Californication

Revelation 3:2

Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have found your deeds unfinished in the sight of my God.

I was chatting with the mom on Mother's Day. No coincidence there. She reminded me that after she and my dad split up, she yearned to return California with us four kids in tow. She had grown up as an Army brat living all over the world and California had become home. She graduated from college in California and she and my dad started out their married life in California.

California then was often thought of an earthly paradise. In the 1950s, America was in the post-war boom and California is where a lot of people wanted to ride their dream rocket ship to. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, in their song Californication, have a lyric: "Space May Be the Final Frontier, But It is Made in a Hollywood Basement." Sun all of the time. No winter. Endless waves. Pretty girls, muscled men. Life tan. It will burn you.  

California turned out for many to be the broken earthquake land for busted dreams. Reality shakes. Moral Plate Tectonics where everything moves. A picture for the song has a swimming pool of molten lava. Artists are modern-day prophets and the Red Hot Chili Peppers for all of their bad boy antics, nailed this song. It has far too many insightful images and words to detail here. Set like a video game. Genius.

I do have a Central Pa. friend born and bred here in Dutchy Land who is making it on California as a film-maker and screenwriter and author. He is a bright and talented dude who is a cut above most California Dreamers. He has a fantastic imagination and the Central Pa. work ethic where he plows the work over and under. It is a good combo. I dream more when I talk to him. He has been a spark for a lot my more daring endeavors like writing a book or going to get my Ph.D.

My mom ultimately decided to stay in Pennsylvania because she did not want to uproot us kids and plant us in sand. We pondered together of what would have happened if we had become modern 49ers chasing the gold. Instead of winding up in California, I settled in Lancaster, Pa. Probably the opposite of California where cultural trends are resisted by hundreds of years of tradition. It is changing but slowly. And that is both good and bad. Not all that novel and new is worth the time.

I have until recently gotten out to California much more than the average American. Two or three times a year. So, I know Cali better than most, not as a tourist but more as an aquaintance. It is a place with enormous assets and deficits. A real fractured but flashy place.       

I heard a fascinating talk last night by Dr. Steve Nichols: "Jesus is On My Bracelet: The Commodification of the Sacred in America" at the Rowhouse Forum where "Nothing Is Not Sacred." Dr. Nichols got into the frontier westward trend in the US (my note: after European-brought diseases wiped out the Native Americans who had no immunities). This blowing geographical and cultural demographic did not work with Presbyterianism and other more structured Christian denominations like the Episcopal/Anglicans. Instead, the horse-ready Methodists who had a Bible left their Conservative bretheren with their libraries, books, degrees, and traditions, literally in the dust.

Contemporary Christian music, relaxed services with no suit and ties and bonnetts, the Hippie Jesus, the Hipster Jesus, have all found their ground to grow in Southern California. Relevance becomes routine. Yawn. Change the religion channel. Revivalism and anti-intellectualism, became what those westward winds have brought and wrought. The anxious bench where salvation is a market proposition--to buy a seat on that plane to heaven--and keep buying. "You will know that we are Christiand by our tee-shirts."

Dr. Nichols was careful to note that experientalism did bring a lot of good into the Church yet it came at a cost and we are paying the price for not being creedal and confessional. And consumerisism has become the result where the eternal is attempted to be encapsulated in the passing.

It is no mistake that the mega-church in America is Saddleback, set squarely in the most conservative place in California, Orange County. The birthplace of modern-day political conservatism (Ronald Reagan), beach culture, the defense industry, and the Metro L.A. area that covers miles and miles of paved and malled land. Home of Hollywood, Disneyland, and other make believe.

Commodification and Conservatism. Californication.