It keeps coming back to me…

I watched My Dinner with Andre for the first time a couple months back, and it continues to rock me. Dense in the conversation is the story of a man’s journey to find and recover his soul in a world where Man is abolished from any importance. He called modern man a walking “zombie”, or a creature that is asleep but doesn’t want to know it.

His journey is essentially an attempt to reconnect with his Creator God, though I am not sure he understood that. I certainly didn’t recognize that when I went out and tried almost every kind of spirituality there is out there. I knocked on almost every door on the block that claimed to have the answer, which is the meaning of life and truth and existence. Some doors I entered; other doors I rang the doorbell, peered inside and ran away. I think the character of Andre describes doing much of the same thing. As a side note, I heard that the actor/writer of this film, Andre Gregory, who is actually playing himself in the film, returned to the Christian faith of his fathers some time after this film was made.

But what comes back to me again and again in this film is what Andre said about the nature of the modern world. It haunts me in fact when I look out at the world around me.

WALLY: [Quieter:] Well, why…why do you think that is? I mean, why is that? I mean, is it just because people are lazy today? Or they’re bored? I mean, are we just like bored, spoiled children who’ve just been lying in the bathtub all day just playing with their plastic duck and now they’re just thinking: “Well! what can I do?”

ANDRE: Okay! Yes! We’re bored! We’re all bored now! But has it ever occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brain-washing, created by a world totalitarian government based on money? And that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks? And it’s not just a question of individual survival, Wally, but that somebody who’s bored is asleep, and somebody who’s asleep will not say “no”? See, I keep meeting these people, I mean, uh, just a few days ago I met this man whom I greatly admire, he’s a Swedish physicist, Gustav Björnstrand? And he told me that he no longer watches television, he doesn’t read newspapers and he doesn’t read magazines. He’s completely cut them out of his life, because he really does feel that we’re living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now, and that everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot!

And when I was at Findhorn, I met this extraordinary English tree expert, who had devoted his life to saving trees. He just got back from Washington, lobbying to save the redwoods? He’s eighty-four years old and he always travels with a back-pack ’cause he never knows where he’s gonna be tomorrow! And when I met him at Findhorn he said to me: “Where are you from?” And I said: “New York.” He said: “Ah, New York! Yes, that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave but never do?” And I said: “Oh, yes!” And he said: “Why do you think they don’t leave?” I gave him different banal theories. He said: “Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all.” He said: “I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they’ve built, they’ve built their own prison. And so they exist in a state of schizophrenia, where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have, having been lobotomized, the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made, or to even see it as a prison. And then he went into his pocket and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said: “This is a pine tree.” He put it in my hand and he said: “Escape, before it’s too late.”

You see, actually, for two or three years now Chiquita and I have had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out. No, we really should feel like Jews in Germany in the late thirties? Get out of here! Of course, the problem is where to go, ’cause it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction.
You see, I think it’s quite possible that the nineteen-sixties represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished. And that this is the beginning of the rest of the future now, and that from now on there’ll simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there’ll be nobody left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts. And that history and memory are right now being erased, and soon nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet! [Emphasis Mine]

There is a nihilism here that’s virtually inescapable with Jesus. Indeed, if this world is all one has with no afterlife, then life and existence might very well feel quite bleak.

As a Christian, however, I know that my citizenship is in the Kingdom of Heaven, not on this earth. With this knowledge, Jesus has given me the tools to detach from the outcomes of this world, to turn to Him and observe the world go to whatever end it has decided to go.

Dropping shoes

I thought I’d conduct a bit of a rambling commentary today about things that are, well, disturbing about our world.

In my previous posts earlier this year, I wrote on David Wilkerson’s vision of an impending calamity that would visit the United States and the world. He couched his letter to all believers in terms of our cities being engulfed in flames. Riots like the ones in Watts years ago will rampage across our country and the world because God’s wrath is upon us.

He advised all believers to put away a store of goods, a thirty-day supply of food and to pray earnestly for God’s direction whether to “run to the hills” or to hunker down. We are now in October heading into November and the signs on the horizon are a little more than disturbing.

We feel that our freedoms and liberties are being usurped by our government; we feel more tense, holding our breaths when whispers of calamities are heard but not seen around the corner; when conflagrations spark in a foreign land, we wonder if those fires will start wafting our way.

We are stepping on emotional pins and needles, or eggshells if you rather. Racial relations seem to be fraying at the edges not in small part due to how easily our leaders and prominent men and women thrust around accusations of racism. A lot of us feel we SHOULD look over our figurative shoulders but are afraid of what we might find standing there. We’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, and many of us aren’t sure what will happen or what WE’LL DO if it does.

So, what do I mean when I speak of the other shoe dropping?

Let me give you an example. With almost everyone I know, when I talk to them alone confesses to me their fear that the world is going to end– soon. We usually speak in hushed whispers, somewhat self-conscious of the possibility that others within hearing distance may stamp us as hysterical la-la lunatics. What they don’t know is that I’ve usually had a similar conversation with the other person a week or a couple months ago.

Even self-professed atheists confess to being afraid that the world is going to end soon, and many of those brushing off these fears say so with a conviction not derived from a supreme confidence that it won’t happen, but an urgent hope that it will not. Significantly, the atheists I encountered didn’t usually cite Global Warming as the cause of the fears. It’s usually something subterranean, shadowy, something nameless they can’t identify.

Many of them talk of December 21st, 2012, nuclear war, viral pandemics, mass starvation, mass deaths, etc. and this is reflected in our movies. 2012 the movie is about to be released next month, so is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road– both are hardly movies of holiday cheer.

In any case, we all sense that a major, tectonic shift is about to occur. What form it will take is not clear. I, for one, still hope for a Christian revival across America whatever happens to the rest of the world… I also don’t think it’s the Apocalypse just yet. These are just the beginning of our sorrows. Let no man deceive you by any means whatsoever, says the Good Book. These are but the birth pangs. The show could conceivably begin 20 years from now, regardless of what happens here in America.

The Fall of the West

A few months ago, my mother said that Americans have too much freedom to do as they please. Actually, that wasn’t just a few months ago. She’s been hammering that message to me for over fifteen years.

Being the traditional Vietnamese matriarch that she is, she felt compelled to disparagingly tell me that these American women change their beau’s as frequently as they change their clothes, that Americans give no thought to the future but spend and borrow too much money they don’t have, that Americans don’t have any discipline or check on their excessive behaviors (if it feels good, do it)… in a word, they abuse the freedoms they have.

Our family fled the Communists as they overran Vietnam and arrived in the States in 1980. Since then my mother has been horrified at the level of indulgence and wantonness, and she felt it was incumbent upon her to lecture me on these ills once she saw that I was becoming Americanized.

I would counter that this wantonness has not always been the way America did things. I would explain that it wasn’t too long ago that American culture was very akin to the traditional Vietnamese culture in what it valued. Furthermore, I don’t think that it’s just American culture that is being corrupted. Look at the Vietnamese in Vietnam where drugs are running rampant and prostitution is commonplace and out in the open– they are just as wanton those in America.

We would have these kinds of exchanges about once a month, half spoken in Vietnamese, half in English. It has been a point of sadness to me for both America and Vietnam, that here at the end of the age, our cultures are disintegrating/ degenerating into something unworthy of their former glory.

I have hope still that Jesus will grant America a revival and a renewal. There are many positive signs to support my hope, but as for Vietnam… I don’t know. I don’t know because I don’t live there and I am an American, not Vietnamese. At this point after all these years, I am as alien to Vietnam as Vietnam is alien to me.

What reminded me of this conversation with my mother an article in the UK’s Mail Online. It captured in an image the wantonness of our age.

Maybe she thinks it’s the drink that is preventing her from putting one foot in front of the other.

Or perhaps she knows the vulgar truth and is merely trying to impress her friends. Either way, the sight is certainly not an edifying one.

This shrieking ladette was photographed staggering through Cardiff city centre late on Friday night.

Such scenes are not uncommon, which is why Cardiff – one of the country’s worst cities for binge drinking – has just banned boozing on the streets.

What scene is this article talking about?

It’s of a drunken British woman trying to walk with her black panties strapped around her ankles… out in the center of the road!

It’s sad to see that the country that once ruled the oceans of the world is producing these kinds of behaviors out of their women. When I saw this picture I thought of what my mother would say about. Probably same thing she’s said for years.

I think we are witnessing the fall of the West. When they chucked their Protestant faith out the window, they chucked out their civilization as well. The virtues of self-discipline, self-restraint and moderation– well, that went out the window too.

It makes me think of the former communists from the Soviet bloc. What a shock it must be for them to have been lifted from the ground after decades of having the boot of tyranny in their face to a world of unrestricted decadence and moral depravity. I think of the Muslim who immigrated to Europe with dreams of freedom away from their oppressive, ethnic tribes only to find a world drunk in nihilistic despair.

Indeed, one Muslim commenter wrote:

ISLAM is the only solution and religion on this planet which prohibits drinking ,gambling. NO AGE BAR. From Cradle to Grave.

But this is not a European Muslim. This man hails from the city of our current President, Chicago. As this man points out, Islam is the antithesis of freedom. The problem is that many people would welcome this renewed oppression, this medievalism because it would absolve them of their responsibilities. Freedom and liberty demands that a man take responsibilities for his own actions and, with God guidance, chart his own course.

I think part of the the West’s disintegration is due to the refusal by many people to accept the burdens of freedom and by their action rejection of the God of their fathers.

Call me cynical…

… but this reminds me of Caesar conducting large-scale extravaganzas and gladiatorial games to divert the plebeians from their problems.

Los Angeles, Are You Ready For Some NFL Football?.

Don’t we already have our gladiatorial games with Ultimate Fighting Championship?

A Question

What effect does instantaneous communication have on the human soul?

Aside from the obvious, prosaic answer that instantaneous communication through the internet has shrunken time and distance in a mere fraction of what it was, what I am more interested in is the question of how this truncation of human existence affects our conceptions of life, beauty, truth and meaning– or in short, all the attribute of the human soul.

This is an open-ended question to whomever wants to answer.