Easter – Page 3 – Ripple Effects

Stream of Easter Consciousness

stained-glass-2a2 So students are sent back to school this week, just in time for Easter. Nobody wants to have a holiday right on Easter week, especially the public school board. That’s how you survive, by being politically correct. And the last two weeks’ holiday is called Spring Break of course. Easter has almost become a banned word, like Christmas. Who wants to be rude and offend others, we’re Canadians after all.

I know, it’s not totally a taboo yet. It’s a much tamer word, Easter, than Christmas, just because it doesn’t have the six-lettered word in it. You can curse with that name, but no, God forbid you should say it in a proper context. I can see you sneer, what’s a proper context, you ask. You’re right of course, no word or context is more proper than others, we’re egalitarians after all. As for Easter, as long as it’s synonymous with eggs and bunnies, pastels and flowers then it’ll never die. Who needs resurrections?

All Fridays are good. They even have a whole restaurant chain commemorating the day. What’s it called… yes, T.G.I. Friday’s. Who says we’re not religious, we thank God for happy hours. We’re much more open-minded now, more civilized, equal and fair, don’t want to pick one day to be better than the others. But definitely we won’t forget Ramadan, or the Chinese New Year.

There’s probably no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life, the sign on the bus says. So we’re safe? Whew! No God means we can now be happy, worry free, all life, no death, … Umm just let me figure this one out. Give me a minute, I’m just not as smart as them.

Jesus wept. He wept at the graveside of Lazarus, brother of his dear friends Martha and Mary. He wept at the fragility of life. He wept at the searing pain of separation. He wept at the hopeless and uncomprehending expression on Mary’s face, even after he said to her I am the resurrection and the life.

Fleming Rutledge said more than ten years ago: “I am deeply convicted, more so each year, of the profound sinfulness of the human race. Yet because of the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus Christ — because of that and nothing else, because of that and nothing less — I am also convicted of the truth of what the Bible tells us about God’s plan of salvation. The rainbow bridge does not lead to Valhalla, where the gods quarrel so much that they destroy themselves. The rainbow bridge leads to the Cross and to the empty tomb on Easter Day.”

Utterly politically incorrect! Who uses the word sin anymore? Who’s Fleming Rutledge, anyway. Never heard of him. No? It’s a she? No wonder.

Now these words echo loud and clear too, written by T. S. Eliot in… what, 1934? Aren’t they a bit archaic now? Or, maybe they’re really prophetic:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

We should go on living, be happy and worry-free, the sign on the bus says.

So we go on living…

and Jesus still weeps.

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No Texting for Lent and The End of Solitude

Roman Catholic Bishops in Italy have added some contemporary relevance in the fasting tradition during Lent: High Tech Fast. The faithful are urged to free themselves from the bondage of technology and gadgets, and refrain from surfing, emailing, twittering, texting … in order to prepare themselves for Easter. This could prove to be a penance much harder to practice than not eating meat, even just on Fridays, for texting could well be the newest form of addiction today.

At about the same time, I heard an interview on the CBC Radio program Spark. Host Nora Young conducted an interview with William Deresiewicz, literary critic and essayist, who has recently written an article entitled ‘The End of Solitude’.

Deresiewicz taught at Yale from 1998 to 2008. When he asked his students what place solitude had in their lives, he got this reply: “Why would anyone want to be alone?”

With the ubiquitous use of high tech gadgets, and the torrents of Internet social networks around us, we are caught in a web of connectivity like never before:

Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely. Now, it is impossible to be alone.

Not only that, the goal now seems to be to gain as much self-exposure as possible, to be visible. It seems that the number of friends we have on Facebook, and the number of hits on our blog directly leads to our self-esteem and our quality of self. The irony is, the pseudo and the virtual are substituting the genuine and the authentic.

What does friendship mean when you have 532 “friends”? How does it enhance my sense of closeness when my Facebook News Feed tells me that Sally Smith (whom I haven’t seen since high school, and wasn’t all that friendly with even then) ‘is making coffee and staring off into space’?

Deresiewicz notes that solitude used to be a desirable social value. From religious sages to the Romantics like Wordsworth, solitude is the channel one hears the still, small voice of God, or heed the beckoning of Nature. As modernism crept in, the literati turned inward to find validation of self, like Woolf, Joyce, Proust.

Then came urbanization and suburbanization. The generation that used to vegetate in front of the TV has given way to the child of the Internet, the networked self. And we no longer believe in the solitary mind.

So what does it matter when we have lost the moments to be alone? What have we lost?

First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct.

Also, the urge to be instantly connected has bred a new generation of skippers and skimmers, replacing readers.

… five minutes on the same Web page is considered an eternity

No wonder we’re told to keep our blog posts short if we want to attract readership.

With the loss of the capacity for solitude, we’ve lost the ability to cultivate depth of self and create independent thinking. Emerson said that “Solitude is to genius the stern friend.” Deresiewicz goes on to say:

…no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific or moral, can arise without solitude.

The irony is, the more we are connected with the virtual world out there, the less we are connected with ourselves inwardly. But this is what’s valued nowadays, isn’t it, to be open, sociable, gregarious. But to maintain a sense of authentic self, we may have to sacrifice popularity, to be not so polite:

Thoreau understood that securing one’s self-possession was worth a few wounded feelings. He may have put his neighbors off, but at least he was sure of himself.

Those who would find solitude must not be afraid to stand alone.

Maybe this is one meaningful connection we should strive for: solitude, introspection, slow blogging, quality thinking, quality reading, quality writing, quality self.

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Click here to listen to the full interview.

Click here to read the article ‘The End of Solitude’ by William Deresiewicz.

Click here to read my review of Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together

Click here to read my post on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in which she explored the privilege of Solitude.

The Easter Message

When I Survey the Wondrous Cross

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of Glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
Save in the death of Christ my God,
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to His blood.

See from His head, His hands, His feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down,
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

His dying crimson, like a robe,
Spreads o’er His body on the tree;
Then I am dead to all the globe,
And all the globe is dead to me.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

—– Isaac Watts, 1707

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