Not to get into too much detail, our roots are in a premodern viewpoint, which basically takes the stance that the divine is directly responsible for everything that is currently unexplained. This proceeded, a few centuries ago, into the modern viewpoint, which covers a bit of a spectrum. It starts out discovering science and natural law, which can explain most of the world around us. Modernism started out attributing the existence of the world to the divine and everything else to science, but it later cut out the divine altogether as it attempted to use various comical scientific theories to explain existence itself.

Obviously, with the wholesale philosophical removal of the divine, man’s search for the meaning of existence became pointless, as the final statement and obvious conclusion of modernism was that existence itself is meaningless. This was the spark that started the fire of the postmodern viewpoint. With the loss of order and meaning provided by the divine, and with science saying that there is no meaning, art and culture fragmented into many different factions, one saying, “We must now create our own meaning,” and another, “We must now create art that is without meaning to reflect our true state,” and another, “We must transcend our current states to find meaning in a higher plane of existence,” and still another, “Each of these is correct in its own way.”

This is of course, a topic for another post, another time. What I’d like to address today is the future of art and culture.

The Redemptive Cycle

You’ll probably have observed sometime in your life that much of creation is governed by cycles. Again, not to go into too much detail, some of these things include the seasons, day and night, the tides, the phases of the moon, the human sleep cycle, along with the menstrual, respiratory, and circulatory cycles, the electric current we use today, along with most machines used to turn various forms of energy into actual work. Also, light and sound and every form of broadcast signal. All of these things are governed by cycles, and they are just the tip of the iceberg.

Much of what we humans consider beautiful in music and drama is governed by cycles. Music will cycle in theme and verse. Drama will go up and down in tension on a micro scale while the whole plotline builds tension and resolves on a macro scale. In fact, as the postmodernist viewpoint languished from lack of meaning, “postmodernist art” discarded this cyclical structure and beauty in reflection of a lack of meaning.

But the world isn’t really like that. The world does have meaning. Cycles do appear throughout creation. In fact, if you look at the Bible’s account of existence, man was created in God’s image (at the top of the cycle), but then fell (the downward turn) and was condemned to die (bottom of the cycle), and was redeemed by Jesus to live forever with God (back to the top of the cycle). The entire existence of man can be defined as one full cycle.

This recurring theme, the cycle of God, reflected in nature and man, is what I like to call the Redemptive cycle.

So What’s Next?

I stated at the beginning of this article that my intention was to look forward to the next direction art and culture would take, the next viewpoint shift we have ahead of us. Believe me, everything before was necessary as exposition for this.

You have likely already deduced the connection between the evolution of worldviews presented in the first section of the article and the examination of cycles in the second. Culture and art has been, up until this point, in the first few stages of a full cycle. We started at the top of the cycle with the premodern view, we’ve fallen through the modern view and have hit bottom with the postmodern view. Naturally, the next phase of this cycle will be the upward turn, the redemption of art and culture.

But what will this look like?

Our culture is a crystal vase that has “freed itself” from the confines of its shelf, fallen, and has consequently fragmented into thousands of pieces upon encountering the floor. Each of the pieces has scattered in its own direction, and it simply seems hopeless that the once-beautiful vessel of culture and art can ever be put back together again.

The Missing Ingredient

Culture and art likely never will take on their old forms again. Even if we did manage to collect all the pieces, there’s nothing to hold them together, or to prevent them from coming back apart once we got them all into position.

However, if an artist comes along to glue the pieces together, there’s nothing to say art and culture has to be what it was before. When our pieces are put back together, art and culture will be something that it never was, that it never could have been before it was broken. That’s the very nature of redemption.

Perhaps the broken pieces of our vase will be assembled into a beautiful crystal sculpture.

The missing piece is God. If there’s any hope for our broken culture, it is that He will put it back together again.

Please note that the vase/sculpture illustration is borrowed from the 2002 film Joshua.

My wife and I therefore decided to host a cookout Monday here at our new home. Folks started showing up at about 2 in the afternoon, and stayed until about 2 in the morning. A wonderful day!

When mealtime came, everyone was of course most helpful in the kitchen. I’ve been a stage manager for about six years, so when it comes to big group projects like that, I’m generally the take-charge type, giving everyone assignments and making sure everyone has what they need.

Naturally, everyone was in and out of the refrigerator all day and all night…I’d estimate the door was opened no less than 150 times Monday. I understand that there is no actual mechanical connection between the door of a refrigerator and the guts that actually make it run, but I believe all that action broke our refrigerator’s poor little cold heart.

Death In The Family

Throughout the evening, people kept checking the freezer for ice, but it seemed like the water in the ice trays just didn’t want to freeze!

The next morning, as I was working (in my home office) my wife came in to let me know that nothing in our refrigerator is cold. The fridge was dead. We had figured that this refrigerator was on its last legs, so we’d been planning to replace it, but we were hoping to wait at least until the New Year. Alas.

I had an old mini-fridge from college out in the garage, so I hauled it into the kitchen and plugged it in and we loaded everything that could fit into it.

So I called into work and told them I was taking the day off, then we went shopping for refrigerators and bought a nice one, one of those side-by-side models with a water filter and a spout in the door.

Replacement

Unfortunately, this came at a pretty bad time as far as buying a replacement goes. I’ve just started paying tuition, and while we can afford it, we don’t have a lot of surplus after that and living expenses.

If you’ve ever heard of Dave Ramsey, you’ll know he gives great amounts of applied common sense in the form of financial advice to his audience via books, seminars, and his radio show. In regards to taking control of your finances, you’ll know the first thing he advises his audience do is to set aside $1000 in an (easily accessible) emergency fund in the bank. After then becoming debt-free, you are to add to it until your emergency fund can cover three to six months of living expenses.

I am in the middle of this third step, building the emergency fund from the original $1000 seed up to the 3-6 month expense coverage. As this was an emergency, I withdrew from the emergency fund to buy the new fridge. Across the next couple paychecks I get, I’ll put the same amount back into the emergency fund.

You have no idea how nice it is to be able to handle a moderately significant financial ‘crisis’ like this without breaking a sweat. We’re not financially hurting, and we don’t have to live on rice and beans for the next three months because of this. We didn’t have to put it on a credit card and pay it back at 29% interest or whatever the going scam is these days. That feeling is awesome.

A Word of Advice: If you don’t have an emergency fund like this, start one. You have no idea how good it will make you feel to have it when you need it. And believe me (and anyone else with sense), sooner or later, you will need it.

Also, if you don’t know Dave Ramsey or his financial advice, I can’t recommend his book Financial Peace enough. Buy it, borrow it, check it out from the library, or swipe a friend’s copy, but read it.

The man decides he’ll start by cleaning the leaves off his roof, but realizes that he needs to fix his ladder so he can get up there. So he gets out his ladder and tools, but realizes he doesn’t have all the tools he needs. So he gets in the car to go get the right tools from the tool shop, but realizes he needs gas. And on the way to the gas station, he realizes he needs some cash. While going to the bank, he realizes he left his checkbook at home, so he goes home to get it…and so forth.

A situation like this is called “Yak Shaving.” The term was apparently invented by a guy at MIT (source) to describe “Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you’re working on.” (source)

I came across this term today in an article I was reading on one of the many blogs in my Google Reader. Ironically enough, when I tried to investigate the term by clicking on it (it was a link), it took me to another page which took me to yet another page…but I eventually got the definition.

Meeting For Coffee

“Sure, I’ll meet you at Starbucks,” I told my sister. I hate coffee, but I really wanted to spend some time with her before her weedding. “Which one are you guys at?”

“Oh, the one up north, at 55 and 461,” she replied. “You know, over by Lowe’s.”

I had just been to that very shopping center earlier today, and I knew of no such establishment. “Oh…right. How do you get there again?”

“Well it’s right there, you know, over by Lowe’s.” Hadn’t she already told me that?

“You mean that little coffee stand out in the parking lot by Wal-Mart?”

“No, it’s a walk-in place. You get to it before you come to all those restaurants.”

Now we were getting somewhere. I continued my discussion with her, getting very detailed directions to the Starbucks where she was waiting, that I had no idea 5 minutes ago was there. But the directions just didn’t make sense.

“Sis, with the directions you give, it seems like the Starbucks should be taking up the same space as the Interstate exit. How on earth do I get there?

“Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. I get off the Interstate and turn right…”

“Oh! You’re coming from the Interstate?”

Where Are You Coming From?

Our miscommunication had a lot to do with the fact that I was physically coming from a different place than my sister thought. The directions she gave were great directions, and they would have easily got me where I needed to go, except for one thing. Her starting point and my starting point were different.

I’ve noticed this is a common source of miscommunication, not just when giving directions to a physical place but when communicating ideas in general. The vocabularies we use can have different meanings depending on where our listener is coming from, on what his or her perspective is.

I encourage you, the next time you feel like you’re having a hard time communicating something, take a little bit of time to consider this. Where are you coming from, and where is your listener coming from? What’s the difference, and how can you use this knowledge to bridge the communication gap?