The Denial of Death?

Ernest Becker wrote in his Pulitzer Price winning book, The Denial of Death, many profound things about how man copes with the fact of death. In Christian circles, idolatry (making anything else but God one’s ultimate significance) is often seen in illegal or immoral categories, but Becker’s interpretation is insightful, idolatry is a coping mechanism, to intoxicate oneself by indulgence to forget the fact that the moment we are born, we are all dying:

Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. As awareness calls for types of heroic dedication that his culture no longer provides for him, society contrives to help him forget. In the mysterious way in which life is given to us in evolution on this planet, it pushes in the direction of its own expansion. We don’t understand it simply because we don’t know the purpose of creation; we only feel life straining in ourselves and see it thrashing others about as they devour each other. Life seeks to expand in an unknown direction for unknown reasons…..

Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don’t know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one’s dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that’s something else.

It seems he was picking up on a fact that was given to us even in Ecclesiastes 9:

It is the same for all, since the same event happens to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to him who sacrifices and him who does not sacrifice. As the good one is, so is the sinner, and he who swears is as he who shuns an oath. This is an evil in all that is done under the su, that the same event happens to all. Also, the hearts of the children of man are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead.

D.A. Carson, the NT scholar, said once in a talk that the last taboo in our current culture is the subject of death, that we can openly talk about sexually explicit content without a blink, yet when you mention that someone is dying, everyone begins to squirm and silence feels heavy in the air. This may be because we are creatures of hope, we don’t realize that hope is something that cannot last in things that are seen. Even people who think they place hope in unseen things, many times don’t believe it, they don’t live it. And as Becker observed, we start to indulge ourselves, whether with alcohol or shopping, to forget our finitude. Hope is an interesting thing; it is only as strong as what you place it in, and lasts as long as its object. 

Though Becker’s description was correct, I do not think he gives a proper prescription for the problem of death. He says that we often are in denial of it, yes, but, I think, the solution is not far off. We deny death. Of course, not of our own accord or power because, again, we all die. But we deny death through one where death could not consume, where death was left impotent, where death was only a marker in time. Hope in such changes death from the end of all things to the beginning of the rest of everything.

Here is a story (from SOULPANCAKE) of a man who died today, of Zach Sobiech, who I want to believe, had this kind of hope. No, more importantly, I want to believe, he placed his hope in someone that is greater. But regardless, we can affirm that he left something respectable, something great behind for the rest of us, who will all sometime, somewhere, somehow face our death.

(seen first on “Upworthy“)

The Wisdom of Walking

It’s been conservatively calculated that at the end of an 80-year lifetime, a person would have walked 220,000,000 steps (7500/day). That is a lot of steps. A college student by the name of Andrew Forsthoefel, after being fired from his job three months after graduation, decided to take a lot of steps, 4000 miles of it (go hear for the entire podcast: This American Life: “Hit the Road”). From Philadelphia to New Orleans to the Pacific, he walked on foot across America with one rule: no rides. But the fascinating thing about his trip was not merely the feat of feet, but it was what he heard along the way. He narrates what he was doing on this long trek:

And as for why, well, I wanted to listen. After all, I was wearing a sign that said, walking to listen. And people told me about their lives, what they’d done, what they wish they’d done, whatever they thought I needed to hear. In Louisiana, a guy who let me camp out behind his trailer told me, all you’re doing is reading a book, just with your feet.

The thing is, we are all walking, somewhere, with someone. Every one of our feet has a story (or stories) to tell, and the longer they’ve walked, more likely that they have much more to say. It kinda reminds me of a blog post by a friend of mine, where we may speak different languages, but there is always a story. So then, what stories do your feet tell? Or better yet, do you care to hear where other’s have gone?

Along the way, Forsthoefel asked many people a similar question, taking all of what they have learned in life, what they would tell their previous twenty-three year old selves. My favorite response came from an elderly Southern belle.

Yeah, I wouldn’t worry so much. I used to worry myself to death. And then now I realize the things you worry about, how many of them come true? Very seldom.

I’d go barefoot more. I wouldn’t be nice. I wouldn’t be the nice little Southern girl. I’d be a bitch.

I wasn’t passive aggressive. I was just passive.

There is, more often than not, wisdom in walking. There is wisdom in age (though age doesn’t necessitate wisdom). But I wonder for us younger folk, how much we are listening. How often do we consign the elderly to obsolescence? More often than not, perhaps? It may do our generation some good to stop running as if we are running alone, to stop and listen to the feet that have walked before us. If we do, we may just not have to take as many useless steps anymore.

Stop Talking

In a casual conversation with two friends, the topic of preaching length arose. In their comments they pointed out the correlation they noticed between the length of sermons and the age of the preacher. They, interestingly, pointed out that many of the preachers who give lengthy sermons tended to be the younger ones. Of course, this claim was merely a claim of individual observation, but one comment my friend made particularly seemed to resonate: ‘When you’re older, you just understand that what you have to say isn’t really that important.’

At first glance, one may think that this friend has a hardened heart or is just immature to sit through a sermon of forty-five minutes plus. But that is because, of the two italicized words in the comment, most of us find the stress in the latter: ‘say’. That is, when we find the stress in ‘say’, we are believing that preaching is important, and rightfully so, but the above comment wasn’t stated to mean that preaching isn’t important. The actual stress was on the ‘you’, meaning, older preachers seem to have a better sense of their place in influencing change in people’s lives. They understand that 15~30 more minutes will not necessarily be of positive impact (or sometimes it’ll be of negative influence). Theologically speaking, they have a better sense of God’s sovereignty. It was interesting to notice after pondering upon my friend’s comment how much young leaders (me including) preach in our prayers. There is a level of guidance that is good in group prayer, but sometimes as one leads, they start to preach again, a prayer topic becomes a sermon as if the listeners must pray in a very specific manner, almost countering the sovereignty of intercession we can find in Romans 8:26. Ed Welch, in a CCEF blog (titled “Edit Your Counseling“) about understanding that more words are not necessarily a good thing, corroborates the goodness of brevity with an anecdote:

I submitted a chapter for a book. The editor suggested that I should aim for 8-10,000 words. After I submitted it, the publisher pulled rank and mandated that all chapters be 5,000 words or less.

I labored to cut it back but it was still over the word count. I told the editor I was at bare bones—there was nothing else I could cut. I assumed (hoped?) that he would say something like, “Oh, don’t worry about that silly word count from the publisher. Your chapter is so good they will make an exception,” or something like that.

What he actually said was, “No problem, I will edit it down to 5,000 words for you,” which he did, and the chapter was better than before. As you might guess, this word butcher is a highly skilled editor. Greater editing skill produced a chapter that is more succinct and clear.

But this is not only true in writing; the same principle applies to preaching and counseling.

Welch’s concern in the post is practical for the listener as his main point is “The more words you say, the less people understand – at least as a general rule.” But my concern, though also practical, is for the speaker. Preaching a long sermon is not inherently wrong or bad, but the concern is the heart and mentality of the preacher, where if the length of his/her words becomes a safety net for that person’s ability to change. If that is the case, maybe we place too much weight on the ‘your’ of ‘your words’. Maybe in our minds we think the words are important, when in fact, WE have become important. Again, this is not a post to say that hour long sermons are in it of themselves a negative thing, but it seems healthy to ask, “Do I have to say everything?”

At the same time the other side of the issue is not to stop talking. The Word must be preached, it must be known. But maybe the issue is that we have far detached listening from our talking. We have assumed all the questions, and forget to ask ‘one more question’ as Welch teaches in his class lectures. Harvie Conn, in Evangelism, puts it this way:

Maybe it’s time we stop asking, “Would you like to come to our church?” and begin constructing surveys around the sincere statement, “We’d really like to know why you’re not going anywhere.”

And he quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer from Life Together,

The first service that one owes to others… consists in listening to them… Many people are looking for an ear that will listen. They do not find it among Christians, because these Christians are talking when they should be listening…. Christians have forgotten that the ministry of listening has been committed to them by Him who is Himself the great listener and whose work they would share. We should listen with the ears of God that we may speak the Word of God.

This is not to say that young preachers must replace speaking with listening altogether, as listening by itself is rarely useful, but rather to put them together. For some this may mean that they listen more and talk less, for others it may even mean that they begin listening. Whichever it may be, behind our behavioral change it may be good to remember my friend’s earlier quote on the wisdom of old age, that it’s quite ok NOT to say everything, all at once, every time.

Loving God vs Loving Right

An acquaintance of mine tweeted this after the recent Justice Conference in Philadelphia, “Don’t be in love with the idea of yourself doing justice; be in love with the just King.” (If you’re curious as to his other insightful tweets, check out his blog: Kyuboem Lee.) In the wake of rising humanitarianism, which also encompasses the wider Christian population as conferences such as the Justice Conference seems to attest, Kyu’s tweet resurfaces some thoughts that are actually related to other aspects of the Christian conservative disposition.

It has come to my attention that I am not very good at loving God, and I think Christians (I should probably say American Christians) in general are not very good at it either. Of course, it would be an whole entire discussion to describe what the meaning of “loving God” is but to simplify one maybe has to take a peak at how one loves others. In Christianese (that is Christian lingo), it is often said that the vertical relationship affects the horizontal, which simply means that if you are correctly loving God, then it should show in your love for others. But it seems most do not understand how often that translation from the vertical to the horizontal does not happen so naturally. Most Christians, I believe, mistake loving what’s right with loving others, and in turn, mistaken loving God altogether. Lately, I have had the privilege of listening to a number of people who claim not to be Christian and it seems one big reflector of this ‘loving right’ tendency is reflected in the way Christians make them feel: dirty, unworthy, second-class. Even when Christians do not intend to do thus, mistakenly thinking you are loving God when you are only loving what’s right will naturally convey that sense. As somewhat of an aside, it is good Christian theology to think that all humans are sinful, dirty, unworthy, but the question of concern here is in reference to whom? Good theology says that it is in reference to God, but often in our practice of ‘loving right’ we make them feel unworthy in reference to us. This becomes very evident in Christian dealings with peccadilloes, not to say that condoning such things is the right thing to do, but raising the condoning or not condoning as the first question illustrates that our primary concern is with strictly ‘doing what’s right.’ This seems to fall in line with a critique stated by one of my professors concerning pastors of large (mega) churches, that they have the luxury to simply state unhelpful mantras like “Jesus plus nothing equals everything” because they don’t have to get into the messy lives of individuals. When throwing principles and mantras from a distance, one tends to miss the details, important details, and in worse cases, it can produce a culture of woodenly following principles as equal to ‘loving God’. This proclivity of ‘loving right’ is also illustrated in the inability of Christians to engage humanly with such complex issues as homosexuality, and in some ways, it becomes evident in almost trivial issues like underage drinking and smoking (i.e. partying). Christians are so concerned with finding what’s right, or to push the envelope, doing what’s holy, that they dehumanize those with whom they engage.

Part of the reason, which I don’t want to get into here, is that Christians a lot of times are not very humble people. The other part why this is so, I suspect, is because Christians (me including) suck at dealing with messiness. We hate it. We think it’ll taint us. We think we are actually clean ourselves. We operated in the Old Testament (Hag 2:11-13) sense that if you touch something unclean (dirty) you will become unclean (dirty). We proudly scream that Jesus gave us his rightness, but in practice, we act as if we’ve earned it by denying the manner in which that rightness was given to us. We forget that the manner in which Jesus engaged uncleanness was to plunge into it. And we forget that we live in the NT era where when the unclean touches the clean, no longer does the clean become tainted, but the unclean becomes clean (Mark 1:40-42). Ironically, the Pharisees were the ones who did not know this, they were NT people who operated in the OT schema. They could not deal with messiness around them. They made people feel dirty, unworthy, second-class. They loved being right, while thinking they were loving God. And while we think it may be so far from us, the ‘they’ starts becoming the ‘we’. We say we are loving God when all we are doing is loving what’s right. Maybe then, it’s time to pause… and acknowledge, “Maybe I don’t love God as much as I thought I did.”

The Box of Sexual Orientation

In a very thought provoking TED talk (titled “Fifty Shades of Gay”), iO Tillett Wright speaks of boxes. She speaks of how we, human beings, naturally want to put other people into boxes or ‘categories’, if you will, and she implies that by doing so we diminish the humanity of the other. She never does address why boxes are always bad (the underlying assumption in her talk), nor does she explain how self-evident relates to equality (or even diversity!). As much as she works these terms toward the emotional (which isn’t a bad thing), she does offer much food for thought. One such is to ponder how we, particularly Christians, box other people into one-dimensional cartoons, and how that affects the way we engage one another. Recognizing multiplicity isn’t necessarily the panacea for discrimination, but it’s something worth mulling over. (I am also very curious as to peoples reactions to the talk. Comment!)

 

The Death of ‘Dating’ (whatever that means…)

In the world of generational categories, I fall in the sociological grouping called Generation X. It’s the generation that spans from the early 1960′s to the early 1980′s right after the Baby Boomer generation. Known to be uniquely characterized by independence and self-sufficiency, it seems to be a favorable thing to have just made the cut, into Generation X. This is so, not only because independence and self-sufficiency are good qualities (they can be poor qualities more than we realize), but because the next generation, the Millennials are a grouping with which I’d not like to be associated. The Millennials, people who are roughly born between 1982 and 1999, are characterized, particularly in the workplace, by having problems with personal interaction and conflict resolution. Rex Huppke gives a conversational anecdote of the said characteristics of the Millennials in the Chicago Tribute article “Millennials struggle with confrontation at work“:

Gravett said that in a recent focus group with 10 millennials, the subjects said they prefer to text someone they’re having a problem with rather than speak by phone or face to face.

“I asked them why they won’t just talk to someone over coffee or something,” she said. “And they said, ‘Oh, that’s too personal.’”

Another millennial told Gravett that the boss had yelled at him. She asked whether the boss raised his voice. The millennial said, “No.”

She asked whether the boss used profanity. The millennial said, “No.”

“So I said, ‘Explain to me what yelling at you means,’ and the young man said, ‘Well, he was really firm and he disagreed with me.’ He took that as being yelled at.”

Oh boy. If having someone disagree with you is akin to yelling, your work life is going to be deafening.

Unfortunately for the average Millennial, this problem with personal interaction and conflict resolution does not seem to only remain in the professional realm but also affects them in the social world. Alex Williams writes in a NY Times article titled, “The End of Courtship?” about how the social media and online dating sites have turned the new generation into people who are novices at face-to-face interaction.

Relationship experts point to technology as another factor in the upending of dating culture.

Traditional courtship — picking up the telephone and asking someone on a date — required courage, strategic planning and a considerable investment of ego (by telephone, rejection stings). Not so with texting, e-mail, Twitter or other forms of “asynchronous communication,” as techies call it. In the context of dating, it removes much of the need for charm; it’s more like dropping a line in the water and hoping for a nibble.

“I’ve seen men put more effort into finding a movie to watch on Netflix Instant than composing a coherent message to ask a woman out,” said Anna Goldfarb, 34, an author and blogger in Moorestown, N.J. A typical, annoying query is the last-minute: “Is anything fun going on tonight?” More annoying still are the men who simply ping, “Hey” or “ ’sup.”

Williams appropriately quotes Andrea Lavinthal in identifying us as “all [having] Ph.D.’s in Internet stalking these days.” But is it really merely the fact that the Millennials have replaced the skill of personal interaction for expertise in navigating cyberspace that has led to this so-called death of dating? Possibly, if we are speaking of surface level influences. A look deep enough at the phenomenon of the ‘death of dating’ should actually quite naturally lead to the following questions: Was our idea of dating correct to begin with? What are we trying to recover? Or moreover, why are we so averse to confrontation?

The answer? I am unsure. It would be presumptuous of me to claim to know this answer to the problems of the non-confrontational Millennials and the end of courting, but it would be unhelpful to just remain silent on the issue, not to mention, I would be acting non-confrontational. A suggestion that could be made is to begin to think of our cultural problems not in terms of technology or dating, but in terms of the notion of ‘autonomy’, which lies deeper than technological circumstances (Possibly a residual effect of the independence and self-sufficiency of Generation X). Non-confrontation go hand in hand with the popular idea of tolerance in that they both tout individualism over and against any sense of dependence. The overemphasis of individualism causes any conflicts or even minor disagreements to seem like attacks on the independent volition of the person against whom there is a disagreement. Then we eventually end up jettisoning any ideas of persuasion and pejoratively label any act that convinces another as proselytizing. All types of discussion enter into no man’s land, and friendly debate is perceived as a war zone. No wonder a disagreement sounds like a yell.

You may not be convinced that autonomy is at the root of the problem (it may just be a part of the problem), but I do know one thing that is proven to be helpful in learning how to confront, which is bold humility. It means to begin any discussion, debate, or argument with the thought, “Maybe I am wrong.” Not in the sense of losing personal conviction or conceding to the erroneous philosophy of postmodernism, but in the sense of being open to listening.  I do not know how much that would help in getting that next date with the next girl, but it will certainly lower the decibel on all voices that disagree with you and would allow for healthy confrontation. Plus, if you don’t agree, you’re probably a Millennial, not concerned about getting that next traditional date.

Essential Extravagance of Festivities

‘Tis the season to be jolly~ fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la~~.

Jolly. Joy. Jubilee. Christmas is a time to celebrate. The colors, the music, hot chocolate warming a set of cold hands, the tinkle of the salvation army bell, the crowds and floats of the Macy’s parade, chestnuts roasting on an open fire (yes, I had to throw that one in); the air of December twenty-fifth moves us to celebration. Of course, not all celebrate the same things. The Christian will obviously celebrate Christ. The Jew, Chanukah (of course not the same day but the same month). And the atheist and agnostic still celebrate family and friends, or maybe one just celebrates the day off. Regardless of what the object of celebration is, Christmas is a time to be jolly, joyful, jubilant.

Often the Christian message that I hear in this season of December is a message that contends against the swing of culture toward materialism and for bringing the day back to celebrating the one who started the holiday, Christ. It is a true and profound message. But as I contemplate this message of anti-materialism slash gratitude of the Ultimate Gift, I’ve come to realize one thing. I’m not good at celebrating. In having processed the message of anti-materialism, I have become a poor participator of festivities. I have subconsciously filed in my mind all extravagance into the category of frivolities. And I have to say, I blame Christianity.

The culture of Christianity has historically found difficulty in accommodating the extravagant. It has often, for the sake of ultimates and essentials, sidelined the extravagant. And along the way, function has taken over form as the better half of the created order. If an object has no usefulness or function, it is difficult to find a place in the realm of modern Christianity. Art, in particular, is a victim of this tendency. The artistic has become at times unnecessary. People have asked, “Why pour resources in such a frivolous endeavor when there are essential needs in this world?” Christians have said, “Fashion is so extravagant that it’s so unimportant compared to the essential needs of injustice.” Yes, it is true that the artistic, music, paintings, dance, comedy, musicals, films and fashion, are all things that do not scream ‘urgent’. But for some reason, the culture of Christianity has concluded that the extravagant is never essential. Jed Perl, the art critic of The New Republic, writes in his article titled, “Put In Your Oar“, that the arts are sometime shoved into places of being efficient, but he contends that the arts are necessarily inefficient, and that its extravagance is essential:

In perilous times, those who love the arts quite naturally go on the defensive. They try to prove that the arts are in fact cost effective. They are playing a dangerous game. Too much can too easily be reduced to crowds and numbers crunching. Some argue that public arts funding boosts tourism. Others theorize that arts education improves children’s brains. And in publishing, the defenders of the now-endangered mid-list author argue that you will only find the next bestseller if you take a chance on what may initially look like modest books. I am certainly not advocating fiscal or institutional irresponsibility. In my experience, creative people are among the more fiscally responsible citizens, simply because they cannot afford to be otherwise. But I think we must insist on the fundamental inefficiency of the arts, on their essential extravagance.

I do not know where Perl’s faith lies, but he does offer the modern culture of Christian functionalism some good advice. Extravagance and essential are not antonyms. To always pit extravagance against the notion of essential is to lose the full Christian worldview. It is to make Christmas decorating a wasteful endeavor. It makes gift giving worthy only if the gift fits the functional needs of the recipient. It turns us into robots of efficiency. It makes us incapable of being jolly, joyful, and jubilant. So at the turn of this Christmas day, I will remember the One who came to save those who would believe, but I will also learn to sit, frivolously enjoying the Christmas lights, music and company, and at times enjoying extravagance, because that I believe is the glimpse of the world into which He save us.