Worthlessness and the pattern of hope: an Advent meditation

In the spirit of Advent, I recently re-read CS Lewis's essay, "The Grand Miracle". This is not an obvious Advent reading, but a great one because in it Lewis hangs the meaning and purpose of all things on the Incarnation.

The story of the Incarnation, Lewis argues, is a story of descent and resurrection, and this particular motif sets the pattern for the entire natural (and supernatural) world. Seeds die in the soil to be reborn into great plants and trees. Likewise, many things in our spiritual lives must be killed and broken in order to become bright and strong and splendid.

Watching early daylight pierce the mist to invade a dark stand of forest outside my window, I felt deep gratitude for this universal pattern of light invading the darkness. But turning inward, I had to admit I felt areas of darkness for which I held no tangible hope of light and redemption.

Human life seems to entail an increasing reckoning with dreams and hopes that will never reach fruition. Youth is blessed with almost ubiquitous potential. Anything is possible. At the point you realize one of those hopes has fallen from that bright realm of possibility, a weight of sadness lands like a flake of snow in the night. We feel the slow pressing down of hope under accumulated sadness and the cold dark, not of waiting or yearning, but of forced giving up.

I pondered deep wounds incurably frozen behind the passage of time, but paradoxically present. "Will the light someday shine even here?"

This morning I happened upon Isaiah 49☨, because I wanted to read out of the sorrow, up into all that messianic hopeful stuff in the Isaiah 50s. I wanted to find the inflection point of hope and savor it a bit.

Chapter 49 begins with some wonderful Christmas hope from the messianic Servant's mouth: "The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name. He made my mouth like a sharp sword...and he said to me, 'You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.'"

But the next verse—4—befuddled me: "And I [the Lord's Servant] said, 'Uselessly I tired in vain, and for nothing I gave my strength. On account of this my judgment is from the Lord, and my toil before my God.'"

I am well-accustomed to the accounts of Jesus' profound suffering, and the many challenges that hindered his public ministry. Perhaps I tend to think more about his exemplary stamina and less about his actual discouragement, because he seemed to be aware that his task was ultimately to be a sacrifice. Whether I should or not, I tend to imagine Jesus facing immense hardship along with certain hope, not actually facing hopelessness.

But Isaiah 49:4 is a clear prophetic expression of God's suffering Servant undergoing hopelessness. He's not saying, "This is hard, this is painful, but it's worth it." He's saying, "I don't have the comfort that this pain will be worth anything in the end. I'm suffering for nothing."

This discouragement I understand. And it's exactly this feeling that has been the source of my most painful experience of separation from God. I wish I had noticed during that time the second statement, "my judgment is from the Lord, and my toil before my God." The Messiah at least still believed God would witness his useless pain, and that would mean something.

However, I believe he suffered real hopelessness. It should be asked, was he actually failing, or just needing to check his perspective and do a little spiritual-emotional bootstrapping? Arguably, he experienced real failure. He was actually rejected, both overall by his nation, and over and over in many particular instances.

When I've experienced hopelessness, I've suffered on top of that black weight the shame that my suffering is also a consequence of my own warped perspective. If I could just think in a more godly way, my inner critic whispers, I'd see the real value in the situation and be encouraged. (Talk about pointless suffering.)

But here is the beautiful thing for me in Isaiah 49: God's comforting response to his beloved suffering Servant can both legitimize the real failure (rejection by the Israelite nation) and at the same time overcome it:

It is too light a thing that you should be my servant, to establish the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the dispersed of Israel; behold, I have given you for a covenant of a race, as a light for the nations, for you to be for deliverance unto the end of the earth... Sanctify the one treating his life as worthless... Say to the ones in bonds, "Come forth!" and to the ones in darkness, "Be uncovered!"

In short, hope of redemption doesn't lie solely in the undoing of the wound or failure you see. You can grieve it. God doesn't de-legitimize hardship. God's pattern of hope changes the "about-ness" of hardship. Don't be surprised if you hear those same words, "It is too small a thing..." Because you are bound up in the same pattern as the Servant.

It is possible to see a particular aim as hopeless, but that does not mean the pain spent on that aim is worthless. The thing you desired may not come back to life. The dying and resurrecting is going on inside of you. If you're feeling the sting of suffering poisoned with the fear it is also needless and worthless, just know that God and CS Lewis disagree (and who else's opinion do you need, really?).

Advent isn't chiefly about gifts—material or divine. Advent is an archetype, the fulcrum of the universe where light overcomes darkness. Advent is about the implications—the hope of that universal pattern pervading all things, material and divine, displaying God's power in them.

Light overcomes darkness always and everywhere, even in the human heart. Failure is real. Death is real. But the pattern of hope co-opts them. It takes time, often long and painful time. But God's universal Advent pattern always means hope for the hopeless, including Jesus himself.

Sanctify our worthlessness, O Lord.

☨ Bible quotes from ESV and Greek interlinear

Photo credit: Kevin Dooley

Adversity: Death by a Thousand Cuts, or Practice for Greatness

Adversity: a matter of perspective

Relatively little in our daily circumstances is under our control. But how we frame our circumstances greatly influences our actual experiences.

Matt was spending his precious time off work toting his young son through the cavernous aisles of Home Depot looking through dozens of samples of flooring and light fixtures.

He didn't care about how the floor in his new home would end up looking, but he and his wife were pushing hard to move out of their apartment, and their gutted future residence had to have something for floor and finishings.

Thought it didn't feel worthwhile, Matt had no choice to but to burn his time off on trivial details. He had co-founded a tech company, and he could face almost any kind of challenge. But an endless sea of mind-numbing trivialities felt like it could be his undoing. Shadow work, though often necessary, lacks the satisfaction of real accomplishment, and it made Matt feel petty, unproductive, and depressed.

Frame 1: death by a thousand cuts

Lingchi is the ancient Chinese torture known as "death by a thousand cuts." It was intended to rob the victim of physical and spiritual dignity by killing him slowly with petty strokes of a knife, leading up to dismemberment and sending him to the afterlife in useless pieces--a non-being.

This happens on a metaphorical level to 21st-century mankind through subtle daily adversity that eludes full recognition. Our historically unprecedented standard of living doesn't mitigate our petty hardships; on the contrary, it deepens them with the unsettling guilt that we somehow ought to be happy yet aren't. Our minor adversities feel trivial when stacked up against our privilege--embarrassingly so--but their incessant slicing bleeds out vital energy nonetheless.

Left unchecked, this perspective on adversity, like persistent laceration, deepens and can ultimately leave one feeling he's in a cruel kind of "Meet the Parents" world, where everything and everyone just seems to be against him. Sarcasm and cynicism can drag one down even further, into life-threatening clinical depression, even with a loving family and a full bank account.

Fortunately, it's not typically our circumstances that are the problem, it's a matter of framing.

Frame 2: practice for greatness

Adversity is what happens to someone. A challenge, on the other hand, is a test one willfully accepts. Adversity is passively suffered for no meaningful purpose. A challenge is meaningful, and is passed or failed--and, pass or fail, leads to growth.

Accepting daily annoyances as challenges rather than adversity effects a subtle change in your view of the world.

Ten minutes on hold to speak to an unhelpful customer service rep may seem beneath you and a waste of time. But what if someone put that challenge to you--just to see if you could endure it and, like a decent human being, be genuinely polite at the end of the call? You might not even consider that a worthy challenge, but chances are you would feel a small, satisfying sense of accomplishment after proving yourself.

This paradox of framing shows up in C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. Screwtape, a senior devil, instructs his junior tempter Wormwood to keep the human subject from recognizing his daily, trivial trials are actually tests of obedience and grown from "the Enemy" (God):

He also, in theory, is committed to a total service of the Enemy; and if the Enemy appeared to him in bodily form and demanded that total service for even one day, he would not refuse. He would be greatly relieved if that one day involved nothing harder than listening to the conversation of a foolish woman; and he would be relieved almost to the pitch of disappointment if for one half-hour in that day the Enemy said, "Now you may go and amuse yourself." Now if he thinks about his assumption for a moment, even he is bound to realize that he is actually in this situation every day.

Consider the value of co-opting life's mundane challenges as "practice" for what matters most in your life--your character.

Accepting these challenges regularly works a lot like the diligence of showing up to practice. One can look at life's annoyances and stresses as random hardship in a chaotic world, or one can find purposefulness and beautiful utility in how the very exercises one needs most find their way to him.

The artificially imposed challenges one finds in self-improvement books get applied to us based on our own self-knowledge, which can be wildly inaccurate. These naturally occurring challenges, however, brilliantly target our weakest areas, because that is what makes them "challenges" in the first place. Though we often don't know what our own weak areas are, we intuitively tend to give them a wide berth, because they are uncomfortable. Likewise we tend to practice intentionally what we are already good at, which is what we need least.

Rather than camping out where you feel the strongest, just for a day try watching for what feels most frustrating or uncomfortable, and intentionally frame and embrace those things as "practice".

When challenge is framed in this way, repetition, too, becomes instructive rather than exasperating. In other words, if it keeps coming back and still feels hard, you haven't beaten it yet.

Maybe your Achilles' heel is an annoying coworker. Realize that that person may be a custom-tailored growth plan guaranteed to make a significant positive difference in your life. All you have to do is accept the challenge as such.

Not all challenges are small. But like all practice, the difficulty grows as you progress. The harder and more sticky the challenge, the more encouragement you can feel in recognizing you have been found worthy of advanced training.

When you frame a challenge as practice, it's no longer categorically lumped in with the many frustrations of life. Rather, it's a 30-second surprise exercise, which is where real personal and spiritual growth lies.

Practicing the things you are good at may make you feel good, but it will not change you. We perform impressive feats for ourselves because we like being good at something. But we try to dodge petty adversity, because we consider it merely a time suck. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, petty adversity cannot be dodged. It comes to us unbidden. It must either be endured or embraced.

Today we fetishize image-based growth and personal development, and wonder why they always feel eerily hollow. Our Western, post-industrialist culture that tells us "productivity" is the meaning of life, and that seen personality trumps hidden character. But we've been sold a bill of goods.

History shows the path to true greatness is through lowliness, which is usually invisible to others. This principle of understated greatness undergirds the monotheistic faiths and much of Eastern thought. "He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much." "The tree laden with fruits always bends low." "Rivers and seas reign over mountains by keeping below them."

Rather than sticking to your lofty strengths, stoop to the easy things in which you fail. We always learn more in the realm of our failures than in our successes.

Likewise, excellence in the little, lowly things builds a strong foundation for great ones because it builds the true character of the person. Seemingly great men often topple because they lack this foundation of character.

If you can in humility bend to the level of your weaknesses, and see them as practice for true greatness, you will begin to find a strange satisfaction in life's little, frustrating challenges, because they will become meaningful and, not only worthwhile, greatly important.

Life, even mundane life, can be full of real growth and fulfillment when you notice and accept those small challenges that come along. A few daily victories in what is least can accumulate quickly into deep growth of character and spirit, because those challenges are more finely tuned to your real needs than any self-improvement program you could ever set up for yourself. 

All the practice you need has been selected for you, and is already waiting at your door. Frame it as such; don't miss practice.

Watch for the Butler

Last night I dreamed I and a small group of others were planning to sneak into a palatial house to steal something from an evil organization headquartered there. The emotional tenor of the dream was sad, almost hopeless. The task seemed unlikely to succeed, perhaps impossible, because of the power and control of those we were opposing.

Sure enough, before we were even inside, the butler opened the door and identified us. He knew exactly what we were trying to do. We were found out before we even began.

But then he smiled. He didn't turn us in, or take us captive. He led us into the household, up circuitous carpeted stairs and down a long hallway, to a very different place from where we'd hoped to go to carry out the theft.

It turned out that he too opposed the household, and was subverting it from the inside, under the guise of one of its most trusted servants. He had been waiting for us. Rather than helping us steal anything, though, he set us to work doing other tasks he determined--things that led to other things, endless secret projects to subvert the power and control of the household. Some of the tasks were hard to understand, but they linked strategically over time into an elaborate, brilliant plan.

That plan of his design would prove far more significant and damaging to the household than our initial simplistic theft, doomed to fail. Only with the butler's help were we able to infiltrate the place, be kept safe and undetected, and be given the information necessary to overthrow the household completely and finally.

After waking up, memory of the past few days returned, and I realized without question the origin of the dream. The day before, the Holy Spirit had been much on my mind. I had been asking Him for help and for courage to face the daunting, seemingly impossible tasks I perceived needed doing in the world around me. And in the preceding days, I'd also been encountering unexpected people and circumstances that revealed amazing opportunities I never could have planned, opportunities to build the coming benevolent kingdom and subvert the present kingdom of darkness.

My sleeping imagination had synthesized a deep truth for me. Most of the things I initially feel need doing, often darkened by hampered hopes, are what He uses just to get me to that ominous door. That is where He meets me--and the rest of us who share the mission.

He brings us into the presence of "enemies" (rarely human ones), and teaches us the when and where and how of the intricacies of bringing His kingdom. It is detail work--exactly the right word spoken, the right wire cut, a certain beam removed, to topple the prisons that hold His loved ones, and set an entire world free.

The dream itself felt like a secret message, an encoded communique of encouragement to keep moving forward watching for those covert rendezvous, where the mission as I understand it may change drastically. Thank God it's usually deeper and infinitely more complex and coordinated than the simplistic things I formulate in my own understanding.

Easter: “You've been mostly dead all day.”

Note: By this title, I in no way intend to imply that Jesus in the tomb was only "mostly dead." The resurrection was the real deal. My point is that Easter demonstrates preeminently God's power of life-giving that takes many other forms as well.
 

The other day I was reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. She says God "deals so extravagantly and unfathomably in death—death morning, noon, and night, all manner of death...Our bodies are shot with mortality."

Annie Dillard finds an inspiring courage through the memento mori of nature. But when I read this passage, it troubled me. Easter was coming up, and the words of the angel at the tomb echoed in my mind: "Why do you look for the living among the dead?" Jesus Himself said of the Father, "He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all are alive to him."

Like Inigo Montoya, I find defining terms helpful. Otherwise we keep using words that do not mean what we think they mean. What is death? Is it merely a terminal physical malady? If so, God’s statement would have been a bit deceptive when He told Adam and Eve that in the day they ate of the forbidden fruit they would surely die; and Satan's retort would make better sense. I find that inconceivable. Death must mean something deeper and wider than just dying.

I find much delight in being able to worship not only the God of everything, but the God of each thing. He is the God of fire. He created it. When I gaze into the searing-red, dancing flames of my campfire, I get to worship the God of fire Himself. I also get to worship the God of love, the God of thunder, the God of the sea. He made all things, but each particular thing speaks something particular about His character. He's not just a general kind of God. Patterns of His character emerge through what He makes and does.

What does Jesus mean, then, that God "is not the God of the dead"? Did we Christians get short-changed? Are we missing a category? Who is the god of the dead? I want a God still when I'm dead. God seems to spend a lot of time trying to get us to change how we think about death and dying. Jesus said to Martha, "I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live even if he dies, and the one who lives and believes in me will never die." Then Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. How many times did Lazarus die? If we believe Jesus, we have to say zero—otherwise two times. Zero makes a point worth thinking about.

I don't think that point is merely that death can lead to something good, like "going to heaven." Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus. It's odd that we make death such a simple, contained thing. Biblically speaking, both life and death extend way out into the subtleties of our day-to-day experience as moral ways. We are always experiencing forms of Life and of Death, like heat and cold. This is what I think Annie Dillard is on to, whether she knows it or not.

She describes shocking confrontations with death in nature, like a frog slowly being eaten alive by a giant water bug. Death is indeed all around us in nature, but it’s also as much within us as without. It is both visible and invisible. When I hate or envy, blood drips into the carpet. When faith and hope wane, the whiff of necrosis is in the air. Even sorrow and loneliness peer down into a dark valley of dry bones. Death comes in manifold forms, because it is in fact a kingdom spread throughout all of creation. Physical human death is only the most painfully offensive tip of the whole iceberg. We fight death all day long in our hidden fear, despair, lust, and selfishness.

Life, too, is a pattern, and a kingdom at war with—in rebellion against—the kingdom of death. Everywhere life overcomes death, the miraculous hand of God is at work.

C. S. Lewis wrote the book on miracles. I love the way he shows God as the God of life in nature. He suggests that God's miracles always reveal the consistent patterns of the kingdom of life.

"Once in the desert Satan had tempted Him [Jesus] to make bread of stones: He refused the suggestion. 'The Son does nothing except what He sees the Father do'; perhaps one may without boldness surmise that the direct change from stone to bread appeared to the Son to be not quite in the hereditary style. Little bread into much bread is quite a different matter. Every year God makes a little corn into much corn: the seed is sown and there is an increase," Lewis says.

Because death (in all its forms) is so out of character for God, Jesus, even in His victory over death did not claim to be the God of death, but the resurrection and the life—much more akin to the gods of fruitfulness and fertility. Lewis continues, "The vine is one of the blessings sent by Jahweh: He is the reality behind the false god Bacchus. Every year, as part of the Natural order, God makes wine...Once, and in one year only, God, now incarnate, short circuits the process: makes wine in a moment: uses earthenware jars instead of vegetable fibers to hold the water. But uses them to do what He is always doing. The miracle consists in the shortcut; but the event to which it leads is the usual one."

Lewis explains the horror of death we see in nature as a corruption of God's good design for life to be in and through one another: "In the universe, as we now see it, this [vicariousness] is the source of many of the greatest horrors: all the horrors of carnivorousness, and the worse horrors of the parasites, those horrible animals that live under the skin of other animals, and so on. And yet, suddenly seeing it in the light of the Christian story, one realizes that vicariousness is not in itself bad; that all these animals, and insects, and horrors are merely that principle of vicariousness twisted in one way." The greater a good, the more evil its distortion.

We tend to see Easter as a point on a line. And indeed it is the greatest turning point of history. But history is like a canvas, and God seems to like to work in layers. Jesus' words about life and death often slipped past His contemporaries' comprehension because His meaning went much deeper and wider than they could see: "Destroy this temple." "My flesh is true food." Life is best thought of as living and the purpose for living, bound together in one whole package. Likewise, death encompasses dying, but only as one of the many representations of the whole kingdom of evil, confusion, despair, and purposelessness. It’s a single pattern, easy to recognize when we look for its telltale signs.

Jesus said "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come so that they may have life, and may have it abundantly." It's good for me to be on the lookout for the subtle and invisible areas life and death that are at war with one another, especially in my own heart. When I don’t look for them, I ignore the signs of dangers creeping in, scratching for a foothold.

The life Jesus offers is not merely a binary issue of where we go after we die. It's apparently something that can "abound". With Him is the "fountain" of life, and He aims not only to save us from death, but to overwhelm us with every form of living. Life is the pattern of fruitfulness and multiplication that applies not only to loaves and fishes, but to love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness.

If life and death are things that can abound or dwindle, it's indeed possible to be "only mostly dead." We have a lot to learn from Miracle Max. Many have been worn down by despair, but Christ's way of life does not extinguish even a smoldering wick. The life of His kingdom is the kind of stuff that can get in to the smallest places, the way dough can "catch" invisible yeast from the air itself. Read the parables; the kingdom of life is about multiplication. We should never lose hope for the smallest bit of life to get in and grow and make something.

Keep your eyes open for the subtler signs of life, and of death. Creation teaches us that the pattern of life can feel slow, and takes patience, but just try stopping the spring from coming. As Lewis says, "A man really ought to say, 'The Resurrection happened two thousand years ago' in the same spirit in which he says, 'I saw a crocus yesterday.' Because we know what is coming behind the crocus. The spring comes slowly down this way; but the great thing is that the corner has been turned."

On Two Challenges to Art and Poetry

I've written an article on enjoying art and poetry for a friend's blog called Fragments. Hope you enjoy.

Dear Addie

Dear Addie, young child, don’t be fooled or benighted—
I’ll tell you the truth so you know,
And have in your heart all that schoolishness righted,
And grasp wonder well as you grow.
The breeze doesn’t blow from here to there,
Like a rivulet wand’ring at will;
The earth rolls around underneath all that air,
While the air remains fixed and still.
The trees and rocks, like your music box,
Are the tiny points jutting above;
And, pricking the tines as time unwinds,
They play out the song that we love.
Look up and see each tip-tilted tree
Whooshing as we fly along!
Press your delicate ear to a pine and hear
Its lilting and lovely song:

“Oh we know the way to the break of day,
Where the songbirds will beckon us bide,
But how can we heed, for we dare not delay
The sonata of eventide.
And oh! What delight—for then plays the night
With its blue tinkling grace notes of stars;
And they all invite the moon to ignite
Risoluto the rest of the bars.
The sunsong is long, but it sweetens the wheat,
Which quivers like golden strings.”

And you too my child, when you walk on your feet,
Make the music play wonderful things.

Some video highlights from kayaking the Rogue River in Oregon