Marc Barnes, also known as BadCatholic, is always thoughtfully provoking.
In this piece he challenges every Catholic, and really, every person, to resist the shallow and go deeper:
There is a tangible longing in our culture, analogous to the hunger a man has for steak after eating
nothing but cabbage, or for the smell of wood and dirt and rain after working in an air-conditioned office — the thirst for worth in an era of fashion. The experience of real worth is a thick, warm, encompassing experience. When we perceive something as good, we perceive that it is always good, or, to be clear, that goodness is inherent to its being. Sure, we may not always be in the position to experience the inherent good of a particular song or a a particular city, but we do not “use up” its goodness, nor “grow sick” of perceived worth.
Real goodness is — in the moment of our experience — experienced as for everyone and for all time. When I am blown away by an album, struck by its beauty, its depth and its meaning, I am offended by the person who sees no goodness in its songs. I might say “each to his own,” but there is nevertheless a palpable disappointment in my attempt at reducing goodness to my own, personal experience. If I am honest with myself, I rarely experience this disconnect in perceptions of the album as “diferences in taste,” and almost always as a belief that the other person is “missing something.”
When we experience real worth in an object, we experience it as having worth for everyone. Its goodness is experienced as a universal goodness. Similarly, we tend to experience worth as “for all time.” We go back to certain albums, we relive certain experiences, we re-read incredible books, look at a favorite painting again and again, watch a certain movie multiple times and each time extract more meaning from it.
Now the merely popular does not have this quality. Popular music is consumed and digested at an incredible rate. There is no honest “going back” to songs that are released as objects of fashion. Popular music has no scent of immortality about it — it must be continuously replaced by “the next big thing.” If any one doubts this, I defy them to listen to “Call Me Maybe” with honest enjoyment, free from nausea, nostalgia or irony. There is no inherent good aimed at in fashionable music, and thus it barely lasts a month before it is used up and discarded.
So the Catholic — insofar as he is called to seek that universal, infinite goodness that finds its source in God — is simultaneously called to resist the power of fashion. Since the term “hipster” simply refers to another fashionable trend, and is thus negated into a valueless phenomenon of popularity, I would not go so far as to say that “Catholics should be hipsters.” Rather Catholics, as a tangible part of their own spiritual growth, should seek worth over fashion, beautiful music over popular music, local restaurants over popular, fast-food chains, excellent films over mind-numbing blockbusters, true psychology over pop psychology, real sacramentals over gaggy Christian t-shirts, books — yes — over blogs, methods of true communication over social media, and real politics over the mainstream stagnation of everything into liberal/conservative terms. We should seek worth — so often unpopular — over fashion, and thereby become signs of contradiction in an oh-so-fashionable world.
nothing but cabbage, or for the smell of wood and dirt and rain after working in an air-conditioned office — the thirst for worth in an era of fashion. The experience of real worth is a thick, warm, encompassing experience. When we perceive something as good, we perceive that it is always good, or, to be clear, that goodness is inherent to its being. Sure, we may not always be in the position to experience the inherent good of a particular song or a a particular city, but we do not “use up” its goodness, nor “grow sick” of perceived worth.Seek worth and you shall find Him.
Carry on.
