Diagnosis: IDD

No, it's not a real term. I made it up. It stands for Information Desensitizing Disorder, and I think nearly every American has it.

A comment I made on Guiroo's blog in response to his entry about the commercialization of Easter brought it to mind. This entry is a slightly expanded version of my comments there.

I don't think we even realize the extent to which commercialization is taken in our culture. We certainly aren't aware of its impact. Even Christian radio stations that claim to be "listener supported" (i.e., no advertising) advertise simply by virtue of the fact that they tell all their listeners who their "underwriters" are. Wouldn't it be nice if there were no expectations of an on-air acknowledgement on the part of the giver, and no sense of obligation to do so on the part of the station?

Our culture's middle name is "Cheap". We cheapen everything, and we have a powerful motivation for doing so. The process of cheapening insulates us from the sharp edges of reality and responsibility. I do it all the time, without even so much as a second thought. We have a deep-seated fear of anything significant. Nothing is private, nothing is off-limits. There is no intimacy nor is there profundity. Everything, be it trivial or life-changing, becomes information to be consumed, from Terri Shiavo's last days through every excruciating detail of Michael Jackson's aberrant behavior to how many people died in Iraq yesterday. To put everything on a level field like this is a reductionism that serves to very effectively decouple the information from any personal responsibility to act on it. The outcome is physical, spiritual, and emotional numbness.

It's a hefty price to pay, but hey, since we're numb it won't bother us, so it's all OK.

Remembering and Wondering

Lately I've been scouring the Internet for CDs of Christian music from the 70's. At first I attributed this urge to revisit that music as simple nostalgia. Now I'm coming to realize that my spirit is trying to make connections and bring them to the surface. It's the beginning of an excursion into why things are different now. Is it that I'm different? That the world is different?

As we were going to sleep last night I was talking to my wife Barb about a set of videos I ordered during one of these online searches. It's a two-volume set called First Love. Several sites offer it, but it was produced by Steve Grieson's company and can be bought from them here. It came in the mail yesterday and once I put volume one in the player, I couldn't stop watching it. It's a curious mix of documentary, interview, and music. Grieson assembled a group of artists who are associated with the Jesus Movement of the sixties and seventies: Chuck Girard, Barry McGuire, Annie Herring, Randy Matthews, Honeytree, Melody Green -- names everyone who came to know the Lord during those decades would recognize -- and has them just talk and sing.

The impact of the content blew me away as I watched people like Terry Clark and Annie Herring talk not just about their music but how they got to their music. I'm still reeling from the emotions that bombarded me. Things are so different now. Chuck Girard commented that people come up to him these days and ask him to listen to their demos or to give them advice on how to break into Christian music. He commented at one point that he is reasonably sure that Keith Green couldn't even be signed to a label today -- he would be considered too confrontational.

Several things struck me as I watched, and I'm still sorting through them, but here are a couple of observations.

First, what is now an industry began as a simple response -- an externalized expression of what had happened internally in these peoples' lives. None of them had "Christian recording artist" as their goal. Their music was the sonic rippling from the Holy Spirit's disruption of the status quo. God was moving and their music poured out -- like a firehose -- from deep inside their spirits as lives were changed.

Second, these were broken people. At one point Annie Herring remarks that everything that could be taken from her had been taken and that she was totally empty. In what is probably the most poignant point in the video, Terry Clark tells a sobering story of how his experiences in the military brought him to the point where he decided he no longer wanted to be identified with humanity. He became, for all intents and purposes, an animal because of the horrors he had seen and experienced. At his lowest point, when he had been committed to an institution and diagnosed as being beyond hope of recovery, God said to him "I know what you've been through -- I know how horrifying humanity can be. The difference between us is that, while you decided you no longer wanted to be a human being, I decided to become one." Out of this kind of brokenness God birthed something new -- not just in individual hearts but for a whole generation.

So why are things different now? Barb and I talked for a while into the night about it, and I realized that, even if I haven't sorted it all out in my mind yet, I do know that one thing hasn't changed. The Church has moved on and what was once alive and fresh seems now to have become institutionalized. We are stale and have wrapped ourselves in a subcultural cocoon to shield ourselves from a world we consider a threat. But the Holy Spirit who moved hearts then has certainly not changed. God is the constant across all the variability. In the late sixties, he chose to begin a work using a generation whose culture had rejected it -- "filthy hippies" with drug addictions and criminal records who had lived on the streets and were deemed worthless by both the Church and society.

We'd do well to take a long hard look at that.

[To Be Designed] is Up

Finally got my "other" blog set up over the weekend. Should be fun to see if anybody actually reads it: [To Be Designed].

Blink

I just started a new book (I must be crazy -- I have a backlog of at least a dozen books that I've started over the last six months) called Blink - The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell's the guy who popularized the concept of "tipping points".

Blink is a fascinating book. In it, Gladwell investigates Western culture's tendency to trust careful, objective, and methodical investigation over more subjective flashes of intuition. It immediately grabbed my attention because I often have trouble verbalizing conclusions I draw. I've always been able to communicate better in writing than verbally, so that's part of it. But a significant part of it is simply that I don't know. Even at work, where my primary responsibility is to design software solutions, I can't always explain why I settle on a particular design. Sure I can talk about quality attributes and best practices, and how the selected design meets their criteria, but the real answer is almost always that it just feels right. That is rarely an acceptable answer to those who feel a need for evidence, and, honestly, it dissatisfies me as well.

Gladwell begins the book by telling the story of a Greek kouros statue that was being evaluated for purchase by the Getty museum back in 1983. Prominent scientists performed a thorough examination of the statue (one even publishing his process and results in a scientific journal) and promounced it authentic. There was one catch. Every art historian who saw it felt it didn't "look right." For reasons they found difficult to articulate, the statue troubled them. This worried the Getty curator, as the museum had already bought the statue based on the results of the scientific examination and a routine check of the statue's documentation. Their lawyers then dug more deeply into that documentation, and discovered discrepancies that eventually led them to objective proof that it was an Italian forgery. The art historians had been right, and the careful, scientific study had missed the aggregate "soft" evidence that the art experts had intuited but not been able to fully articulate. One had said the the statue "felt fresh." Another had complained that its fingernails were "wrong." Still another had remarked that its feet "looked modern."

We have been taught to distrust such insights, and I'm looking forward to what promises to be a very interesting treatise on learning how to change that.

Well...

Since it's been nearly FIVE months since I've posted, and I get gigged on a regular basis for it, it's high time I posted again. Since it's an easy out, I'll blame the software development project I've been working on over that period of time. Our QA group qualified the release yesterday, so for the first time in a LONG time I actually have a Saturday morning when I'm not working.

I'm planning to start a professional blog soon so that I can rant about that sort of thing -- I put in four months' worth of work over the last two months and it doesn't have to be that way. More on that when I get it set up. For now, I'll just say I'm glad to be back in the land of the living.