Opinion | My Hope for American Discourse - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...odbye-social-media-prayer.html
interiority contemplation distant modernity incarnation community material
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In the 1930s, the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev argued that modernity is characterized by an externalization of the self, an outpouring of and obsession with activity, productivity, results and progress.
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Modernity, he thought, was exhausting itself. Humanity could not “carry on any longer merely on the surface, a purely external life”; we must either “go deep or peter out altogether.”
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This deepening requires times of interiority, contemplation, rigor, invisibility, time with the inside of holy things.
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There is also a tendency in our moment to prioritize the distant over the proximate and the big over the small.
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We can seek to have all the right political opinions and still not really love our actual neighbors, those right around us, in our homes, in our workplaces or on our blocks.
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Ben Sasse wrote, “When we prioritize ‘news’ from afar, we’re saying that our distant-but-shallow communities are more important than our small-but-deep flesh-and-blood ones.”
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In our time of digitization and rapid information, our temptation is what the philosopher Charles Taylor called “excarnation” — the opposite of “incarnation,” it makes our life into an abstraction.
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We become like Linus in the old “Peanuts” cartoons who famously said: “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.”
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True community, however, is made of real people with names, of friends with true faults, of congregations with faces, of the local, the small.
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Global and national news is important and I will continue to read news and opinion pieces nearly every day. But for me, as for most of us, the places we meet God — the places we become human — are not primarily in abstract debates about culture wars or the role of religion in society, but in worship on a Sunday morning or in dropping off soup for a grieving friend, in a vulnerable conversation or in making breakfast at the homeless shelter down the street, in celebration with a neighbor or in the drowsy prayers uttered while rocking a feverish toddler in the middle of the night.
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The way to battle abstraction in our time is to embrace the material, the incarnation of our lives, the fleshy, complicated, touchable realities right around us in our neighborhoods, churches, friends and families