Jesus and Liquid Modernity

Every now and then I hear a metaphor and it strikes me between the eyes. This morning in our Bible Study, Donn talked about a man I had never heard of, Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman is a sociologist in England, over eighty years old and very well known in Europe. He has written something like forty books. He asserts that in the last few decades we have shifted from a common life that is solid to one that is liquid. I got the metaphor right away, in a manner that was almost visceral.

Last week I explored a bit what it means to try to live a whole Christian life in a world where so many of us feel overloaded. How do we live in world that is becoming liquid?

First, it might be helpful to see what Bauman means. Having just heard it today, I don't know much, but here is what it says in Wikipedia:

'Liquid modernity is Bauman's term for the present condition of the world as contrasted with the "solid" modernity that preceded it. According to Bauman, the passage from "solid" to "liquid" modernity has created a new and unprecedented setting for individual life pursuits, confronting individuals with a series of challenges never before encountered. Social forms and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life plans, so individuals have to find other ways to organise their lives. Individuals have to splice together an unending series of short-term projects and episodes that don't add up to the kind of sequence to which concepts like "career" and "progress" could be meaningfully applied. Such fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable — to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability. In liquid modernity the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting (or failing to act) under conditions of endemic uncertainty. '

If last week I suggested that the church is an antidote to being overloaded by being a sacred space where we are invited to be still and know that God is God, what might be the church's response to the liquidity of the world?

There are two responses that immediately come to mind, both of which require more thought and exploration. One response is that we will continue to insist on the integrity and wholeness of the human person as created in the image of God and redeemed by his Son, Jesus. For each of us, there is a there there. Much, if not all, on the outside may be rife with uncertainty. But inside each of us there is a soul, and by baptism that soul is hid with Christ, safe.

The other is that we need not fear the 'endemic uncertainty' because Jesus is already there. Another time I was hit between the eyes by a metaphor was reading a book of theology about Hans Urs Von Balthasar, who is perhaps one of the three or four greatest theologians of the last fifty years. Balthasar thought deeply about Jesus' radical availability to the full range of human experience. He reflected on every stage of Jesus life, from the way he followed his earthly mission, to the cross, to his experience of utter abandonment on Holy Saturday to, finally, his resurrection.

According to this book, when Von Balthasar reflected on Jesus' resurrection, he saw that the resurrection represented the complete availability of Jesus to all humanity, beyond the limits of time and space. And this is where he used the metaphor that struck me between the eyes. Do you remember how we say together in the eucharistic prayer 'Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.'? What is that is? How is it that Jesus is present to us now?

For Von Balthasar, the resurrection was the liquefaction of Jesus' human person so that it became radically available to the world. If you don't know, and I didn't when I first read it, liquefaction is the scientific term for what happens to solid earth and rock in an earthquake. During the time of the quake, the tremors cause what is ordinarily solid to turn into something that behaves with all the properties of a liquid. By the Resurrection, Jesus turned from being a like a solid to being much more like a liquid!

If this is true about Jesus, and I believe it is, then we have no need to be ultimately anxious about a common life disconcertingly turned from solid to liquid. Jesus is always already there. Or I should write that he is always already here. He has been turned from a solid, that is Jesus of Nazareth who walked the earth for about thirty years about two thousand years ago, to a liquid. He is available now and forever. No matter how liquid the world gets, Jesus will be there.

I find the world very disorienting right now. I am certain that I am not alone. The lack of vitality in both our economic and political life are causing many to ask some pretty deep questions. How do we live now? The very good news is that in scripture and in Jesus we can find, mysteriously, the very best responses.