (i.e. non-consumable and non-disposable) sense of 'home' 'community-with-rightful-claims-upon-me' and 'place' while postiviely medieval, is challenging my other much vaunted and more 'socially acceptable' goals (PhD, professional success, etc.) for supremacy right now. I suppose this is all slightly pathological for me, rather than philosophical. I don't have much of a sense of family, and so go to great lengths to create proxies everywhere I go. Is this the Church to me? Is that what Church is supposed to be? Is it my group of friends? Is this what a group of friends is supposed to be? Should I get married to attenuate some of this? Am I expecting too much from people around me? I'm inclined to think I am. I find myself torn between these things.
Loyalty to a group of friends, to a region, to a set of ideals, to a community, to anything permanent and of 'commanding presence' as Albert Borgmann would put it...the time and place we find ourselves in as a culture are quite corrosive to these things. Nonetheless, they are the thing that give our lives the substance and substrate of meaning that make them live-able, even joyous. All the same, in pursuit of the education I feel that I need to articulate and protect these unseen ecologies and webs of life that hold our realities together, I participate not in them but in their destruction precisely by my departure to the other side of the continent to pursue schooling to point them out and protect them. Who knows if I will ever be able to resurrect those friendships that were left behind? I hope so, but who knows? We'd like to think that all the things we pursue or happen to us are largely for the better. I'd like to think becoming an Anglican is all for the best, not just for me, but for those I love. Is it? While no one from my old church has stayed in touch with me much, the few people I still really care about there are sure to be slightly taken aback by my decision to jump off the Assemblies of God/Foursquare boat and swim for the shore of Anglicanism. Certainly, the dream of planting a church with a particular one of those people that we harbored once or twice in our hearts is dashed. What if my coming to Gordon-Conwell, and coming over to Anglicanism amongst other things are just an outplay of my rootlessness? Not a display of liberty and responsibility, but of disorienting and nauseating freedom. Not a ship free from the constraints of port and under sail, but torn from it's moorings and drifting in a strong wind towards a lee shore? Don't get me wrong on this point, ships are meant to sail, so are we meant for a certain degree of educational, psychological, financial, and geographical mobility...but I am speaking of hyper-mobility here. That prefix assumes a continuum upon which can be found deficiency, normalcy, and excess. I find us as a culture in the excess of this activity/trait at this point in time, and use the term hyper to denote this state of affairs. Anyway...maybe I should just stop whining. Things are going to be ok. Heaven isn't so far away, and there we hope to to find a fellowship forever unbroken with all things. The Road may go Ever On, but luckily it is the odd spots that are lonely, and not the character of this path as such that makes it so, and so we have hope both for Heaven and for Earth.
Loyalty to a group of friends, to a region, to a set of ideals, to a community, to anything permanent and of 'commanding presence' as Albert Borgmann would put it...the time and place we find ourselves in as a culture are quite corrosive to these things. Nonetheless, they are the thing that give our lives the substance and substrate of meaning that make them live-able, even joyous. All the same, in pursuit of the education I feel that I need to articulate and protect these unseen ecologies and webs of life that hold our realities together, I participate not in them but in their destruction precisely by my departure to the other side of the continent to pursue schooling to point them out and protect them. Who knows if I will ever be able to resurrect those friendships that were left behind? I hope so, but who knows? We'd like to think that all the things we pursue or happen to us are largely for the better. I'd like to think becoming an Anglican is all for the best, not just for me, but for those I love. Is it? While no one from my old church has stayed in touch with me much, the few people I still really care about there are sure to be slightly taken aback by my decision to jump off the Assemblies of God/Foursquare boat and swim for the shore of Anglicanism. Certainly, the dream of planting a church with a particular one of those people that we harbored once or twice in our hearts is dashed. What if my coming to Gordon-Conwell, and coming over to Anglicanism amongst other things are just an outplay of my rootlessness? Not a display of liberty and responsibility, but of disorienting and nauseating freedom. Not a ship free from the constraints of port and under sail, but torn from it's moorings and drifting in a strong wind towards a lee shore? Don't get me wrong on this point, ships are meant to sail, so are we meant for a certain degree of educational, psychological, financial, and geographical mobility...but I am speaking of hyper-mobility here. That prefix assumes a continuum upon which can be found deficiency, normalcy, and excess. I find us as a culture in the excess of this activity/trait at this point in time, and use the term hyper to denote this state of affairs. Anyway...maybe I should just stop whining. Things are going to be ok. Heaven isn't so far away, and there we hope to to find a fellowship forever unbroken with all things. The Road may go Ever On, but luckily it is the odd spots that are lonely, and not the character of this path as such that makes it so, and so we have hope both for Heaven and for Earth.
posted by Troy at 1:01 PM
1 Comments:
Troy -
I find that while the 'what-if' game lends itself to my disposition, it is unhelful to me in the longrun because it produces desires which can never be. Having said this though, I do recognize in your post those same longings for normalicy, for a life that is stationary (or managibly so), and for a constancy which leave the world a secure place. I think that you are right to look to the eschaton for the fullness of this reality that you and I and probably many of humanity seek.
For me, whenever I end up in the guessing game, I remind myself that its fish or cut bait. I am here, and not there (though that kind of funny, because I am physically here in Seattle - at least for a few more hours), I am doing this and not that. For me (and I know that this is skeewed to one side because I am ralitively career-oriented) I feel like I know what I want to do - what I am built by God to do. That specific (or more specific) thing that God has crafted me for. We are all meant for lives in communinty, and you are right to point out that much of our joy and happiness is derived from these freinds and activities with them. But I think that this is a norm that is worked through our lives, and should not be the exclusive thing that we do. We are called to a community, but not to the exclusion of other things. I have a commission of sorts from the Lord, and I need to attend to that also. It's holding the two in balance, making choices that affect each of these things, and living with the reprocussions that is frustrating, but is also the nature of live.
Your thoughts?
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