Another talk that I gave at my church. This one was focused on the wonderfully simplistic yet deeply powerful ancient spiritual exercise called “the Examen” that uses emotional awareness to integrate self-reflection and prayer.
Bringing together this summer’s Pixar blockbuster Inside Out, classic episodes of the original Star Trek and the gargantuan, impenetrable novel Infinite Jest, here’s my Tuesday’s in the Chapel talk for this semester (as audio and transcript):
First Reading:
From Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, p. 695:
Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile… One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.