Imagination Migration

Charlie Brown or Snoopy was right, a good book is a good friend. So I must commend my companions of late: Scripture and The Shaping of Things to Come.

I've been reading through Jeremiah, that afflicted prophet and child of God who expresses so much of what we really feel and think about God if we were reflective upon ourselves. I could follow that vein for a while but a short little chunk got my wheels going today, "Even the stork in the sky knows her appointed seasons, and the dove, the swift and the thrush observe the time of their migration. But my people do not know the requirements of the LORD" (8:7).I was imagining scenes from that great indie film Winged Migration. Those seemingly brainless but beautiful creatures know intuitively their appointed season of migrating, their time of returning. So, there is a time the people of God should migrate/return to God. We have a nickname for that: "repentance." The context of 8:7 speaks more, so I will let you have the joy of studying that.

And my ole fav, Douglas Coupland, (author of Life After God, The Shampoo Planet: Tales for an Accelerated Culture) showed up in The Shaping today. Douglas has a powerful knack of bringing melancholy and mood into his writings, especially toward the feeling that one gets when they consider the landscape within the soul of a Generation Xer. In his book, Generation X (London: Abacus, 1991), he wrote the following about the middleclass malaise:

"You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied."

The middle class is on a precarious perch betwixt two worlds: affluence and poverty. The middle class has the ability to change the world and influence both the powerful and the forgotten but comfort, pride and fear has conquered the middle class. The middle class adopts a lifestyle that is beyond their own means and struggles to find any meaning that exists beyond a lifestyle.

And so it is.