Is the Real "Woke" Awakening?

 

How is it that Canada, the US, and the Catholic Church are all saddled with historically terrible leaders at the same time?

For that matter, how is it that, back in the 1980s, Britain, the US, and the Catholic Church all suddenly got great leaders at the same time? One might add Gorbachev in the USSR, Deng Xiaoping in China, perhaps Helmut Kohl in Germany. Whether you loved them or hated them, none of them were doing business as usual. All did something historic. Against the backdrop of the digital revolution in business, the first personal computers, Steve Jobs and Apple.

The simplest solution is to accept that God—and the Devil—are active in history. Who runs a government is normally, according to the New Testament, left in the Devil’s power. The three great enemies of the soul, after all, are “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” The social consensus is “the world.” Saint Paul says our battle is against “the principalities and powers of this world.”

But God will step in when things look hopeless. We can and should hope.

Something is happening at Asbury College in Kentucky. The film “Jesus Revolution” has just been released. Mel Gibson is due with “The Passion of the Christ: Resurrection” next year. Films can have great influence in modern life.

I always thought the counterculture of the Sixties got hijacked, by Marxists, yuppies who were only cosplaying as “hippies,” and abusive parents. It should otherwise have ended in a massive revival of Christian spirituality. The rock and roll was really gospel music, borrowing the same religious energy, thinly hidden behind inane or trivial lyrics. The folk music was often explicitly religious: Michael, row the boat ashore. The answer is blowing in the wind. Children, go where I send thee. The drugs were a key to spiritual experiences. The sex was often a juvenile craving for love, by children who had never experienced it. The counterculture as a whole was a rebellion against the materialist culture that Firesign Theatre mocked as “More Science High School,” against the denial of the spirit that behaviourism or structuralism or modernist architecture advocated and conveyed. A culture that “had no soul.”

At the time, I wasn’t involved in the “Jesus Freak” stuff. I was investigating Eastern religions, still at arm’s length. Just as I stayed at arm’s length from the politics, and the drugs, and the sex. I’m cautious by nature. But I ran into Jesus Freaks, and I felt they were often the best of that generation.

We almost got there sixty years ago. We have lost two generations. Maybe this time the spark will take and the kindling will be set ablaze. At a minimum, we all can feel the yearning.