A thought that keeps cycling
What would a call to Closeness with God sound like today?
There's this constant media bombardment - there are now even ads that are designed to flash into the train cars in Metro tunnels, people are expected to carry phones with them everywhere (and the fact that we don't seriously wierds out some of my husband's relatives), there are televisions in many restaurants, and even where there aren't, there's piped music. People have turned their own bodies into billboards. While this is nothing new - after all, the whole idea of heraldry was to make someone visibly on one side or another on a battlefield- it's now taken to absurd lengths. Lots of Dutch fans watched a World Cup match in their skivvies after their orange lederhosen with lion's tails were confiscated as an attempt at "ambush marketing" by a brewery that was neither the team's sponsor nor the games' sponsor.
And of course, we're used to being harangued in the name of God. One hate-filled preacher after another assures us that natural disasters are the result of SIN! as though tragedy never strikes good people. I wonder sometimes what their followers must feel whenever something bad happens to them. How horrible not to even have God to turn to when you are feeling lowest, but only to implore not to make things worse, as though God were some sort of cosmic torturer, intent on paying tit for tat. We see constant reminders that God really wants us to go to church, though which one is still being figured out. One local megachurch has taken to buying ad time on the radio and delivering mini-sermons with an ad for the church.
How do we know the call when we hear it, if we can hear it over the boom of an earth-shaking subwoofer, the roar of our machinery, the distracting chatter that is everywhere, and of course, the loud cries of the preachers? What if, instead of the loud cries of the prophets to the cities in an age where all machinery was powered by muscle, wind, or water, today God whispers in the forgotten places? How will we know? Am I listening? Am I looking in the right places?
There's this constant media bombardment - there are now even ads that are designed to flash into the train cars in Metro tunnels, people are expected to carry phones with them everywhere (and the fact that we don't seriously wierds out some of my husband's relatives), there are televisions in many restaurants, and even where there aren't, there's piped music. People have turned their own bodies into billboards. While this is nothing new - after all, the whole idea of heraldry was to make someone visibly on one side or another on a battlefield- it's now taken to absurd lengths. Lots of Dutch fans watched a World Cup match in their skivvies after their orange lederhosen with lion's tails were confiscated as an attempt at "ambush marketing" by a brewery that was neither the team's sponsor nor the games' sponsor.
And of course, we're used to being harangued in the name of God. One hate-filled preacher after another assures us that natural disasters are the result of SIN! as though tragedy never strikes good people. I wonder sometimes what their followers must feel whenever something bad happens to them. How horrible not to even have God to turn to when you are feeling lowest, but only to implore not to make things worse, as though God were some sort of cosmic torturer, intent on paying tit for tat. We see constant reminders that God really wants us to go to church, though which one is still being figured out. One local megachurch has taken to buying ad time on the radio and delivering mini-sermons with an ad for the church.
How do we know the call when we hear it, if we can hear it over the boom of an earth-shaking subwoofer, the roar of our machinery, the distracting chatter that is everywhere, and of course, the loud cries of the preachers? What if, instead of the loud cries of the prophets to the cities in an age where all machinery was powered by muscle, wind, or water, today God whispers in the forgotten places? How will we know? Am I listening? Am I looking in the right places?
posted by Plain Foolish | 9:18 PM
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