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Mushiness
Daniel Yankelovich, a market researcher, has developed what he calls the "mushiness index" to assess whether people truly understand the costs associated with the principles they express. For example, do the 'green folks' really understand that if they want to save the environment they need to drive less? And the budget cutters, are they willing to give up their own government 'goodies'?
John Updike's, "A Month of Sundays", made me think that we in the church need our own mushiness-index. Updike tells the story of the Rev. Thomas Marshfield, a lapsed vicar who longs for transcendence and attacks the marshmallowy immanence of his younger assistant, Ned Bork's "limp-wristed theology, a perfectly custardy confection of Jungian-Reichian, soma-mysticism swimming in a soupy caramel of Tillichic, Jasperian, Bultmannish blather, all served up in a dimestore dish of his gutless generation's give-away Gemutichkeit".
Marshfield wants nothing of religion made amenable to human demands. "Let us have it in its original stony jars or not at all!" Beldon Lane, (The Solace of Fierce Landscapes) comments: "Why does such a harsh and unmeasured Connecticut-Calvinist outburst strike such a deep prophetic chord? In a society that emphasizes the limitless possibilities of the individual self, it comes as a strange freshness to be confronted by an unfathomable God, indifferent to the petty, self-conscious needs that consume us."
In faith, 
Pastor Tim |
