My Satan, My Tempter, My Opponent
Busyness.
I’ve tried to speak of the typical misdiagnosis that Christians make of our moral decay. We haven’t decayed into materialists. I’ll present just one common-sense test of my view vs. the standard view. Materialists necessarily recognize the objectivity, ‘absoluteness’ in a sense, of laws at least in a limited domain, the domain of physics — so to speak. Modern human beings don’t recognize the objectivity of laws even when it comes to material objects, perhaps because of the very successes of modern technology that seems to promise to make matter do whatever we want it to do.
What modern human beings lust after is transactions, not things. Children don’t place a materialistic value upon those piles of imagination-killing toys they get on birthdays and on Christmas. They follow their training and enjoy mostly the processes of getting gifts. The unwrapping of a gift is more important than its use. The gifts themselves are often beside the point and will be set aside to gather dust until given away to some charitable agency. An appreciation of things, of material objects, would be tied to some understanding of those things as intractable objects following laws which we can’t change and would show in at least a sporadic care for and maintenance of those objects. We know that’s not the general situation because parents are always complaining that children nowadays don’t care for their belongings. In my generation — born 1955, you’d better oil your baseball bat and put it away because you weren’t like to get another.
It’s busyness that we seek and busyness is a sign that the gods of the marketplaces are being served. One of the very bad aspects of the modern world is that busyness is being served by our church communities as well as by our political parties and our commercial entities. We judge our prosperity by the GNP which is a measurement of marketplace activity and we don’t even have a concept of what a good, stable life might be. We measure, however vaguely, the health of a church community by its busyness. We measure the worth of our lives far too often by the busyness of those lives.
We deform political life so that it’s no longer a way for the citizens and traditional institutions to shape certain aspects of their lives. Politics is a forum for the overly-active, a forum which generally excludes participation by those who consider politics important but not the main activity of their life. The main danger the public square presents to Christians is not the stripping of spaces once decorated by crosses but rather the way in which the public square keeps us moving about so that we can’t be at peace even when we return to our quiet places.
But it’s not just the public squares that are that sort of a danger. Even our institutions which serve God, such as our churches, have become our satans, our tempters, our opponents. They serve the needs of the gods of the marketplaces and work to draw us out of our neighborhoods and our more organic relationships. They serve the needs of those gods by teaching us a worthwhile life is measured by the number of our transactions in the modern marketplaces.
