random thoughts on anachronism

I recently came across a quote in an add which read;

"I dwell in two worlds simultaneously. I co-exist in the modern era as if in
exile while my imagination resides in a glorious past that might never have
existed. This modern world is too empty for me, too devoid of passion. So,
now I
live for the songs of steel, the frenzy of battle and the peans of
victory."

Where does this fascination for the past come from. In recent years beginnning in the nineteen eighties onward there has been a revival of all things histoircal. In Canberra there is a sweeping craze of "lindybombing", where groups of dancers invade a public space and do the charlston or bopp away to "minnie the moocher".

While the decadence and frivolity may be remebered, the context is forgotten. The horror of war, the sense of loss, the financial collapse and the sense of tightening your belt.

In another part of town grown men and women dress in medieval garb and slug it out with broadswords while a continent away enthusiasts refight the battles of the American Civil war.
We have become obsessed with our collective pasts, and captives to it.

It seems as postmodern man we now find the age of our fathers and grandfathers more understandable than the age and culture in which we find ourselves. Or perhaps this behaviour is anti- post modernist in that it hearkens back to a previous age before ones identity was based on what one consumed (read could buy).

Are we really merely exchanging one mask for another. Is our behaviour really an admission that we would preffer to live in someones rose coloured memory than in a world in which we feel increasingly isolated from any sense of real community.

The question which puzzles me is this, "Can there be any unity (community) without truth?" Martin Luther believed there cannot, and for that precise reason was accused of chism.
If truth is indeed a person, and that person is Jesus Christ, there can only be true unity in his church.