No Rest

Nothing is more difficult than prayer. In all other tasks of religious life, however exacting, one can sometimes rest, but there is no rest in prayer, up to the end of one's life.

Simone Weil

Fourth Station

Jesus Meets His Mother

The great task of Christians must be to absorb the spirit of God's kingdom and, with souls filled with the kingdom of God , to work on the projects of history. It's fine to be organized in popular groups; it's all right to form political parties; it's all right to take part in the government. It's fine as long as you are a Christian who carries the reflection of the kingdom of God and tries to establish it where you are working, and as long as you are not being used to further worldly ambitions. This is the great duty of the people of today.

Emptiness and Abundance

The soul is not empty, so long as the desire for sensible things remains. But the absence of this desire for things produces emptiness and liberty of soul, even when there is an abundance of possessions.

St. John of the Cross

An Ethics of Seeing

What sort of viewer am I to become? I pose this teleological question to myself so as to consider my responsibilities as a consumer of various media.

What owns me? What possesses me to login to Facebook several times daily; to follow my friends on Twitter, Tumblr, Blogger; to read the Seattle Times and the Onion; to turn the radio dial to NPR, or community public radio, or (in my weaker moments?) to Movin’ 92.5 to fill my earholes with a litany of pop hits from the 80’s, 90’s, and 00’s? What motivates me to go to the independent coffee shop over the Starbucks, to inhale several hours of reality television weekly as well as read scholarly texts for school, to walk through the transient-filled city park on my way to work … why do I choose to walk to work in the first place?

I am surrounded by images and messages purporting consumerist values—sometimes quite explicitly—which in essence demand I cultivate “an ethics of seeing,” as literary theorist Susan Sontag has written. As a viewer of media, a consumer of a wide range of texts such as film, architecture, clothing, ideas, etc., it is pertinent that I attempt to articulate my consumer morals. Here comes the million dollar word: discernment. The Jesuit Michael Paul Gallagher suggests that “discernment specializes in unmasking illusion and in offering skills for a deeper wisdom of judging reality.” Exploring my consumer morals by developing an ethics of viewing things as they really are bids me to peel back the layers of misinformation and to critically imbibe communicated texts. This necessarily entails deciding between what is worthwhile and what is more worthwhile in regards to the music I listen to, the news I seek out, and the concepts I integrate into my imagination. I expect that practicing “responsible consumerism” will nudge me towards finding greater satisfaction in the items I do choose to view, as well as give me better reason to abstain from blindly eating up the messages the Internet, newspapers, and buildings in my neighborhood feed me.




What does the ethical viewer look like? Well, I’m not sure. However, this Lenten season, I am abstaining from all aforementioned social networks (I even refrained from tweeting about this “digicleanse” on my Twitter account). This is in addition of course to taking up habits of betterment, such as meditation and almsgiving. This is also in addition to abstaining from the Lenten “usuals,” meaning fasting from meat on Ash Wednesday and Fridays. By abstaining from Facebook and Twitter, I hope to more clearly see the role of these social networks in my life and to critically examine what ethical questions might arise. We humans live in a symbolic world shaped by the images and media values we take in, whether these are intentional feasts or publicly force-fed to us. I want to creatively challenge consumerist values by critically interpreting the media through which I view the world, myself and others. If using Facebook is a practice through which individuals (including myself) and communities make meaning of the world, then my Facebook fast has spiritual implications. What is my experience of Facebook as either a participant or a conscientious abstainer? I guess I’ll chew on this.



RESOURCES:

See the works cited in my first blog entry. Also:

Landis Barnhill, David. “Good Work: An Engaged Buddhist Response to the Dilemmas of Consumerism” from Buddhist-Christian Studies, Vol. 24 (2004), pp. 55-63.

Nash, Jo. “Mutant Spiritualities in a Secular Age: The 'Fasting Body' and the Hunger for Pure Immanence” from the Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Fall, 2006), pp. 310-327.

Third Station

Jesus Falls

Every country lives its own "exodus"; today El Salvador is living its own exodus. Today we are passing to our liberation through a desert strewn with bodies and where anguish and pain are devastating us. Many suffer the temptation of those who walked with Moses and wanted to turn back and did not work together. It is the same old story. God, however, wants to save the people by making a new history....

Second Station

Jesus is Betrayed by Judas

Each week I go about the country listening to the cries of the people, their pain from so much crime, and the ignominy of so much violence. Each week I ask the Lord to give me the right words to console, to denounce, to call for repentance. And even though I may be a voice crying in the desert, I know that the church is making the effort to fulfill its mission....

On Having Mis-Identified a Wild Flower

A thrush, because I'd been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only.

Richard Wilbur

New and Collected Poems

(San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988)

Via Crucis

Walking the way of the cross (Via Crucis) is traditionally a Catholic devotional exercise that commemorates the passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Embraced now by Christians of all denominations, the stations of the cross invite us to enter into the reality of Christ's life, death and resurrection, inspiring us to live kinder, different and more peaceful lives. Also called the way of sorrow (Via Dolorosa), the stations of the cross lead us on a spiritual pilgrimage of prayer during Lent.

The images I have chosen to include here hang in the chapel at the University of Central America, a Jesuit college in San Salvador, El Salvador. I first encountered these when I visited the chapel with my father in the summer of 2002. The university is the cite of the assassinations of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter on November 16, 1989 during the country's civil war. It has since been discovered that those responsible for for the massacre were trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) in Ft. Benning, GA. As an undergraduate at Boston College I attended the annual protest at Ft. Benning twice. The protest is a powerful, moving experience of both solidarity with the victims of the school's graduates as well as an acknowledgment of the U.S.'s violent role in Latin America. The graphic images portray the stations of the cross and are accompanied by text from the sermon Archbishop Oscar Romero gave the weekend before he was assassinated, in March 1980.

FIRST STATION: Jesus is Condemned to Death

Let no one be offended because we use the divine words read at our Mass to shed light on the social, political and economic situation of our people. Not to do so would be un-Christian. Christ desires to unite himself with humanity, so that the light he brings from God might become life for nations and individuals. I know many are shocked by this preaching and want to accuse us of forsaking the gospel for politics. But I reject this accusation.

RESOURCES:

Megan McKenna, The New Stations of the Cross: The Way of the Cross According to Scripture (USA: Image, 2003)

Remember, Man

Genesis 3:19 Meménto, homo, quia pulvis es, et in púlverem revertéris

Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.

We make no response to these words; we simply return to our pews.

Statement of Intent

This project begins as an adventure, a challenge I have taken up as millions of Christians worldwide begin to observe the season of Lent. Lent is Latin for “spring,” as in the season in which life sprouts, blossoms, hatches, emerges forth. However, most Americans—Christians and non-Christians alike—are more familiar with the idea that Lent is a time for abstaining. No eating meat on Fridays, give up chocolate or alcohol or swearing, sit and think about what you’ve done. That may sound harsh, but I have to wonder if it’s really so unlike “spring cleaning,” perhaps on a spiritual scale? A yearly organizing of the spiritual house, what stays and what is give-away, what needs to be deep-cleaned or replaced, brought out or put away. Fasting does not quite connote the same sense of betterment that spring cleaning might. But fasting is certainly not unique to Christianity—in Islam the month of Ramadan is devoted to fasting, and Hollywood, Oprah, and the Cosmo Girl all recently embraced the Acai Berry detox diet. I once read that fasting is about giving up something you love (sweets, for example) for something you love more (translate as “God”). Spiritually speaking, this makes sense—every time I refrain from eating meat on Friday, I am subtly reminded that this is because it is Lent, which is God’s time. On the other hand, fasting literally means not consuming, and I am enraptured with the spiritual implications of this.

In this space I seek to engage several questions raised by not consuming during Lent. What connections can be made between Lenten fasting and me as an American consumer? What do I consume? What might abstinence mean spiritually? How does consuming and/or fasting shape my spirituality? My reflections will be primarily based on my own experience as a …
twenty-six year old
Caucasian
Roman Catholic
American
woman
heterosexual
non-handicapped person
upper-middle class lady
current resident of the Pacific Northwest
graduate student.
(Mouthful). I will also be digesting several resources I have consumed for this project, mainly within the area of religion and the media. These will be added as “resources” throughout. Finally, I have included below a glossary of terms which includes a couple general definitions of the key words I will be using. This is in part so I will not be caught up in semantics, attempting to be clear about what I do and do not mean with each entry, wasting breath, screen space, straining further your eyes; but also this is because I find the general definitions best serve my purpose of exploration—I have no interest in using this blog as a soap box to preach my personal conclusions as universal truths. Rather, I seek to explore my own agency of choice as a consumer of media. I choose to read NYTimes.com, I do not choose the stories featured or the images highlighted ... so, what do I choose to ingest and act upon? What does this mean for my relationship with myself, with others, with God?

My hope is that these entries provoke thought, invite meditation, and honor both my own experience and the Divine Mystery …

GLOSSARY OF TERMS:

“media”: the actual or principal means of mass communication, such as the newspaper, the radio and the television. (Jolyon Mitchell)

“popular culture”: those commercially-produced items specifically associated with leisure, the mass media, and lifestyle choices that people consume. (Lynn Schofield Clark)

“spirituality”: relationship with self, others, God, especially regarding making meaning of the human experience.

RESOURCES:

Jolyon Mitchell, ed. Media Violence and Christian Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Jolyon Mitchell and S. Brent Plate, editors, The Religion and Film Reader (New York: Routeledge, 2007)

Gordon Lynch, ed. Between Sacred and Profane: Researching Religion and Popular Culture (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007)