Reflecting on Paul Berman Reflecting on Vaclav Havel

An interesting article by Paul Berman on Vaclav Havel, the late president of the Czech Republic.  There's a lot in there, and I encourage you to read the whole of it, but this is the portion that grabbed my attention: 

Havel was frightened by atheism. In his eyes, communism was atheism’s apotheosis. Communism led everyone to focus on material circumstances and to dream of improving the circumstances, and to dream of nothing else. For why should anyone dream of anything more than material improvements? More does not exist. Such was atheism’s message. To pine for a new automobile made sense, but there was no point in contemplating the state of your soul.

Havel was right to be frightened. We would do well to be frightened ourselves.  In all the talk of the economy - which is valid, the economy right now stinks - we miss the greater threat, which is the threat to our liberty this focus on material prosperity entails and thus the threat to our being as individuals before a sovereign God.  Berman gets at this a little when he also writes:

Nor was this a problem merely for the unfortunate populations who might live under a communist dictatorship. The Western-style democracies boasted of rule of law, human rights, democratic elections, market economies, and so on. Havel reminded everyone that these institutions, for all their charms, are “technical instruments,” useful only for achieving other purposes; and it was still necessary to acknowledge and refine and choose among the other purposes. In his estimation, an acknowledgment of other purposes required a notion of the transcendent.

Yet Havel and, in this article about Havel, Berman are reluctant to specify who or what that "transcendent" might be.  It is sufficient for them to acknowledge that there is such a thing, that vague "spiritual values" and references to the "human spirit" are enough to meet the need Havel so poignantly identified.  They are not.  You cannot worship and serve "that great transcendent something sort of out there where ever it might be that's bigger than us".  No, God must have an identity.  If you cannot talk to your God, cannot hear from him, cannot relate to him, then you don't really have a God.  You have a force or a power, like inertia or gravity, that you can seek to manipulate to your own ends, and your "spirituality" becomes indistinguishable from the materialism of so much of both Marxist and non-Marxist thought.

We, here in the West, are fortunate that the "technical instruments" we have are more conducive to declare the truth of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light, but we must also have a care that we use these instruments to serve - and call others to serve - the God who alone is the source of all being.