All of my faithful readers will notice that I've gone almost a month without having anything to say - and you know that I'm not one for being lacking in comments. (One work acquaintance recently called one of my E-mail responses to her "windy". I'll have to hold on to that one.)
The reason for my silence is pretty easy to figure out - we're fully into the arts season here, so I've been immersed in rehearsals and preparation for Sunday services. Christmas is no longer in the peripheral vision, but is now kind of like McDonald's Grimace approaching waddling slowly toward at 2 o'clock. I'm performing with two community ensembles and have a lot of musical church responsibilities as well, so I'm very much aware of the typical arts schedule and the even greater level of activity that is approaching after Thanksgiving.
In 2007, one of my resolutions was for music to "become my primary avocation". This is a goal that I can say was very much accomplished, although it took me until this year to have it happen, and it happened in a way requiring more commitment and work than if it were a simple hobby. That's what I meant to have happen, but it's already nearly what I'd classify as "semi-professional".
When you decide that you are going to be a serious amateur musician and try to do more paid gigs on the side, which is where I am with it now, you have to give up other things in your life that have taken up your time. My free time is much more scarce, which means my time has become more valuable to me - this is a difficult place to be in at the beginning of what could be an economic calamity. This is going to cost all of us and we're going to feel it - perhaps very, very painfully in a great day of reckoning.
In life's economy, we all must understand that we cannot do everything - even everything that is important. My friends are important, but I'm not able to spend nearly as much time with them. Staying on top of the news is important to me, but others are now telling me about big news that I should have heard about already. Listening to music at home and having a deep experience with it is important to me, but I hardly have time to even turn on FM radio. My online friends are important to me, but I struggle to be able to set aside time to talk to them, knowing that my online time is a huge time-sucker that I nearly can't afford to touch. Reading is important to me, but I'm often so tired that when I pick up a book or magazine, I fall asleep before I can even get started with it.
Frankly, this means that I'm less sociable, less up-to-date, less inspired, less communicative, and less knowledgeable than I was before about July or so.
This gives me a greater appreciation, in a tangential way, for those who juggle multiple commitments of career, family, relationships, and hobbies - and also a greater awareness of how our culture values many of our commitments as having a greater weight than others, even if we don't personally prioritize our commitments in the same way.
All of these competing ideas, implications, concerns, distractions, and ambiguity are always swirling in my head - but now the whole amalgamation of them is bigger as they entangle themselves together and interact with one another. As I told one friend recently, it is a lonely road, but it is also a very existentially-frightening one, as getting too caught up in it will lead your mind - your very self, into a vortex from which you cannot emerge.
I think what we're experiencing now in terms of our financial crisis is the same sort of thing - only a product of our collective efforts and thinking.
Our financial system is really a Tower of Babel - it was something designed to reach the heavens. The tower was reaching for something so grand that even trying to figure out what it is reaching for is something too mind-stretching for even our best minds to comprehend. If we as a collective can't figure out what it is we're trying to build and how it all works, one can make an argument that we very well are trying to reach God.
Flawed and limited as it is, if we talk about the old analogy of religious devotion that speaks of many paths to God leading up the mountain, starting from different places and meeting at the top, can we then say that one of the paths people take up the mountain is through economics? Do we believe that Moore's Law also applies to the economic system, so that we're going to reach some type of Age of Spiritual Money after a certain amount of time?
As a libertarian, I do believe that a truly free-market (which is only theoretical and may only be able to be theoretical) does promise some type of shimmeringly beautiful destination that we can only see in our minds, but I'm not sure humanity has the ability to carry it out - because power over other people may be much more intoxicating than the more concrete posession of money.
In the same way that all of the complexities of our personal life threaten to consume us if we let them (and I'm not altogether convinced that the "keep it simple" adage is always the right course of action), I think we're similarly staring down into an economic chasm. We're going to have to dive in sometime - because the day of recokoning, the day of judgment is coming.
Thinking about this reminds me of all of the great minds I've read about through history who have gone completely insane. Some people on the street will tell you that people let themselves go into this kind of mental illness. But I find myself wondering if this is really somehow our destiny . . .
When I listen to some of the most brilliant people I know, or read the work of some of the most brilliant people who have walked the Earth, many of them seem to me to point to a kind of Medusa-truth: a nickel-black, undulating well of mystery that is so incomprehensible, that responding to its beckoning causes you to gaze inward and subsequently fall into what we can only see from our perspective as blackness.
I wonder if those who get sucked into this well actually experience the blackness we assume they do? Or if they do come to some type of understanding of (or peace with) the truth that we have replaced with a much more comforting and comprehensible fiction?
The same busyness I occupy myself with in the quest to be a musician and a "real Christian" (as one colleague said recently) and to experience the truth that I find in those particular pursuits might be a type of truth that our world has chased after. Can we really say that it's only about money? I think it's too dismissive to say that we've created some type of greedy and rickety edifice to only wealth - to say that we are coming crashing down because of our love of money is naive preacher-talk. It is something much more significant than that we've been reaching for with our incredibly complex financial formulas and investment devices.
I know that if I look at the whole of what my life now seems to be, trying to take in all of its tasks and responsibilities, my mind becomes filled with the anxiety of comprehending the whole of what my life currently is about. Our culture is filled with this same sort of anxiety, because I don't think any one of us individuals really understands the whole of our economic system, and evening examining it is going to bring us all down.
Perhaps we all (including me) need to be, or are destined to be, brought down into the abyss. But my Christian heart (and libertarian head), says that redemption somehow awaits us on the other end of the wormhole.
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