Our Dear Little Death Culture 5

Born to Shop.  Remember those words?  When the going gets tough the tough go shopping.  Remember these words? The mayor of New York's first advice to New Yorkers following the attacks of 9-11: Go shopping.  Remember those words.

Ah, capitalism, that relentless wheel of progress and greed that never stops grinding and never stops grinding into the dust whoever gets in its way.  How we've been sold a bill of goods.  What we buy is what we are.  We brand ourselves through our transactions, what we wear, where we live, what we drive, where we eat, where we shop, what airline we fly, how and where we vacation and it all involves spending money, buying, consuming, spending money, buying, consuming and consuming and consuming and consuming...

What created in so many of us such a vast, empty and bottomless chasm that can never be filled and nags and craves and always hounds us to fill it, be it with food, drugs, or things or experience?  And this is the new face of consumerism.  The purchased experience, often in the way people travel.  They are not quite so obsessed with accumulating stuff, since fewer people these days have enough space to live in where they can fit their consumer treasures, but there is always the purchased experience.

I am not knocking experience, especially in the form of travel.  What I am bringing into question is this whole bucket list mentality.  That it really isn't important if the experience is life changing or not.  It's treated more like a high, like a drug.  Vacation crack.  Consume, consume and consume and don't even think of offering anything in exchange except a swipe of your Visa.  Don't even think of letting that visit to a village in a Third World country so transform you that you will experience a new ethos of compassion in your own life and work at being the change that you desire to see in the world, in your own community.

There is something fundamentally broken in our culture.  It is all about me, about consuming, about filling that empty hole in my soul that only the Spirit of the Living God can fill.  But we are generally averse to any form of spirituality that demands something in exchange, like allowing our values to be transformed by the living force of love and actually reaching out in love and care and justice to our immediate neighbours and to the rest of the world around us.  Easier to settle for the cheap soporifics of yoga and Buddhist meditation and this is not a slam against Hinduism or Buddhism, but a critique of the consumerist mentality in contemporary Western culture that has totally appropriated and bastardized these honorable disciplines.

Our culture is a Death Culture for the simple reason that it is all based on self gratification, a gratification that always remains elusive because it is a God-shaped hole in our hearts we are trying to cram with stuff that doesn't fit, because God, the God who is love, who made us, can alone fit there and we constantly reject him to our own detriment and to our own spiritual death.