• Article Tools
• Print
• RSS

The Creative Minority

by Christian Huebner 

Riding the light rail train in Houston last week, I saw something beautiful. A young flowering crab in the middle of a grassy patch had just put out buds--purple, almost lilac, in color.  The skinny branches of the tree etched the hue into an otherwise earthtone-and-industrial scene. It occured to me: this is for Lent.

The idea was delightful, and I instinctively looked around the train to share the discovery with someone.  No great surprise, but no one else seemed to see what I was smiling about.

There was an obvious reason for that: usually, you don’t try to catch the eye of the guy wearing a goofy grin in public. In fact, you might deliberately avoid it. But there was, I felt, another, more subtle reason why no one else shared the same knowing smile: very few people would unconsciously calculate that purple plus springtime equals Lent.

In another time or place, that would have been different. On my night stand right now, for example, is Sigrid Undsett’s Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy. Kristin is a bildungsroman -- a coming of age novel -- about a young woman in fourteenth-century Norway. Of the novel’s many outstanding qualities, one of the most impressive is how thoroughly Undsett recreates and draws us into medieval Christendom. The Church in that age was the central institution of western civilization: every part of life – sacred and profane – took place against a liturgical backdrop. Even the greatest sinners and scoundrels in Undsett’s world recognized this and understood that someday they would be judged accordingly.

Today, the situation is different. The imprint of the Church is still everywhere in western culture in both obvious and subtle ways. The standard workweek is still built around the Christian Sabbath (even where it is only observed in the breach). And roadside diners nationwide still serve up clam chowder as the soup d'jour on Fridays.

But these are vestigial traits. Today the Church, while a significant influence, is no longer preeminent in shaping the culture. Compare major technological developments like the printing press in the 15th century, whose most obvious first function to its creators was to reproduce the Bible, with analogous developments in our age, like the internet. The internet has become a tool of the Church, as for many other people, but its prime movers develop it from an areligious perspective. So too with paradigm-altering ideas: Newtonian physics and Cartesian geometry, still the basic template for mathematically describing the physical world, were developed with the understanding that they were in the service of better understanding God’s creation. Darwinism, on the other hand, a more recently-devised and massively influential paradigm, while not in necessary opposition to the Christian worldview, has often been promoted as the basis of a post-Christian worldview. And just as importantly, the most popular storytellers, artists and musicians usually do not understand themselves as working within the Christian tradition.

Peculiar as it may sound, all of these shifts correlate with why it was unlikely that the average person on the train with me last week did not see a symbol of Lent growing outside the passenger windows. The Church in the West, for some time now, has been traversing into post-Christian culture, and a post-Christian culture does not train you to look out for Christ.

And yet, should this be cause for discouragement? The visible Church has spent time in the worldly wilderness, on the outskirts, in the catacombs, before. The Church and her mission endure, though the approach of Christians taking on that mission may change.

The man formerly known as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger urged this as he surveyed the decline of Christian influence in the West. Christians, he concluded, must now look upon themselves as a “creative minority,” exercising influence for Christ by presenting the shining alternative, rather than preserving the entrenched status quo. This can mean many things. For me, it means pointing out Lent in tree branches.

---

(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)