Cult of the next thing

Cult of the next thing

The doorways out of the cult is contentment rooted in two expressions “thank you” and “enough”

Well we know this. But simply knowing it doesn’t usually help. The cult is big, powerful, well organized, flawlessly run. It can usurp almost any impulse and then package it, market it, and make a profit out of it. Recently, a whole range of ads from cars to clothes to CD player have traded on a growing resentment against commercialism. All wheel drive sport utility vehicles with multi - million pesos plus price tags are touted as the magic means of escaping the artificiality of a word locked into an elephant, snorkeled amid schools of bright colored fish. And I’ve used money to buy those little sticky wax rings that seal sewer pipes on toilets. It was handy in both instances. But Mammon is a worthless god demanding, capricious, conniving. He’s surely and brutish, rarely lets you sleep well or long. He is sometimes generous, in a fickle way, but he has a well practiced habit of depriving you of taking deep and lasting pleasure in his gift. He brings with them the sour aftertaste of ingratitude “It’s not enough of fear it wont last o insatiability, I want more”

Maybe this is the worst irony of the Cult of the next thing; it doesn’t train us to value thing too much, but rather, too little. It teaches us to be discontent with what we have. Those in the cult cherish nothing. Craving always chokes out treasuring.

The doorways out of the cult are called contentment. And content “Tell us, sister! Tell us!” the worshipers shouted back.

“Oh, I love Him so much; I don’t know where to begin to tell you how good He is,”

“Begin there, sister! Begin right there!”

“Oh,” she said. “He is so good to me.  For three months, I prayed for shoes. And look” and at that the woman cocked up her leg so hat we could see one foot. One very ordinary shoe covered it. “He gave me shoes.”

The Ugandans clapped and yelled and shouted “Hallelujah.”

I didn’t. I was devastated. In all me life, I had not once prayed for shoes. And in all my life, I had not once thanked God for the shoes I have. Later it came to me that the deepest theological concept is not the doctrine of transubstantiation or the theories of atonement or the arguments for theodicy. No, the deepest theological concept is thankfulness, because to thank God in all things and for all things is to make the boldest statement about who God is; is He a giver or a taker? If you ask for bread, will He give you a stone?

- Mark Buchanan