It is a mischaracterization to call Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World a dystopian novel. 1984 is dystopian because it describes a sort of “perfect” society where everyone is actually miserable. Almost everyone in Huxley’s perfect society is (for all we can tell) genuinely happy.

It is also a mischaracterization to read it as a warning about a totalitarian world government. Again, 1984 is that kind of book, and does it very well. But in BNW, the police use water-guns, and the government rarely uses coercion or physical violence (throughout the events of the novel, anyway). The main characters are told by a “World Controller” that the world was once so full of suffering that its population gladly accepted this brave new world.

Instead, Brave New World is about tendencies in human nature that are alive and well right now. The futurism of the novel is only a device to say something about what we want from our lives right now, and whether it is worth wanting.

Because almost everyone living in Huxley’s utopia is genuinely happy, the book presents us with a problem: none of us (those of us living this side of utopia) really wants “happiness”. We want grandeur. We want vengeance and adventure and glory. We want freedom, catharsis, power. Sex and food and war and holiness and motherhood. Each of the things we want is incompatible with the others, and they’re all fundamentally incompatible with happiness.

But if it were possible to eliminate, tame, or satiate all these messy wants by keeping them constantly satiated—would we then be happy? This book answers with a resounding yes, but forces us to ask, Is happiness itself even worth wanting?

Huxley demonstrates, with remarkable emotional salience, that happiness itself is elusive, illusory, and fragile—a strange, unnatural thing to pursue. A thing we wouldn’t want even if we got it. After reading this book, I’m not even sure the word “happiness”—when used to describe this broad, all-encompassing thing that life is supposed to be about—refers to anything real at all.

All those mad wants make happiness impossible. If you don’t get what you want, you’re unhappy, but if you do, you probably made someone else unhappy in the process. And how long does it take after getting what you want before some new (probably stronger) desire rears its head?

Huxley’s utopia shows us that the price of getting what you want is having what you once wanted. It shows us that, unlike itself, the unhappy world in which we live is the inevitable result of everyone who ever lived up till now pursuing what they wanted. The sages of Buddhism have observed this fact and offered a pretty spot-on diagnosis for it: Desire creates suffering. The various remedies Buddhism offers tend to converge on the idea of overcoming desire through asceticism and good deeds. But don’t get it twisted: the end goal in Buddhism is a state where, rather than getting anything you might want, you extinguish the cycle of wanting and suffering altogether (“Nirvana” means something like “blowing out” or “extinguishing”).

The utilitarian engineers of Huxley’s utopia take the total opposite approach of Buddhism. They attempt to reduce suffering as much as possible for the greatest number of people by shrinking the gap between desires and the fulfillment of those desires. And near-universal happiness is achieved. They create a world where what little suffering there is is brief, mild, and manageable. Where “god” (or the omnipotent, omnibenevolent government, anyway) never gives you more than you can handle.

The result is a world without the irrational disasters that follow from passion, grief, ambition, and religious devotion. A world without any broken hearts. A world without glory or grandeur or love. A world without boredom or disappointment. And, most strikingly, a world without parents, lovers, sons, daughters, tribes, or nations.

It’s a world utterly unrecognizable to you and me, repulsive to almost anyone who reads the book. By way of extreme contrast, the book reflects back to the reader his own loyalty to the cosmos that he lives in, no matter how much it foils and stifles happiness, how full it is with suffering. It awakens the passions of what Chesterton called a “Cosmic Patriot”: a person with loyalty and love for the cosmos—for this cosmos—despite its disappointments, frustrations, and torments.

Nietzsche said that "he who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” He was right, but there’s another side to that coin: the greater the why is, the harder the how. Huxley’s world (which is just our own with the saturation and contrast cranked up) makes the hows infinitely easier by fracturing and shrinking the whys into impulses and whims that never go unsatisfied. I returned from my visit to that world convinced, in my bones and in my guts, that a truly happy human is not one whose suffering is extinguished, nor one whose longings are constantly being satisfied, but one whose life is suffused with great love (no matter the suffering—no matter all the terrible hows—that come with it).

Camus said that “one must imagine Sisyphus1 happy”. He was arguing that the only courageous response to the obvious meaninglessness of life was to embrace the absurdity and launch headfirst into doing whatever the hell you want, no matter how cyclical and pointless it is. Camus probably would’ve hated the idea of Huxley’s utopia (my guess is that he would’ve found it to be full of cowards). But Camus’s own ideas inevitably lead to the kind of utopia that Huxley describes: a world where everyone has embraced the absurdity of life and does whatever he wants. Sisyphus lives a life that is all how and no why, and Camus imagines him “happy”. Huxley’s utopia would prove Camus right (but also produce a world without courage—something Camus was inexplicably fond of). As far as I’m concerned, Camus can keep his dull, gray Sisyphean happiness. I cannot imagine Sisyphus happy, only bored out of his god-forsaken mind.

I say that one must imagine the crucified Christ happy. But it’s a happiness that would be as unrecognizable to Camus as it would be to Huxley’s World Controllers. In Christ, we see a man suffering the greatest injustice in history, the deepest agony ever known. And we see him choosing it every second: every miserable how a willful act of goodness and kindness, even toward his enemies. An unmoved, unmitigated joy behind every move of a brow or a finger. A big enough why. A human life immersed in suffering and death and completely suffused with an eternal, undying love.

No one is shallow.
We all gotta deal with our depths.
The abysses within us.

We've all had needs go unmet,
seeds of good and evil
go unchecked.

If he's a bigot
and a dullard
and an asshole then you

are a hypocrite
and a dandy
and an asshole.

If, to you, he is all surface,
try to see that he has seen
some other version of the same damned thing

that freezes the blood in your veins too.
If he is arid, cold, hardened soil, surely
sorrows and joys are buried there,

be they cadavers or
the seeds
of something you

can't even begin to imagine
(any more than he can)

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. […] There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

- C.S. Lewis

So it recently served this up1:

Instinctively, upon a first reading, I agreed with it. Or liked the ring of it, anyway. I want my kids to grow up attending the liturgy. I have a rancher friend who chooses to keep his kids in “big church” from a pretty young age, and he has some of the most well-behaved and kind and independent kids I’ve met. A part of me wants to follow in his footsteps.

Plus… Anything that sticks it to evangelical mega-church culture in favor of more traditional liturgies tends to immediately tickle my ears. But I’ve noticed that when I see someone else saddling up that particular high horse for me, I’m usually pretty eager to jump on it, and I don’t like that about myself.

I hadn’t thought about children’s ministry much before reading this note. As a liturgy & music director, I’ve always thought of it as outside my wheelhouse, and I only became a parent two years ago, so I just didn’t have much of an opinion about it. My first reaction was to gobble up this new, spicy opinion without much critical thought, if I’m honest. But I’ve been chewing on it for a few days, and some problems have arisen for me.

The first thing that gave me pause was not theological, but personal. It’s hard for me to entertain the idea that my colleagues who pour their heart and soul into children’s ministry are participating in something as evil (or at least stupid) as Separating Children From The Worship Of The Church. That would be a terrible thing if it were what they were doing. But I’ve seen too much of the fruit of their work in the life of my church and my family to buy it. Even if Mr. Allee is right about kids being in church, he must be missing something if that’s what he thinks Sunday morning children’s ministries are doing.

I agree with him that something’s gone terribly wrong when we fail to teach our kids to participate in the worship of God by God’s people. And the consumeristic, entertainment-based approach that many evangelical churches take has certainly gone wrong in many places. It seems like that’s probably what he’s getting at, and I’d go that far with him. But this overly simplistic critique misses several important pastoral advantages of Sunday morning children’s ministries.

• Children’s Ministry is the Church worshiping. The biggest problem here is that Mr. Allee takes for granted that what happens in “children’s church” is not worship. From where I’m standing, every Sunday, every K-4th grader in my church participates in Corporate Worship. They spend time with other Christians. They have scripture read and taught to them. They pray. They sing songs to Jesus. They even share a meal (a snack, anyway). These are all significant marks of church gatherings in the New Testament2. I agree with him that worship is not just the music. The semantic drift of the word “worship” in American evangelical culture has been a bee in my bonnet, too, for a while now. But neither is worship limited to music + a sermon, or, music + a sermon + the eucharist. Not just the whole of the service, but the whole of the Christian life is worship. Christian worship, broadly speaking, is the whole life of the church, each member offering his or her body as a living sacrifice every day of the week. In Corporate Worship, we gather weekly to participate in the specific practices listed in Acts 2:42 and elsewhere in the New Testament that have defined weekly gatherings of the Church since its founding. And The Liturgy is how we structure those practices according to tradition and prudence. I see all of these taking place every Sunday in my church’s children’s ministry, so my main issue is with the assumption that children’s ministries “separate” the children from worship at all.

• Children’s Ministries make worship meaningful and accessible for young children. Jesus scolded the disciples for keeping the children away from him. But it’s hard to imagine he followed that up by scolding the children (whispering harshly through clenched teeth) to shut up and sit still (so as not to embarrass their parents) while he gave a 35-minute lecture on a chapter from Leviticus. This is what some Sunday services (some, at the very least) will certainly feel like to a young child, especially in traditions like mine, where the reading and exposition of God’s Word are the central focus of the liturgy. We spend roughly half of the liturgy sitting and learning from God’s Word at my church. Most four-year-olds have not yet gained the skills to learn very much from a 35-minute sermon. To be sure, kids need to learn to sit quietly and tolerate boredom, and I don’t believe in rescuing children from boredom at every turn. But is that really the central lesson we want our kids to learn at church—to begrudgingly tolerate boredom? Many a future apostate learned that lesson well enough, even if they missed the rest. Can this really be the only conceivable way to teach your children participation in worship?

• Much of the Bible is not appropriate for young children; it is still the Word of God. In order to preach the whole counsel of God, it is often necessary to speak frankly and without euphemism about things like sex, violence, and death. If a church’s preaching is expository, some sermons will necessarily be inappropriate for young children. If you disagree, give Judges 193 a go for your kids’ bedtime story tonight and let me know how it goes.

• The whole church body serves and teaches our children. Children’s ministry, at my church anyway, is not a day care service that enables mom and dad to attend the rock concert/ted-talk without their kids bugging them. It is an act of worship that the whole church participates in. Not that every individual in the church serves in the ministry, but we do regularly encourage all members to serve who are able. This means that on any given Sunday, my son may be learning the faith from a middle-aged dad, a 75-year-old grandma, or a 20-year-old college student. He is also beginning lifelong friendships (we hope) with Christians his age and learning the gospel together with them. There are few ministries, including the one I oversee, that do more to form relationships, tighten bonds, and edify the body across generations.

• Children’s Ministries enable everyone to fully participate in worship. Here is a fact: if you put a healthy, energetic 2-year-old boy in a quiet room for an hour with a few hundred people, the only thing his parents will be focusing on for that hour is desperately trying to keep him from distracting everyone else. Add a 4-year-old and an infant to the mix, and you’ve got at least one parent (probably a mother) whose ability to participate mentally and emotionally in Corporate Worship has been dramatically reduced for years at a time (and often the most stressful years of their lives—years when the need to participate in corporate worship is especially great). Since I’m at work (at the church) by 6:30 am on Sundays, my wife essentially has to function as a single mother until the sermon starts, and even with our children’s ministry, it is an exhausting undertaking. She is a saint, but if she also had to keep our two-year-old and infant still and quiet for 75 minutes (while some of the less sanctified attendees stare daggers through her skull), she’d have to muster everything she had just to convince herself to be there. By itself, this is not a good reason for children’s ministry; it’s not daycare, after all, and the liturgy will and should ask difficult things of us. I’m not advocating for an attractional model of corporate worship here. But if a given children’s ministry also works toward all the above advantages, while removing a massive barrier to attending for overburdened parents/families, it seems to me like a huge win for discipleship and congregational care.

At my church, we try to strike a healthy balance. K-4th stay in the sanctuary for the Call to Worship, the first three songs/hymns, the Confession & Assurance, and baptisms4. After that, they and their teachers continue to participate in worship by moving to classrooms for a teaching time appropriately accommodated to the children’s ages. We also have several services throughout the year (including Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday) where K-4th are in the sanctuary for the whole service. 5th grade and above attend the whole service. My church is (as far as I can tell) achieving that end which Mr. Allee doesn’t think possible for a church like mine, so poisoned by “extremely modern” and “disastrous” ideas: we are training and enabling our children to fully participate in the church’s worship of God.

"Dear God," whispered the child.
And what she asked, she wholly meant.
And her prayer would not be answered.

There was only
the silence of
an empty room.

The dust in the air
in the morning sunbeam.
The gently lit piano bench.

Good things.
The absence of good things.
Her inalienable knowledge.

A hushed sigh.
Small, patient tears.
Another hopeful glance

at the door.

The title here is a bit misleading. This is no knock-down-drag-out apologetic. Sorry if you clicked through expecting that. As I said in the last post (or something to the effect), arguments and rants make for shitty poetry. But if that’s you, I’m glad you’re here anyway!

What follows are some reflections on the poem. I’m afraid, though, that they’ll give the impression that I was thinking about all this stuff as I wrote it. I wasn’t. The poem—the images and feelings of it—that was what came first.

In my experience, arguments and rants won’t get you much further in the life of faith than in poetry. I do believe that Christianity is true. But I am not arguing for that here. I am, frankly, not very good at arguing for it. The following is not the, or even a, reason that I am a Christian:

I am good at knowing what is true
+
Christianity is true
=
I chose to be a Christian

Some folks seem to think that’s how it works, but it just isn’t. There are many messy and inconvenient causes for my being a Christian, some of which I probably don’t even know about. In fact, here are a few that I do know about:

• I was born to middle-class rural white folks in the United States in the late 20th century

• I had several euphoric experiences in an evangelical/pentecostal context as a teenager and young adult

• There are lots of parts of the Bible that I love (if also a few that really trouble me)

• In the middle of “deconstructing” my faith, I accidentally stumbled into a Christian community full of kind, open-minded people who nonetheless held to traditional Christian teachings. From what I understand, this is not a super common experience.

• It is unsustainably exhausting to question everything, and eventually you just have to settle down and learn to live with some cognitive dissonance

• A few years ago, I stumbled into a job that I really love, and if I stopped being a Christian now, I would have to find some other work. That would suck

My Christianity is more like the prayer prayed by the girl in the poem. I am a Christian because I have known good things and felt the absence of good things. The good things are everything to me and the absences hurt like a, and well, anyway, in both cases, the Good seemed very, very real. More real than the chair I’m sitting in, than my body itself. More real than any ideas about them. More real than anything. The few other worldviews I’ve flirted with (secular materialism, expressive individualism, Buddhism) all seem, in the end, to deny the realness of Goodness.

The fact of the “empty room” (that is, the fact of the silence of God in the face of unjust suffering) makes it very hard to be a Christian, regardless of the compelling explanations many Christians have thought up over the years. But the fact of the Good (both its felt presence and felt absence) makes it hard for me to be anything else.

Why should the room feel empty unless something is missing from it? Everyone else (Nietzsche, the Buddha, Sam Harris) taught me to get used to the room. They told me that nothing is missing; that the emptiness (if not the room itself) is just an illusion. And then they offered ways to cope and get on with life in this permanently empty room until die. Christ and his cross teach me how to live in the room too—how to suffer the absence of God from the world. But Christ and his cross teach me to keep a tearful eye on the door. So, despite the best efforts of some truly remarkable atheists1, and some unfortunate encounters with “Sunday School Teachers2”, I am not an atheist.

Hiya! Episode two in my series of experimental commentated playlists is out!

The only platform where it can live is Spotify, since podcasts and songs live in the same ecosystem there, so if you’re not a Spotify user, first of all, Respect. Second, I’m sorry. Spotify sucks. They’re probably evil. But as a consumer, I can’t do without it. And as a creator, this is the only way to do this without piracy that I know of.

Also, Spotify introduced a neat feature that lets you mix songs with smooth transitions, which is a huge boon for these playlists and a huge problem for my hyperfixation! 🙃

If you give it a listen, be sure to turn shuffle off, or it won’t make any sense at all.

Enjoy!

• he’s still doing this thing i guess

"Shit," whispered the child.
And the world did not collapse. No
hellfire from heaven fell upon his head.

There was only
the silence of
an empty room.

A bit of guilt,
a bit of fear,
some pride,

some relief,
all together
at once.

A hushed sigh.
A small giggle.
One more nervous glance

at the door.

I have edited this poem a bit over the years, but the main idea began about 7 or 8 years ago. It always felt a bit limp and incomplete to me, until I recently found those last two lines. I also realized (even more recently) that there had to be a second poem. So I wrote a second poem, and that one’s coming next week. It’s called How Atheists Fail To Create More Atheists (Despite The Help They Get From Sunday School Teachers).

The thing is, this poem basically began as a whiny complaint against the kind of Christians who have added, Don’t say words I don’t approve of, to the Ten Commandments. I still think that complaint is legitimate—the great commission has nothing in it about which word you should allow other people to use for poop in your presence, after all—but preachy rants generally make for bad poems. There’s nothing more boring than a poem that just MAKES 👏 A 👏 POINT 👏. The “point” is still there, and I suppose it is still part of what this poem does. But for it to be a poem, it had to do more than that.

The “point” is that arbitrary legalism and judgmental religiosity de-convert more people from Christianity than Dawkins and Hitch could have dreamed of de-converting. It’s a good enough point as far as it goes, but who cares? In the first sentence of this paragraph I stated it more clearly than the poem does, so what do we need the poem for?

Once I added those final two lines, though, it felt (to me anyway) like the poem stopped being a boring point-making anecdote, and became a story about the human condition. The poem isn’t exactly about atheism or bad words. It’s about what we do with our guilt and fear and where we find relief from them. It’s about what’s worth worrying over. It’s about laughter and pride and who we are behind closed doors.

The Sunday school teacher (here a symbol of judgmental religiosity and legalism) has passed a bad understanding of God’s judgment down to our future atheist. She’s created God in her own image: a petty tyrant with a tiny little kingdom where shame, respectability, and language-policing keep the top dogs in power. The child has begun to reject this God, and fair enough. But the guilt, the fear, the pride, the need for relief, they are all still there. They are real, whether the Sunday school teacher’s God is real or not. With the final line, the poem asks:

What kind of situation does the child find himself in now?

For centuries, fiddlers
have scratched universes whole
out of horse hair and goat's guts
and human flesh.

Rich children have been taught
to call their fiddles violins;
had that filthy fiddler's yearning
bored and beaten out of them.

(And by the way, when the boredom and beatings failed,
those children became Beethoven and Tchaikovsky.)

But fiddlers go on scratchin
and clawin their jolly way
to melodies that ache
and harmonies that soothe
and rhythms that itch
and scratch the itch.

And here is a new thing.

Metal strikin metal bendin metal through pitch.
Precision manufactured, flat-wound steel strings.

Slick and sharp. 
Graceful violence.

The filthy fiddler's yearnin but no flesh.
The demon barber’s razor without a throat to bleed.

Appalachian hollers shriekin through line arrays,
hillbilly music bumpin through the southern plains.

A postmodern technocratic distopia disrupted.
An arena full of Mennonites and rednecks and hipsters,
all utterly entranced.
Transfigured, hotdogs and crispy boys and all.

Alison Krause just melted our hearts,
Jerry is now melting our faces off:

a domestic, midwestern grandfather figure
with an old-timey guitar on his lap
playin old fiddle tunes,
become death,
the destroyer of worlds.

When this poem revealed itself, I was at an Alison Krause and Jerry Douglas concert here in Wichita. It struck me as both funny and a little profound. Or, anyway, it describes something profound: the distinct contrast of the modernity of bluegrass music, with how ancient and deep it feels—especially the sound of the Dobro.

With the exception of the fiddle and upright bass, every instrument used in traditional bluegrass music is a thoroughly modern innovation. The banjo is newer than the automobile and the Dobro is about the same age as Television.

Another contrast arises too, between the silliness which some outsiders perceive in bluegrass music (it is shorthand in movies for inbred hillbillies) and the actual sophistication, depth of emotional expression, and diverse heritage the tradition contains. Bluegrass is the mad, enchanted lovechild of Bebop Jazz and the Appalachian folk-song tradition and there is nothing in the world quite like it.

I’ll throw in a third contrast, for free! Bluegrass is a true folk music (meaning it is not exclusively composed and performed by specialists, but by everyone—folks at every skill level play and sing it together in living rooms and around camp fires). But it’s also a high-level fine art (see Bela Fleck or Chris Thile, two of the most highly accomplished instrumentalists in the world, even in genres outside of bluegrass, like classical and jazz).

At the concert, I was caught up with wonder at the strange situation I found myself in. Sophisticated sound-projection technology (“line-arrays”) run by at least 2 or 3 professional sound engineers. An advanced, sophisticated, modernized version of an ancient form of folk music. Here we are, at what feels like the end of the world but probably isn’t, listening to an old-timey grandpa absolutely shred on a very modern (but old-sounding) instrument, playing a 200 year old Appalachian fiddle tune after covering a latin jazz fusion song (which was Spain by Chick Corea).

What a life!

O how sweet to trust in Jesus,
Even if it bitter seems,
Though He slay me, though I grieve,
His Goodness neither taste nor see.

Bittersweet to trust in Jesus,
Sweeter surely it would be
Not to have to trust at all,
His scars to touch, His face to see.

Refrain:
    Jesus, how I long to trust him—
    This Jesus I cannot ignore!
    Jesus, Jesus, precious Jesus!
    O for grace to trust Him more!

Hard to know what Goodness tastes like,
To say for sure what shade It is.
Sickly sweet to trust this Jesus,
To learn to taste and see like Him.

(Refrain)

Yes, 'tis sweet to trust in Jesus,
Just from sin and self to cease;
Just from Jesus simply taking
Life and Rest and Joy and Peace.

For the last year or two, as a kind of writing exercise/ADHD doodling habit, I’ve been writing new verses for classic hymns. I plan to put out some recorded versions sometime in the next year or two, but for now, I thought I’d share some of the lyrics.

This is not a correction of “Tis So Sweet To Trust In Jesus”, which needs no improvement as a devotional song. I only used the original (which I love) as a jumping-off place to say something new about my personal experience in following and trusting Jesus.