This brand new book by Timothy Willard and Jason Locy confronts us with realities so many of us face from day to day - the need to recognize and strip away the many cultural veneers we've applied over the years and to rediscover our personal and collective identity in God - the real me. They do so by helping readers to discern the interplay between the language of culture and the language of God and how the former often silences the latter.
The language of culture beckons us to talk a certain way, act a certain way, dress a certain way, and ultimately live a certain way. "We all speak this language as we mimic the world of celebrity, buy in to the promise of consumption, and place our trust in the hope of progress." The celebrity world tempts us to put self above all others. Through consumption we search for meaning, while the progress of technology allows us to escape the real. "Our computer screens and avatars simulate the life we want but not necessarily the life we have."
In the chapters that follow, the authors address a number of these concerns:
- The veneer of celebrity causes us to strive after culture's definition of success which elevates self. By focusing almost exclusively on self-promotion, we usually end up leveraging our relationships as a means of gaining notoriety and fame. Jesus, however, calls us to self-abandonment, to promote the `other' and to redefine success as obedience to God.
- We are a culture obsessed with consuming, and every decision we make about what to buy (we believe) makes a statement about who we are trying to become, so that consumption and identity coalesce. We believe that our purchases define us, so we end up buying what culture says will give us meaning. However, "when we focus our lives on an outward expression - consumption - seeking to produce inward meaning, we fragment ourselves." As we move away from our inner source, God, we can "survive only for a time before we perish in the dry air of consumerism."
- Technology has also become intimately connected with consumerism in that we view people as products. Facebook (yes, I have my own page) allows us to browse, not for products, but people. "Our hobbies, interests, and religious views are all relegated to what can fit into a form on a website, our relationship status reduced to the choices offered by a drop-down menu, our opinions synthesized to 140 characters" on Twitter (yes, I have one of those as well). Human beings "look like products in an online shopping cart - downloadable, browse-able, clickable, even deletable." However, this has caused us to drift away from one another and we soon realize that something is missing.
In the end, Willard and Locy call us to strip away the veneer from the inside-out, and to allow the God who created us to shape us into people that reflect his character and attributes; to be the people he made us to be. They call us to embrace a new existence, one defined and made possible by Christ and unbound by the trappings of culture. They call us to capture the language of God.
I highly recommend this book to everyone searching for meaning and clarity in a culture that has scripted a skewed definition of what it means to truly live, and who believe that there is more to life than what society promotes as `real.' The book will help you to begin the process of stripping away the veneers that culture has applied over the years and will inspire you to acquire a new sense of identity and purpose; one that allows God to define you as you were meant to be defined, and to live as you were meant to live.
Loving God and loving others.
