"We live in a culture hypnotized by death, not a culture awed and mystified by life: a culture that holds death, not to be a comma, but a period; not to be a boundary but the end--THE END--the everlasting, eternal end.
H. Richard Niebuhr is right when he says: This is "the great overarching myth ...the almost unconquerable picture in the mind"--the mind that reaches into us all, that we all share with our culture to some degree: in the "past forgotten, dead generations." And there is an "image of myself" and all society "coming to that future when there is no more future." Niebuhr calls this, in all its forms, our "mythology of death."
Because we have been overwhelmed by the myth of death; because our culture holds death to be THE END, the everlasting, eternal end, we cannot, many of us, sing, tenderly and vulnerably with tears streaming down our faces about the everlasting arms; we cannot sing "leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms"; we cannot sing with Martin Luther King, Jr., "Precious Lord, take my hand"; we cannot sing with the Black churches..."This is my story, This is my song..."
And so the church must become the skeptic--we must become the skeptics-- skeptical of the powerful myths of our day which often are at the bottom of both our beer commercials and our methods of literary criticism, our politics and our very views of human well being.
Segregating life and death--and living in a culture that holds to the myth of death as the last word--we segregate joy and sorrow. And we segregate them desperately... trying to keep the vision of nothingness out of our days and ways; trying to keep sorrow out of our joy.
Coleman B. Brown
Question: could this impending war with Iraq, at least in part, be one of many ways of trying to keep sorrow and nothingness out of our days, out of our joy? Read Chris Hedge's War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning. I am not against self-defense, but war as the ultimate distraction and idol.
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