Monday, May 10, 2004
My Own Fall in the garden of Eden
Something that got me thinking lately. On Saturday I went to Life Giving Spring Bookstore, an Orthodox bookstore in Glendale. We went there for a few reasons, one of which was to talk to Anastasia, the owner. We got to talking about life in Greece, comparing and contrasting life in a small village with that in the larger cities.
I suppose in some senses, the differences aren’t all that different than the differences between rural Appalachia and Los Angeles or New York. But one of the differences got me to thinking about something else. There seems to be, in my experience, a different kind of spirituality represented in these two kinds of places.
In the larger cities of both Athens and Los Angeles, technology and innovation rule. Whatever is new is good. Fast paces are the order for the day, and a simple life is frowned upon. Church life is acknowledged as a good thing, but regularly practiced by relatively few. Communal life is almost non-existent, it almost has to be forced to exist at all.
But in my experiences in both rural Kentucky and the more remote villages of Greece, there was a thriving communal life. People ate together, played pickup games of baseball and cards, or in Greece, backgammon and soccer. Old women walked across their little towns to visit family, old men tended their gardens with their grandchildren. It was something I saw in almost every small village we drove through, and we drove through literally hundreds of them.
Bear with me for a second, I’m going to go somewhere different, then bring it back around. On Sunday, my high school students and I were discussing in what ways have the messages of secularism creeped into our thinking, both personally and societally. From such things as a) a particular protestant talk show host who boldly proclaimed that a democratic form of government is the only kind in which true Christianity can thrive, b)the idea that we ought to limit childbearing so that we have more financial resources to shower upon them, c)our lives are better because of the technological advances of the last 50 or hundred or thousand years, and many others.
We discussed these messages that our society promotes, and then I just played antagonist with them, asking them to examine their personal views and how they measure up to the values of the Church.
But it seems that we have accepted lives, especially in metropolitan areas, that must be bombarded with messages from everywhere. I long for that simple life of the farm of my youth, where I was one step removed from the distractions of the world, and the messages it wants to pour into us to keep us individualistic and out of community. It seems that as the level of urbanization increases, the more complex and complicated our lives become. It also seems that with these increases, there is a decrease in childlike faith in God.
With our complicated lives come complicated faiths. It seems to me we’ve substituted our simple childlike faiths for complicated ones. Maybe this is unavoidable, or maybe, as Fr. Thomas told James, this is unnatural, and we’ve substituted truth and beauty for a lie. But I always find myself coming back to the question “How much can we strip ourselves of these things, before we do more damage than good?”
One of my brothers boldly stated that if he had been in the garden instead of Adam, he would have chosen better; he would have cut the tree down. Well, perhaps he would have, but I doubt I would have. I made my own fall from grace, my own denial of the simple faith of my childhood, and I suspect, as Fr. Wayne has said so often, I'll spend the rest of my life trying to regain that which I already had as a child. Suffer not the little children...indeed.
Something that got me thinking lately. On Saturday I went to Life Giving Spring Bookstore, an Orthodox bookstore in Glendale. We went there for a few reasons, one of which was to talk to Anastasia, the owner. We got to talking about life in Greece, comparing and contrasting life in a small village with that in the larger cities.
I suppose in some senses, the differences aren’t all that different than the differences between rural Appalachia and Los Angeles or New York. But one of the differences got me to thinking about something else. There seems to be, in my experience, a different kind of spirituality represented in these two kinds of places.
In the larger cities of both Athens and Los Angeles, technology and innovation rule. Whatever is new is good. Fast paces are the order for the day, and a simple life is frowned upon. Church life is acknowledged as a good thing, but regularly practiced by relatively few. Communal life is almost non-existent, it almost has to be forced to exist at all.
But in my experiences in both rural Kentucky and the more remote villages of Greece, there was a thriving communal life. People ate together, played pickup games of baseball and cards, or in Greece, backgammon and soccer. Old women walked across their little towns to visit family, old men tended their gardens with their grandchildren. It was something I saw in almost every small village we drove through, and we drove through literally hundreds of them.
Bear with me for a second, I’m going to go somewhere different, then bring it back around. On Sunday, my high school students and I were discussing in what ways have the messages of secularism creeped into our thinking, both personally and societally. From such things as a) a particular protestant talk show host who boldly proclaimed that a democratic form of government is the only kind in which true Christianity can thrive, b)the idea that we ought to limit childbearing so that we have more financial resources to shower upon them, c)our lives are better because of the technological advances of the last 50 or hundred or thousand years, and many others.
We discussed these messages that our society promotes, and then I just played antagonist with them, asking them to examine their personal views and how they measure up to the values of the Church.
But it seems that we have accepted lives, especially in metropolitan areas, that must be bombarded with messages from everywhere. I long for that simple life of the farm of my youth, where I was one step removed from the distractions of the world, and the messages it wants to pour into us to keep us individualistic and out of community. It seems that as the level of urbanization increases, the more complex and complicated our lives become. It also seems that with these increases, there is a decrease in childlike faith in God.
With our complicated lives come complicated faiths. It seems to me we’ve substituted our simple childlike faiths for complicated ones. Maybe this is unavoidable, or maybe, as Fr. Thomas told James, this is unnatural, and we’ve substituted truth and beauty for a lie. But I always find myself coming back to the question “How much can we strip ourselves of these things, before we do more damage than good?”
One of my brothers boldly stated that if he had been in the garden instead of Adam, he would have chosen better; he would have cut the tree down. Well, perhaps he would have, but I doubt I would have. I made my own fall from grace, my own denial of the simple faith of my childhood, and I suspect, as Fr. Wayne has said so often, I'll spend the rest of my life trying to regain that which I already had as a child. Suffer not the little children...indeed.
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