Month: September 2013
The Gospel according to Ponzi
Frederica Matthewes-Green seems to me to have been AWOL from blogging, but returns today to answer a pastor’s question “What is worship for?”
[I]in the Scriptures (and through church history) worship was intended to be worship. It was aimed at God, in adoration and supplication, not at attracting non-believers, or even at giving fellow-worshippers a good worship experience. This focus on God was the case until very recently; now our immersion in a consumer economy has led us to think of everything in terms of appealing to potential customers. We are so mentally saturated in advertising that we have come to think of ourselves and our faith as products that need to be persuasively sold.
That’s how worship gets redirected from the Lord to outsiders, who have no ability yet to understand or respect Him. The church becomes an organization that is primarily occupied with planning a billboard, because the most important goal is to capture non-believers’ attention. When someone responds to a billboard and becomes a member of the community, he discovers that he has joined an organization that — is planning a billboard. The main goal of members of a church is to attract more members to the church. It’s like Ponzi scheme.
…
[W]orshippers’ focus is not on worship, but on God. Worship is not a performance. It is not entertainment. It is not advertising. Worship is work, as the Bible-Greek word leit-ourgia, liturgy, shows; it is “the work of the people.” We undertake this work as members of a vast community, going back to those instructions to Moses thousands of years go. We are responsible to continue that worship and pass it on with all the seriousness and beauty it deserves. We offer this worship as transitory place-holders, striving to doing it as well as those before us did, and those after us will do. Our eyes are fixed on the Lord who receives our worship.
I’ve been Orthodox long enough now to realize that worship isn’t “for” anything, but the Ponzi scheme twist is new and seems quite on target.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
What we long for
Tidbits 9/16/13
Working past 65
I can’t help but notice the spate of glowing articles about people working past age 65. Both the business page (Gosh! Older workers can be very energetic and creative!) and page D-1 (“Who says you have to retire at 65?”) of our Sunday paper touted the glories of not retiring, or of retiring while continuing to work.
This continues the fine American tradition begun maybe a hundred years ago with articles like “Who says moms have to stay home with the kids?” and “Gosh! Women and children can sew garments in dim light and oppressive heat with the best of ’em!”
Kidding aside, I do truly have some issues, religious and otherwise, with the Standard American Retirement Reflex. I don’t want to retire until I know what new challenges I’ll take up (current front-runners: travel, gourmet cooking and more regular exercise). But these stories have a whiff of “making a virtue of necessity” to them. And I suspect that <synecdoche> the Chamber of Commerce</synecdoche> is smiling knowingly at this PR coup.
Be it remembered, however, that once upon a time, in a land far, far away spiritually, it was not thought that universal participation in the money-paid workforce was a thing ardently to be desired. Indeed, the “Family Wage” was the progressive desiderata for a time, and I consider it a mark of our gullibility and collective amnesia that we now pine for a “living wage” and think that life is incomplete without the goods shit we can buy if we – Whoa! What a great idea! – pool two or more living wages under one roof. Look! Kim Kardashian! Chaz Bono! American Idol! Shiny! (HT Mark Shea)
The beast feeds itself. Mrs. Jones goes to work, the first on her block to do so. Before the Jones kids have become notably delinquent, the Joneses have compiled an admirable pile of goods shit we could buy if Mrs. Tipsy would go to work, too. And then the next family down the block follows suit, and before too long, nobody feels they can survive on a single wage. And maybe they really can’t (unless the Missus aggressively gardens, cans and freezes, and what kind of middle-class family still does that?! It’s barbaric!) because the extra worker supply has driven down wages.
And retirement savings? Out of the question! What say we just keep on working? Life is meaningless without a nice paycheck anyway.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 