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A soul-friend discovered, and the launch of a new book prize – Jogger’s Read of the Year with the top prize going to Dee Hock’s “Birth of the Cahordic Age” discovered by me 10 years after its publication.
Dee Hock describes his relationship to insitutions – and it rings an eight bell quarter peel in my mind. he writes of his teenage rebellion:
“My rebellion was persistent, stubborn, at times stupid refusal to accept orthodox ideas, be persuaded by authoritarian means, or seek acceptance by conformity.”
He asks: “what is this chasm between how institutions profess to function and how they actually do; between what they claim to do for people and what they actualy do to them?” (p37) Among them: schools that can’t teach, unhealthy health-care systems, welfare systems in which no one fares well, farming systems that destroy soil and poison food. (p28)
I could ask in similar vein why it is that the church which is supposed to offer life in all its fullness induces such boredom and is seen as a “turn off” instead of a “turn on”, and why it is that the good news of salvation has to be cloaked in disguise in order not to frighten people off (according
to my reading of a recent PCC discussion on our parish magazine.
Grits and Grains 