Lenten Lessons

So here's what I know about lent:

You give up something during Easter season in order to realize something deeper about your life.

I'm embarrassed that after I celebrated it this year that I am not able to articulate it any better than that, so I sit her blogging on my second day of using facebook again not sure if I celebrated lent at all.

What's equally as disturbing is that I'm not sure that I should've kept Lent. I'm not a Catholic. When I told a Catholic friend about me kept Lent, he knowing that I am not a Catholic, said, "You're not a Catholic." And he seemed offended. But for what's it's worth, the following was my justification for keeping it, at least in my own head.

Even though I am not a Catholic, I feel that I am a part of the history of Christ that has been unfolding in the history of the church of which Catholicism and Protestantism are a part. I look at lent the same way I look at fasting. Fasting to me seems to be a really good thing because denying ourselves seems to be a really good thing. It focuses our attention. It has the ability to show us something about ourselves we might not have seen because of the habitual lifestyles we lead. A facebookless Matt is a different Matt than a facebooking Matt. And giving up facebook is a way for Matt to figure out if he really needs facebook to be a better Matt. Discipline in general seems to have more positives than negatives. A disciplined life is a happy life in my estimation, and it takes practice and discipline in order to be disciplined. Fasting is also counter-intuitive, but then so is discipline, so I think maybe happiness is counter-intuitive. But this makes sense. Think about what we would become if all we did was pursue our immediate impulses. I think our lives would suck. I think. Lent is an opportunity for us to discipline ourselves to discipline ourselves. And to continue speculating, perhaps in turn teaches us how to commune better with God, since it takes discipline to do that.
Alas, that being my justification as a protestant keeping Lent, I may not have done so as a Catholic. I suppose to some degree that's okay, but you Catholics out there are free to tear to me to shreds on this one. I'm standing in the middle of the street. I'm not moving and you're coming down the street on your two-wheeler, maybe you have a bat-pod. I'm not moving, so hit me if you like. I'm a target.
Anyway, if I haven't learned anything about Catholicism, or the significance of Lent, I have learned something by giving up facebook. And I tend to believe that my experience was spiritual.

I'm not sure yet if the distance I felt from my relationships had anything to do with facebook, but I am already starting to see the connection between my lack of facebook and my lack of feeling connected with my friends. I mean that's not a difficult connection to see. But what I wonder is if this is really sad and I'm addicted to facebook in an unhealthy way, or if I am just a human living in the technological age, but still human and need to be connected. Perhaps part of the problem is that there are not many things that I connect with people about. I like difficult things like philosophy, theology, religion, sports, and 20th century American novels, and stream of consciousness weirdness. Facebook was a way for me to wax eloquent with a witty status or something and get a response, a connection from a friend.
Perhaps this is just classic overthinking. But here's a thought that's a little more universal maybe. Is the feeling of being connected through facebook human connection, or is it superficial? If my feeling unconnected is a result of not being connected to facebook, and I begin to feel better now that I'm on facebook, shall I as a modern person question the possibility of true human connection in my lifetime? Well, maybe I better not go that far. I am married and feel extremely connected to my wife and in more ways than sexual. But the real question is; if I should conclude that my lack of connection was due to my fast from facebook, should I think twice about getting connected again? The broader question being asked, which is totally another post is; what is modern man, and should he fear his machines and technics? Are they merely giving him a different way to express his drive for human connection, or are they giving him a totally superficial experience and alienating him altogether? Or... are we alienated either way and doomed to a life of anxious desire for a connectivity we cannot completely understand or fulfill?
In the end, my lenten experience brought me know closer to understanding Lent, Catholicism, or the plight of modern man. But it did heighten my awareness of the reality of existing as a modern man and brought some of the questions that were sitting by the punch bowl, in the dark, away from the dance floor to the dance floor. And I think it was a valuable experience then, since these questions seem very urgent and relevant.

Existential Christianity

Existentialism is the doctrine that existence precedes essence. But is existentialism defining it's own essence before examining its existence? This apparent contradiction is only problematic if we locate the problem in the definition. But perhaps the problem is in the label, existentialism. The axiom; the a priori, of the ideal in question is that existence precedes essence.

When we think in terms of existence and not essence we find that existence presents problems of which essence thinking could never conceive, and therefore never solve, and our existence problems are real. However, what if they are not real? How would we know that our existential experiences are real? Surely we cannot discover their falseness by examining them according to essence, that realm which cannot conceive of existence problems in the first place? How shall it have the answer to a problem of which it cannot conceive? The philosophy of essence is an hilarious Holiday Inn commercial.

Some of you are begging for examples of an existence problem that cannot essentially be addressed. That's another post. Ha. What I find interesting is the claim that the existence precedes essence paradigm is the one under which the ancient Jews and the Jewish cult called Christianity operated; the claim that God's law was not the handing down of universal principles, but instructions concerning how His redeemed culture is to live, that is exist in a surrounding and yet unredeemed world.

That existentialism is now associated with atheism is unfortunate. I for one feel as if it has been hijacked. And when we find conservative Christians dismissing the published thoughts of more moderate Christian thinkers as the "brooding existentialism put forth as Christianity" I don't know whether to laugh or bang my head against the table. Sure, existentialism bears an atheistic form, but its main prognosticator, Soren Kierkegaard, argued for an existence paradigm in order to save Christianity from being swallowed up by a humanistic worldview. I will not fall into the trap of saying that existentialism is essentially Christian, but I think pointing out that existentialism as we know it, that is, the consistent use of an existence thought paradigm, was originally thought in relation to Christianity in order to avoid Christianity's death at the hands of the essence paradigm is noteworthy because as I have discovered at this point in my life, existence driven Christianity is what makes the most sense to me.

That folks should confuse existentialism with atheism, relativism, or the denial of any abstract truth, or the affirmation that all truth is contextual is an unfortunate misunderstanding. But that's another post too.