For my own sanity and to help with the dryness of my soul, I’ve been slowly reading Richard Lovelace’s Dynamics of Spiritual Renewal. It’s good. One of the secondary elements of spiritual renewal (in communities, within individuals) is what he coins “disenculturation”. It’s not where you burn all your “secular music” or build a bunker to keep yourself unstained from the world. It’s about disentangling your identity in Christ from the markers of your culture (politics, arts, entertainment, etc.). The gospel remains able to transform any culture only when it remains disentangled from every culture.

Not that “culture” and “world” are perfect synonyms, but it got me thinking about Jonathan Edwards’ excellent bundle of sermons called Charity and its Fruits. Edwards argues that one of the things about charity (read, “love) is that it tends to holy practice in life. If you try to love other people as Christ loves you, you tend to grow in holiness. Go figure, right? Well, Edwards says that one of the inevitable flavors of holiness is “weanedness from the world.”  The idea is obviously that are default is to be nourished by the world and, as Christians, we need to be weaned from that. It’s an exercise in falling out of love. Anyone who has ever tried it knows that it is a slow, painful process.

He that has his heart loose from the world, will not practically keep the world close in his grasp, as being exceeding loath to part with any of it.

If someone’s actions show that they think more of the treasure on earth than of treasure in heaven, and if, when he gets it, “he hugs it close”, he gives not the least evidence of his being weaned from the world. Threaten my security or my rights or shut down my local coffeeshop for a day, and you will really see what I hug close. Maybe I hug some things in this world little too closely.

I wonder how many blindsides in my life and in my culture hide the many ways in which I’m still hooked on the world?