Ours is the Age of Fear

What happens when you run out of ideas? What happens when there is nothing to say, nothing to write, nothing to paint, nothing to compose? Whose fault is it? Is it the artist’s or the environment he is surrounded with? Are we running out of ideas because we are saturated with too much information? And most of all, what is the remedy for these distractions, indifferences and malaises we are finding in the depths of our souls? I don’t have the answer to any of these questions and that scares me.

I am also not immune to the phenomenon of distraction. I am caught up in it: I search the Internet for useless information, even though I know very well that it will only take away something from my being. Click, click—follow the link but to where? Where are these articles leading me? Who is writing this? Who is reading this? There is no way that we are able to actually read everything that is thrown at us in a given day. And if we do, then we seriously need to consider looking for a job.

Before I started this blog of mine, I seriously considered whether I should venture into those waters. Another blog? You must be joking! Granted, I don’t blast people with private (and trivial) details of my life: what I ate, how I digested it, and what time the food finally decided to leave my body. But still. This way of communicating still makes me wonder whether it is worth it. As a writer, one wonders: is anyone truly reading this at all? And with so much on the Internet already, why should anyone engage in another “click,” in another unconscious movement of the hand? A hand, which is not connected to the mind or heart.

We are the age and people of anxiety, of fear, of spiritual malaise. The more we “blog” and move fast through the cosmos, the more we are lost. We are the age of great confusion. For example, to be good or to believe in God is to go against the grain, to be counter-cultural. Are we ready to accept that the only way out of the confusion is to be counter-cultural? But perhaps, we are not ready to accept the loss of superficial comfort, which only keeps us in further bondage. We must be willing to let go because even in our confusion and malaise, we still know that we cannot serve two masters. But there is a great difference between an intellectual virtue and moral virtue, as Ralph McInerny said. I may know that my habits are bad but whether I actually commit to an act of changing them is another matter altogether.

The culture is telling us that we must keep looking but it never tells what should be the object we seek. I’ll never forget a commercial for iPhone or some such thing: a hand perusing the Internet, calling “friends,” texting is doing these acts with such ease and flawlessness. This hand is perfect. But we never see the human face. Who is this person? Why are they on the Internet? Who are they calling and why? Are they afraid of being alone, utterly alone? The tune is sung in the background by a droning, lifeless androgynous voice: “I don’t know what I’m looking for but I’m going to look some more.” Frightening. We are not utterly alone; we are utterly afraid of looking into ourselves and seeing the truth.

These are difficult matters. How does a man wake up from a slumber and a dream that he has been in for most of his life or if he has never even been aware of this dream? He must change his paradigm completely. He must have courage. And I hate to say this: he has to come to know God. He has to stop avoiding God, for good.