Dealing in Death

If you've been reading this blog for a little while, you've probably discovered that I enjoy over-analyzing some of the more obscure, mostly irrelevant things in everyday life.  For the most part, I like to think that I've gotten a pretty good handle on a lot of it: the fact that nobody else bothers to analyze this stuff notwithstanding, I've come to view myself as pretty damn perceptive.  Two things that I don't relate to very well, though - no matter how well I try - are marketing schemes and funeral homes.  My feelings toward marketing schemes are something of a disillusionment, mostly because they're so commonly intended to sucker people into buying things they don't need.  The fact that I know perfectly friendly people in the funeral business dictates that my attitude towards this beast is slightly more amiable; however, I simply can't bring myself to fully understand an establishment that profits off of people dying.  Needless to say, when these two entities come together - most commonly as funeral home marketing schemes - I'm totally thrown for a loop.

Let me explain.  Before you start worrying for my sanity, rest assured that this isn't a dilemma that I randomly dreamed up during this morning's sermon (out of the possibility that Dave Williams is reading this, I'd like to emphasize that it was tres good).  It actually emerged right when I got home from church, upon my decision to open an unaddressed piece of admail placed in my mailbox by a local funeral home, that will remain unnamed lest my ass gets sued for libel.  I'm not sure what initially inclined me to open it; what I do know, is that the content elicited a pretty mixed bag of emotions, ranging from humour to shock.  As a taste, check out the introductory paragraph of the letter:

Dear Family,

This is your opportunity to recieve a FREE FUNERAL COST ESTIMATE.  You can also receive a FREE Planning Ahead Brochure, filled with valuable information on planning ahead.  Simply mark your answers below and return the completed questionnaire in the attached postage-paid envelope.  It's easy and there's no obligation!

NO COST - NO OBLIGATION

Am I the only one that feels as if this represents a compilation of much that is seriously screwed up about our society?  On a trivial, personal level, this letter had the callous effect of tainting my otherwise sunny, happy, content day, by reminding me that I'd eventually have to plan a funeral for myself or my loved ones.  Whoopee!  Slightly more nauseating is the fact that the following portion of the letter was a questionnaire format, in which the "future client" is prompted to anticipate their future preference for a wood or steel casket, much like an airline passenger would be asked to choose between the vegetarian blog of unintelligible matter and it's meat equivalent.  The utilization of such marketing standards as "no cost - no obligation" - in bold and caps, to boot - also just doesn't seem quite right to me.  Call me crazy.

I was especially struck by the concluding paragraph of the piece, which informed the reader of the fact the funeral home had the gall to make the advertised product a "limited time offer."  Are these guys serious?  Is it meant to be a joke, something along the lines of "your time is limited, and so is this offer"?  I also found it pretty amusing that at the end of the letter, the author provides a check-box beside a sentence reading "Please see that I also receive a FREE Planning Ahead Brochure".  Couldn't they have just said something along the lines of "Please ensure that I receive another depressing reminder of my impending death"?  The ridiculousness of this content has convinced me that these guys are either failed stand-up comedians who got booed off the stage one too many times for making their audiences feel like crap, or zombies.  One of the two.

I realize that if I was truly writing in the analytical tradition of my last few posts, I'd try to draw some sort of absurd sociological/theological/philosophical conclusion from this stuff.  After considering this course of action for about five seconds, though, I've decided that it would be mostly ridiculous, considering I just concluded what could be described as a glorified book review of a funeral parlour pamphlet.  I may not be headed for a six-foot deep hole anytime soon, but I won't rule out the nuthouse...

A categorical cry for help

For those of you who haven't noticed, this blog is a bit of a hodgepodge.  When I actually make the effort to post multiple times every couple weeks, the range of topics addressed becomes quite diverse, to say the least.  The first absurd metaphor that comes to mind is a typical food plate at an after-service church pot luck: it's hard to make out what is what, and when your taste buds are finally getting accustomed to the vegetarian chili, that little bit of jello dessert that snuck it's way onto the fork throws you right back off again.  

With this in mind, I've flirted with the idea of categorizing my posts.  Practically speaking, it makes sense, both for myself and others: whether one of my readers wants to skip to a certain topic because he thinks I suck at everything else, or I want to track down something I wrote in the past (I think it's all good), a classification system of sorts would come in handy.  It seems as if my most avid blogging buddies - all of whom are far more well versed in the trade than myself - have elected to categorize; the pragmatist in me advises me to follow their example.

Logical sensibilities aside, however, I can't help but feel a type of aversion to the idea.  Perhaps I'm reading a bit too far into it (not a far-fetched possibility, by any measure), but it seems that by attaching a label to something, I'm creating a condition where all of the preconceptions and stereotypes associated with that label could taint my post.  Not that this is necessarily a bad thing - personally speaking, if I didn't regularly group ideas together, my mind would be as confounded and disoriented as a Lewis Carroll novel.  One of the things I value the most about this space, though, is that it's a place where disciplines, topics, themes - whatever you want to call them - can intertwine and relate to one another.  Whereas Marxist economics and evangelical theology might be considered strange bedfellows in many conventional forums, my blog gives me the unique chance to throw them in a room together, and see what happens.  

As I write this, I'm deprecating myself for sounding conceited.  Who am I to think that I'm in a special position to draw these types associations in my humble blog, while critiquing well-aged classifications in the process?  Perhaps categorization would be a needed shot to my ego, a wake-up call to the limits of "thinking big" and the merits of dedicating oneself to a focused topic.  

If you haven't figured it out already, this is more of an call for opinions than anything else.  To those of you who do keep a blog: why or why not do you categorize your posts?  If you do, do you find it limits the perspective they offer?  There may be people who don't read a blog, but have a pretty good idea how they'd structure it if they did; my menial appeal extends to you also.

A work in progress?

I spent last weekend with my good friends Jon and Steffen at the latter's cottage in Kincardine.  To me, it was a unique setting, where one wakes up to the crashing waves of Lake Huron while also taking in a subtle whiff of fertilizer from nearby farms.  An offering to the senses quite alien to the more typical cottage serenity of my native Haliburton Highlands, but very pleasant in its own way.

Unorthodox locale aside, the cottage itself was pretty typical.  Cedar plank walls decorated with cheery folk art, eclectic, character-filled furniture, and, of course, a fireplace.  Airtight wood stove, to be exact, but that's beside the point.  It seems to me that the fireplace is the focal point of any self respecting cottage or cabin, largely due to the activities that typically take place around it: hot chocolate drinking, lively conversations, and awkward attempts by overconfident urbanite males to keep the blaze going with butane and birchbark, to mention a few.  A slightly more subtle, but equally fabled, pastime is to sit and watch the flames.  Long convinced as a child that this was an affinity reserved for octogenarians in La-Z-Boys, I've only recently begun to appreciate it's appeal myself.  There's something mysteriously calming about watching fire - a normally hostile element, but in this case tamed by membranes of brick and metal - eat away at hapless pieces of dead organic matter.  I can't quite put my finger on it, but the fact that it's an interest shared by myself and grandfathers the world over implies some sort of intrinsic appeal.

As I sat gazing at the modest little blaze in the Pentelow cottage's living room, it occurred to me that as well as being rather boring and odd, this activity was also characterized by it's blatant uselessness.  From a purely practical standpoint, any more than the occasional glance to make sure the fire didn't out - thus exposing us to the rather impractical realities of cold and sickness - really didn't serve any tangible purpose at all.  Aside from inciting a fleeting state of relaxation, my act of watching the flames was wholly antisocial, unproductive and materially inconsequential.  I'll admit, the fact that I was in the middle of a typical weekend of R&R didn't prevent this realization from being a bit disheartening.

Likely, my unease was largely due to the emphasis I put on the idea of "progress" in my life.  I often feel as if the primary goal of my existence is to increase my knowledge, advance my credentials, and expand my influence; when these pursuits begin to feel narcissistic, I confidently reassure myself that they're requisite to my being able to help the maximum number of people possible in the world.  The constant need for improvement on my current state at any given time, it seems, dominates my very identity.

Daunting as this conditions sounds, I hardly suspect I'm alone - the need for progress, it seems to me, manifests itself in everyday life everywhere in the world.  My mind turns back to the Laotian banknotes I carried throughout my SE Asia travels, and their depiction of bridges, power plants, and factory farms - all symbols of the technological modernization human societies strove after throughout the 20th century.  Closer to home, politicians speak of "progress" being made towards states of gender equality and universal human rights; to them, we're set on a linear track, with the sole gear being full speed ahead.  The motives that drive these mindsets are often commendable; however, their propagators all-too-often ignore lessons learned from the past, as well as neglect to consider the opinions of those who are perpetually overlooked in our current age.

Even religion, it seems, isn't immune to the influence of the culture of progress.  Whereas one might expect followers of Christ, for example, to be inclined towards stillness and introspection, it seems as if they're "on the move" as much as anyone else.  I've observed this to be evident in their everyday lives: whether they're fine-tuning the wealth-creation potential their stock portfolios, or ensuring their family's continual financial "security", Christians seem just as concerned with "betterment" as anyone else.  The trend is also marked in Christian theological and philosophical thought: an example can be found in C.S. Lewis' influential Mere Christianity, where the author makes the distinction between the "old days" of theology, when it was "possible to get on with a very few simple ideas about God," and today, when a great deal more discretion must be made between good and bad ideas.  According to Lewis, "to believe in the popular religion of modern England is retrogression - like believing the earth is flat (Lewis, 155).  Although I'm not in the position to oppose his judgement of the "religion of modern England", I do question his apparent bias towards modern ideas.  In a recent work, philosopher/theologian James K. A. Smith highlighted the danger this type of "temporal hubris" poses to the development of a healthy Christian worldview (Smith, 135).  

In addition to endangering the role the ancients have to play in our everyday lives, I get the feeling this hegemony of progress hampers our ability to live a healthy degree of our lives in the present.  Another post for another time - suffice it to say, I'm increasingly convinced many of us move through our lives obsessed with the future, without enough focus on our personal past or future.  Stay tuned for a good laugh, as I try to unpack yet another topic way out of my ballpark :)

In summary, progress is ubiquitous.  I'd be a fool to lambaste it as general thing; on a basic level, after all, my continuing existence relies on a number of basic biological progressions. Socio-politically, progress is also very real, and, in many ways, good - one of the most admirable applications of the study of history, after all, is it's use to ensure we don't repeat mistakes of the past.  All too often, though, it seems that we adhere to a type of progress-regression dichotomy, in which our minds place activities within one of these two categories.  As hard as I try, I can't find a  place for staring into the fire in either of those categories, leading me to suspect there's something in between.

Semi-obsessed with semicolons

I was just reading my last blog post, and realized how much I over-used semicolons.  Partly due, undoubtedly, to the fact I started writing it at about 12:00AM.  More so, I'd say, to my unwillingness to finish a thought when it duly should be put to rest.  God help my future spouse, if this is any reflection of my communication skills in general.

I'll leave it up to my grammarian friends (all of whom, presumably, are still in the closet) to draw correlations between my use of certain types of punctuation and my life as a whole.  Take this post, in all it's brevity, as a mere admission of guilt;  I'll try my hardest to repent.

The City of Joy

A couple weeks ago, I promised an imminent follow-up post to my initial thoughts on discovering joy.  Those of you who've been following my ramblings for a while know that when I predict a publication "tomorrow," reality dictates that it will actually be a couple of weeks in the making; with this in mind, hopefully you're not disappointed.  Fittingly enough, I just concluded a conversation with my housemate Janine on the topic of perfectionism, in which I described my tendency to procrastinate in blogging as characteristic of that tendency in my life. I'm sure I'll address this in a post in near future (read: sometime before Afghanistan becomes a fully-functioning democracy).

For those of you with poor long-term memories: in an entry in late March, I described my recent attempts to gain insight into the anatomy of joy using literature.  Frankly, it's turned out to be an absolute disaster - if anything, my perusal of C.S. Lewis' Surprised by Joy only served to increase my confusion on the topic.  If utter failure was ever the best thing that could happen to me, though, it was in this case; by neglecting to define joy in any objective manner, I feel that Lewis revealed to me the possibility that joy is a wholly subjective, or personal, thing.  I'm happy to say that Dominique LaPierre's City of Joy, while causing me to become even more intrigued about the idea of joy, didn't contribute any more to my cheeky original purpose.

City of Joy is a story set in the Indian city of Calcutta, based in the 1970's (I think; the date is never explicitly revealed).  It is primarily told from the perspectives of two people - a Polish priest called Stephan Kovalski, and urban immigrant Hasari Pal - whose lives, despite being separate at the beginning of the book, symbolically converge as the narrative unfolds.  One thing that they have in common throughout the whole book is that they live amongst the most destitute people in one of the most destitute cities in the world, with the most salient difference being that while Pal is forced by circumstance to live as a street-dweller, Kovalski is compelled by his Catholicism to voluntarily immerse himself in the lives of "the least of these".  About midway through the book, a young American doctor, Max Loeb, joins Kovalski in his occupation of the notorious slum of Anand Nagar, the name of which the book's title is some kind of translation.

If you were to glance at a set of Coles Notes for City of Joy (heaven forbid their existence), you would probably envision a place totally devoid of anything positive.  Slumlords, clogged sewers, lepers - the depiction of scathing droughts being immediately succeeded by invasive floods, along with being literal, serves as a metaphor for the cruel irony that characterizes the locale.  Indeed, at times the story was downright depressing; just as the reader is getting to know a character, for example, the latter will be stolen by the scourge of tuberculosis.  The suffering of children is perhaps the most unfathomable: those who happen to survive through the brief period of juvinility granted to them by the slum are, more often than not, thrust into an adolescence of begging and garbage picking.  Suffice it to say, an Amazon.ca "Sneak Peek" probably wouldn't increase sales in this case.

It is upon closer examination of the relationships of this book that the story becomes more compelling.  The spiritual bonds that endure in what could otherwise be described as a physical mess are the remarkable aspects of this account; indeed, I'd go so far as to say they offer a glimpse of an irrational, bizarre, supernatural thing that may best be described as joy.  What would compel Muslim and Hindu residents of the slum, one day fighting over deep-seeded disparities, to celebrate a Christian festival together the next?  Lepers, burdened by unimaginable physical incapacities and social stigmas, to drag themselves along with smiles on their faces?  A large family, living on a pittance of resources, to offer the best of their dinner to the young, healthy European priest in basketball shoes?  Some might deem it ignorance, others blame it on insanity - I'm convinced that it's something more, something given to humans by God.  

Without succumbing to the temptation of trying to define this thing - joy? - I'd like to suggest that it is most vividly eminent in people who are determined to live their lives fully, regardless of their situation.  As well as seeing this throughout City of Joy, I observed  it at times during my own travels in India: people, mired in the webs of class and caste, living lives characterized by cheerfulness and a contented demeanor.  I'm not saying this was the case with everyone, and I certainly don't believe the strangleholds of class and caste are morally right; however, there seems to be something that glows here, that isn't as readily seen in the West.  

In Becoming Human, which I also just finished reading, Jean Vanier talks of freedom as being "the acceptance of the world as it is together with the will to struggle to make the world a better place for us to live" (p. 121, see Mar 1/09 post for citation info).  At first, I considered this passage depressingly defeatist - how can I, as an outisider, accept the world of Anand Nagar as being how it is, much less the people that actually live there and experience it?  However, as I considered it more, I realized how essential the first clause is to victory in the "struggle" Vanier mentions in the second part of the sentence.  If the people of the City of Joy don't learn to live the fullest life and love with the little that they currently have, how are they going to work together to make their world an even better place?  The same logic applies, of course, to us in the West; if we don't nurture the small amount of spiritual awareness we possess in our society, how will it possibly erupt into a blazing flame?  Perhaps it is when we learn to appreciate the presence of God in our lives, no matter how small, that we truly experience joy.

Sincerely speaking, I really don't know.  Joy remains as mysterious a concept to me as it did before I naively picked up two books that just happened to have it in their titles.  The Bible is, no doubt, a good place to dig further; I've read it with this intention before, but I'll have to do some more focused study with joy in mind.  Thankfully, I feel as if I'm coming to the humble realization that joy is not to be found in crash-course format.  It looks as if I, like Father Kovalski and rickshaw-wallah Hasari, am just going to have to live it out.  

The "real world" - more of the same?

I just finished a short discussion with a couple of friends, which originated when one of them expressed concern over the effects a semester abroad program he's participating in would have on his learning experience.  I'm not sure what was exactly at the core of his anxiety, but he appeared to be skeptical of the balance between "academic" and "real-world" learning that the program would presumably try to strike.  A brief-but-succinct conversation ensued, in which those involved (the aforementioned friend, another friend, and I) contrasted academic and real-world (or experiential) learning in fairly different ways.

Not being foreign to this debate - indeed, I've tossed it around in my own mind many times, as well as with others -  I had a pretty good idea of what I thought was the most important factor to consider when discussing the nature of each learning method.  As those of you who've been following this blog for the past year (c'mon, there must be a few!) know, university, to me, has largely been a place where one gains status.  Hopefully, you've also recognized the immense respect I have for the academy's place in the world; however, in this conversation, it suffices to say that a good part of my motivation to "succeed" in my studies was that it would help me become a more respected (even exceptional) member of society.  For whatever reason, I've also been bred to believe that the academic type of learning is a prerequisite to being successful in the "real-world."  It won't come as a surprise, therefore, that I've been burdened with the misconception that success in university would necessarily precede eminence in anything that might follow in my life.

It's only quite recently that I've come to realize that I subscribe to this mentality, that success in the academy = high status and reputation.  I resent it, and believe that it's corrupted my view of what it means to live a life that's fulfilling to oneself and others.  With this in mind, for all of the positive impacts that university has had on me, it's also centrally contributed to the development of unhealthy motives within me.  I've come to view motivation as the factor that can "make or break" a student's tenure in the academy, in terms of how he uses the tenure to benefit the world around him.  For example, how is someone supposed to truly empathize with the poor and vulnerable if he maintains the pretentious conviction that his education makes him, in some way, more "refined" than them?

Considering the relative passion with which I expressed these ideas to my friends, I was surprised when they reacted the way they did: they blatantly disagreed.  Although I won't presume to know exactly what was going through their minds at the time, they seemed to be more concerned with the practical deficiencies of academic-style teaching than any possibility of the university advancing pompous mindsets.  The academy didn't seem to be teaching them to feel superior, as it did to me; rather, they harboured doubts that it was really teaching them anything at all.  Conversely, they seemed to believe that an experiential approach - talking to people instead of just reading about them - would help them better understand the issues that they initially enrolled in school to learn about.

My friends were, of course, making a very good point.  There are many realities which one can only become aware of through direct confrontation – in international development, the area of study for all three of us, this is especially true.  However, I don’t think that less academic learning and more experiential learning would have changed the attitude that I believe somewhat compromised my learning experience.  This is because I truly believe specter of ego resides just as threateningly in the “real-world” as it does in academia. 

From a linguistics standpoint, terms such as “real world” carry undertones that are just as strong as contained in words such as “academic”, “university”, or “Dr.”.  Of course, this doesn’t have to be the case: just as being a scholar wasn’t considered synonymous with being an elite in the Middle Age European universities, as it seems to be today, entering into the “real world” doesn’t necessarily mean entering adopting a "more realistic, pragmatic outlook" than one's comparably naïve academic friends.  However, I think we need to be conscious of the fact that places such as academia and the real world are just as much mindsets as geographical places, and if we’re not careful, they’ll come to define us.

I’m not sure about my two friends, but graduating from university and entering the so-called “real world” hasn’t liberated me from the temptation to be motivated by status.  Unless I continue to be conscious of my vulnerabilities, I’ll always be looking for new ways to advance, progress, and refine, no matter what occupation I find myself in.