A Missing Generation in Orthodox Christian America - Unarmed in the World

I'm really struggling with this post and I'm not quite sure how to proceed except to just say what I know to be true and what I experienced.  

I entered college as a naive child and unarmed to face the American college experience.  While I "identified"as an Orthodox Christian, I had very little knowledge as to what that even meant.  Other than a comical encounter with a well-meaning member of Campus Crusade for Christ, and one trip to a local Orthodox Church for Pascha my sophomore year (I showed up late and was there for maybe 15 minutes), that was pretty much it for God in college.    

Without going into the details of my four years, it should suffice to say that I left college deeply wounded.  I made the same choices as many other college kids but for some reason, I seemed to have come up much much worse for the wear than everyone else.  My relationship with my parents was dysfunctional at that point.  My father was trying to make a go of a new business venture and there were so many stressors involved with that.  My mother had her own struggles that interfered with us having a close relationship for many years, so there was no trusting relationship that so many of my other friends seemed to have with their mothers. Nor did I have any older siblings or family members or trusted adults that could help.  I really had not a single person in whom to turn.  My close friends did not understand and their advice was "you shouldn't feel that way." I know they were only trying to be helpful and we all existed on the same plane of maturity, but that common phrase didn't help at all .  Sadly, the end result of all of this was extreme anxiety and feelings of abandonment and isolation.  

I kept trucking along though.  I moved to the big city and got myself busy.  And when I wasn't busy, I depended on music and TV to drown out those incessant thoughts that told me how unworthy of a human being I was. I could not bear silence because those painful memories would rush back to attack. And although I still remained nonreligious, I was in a panicked state that God was now looking for the opportunity to throw me into hell.  Paranoia at its finest.  Thankfully, I was never suicidal although I fully understand how many people could end up in that place. The paralyzing fear of divine judgement from a vengeful and unforgiving deity was so deeply ingrained in me that it wouldn't allow for such thoughts. I did NOT want to die. 

In this distressing spiritual and psychological state, I continued to push onward.  I married and had a child who was brought into the Church because that's what you are supposed to do. I worked full-time until we moved to a place that would allow me to stay at home to raise a family. However, after the initial busyness of the move was over, the thoughts returned and churned over and over and over.  Fear continued to rule my life.  A few months after moving into our new home, I had a difficult and scary miscarriage, and then almost four months later, 9/11. September 11, 2001...the day that forced every human to confront their mortality.  The very thing I had been avoiding for the past ten years.

 

      

    

Committing American Cultural Blasphemy - Turning Off The TV



Can be purchased here at Amazon.


A scandalous thought for the last post of the month.  Turning off the TV forever. 

I have just finished Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander which presents this radical idea, and I gotta tell you, it's one of the greatest books I have read in a long time. I have long believed that television is one of the key culprits in the demise of humanity and this book confirmed these beliefs and then some.  Television distorts reality, screws around with your brain and can quite easily become a means of thought control.  Scary stuff.

Here's a brief but very interesting synopsis of the conclusions found here.  The link will take you to the Orthodox Christian Information Center, but the book itself is non-religious and written by a man born into the Jewish faith.

In my own personal musings I often wondered if people's unhappiness and general discontent with their daily lives was based on their comparisons on what television would have them believe a "happy" life really is.  Real life is mundane, television life is not.  It cannot be or you wouldn't watch.  The sole job of advertisers is to sell you products, to make you believe that what you don't possess is the real reason you are unhappy. And, for whatever reason, we believe it.  We have created a nightmare of a society based on consumerism and the constant arousal of a flickering television that jumps from one scene to the next creating what Mander calls "Artificial Unusualness".  It's madness!  Sheer absurdity!   It is impossible to emulate the life advertisers and television programmers present to us as reality.  I personally know of marriages that have fallen apart because either one or both spouses lived in this fantasy world and held insane expectations of what their lives "should be" which was never based on reality.  Like I said, life is mundane, it does not move at the speed of television.  We go through long periods of routine, something that television will not portray.  I believe that routine is not bad, but actually ideal.  If I am not focusing on material acquisitions or whether or not "my needs" are being met at every waking moment I can focus on other people, which surprise, surprise, is one of the primary messages of the Gospel of Christ.  Sounds like television may be a type of Antichrist.  Food for thought for sure.    

So, as we are rapidly approaching Great Lent in the Orthodox Christian Church (one week from today to be exact!), maybe a 7 week kibosh on television watching is in order. Do you think you could do it?  Or at least cut back?  I know I will.  I think I may have mentioned it before in another post, but I would rather live in reality than delusion. It should be obvious that television is a source of delusion that implants false ideas that we passively accept whether we realize it or not.

Read the book. Do it for yourself, your children, for the sake of the human race. 

Wow, that was one hell of a rant...see you in March!