Culture of Having Against Culture of Becoming

The Culture of Having (CH) refers to the endless desire to possess, acquire, appropriate and to amass material things for one’s use and consumption.

The Culture of Becoming (CB) refers to a universal desire to renew, to grow, to transform oneself, to be a new person.

CH is normal daily human need to sustain one’s physical life. That is why it is endless. It ends ultimately with death. The proper way to pursue this desire is to Have only that which makes for a Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body which the Latins expressed literally by Mens Sana In Corpore Sano. But if CH is overused, unused, misused or abused it is dangerous and can be fatal.

CB promotes the beauty of character, of a well-behaved person. Aided by divine grace a human person can be formed, transformed and become a new person like Jesus of Nazareth, the Resurrected Christ, the most perfect human being, God in human form.

The human Self is conscious that it possesses two realities: the temporal and the eternal. CH and CB are therefore formative processes that integrate what is temporal and eternal in us.