It’s been a busy few weeks, and coming up with motivation on this blog has been difficult at best, Lots of aspects of life have gotten in the way, and it’s made wanting to do anything with my evenings, other than just play Minecraft and veg out, difficult. I still think it’s important to keep up the discipline though, so I’m writing whatever comes to mind tonight. Consider it a mental train of thought that probably will just end up as a train wreck.

One of the things that has caught my mind lately is the concept of culture. Because America is such a new country in the history of the world, and is made up of immigrants from every corner of the world, there is a distinct lack of historical culture. What has passed for culture in our country over the past few decades is really just a sense of nationalistic pride, or sentimental longing for an era of discovery or prosperity. There isn’t much that binds America together from a ‘culture’ perspective, the same way that other countries have.

I was reminded of this when a friend who lives in China sent out his lunar year greetings. It made me think about how this country of millions has been celebrating this holiday for centuries. Everything revolves around not just a nationalistic culture, but a deep, personal and familial cultural identity.

This all is part of a stream of thought that I’ve been having lately about my own sense of personal culture (or lack there of). I grew up without much of any historical context. There were no historical or ethnic celebrations in my family beyond the typical holidays that we all celebrated. Perhaps those Hallmark holidays are what we can call our American culture, but part of me feels that they’re somewhat hollow.

It also made me think a lot about my journey of faith. How my passion and desire for a faith community, might actually have something to do with my desire for a cultural context to call my own and be a part of. I know that one of the things that drew me to Catholicism was it’s deep sense of historical tradition and ritual, both things that are deeply prevalent in many cultural experiences in human history.

Not really sure where I’m going with this whole mess of thoughts tonight, but I felt like it might be some thoughts I wanted to write down and keep track of for later musings.