Today is the day – the day of great sacrifice, the day of great salvation. Today, a great multitude of people will go out and celebrate their materialistic salvation, going forth to the altar of consumer sacrifice and giving generous donations to the gods of big business. Today is the day salvation, in which those struggling gods, weakened by the lack of faith shown to them throughout the year, find their flocks return, bringing with them a bounty of treasure, enough to provide their high priests a livelihood for another year. Today is the day, the inverse of Good Friday. Today is Black Friday. Welcome to the darkness which imitates the light.
Look what happens on this annual pilgrimage to the malls: consumers go out, have an all-night vigil in front of the altar of choice, giving up of food and drink, sleep and shelter, hoping that the gods will be pleased and give them, in return, monetary salvation. It is the social religion of choice; today one is not a fool to give up of oneself, because today one’s sacrifice goes for the salvation of businesses, and if the businesses are saved, then these gods will in return bless the nation with security for another year.
Even though Black Friday is a perverse inversion of Good Friday, Christians find themselves involved with this dark mystery religion. Indeed, this new religion invokes the Christian faith, encouraging Christians to believe one can indeed serve two masters, God and mammon alike. Mammon does not require its follower to renounce Christ: indeed, it calls upon Christ, and uses Christ the best it can, because it knows that the work of Christ can be perverted and used for its own ill ends. Indeed, it even follows the examples of Christians of old: Christians took over and used old pagan temples and practices in order to convert pagans to their new faith; mammon, having learned this lesson, follows suit and takes over Christians celebrations and uses them to convince Christians to become one of its fold.
But if today is the day of personal sacrifice, a day of great fast for the saving of the buck, then we must ponder if this is not somehow connected to the secular celebration of Thanksgiving, the day of gluttonous rejoicing. While I will admit there is a layer of the celebration of Thanksgiving which a Christian can celebrate (giving thanks to God), we must look to the bigger picture, and see how the consumer world has connected the two days, Thanksgiving and Black Friday, together. One is the celebration of excess, the celebration of the bounty of the previous year; the other is the fast, the vigil, the sacrifice aimed to appease the gods of plenty, so that one can attain another joyful Thanksgiving the next year. Thanksgiving is at once Mardi Gras and Easter for the consumer religion. It adapts older, good traditions in order to seduce the public into its religious rites; it even uses those who do not fall for the Black Friday religious rites, who try to keep to their own Christian purity, by having them join in with its paschal feast: heretics are shown to receive the gracious gifts by the gods of plenty, showing how strong and charitable those gods must be.
Do not believe it.
While I do think a Christian can celebrate Thanksgiving without sin, and that there are many good aspects to the memorial which takes place on the day, they must be aware of how their celebration is being used in the larger, social religion which is at the heart of our state. It is for this reason that Christians should also remember the whole story, the kind of which Michael Iafrate reminded us of this week. The social religion is dangerous, and it covers up a multitude of crimes it created by its perversion of a good.
Welcome to Black Friday. Mammon wants to know: will you celebrate its rites today? Can you help it save the world?
Excellent Article. Here is my take on “Black Friday” in light of your article (from my blog):
“This saving money that is supposed to occur en masse on this day, is, Vox Nova purports, a kind of ‘fast’ or ‘vigil’ of Thanksgiving–the celebration of gluttony, and, I think, for Christmas, which has become, in a secular sense, a continuation of the gluttony of “Turkey Day’ writ large–a month long ‘feast’ of ‘I get what I want’.”
Dymphna
You are right about the false-Christmas which comes out of this, which is also in imitation of something real and holy. And it shows how the perversion tries to include what it is perverting as a way to hide what it is doing.
Exactly. Everything holy has been stolen and perverted.
What kind of an American are you, Henry? Everyone knows that the “Number of People Trampled in Pursuit of $200 Laptops” index is an important macroeconomic indicator ;)
Henry, the prices are lower today so more people shop. That’s no sin.
Pinky
That only shows the whole point of the post and what matters most in our society; what is it that people are willing to sacrifice their time for? What exactly is it people are willing to fast for? All-night vigil for a tv is fine. But don’t dare talk about fasting because of sin.
Henry, my point is that Black Friday is just a thing. It’s a frivolity and an opportunity for a decent discount. It’s not a secularization or a perversion of anything. But my disagreement may be more with the previous article that this article is built on.
There has been a question in my mind ever since I was a senior in high school. I think I mentioned it in another thread recently. It is “How can I justify having so much when others having nothing?”
We all know this story from the Gospel of Mark:
I have seen arguments that basically say nobody’s perfect, so we are not called to sell everything and give it to the poor, but a footnote in the NAB points out that Christians are called to perfection. (There are a number of fascinating things about that passage that I can’t try to cover here.) In any case, it seems to me to strongly imply that following Jesus requires giving up all material possessions.
As a slight aside, I got to know someone quite well who was in a religious order and had taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. While he owned practically nothing himself, the community he belonged to was far from ascetic. They had beautiful cars to drive, they ate very well, they were given tickets to all the hot sporting events. There were many “benefactors” of the order whose donations guaranteed a lifestyle to which people experiencing real poverty could only dream about.
So how much should a devout Catholic opt out of American society? And particularly for the very affluent, how seriously should Jesus’s words be taken about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom? And should I have foregone the pound of rugelach I bought yesterday for $14 at Andre’s Hungarian Bakery and given the money to the poor?
David,
Most people not that Jesus’ answer here is in context with the young man himself; his answer was the medicine for that young man himself and his improper association with his goods. He was called to be something others were not, one of Jesus’ close disciples — which did require much and the giving up of much. However, his failings and weaknesses are not the same as with others; we do see Jesus does not condemn others who have money; indeed, Zacchaeus is shown to have a better understanding of his possessions, which is why he was willing to give of it to others, without it necessarily meaning he had to give it all up. Perhaps the young man, for his own greed, had to give it all up to overcome his improper attachment to his goods, while Zacchaeus did not suffer the same affliction, so the solution is not the same.
I think we have to look at it in this way — we all have spiritual maladies, we all have various temptations and sins which afflict us more than others, and it is those which we need to deal with for our own perfection. Goods as a whole are ours only in the sense of stewardship; if one does not grasp that, then their association with their wealth is off. If they do, then they can be called to continue to possess and even increase it (as per the parable of the talents) to use it even better and help even more because of their proper association with their wealth.
I hope that helps. I’m still recovering from an illness, so I’m writing this fast without edits, and so I might have some typos/ grammatical mistakes as my thought changes mid sentence /etc, which is common when I write fast like this.
As you suggest, Henry, it is important to see Black Friday in the context of all the other holi-days of the state, including Thanksgiving, all of its war-glorifying feast days, and its perversion of “Christmas” which most Christians even celebrate. The religion of america is one of military-consumerism in the words of Walter Bruggemann.
And should I have foregone the pound of rugelach I bought yesterday for $14 at Andre’s Hungarian Bakery and given the money to the poor?
David – I’ll take it off your hands if it’ll make you feel better ;)
David – a lot depends on your vocation, or what you think your vocation is. As a single guy, I don’t need many goods but I save prudently in the hope of a married life. Prudence in saving, temperence in spending, justice in charitable giving.
Henry – feel better.
Henry and Pinky,
The question still remains — no matter what one’s interpretation of that particular story is, or even setting aside the whole New Testament — how can I justify having so much when there are some who have nothing? How can I justify luxuries when some people don’t have necessities?
David
The New Testment makes matters easier than reason in this area and Henry gave the example of Zacchaeus and in line with that you have Paul writing from prison in Philippians 4:12
“I know indeed how to live in humble circumstances; I know also how to live with abundance. In every circumstance and in all things I have learned the secret of being well fed and of going hungry, of living in abundance and of being in need.”
For most human beings and apparently for Paul to some degree, that which is beyond the necessary keeps people interested in being alive. Try it. Give everything you have to the poor and monitor in the coming months if you like being alive on the planet. Most of us would not so we don’t do it but we commit to consistent giving of part of our above necessary assets. Benedict has a grand piano, Prada or personal cobbler shoes, Serenghetti sunglasses, several maids and chefs and he just ended a meeting this week with world figures who gathered to ask the rich countries to give more toward the hunger problem (like the rich countires are feeling rich right now). How does he get the hutspa to ask while he has non necessities of a costly nature? Probably because he has few such non necessities…but he has them and every Pope does.
David, to answer that question properly, a person would have to know a lot about your character and your state of life. In other words, a spiritual director. I think you need specific advice – although on the subject of poverty, St. Francis de Sales’ Introduction to the Devout Life is a great starting point.
Pinky,
Thanks for the recommendation. I have ordered a copy of the book — the 400th Anniversary Edition!
Thanks also to Henry Karlson and Bill Bannon.
I have been raising this question for 40 years without getting any answers that seemed to me to come to grips with the seriousness of the question. And now, thanks to Vox Nova, I have three.
You’re welcome David. Paul’s passage is the kind of thing that people with for example scrupulosity need to know and that is why God placed such passages there in the New Testament. Someday count the gallons of wine that Christ produced at the wedding of Cana and ask yourself if John the Baptist would have done such a thing. I don’t think he would have and yet Christ did. John wore animal skins and lived on lucusts and wild honey. Christ did not…but came “eating and drinking” so as to relate to most of mankind throughout history. The Bible is not about John the Baptist but about Christ.
David,
You are welcome; I tried — as I said, to at least give a way to look at it. I certainly think there is room for poverty, and some are called to that vocation. It is a virtue, but like what St Maximus the Confessor pointed out (and used in a recent article by me) we must follow the “middle path of virtues” which recognizes that the good for one, even if it is a higher good, must not be used to judge lesser goods.
Bill is also correct; it is easy to discount the human side, to almost gnostically reject the world and its luxuries. Consider the kinds associated with Jesus, including the oil used to anoint him. The dignity of the human person is involved with this, imo.