atheism for lent, day 30: atrophy of our “wonder” muscle

I can’t believe it’s only 10 days until this Lenten practice is finished for 2023. Forty days of daily theological/mystical/atheistic study seems insurmountable, viewed all in one piece. But by the end of today, we’ll have completed 3/4 of this decentralizing, destabilizing non-tradition. As intense and, at times, tiring as it’s been, I’m going to miss it.

But I digest. On to today’s reflection, which comes to us via Gabriel Marcel: French philosopher, drama critic, playwright, and musician. He eventually rejected the term “Christian existentialist” (he preferred to describe his work as “philosophy of existence” or “neo-Socrateanism”) but that is how history remembers him. According to Dr. Peter Rollins, Marcel’s work “offers up to the reader a beautiful defense of the dignity and value of humanity in the face of the increasing reduction of people to their roles and functions” (AfL, 2023). That sounds delightfully anti-capitalist to me. I heart Marcel already.

In his most famous essay, “On the Ontological Mystery,” Marcel delves into the mystery of being. His concern is that modern humans (as of the mid-1900s) have lost awareness of their own sense of being, focusing mostly on an individual’s function and repressing any inward life that might burgeon into a higher purpose. To Marcel, the “modern” individual goes through life adhering mindlessly to timetables meant to optimize the discharging of function. Even sleep, relaxation, and sexual intercourse are subject to this lack of intentional living: instead of needful, natural aspects of being human, these activities serve only to enable the individual to perform a particular (assigned?) function in society.

You’d think Marcel’s describing a dystopian nightmare. But no — he’s just describing the beginnings of where we are today. Capitalistic, rise-and-grind hustle culture. Marcel names it all empty, sinister, and inhuman.

Deliver us.

In Marcel’s (our) dystopia, doctors and hospitals play the roles of mechanics and auto repair shops, so that people can go in for the regular maintenance vital for keeping them functional. Human death has become merely the scrapping of a used-up, worn-out piece of equipment.

It’s a sad, depressing state of affairs. Obviously, I can’t speak to the world of the mid-1900s that Marcel describes. But if he meant to predict what the world would look like now, 70 years later, he certainly was not wrong. Our collective “faculty of wonder” has, indeed, atrophied; we have lost all perception of the dimension of depth within our world and within ourselves; the emphasis on the functionality of the individual human ahs cut us off collectively from the ground of being. We have robbed reality of its weight and significance. We have robbed reality of meaning, and we sit in a “council of despair.”

No wonder the number of people suffering from depression and/or anxiety (*waves* hi, it’s me) keeps rising.

The one shining ray of hope Marcel gives us is the deep-seated dissatisfaction the individual experiences in regard to all of this. The individual might no longer muse over the essence of being — but still, humans understand somewhere deep down that all is not well and all manner of things are not well. There churns within us, consciously or subconsciously, the sense that something has gone horribly awry. This is good news — because where there’s dissatisfaction, there’s a possibility of initiative toward change.

Furthermore, says Marcel, it’s possible that even the aspiration to change already constitutes a reengagement with the essence of being. He wants us to see that there’s a dimension of human existence that can’t be reduced to our possessions and the functions we perform — and he wants us to see that in some way, we all realize this. Our being isn’t a objective, analytical problem to solve but a mystery to immerse ourselves in and experience subjectively.

As soon as we start thinking about these things, says Marcel, we have at least touched the waters of mystery. Maybe we’ve even dipped our feet into it. Maybe we become immersed in it without a whole lot of effort at all. All it takes is a little bit of consciousness and intentionality.

Here, religious life is the deliberate, continuous engagement with and within this mystery. This is the cure to the illness Marcel diagnoses in contemporary society.

I can’t disagree with him on any of this.