The Wisdom of Douglas Coupland

For the one or two people who read this blog, I'm sorry it's been so long since I wrote, well, anything. Spring is the busy season working at a church, where a personal life becomes something you vaguely remember but don't really experience. Anyways, here's some cool stuff:

I've been on a bit of a Douglas Coupland kick recently, reading Generation X, Life After God and Shampoo Planet. I think Coupland is brilliant, having the ability to tap into cultural trends and put faces to it in a way nobody else that I've read can. Here's a few quotes from his work that go well with the themes in this blog...


From Generation X:

"ME-ISM: A search by an individual, in the absence of training in traditional religious tenets, to formulate a personally tailored religion by himself. Most frequently a mishmash of reincarnation, personal dialogue with a nebulously defined god figure, naturalism, and karmic eye-for-eye attitudes."

From Life After God:

"Life was charmed but without politics or religion. It was the life of children of the children of the pioneers - life after God - a life of earthly salvation on the edge of heaven. Perhaps this is the finest thing to which we may aspire, the life of peace, the blurring between dream life and real life - and yet I find myself speaking these words with a sense of doubt.

I think there was a trade-off somewhere along the line. I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched. And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God."

Then, at the end of the book, he writes:

"Now - here is my secret:
I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God - that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love."


Peace,
Matt