Church

What is the main church these days? It is the church of corporate market capitalism. In most ways it is the opposite of Christianity, if Christianity means the example and maxims of Jesus.

Bank loan managers and employers and teachers are priests, in their booths your sins are weighed. Perhaps you have sinned against the Holy Spirit by trying to secure the future. The holy spirit is a recalcitrant, unpredictable son of a...

The stores and malls offer communion with Novissimus, ("the newest thing there is") with all kinds of NEW stuff!, possibly not even touched by human hands, in an airtight plastic blister-pack. Impeccable (which means sinless). The clean, shiny, new thing is an icon.

This world-dominating church with its almighty but fluctuating buck preaches with a forked tongue. Its branch institutions preach the job ethic (the "hand yourself over" ethic. The "give up your days to capitalism" ethic)-- they try to make a silent ("self-evident") premise, a presupposition, and an assumption out of it-- that's one preachment they share with the 300 year Puritan Protestant tradition. Seek ye first the kingdom of suffering, endurance, pain, and hardship. They tell you to value your own sacrifice--be sure not to live for yourself or your talents or relationships, but first and foremost make money, and spend it on commodities, first and foremost big-ticket items that keep you at the treadmill and grindstone for decades. It's allright to paint, write, or play music but your work in these is nothing and is called "doing nothing" if not measured by and dominated by the almighty ridiculous Buck, who has forgotten his role as servant, thinks he is God.

This job (labor for sale) ethic is called the "work ethic" but it isn't a work ethic. You can work all day in your garden, or practice your oboe til you're otiose, or slog with your partner in difficult miscommunication and come up out onto deeper understanding, renovating your childhood inheritance of ideas and beliefs, creating new categories and opening new mystical territory; all this is "doing nothing" to the cynical preachers and the true believers of the market cult. And it goes without saying, of course, that you mustn't "do nothing." "Contribute," they intone. But if your contribution doesn't come under the measaure of the almighty Buck ("no gods before me"), it is excommuniqué. Pro-fanum (outside the temple). In the wild realm of the sacred! Down the garden path! Lucky you! But if it does turn on the buck, content is externalized: it doesn't matter what you do-- make cluster bombs to rip out kids' arms, hire single mothers at starvation wages, chainsaw down the old masters' paintings in the forest galleries.

This cult claims "reality" for itself, and "common sense" and "growing up" and all such sobering poop. The word "real" comes from "royal" when guess who decided what was important?

The market church preaches "self-sufficiency" while instilling, installing obedience, conformity, fear, and rote repetitive work for 12 years-- associated with books and learning-- into children. It provides no room for questions in its IQ tests, nor for creative answers. Then, when its job system collapses, it tells them to be entrepreneurs! Einstein: "The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." Original thought is not welcome in universities and schools, and the "best" students are those who are best at handing back what they are told. Doing, that is, what they are told, and paying through the nose for it!

At parties, meetings of the congregation, people ask, "what do you do?" meaning, "How do you serve Mammon, how do you get bucks?"

It's dull and boring in the church, for the most part, though the market will sell you any number and variety of counterfeits of what your soul really needs, which is vital participation, aliveness, social position in the hearts of your friends and loved ones rather than a position in the scales of materialist "prestige" or the envy/resentment of your neighbours. You have no intimacy at the workplace, but pornography is more accessible and more explicit. You have no power at work but for several years' investment of obedience you can have some toys, and for a large chunk of your life you can have the house and car, symbols of "ownership" where on weekends you presumably can live without obeying masters. You own some objects but you do not own your days. Time grows short!

Perhaps you have symptoms--of course you do. And highly paid men in white coats will sell you a big Latin name, so that you can be sure your symptoms have nothing to do with your soul that you put on hold so long ago, to try to please Mom 'n Daddo. And the dox will give you designer chemicals to kill that annoying cry in your body. We live in a societal cult of ownership, but who wants to own their own symptoms?

You have kept up appearances-- at least your workmates, even your friends don't seem to know of what goes on behind closed doors in your house, or behind your designer glasses and crisp suit, or behind your car's polish, or your fine lawn, or your lousy goddamn lawn fulla weeds.

You are not pleased with your relationship with your sister(s) or brother(s) and definitely not with Mom 'n Pop, though perhaps you don't spread your unhappiness-- what might people think?

Who appreciates you? They're all selfish, none of them know how you struggle. And look at the TV people, they are cool, well-dressed, and full of humor and the cars in the TV ads are perfect, polished, and drive on mystical deserted country roads past farmerless productive fields: Arcadia!

Face it: there is evidence of luxury and graciousness and power and prestige all around you, and you can't get it inside you to come out in your sweat and make you feel good about yourself. What the hell is the problem?

Perhaps you go for therapy. The therapist is a well-paid professional, and seems to honor your feelings-- she is a safety deposit box for your unhappiness the rest of the world doesn't see. So you can bring it to her over a week for $80 or $100 and have some relief-- your pain is seen and you have paid for her confidentiality.

The sunset, the Titanic of "neoliberal" capitalism will glow even brighter. Pornography will be so explicit, it will show you guts and bones...

The dominant church is sinking--it is a ship-- the Titanic. It's a lurching church. While the church lurches, the bird perches: the holy spirit, and Sophia, wisdom, who plays over the whole earth. It, the church, "is" bright with expensive artificial light, it is hermetically interior and proud of it-- like a mall, it sweeps its poor and street folk out of sight if it can. It swells with its own "suckcess" measured in its own terms. If you go to hunt for the captain you will find it isn't Bill Gates- he's just a player, the star player just now. No, seek out the captain in his hidden room, a lot like the central chamber of the palace of Oz- you'll see a 300 year old corpse at the helm, naked, frozen in rigor mortis: the emperor with no clothes, or self. The peremptory poor emperor in the furor of his perorations-- errors.