A Provocation on Individualism

Western individualism, in which the self is essentially divorced from communal interconnections and social responsibility, is nothing more than an advertising ploy: By getting you to focus on your rights, your needs, your pains, your pleasures, your freedoms, your entitlements, your grievances, your opportunities, your gratification, the Market turns you into a cipher, a vacuum, a perfect Void which seeks to ever consume and yet never be filled, so that you become another cog in the Engine that produces endless profit and power for Mammon. The solution, like most solutions which flow from Christ, is paradoxical, because Christ himself is the paradox of full humanity and full divinity united in one person. And this paradoxical solution is solitude and solidarity. On one hand, to recover our true self in Christ, we must retreat from the incessant Engine of consumption into the stillness and silence of solitude. By being able to be alone with Christ we will still the violently aggressive noise of the Market marketing to our hunger for incessant gratification. On the other hand, to recover our true self in Christ, we must also join in solidarity with others in the joys and pains of life together, in the service of their needs and hopes, in the healing of their wounds and sufferings. And through this self-giving dance of solitude and solidarity, we will learn to become fully human and fully alive with the life of God, as incarnations of the Incarnation, uniting humanity and divinity in our self as we find our self in Christ. 

The Way of Christ is Progress

Recently, as people on social media are wont to do, a long time friend of mine posted a really reductionistic meme about the "unchanging" nature of the Way of Christ. It said: 

"Christianity does not 'progress' with the times. If it did, it would be a false religion. Do not be deceived into thinking there is a progressive form of Christianity. It doesn't exist because the truth never changes. Jesus is the same yesterday today and forever. Amen"

I used to fear change and progress, and I was also committed to a really simplistic and reductive understanding of the Church as "the pillar and foundation of the truth" (cf. 1Timothy 3.15).