The search for 'rootedness' in comtemporary culture.

"It is not industry that makes men restless, but false impressions of things drive them mad."

Seneca, On the shortness of life.

"Did you know that the increasingly popular pastime of genealogical research--searching out information about our family roots, our past--has become one of our leading leisure pursuits in the Western world?" The priest's words struck a chord. Imagine that. Surpassing even the nation's healthcare and fitness fads, cooking and diet obsessions and a myriad of other self-help gigs, finding about our own family roots has become big business.

The priest was making the point that our 'mobile', ever-on-the-move, generation has developed such a powerful sense of its own rootlessness and lack of belonging that genealogical research, with the aim of finding our place in the greater scheme of things, has now become an national obsession--a surrogate new religion.

We move home every few years, we spend hours getting to and from our place of work, and we travel enormous distances to holiday destinations. It is this constant mobility that it is suggested increases our growing sense of a lack of roots.

Genealogical research, boosted enormously by the arrival of Internet search capabilities, has brought researching family roots within the grasp of all of us. And with it has grown the inevitable 'expert' industry. Family research gurus have now joined the army of lifestyle gurus who tell us what to eat, how to be fit and healthy, what to wear, what to drink, and even what to think. As the minister observed, "Gurus or experts are only too willing to appear and tell us ... for a price--and there are only too many willing to receive from them." Ironic, is it not, that in this age of the strong, self-determining postmodern mind, we should be scouring musty records in dusty old churches in the hope of rediscovering our sense of rootedness and belonging?

Whole TV channels are now given over to offering lifestyle choices and 'expert' advice. When we go to the newsstands, we are jostled visually by a phalanx of different-yet-somehow-the-same shiny and colourful lifestyle magazines. And on each cover the latest smiling guru beckons us to buy--and learn the 'secret.' We know well enough that dictum of the latest popular guru one day will probably be reversed by another the next. Still it does not deter us. We want to search every word of what they have to say, just the same.

Though somewhere inside we know that we have heard it or read it all before, we are undeterred and pour hard-earned cash into the pockets of the latest 'authority.' Again we miss the irony. By selling us their 'secrets,' what has worked for them, they have become rich. But, after buying all the books, CD's and taking all the courses, we find that somehow it doesn't quite work for us.

Due south in the Wild West they had a name for purveyors of society's quick-fix elixirs: snake-oil salesmen. Today we live in the ultimate quick-fix generation. We flit around and search for the 'cure-all' to the gnawing 'godhole' in our soul. Thus our highly self-esteemed mobile generation, with its grandiose sense of individualistic, anti-authoritarian freewheeling self-assertiveness, inadvertently reveals itself as really quite needy, quite dependent. And as each generation's preferred pastimes reveal much about its needs and diversions, so the burgeoning genealogical research industry reveals the deep desire of our generation to discover who we really are and where we fit in.

What are we really learning?

But what are we really learning from all our TV viewing and glossy magazine culture and its wealth of guru expertise? Well, for one thing, we might observe cynically, the experts are getting richer while we are not. But, more significantly, that the glossy magazine culture is actually feeding our faddish minds with fragmented pieces of realities with which to piece together a coherent and spiritual view of the world.

Neil Postman, in his seminal work Amusing Ourselves to Death, on the deleterious effect of the TV culture on the modern mind, put it this way: "Everyone is entitled to an opinion ... but these opinions are of quite a different order from eighteenth-or-nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions, which would account for the fact that they can change from week to week ... television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation."

"Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information--misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information--information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result."

It is not just television and the consumer magazine culture which feeds the malaise. It is the whole nature of our soundbite culture. That is why so many of us, it seems, are quite prepared to disengage and go searching for 'our roots.' Even so, it seems, as Mick Jagger's generational anthem put it: we "can't get no satisfaction."

In an era of falling religious faith, we appear to be clinging just as tenaciously to faith in guru 'saviours' as a vital social component in our search for belonging. I believe I get my 'rootedness' through faith in the Judeo-Christian God. A growing number, it seems, prefer mooching around in the church crypt beneath my feet in search of theirs. Others meanwhile pursue very different gods.

All of us ought to enjoy our gentle pastimes and leisure pursuits. But the dramatic rise of genealogical research to a national pastime, even obsession, perhaps betrays a key social misunderstanding. That the army of gurus who inhabit our TV screens, and who smile out from the covers of a mind-boggling array of national glossies, may just have less spiritually rooted 'secrets' and answers than we hope or think.

Faith in what?

Also highly revealing is our national pursuit to recover a sense of belonging, a rootedness. It seems that, ultimately, whatever our opinions, far more of us betray ourselves as people of faith after all. We might like to deny that faith as 'religious;' nevertheless it has all the same observable trappings--and lack of 'scientific' empirical proof. When it comes right down to it all of us 'live by faith.' The question is not therefore whether we possess 'faith.' Rather the question becomes: faith in what or in whom?

Referring to the false 'gurus' of his day, in fact the OT 'church' leaders the Pharisees, Jesus said: "Let them alone. They are blind leaders of the blind; and if one blind person leads another, both will fall into a pit." (Mt. 15:14). His concern was not for the 'lifestyle gurus' who asked the rootless to put their faith in them and their strict rules of human devising but for those who saw that the 'peace which passes all understanding" and gave them rootedness, had to be found elsewhere.

Do Canadians have faith?

Canadians, like many others in the Western world today, appear confused about the nature of what faith means in practice. Four in ten Canadians, according to a recent CanWest poll, believe they have been in the presence of God, and nearly a third say they have had a religious or mystical experience. But only 17 percent report attending church regularly compared with 36 percent of Americans. Just like all modern 'rootedness,' it is today seen in terms of individualized 'privatization of faith' and not in any sense a communal catholicity of faith. As Andrew Greville, senior vice-president of Ipsos Reid, which conducted the poll put it: "There's a huge gap between those who believe and those who belong." So even the majority of those Canadians who claim to believe, so it seems, lack genuine rootedness through faith in a body beyond their own.

Genealogies may interest us all. Even the Bible considers them important. But one day, rootlessness revealed in our never finding the community to which we truly belong, ought to end as we are grafted into another body--Christ's. As Cardinal Newman put it: "We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe." Sojourning may have its pleasures and national citizenship its privileges. But a real sense (that peace that passes understanding) of belonging and rootedness can come only through faith in Christ and his body, the Church Catholic.

Peter C. Glover is a freelance writer and journalist, as well as the site director as www.globalwarminghysteria.com.