Two Facets of Today’s Counterculture

It was incredible.

While I was crossing the street to the central library on campus this afternoon, I overheard the cry of a frustrated girl: “You can just do it with your phone now… Technology is taking over!”

From the spoken word poem “Look Up” to Instagram accounts dedicated solely to documenting large groups of people on their phones, there is an obvious and overarching attitude in millennial culture that is pushing back against technology’s ubiquity. Young people are so addicted to their phones that there is now a market for fake, plastic phones, intended to ween us out of our phone-cradling habits. When I go out to eat with friends, there has been more than one occasion where someone will propose the idea that everyone put their mobile devices in the middle of the table, stacked one upon the other, not to be touched until the end of the meal. The first one to violate this rule has the penalty of paying for everyone else’s dinner (Try this out; trust me, on a college budget this is great negative reinforcement). The conversation that follows doesn’t suffer from constant interruption from the dozens of people that could be texting or calling us, and we actually get to enjoy leisure time at the table.

In reflecting upon what may be the cause of this phenomenon, I want to highlight another emerging cultural attitude that I have noticed gaining popularity: aversion to the hookup culture. I could write pages upon pages about the rise of the latter, but will limit my words to a cursory summary. First, on technology.

The contrast could best be set up as one between technological connectedness and physical intimacy. If you have not seen this video by Shimi Cohen, watch it now. The central thesis is that friendships arranged and overseen by social media allow us to “image-crop” ourselves in order to coat the rough edges of our personality with a shiny and societally affirmed veneer. Vulnerability and authenticity fall out, and intimacy is replaced with self-produced interactions. Note well the time it takes to write the  instant message or text you are going to send to someone you ‘like’: dominated by backspacing, curtailing, editing, and hesitancy, we are uncertain how we can most make this ‘other’ want us. But what is the point of getting another person to esteem a fake version of ourselves? If we are advertising via Facebook, Twitter, Insta, or LinkedIn the ideal versions of ourselves, insecurity with our actual selves is bound to result–in fact it may be the origin and cause of such acts!

What we crave nowadays in our tech-indulged culture is true intimacy, true vulnerability, reciprocity of love (when love is returned, not merely taken), and someone who will listen. All of the aforementioned links have as their thesis the following message: Put down the technology and pick up a conversation. Now for the second countercultural position: our revolt against the hookup culture.

This is a phenomenon not exclusive to Love and Fidelity Networks or Anscombe Societies across the country, but has made its way into music, buzzfeed lists, and movies. This Thought Catalog piece on how youngsters date nowadays stayed with me for a long time. It was around 3am when I first read it (winter break shenanigans are to blame), and I found it to be a monumental and valid indictment of my generations’ understanding of dating, sexuality, and love in general.

What it revealed to me (which should have been self-evident), is that we are dissatisfied by one-night-stands. Tinder is spoken of by the author as a salve, a stall, a preventive measure that does not answer the root of the problem. The twin Hollywood hits “Friends with Benefits” and “No Strings Attached” championed the ideal of ‘traditional’ relationships. Why were they so successful? Because Ashton Kutcher is hilarious? Because Mila Kunis is adorable? Surely both are true, but underneath lies the fact that it is our human nature to desire authentic love.

Call me a radical traditionalist, but I believe we want more than just erotic love for a short time! Ultimately our desires aim at agape love for an entire lifetime; we crave a love that wills the good of the other in sickness and in health, in good time and in… you know the rest of the formula. While the fleeting pleasures of a hook-up may satisfy temporarily, ultimately they leave us in despair in the morning, waiting to find the next potential partner in order to keep that relational desire at bay for one more night.

So, random girl on campus, I hope your call to arms is realized. I hope that technology does not take over, and I think that the massive pushback against it is an indicator that it will not. I also marvel at the movement against sexual promiscuity that is currently growing in the hearts of young people. Hopefully, we will not be so lazy as to succumb to apathy and simply allow our culture to be molded by “invisible and inevitable forces”. The adage goes: be a thermostat, not a thermometer. Take a tech-Sabbath. If you’re a guy, ask a girl on a real date (I should take my own advice, gee dang). Human nature has not changed much over the years, and our innate social desires will always be present. A look in the eye carries more weight than a like on Facebook. Permanent vows within a sacrament mean more than a picture of you and a person of the opposite gender together. These are just two examples–technology and romance–where I see a counter-culture growing, and I can only see good come out of them.

Fulfillment vs. Negation; On the paradoxes of Christianity.

Thou shalt not have sex before marriage. Thou shalt not drink any alcohol. Thou shalt not… 

The list goes on. Eating meat on Fridays during Lent, missing service on just one Sunday, no contraception or birth control. In all areas of life, Christianity and the call of a disciple are severely constraining. It puts limits on your free-will, seems to run counter to your appetites, and tells you to deny your temptations.

Why would anyone desire this? A pesky set of dogmatic rules… What is attractive about this? Why wouldn’t I, a great and self-sufficient ego, choose for myself a life lived for myself and ruled by myself for ends prescribed by myself? I mean that is what college (and life after, save for that pesky thing called work) is about right? The unending satisfaction of all desires; unlimited meal plans, 24-hr drinking binges, spring-break delirium, and so on and so forth.

If there is the opportunity for such unfettered, unbound, and gratuitous fulfillment at our fingertips, if we live in a world so materially rich such that I could have food, water, consumer goods, entertainment, and potential mates delivered to my doorstep all using my smartphone (Jimmy Johns, Amazon, Netflix, Tinder), if all of that is possible, why would I be a Christian?

The usual story goes like this: “Christianity negates your desire.” Pastors tell us to kill our sexual passions–to gouge the proverbial eye out, not only to those with same-sex attraction but also those who are heterosexual. No sex before marriage, no birth control in marriage, and none of that weird kinky stuff either. We cannot overindulge on food, or on sleep, or on money, lest we fall to the vices of gluttony, sloth, and avarice. Basically, kill your desires, before God damns you for having them.

My friends, what a backwards view. As I was cleaning dishes today (an act during which many good ideas somehow emerge), a thought dawned on me. The aforementioned set of beliefs is more akin to Buddhism than to Christianity. Allow me to explain. If the cause of our suffering is grounded in unmet desires, as Buddha teaches, then the way to Nirvana is to rid yourself of desire. Only in the absence of desire can one find peace, bliss, and satisfaction.

Well let’s take a look at a favorite story of mine in order to see some contrast. There are two characters, a woman and a man. It is a hot summer’s day, the woman sits near a well, and a man strolls by to ask her for a cool drink. She, in confusion, replies: How can you ask me for a drink?

He answers: “If you knew… who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

**(Well that’s confusing… the heck is “living water?”)

She goes on and asks: “Sir, you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water?” 

**(I want to know the same thing! If any of you guys have found ‘living water’, alert the CDC immediately and let’s get this under quarantine!)

Continuing on, the man answers: “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

At this point you’re probably with me, asking: what is the man talking about? I thought this story was going to be a love story, now it’s taken a turn out of left field and suddenly there’s mention of springs and eternal life!

My friends, surprise! This is the story of Christ and the Samaritan woman from the Gospel of John, chapter 4 verses 10 – 14 to be exact. Check it. No really click on that, it’ll take you there.

This, in short, is the absurdity that Christianity proclaims. 1) WE ALL GET THIRSTY. Boom, universal desire acknowledged. 2) IT IS NOT A SIN TO BE THIRSTY. Boom, desire said not to be intrinsically evil. 3) YOUR DESIRE IS MEANT TO ORIENT YOUR SOUL TO GOD. Boom, desire points to–wait what?!? I thought God was some sky-fairy who disapproved of my rap music collection? I thought He was a tyrant and moral monster who shuddered at my private browsing history? You mean to say that my desires are meant to be fulfilled in Christ and not denied by Him?

Yes. This is the true scandal, that all of our desires, for someone to be in relationship with, not someone to ‘connect to’, for unconditional and requited love, not a noncommittal hookup, for an eternal home, not a two-night getaway to the country, for true food and drink–living water, bread from heaven–and not that which does not ultimately satisfy; all are fulfilled in Christ and the Christian lifestyle.

Our desires, in order to be fulfilled, must be constrained. No river can run with strength without its narrow banks. No one can run a four-minute mile or deadlift 500 lbs. without self-discipline. No one can sit at a piano and play Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 2 without hours of deliberate practice.

In order to be free, we must be bound. Yet bound to the right source. Bound to something, someone without, and not within. For if we are left to the task of setting out on the path of finding fulfillment on our own, we will end up looking where 6th-century writer Boethius and almost all of humanity turns to: fame, power, glory, money, sex. We must be reoriented, redirected, repositioned, reawakened to see as the saints do. That the Kingdom of God is a treasure, a pearl of great price, that one ought readily to sacrifice the satisfaction of trivial passions in order to pursue it more freely.

I must end with an apt quote by none other than C.S. Lewis to conclude. From his Weight of Glory:

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition, when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

On Weddings

Recently, a large gathering of inter-faith leaders gathered at Vatican City to discuss the complementarity of man and woman and the need for a continual affirmation of the family unit. This statement on marriage can be found on their website. I thought it rather beautiful and moving:

“Why do weddings still move us? We do not become emotional when business partners strike a deal. We shed no tears at a friendly handshake. We feel no such joy to hear of “casual” mating.

A wedding is different. Here stand a man and woman, entering together into a new life.

And yet it is more than this. They are about to enter the generations. Their union proclaims life: their parents and grandparents still live within them. Humankind lives within them. The cultures and creeds of the world live within them. They are there—in the blood. Those bearing witness know this truth. They too have been born from a union of man and woman.

See the grandmother who looks on, now frail. She was once that bride, and the memory of her own mother and father dwells within her still.

See the brother who welcomes guests—he will one day be that bridegroom, and he too will enter in a new way the long history into which he was born.

See their friends and neighbors. They are more essential than any might guess. For it is they who will help make this marriage flourish. Their investment will return to them, for marriage is a cup that runs over.

See the mother of the bridegroom, hugging her son amid smiles and tears. He was once a helpless baby whom she nursed at the breast. Now he stands tall above her, and his voice is deep, and his shoulders broad. She remembers his birth. He who was once her child will one day be a father.

See the father of the bride, holding her by the hand. He recalls when her mother bore her, and he envisions in her what is so hard to believe, the mother-to-be. She is the bearer of a future. She is irreplaceable.

See man and woman together. They are not just two people. He is for her, and she for him; it is inscribed in their bodies. Their union will bring life that binds and mingles families, encourages faith to flourish, and brings humankind and the world’s diverse cultures to flower again.

Both are eager to undertake their new responsibilities—their gift of self to the other—and think little about what is owed them. They know nothing yet of the difficulty of the years ahead, only of their desire to travel it together.

It is hard now to speak of such obvious and beautiful things, but they are there. All the witnesses know it. It is the music of man and of woman. Man with woman brings out the finest in him, directing his blood and his mind toward what makes life possible; and woman with man brings out the finest in her, directing her love and her care toward what makes life sweet.

Today, however, the homes that marriage makes are exposed to an army of distractions, and to the thief and the enemy who comes to steal and destroy. Weddings are rarer and children fewer. Where poverty erodes, marriage feels out of reach. Where war afflicts, families are crushed. Anywhere marriage recedes, we lose the transcendent and material goods that all human beings should enjoy.

And we too are at fault, for when marriages are exposed to the wind and the rain, we have paid little attention. When the needs of children succumb to the wishes of adults, we have often remained silent. Love is reduced to a consumer item, an airbrushed image, or a slogan to export. It will not work. We will not flourish.

For marriage is no mere symbol of achievement, but the very foundation—a base from which to build a family and from there a community. For on earth marriage binds us across the ages in the flesh, across families in the flesh, and across the fearful and wonderful divide of man and woman, in the flesh. This is not ours to alter. It is ours, however, to encourage and celebrate.

And so it is that we rejoice at weddings.

This we affirm.”