We Have Become Alien

We Have Become Alien. The name is borrowed from the title of a song on the Cary Brother's album "Under Control." It is an absolutely lovely, graceful and moving psalm of anguish, brokenness and alienation that allows me to feel the Sacred/God suffusing through the instruments played and the words spoken. And that shall be the origin, the center that drives this blog forward — alienation; though of course the categories, topics, and issues covered will be diverse.

The idea of alienation has become central in my thinking, lately, and more and more. It all goes back to the mythology of the Garden of Eden and the narrative of Adam and Eve. The first universal human beings, male and female, are created by God and live in perfect harmony with the world around them. Crucially, there is a unity between God and Humankind — the original Oneness of human experience. And then Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, being tempted by the snake (who, if you are Christian, is the incarnation of Satan). This disobedience, the discernement of good from evil, carries with it a heavy burden, and it is through this act that Death/Θάνατος first enters the world. The result is the Fall: the break of our primordial Oneness, as a separation at the core of our being. 

We find this idea of primordial Oneness in secular philosophy as well, particularly in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the womb, we are one with (M)other — one with the Other — and it is only upon birth that a separation between I and Thou becomes. Lacan called this primordial unity between subject and object the Real, and extended it until about six months of age. Alienation is likewise present in the writings of G.W.F. Hegel, in which human existence is separated from human essence; where we do not realize the unity of spirit and existence in the World, as an overflowing emanation of pure being as the endless interplay of identity and difference.

The quintessential dilemma of human existence is that we are an individual that has a desire for wholeness, for Oneness with the Other. Yet, we are alienated from the Other. And this separation causes anguish, loneliness and longing. It is for this reason that Christian Salvation is posited as the negation, or the antithesis, of the Fall. For Roman Catholics such as myself, Christ regenerates our brokenness and heals the rift separating us from God. Christ repairs the gulf of separation and reunifies us with God; returns us to the Primordial Oneness. 

So that is what this blog will be about. It will be my humanist search for meaning, closeness, community and Oneness in the World — in a word, the pursuit of the Sacred in the World. In the end, it is about finding God in the World.