Vulnerable All-Knowing

Apologies for the tardiness in the blogosphere... life just seems to happen whilst we're busy making other plans... In lectures recently, we explored the contours of an existentialist worldview. This generation for all of it's post modern posturings still pangs for the existentialist ideal and deep down I intuitively sense is deeply pessimistic of the po-mo excuses that arise from being defined as a fragmentation of social constructs. Perhaps this has been existentialism's enduring legacy...inconspicuously flying under the radar of the post modern juggernaut, yet establishing a foothold in the hearts and minds of an entire generation mistakenly labelled "post modern" when in reality their existential longings to be defined and transcend the mundane prisons of empty existence are perhaps the real motivators for the plethora of choices at their disposal. Existentialism at least stands unashamedly honest in its complete reliance upon the onus of responsibility for one's actions. Condemned to be free as Sartre would say, this age longs for the transcendent leap into the fullness of anything that will give meaning and purpose, however irrational... the "one thing" of blind illogical abandonment that takes us into the mystery of the "other", be that God or just our daily "distractions". I caught the last glimpse of the British series "Life on Mars" the other night - what a vivid representation of classic existentialism that was!

Straylight Run encapsulate the existential quest so poetically in their great song "Existentialism on Prom Night":Sing like you think no-one's listening... you would kill for this, just a little bit...sing me something soft... sad and delicate.... loud and out of key... sing me anything... Vulnerable all-knowing... Or what about John Mayer's classic existentialist declarations - I want to run through the hall of my high school, I want to shout at the top of my lungs. I just found there's no such thing as the real world... just a lie you've got to rise above. I'm bigger than the my body gives me credit for... Ahh Transcendence... the quest to "rise above" is embedded deep within us all. We crave for otherness, with every heartbeat we long for something to transport us from the miry clay of our empty, earthy existence.

But we don't talk about existentialism any more, do we?? As a young Christian, armed with my five volume set of Francis Schaeffer, I quickly dismissed existentialism and its upper story dualism. But the more I observe my own generation, the more I see that whilst po-mo rules the rhetoric, the existential longings remain deeply ingrained as the veiled zeitgeist and the desire to "bleed just to know we're alive" (Goo-goo dolls) , and "to wake up kicking and screaming and know our heart's still beating... still bleeding...we're awakening" (switchfoot) have not been diluted by the plethora of po-mo choices available to us. Perhaps it is time for our own re-awakening and to re-read the morose musings of the melancholy Dane with fresh new eyes and new ears in our current generation... and perhaps, re-discover that existentialism is far from dead - but kicking and screaming and beating and bleeding in the most unlikely places.