Are we disposable?  A recent work by Josh Kline, an artist living in New York, speaks to this question.  It's called "Cost of Living," and features a cart with various objects, including a head, shoe, spray bottles, and notepads.  It's not intended to last, nor is it expected to emphasize any connections between its parts.  This work is a statement about the culture of disposability that seems rampant in many parts of the West today. We are so quick to dispose and disconnect, so eager to find the new, so happy to replace what we have for what we believe to be something better, something improved, something that we believe will allow us to do something a little bit more easily.  Many of us live to dispose.
     Things do wear out, of course, and we may well find virtue in supplanting what we have always used to do something with something which enables us to do it more effectively.  Time, and ingenuity, march on.  It's nature of humanness to innovate and change.
     Yet I wonder if in constantly innovating we forget the weight of what has preceded us, the force of the many streams of tradition that have shaped what we are capable of doing today.  As Isaac Newton remarked in response to his alleged genius in discovering gravity, "I stand on the shoulders of giants."  Newton was well aware that what had been had been, the state of science and culture to that point, had prepared and enabled him to come up with his pivotal insight into the nature of the universe.  He knew he could not operate in the isolation of the present moment.
     So yes, we replace, and yes, we change.  For those of us in the West, this is easier to do than it has ever been.  Increased opportunities for recycling, commercial pressure to devise new products or variations of existing ones, and our innate propensity to suppose the "grass is greener," blend and combine to spur us, always and ever day, to move on.
     It's a tricky balance.  On the one hand, we revere what is.  On the other hand, we strive to see what can be.  It is the wise person who understands that what can be is only so because what has been is meaningful, and this because it is grounded in a meaningful God.
     Dispose or retain:  what will you do?