It's a Throny World Out There

        I was on a break from work, walking up Johnson St. Working at a Sally-Anne shelter I sometimes marvel at the contrast between my work environment and the trendy boutiques that line the sides of Johnson. I was in that state on this break, it’s after 5 on a Sunday, and you can more or less murder in the street for want of watchful eyes. Then my eyes fall into one of these store windows, to behold thirty people in one of these trendy stores, there hands clasped in nameste.
        Now I'm picky about most things. I'm a beer snob, food snob, coffee snob, etc., but I'm especially snobbish when it comes to those things that pertain to the care of the soul. These are not half-way matters. I believe that function fallows form, and that the soul correspondences to the boundaries we set upon it - so - when I see a large group of young woman practicing mediation in a retail chain store my alarm bells start ringing.
        That said: Hats off to Lulu lemon man. They've done it. They’ve achieved the level of product integration that ad men have wet dreams of. Lulu Lemon is no longer just a store, it’s a temple. A place of practice for those who are looking to be spiritual - not religious. This is exactly the type of pseudo-spirituality that Naomi Kelin warned us of when she heralded the dangerous of “lifestyle branding” in No Logo. The commodity is not the clothes, it’s the community.  
        Kevin Robert has realized this, and he’s taking it to the next level. He’s the marketing guru who has devised the formula to win over your soul (I mean this in a very real way). His book, Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, argues that brands need a special mixture of Intimacy, Sensuality, and Mystery to gather the love and respect of the consumer.
        I cannot over emphasis the immense perversion that is taking place here. Immense because he is ultimately arguing that Cheerios will provide the same sustenance as the Church. Robert’s wants the next generation of ad men to construct symphonies of lies, stories he calls them, stories to give the consumer a place within the mythology of the commodity, a community of belonging.
        As Christians we have the same practice in the World, we tell stories, stories that Jesus told us and that we tell other people. We have a narrative that instructs us on how to live in the World and it is from these gospels, and the practice of the sacraments, we step into the Lord’s peace. And it’s a far safer and securer peace than anything an ad man can come up with.
        Marshall McCullen knew that. After pioneering the field of media studies, the parable that McCullen was fond of using was likening advertising to Edgar Allan Poe’s story A Descent into the Maelstrom; where a man lashes himself to a heavy chest as he is sucked up into a hurricane. McCullen, who was a devout Catholic, argued that as the maelstrom of advertising grows around us we too need to be fastened to something so that we will not be blown helter skelter by the winds of market fancy. This is one thing that makes me grateful for my faith with men like Robert at work, in that it shelters me from these winds, as it binds me to the World.

Worship in the Bathroom

        Something strange is happening in the bathrooms of hipsters. I noticed it about 5 years ago when I first moved out to the west coast, I went to use the lavatory of a friend of mine to discover that he had transformed it into a vestry. The bathroom was decked out in kitch Jesus rejects. Sacred heart there, last supper here, crosses of all manner: wooden to florescent, and other velvet renderings of our saviour. At the time I took it with a shrug “Well this is...different,” but I have since had the experience repeated often enough now that I feel safe calling this a trend, and a trend that I believe foreshadows deeper rumblings of the soul than any American Apparel hoodie can speak to.
        Allan Watts, in an essay entitled Murder in the Kitchen, spoke of how there are two rooms in our North American society where we acknowledge our humanness: the kitchen and the bathroom. He contrasted that with the living room, a space that exists purely for presentation, the space where we deny our existence as animals. As one friend of mine put it: No one farts in the living room. And if they do they are scared for life.
        I think Watts is on bone in this description, and I believe that there is something quite profound in the growing religious iconography of washrooms. The bathroom is a space that we deny in our daily lives, it is a space that is for the body, and in our culture the bulk of our existence is spent in our heads. This creates an “anything goes” opportunity in the washroom. Indeed I think we can look upon this as some sort of cultural barometer, where the subconscious of a generation is being revealed.
        And what is being revealed? What does this speak to? I believe that it does simultaneously speak of the hunger for God, as well as the fear of God. Here the broken God is shown in the most crass, low-brow form of art that Value Village has to offer, yet hung in the most intimate setting of the home. There is the typical critical-distance that is maintained in this post-modern generation, where the action is meant to be ironic, but why Christ and why so often?
         We could just take this at face value and say that it is the ironic posing that we have become accustomed to in an age that lives in fear of sincerity, but I do not think so. I think something is sending shoots out into the counter-culture that has grown weary of defying and defining everything. And this could very well be the only safe expression of the Holy Spirit that hipsters can come up with.