One other caveat. This is going to be one of three kinda/sorta political posts I make, this one most directly tied to politics, and the other two dealing with political figures who said things I think touch on the sort of philosophical junk I usually post. So bear with me for three posts, get mad at me or whatever, but realize that I’ll go back to amateur philosophizing and hey, maybe even more book talk one of these days. I don’t love “getting political” for a variety of reasons, but I wrote this article for a submission I never made, so now we’re going for it.

The other day, I read an op-ed by a minister I’ve never met that suggested that the recent electoral success of the Democratic Socialists of America must be stopped by way of embracing Christian Nationalism. If you haven’t heard, the DSA is making serious inroads into the Democratic party, racking up wins such as Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayorship, AOC’s presence in the House, Bernie Sanders’ amplification since the 2010s, and a whole host of primary victories over the summer, including the narrow victory of Abdul El-Sayed over Haley Stevens in the Michigan Democratic primary.

The op-ed I read suggested that this is just “cultural Marxism” warmed over, a kind of devilish bewitchment of the American Left, a seduction of young and dumb liberals into radicalism that will erode the very fiber of our nation.

But what this author never successfully did, in my view, was to ask the question why. WHY are these candidates so exploding in popularity, and how should we as believers think about it? How about us as Reformed people? I came up with the following:

Having spent a large portion of my ministry with the young (and being a Millennial myself), I think we miss the mark if we endorse Christian Nationalism over and against the Democratic Socialists of America.

Let me be clear: I have little in common with the DSA. Perusing their website, I find disagreements are legion. As a matter of policy alone, I actually kind of struggle to find anything I agree with without at least some qualification, and much to disagree with without qualification. I certainly cannot condone much of their platform, nor can I condone their affirmation of what God calls sin. And politically, I don’t want the Senate to be abolished nor do I want the American Constitution to be fundamentally destroyed.

However, I think much of the critique of the DSA still misses an extremely important context: the question of why. It’s been suggested that the DSA is simply another wave of “cultural Marxism,” and that the church is silent in the face of this perceived threat. But why is the DSA gaining popularity with young people?

I believe I can offer at least part of an answer, which might give important context to this discussion. First and foremost, young people are feeling an economic squeeze that, frankly, we are completely exhausted by. Very few goods have gotten less expensive, and economic hallmarks like home ownership among the young have become increasingly out of reach. Truthfully, I was only able to buy a house and start a family because of the generous debt-free foundation I was able to start out with due to wise financial decisions made by my parents; millions of young Americans have had no such support and live paycheck to paycheck while they watch those at the top enrich themselves more and more.

While there’s a temptation to simply dismiss this as covetousness, many young people feel they were promised a world that has not materialized, not due to the machinations of circumstance, but because that world has been actively stripped to dust by those who take for themselves and leave nothing for anyone else. The “K-shaped economy” is an extraordinarily discouraging thing to live in; hard work and elbow grease do not erase the fact that wealth has concentrated into the hands of a select few at the very top while wages have stagnated for those down the ladder.

This isn’t a bit of DSA propaganda as much as it is an economic reality–one which makes movements like the DSA more attractive. The DSA is the only identifiable group taking these concerns seriously, when the church could take a tremendous opportunity to lean into our rich history of caring for the concerns of the poor. The popularity of the DSA is an indictment of the church–not in that we have failed to criticize this group with enough vitriol, but in that we have ignored the souls drawn to such groups by legitimate hardship. Young people are hungry for change, not because they are so nakedly interested in revolution, but because they are having a hard time buying food.

I mean, look at this exchange:

Look y’all, I have way more in common with Watters than El-Sayed, on the surface at least. Consider this poll:

A tight race to be sure. But consider that AARP was also summarized as saying, “The poll…found a significant age divide, with El-Sayed leading voters under 50 while Rogers performed better among voters age 50 and older. Affordability, Social Security and health care ranked among voters’ top concerns.”

Again, I want to stress that I’m not necessarily sticking up for the DSA as such, but the DSA are the only recognizable group that, en masse, seems to respond to the concerns of the young. Watters wants to get El-Sayed into a slap fight about men in women’s sports; El-Sayed responds by saying he wants to do something about the fact that people are, ya know, picking between health insurance and food. I will admit that El-Sayed being an epidemiologist endears me to him a little bit, since I have sympathy for the efforts of public health, but that’s about all I have in common with the guy.

It is increasingly obvious that we are in a second gilded age, in which those at the top of society are using their positions of power to enrich themselves, often with taxpayer money. When people read of the president opining for a 600 million dollar ballroom, half of which is paid for by the taxpayer, they feel ripped off. When they are told that investment in healthcare, infrastructure, food assistance, and education are socialist pipe dreams, they feel increasingly let down, especially when our elected officials do not blink to spend nearly 40 billion dollars in an unauthorized war of choice that has held disastrous economic consequences, to say nothing of the violations of the sixth commandment that are perpetuated by, then excused by, our government. When they read of the president’s attempt to sue the IRS for 10 billion dollars of taxpayer money, they feel that they are being used as nothing but cash cows for the rich and powerful, and when that plan falls through and the administration pivots into establishing a fund which pays the president’s allies and shields him and his family from audits, again paid for by taxpayers, they feel like they have been stolen from.

The Trump family has put billions of dollars in their own pockets over the course of this second presidency. Seriously, just Google it; it’s appalling. It is unsurprising, then, to see a movement arise that suggests this is unfair, and for Christians to adopt a conspiratorial tone that this movement has arisen by some manufactured attack on American values is disingenuous, not to mention personally insulting to those who would rightfully see this behavior as deeply unethical and ungodly.

In my mind, 19th century problems require 19th century solutions, and a round of anti-trust legislation and punishments for corruption would probably go a long way. But judicial decisions aside, an ecclesial retrieval of our teaching on the blessedness of the poor would help to invite suffering sinners into our spiritual hospitals. Consider, for example, the words of Matthew Henry commenting on James 5:

“God gives us our worldly possessions that we may honour him and do good with them; but if, instead of this, we sinfully hoard them up, thorough and undue affection towards them, or a distrust of the providence of God for the future, this is a very heinous crime, and will be witnessed against by the very rust and corruption of the treasure thus heaped together…Those who have wealth in their hands get power into their hands, and then they are tempted to abuse that power to oppress such as are under them. The rich we here find employing the poor in their labours, and the rich have as much need of the labours of the poor as the poor have of wages from the rich, and could as ill be without them; but yet, not considering this, they kept back the hire of the labourers; having power in their hands, it is probable that they made as hard bargains with the poor as they could, and even after that would not make good their bargains as they should have done. This is a crying sin, an iniquity that cries so as to reach the ears of God…”

Or perhaps we could learn from our more recent J.R.R. Tolkien, whose hoarding dragons were cautionary tales against the corruption of massive wealth. Or remember the words of Saint Augustine, who told us that “the poor are your porters; they carry your goods to heaven.” Or as the Lord Himself said, as we have done to the least of these, we have done to Him. Man, maybe someone should write about the perils of hoarding wealth from a Christian perspective.

In thinking about this topic since the last election, I am blown away that the church has such a rich history of caring for the poor and economically disadvantaged, and equally impressed that so little of that teaching makes its way into any discussion of politics, as if the two are somehow separate spheres, such that we can open food banks in our sanctuaries but never consider that we empower politicians that make them necessary.

To put it bluntly, we are missing roughly half of Gen Z specifically because evangelical support of the president is so unwaveringly strong. Half of the young souls of this nation are driven away from our churches because we have latched ourselves to a political office holder, one whose corruption and personal character flaws are so well documented it is almost tiresome to bring them up at all. You can brush those folks off and say “well, they wouldn’t come to church anyway,” but I am grateful that my Savior did not have such a dismissive attitude towards me in my own wandering. May we place no obstacle in the way of those who would hear the Gospel; may our only given offense be the offense of the cross.

In contexts like these, the DSA’s rising popularity at least makes sense. Brushing off the concerns that lead people to the wrong solutions is not shepherding the lost into the fold. It is merely alienating the young struggler from the cause of Christ. After all, it is to the poor that Christ and Paul directed so much of their energy. In an increasingly expensive world that is made only more expensive by the collusion of tech oligarchs and corrupt government officials, the message that Jesus cares for the forgotten, needy, downtrodden, and economically inferior could really resonate–it could demonstrate that material poverty is an object lesson of spiritual poverty, or that even if we are materially poor we could have all that we need in the forgiveness of our sins through Christ, who is like the treasure hidden in the field or the pearl of great price. But instead of showing the Gospel and its power for those who feel forgotten and defrauded, we as a church flog those who want change. This will only drive people away from the King they so desperately need.

DSA candidates are, among other things, pretty vocally anti-corruption, and for a generation that increasingly feels ripped off, this resonates. It isn’t just a naked flex of Marxism; there are legitimate grievances against the powers that be that young people deserve a robust answer to, rather than being brushed off as “cultural Marxists.” As a church, we belittle these concerns in a way that turns people away from our Lord, and this is unacceptable. The solution is not to defend the DSA as such; the solution is to ask what kind of environment pushes young people to ideologies that are anti-establishment, in which the church can sometimes be swept up.

Ultimately, when we write that the DSA offers a false religion, we polarize young people looking for change even further. Again, I am not necessarily sticking up for the DSA’s policy positions, but I am suggesting that a young man struggling to get by may see a false dilemma with two poor (and manufactured) choices: on the one hand, shut up, submit to the oligarchs, and suffer in silence (or embrace Christian nationalism, but that’s kind of a similar solution, just with the asterisk that you’re assuming you’ll be part of the ruling class). On the other, if the promise of a better world is purely secular, take it and leave the faith behind.

I think this framing of the issue lends the young sufferer only these two choices. I would rather submit that we need to show a better way: we can celebrate our political institutions without deifying them,1 we can hold our elected leaders to a high moral standard that, at bare minimum, does not violate the 8th or 10th commandments, and we can look for ways to ease the suffering of those around us.

So please, Christians, and especially Reformed world, offer the young of this nation what they so desperately need: relief, not culture wars. Love, not castigation. Gospel, not identity politics. The poor in this nation are suffering daily, and as more people slip beneath the economic cracks, more people fall into fraught ideologies like secularism, simply because that is the only place their concerns are taken seriously. Let us offer them hope in the Gospel instead.

As an aside, I was recently on a friend’s podcast to talk about Christian Nationalism. If you’re so inclined, you can check out that podcast here.

Of course, I’m talking about the master of moustache, the terror of theists, the abyss-staring, clergy defying, meaning constructing Friedrich Nietszche, whose name I have to google like every other time to spell-check.

For all my wishing that we had never had to wrestle with the writings of Big Neech, there’s one thing you can’t say about him: he’s not stupid. Self-indulgent, yes. Convinced of his own brilliance, yes. But not wrong in his own self-evaluation of his faculties. To paraphrase The Big Lebowski, you’re not wrong, Friedrich, you’re just an a-hole.

All that being said, his criticisms of Christianity as an institution are simply a fact all thinking Christians have to reckon with. We cannot go back to a pre-Nietzschean faith. It ain’t happening, folks, and plugging our ears and ignoring his impact is foolish. Deal with him.

I say, that, but I’m not going to. Not now, at least. The important point I want to make here is that, as philosophies tend to, we live downstream of his ideas as they permeate everything. His legacy isn’t Nazism, though the Nazis misused his ideas to prop up their whole thing, as they did with just about any intellectual whom they could twist to their own ends. His legacy isn’t relativism, which in case you haven’t heard, is pretty much dead.1 His legacy is self-constructed meaning. We’re rife with that one in modern society, pretty much wherever you turn. As Friedrich puts it (paraphrasing), you rescue yourself from the oblivion of nihilism by taking to the arts and constructing your own meaning. It’s easy to misunderstand him as a nihilist, but he actually wanted to save the world from nihilism in his own way. I think he’s ultimately barking up the wrong tree, but I at least get the logic of what he’s going for. And the last thing you can do is say his thoughts are shallow or overly simplistic. Wrong, maybe, but that’s not the same thing.

I think most people, to some extent, are Nietzschean. What I mean is this: we forego God and institutions, institutions which resent being doubted in one way or another. But by sheer numbers, lots of people don’t really face severe consequences by ignoring the judgments of an ecclesial body, especially if they’ve never been part of one. The church makes moral judgments of the lifestyles of tons of people, and many of those people respond with the ultimate text message of dismissal: “k.”

I’m not suggesting this is a good thing, mind you. We ignore the commands of the Almighty at our own peril. What I’m saying is that lots of culture is post-Christian, and many of our Christians are pushing them in that direction. At the same time, self-consciously aware mankind cannot bear pure nihilism. Nihilism is, for many, a stage through which we pass, and one out of which you convert to something or other. For some this is the time of a religious conversion, and we of the church welcome them in. For some, it is to fundamentally shift and look inwards towards meaning, but I don’t think it’s as a conscious choice. Human beings are, I think, hard-wired to find fulfillment, and much fulfillment is made in instinct not agency. We find the things that move us by unconscious feeling, not conscious choice. As Nietzsche taught, we start from ashes and construct a new thing. As Nietzsche also interestingly observed, the death of God also robs us of such things as inductive reasoning and any ability to trust scientific processes, ergo he sees a logical snare into nihilism inevitable. he supposes that we must heroically rescue ourselves from our own logically founded nihilism. Meaning simply must be constructed in defiance to an irrational world. It’s a compelling idea, even if I think it borders on self-defeating presuppositions themselves. To which Nietzsche, a deep thinker, would no doubt reply, “yeah, but it’s better than the alternative, and impossible to avoid.”

I think most nonbelief operates on this level somehow, someway. And I don’t think that because I’m smarter than the nonbeliever—never. But my point is this: get out of a metanarrative view of history, and you start grasping for the things that resonate with your soul. And you have to do a lot of searching to find something like that. Be careful; self-actualization is great until you self-actualize into something stupid.

But sans divinity, and three generations after the death of God, being Nietzschean in society is the default setting, considered or no. I’m not suggesting we have a battle on our hands as believers; I’m suggesting the moment has already come and gone.

Evangelistically, our job is to live faithfully and show that meaning is found not in indulging the self, but rather self-denial. In losing our lives we find them; in denying the self we find a truer self than we have ever been.

But if you want a culture war, you’ve already lost. You fight on ground you are trespassing on. Socially, we have already forfeited the cultural fight, not because we were soft on sin or effeminate or because we voted for democrats, but because we have engaged unbelief in their own home turf. Our desire to win a cultural war has driven us to become more worldly than ever, in that we are so focused and white knuckle gripped on the kingdoms of this world that we have lost our legitimate moral witness. One of the most commonly given reasons the young do not come to church is because of the church’s insistence on getting enmeshed in political fights. It’s not the number one reason, but it’s up there. We also happen to have the rather disturbing statistic that nearly half on Gen Z says they do not come to church because of the American church’s unwavering support of the current president. That is a problem that will only get worse, because even after he’s gone, these people are not going to forget to whom the evangelical church in America knelt and kissed the ring.

That issue aside, however, I also think it’s telling that, “78% of those who left believe they can be moral without religion, 64% question religious teachings, and 54% feel they do not need religion to be spiritual.” The train has pulled into the station. The general public is Nietzschean now. Meaning is constructed as it is found to resonate with the self.

Compare this to the other thinker I’ve contacted recently whose work is far more undercooked. I won’t give my WWE intro for this one, because I don’t think she deserves it.

I’m talking about Ayn Rand.

I think I dislike Ayn Rand for a number of reasons, but they can all be sort of summarized by the fact that she was a rigid, uncompromising idealogue. Her adulterous paramour falls in love with a woman his own age? She sits him down and explains to him that his choice is not emotionally hurtful somehow, but illogical based on her own philosophy.

That little anecdote kind of sums up my problem with her work; it seems less like Ayn Rand is so thoroughly convinced she’s right. More than that, she thinks she hit an intellectual gold mine and wants to distinguish herself by being the first one to say—and live—that discovered ideology. At least, that is my interpretation.

I find Rand a simultaneously pitiable and sort of repulsive figure. She had a harrowing life, but was also so myopically preoccupied with her own fame and intellectual consideration that she seems deeply unpleasant. I highly recommend this YouTube documentary about Atlas Shrugged and her own life to be deeply interesting, so check it out.

There’s a lot I could say about Ayn Rand, but here’s why I’m mentioning her at all in distinction to Nietzsche. Big Neech is her intellectual superior in pretty much every way, but his philosophy is adopted, in my estimation, by the common man. Rand, however lacking her philosophy might be, has greatly influenced the ruling class, who then use that philosophy to justify disdain for the lower classes.

I’ve heard Rand’s philosophy jokingly summarized as, “everyone hates the rich, but do you have the courage to hate the poor?” And while that’s a funny way to put it, there’s some truth to it. Spend any time reading Atlas Shrugged and you’ll find a deep disdain for common human beings, describing the regular Joe as an impediment to “men of the mind” who would push society forward if they could. These men of the mind, tragically, are held back by a feckless government, who sees it necessary to drag everyone down to the level of the common man, to whom resources (which would be better allocated by these mighty men) is given in a sort of welfare-tragedy. Rand offers us a much dumber heroic gambit than Nietzsche: have the courage to let men of the mind loose and condemn the rabble to be abandoned. They are, after all, parasites on society, and the notion of all men being created equal is a fantasy that holds back mankind. Ayn Rand, unsurprisingly, is an atheist, and like Nietzsche sees Christianity as counterproductive at best and actively subversive at worst. Atlas Shrugged actually ends with the Übermensch2 demigod character, John Galt, celebrating the world being plunged into equalizing darkness as he draws a dollar sign into the night sky. Read for yourself:

They could not see the world beyond the mountains, there was only a void of darkness and rock, but the darkness was hiding the ruins of a continent: the roofless homes, the rusting tractors, the lightless streets, the abandoned rail. But far in the distance, on the edge of the earth, a small flame was waving in the wind, the defiantly stubborn flame of Wyatt’s Torch, twisting, being torn and regaining its hold, not to be uprooted or extinguished. It seemed to be calling and waiting for the words John Galt was now to pronounce.

“The road is cleared.” said Galt. “We are going back to the world.”

He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar.

I know derision is not an especially flattering color to wear, but does anyone else read this and find it, I don’t know, pretty stupid? There’s a certain vacuous thinness to the idea that a demigod immortalizes his philosophy by drawing a dollar sign against a dark, blacked-out city. It just strikes me as so shallow, and I think it makes Rand look particularly bad that the last image she wanted her audience to take from this behemoth novel is a dollar sign, not just because chasing dollars is hardly the road to fulfillment, but also because she herself unintentionally reveals the weakness of her philosophy. There’s a reason Rand’s work has never seen serious academic consideration in the mainstream, much to her chagrin. It’s because there’s just not that much there. It’s kind of sad, really, and her tragic personal story only backs up the uselessness of this as a moral philosophy.

So if this is the case, why do so many ostensibly Christian leaders fawn over Atlas Shrugged and the works of Ayn Rand? She consciously hated Christianity and insisted on atheism. What’s the deal? A few examples:

Paul Ryan, former speaker of the House of Representatives, said “I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff. We start with Atlas Shrugged.”

Ted Cruz warned that Atlas Shrugged described how the “parasitical” class would be put into arbitrary power.

Ron Paul loved Ayn Rand enough to name his son Rand, who also admires Ayn’s works.

Steve Jobs apparently loved Ayn Rand.

Elon Musk, a guy I don’t like, has increasingly cited Rand, even though he initially said a while back that her ideas need to be tempered with kindness.

Everyone’s favorite lizard person Peter Thiel has long expressed admiration for Ayn Rand, and was awarded by the Atlas Society (a Rand-based organization) for his political work.

Alan Greenspan gave the statement that Ayn Rand gave the moral justification for capitalism in Atlas Shrugged. Goodness, I hope not. Private property rights are a given in the Christian system, but I flatly resist the idea that capitalism as such must lead to Objectivism. But then again, Christianity should speak into capitalism instead of playing along as a philosophical permission-giver.

Among others.

Here’s what I think is the payoff of this, as depressing as it is: it is distressing that the powerful in society are influenced by an intellectually thin philosophy that teaches them to see those of us “beneath them” as an annoying obstruction. That…can’t do anything but put us in a pretty precarious position, right? I shudder to think what the oligarchs above us would do (or what they would desire to do) to the poor in their deepest, most honest thoughts. Especially if Ayn Rand is their moral guide.

Here’s the antidote, as far as I can tell, to both Nietzschean self-constructed meaning for the masses and the pernicious philosophy of Objectivism which treats the lower class with contempt:

Proverbs 19:17, “Whoever is generous to the poor lends to the Lord, and he will repay him for his deed.”

Galatians 2:10, “…they asked us to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do.”

2 Corinthians 8:9, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.”

A longer text but worth quoting in its entirety because it cuts against both Nietzsche and Rand so effectively, Matthew 25:31-46, ““When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.””

John 15:12-17, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. These things I command you, so that you will love one another.”

If you want to resist the will of evil men, love your neighbor. If you want to rescue meaning from nothingness, look to your Savior. Therein you find the real counterculture. Train yourself to care for others. Pick not just a third lane, but a better highway.

This has, to borrow from the Hitchhiker’s Guide, made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

My point in this somewhat truncated article is not to excoriate the ethical problems with owning this much value. Though as you could probably guess if you know me, I think this is, well, not great. It’s difficult to imagine that owning this much wealth is ethically good or even neutral, but my point in this is to suggest that the way in which American Christians are not talking about this reveals something to me. The only ones I see decrying the existence of a trillionaire are Leftists. Now, this is merely from my perspective, and I don’t spend nearly as much time in right wing spaces as I used to, but I think this is as good as an occasion as we could ask for to recognize that we American Christians have more-or-less left off any teaching about greed, wealth, and what you might be able to call “monetary ethics,” so to speak.

For those of you who are already sounding the Pinko alarm on me, let me make it clear that I am not a communist, nor do I think Marx is my homeboy. I am not interested in the absolute equity of all individuals by force nor revolution. But here’s the thing: you do not have to be a communist to decry the hoarding of wealth like this.

I’ve said it from the pulpit so many times that I hardly want to give this qualifier at all anymore, but here goes: it is not intrinsically evil to have wealth, all else being equal. Job, Abraham, Lydia, the Shunammite woman of 2 Kings 4, and many others are blessed with wealth from God. That isn’t the issue in and of itself. The issue is twofold:

1. 1) Has your wealth been acquired by unjust means (which is sin) and

2. 2) Does the existence of your hoard deprive others of life?

The issue isn’t merely number 1. Having wealth is complicated; it isn’t just a matter of getting it fairly, it’s a matter of maintaining it fairly. Also, one other qualifier: I’m not talking about those who are materially wealthy and have some kind of large nest egg. I’m talking about the ultra-rich here—the billionaires and beyond.

I am not suggesting that if you have a lot of money, you should intrinsically feel like I’m accusing you of doing something wrong.

What I am saying is that Christians used to speak to the issue of greed and hoarding until we started idolizing those who had the absolute most. I don’t know what the heck happened here; I don’t really have the time to unpack that change. But change, unfortunately, this did; our moral witness as Christians, rightly or wrongly, has shifted to other priorities, mostly culture war stuff.

Allow me to share with you a word of Scripture from James chapter 5:

Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you.

Now some of you, perhaps the wealthier among you, might read that and think I’m talking about you. Leaving aside that if this text offends you, you may want to reflect on that, I can assure you that I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about men like Elon Musk. I have benefitted, maybe not from personal wealth, but from knowing wealthy people, many of whom have helped me from time to time. To not acknowledge this would make me a massive hypocrite! When I fundraised for my post-graduation internship, I thanked God that I knew people who could give me 5000 dollars to support my ministry. That is a good and appropriate use of wealth—it is wealth used for Kingdom ends (that I pray I did not waste during my time on campus!).

What I have never known is a person with maximal wealth. I don’t know a single billionaire. And I certainly don’t know the one trillionaire. It seems to me, though, that hoarding wealth was known to our forefathers to be an intrinsically immoral action. We don’t have to go that far back into history; just go to Tolkien. At the risk of stating the obvious, Smaug is not aspirational!

Tolkien had an awareness that hoarded gold was a poor life, a sickness which plagued the dwarf king Thorin and made him mad. The master of Lake-Town also stole gold from the hoard meant to feed the poor, and fled to the wilderness alone, where clutching gold he could not eat, he starved to death. As Tolkien puts it, "dragon hoards “were cursed, and bred in men the dragon-spirit: in possessors an obsession with mere ownership, in others a fierce desire to take the treasure for their own by violence and treachery.”

Tolkien was hardly a commie, you know. He still held a moral witness against hoarding wealth.

But you can go further back than that. My personal go-to Bible commentator, Matthew Henry, wrote a scathing word in considering the above James 5 text. This is a long quote, but I assure you it’s worth your consideration:

[T]he generality of the rich rejected Christianity, and were hardened in their unbelief, and hated and persecuted those who believed on Christ. To these oppressing, unbelieving, persecuting, rich people, the apostle addresses himself in Jas. 5:1-6.

1. He foretels the judgments of God that should come upon them, Jas. 5:1-3. they should have miseries come upon them, and such dreadful miseries that the very apprehension of them was enough to make them weep and howl—misery that should arise from the very things in which they placed their happiness, and misery that should be completed by these things witnessing against them at the last, to their utter destruction; and they are now called to reason upon and thoroughly to weigh the matter, and to think how they will stand before God in judgment: Go to now, you rich men. (1.) “You may be assured of this that very dreadful calamities are coming upon you, calamities that shall carry nothing of support nor comfort in them, but all misery, misery in time, misery to eternity, misery in your outward afflictions, misery in your inward frame and temper of mind, misery in this world, misery in hell. You have not a single instance of misery only coming upon you, but miseries. The ruin of your church and nation is at hand; and there will come a day of wrath, when riches shall not profit men, but all the wicked shall be destroyed.” (2.) The very apprehension of such miseries as were coming upon them is enough to make them weep and howl. Rich men are apt to say to themselves (and others are ready to say to them), Eat, drink, and be merry; but God says, Weep and howl. It is not said, Weep and repent, for this the apostle does not expect from them (he speaks in a way of denouncing rather than admonishing); but, “Weep and howl, for when your doom comes there will be nothing but weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth.” Those who live like beasts are called howl like such. Public calamities are most grievous to rich people, who live in pleasure, and are secure and sensual; and therefore they shall weep and howl more than other people for the miseries that shall come upon them. (3.) Their misery shall arise from the very things in which they placed their happiness. “Corruption, decay, rust, and ruin, will come upon all your goodly things: Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten, Jas. 5:2. Those things which you now inordinately affect will hereafter insupportably wound you: they will be of no worth, of no use to you, but, on the contrary, will pierce you through with many sorrows; for,” (4.) “They will witness against you, and they will eat your flesh as it were fire,” Jas. 5:3. Things inanimate are frequently represented in scripture as witnessing against wicked men. Heaven, earth, the stones of the field, the production of the ground, and here the very rust and canker of ill-gotten and ill-kept treasures, are said to witness against impious rich men. They think to heap up treasure for their latter days, to live plentifully upon when they come to be old; but, alas! they are only heaping up treasures to become a prey to others (as the Jews had all taken from them by the Romans), and treasures that will prove at last to be only treasures of wrath, in the day of the revelation of the righteous judgment of God. Then shall their iniquities, in the punishment of them, eat their flesh as it were with fire. In the ruin of Jerusalem, many thousands perished by fire; in the last judgment the wicked shall be condemned to everlasting burnings, prepared for the devil and his angels. The Lord deliver us from the portion of wicked rich men! and, in order to this, let us take care that we do not fall into their sins, which we are next to consider.

Henry goes on to say (and this is the important part if you skipped that quote above):

The apostle shows what those sins are which should bring such miseries. To be in so deplorable a condition must doubtless be owing to some very heinous crimes. (1.) Covetousness is laid to the charge of this people; they laid by their garments till they bred moths and were eaten; they hoarded up their gold and silver till they were rusty and cankered. It is a very great disgrace to these things that they carry in them the principles of their own corruption and consumption—the garment breeds the moth that frets it, the gold and silver breeds the canker that eats it; but the disgrace falls most heavily upon those who hoard and lay up these things till they come to be thus corrupted, and cankered, and eaten. God gives us our worldly possessions that we may honour him and do good with them; but if, instead of this, we sinfully hoard them up, thorough and undue affection towards them, or a distrust of the providence of God for the future, this is a very heinous crime, and will be witnessed against by the very rust and corruption of the treasure thus heaped together. (2.) Another sin charged upon those against whom James writes is oppression: Behold, the hire of the labourers, who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth, etc., Jas. 5:4. Those who have wealth in their hands get power into their hands, and then they are tempted to abuse that power to oppress such as are under them. The rich we here find employing the poor in their labours, and the rich have as much need of the labours of the poor as the poor have of wages from the rich, and could as ill be without them; but yet, not considering this, they kept back the hire of the labourers; having power in their hands, it is probable that they made as hard bargains with the poor as they could, and even after that would not make good their bargains as they should have done. This is a crying sin, an iniquity that cries so as to reach the ears of God; and, in this case, God is to be considered as the Lord of sabaoth, or the Lord of hosts, Kyriou sabaoth, a phrase often used in the Old-Testament, when the people of God were defenseless and wanted protection, and when their enemies were numerous and powerful. The Lord of hosts, who has all ranks of beings and creatures at his disposal, and who sets all in their several places, hears the oppressed when they cry by reason of the cruelty or injustice of the oppressor, and he will give orders to some of those hosts that are under him (angels, devils, storms, distempers, or the like) to avenge the wrongs done to those who are dealt with unrighteously and unmercifully. Take heed of this sin of defrauding and oppressing, and avoid the very appearances of it.

As you can see, maybe we should reconsider our silence concerning the dangers of great wealth. Another metaphor I’ve used from the pulpit before: think of wealth like smoking. Smoking is not a guarantee that you get cancer, but it greatly increases your risk of getting cancer. In the same way, wealth is no guarantee of ungodliness. But it sure is a risk factor for it. Incidentally, the more you smoke, the higher your risk. So also, the more wealth you hoard, the greater your risk of ungodliness.

I’ve known plenty of rich people who are godly, and plenty of generous rich people. I’ve even learned generosity from some of them, and benefitted personally from knowing them. This ain’t about them. It’s about the hoard, and the necessary harm done to acquire, say, one trillion dollars. Or like the mayor of Lake-Town. Hoarded gold destroys us all. Church, don’t fail to resist the perils of the hoard. I promise it doesn’t make you a commie.

Qohelet, the teacher of Ecclesiastes, has clearly seen some crap. He doesn’t describe anything particularly graphic in his work, and he doesn’t really give any account of some specific awful thing that’s happened to him. But Qohelet nevertheless reads as the sort of author who has an easily discernible level of world-weariness that I can’t help but think we could all identify with, especially in an ever more pessimistic age. He isn’t wrong to say that everything that has happened before will happen again, nor that there is nothing new under the sun. While there may be a temptation to think that technology is the exception that proves that rule, I think he’s getting more at the heart of humanity: we behave more or less the same way in any historical epoch.

Most human beings are some admixture of good acts and bad. Most of us do things that we shouldn’t upon one occasion, then do things we should on others. And if we’re really blessed, we will do a thing we shouldn’t do that is also virtuous, which is to say we go above and beyond whatever the duty of the situation may call for.

In all of this, I can’t help but think of the universe as a sort of inhaling and exhaling organism. If you’ll humor my somewhat woo-woo metaphor, the changing of the seasons, the rise and death of generations, and the push and pull of any given natural force is like an inhaled and exhaled breath, or like ocean waves on a beach, or cresting and falling waves at sea. Qohelet said as much in the famous words of Ecclesiastes 3:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.

This world is a big set of lungs, and we are breathed in and out of it when the time is right.

I am often sorrowful over the state of the world, and I join in my fellow Millennials in having anxiety about the future. I speak to a lot of people who say the same, or something similar. I have spoken to those who would tell me they are angry with God. But I think Ecclesiastes gives us a handle upon which to lean when we look at the state of this world. Speaking only for myself, I’m not angry with God. It’s not god who lets me down, it’s always other people.

Inevitably we go round and round, doing this dance of hurting each other and being hurt, but in time, we find there’s an inevitable joy as well. If life is a tragedy in that it ends, it is a triumph when we have any moment of joy. It is not only through sorrow that you will grow. You will grow in your happiest moments as well, if you can learn to. You were not born to die, my friend, but to live.

But Ecclesiastes inevitably reminds us: you will come to an end eventually. Don’t be surprised by suffering. This is not the same thing as saying you shouldn’t suffer, or shouldn’t feel the bitter gall of suffering. See, Ecclesiastes is not a book that gives an answer to the biggest theological question of the Jews, just as Job does not. The biggest question in the Jewish mind was undoubtedly the problem of evil, or more specifically, the problem of suffering. “Why, oh Lord?” is asked in Scripture many times. The comfort of Ecclesiastes is in knowing that the Bible (and God its ultimate author) is not expecting a painted-on smile and unending euphoria under the sun. The comfort of Ecclesiastes is in knowing that the Bible anticipates that this life will have futility, vanity, and frustration. When we feel it, it can make us feel a little better to know that God’s given us ancient texts that express others have before us. As a wise man once said, if you’re going through hell, keep going.

Whatever preparations you’re doing, for whatever you’re doing in life, are going to fall into a frustration Qohelet felt first. One of my preachers from childhood put this very well in explaining Ecclesiastes from the pulpit a long time ago: Proverbs (which immediately precedes Ecclesiastes and is a collection of pithy, wise sayings) is the equivalent to a boy being told by his mom and dad to sit up straight, tie his shoes right, eat fruits and vegetables, and always obey the speed limit. Ecclesiastes is the grumpy grandfather that comes to his grandson next and sits him down for some real, worldly wisdom. “Son, let me tell you what you really need to know.” It’s not so much that the parents are wrong, it’s just that the grandfather imparts a certain perception of the world that only those who have been through life for a while can know.

Ecclesiastes can come across as jaded. Cynical, even. Some suppose that Qohelet may be apostate from true faith itself. I’m not so sure.1 But what I can tell you is that Qohelet gives us a vision of moderation and standoffishness that can be a lesson to us, even if it is not something we live day-to-day forever. The word “vanity” is thrown around a lot in there. You could read that as a sort of “nothing matters” nihilism, but I think that’s a shallow way to read the text. Qohelet is a deeper thinker than a 14 year old edgelord who just discovered (and therefore takes the wrong lesson from) Friedrich Nietzsche. Ecclesiastes offers the comfort that however bitterly you feel your frustrations, they are not wholly unknown, and this can offer some level of comfort.

I think, if I may take a bit of creative license, that Qohelet sees much of the hustle and bustle of life as an exercise in focusing in too much on things that have no ultimate consequence. If your boss annoys you at work and you spend a ton of mental energy thinking about that fact, you are engaging in a type of disproportionate time-wasting that can only be called a vanity. A thing that does not, ultimately, matter.

I think in our dreams we learn what we care most deeply about. That moment halfway between sleeping and waking is perhaps the truest expression of who we are. So in that moment, who are you?

I want to wrap this up by merely making an observation. Ecclesiastes is a good book to read if you’re going through something. And it isn’t because it will give you the golden key to understanding why God does specifically this or specifically that. Ecclesiastes tells you that the God who authored that book knows what it means to suffer, expressed in the life of Christ. “Man of sorrows, what a name,” after all. God does not often tell us, specifically, why, though we are allowed to ask. So often, as He told Job, he answers “why” with Who. God is not done with you, this world, or even your sufferings, however ominous that may or may not be. Know that your suffering is not meaningless. Your suffering is not vanity. If you let it, it will produce character and hope which does not disappoint. Don’t give in to the idea that because you suffer, you are more entitled to anger with God. God gives out this, and then that, and gives some easy lives and others difficult ones. We all have sorrows, though perhaps not in equal measure. Perhaps be grateful that someone doesn’t have to go through what YOU go through, and empathize with their joy. Be the kind of person someone can tell GOOD news to, not just bad. God may not always tell you why, but He will show you who He is, and how He loves you.

He also wrote that, “Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering.”

Qohelet wrote, “All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.”

And also “What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted.”

There are two ideas I’ve been bouncing around in my head for the last few days, and two which I think can be synthesized into a sort of black comfort.

The first is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s idea that this is the best of all possible worlds. I’ve heard the idea mocked by Voltaire and many others, but if you ever poke through Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics, you’ll find it might not be such a stupid idea after all. He wrote that goodness is an expression of God’s character, and not an arbitrary choice of what actions constitute good and evil. In other words, there is no possible existence, no plausible counterfactual in which God could have assigned that murder, adultery, and theft were morally good, because murder, adultery, and theft are all in conflict with the divine nature as He exists in Himself.

Leibniz goes on then, saying “one acts imperfectly if he acts with less perfection than he is capable of.”

“I believe that it is difficult to love God truly when one, having the power to change his disposition, is not disposed to wish for that which God desires. In fact those who are not satisfied with what God does seem to me like dissatisfied subjects whose attitude is not very different from that of rebels. I hold therefore, that on these principles, to act conformably to the love of God it is not sufficient to force oneself to be patient, we must be really satisfied with all that comes to us according to his will… if the future shall perhaps show that God has not wished our good intention to have its way, it does not follow that he has not wished us to act as we have; on the contrary, since he is the best of all masters, he ever demands only the right intentions, and it is for him to know the hour and the proper place to let good designs succeed.”

Now follow me on this while we pivot to something completely different slightly tangential.

The Buddha once remarked that “pain is certain; suffering is optional.” This is perhaps crystallized in the Buddhist doctrine of dukkha, which we roughly translate to “suffering,” but that doesn’t quite get hold of all the nuances. Dukkha can also be summarized thus: “Birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, illness is dukkha, death is dukkha. To be with what you do not want is dukkha. To be separated from what you want is dukkha. To not get what you want is dukkha.” Dukkha is the gnawing knowledge that life is imperfect, and that things aren’t the way they should be. Life is unsatisfactory. Imperfect. Not necessarily completely broken, but not the way it should be.

“Dukkha is whatever puts a squeeze on the heart.” I think that probably gets at what it is best. I’ve felt that. You have too. The squeeze put on the heart, whatever it might be.

Or to put it another way, paraphrasing Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian, “This is the way it was and will be. This way and not some other way.”

God working in the best of all possible worlds is one explanation for the problem of evil: he challenges us with the black proposition that though there is suffering in this world that seems senseless, it is never meaningless, and as stunning and awful as that might seem, or as much as that might seem like a cop-out to divert moral responsibility from God (who could theoretically allow no suffering), it is nevertheless a command for humility before the architect of the best of all possible worlds. Standing in a graveyard this sounds extraordinarily offensive to the point of infuriation. But maybe that is what we are called to accept. This is the way it was and will be. This way, and not some other way. If you have the opportunity to preserve life, you should take it. Don’t make your ideological commitments worth more than human life. Don’t make your preconceptions of the way you wish it was get in the way of doing something that makes you uncomfortable, even if you’re deciding for someone else.

The Buddhists aren’t wrong to see dukkha as foundational to this world as it is in its current, fallen form. They’re only wrong to suggest that dukkha is the first principle of being. But their assessment of our current estate is not so farfetched.

God does not tell you why He does the things He does. As foundational as it is to the Hebrew mind, there is no Hebrew Scripture in which God lays everything out and explains why, exactly, He does certain things or allows certain evils. Leibniz takes a good crack at it, though, when he suggests that an architect is considered imperfect if he could have built something better. There’s no “better” when it comes to a perfect being, so therefore, this universe must be the best he can do. For us, that leaves more questions than answers. But like Habbakuk, like Job, like the saints who cry out “how long, oh Lord?” in Revelation, we get no direct answer.

This is the way it was and will be. This way, and not some other way.

Leibniz’s thought is, in my mind, sound. But it isn’t easy to swallow.

That’s the thing about truth, though. It is what it is; it is not what you wish it could be.

But there’s one key element missing in all this. You can wrestle against the fact that this is the way it is, and not some other way. Or you can accept it. You can embrace this truth even as it rains down heavy on your heart. If there is Christian wisdom in the Buddha, it is surely found in the realization that this world is a river in whose current we are caught, and we will eventually slip beneath the surface. Fighting against that current of being is a fool’s errand, for thrashing only makes you more miserable. Better to simply enjoy the ride as you can, in what circumstances you find yourself. Or as Paul says more bluntly, “who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, ‘Why have you made me like this?’”

As C.S. Lewis puts it, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

We get no answer to our eternal why, but that does not mean that we do not get to ask the question. The answer to why is not given, only the answer to who. In all the torrent of the pain of this life, the only answer we have is to trust that this is not a universe spiraling out of control. Exodus 34, “The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands,[a] forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” And Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped.”

This is more than a cheap nod to God as an excuse for bad things happening to you. If this universe is not out of control, we can acknowledge that all our hurts, even the deepest, most bitterly felt ones, are temporary. Pain itself can be transformed into an occasion for trust. Not because it doesn’t hurt. Allow yourself to hurt—Paul says not that we do not grieve, but that we do not grieve as those that have no hope. You are allowed to feel the misery of the world, even if it is by design. Just know that the designer is trustworthy. God does not call us out of the valley of the shadow of death. He does, however, stand beside us as we go.

We are all rushed along in the river of life, and that rush itself is perhaps dukkha. What it isn’t, though, is a sign that this world is chaos. My own Reformed theology teaches that “the decrees of God are, his eternal purpose, according to the counsel of his will, whereby, for his own glory, he hath foreordained whatsoever comes to pass.” That whatsoever is an impossible difficulty for so many, because it suggests all the atrocities of this world and all of the pains of your life—in their extremity—are, at the very least, by design in some way. That is untenable to some. It is therefore monstrous to imagine that this is the best of all possible worlds, to blend my theologies. But think of the inverse. It is hard to imagine a God that ordains what appears to be senseless tragedy and devastating, extreme misery. But is it really better to imagine a God who would not intervene in suffering if He had no higher purpose for allowing it? Is it better to imagine the God of the open theists, who is impotent to effectively help? Is it better to think that there is no one home and nobody in charge?

Or perhaps we could retreat to the argument for free will—that if God is to allow meaningful love, He must allow meaningful choice, and therefore the door is open to human suffering in order to enable true philosophical liberty. But in my mind, I find it unacceptable to think that God would uphold the suffering of countless innocents to maintain the integrity of an abstract philosophical concept. It’s not as if the concept of free will can feel gratitude or pain if God does or does not protect it.

Ultimately, then, what we have is an enlightenment that awaits us. I can’t pretend to have attained this enlightenment, but I can at least see the road. Accept the bitter providences of this life as endemic to this mortal coil. We live in a world that is not as it should be, and we therefore should not be so terribly surprised by the pain of life. As I once learned from my father’s favorite novel, there is a difference between being resigned to your circumstances and resolved to them. Accept that there are some things you simply cannot change, and accept that you may be asked to do things you don’t want to do. If those things tend towards life, do them, knowing that you can still be a blessing to those under your influence and those with whom you come into contact. Feel a great empathy for your fellow creature. We are trapped in our subjectivity, after all, unable to experience the noumena without it passing through the experience of the phenomena. Life is tough. it might be tougher for you than others, but it might not be, actually. So be kind to one another. Forgive as Christ has forgiven you. The sad reality is that suffering can make you awful towards others: bitter, impatient, selfish, and all the other vices, unless you allow it to work on your heart, slowly, drop by drop, until we attain the awful wisdom of the grace of God—that greatest wisdom being a love for others and a love for God.

Those who have suffered greatly—and maybe you have—stand at the crossroads of bitterness and empathy. This is the best of all possible worlds. In light of that reality, choose this day which road you will travel.

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As many of you are no doubt aware, Artemis II launched and landed over the course of the last week and a half or so, the capsule finally touching down last Saturday. That mission, among other things, marked the farthest human beings have ever been from our planet, over 250,000 miles from our blue home.

I love space. I love exploration, discovery, and the impressive work that goes into making something so extraordinary as space travel possible. I am enamored with the final frontier, and I’d argue it’s hard not to be.

One of my favorite things about this mission, aside from the extraordinary reality of the thing itself, is the truly stunning photography that comes along with such a mission. I’ve included some of my favorites at the end for your contemplation.

Concurrent with this mission, little old me went on a youth retreat this weekend. A couple hundred students from our local churches met up in rural Alabama to get together, worship Jesus, and make new friends. It’s always a good time, even if it is pretty exhausting. As we had breakfast, I had what I could only describe as a moment of staggering love, as I saw these kids, their whole lives ahead of them, shuffling around and groggily gathering their breakfast and coffee. This has happened once before, as I walked through the crowded foot traffic of a Christmas market a couple of years ago. I saw all of these people, all with their independent lives, all with their own struggles and fears and hopes and anxieties and all the other awful and beautiful parts of life, and I felt an intense, aching, and passionate love towards all of them. I was moved to tears by the forceful power of the lives in front of me. They will grow. Struggle. Maybe have kids of their own someday. Some may experience tragedy, and I’d wager lots of them probably have already. Most of them will have a life, and I pray it is gorgeous. I know it will be, because life is.

I’ve been listening to this Avett Brothers song recently. It’s beautiful. It asks simply: how far is heaven? Is it in the air we breathe? Are you the providence of God in human flesh? If you’ve ever been, how can you disappear? If you have the skill, for goodness’ sake, edit this song over footage from the Artemis mission. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It strikes me as tremendously profound to see and love the human life you find yourself surrounded by. Youth ministry has plenty of its own difficulties, and I have struggled to stay engaged with my students as the cares of this world wrap around and choke my spiritual vitality. But that morning, I guess around 8:15, I saw the teeming mass of humanity in my own small way, and I felt an almost crushing sense of love. I want to spare these kids the pain they will inevitably experience. I mourn the pain they have already felt that they keep to themselves. I want to wrap them in the warmth of the emotion I feel towards them. I want them to be, in a word, okay.

Now is a long time. And that brings me to Artemis. Imagine all my feelings towards these kids writ large to the whole world. Seriously, look at this picture:

Look at that image and consider something. Every ounce of pain, every bit of agony, every morsel of joy and tiny taste of heaven is all set on this one celestial stage. The truth is, we are not insignificant, not really. Because we matter to those around us, we are interconnected in our togetherness, and no action of ours is isolated from all the others. We are together. We sink and rise together, and then sink and rise again. We are, all of us, born out of this place, a product of this place, our beautiful and fragile home.

When I look at that blue marble, I see everything. Everything I’ve ever loved or hated. Everyone I’ve wanted so desperately, in the furthest reaches of myself, wanted to help. I have agonized over wanting to help, and all of that agony is towards this planet. I see everyone who’s ever broken my heart or made me smile. Those are often the same people.

That blue marble is everything we know. It’s everything we can know, because even God has made Himself known on this stage. It’s everything we could be. It’s beautiful, and it’s transcendent of our own selves. How far is heaven? it’s closer than you might think. It’s found, at least in seed form, in your neighbors, in your friends, in all those on this beautiful ball.

I really have a hard time putting into words how deeply I want to press into this world my feeling of abject love. I love this place.

So don’t desecrate it by failing to love its inhabitants: human, animal, stone, soil, and all the rest. Give, asking nothing in return. If someone asks for your cloak, give them your shirt, too. Do not give in to incuriosity. This place is, in the most luminous sense, beautiful.

Life itself literally springs out of the ground in this place. This place, which is unique in the whole universe. The cliché is true, as clichés so often are; life is a gift. A GIFT. It is a really truly wonderfully staggeringly BEAUTIFUL GIFT. So savor it. And even more than that: save it wherever you can. In the best ways that you can. Even if—maybe especially if—it costs you something, even whatever expectation you had most. Perhaps there is no more beautiful way to love this place than to give away what you want so someone else gets the benefit. I want my children to know I handed them off that which cost me most to give to those who were undeserving. I want them to know I have loved them by giving them whatever they need to continue and to preserve this place, and that it cost me something, even that which I wanted most, so that they could do the same for someone else later.

I was thinking again about the moment of death the other day. It’s scary, but maybe not so bad. My earthly consciousness will one day cease, but I forget I’m conscious all the time, right? There is a certain security in knowing that I will slip over the horizon of life and pass the torch and tell my daughter, “now you go.” And I will be sealed back into that ground from which all men spring. I will go and be given back to that Earth which made me, as I go to my fathers and mothers, and through God’s grace, up to the place that He has prepared for me, and one day I will again be brought to an Earth remade, for this is, at the end of everything, my beloved home after all.

I love you. If only you could feel the way I feel about you. If only you could see the way I see you. Maybe then I could tell you how sorry I am.

I love you, planet earth.

From your loving native son,

Matthew

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Mostly, I’m writing this brief article to advertise his new venture. Here, go read this real quick:

I think this article makes plenty of points I find myself nodding along with. Substack really IS the fast casual dining experience, and Instagram and Twitter1 are like the drive-through slop factories that I frequent more often than I should. Substack is the Chipotle to Facebook/Insta/Twitter McDonald’s. That’s a fantastic analogy. Well done, Andrew.

I’m also fond of Andrew reminding us of the reality that “just asking questions” is a pseudo-humble and kinda/sorta subtle way of introducing hostile and biased inquiry into a conversation to foment doubt. Man, maybe someone should write an article about that.

But as I read on, I found a few points of (mild) disagreement wrapped in moments of legitimate sympathy. It’s unfortunate to me that Andrew is correct that the dangers of Substack are real, but I find myself wishing I could interrogate the epistemology we all just kind of assume of ourselves. I sympathize with Andrew and his unnamed friend when he laments that there’s a certain weariness that comes with having to defend one’s own viewpoints relentlessly. And I agree that the culture wars are on Substack wearing a tie and slacks.2

But, I’m afraid, we can’t let ourselves off the hook when it comes to faulty reasoning just because it’s exhausting. That’s not to say that you have to spend every waking moment tinkering with your thoughts (few do and I certainly don’t), but if you’re going to hold an opinion or view that’s going to have real consequences on your decision making or on those who you come into contact with, you better know what you’re doing. Andrew writes that in conversation with his friend, he was asked “Is it okay for me to just believe what I believe and not have to defend it?”

I’m sorry, but the answer to that question is no.

Now before you come at me with Matthew 18:3, let me say that there are intellectual comforts we can enjoy, and maybe even should enjoy. But there’s an epistemic burden we all have to acknowledge and work with whenever we reason about, well, anything. As annoying and mid-witted as “fallacy hunting” can sometimes be, there’s a reason we learn to avoid logical fallacies—they expose a deficiency of reason that will work its way out into real-world consequences. Bad decisions get made because of bad reasoning. By examining your own beliefs, you can become a greater blessing to those around you, insofar as your reason is clear. A guy telling me to get out of the way of a speeding bus is doing me a favor, even if he’s a total jerk about it.

It also makes me sad that there’s a cynical reality to his friend’s earlier statement that “you will have really solid arguments I can’t speak to, but that doesn’t make you right.” Of course, that could be true, and effective rhetoric isn’t really a good measure of reality. But rhetoric itself can be wielded by fallacious reasoning, as seen in fallacies such as the firehose of falsehood or gish-gallop or even the motte-and-bailey.

Don’t misunderstand; I’m not saying I’m perfect in all my logic or that I’m infallible or that everyone else is dumber than me. What I’m really saying is that we ALL, including myself, need to interrogate our own positions on any number of things. That’s incredibly hard and even painful work, but it must be done. And more to the statement itself, if someone has strong arguments that you can’t speak to, you really should look into that. No, strong arguments are themselves not bulletproof, but if you find your view on something is regularly shunned, attacked, or beaten down by data you ignore, you should be honest and at least acknowledge that a review is in order—without just looking for the flaw in whatever attack you don’t like. Bad reasoning comes from flawed human psychology, and it unfortunately has deleterious effects for everyone. So in a weird, falling-backwards-into-it kind of way, intellectual interrogatives are a way that enables you to have better opportunities to love your fellow image-bearers and deny yourself. Staying put intellectually is a selfishness that can have worse consequences than we realize. So while I get that the emotional exhaustion of doing this work is real, it doesn’t stop being necessary for the good of everyone. If we come to a clearer picture of reality we can help others, and model the self-sacrificial love of Christ.

I don’t mean to sound like I’m just trying to dog Andrew or even his friend, really. In going to Anglicanism, Andrew explains that one simple step into a different tradition caused him a lot of intellectual and faith anxiety. But the fact that he was even subconsciously able to explore other faiths (and even non-faith), even as such an exploration gave him a large dose of anxiety, speaks to me that he does the exact kind of intellectual work he should be doing. And you should do it to. And so should I.

Andrew writes that the culture tells us to find our own truth. I think the response to that (at least as far as I’m concerned) is “yes and no.” While there are those who still say to live your truth and all that jazz, relativism is more or less dead, killed in the era of outrage, ragebait, and what appears to be actively malicious political leadership heralded by people who are, essentially, Twitter trolls with nuclear armament.

But I also think there’s a rest to be found in the Gospel, as identified by Andrew. Instead of the Sisyphean task of rolling the intellectual stone up the mountain again and again, we have the Rock of Ages on which to rest, who Himself is the cornerstone that at times shields us and at times crushes us.

Unfortunately, he’s right to say that a lot of “debate” is the quest for a gotcha moment and a snappy sound byte that might go viral. So ya know, don’t be that guy. But don’t get so cynical about knowing anything that you just sit in your own views, unchallenged forever. You have to be willing to reconsider. Read a book or paper you disagree with and actually listen to it. That doesn’t require signing up for whatever they’re selling you, but look into stuff. If something is built on a faulty assumption, tear it down. You’ll help everyone by doing so, even if it hurts.

Good job, Andrew. Please write more. You are Mike with the steam shovel, and I want to see “another good idea” that you have to come up with.

But unfortunately for him, about 70% of the lecture was gish-gallop nonsense. That being said, he made two points that have a kind of legitimacy about them, in that I think they are, if nothing else, thought-provoking.

First, he did say something specific which I thought was really interesting. I’m paraphrasing, but the gist of it is this: “It doesn’t matter how crazy you think someone is. It is those with the gumption to act on their beliefs that impact this world.” His point in context is it really doesn’t matter how crazy your leaders are, in the sense that their crazy-ness is not some defeater of their personal objectives. Specifically, he was saying that sensible mothers in Russia have no interest in sending their sons to war, but Putin sends them regardless, because he is the one making that decision.

In a sense, as brutal as it is, he’s right. The will to act is determinative. And if someone powerful has the will to act, you are at their mercy. Now, the good news is that not everyone imposes evil on you. There are benevolent actors who compel your behavior, even if that behavior isn’t something you particularly want to do. A small example: if you’ve ever been forced to solve a difficult problem in school, you’ve been forced to do something you don’t want to do in the interest of becoming educated, which is in the best interest of society. You are legally required to educate children—either in a public school, private school, or homeschool. This is a good thing, because lifting a legal sanction against not educating your kids will result in a stupider population, which is worse for literally everyone. We can crone about “our rights” all we want, but it’s in the best interest of everyone to compel people to educate children.2 This is a good opportunity to practice laying down our rights to help others, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

My point is that there are lawmakers who have compelled you to do something you may or may not want to do, but it is ultimately for your benefit—and the benefit of everyone else. This is why we need to pray for leaders and decision makers, that they would have wisdom to discern how they should or should not use such compulsory power. Because so often, compulsory power is used as a brutality, as in the case of Putin’s Russia. The worried mother is less powerful than the man holding the gun, and even though 99% of people would (probably) sympathize with the mother, she doesn’t get a say. It is the other side of the dark reality that it is those who act on their convictions that are those who make a real mark on this world. This is what one of my history professors would call a “creative minority,” that small part of any population who exercises oversized influence.3

Then in second place, there was a point our crank-teacher made about geopolitics. He theorizes that Putin has started his war in Ukraine as a form of “national exercise,” in the sense that war is considered good for his own country, a mechanism to combat alcoholism, infertility, and consumerism. If you send your sons to war, they will have renewed purpose, unity with one another, and a shared enemy.

Do you see the problem with this?

It isn’t because the teacher is necessarily wrong.4 It’s that this is, to me, a deeply immoral solution, however effective it may or may not be. As I have said in a previous post, as Christians, our job is to take suffering away from others, even and especially at cost to ourselves. This is a utilitarian answer to a series of problems, one which monstrously solves your problem by passing suffering to someone else. If someone suffers in order for you to feel fulfilled, you have sinned. We should know that. We should feel the weight of that, and not go on justifying ourselves.

Now, there are times in which you have to cause some kind of suffering for a larger goal. Medicine is bitter in the moment but cures the disease. There’s something of a balancing act going on here; inflict nothing on those around you and you run the risk of kicking the can down the road. You spoil the futures of your children and their children to selfishly preserve the present. That’s no good, obviously. But on the other side of the coin, if you inflict TOO MUCH on the people around you, you hurt your neighbors in a very clear, direct way. As Proverbs says, the fallow ground of the poor would yield much food, but it is swept away through injustice.

But surely, then, it is monstrous to inflict war on others and yourselves in order to trim the proverbial fat from your society.5 The teacher makes an interesting followup in a rare moment of commentary—it is his opinion that Russia will not be Putin’s legacy, Putinism will be Putin’s legacy. And by that he means a series of small, regional conflicts intended to legitimize those in power and rally the common people to an outside enemy, all in the name of strengthening the nation by engaging in war and its wartime economic benefits.

Oh.

Has anybody watched the news lately? Does any of this sound familiar?

Surely it makes you think of the 2012 Republican primary debate, right? Brian Metzger sums up the scene in an excellent article I highly recommend you read.

As Sparks Fly Upward

Farewell, John Piper

Recently, hard-left, liberal, woke theologian and pastor, John Piper, was piled on for tweeting out this scripture, “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” Leviticus 19:34 together with this sentence: “Christians…

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6 months ago · 1360 likes · 275 comments · Brian Metzger

Back in 2012, former Congressman Ron Paul, during a Republican primary debate, suggested that the “Golden Rule” (treat others as you would want to be treated) should be applied to American foreign policy. He was booed by the audience which, if statistics are accurate, was made up largely of evangelical Christians. His remark was immediately preceded by Newt Gingrich saying, “Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear-cut idea about America’s enemies: Kill them!”” The same crowd roared with approval.

Okay, what’s my point? It’s that this “putinism” if we so call it is bloodthirsty, bad, and ya know, unChristian. Does this kind of language strike you as godly? Just? Christlike? Beating in rhythm with the heart of God?

But who cares about any of that, right? Putin doesn’t care about moral purity, and I doubt the heads of most governments do. But that’s okay. Because first of all, you should,6 and second of all, Rome is not eternal.

Albius Tibullus first called Rome the “Eternal City,” followed by Virgil and Ovid in their poetry. The Roman empire was absolutely convinced that its empire was forever, and that it would never fall.

To be fair, they had pretty much an all-time great run. Speaking for myself, I am one of those men that thinks about the Roman Empire a lot. Rome’s legacy is enduring and unmatched, and even modern empires claim their heritage from the ancient GOATs.

But leave aside your poetic notions of Roman heritage for a moment and think about political reality. The great empire had its run but eventually fell. I know the East held it down for longer, but the Western empire finally came to its end in the 6th century. Rome lasted over 500 years. That’s pretty dang good. But there was another force that infected Rome and transformed it from the pagan to Christian empire before its dissolution. And of course, that is the life of faith.

It is very, very easy to conflate politics and religion. In fact, they were often directly and unapologetically intertwined until relatively recently in world history. But I would argue that one of the most interesting things about Christianity is that it is transcendent—the faith cuts across time, language, gender, age, and power. Galatians 3 is absolutely right to say that we are one in Christ Jesus, over and against whatever else might divide us.

And the author of that letter, the apostle Paul, is one of the most brilliantly subversive people in human history. The fabulously educated Paul wrote letters to various churches—small, unlearned, powerless, offering him nothing. He wrote pragmatic, instructive material. He was not shy about asking for money to support other struggling churches. And of course, Paul was, himself, a Roman citizen.

I highly doubt Paul was writing subversive material intended to corrode the power of Rome. If he did, he was terribly obscure in his purposes. No, Paul was writing to his fellow Christ-followers, writing what is almost a collection of ad hoc solutions to pastoral problems.

And yet, this corpus and the Christ proclaimed by believers was instrumental in toppling the greatest empire the Western world had known to that point. Even more than that, these teachings almost turned Rome inside out, as the empire Christianized late in its existence.

How did this happen? Well, the short version is that God did it. But like, how? There were mechanisms and thoughts that Paul gave humanity that challenged and subverted Roman thinking directly. Dr. Sugrue talks about this in a lecture I beg of you to watch, so just know I’m stealing from inspired by him.7 In short, Rome was familiar with the mystery cults and even resurrection cults in its fringe vassal states and didn’t initially think of Christianity as a big change from one of those (which could come and go). But then something weird happened, and more and more people were talking about eating a man’s flesh and drinking his blood. Was this a cannibal cult? That is a BIG NO for your civil society. Then there’s this business of calling Christ Lord in opposition to Caesar. Then there was this odd behavior these people had in which they said that the empire would NOT be eternal, it would fall before the end of the world.

Rome knew how to handle a military uprising. Kill everyone and crucify the leaders to get everyone back into submission. But this was no military conflict, was it? This was the subversion of a militaristic and brutal society by the promise of another world after this one. Killing the Christians didn’t weaken their resolve, it bolstered their belief in heaven.

Further, these were the members of a strange religious group that was comfortably inferior. Christians were mocked for being a religion of slaves, women, children, and imbeciles. The dregs of society were the glories of their churches, and this was unconscionable to the Roman system of rigid meritocracy. Think of it: Paul wants to create an ethos of love and spread it through a brutal world. The Romans had no shortage of created human misery for him to invite people out of. It’s beautiful, and it is the answer to the awful tragedy of human consciousness.

I want to emphasize again that the beginning of the faith was a promise of a kingdom whose members were beloved not because of their merit, but because of Christ’s, and that this distinction would have been set not as an esoteric part of Christianese, but a powerful promise of hope in the face of a government that directly opposed this idea day by day. It is not an accident that Paul went on his missionary journeys and spread the Gospel to receptive people and Rome hated him for it. After all, what are our chief virtues in this life of faith? Faith, hope, and love.

Faith is one of the bridges of continuity between the Old and New Testaments. Love, the greatest virtue of the Christian life, is the final blossom of Christian life. And standing there in the middle is hope. Paul gives us a tremendous gift in telling us that hope is a virtue. While we take hope as an obvious good, this is not so clear in history. In ancient Greece, for example, hope is not a virtue, but a vice—a delusion, a way to set yourself up for disappointment, a curse for mankind. What was in the bottom of Pandora’s Box, after all? It was hope. For the Christian, hope was a promise, an anticipation for things better than they are now. For the Greek, hope was a curse, as they saw the world in a kind of unavoidable, cynical brutality.

The thing is, this world CAN BE cynical, brutal, and cruel. I mean, look around. You don’t have to go further than your own home to sometimes see the truth of that. But the miracle of Christianity among many other miracles is that hope can actually be trusted, and that we can truly expect God to work for justice, love, and charity.

This is what I want to get across to you so often. In this life there is pain, and you should embrace it, especially if you can absorb it on behalf of someone else. But there is not meaninglessness. This is why Christ bids us to die, to take up our cross. You will have to do things you don’t want to do in this life. You may have to give up whatever it is you hold dearest. It may even be wrested away from you against your will. But there is a treasure that can be yours where moth and rust and thief cannot enter. This is the Gospel hope that can turn an empire on its head. Whoever loses his life for Christ will find it, and whoever sells all he has can be His disciple. The longer you struggle against whatever it is that God is calling you to do, the more pain you will cause yourself—and others, too. Rome is not eternal. It is the city of man. And as much as I love America, America is not eternal. There is no such thing as infinite growth; there is only life and death and rebirth. All flesh is like grass, and the grass withers, the flower fades. What kingdom will stand in the end? Not one made by YOU. Jesus said it Himself—His kingdom is not of this world. It is beyond it. It transcends it.

Paul knew hope was vital to his audience, because it made the promise that the love-ethos will outlast the cruelty of Rome, the cruelty of this world. Hope will take you from faith to love, because we can trust that God will uproot the evil empires that now work in this world.

Paul was right. Rome wasn’t eternal. Your kingdom won’t be either. So give it up, and know that you won’t be disappointed. The tighter you grip what you want, the more painful it will be when it is inevitably taken away from you. Rather open your hand, cling to the rock, and scream as the storm blows over you and through you. In so doing, paradoxically, the empires will fall.

“[A] thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

I knew this game had a reputation for predicting the future in some way, but I didn’t play it until we were all in isolation during the heights of COVID. When I played it, it quickly reached a lofty height I can only think that one, maybe two other video games have reached in my life. The game was a legitimate piece of art.1

I’ve always loved playing games, and I think they tend to be unfairly maligned just for existing, as if there’s something wrong with playing games in general.2 There are countless classics I have loved—the original Halo series probably being my personal favorite, followed closely by Final Fantasy 6 or Chrono Trigger. Others such as most Nintendo franchises have made their mark on me. More recent favorites would also include games like Elden Ring, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and Oblivion: Remastered, among many many others both old and new.3

But as artistic as some of these games can be, such as Final Fantasy 6 (whose soundtrack I was just listening to this morning), I would argue great games CONTAIN art moreso than they ARE art. Chrono Trigger has a beautiful soundtrack. The Elder Scrolls series has wonderfully complex lore and fantastic fantasy elements, but I would not say that the act of playing those games is, itself, an act of art.4 A game can contain a fantastic story that moves me, and I can get very “into it,” empathetic with the characters, immersed in the world, enraptured by the setting or visuals. In that sense, video games are themselves artistic, and can be deeply moving.5 But I would draw a line between pressing controller inputs and what could be called “art,” wherein the very playing of a game is art itself. Please don’t hear what I’m not saying; video games can be rich repositories of artistic experience made by deeply talented and beautifully artistic people. I am merely remarking that the act of playing through a digital world by inserting inputs is rarely art in and of itself. I’ll warn you now, if you care, this article is going to spoil the living crap out of Metal Gear Solid 2, so if you have even a little interest in playing it, go do that. Now. GO! It’s only like 10-15 hours long!

One of the rare exceptions to this is Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of the Patriots. In a nutshell, MGS2 is an espionage game in which the main character, Raiden, is a rookie operator tasked with infiltrating a terrorist group that has kidnapped the president and demanded a $30 billion ransom. It all sounds very Mission: Impossible and campy, but as the plot unfolds, the player is led to understand that (SPOILERS):

The entire operation is a simulation, a way of controlling the social and political information given to the public. This whole thing has been a game, a way to maintain the power of a shadowy organization called The Patriots, who have had their hands in creating and disseminating the simulation so that they can use artificial intelligence (yes really) to easily influence the public into doing what they want. So what makes this art? Well, it’s the fact that YOU, the player, are undergoing the simulation by PLAYING THE GAME. Our hero, Raiden, is you, the player. This becomes clear when The Colonel, your boss, reveals to you late in the game that he’s just an AI, an agent of The Patriots, sent to manipulate Raiden to get him to carry out the simulation. A sample of the dialogue:

Colonel:
Raiden, turn the game console off right now.

Raiden:
What did you say?

Colonel:
The mission is a failure. Cut the power right now.

Raiden:
What’s wrong with you?

Colonel:
Don’t worry, it’s a game. It’s a game just like usual.

Rosemary:
You’ll ruin your eyes playing so close to the TV.

Raiden:
What are you talking about?

At one point, The Colonel turns off the game as you’re playing it. He shouts the names of train stations. He claims he had an affair with Raiden’s girlfriend (who is also a simulation!) to manipulate him. All the while you, the player, are going through these emotions with Raiden—the very people you thought were your closest allies have been using you all along. This is just my interpretation, but the name “Raiden” itself is a reference to thunder and lighting. Raiden is the electrical conduit that enables YOU, the player, to engage with the simulation.

And all the while, Raiden is working to fight against these terrorists, who themselves are a sort of bizarre collective victim. The big bad guy of the game is a guy by the name of Solidus Snake, the third in a series of clones desperate to try and pass something on. Solidus, like his brothers, is sterile, and cannot stand the notion that he will die and leave nothing in the world. As he puts it:

“Jack [that’s Raiden, btw], listen to me. We're all born with an expiration date. No one lasts forever. Life is nothing but a grace period for turning the best of our genetic material into the next generation. The data of life is transferred from parent to child. That's how it works. But we have no heirs, no legacy. We brothers are called ‘Les Enfants Terribles’—cloned from our father, with the ability to reproduce conveniently engineered out. What is our legacy if we cannot pass the torch? Proof of our existence—a mark of some sort. When the torch is passed on from parent to child... it extends beyond DNA; information is imparted as well. All I want is to be remembered. By other people, by history. The Patriots are trying to protect their power, their own interests, by controlling the digital flow of information. I want my memory, my existence to remain. Unlike an intron of history, I will be remembered as an exon. That will be my legacy, my mark on history. But the Patriots would deny us even that. I will triumph over the Patriots, and liberate us all. And we will become... the sons of liberty!”

Both Solidus and The Patriots can agree that human life is a biological struggle to carry on one’s genes. Solidus can’t do that, so he is desperate to make a mark in some other way, to give some kind of proof that will last to show that he was alive. The Patriots, on the other hand, are more interested in containing and manipulating the flow of information (“creating contexts” as they put it) so that the whole human race can ostensibly benefit under their benevolent-but-definitely-creepy shadow dictatorship. Solidus’ rebellion at the end doesn’t fit into this scheme, so he must be eliminated. And Raiden, their simulator, is forced to carry out the task. He is literally hard-wired to do it, in the sense that the game cannot progress until you kill Solidus. He is, quite literally, in OUR WORLD, unable to do otherwise, because after all, this is in reality, a game.

Now, I know what you might be thinking. “holy cow! This is what the LiBeRaLs do! They stifle free speech! They censor information! They want to control the digital landscape!”

I realize that informational warfare is as old as time itself, but this game is way more prescient than you’re giving it credit for. Metal Gear Solid 2 is not about some supposed liberal psyop that made COVID a bigger threat than it actually was. If you think that MGS2 is about YOUR worldview, you are mistaken. If you think The Patriots were defeated because your refused to wear a mask and posted misinformation on Facebook or whatever, you are no cleverer than those in the public who celebrated the defeat of the terrorist Solidus Snake without ever realizing that The Patriots even existed.

But this isn’t about fighting yesterday’s battles over COVID policy. This is about the digital age in general. Maybe that was one battlefield, but it’s about more than just that. This game is about profiting over manipulating YOUR OPINIONS using digital tools made to do three things:

1. Affirm that you’re very smart

2. Affirm that your decisions are always good

3. Affirm that you have accurate information about the world.

MGS2 is not about you being on the right side of a war for information. It is about how you are not as clever as you think you are, and even your fundamental assumptions can be successfully exploited for the benefit of someone else. After all, who is using AI the most these days? Who is profiting off of your confidence? ChatGPT is powerful (and sinister) for many reasons, but perhaps its most obvious vice is its ability to get you to either affirm your assumptions OR assume that you’d never fall for it. After all, it is only the deceived that says “I cannot be deceived.” We are ALL vulnerable to lies that please us. And when you begin to build yourself a life based on that lie, it is all the more painful when it comes crashing down. The Patriots prefer another way: that you live in a self-reinforcing bubble, causing trouble for no one, least of all yourself.

Lies are the more painful when they are long believed. Facing reality only becomes harder and harder the more of a lie you live, eventually becoming so painful that your mind cannot bear the truth and will actively avoid it. This is REAL lesson of MGS2. You think you know, but you don’t. Add on top of this the question of legacy and genes. The Patriots, ostensibly, have the best interest of the public in mind. Well, big whoop, that’s what everyone thinks. Unless someone is actively nihilistically obliterative, everyone and their brother thinks that what they think is best for society in general. The Patriots are making a key mistake though, and you probably are too. They think the passing of genes is the ultimate good. And before you scoff and say that you don’t think that, realize that their myopia might not be yours. The information you pass into the world can either be a cure or a poison for others. Even if you think life is more than biology (and therefore disagree with The Patriot’s premise), you still have a vulnerability to being manipulated by what you want to hear, and what you WANT to be true. I am not above this vulnerability and neither are you. It’s like trying to build a shield from an attack from the fourth dimension; you literally cannot do that, because you cannot comprehend what it means. As The Patriots say themselves, their plan isn’t one of censorship, it’s of self-confirmation. You simply blind yourself to inconvenient information that messes that up.

So my advice, insofar as I have any, is twofold. Number one, challenge the things that “sound good” to you. If something is comfortable to your sensibilities, don’t assume it’s real. That is difficult work. It is dying to self. It is extraordinarily painful, especially as you see in others you love and even in your own heart that that which you hold dear might not be real. And second, realize that SOMEONE IS RIGHT, or at least MORE right. Imperfect precision is not complete inaccuracy. Or put another way, someone being a little wrong does not mean they are completely wrong. But it can be true that someone is precise (tightly hitting the same mark) but inaccurate (not hitting the designated target, in our case truth). That is the key to misinformation: you might be right on what you’re hitting again and again, but far afield from the target you think you’re aiming for.

There are covers and copes and confirmation biases and escape hatches all throughout your psychological experience. The Patriots want to exploit them to get you to operate in a way that, ostensibly, makes you happy. But confirming loveable lies is no way to live—not because you ever feel their poison, but because someone, somewhere, will bear the brunt of your carefully protected subconscious falsehoods. Do you want THAT to be the legacy you leave? Solidus wanted something, anything. But there are worse things than being forgotten. Being a curse among your fellow men is surely one of them.

The ending of the game is initially bleak, by the way. Raiden (and you) have undergone an intense psychological trial, leading to despair. Raiden discovers that The Patriots win in the end, and no one else even realizes they exist. To the outside world, a blonde guy in a wetsuit has saved the world from a terrorist threat. All is well. But Raiden knows the awful truth that these people have been sold a lie that sounds great, and he finds himself wandering the New York streets in despondency.

That is, until Solid Snake shows up. Snake, the protagonist from Metal Gear Solid 1, is the brother of Solidus, one of Les Enfants Terrible, unable to reproduce, unable to come out of the shadows of espionage and special operations to leave his legacy. He has a different view on the whole thing. He comforts Raiden with these words:

“Life isn't just about passing on your genes. We can leave behind much more than just DNA. Through speech, music, literature, and movies... what we've seen, heard, felt... anger, joy, and sorrow... these are the things I will pass on. That's what I live for. We need to pass the torch, and let our children read our messy and sad history by its light. We have all the magic of the digital age to do that with. The human race will probably come to an end sometime, and new species may rule over this planet. Earth may not be forever, but we still have the responsibility to leave what traces of life we can. Building the future and keeping the past alive are one and the same thing.”

Pass on the best things, then. Listen when our God speaks to us, for in so doing He defines the reality we can so often obscure with the comfort of a lie. Do not listen to those words, “you will not die…” but rather embrace that reality, and pass on the things that enable us to leave evidence we were here. Building the future and keeping the past alive are one and the same thing, not because of some romanticized or nostalgic view of a mythical past, but because we can leave this world better than we found it, hopefully. But maybe that’s just what I think.

Nevertheless, I had some positive feedback on it, even if the net I cast wasn’t particularly wide. I think I’m generally okay with that, or at least okay enough with it to not freak out and look up a hundred different ways to increase my reach.

The feedback I got on it, specifically, was a big encouragement to me, because I friend of mine told me I had done something that I wasn’t really trying to do. I was told that I had written a very lenten essay. In other words, what I had written had a Lent theme to it. And I posted it the day after Ash Wednesday, no less.

I take this as a pretty high compliment! I accidentally posted something that got someone thinking about the church season we’re in. I’ll take that as a win. Now, in an effort to try and do something purposefully I first did on accident, I’d like to put out a few more posts that have to do with this church season, and match up (at least sort of) with Lent. I also intend these posts to be shorter, and probably more directed at a specific thought.

But enough about method. If there’s anything I get tired of on social media, it’s the insistence some people have of justifying all of their methodology before saying anything of substance. I’m a huge hypocrite about this, in that I try to qualify a lot of what I say (and, ya know, I wrote what I did above). But whatever. Here’s a meditation for your day.

As mentioned in the title, a question is a loaded gun.

I’ve been watching a fair amount of Columbo over the last few months. If you’re uninitiated, Columbo is a long running series about the homicide cases tackled by the titular detective. But the interesting part of Columbo isn’t a pulse-pounding spectacle of cops chasing perpetrators or wild gunfights. It isn’t even the murders themselves, not really. The interesting thing about Columbo is the detective himself. Columbo isn’t particularly strong, nor is he fast, nor is he funny (at least, not on purpose). He’s actually kind of annoying, at least to his suspects. No, the interesting thing about Columbo is seeing how this unassuming detective will nail the perpetrators of these murders (which you always know from the start of the show). How will Columbo get these jerks to confess? What lie will he catch them in?

Columbo, ever vigilant, bides his time. Usually his questioning is about something the killer doesn’t realize is relevant, and the killer (who inevitably thinks he’s much smarter than the schlubby detective) unwittingly incriminates himself by seeming all too helpful and willing to speak to the police.

I’m very, very far from being a lawyer, but if there’s one piece of advice I’ve always heard when you’re interviewed in relation to a crime, it’s to shut up until your lawyer gets there. The villains in Columbo do not follow this advice, both for TV reasons (if they did the most sensical thing we wouldn’t have a show!), and also because the murders are invariably smug, self-assured rich people who assume there’s no other outcome than getting away with it.

Columbo’s whole schtick is to put on this “aww shucks” attitude, massage the killer’s ego, then sleepwalk him into his own downfall.

Of course, this isn’t a review of Columbo, not really.1 It is to recognize a simple thought. A question is a loaded gun. Questions are live rounds, if you prefer.

In Columbo, the detective artfully questions his marks with honest but unassuming queries, and before they know it, they’ve let out the rope they’ll hang on. What this demonstrates to me is that not all questions are created equal.

Something I see getting thrown around a fair bit in the wild world of the internet is this notion of “just asking questions,” as if questions are neutral or inherently humble in some way. but questions are more than this—they can be loaded. They can be heavily biased. They can really be statements masquerading as inquiries.

And on the whole, we should question things, right? We should examine claims, test them, scrutinize things that are said to us, etc. At the same time, credulity is not always a great sin. You just have to be careful what you’re credulous of.

But the point is, much like Columbo’s questions, our questions are not neutral. What passes for honest questioning can hide a lurking agenda. I remember seeing this in conspiracy spaces back when those were still fun to observe. People would look at a widely accepted narrative, criticize that narrative by asking questions about it, then declare their conspiracy of choice was correct all along because the “mainstream narrative” couldn’t answer their questions.

But here’s the thing. First of all, a series of leading, loaded questions is to turn on the firehose of falsehood, which is incredibly difficult to deal with for those not ready for it. An unprepared astronaut who has seen space personally cannot possibly defend themselves from a prepared flat-earther who fires off so many lines of skepticism that they can’t be corrected without careful consideration. This is even more hopeless if it happens in front of an ignorant audience. Rhetorically, what ends up happening is that a flood of questions makes an otherwise expert opinion look foolish, and in rhetoric, the appearance of correctness is much more important than actually being factually correct. This is also compounded by the argument from incredulity, which is the fallacious assumption that because someone cannot imagine a given proposition is false, it must therefore be true. This is, of course, a problem in that whether or not an individual can imagine something being true or false has little bearing on whether or not a given proposition IS true or false, as far as that pesky thing called reality is concerned.

Fortunately, flat-Earth is not a generally accepted proposition, and even an ignorant audience is going to mostly disperse without giving up the globe. This strategy becomes more pernicious—and more dangerous—when it is applied to decisions that have real-world consequences both for ourselves and for others. Politics and misinformation so often go hand in hand, and I advise you to check and see what those who desire power say to you, how they live, and whether their claims stand up to dispassionate scrutiny.

After all, “just asking questions” is not the ticket to humility and honesty. Columbo isn’t asking honest questions, he just so happens to be the good guy, which of course we always assume of ourselves.

But realize something: you might not be as humble and dispassionate as you might think. Every once in a while, Columbo will drop his facade, and it’s always fascinating. In an episode I watched not too long ago, Columbo, exhausted from an all-nighter and working a difficult case, makes something very clear to someone covering for a murderer. He drops his act completely, and looks at the woman protecting her murderous boss, and says clearly: “No, I’m asking YOU! I’m asking you about a murder!”

In his exasperation, Columbo reveals that this isn’t a game. This is not an honest inquiry, insofar as his questions and investigation are not neutral. They are a tactic. See, Columbo doesn’t carry a gun. He doesn’t like them. But he doesn’t have to. Columbo knows a question is a loaded gun.

Guns are tools. Guns are violent tools, but tools nonetheless. And they are extremely powerful tools. When I was growing up, my dad taught me the first and second rules of gun safety:

1. Always assume a gun is loaded.

2. Never point your gun at something unless you intend to shoot it.

Maybe those rules ought to apply to our questions, too. Now, you should interrogate the claims and proposals in your life. Heck, you should interrogate your own assumptions, and probably do so often. Lord knows that isn’t very fun, but in case you missed it, I also think that you have to be willing to change2 if need be.

But realize that your questions are loaded. Be careful what you want to point them at. We all think we’re like Columbo, great detectives searching out the truth through investigative questioning. But that is to make a mistake—Columbo knows he’s got a murderer to catch. And not to be a wet blanket, but he’s in a television show where the audience already knows the facts. We know Columbo is in the right when he questions these murderers, even if his act is to lie to them. In real life, we are not so omniscient as we are when we see what happens on the screen. As Christians, what truth do we have that is fundamental to life? Only that which is given to us. 1 Corinthians 4:7 is one of the most elegant calls to humility in all the New Testament: “What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?” This applies to worldview-level, fundamental truths as much as it does anything else.

With that in mind, I return to our questions. Question with boldness, as Jefferson once said and as many like to co-opt. As Thomas put it, “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”

Now I do want to recognize that Jefferson was an Enlightenment rationalist through and through. I am not so sunny on the capacity of human reason to solve all the mysteries of the universe. I am far too Calvinistic to affirm such optimism.

Yet, at the same time, I can appreciate some aspect of what Jefferson is saying there. I think there’s some Christian traction to be had in pressing on that phrase “the homage of reason” in conjunction with Isaiah 1:18, “Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.” I’ve always thought it odd that God says we should reason together then proceeds to talk about forgiveness of sin in that verse, but I think I understand something more clearly now: if we were rational, if we could hear the logic of reason, we would know that logic should overwhelm our rebellion. It is irrational to persist in sin. To reason—and to interrogate our own sinfulness—should drive us to the Cross.

So perhaps it’s less that reason is, itself, homage, and more that reason prompts homage. But nevertheless, there is a part that reason has to play, and a part of that reason is to question well. Jefferson was actually writing that advice to his nephew, that he might be unafraid to examine, re-examine, and question his world, consequences being put on the sideline.

Sometimes it hurts to look into the light, but we are better for it. A question is a loaded gun. Be careful what you shoot with it. But know that, sometimes, you have to take a shot—you have to take it to provide for your family or to protect them or to protect yourself. But do yourself a favor. Don’t get trigger happy just so you can shoot all the stuff you don’t like. Use that tool not to advance yourself but to advance everyone. We are less like Columbo and more like ourselves as we really are than we might expect. Be careful, and don’t blast off loaded questions irresponsibly. But when the time comes, fire.3

Cheerful stuff! Thanks for stopping by. As I occasionally say to my student ministry group with tongue planted firmly in cheek, thanks for coming in so I can remind you that you’re gonna die someday.

Of course, dying seems abstract, disconnected from reality. It is only when we face cold hard reality that we can reckon with that altogether inconvenient fact that one day we will face a definite end. It is our inescapable curse, a prison without exit.

And one of the things that makes me feel some anxiety about that (aside from the obvious) is the things I’ll miss. Here’s what I mean.

According to the smart guys that do math and know stuff, there are so many things I will miss. If God doesn’t call game over on this world first, I will miss spectacular supernovas and the deaths of stars over incomprehensibly long stretches of time. I will miss the re-organization of the night sky and the collection of new constellations. I will (probably) miss any long-term space exploration, if we make it that far as a species.

I won’t get to see this happen in real time:

And that’s just kind of a bummer. Life is far too short to experience all of the breathtaking things that will happen long after we’re gone.

But of course, I’m not really a total doomer, either. I believe in a beneficent God. I believe in redemption, and I look forward to the promise of life after my inevitable pass through the veil. But even in this life, I am glad that I, as of now, have at least one successor on the way, arriving this Summer.

To paraphrase Alan Watts, to have a child (or really to have any descendant, even an indirect one) is something of a passing of the torch. It is to say, “now YOU go.” It is the way in which we live on, even if our bodies cease in their motion. Of course, we ourselves do not personally continue. In some sense, to die is to try and remember what it was like to be before we were born, though of course this is a nonsensical statement.

I have no memory of existence before my birth. Such a concept makes no sense. My first memory is being swaddled and laid down in a crib to nap, not the 80s or 70s or the stuff that I obviously wasn’t there to experience. The difference is that it’s weird to imagine a place continuing after my life has concluded, not a place that exists before it began. Hopefully this isn’t a completely banal observation, but reality is, of course, subjective and objective simultaneously. The world will (probably) keep turning in 150 years, even if everyone reading this won’t be there to see it. Reality is objective, and we do well to live in light of what is objectively true. To fight against the stream of the world as it is is to try and paddle into the side of a riverbank. It’s not going to get you anywhere. You must accept the current as it flows, not as you wish it flowed. We cause much heartache in not accepting reality, even if reality can be harsh and can destroy our sense of self. To give up and surrender to life as it is is not failure, it is change. And at times, it is extraordinarily painful.

Your living in this strange reality is what it is—it isn’t what you wish it was. And even if you live a comfortable lie for many years, perhaps the whole time you walk this mortal plane, that lie is passed on to someone else, who will inevitably shoulder its burden. To live in a lie is to burden those of the future with your mistake. I’d advise you not do that. If we believe a falsehood and pass on that falsehood, we perpetuate some kind of suffering. Someone will eventually pay the price for our falsehoods, even if we never see it ourselves, or even understand this at all, or even if that person we burden is a total stranger to us.

This is, of course, still sin, and still our fault. Our Westminster Larger Catechism, one of the foundational documents of our Presbyterian church, makes clear in questions 135 and 136 that “all occasions, temptations, and practices, which tend to the unjust taking away the life of any” are wrong. Christian ethics does not stop with the self nor the family, it extends to all people, to whom we owe a debt of deference and priority. Christian ethics is the subversive field it is (or maybe should be) because it dares to see God’s image in all people, whether they be slave, free, Gentile, Jew, man, woman, foreigner, family, friend, or enemy.1

With this in mind, we have an obligation to live and pass on truth. I think we all agree with that; there’s few among us that think “I want to live a lie.” That’s soul-crushing. But of course, truth is hard to come by. Rod Dreher wrote a book called “Live Not by Lies,” a great title and good thesis but totally backwards message. It is not the “soft totalitarians” that have come to play, but the wannabe totalitarians who have seized power in reaction to the fears stoked by outrage culture and have caused tremendous suffering. Physician Dreher, heal thyself.

But of course, Dreher and many others are living according to what they think is objectively true. They are not, to be generous, consciously deceiving anyone but acting according to what they believe to be reality. And my disagreement with them is also based on how I fracture reality perceived through my subjective perspective. Reality is, but it is beyond any one of us, because we can only perceive reality through subjective consciousness. David Foster Wallace brilliantly uses that phrase, “fracture reality.” We are prisms through which reality passes, and at worst we distort the light of the world. At best we magnify or emphasize some part of the light and make it clear to others.

This is why, in my most private poems, I’ll write things like “all the universe dies with me.” Not out of some hubris which insists in solipsistic reality. But because all the world is inaccessible to me when I cease to be. My utterly unique sense perception of the universe is snuffed out and so is yours when YOU inevitably pass.

All of this brings me to Schopenhauer. Mr. Life-of-the-Party himself, Arthur Schopenhauer is considered the exemplary of philosophical pessimism. As a good Calvinist, I think he’s pretty good at capturing reality outside of God’s grace: inevitably bleak, out of our control, and leading to a desolate end. Cheerful stuff! But there’s something in Schopenhauer that can help us as we consider the conflicting subjective interpretations of an objective reality: his metaphor of the horse and its rider, crystallized by the words of Michael Sugrue. I want you to really get that this is what I’m working towards:

Imagine a rider on a strong-minded horse. That horse is going to go where it wants at whatever speed it wants. The rider deludes himself in thinking that HE is the one in charge here. For Schopenhauer, the horse is the will and the rider the intellect. One gift of modernism and postmodernism is to recognize that the horse has a will of its own; it is not a mere vessel for the intellect to direct. Will can often move FIRST, and can often get us into trouble we don’t recognize. Or as Dr. Sugrue puts it, do not flatter yourself with your misconceptions about your own autonomy.2 Schopenhauer does us a depressing but useful service by sharing his unhappiness with us. He feels no need to give us false comfort with pleasantries and sentiment.

But of course, I am not a philosophical pessimist. For all the bleak reality of life, I am also hopeful in a God who does not leave us to rot, and does not abandon us to the madness of our own false, proud worldview. However, I recognize that, even if God is at work in our world, Schopenhauer isn’t wrong about the will often (not always) preceding intellect. After all, this is why social media has so perniciously separated us from each other. We self-reinforce the chosen reality we like, and we find utilitarian ways to discard inconvenient truths, all while plastered to the screen. However, it isn’t the screen that is the problem in and of itself, it is only the gasoline thrown on the fire of self-reinforcement. The most obvious and crass version of this is the use of AI like ChatGPT et al which are designed to never contradict or challenge. If someone tells me something that makes me uncomfortable, it’s okay, because I can find a way to say whatever inconvenient claim made against me doesn’t count for one reason or another.

So, is all this another way of saying “it is what it is,” chucking a search for truth out of the window, or simply saying we are paralyzed by competing truths that can’t overcome one another? I emphatically say to you NO. And the way in which we combat our own proud philosophical arrogance is through a simple but painful admonition:

YOU HAVE TO BE WILLING TO CHANGE.

If you want to save the world, you have to be willing to change. That’s it. That’s what we MUST do. Our fellow human beings are counting on it. Our world is counting on it. Your sanctification is counting on it. Your relationships are counting on it. You have to be willing to change.

Change in what way? Well, you have to be willing to reexamine. To place yourself in the perspective of someone else. To give away your selfish desires. To die even to the things you hold dear. You are a breathing time machine, so step into the flow. Don’t paddle into the riverbank and make it someone else’s problem 150 years from now. CHANGE. Because in changing, you GROW. How often we try to spare ourselves pain by refusing to change. But if you never die before your death, you pass a million deaths to all the world. This is the paradigm of faith, isn’t it? Death and rebirth. Death before dying, so that when you die for good, you have already practiced. Let your lungs breathe out their last to whatever you hold on to most tightly in this life. After all, as Jesus Himself said to the rich young ruler, sell what you have to gain treasure in heaven. You can’t cling to your riches, whatever they may be or however meager they may be, and enter heaven, for in so doing, you have not surrendered to the reality of God’s world.

What I’m saying is an invitation to extraordinary pain of one kind or another. We have to give up our very conception of ourselves to become more like Christ, to be more sanctified, to partake, as Peter says, of the divine nature. But also from Scripture, we read that a seed falls into the ground and dies, only to be born into a new and superlative life. To remain a seed forever is to die without giving something else to the world. To die a seed is a tragedy. But to die planted is to be renewed, even as we must go forth unto death. Take on suffering yourself so that others are spared that suffering later. This is no less than the pattern of Christ.

To paraphrase Augustine in his Confessions, every morning is a new Genesis. But rather than a saccharine nicety, this statement means that there is new life found in the ashes of the old. It is not a mystery to me that ash has such variegated and wide applications. It is God’s metaphor for the course of this world: dying, being reborn, being useful for other things, transforming and changing and the like.

Here’s the thing: to absorb these painful, bitter, and small deaths NOW is to spare some later person from taking them on. By your sadness in changing now, God will spare the happiness of the future. Jesus Himself tells us we must deny ourselves and follow Him, the exemplar of self-sacrifice for the good of others.

This isn’t easy, naturally. Augustine wrestled tremendously with this as recorded in the Confessions. He knew the incongruity of the horse and the rider. Intellectually, he knows the time has come for him to lay his deadly doing down and accept the Christian faith. But in his will, HE DIDN’T WANT TO. According to Dr. Sugrue Augustine records that he behaved as if a madman, plucking out his own beard, talking to himself, and violently throwing himself against the walls of his home, all as he wrestled with this incongruity: I know, but I do not want. “Lord, grant me chastity and continency, but not yet.” Augustine quoted the Gospel as an indictment of himself: a house divided against itself will not stand. You must choose to be different from how you have been, that you might blossom into something greater. There is great pain in this, yes. But a lie is still a lie, and you don’t want to find yourself embracing a monster you can’t bring yourself to recognize for what it is.

Now, what happened when Augustine yielded his will? What happened when he finally said “enough” and ceased kicking against the goads? He was a blessing to the whole world. In his own words, the gates of paradise were opened to him. On a more personal level, he was a tremendous relief to his own mother, who died not long after his conversion. By the grace of God and His tremendous gift, she went down to the grave knowing her husband and son would join with her in paradise. Monica the patient and faithful endured the temper of her pagan husband, humbled and changed on his deathbed, converting in the end. Changing in the end. And tradition holds that she wept for the salvation of her son, who became a force for the faith so powerful and enduring that he is known and beloved some 1600 years after his final passage. God does not always grant such miracles, but it is easy to see how change was what Monica the beloved longed for, and what she was comforted by. See how God will use your change and rejoice.

I’m currently taking a class that narrowly focuses on two attributes of God: His immutability and His impassability. For those of you who don’t have a theological dictionary handy, this is to say that God does not change and that He is passion-less, or without the sort of suffering or emotion that prompts change in Himself. This is a bit far afield from the thesis of this writing, so I’m not going to get heavy into the details here. I merely want to make a quick observation about this.

I think there are some people who value constancy as the ultimate good. If you’ve been consistent your whole life, you are a superior person than others. But this is wrong, naturally. First of all, the whole idea of a Christian conversion, dramatic or not, is explosive to this assumption. There’s at least one change that is self-evidently good in that way.

Also, at the risk of stating the obvious, human beings are not God. Part of the whole point of the philosophical commitment to God’s immutability that we have is that God does not change because He is already perfect. There’s nothing for Him to change into as far as improvement goes, and there’s nothing for Him to change down to in that there’s no capacity for Him to stop being who He is in His essence, which is, by definition, perfect. Without getting bogged down in the doctrinal weeds, I merely want to point out that there’s nothing in Him to change, whereas we are locked into a changing universe and changing self. We are, all of us, GOING to change, whether we like it or not. I’m rather suggesting that a willingness to do so, aimed in the right direction, is a good thing.

This whole thing is getting pretty lengthy, so allow me to make a couple more observations, then you’ll be on your way.

First, I think it’s interesting that near-death experiences tend to change people, and tend to change those who have them for the better.3 Not that I’m wishing a brush with death on anybody, but from a strictly material standpoint, it seems like this paradigm of death and rebirth rings true. I’m not suggesting you put yourself in mortal peril, but I am suggesting that if dying-to-self has an analog to, ya know, actually dying, it seems that it’s a healthy practice (self-denial, not the actually dying thing). Know that conscious and chosen “death experiences” are the material by which we change ourselves, and by so doing, we impact the whole world.

Also, you have to change into something sensical and positive. You have to change into a greater comprehension of the world as it is, not world as you wish it was. The internet is littered with those who have changed for the worse, often self-enforced and deeper dives into untrue rabbit-holes and bad advice. Maslow really was cooking when he came up with the hierarchy of needs, but on that tip of the pyramid, make sure you don’t self-actualize into something stupid or (perhaps even worse) untrue.4 As far as knowing the difference, well, I lean back on special revelation and general revelation, “special” being that truth which is told to us (Scripture and revelation) and “general” being that which we discern from nature (collecting knowledge, minimizing human bias and maximizing objectivity as best we can, exploring the world, etc). But the details of such practice are the subject of a different day.

And second, remember your Marcus Aurelius. Change is the very nature of this material universe. Things do not stay as they are. Specifically:

“Why should anyone be afraid of change? What can take place without it? What can be more pleasing or more suitable to universal nature? Can you take your bath without the firewood undergoing a change? Can you eat without the food undergoing a change? And can anything useful be done without change? Don't you see that for you to change is just the same, and is equally necessary for universal nature?”

Our souls, he writes, are changed all the time by the washing of our thoughts. Thought is the dye by which your soul is colored; thought is the substance by which you are constantly changed. Change is the nature of this material world, and to fight it is folly.

Live your life. And be willing to change, for change is the temporary death that blossoms into growth. Die to self—in so doing you give others life. Take up your cross and follow God, who is changeless only because there is not further improvement to be had in Him, but plenty capacity for improvement in us. You’ll find that the more you die, the more you come closer to life. Love God and others. To paraphrase the Talking Heads:

Love until your heart stops. Love until you’re dead.

Something was crystallized in my brain the other day. No, it’s not the calcification of an overly ruminative mind (though I’m sure I could use a good scrub in there), at least I hope not.

I want to start by asking you a question.

Is known crackpot Alex Jones (pictured below) a stupid man?

Are Alex Jones’ followers stupid people?

Hang on to your answers for a moment and let me draw your attention to something else. What I’d like to share with you is this. It’s probably the most thought-provoking YouTube short I’ve ever seen (in fairness, that is an insanely low bar to clear, but here we are).

A brief introduction is in order. This short is posted by the YouTube channel called “Channel 5,” a gonzo style journalism channel inspired in equal parts by Hunter S. Thompson and the now-defunct YouTube show “Joe Goes.” Channel 5 will get candid, on the ground coverage of interesting and weird stories across America. They started as a goofy group that used to interview people who are completely out of their minds on whatever their chosen substance was, all to hilarious results. Think, like, interviewing the hippies at Burning Man kinda stuff. Well after a bunch of things happened and tons of noise was made, they pivoted into a more serious tone, their endeavors maturing. If you can’t tell, I’m kind of a big fan. Recently, they went out to rural Arkansas, but not to poke fun at hillbilly rednecks and poor whites and all that. They went to interview the residents of a cloistered society that has decided to remove themselves from modern living, choosing instead to live amongst themselves as a collective.

That’s not inherently immoral in and of itself (aside from being kinda weird and raising some red flags), but these guys are very very right-wing, to the point that it becomes clearer and clearer why they have chosen to remove themselves from what you might call “polite society.” In Channel 5’s interviews, it is clear that these are people who have accepted the supposed “race realism,” which is to say that they are deeply closeted National Socialists. You know the ones. Yeah, Nazis.

But when you hear them talk, they are not inarticulate. They are not heavily accented bubbas waving around provocative flags or Nazi symbols or whatever. They actually come across as pretty normal, circumstances (and unsavory opinions) aside. By the way, if you’re interested, the full documentary can be found here.

But this post is not to simply say “look at these weirdos!” and point and laugh. This is about how we can misuse our own intelligence. Okay, enough introduction, check this out (also language warning, just FYI):

Seriously, I’m gonna need you to click that link; the rest of this is missing vital context without it.

We often think that intelligence is an insulator against falsehood. And certainly, it’s part of that puzzle. But the thing I have come to understand is that intelligence, improperly exercised, can still lead you down a bad road. It is certainly no advantage to be stupid, mind you. But I think we all kind of think the smart guys are also always the right guys, in an objective sense. But these guys in Arkansas, and that professor that critiqued them, are proof against. Basically, intelligence is not a guarantee of right or good thinking. Does it help? Of course. Someone who is smart is more likely (and even perhaps much more likely) to be right about things. But intelligence is not a silver bullet or a vaccine against falsehood.

Remember Alex Jones?

Do you think he’s stupid?

I actually don’t. Not really. Alex Jones is a reasonably intelligent person, insofar as I can judge that at a distance. But two things this does not make him are as follows: this does not mean he is sane and this certainly does not mean he is right, factually speaking.

The thing is, Alex Jones and these people in Arkansas are not stupid. We think they must be stupid because they are so obviously wrong about a great number of things. But there’s a fallacy lurking in that assumption. They are not stupid. They are wrong. There’s a meaningful difference there.

Their intelligence is, as it were, misused, simply a tool to more articulately prop up an initial assumption. It’s like a beautiful beam being used to support a decrepit shack—a great tool to get the job done, but a terrible waste of something that could be brought to a better use.

We are, all of us, compensating all the time to make our assumptions make sense. There are a million ways, every day, that we guard our own assumptions, because the pain of changing in light of being shown wrong is too great; there’s too much at stake. An assumption—especially one that we build our lives around—is nigh impossible to break through, because our psyche is so averse to the pain of

1. Being wrong, and the loss of the time we have spent being wrong (to say nothing of the wrong-ness of those around us who have shared in our assumptions) and

2. Changing our minds.

I’ve said that so many times in my life it borders on my own personal cliche. But what do you do about it? Hold onto this question for me too.

Another thing I learned recently: some people experience their thoughts in such a way that it has an initial physical consequence. Like, losing your car keys, then realizing you have done so, does not prompt a mental reflection of images or words to find them, but first a jolt of panic. And if someone has that kind of mental response to things (which apparently isn’t uncommon or even necessarily bad, by the way), there’s more at play than a mere intelligent reflection to try and find those keys. A person can be much smarter than me and still have an emotional affect that clouds their judgment. That doesn’t even make my judgment better in the long run (that person might find their keys more efficiently than me for a variety of reasons), but it does help explain why an emotional response can resonate so deeply with some people.1

Alex Jones is not stupid. He may not even be insincere (maybe). But he is led to a host of “alternative” (read: wrong) facts because he is able to USE his intelligence to manufacture clever ways to still accept his view of the world. This is the maddening aspect of individualized subjective consciousness to me: we cannot reach into people’s subjective experiences of their own minds and change anything. Changing someone’s mind is extraordinarily hard, and requires more finesse than I can scare up in all my thinking. What’s more, something obviously untrue can be made to sound terribly clever, and it can make sense. But the sense that is made is only within a closed loop, and new information is shut out. But be careful—that isn’t stupidity doing the exclusion, not always. That’s actually the work of a self-consuming cleverness, which protects belief by explaining away important contexts and challenging information. Edmund Husserl, anybody? Subjectivity is extraordinarily hard to understand, because it is so difficult to step back from the subjectivity by which you experience everything. To paraphrase Rust Cohle from True Detective, it is fundamentally true that the mind is a locked room with one occupant. Ultimately, only you know what it feels like to be in there, and only you will ever know your experience of yourself.2

As an aside, this gels very nicely with my Reformed theology. No conversion, no repentance (“changing of the mind” being the most common gloss for the Greek word μετάνοια) is possible unless something outside ourselves acts in us first, and so God has. A somewhat amusing consequence of mashing together these two ideas is the notion that changing the mind of a human being is so hard it takes a divine miracle to accomplish it. Try to keep that in mind the next time someone really wants you to think that the Earth is flat and you decide they just need more information to “snap out of it.”3

The funny thing about truth is that it does win out, eventually. Marcus Aurelius is right about the material world being subject to change and correction—eventually what is actually real will be…well, maybe not known, but at the very least, obvious if anyone or thing is around to see it. Everything will be disclosed by the working together of time and reality.

But let me go back to the intelligence thing for a second. Is Alex Jones a true believer in what he peddles? Maybe, maybe not. At the very least, I do think he is unethically preying on those who might be stupid, and that is a disgrace to him. I found a clip of an ad he put out years ago to hawk his products, taken from a larger mini-documentary about his predatory business practices. Here’s an example of such predation in action, the work of a man that I have to believe at some level knows what he’s doing:

I sincerely apologize for presenting you a clip of a shirtless Alex Jones. If the embed failed, by the way, just skip to 10:13 and watch about 10 seconds to see what I’m saying.

This is also why I get something of a stick in my craw when I see every little thing labeled “scientific,” especially those things that are obviously UN-scientific.4 I want this to remain in pretty narrow parameters, but here’s what I’m getting at. Ten billion marketing departments slap the word “scientific” on stuff in order to both legitimize and objectify the claims they make about a product. And it’s terribly clever; if you criticize something labeled “scientific” as ridiculous or unwise, then YOU are put in the position of being the “REAL zealot,” unwilling to hear the discourse from “the other side.” Criticize flat earth by saying it’s an out-of-hand bad idea, and suddenly you end up with podcast titles like “the religion of globe-earth.” Then you can put a handful of articulate guys in sharp suits with decently high production value, get them to “talk good” for an hour, and bam, you’ve created a seemingly sophisticated resistance to the “mainstream narrative” that suddenly doesn’t know how to fight back. This is, of course, all in defense of a self-evidently bad idea to those on the outside. In the words of a podcaster who shall not be named, “dude, you’re talking about the effin Earth being flat!”

Some ideas are simply bad ideas, no matter how articulately they might be defended. And ultimately, if someone takes a bad idea as a bedrock conviction (for any number of psychological or environmental or emotional or experiential reasons), all of their energies, including a high intelligence, are exercised in a defense that can suddenly seem convincing, or at least plausible, if defended intelligently. But these exercises do not an objectively good idea make, even if they can sound persuasive.

And this brings me back, finally, to the YouTube short I mentioned earlier (seriously, go watch it). I want to type out what the professor in the short said because that’s the ultimate thesis of this meandering post.

Don’t miss what he says (and this is worth quoting in full):

“[IQ] tests were made for the purposes of figuring out who’s going to do well in school. It doesn’t predict terribly well to many kinds of real-world successes. There’s so much it doesn’t tell you, and it doesn’t tell you about emotional intelligence, creative intelligence, common sense, wisdom…there’s so much more to a person than just their IQ. I would say the major problem has been…what’s sometimes called scientific racism but it’s not really scientific. It’s using the guise of science to advance racist views, because you sometimes get racial differences in different kinds of test scores, including IQ, that don’t take into account where those differences may come from. It was convenient for some people to say ‘well, look, we can divide people by nationality or socially defined race or ethnic group or religion into different IQ groups,’ and they probably believe themselves that it told you something, but it didn’t tell you what they thought it told you. People with high IQs are often better at convincing themselves of whatever they want. So in other words, they use their IQ for self-justification. They’re better at justifying whatever they want to believe. So if they have an ideology, they may have a very weird ideology, but they’ll find ways to defend it. Even if it’s not factually accurate.”

So back to the second question I prompted you to consider. What do we do about this? So what, everyone exercises cognitive bias? Big deal. I guess my conclusion is as follows.

The cliche is real as they so often are: knowledge is power. But beyond that, knowledge can be empowering. But that’s only a chance, not a guarantee. You have to know that changing your mind about something is very hard, but for the sake of this world, for the sake of those you love, you must live that pain. You must reassess even the things you hold dear. Everyone around you is counting on you. Don’t retreat to psychological comfort simply because you are smart. Don’t move to the woods in Arkansas (metaphorically speaking) to protect your precious preconceived visions of the world—aim to tune up that mental engine, because in so doing you yourself can be a gift to your fellow man. Don’t use your intelligence to stifle your curiosity, which is itself a precious and fragile gift from on high. Don’t use your intelligence to stifle your own growth. In God’s light, be unafraid to see, even if the light burns your eyes. After all, in His light, we see light. As one smart guy put it, the truth will set you free, but not until it is finished with you. You’re too smart to do otherwise.

When I go to the gym, I typically have a pretty steady diet of, as the aging kids so often do, the same 20ish songs I’ve been listening to for approximately 15 years. But occasionally, I’ll branch out and listen to something besides just music. Usually the hype music I’ll reserve for the heavier lifts, then ease off to a lighter listen for my lighter sets.

This morning, I got a hankering to listen to a lecture (suggested to me by the inscrutable YouTube algorithm) called Husserl: Phenomenology and the Life World given by the late great Dr. Michael Sugrue. You can find it here, by the way; it’s fantastic, as all of Dr. Sugrue’s lectures are. I’d never heard of Edmund Husserl before this morning, much less that he was the founder of the movement known as “phenomenology,” nor that he was pressured out of his teaching post by the Nazis (Husserl was Jewish) and replaced with everyone’s ““““favorite,”””” Martin Heidegger.

Maybe I was just impressed by Dr. Sugrue’s lecture, but I found the guy’s ideas fascinating, in a way I would not have anticipated. I think (and yeah, maybe I should let this marinate a little more before making a post about it, but here we are) that he’s cleared something up for me that had been bothering me.

A few weeks ago, my wife told me she had been stumbled across a few posts on the ‘Gram from a person (who will remain nameless, due to my distaste for giving clicks to people who I don’t want to give direct attention to) who was selling courses on intuition. More specifically, the idea was that you could train yourself to make decisions based on an internal guidance, a kind of force that could be trained and intrinsically trusted.1 There was a promise that you could learn to realign the rhythms of the body according to the laws of the universe to learn to make better decisions, both in tense moments and in long-term planning. To me, this sounded like a convenient way to sell you a mystical version of the old advice to “trust your gut,” but it did leave me with a sort of gnawing, unresolved question. When I use the word “intuition,” what the heck am I actually talking about?

I affirm that we have God-given instincts that lead us into unconscious feelings of danger, or distrust, or whatever. I do think we have a survival instinct that we are entitled to act upon.

I also affirm that this system is not always right, but if you feel you’re facing an immediate threat, I can’t blame you for being safe over sorry.

But is that all intuition is? Survival instinct? Picking up bad vibes and getting away? Picking GOOD vibes and moving forward?

For some of you, maybe this sounds dumb, or obvious, or maybe you think “you know it when you see it.” Intuition is your instinct, and you can train it to be better than it has been in the past.

But that doesn’t quite satisfy me. And I think I finally have an articulation of why this might be the case. See, equating intuition with instinct doesn’t really effectively answer the young lady selling intuition training that smacks of just-this-side-of-seeing-a-psychic to me.2

Does she need to be “answered?” Does she need to be “defeated?” I mean, I don’t really intend to take an adversarial posture with a random person selling something online that clearly isn’t for me. So in a direct way, I have no intention of picking an internet fight with this person, or mocking her, or making fun of her followers. But I do have a problem with leaving unresolved thinking unresolved in my own mind. In that sense, I have no intention on picking on someone, as much as I’m interested in explaining what I think is a better way.

And this is where Sugrue and Husserl behind him enter. See, Sugrue is very very good at explaining philosophical concepts clearly, and in explaining Husserl to me this morning, he helped me straighten out this annoying, lingering uncertainty surrounding this word “intuition.” Is it fair to compare a guy with 3 master’s degrees and a PhD from Columbia, combined with the thinking of a founder of an entire school of philosophy, to an internet influencer? NOPE! But we’re gonna do it anyway.

I’ll not beat around the bush. Here’s the better definition I get of intuition from these two guys combined. Intuition is that which is true of your own experience, according to your own experience, known through your own experience. In other words, intuition is that which is known to you, that only you can know, about yourself. Yeah, this definition is a little restrictive. But I think it’s very useful.

There’s a simpler way to describe this. A question (stolen from Dr. Sugrue) will help. I’d like to know how YOU, the reader, would answer these questions:

Do I (Matt) have a headache?

Do I hope to be elected president someday?

Do I like spinach?

Your answer to these questions, especially if you don’t know me too well, would by necessity be “I don’t know.” But here’s the thing.

I *can* know the answers to these questions. And I can KNOW them because I can INTUIT them from my own experience of my self. What, are you going to correct me on whether or not I have a headache? Doing so would be silly. “My knowledge of my headache is a direct intuition of my experience.” (Sugrue said that and it beared directly quoting). I don’t need someone else to help me know whether or not I have a headache. I can get there, pretty easily, on my own. If you doubt that I have a headache, what am I supposed to do? A bunch of math to prove to you that, yes, my experience of my own headache is real? Can I do some experiment to show you definitively that I have a headache?3 You wouldn’t gesture to some outside factor to explain to another mind what my specific experience of the world is. It’s not possible. David Foster Wallace brushed up on this when he wrote “how odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.” Experiencing the world from a single point of consciousness, doomed to be forever locked out of the experiences of other self-reflective individuals, is a strange thing indeed. “How strange it is to be anything at all.” But nevertheless, there is a truth to my experience that only I can actually know, and I know it through my own experience of that experience. That is intuition: to know that which is known only to you, and only about you. Somebody call Soren Kierkegaard, we’re getting existential.

And, by the way, this is not to validate the vapid notion of “living your own truth” or “everyone has their own truth (regardless of it being in conflict with others’ truths),” which are the impoverished versions of these ideas. Truth is still truth because it is real, and even if you feel something is true or untrue, that really doesn’t have much bearing on whether that given thing is true, in an objective sense. Your feelings can be real and really felt, but they are still a product of a finite, not-omniscient mind. Your feelings are real, but they can still be based on something that is not real. And we do well to remember that.

I think the limit to this is rightfully placed in making suggestions about the world outside your mind, as long as you recognize these suggestions are not unassailable truth. We can intuit that something may or may not be likely concerning the world outside our own minds based on our previous experiences, as long as we are simultaneously willing to concede that these intuitions can be wrong, and we are willing to be corrected on them. In this way, we can avoid the trap of poor conclusions, in which we assert that something must be true because we feel it must be true. As always, I lean back on the Greeks, and affirm that the correspondence theory of truth is probably the best guide we’ve got for truth.4 Now to be fair, very few are going to claim that they think truth is manifested by our feeling of a proposition being true. We all think we are obeying the correspondence theory and all of that. But recognizing the limits of intuition can give us all a dose of “reality-humility,” in which we hold truths we cannot prove true somewhat loosely.

I suppose, then, we can also adapt this definition of intuition to lived experience and common language, when we say things like “I picked up a guitar and kind of knew what to do intuitively.” Based on past experience of the self’s experience, a young man (not me, sadly5) can pick up a guitar and play it by expected experience based on past experience, or perhaps some innate talent, but even such talent would be the product of knowing what to do based on the past. When we use language this way, what we’re really trying to say is that this hypothetical young man can pick up an instrument and play it without previous training, but that doesn’t necessarily have to conflict with the definition I’ve laid out above.

There are, of course, ways in which we are all disposed to intellectual tight-fistedness, and intellectual arrogance. But that brings me to the demi-glace.

Demi-glace is a kind of meat sauce made by reducing the boiled stock made from animal carcasses. It’s made, at least historically, according to the French technique of creating thickness in sauce via reduction, as opposed to the American/British tradition of using some kind of thickening agent.6 Demi-glace is an all-day affair to make, and often has to be done at least partially outside, because, ya know, you’re boiling dead animal parts for hours, and it tends to smell less than pleasant. But of course, the end product is delicious! It’s a tremendously helpful sauce that can punch up just about any savory dish.

I think Husserl makes his demi-glace the French way, and I make mine the American way. Here’s what I mean.

Husserl, as I understand him, is looking to understand the subjective experience in an objective way, or at least, as objective as he can make it. What are the universal features of consciousness? What are phenomena like to experience? What is the appearance of something to a subjectively experienced mind? And what is the meaning and significance of lived experience? What Husserl was trying to get down to was a reduced sauce, that is, how do we understand what the experience of being is? What is the ultimate thinking that informs all the other thinking? Apparently he wrestled with this quite a lot, having written over 45,000 pages on his philosophy. And interestingly, Sugrue considers his project a failure! He’s never able to quite level out the transition from the subjective to the objective.

Fun fact: you can make a very good demi-glace without reduction, or without too much reduction. All you do is add a quarter ounce of gelatin, 1 tsp of tomato paste, 1/2 tsp of onion powder, and 1 tsp of soy sauce to 1 quart of chicken stock and heat it up for a little while.

In a way, I think this is how you can get a good product without needing to reduce for hours. Call it lazy if you like; it still gets the job done. I think this project is more workable for most people, and I think my demi-glace is also an attempt at the objective thinking that makes all the other thinking possible. It’s just not me that’s doing the initial thinking. No need to reduce for hours, just check this out: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” I don’t intend this to be coy; I intend it to demonstrate the the process is possible with a lot less heartache (and headaches!) than Husserl is serving up.

All of this also brushes up against David Hume’s problem of induction, but I’m a Christian, so I get to cheat and use God’s first cause as a reasonable assumption that the future will correspond to the past. Now, I believe God exists and is personal, but surely even if you don’t you can see how this idea is useful. Induction becomes possible when there is a God outside the world to whom the world is contingent and owes its stability and predictability.

I guess all this thinking about intuition leads me to a conclusion. We are more than a bundle of experiences, but we are not less than that; that is to say, it’s inherently interesting to me to think that part (not all) of being a human is to be the sort of being that is a summary of all the things that have happened to me so far—which of course implies that if something happens to me, it can change who I am. Maybe sometimes that is a scary prospect. But that gives us a tremendous opportunity for growth, doesn’t it? This makes conversion and faith and all the wonderful things of life possible. And for this, I intuit that I am grateful.

1. The Bondage of the Will by Martin Luther

Martin Luther himself referred to his rolling clap-back at Erasmus as his magnum opus, the thing he was most satisfied with among all his writings. I’ll be honest with you, if you aren’t at least a little informed of Luther’s battle with Erasmus, you are going to be very very lost reading this. That being said, for a work of theology written 500 years ago (part of the reason I read it in 2025), this is still a lively and thought-provoking work, born of the monk who no-doubt would have loved social media zingers. The big question of the work is fairly straightforward, so much so that Luther thanks Erasmus for getting right to the heart of the issue. Does the Bible teach us that we have free will or not? Erasmus says yes, Luther says no. But it is the criteria to which Luther appeals that makes this a timeless Reformation-era staple. And it is this criteria upon which Luther argues with Erasmus. It is the criteria of the Word. Does The Bible teach free will, or doesn’t it? For Luther and Erasmus, this is the only question that matters, and suffice to say, I think Luther wins. He does not, as he says, think that man is without personality, or is somehow without legitimate emotion, as if we are all some kind of robots. Rather, based on the testimony of Scripture, Luther is convinced that our will is now bound, caught by sin and unable to do anything while still in this trap.

At one point, Luther says that the Bible’s commands are, at least at first, meant to show us this bondage. He writes that the man bound to sin is like a man with his hands tied behind his back who is then told to stretch out his left hand. It isn’t so much that this command is nonsensical, it is that he is held back. He can imagine what it is to be free, but he cannot free himself. His will is bound, in need of freedom it cannot grant itself. And of course, Luther sees this freedom from the Gospel, and having been thus freed, he can do those things God commands him to do: love his enemies, pray for his persecutors, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, visit the prisoner, etc.

And of course, it wouldn’t be Luther without a little toilet humor. I have no idea what the original language says, but in my edition from Ligonier, Luther writes that Erasmus writes beautifully but has content that is, let’s just say, a waste product. He says Erasmus is learned and erudite, but uses these gifts to package crap, saying that reading Erasmus is like having a servant who brings you a fine vessel of gold for supper filled with the sweepings of the stable. Further, he says in the conclusion that he is much stupider than Erasmus even though he thinks his argument (being Word-based) is still sound, but that if Erasmus would but join his side, he would be its champion.

Luther’s exegesis still cuts, and his voice still resonates. I wonder what the Lutherans of today think of this work; as a Reformed Christian myself, I found much agreement here.

2. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro.

This was a recommendation from my wife, and man, was it an experience. Don’t expect anything flashy or all that exciting, but it doesn’t need that. This is basically a group of characters growing up in a boarding school that hides a horrifying but casual secret. The action is, more or less, people going to places and having conversations. But man, if it wasn’t powerful. What’s interesting is that Ishiguro is attuned to subtlety, both in conversation and in style. The characters (for the most part) know all the horrible things that happen, so they don’t talk about it. And then when they finally do, it’s mundane to them, ordinary, while we as an audience are floored. I also haven’t read something this interested in small movements before, maybe ever. It’s slow, but intentional. Sad, but not hysterical. Gripping, but not white-knuckle. This deserves its own post someday, but cherish this book.

3. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

Well, this was one of my favorite things I’ve read in a while. This is barely a monster story in some ways, and more a philosophical novel. I loved it. Gone are the dramatic scenes of “IT’S ALIVE, IT’S ALIVE!” Igor makes exactly zero appearances. There’s no dramatic spark from lifting the body into the sky. Electricity is the instrument of life in this book, but it’s not in detail. The monster is sympathetic, but that sympathy ends when he kills others. This is the answer to the question: what if God and your dad both really hated you?

Remember kids: how you treat the monster is not about the qualities of the monster itself. How you treat the monster is a reflection of YOU. If you love cruelty and hate those life forms that are unlike you, you have proved yourself a wretch and an unsympathetic person. The all-too-human habit of cruelty is a plague on our species.

4. Dracula, Bram Stoker

Well, this freakin’ ruled. For a book written in the 1890s, this is the right mix of creepy, action, and dread. There’s not much else to say, other than that this made the whole month worth it. The Count himself is an irredeemable evil, and absent are all the obnoxious sensualities of a modern adaptation. Dracula is monstrously evil, and he makes no apology for that. He’s also a bit of a moron, and a massive coward. But when you read of the fog summoning and the wolves gathering, our own blood can still run cold.

I am also just enthralled by the best character in the novel, Dr. Abraham Van Hellsing. He is everything we should strive to be. Kind, virtuous, knowledgeable, and gentle towards the innocent. He’s the guy I want handing out crucifixes next time I have a Dracula problem. He and his party of misfit vampire hunters spend the first half of the novel on their heels, then once they get their bearings, they have the fortitude and determination to fight back against the night. This is a great one—you should pick it up.

“Listen to them—children of the night. What music they make!”

Or maybe I missed the point, and the real moral of the story is that Transylvania really sucks.

I like chess, having learned it as a kid in 4th grade. My interest in the game grew during college (including the first ever win I had against my dad), and I was further interested, like a lot of people, after watching The Queen’s Gambit. Incidentally, TQG is based on a rather lovely novel which deserves your attention.

Anyway, I recently read and really liked the novella Chess (also known by several other titles) by Stefan Zweig. This novella was excellent, and prompted me to give my own go at writing a chess story. So without further ado, here’s that:

It always starts so simply.

E4.

E5.

Two pawns facing each other down on the center of the board. The opening that’s so common it starts a quarter of the 12 billion games played every year. It’s as common an opening as you can find.

And naturally, unsurprisingly, it has begun this match between two players. The first, playing White. An old, philosophizing chess master. Though a fading star, he was not done quite yet. He played knight to f3, another common move.

Black was played by the young upstart, the man whose future seemed only up and ever upward. There was no doubting his skill, even here, facing this long-known master. The man was young, wore a sharp brown suit, and adjusted his checkered tie as he surveyed the board. He quickly played Nc6. His pawn was covered and yet his knight continued to exert pressure on the center. It was another common move.

These things happen so quickly in high level play. White took only a moment, and began again with bishop to b5. He swung out and pressured that same knight. The old master was much more disheveled than his counterpart. He wore a thin tie, but had loosened it already. His rough tweed suit did not have the tight vest nor sharp starch of his counterpart’s—he was a man in the twilight of his life, yet still here, fighting and wrestling with this game of mental agony.

Black advances his furthest pawn to a6, intending to kick that pesky bishop back to its hiding place.

There is no doubt these men both want to win, and win badly. White was playing the Ruy Lopez, hoping to maintain a strategically open position that could offer flexibility without over-committing to aggression. Black was interested in keeping center control and pushing back White’s probes.

The two men were locked in a moment of pride, forgetting everything else—nationality, winnings, notoriety, legacy, anything. Chess is a form of torment for those best at it, and here they locked their horns and began their struggle. They played in a land foreign to them both. They both had families. They both had friends, some of those friends being geniuses in their own right.

White’s interest in chess was an extension of his interest in philosophy. He was a believer in struggle, competition, and existence as a form of contest between man and various opponents. He was, however, a utopian, and believed in charity, hope, faith. He was not a zealot but had a complex interest in religion.

Black was much less interested in the sophistry of ideas without practice. He was, in the end, monomaniacal about this one thing: the game of kings itself. Any philosophy he had interest in was merely in the philosophy of playing the game itself. He wanted positional mastery, and to crush any opponent in the endgame, in which he excelled. Endgames are so often about creativity, and foresight, and all the memorized theories you might have had are stripped away. You cannot know for certain what material you may have in the end. And so when you get there, what will you do? You have to play what you have, as in anything. You can’t magically wish for a better piece or a more favorable position. If you’re going to excel in the end, you first must plan for it, but failing that, you have to be able to use what you are given. Merely wishing accounts for less than nothing, because it is only a distraction from what you have. You must play. And if you play, you must play intelligently, without bravado or recklessness, so that when the time comes you have the muscle to seize and grip and hold on. The endgame revealed your heart and your resolve. Play well, then.

White’s bishop takes Black’s knight on c6. And with that, the real struggle begins. Black elects to take the bishop with his d pawn, dxc6. He’s doubled his pawns, but this may not matter to a high-level master such as Black. But elegant attack awaits him.

White pushes a pawn to d4, pressuring the center. Black obliges him and takes with his pawn, exd4. What follows is White’s attempt to simplify the game, and he marches his queen to d4 to take the pawn. Black sees the trade and again obliges, Qxd4, then White takes with Nxd4.

Trading queens this early is a good way to make sure the game comes down to tactics and strategy. In removing this most powerful piece, it’s easier to force your opponent to have to think more deeply. Surely Black is trying to force White into creativity, stripping him of any wrought memorized strategy. But White is waiting for him. He is happy to use this game, even this important and world-stage game, to practice his philosophy of struggle. For White, this is not an end unto itself. It is the very means by which he may show his philosophy. And even if no one else cares or pays any attention to his philosophical material, he will, for himself, do this great thing and indulge his way of thinking, and know his work is not in vain. He can still produce results, and still show the world that he is not giving it up to the upstart just yet.

A few more moves pass. White pushes out his other knight into the fray; Black plays more conservatively and moves to protect his king. Both castle. Barely ten moves into the game and both have already lost 13 points of material. No decisive attack will come. This will be a locked human contest of will and of sharp, subtle difference. White pushes another pawn to pressure the center. Black positions a rook to begin an attack. White marches pawns up the board to pressure Black’s bishop.

And on and on it goes—White advancing a little here, Black countering there, both men sweating in their seats, both minds probing for the slightest crack on the other’s armor.

Black has a family, and will soon have children of his own. What he doesn’t realize is that this elegant game will squeeze away these beloved people—his first marriage will end in divorce, and his second will have its fair share of hardship. He will one day tell his second wife how much he hates chess, and how deeply he resents it. He will tell her that it stripped away his whole mental life, and even though it has made him a celebrity and a public figure, it has eaten him, for it profits a man little to gain the world and lose his soul. He finds he actually prefers baseball.

But for now, all these years earlier, he tries to defend his d6 pawn, struggling against White’s spatial advantage and wishing badly he could go back to undo some of White’s annoying move. Nevertheless, as always, he must soldier on. It does not matter where he wishes he found himself. It matters where he is. And so he thinks, and leans over the board, and drinks a sip of water, and stares unblinkingly at his position. He had desired to exert his rooks on the center, but his own pieces stand challenged and obtrusive. White and Black both manage to line up their rooks in a column each, mirroring each other. Meanwhile, Black’s bishop hangs lurking in the corner, on the surface impotent, but one pawn push away from exerting its pressure.

Meanwhile, White struggles to know his place. He is childless, and has had no serious outside interest in his voluminous work aside from Chess. He resents and laments his place in this world, and desperately wants to be remembered. How sad it was! He was a man living a philosophical life forced into a tabletop game, desiring a career in mathematics and philosophy and cursed by excellence in this game of kings.

Many moves happen to little fanfare. Black plays fast, hoping to throw White off his game. He largely fails. White has dangerously advanced his king up the board, and black pushes it back with a pawn. But White is not through yet. He’s positioned his rooks to the far right 8 column, pushing hard on the right side. And in a stroke of genius, he pushes his pawn to e5, that same square that Black had started the game with some 35 moves ago. Black had hoped to play defensively and mark time to move towards a draw, but now the die is cast. He must take the e5 pawn, and he does. This has opened up his own rook, but it may not be enough to help him out of this position for a simple reason: few have noticed, but White has been waiting for this opening to attack with his knight. Black tries desperately to get his own knight into a stalling position, but it is too late—with one move, White uses his knight to stick one of Black’s bishops and rooks into an inescapable fork. Now black must choose which piece to surrender and which to save; no other options befell him.

Black chooses the bishop, and White eats the rook. The bishop takes that knight back, but it is a cold comfort, as that same dogged bishop faces a new attack from a rook pushed up the board. White smiles and sweeps the piece up the column with a dramatic flair. Herein lies the outcome of the struggle.

Black is not quite done, and holds out hope that his play can save him. He frowns, and crosses his arms, and taps his shoe twice before regaining his composure. With another grand sweep, White shoots his other rook to the far left of the board, making an obvious play at Black’s king on the back rank. Black desperately moves his king to prevent being smothered by two rooks, but White is not letting up an inch. Check.

Black’s bishop, stolen of its power, blocks the check. White moves in one final time with his remaining knight. Black can see it now. The future is indeed his, a future he will grow to resent, even with all its benefits. But for now, White has denied it to him. He is not yet finished. He will try again next year, and try and try again, and try more after that. Black stands up, and extends his hand to resign.

Hope you enjoyed. It’s spooky month and I’ve been reading both Dracula and Frankenstein, so expect a little Halloween themed fun with those two in the near future.

I am not a rich man. I’m not given to extravagance, or maybe more accurately, I don’t like to pay for it.1 And when I read James Joyce, especially when I read about James Joyce, I feel that there’s something I can identify with in this way.

Of course, Joyce lived a much harder life than any of us likely have. He endured both abuse and poverty, and had to grow up fast to take care of his younger siblings. Now, this was before he developed horrible vision problems, and before he exiled himself from his native Ireland, where he felt particularly repressed. I thank the Lord he became an eccentric writer and not a serial killer with a past like his.

He and I, in a way, intersected through the month of August. I knew I had a trip planned to Ireland, and so I ordered this small collection of poetry which included his play Exiles.

It was a bit expensive, but pretty, and contained moving poetry. I guess this was where my fascination with Joyce began, reading these stanzas that sang:

O cool is the valley now

And there, love, we will go

For many a choir is singing now

Where Love did sometime go.

And hear you not the thrushes calling,

Calling us away?

O cool and pleasant is the valley

And there, love, we will stay.

Or ya know like this:

Because your voice was at my side

I gave him pain,

Because within my hand I held

Your hand again

There is no word nor any sign

Can make amend—

He is a stranger to me now

Who was my friend.

Or maybe just for fun, Ecce Puer:

Of the dark past

A child is born;

With joy and grief

My heart is torn.

Calm in his cradle

The living lies.

May love and mercy

Unclose his eyes!

Young life is breathed

On the glass;

The world that was not

Comes to pass.

A child is sleeping:

An old man gone.

O, father forsaken,

Forgive your son!

So here’s the thing. I don’t read a ton of poetry, not really. But even so, I was a little stunned by the genius Joyce displays here. Ripped from a collection and haphazardly formatted on the internet, I expect it doesn’t hit as hard much of the time. But having tried to write some poetry, I can assure you it’s harder than it looks. The guy is a genius, and I don’t think there’s any other way to describe him. A weirdo, unable to control urges, substance abuser, whatever else you want to call him, you simply cannot call him a bad writer.2 And this endears me to him greatly.

So after I took on the challenge of reading Ulysses (which I talk about here!), I also had Dubliners fall into my lap, almost literally. I had told a friend where I was going, and she insisted on me reading it. So through her speaking to my wife, I wound up with a copy of Joyce’s short story collection in my hand, and seeing it was decently short, I decided “eh, what the heck,” and threw it on my now-burgeoning Joyce collection.

This one was the opposite of The King in Yellow to me. Instead of starting strong and finishing weak, I felt that Joyce’s collection got better with every story, in spite of it not really gripping me in the beginning. The final story, “The Dead,” was a gut-punch, with 14 more that preceded it. And, honestly, Dublin itself matched the collection, even over 100 years later:

^That’s Dublin at night, by the way. Sorry for the blurry photo; I was coming off being extremely sick the night before, and I’m taking this shot out of a cab window to go catch the early flight home. I love that picture, though—right in the middle of a city of 600,000 and not a soul in sight. It’s peaceful, and a little mysterious, even if the photo is sorta bad. A daytime picture:

One of the things I had mixed feelings about was the depressing tone through much of Dubliners. Fortunately some of the later stories made up for it, but by and large, it’s fairly unhappy. Going to Dublin kind of helped me understand this.

The city had something of a sadness to it. It was difficult to explain. Though everyone was friendly, and needless to say things have changed quite a lot in the last hundred plus years, that general atmosphere is something I think is still more or less the same.3 Maybe I’m reading into it or I psychologically conditioned myself somehow, sure. But I couldn’t help feeling there was something a little melancholy about this city on the emerald isle. But I also think it was a wonderful place, and beautiful.

Joyce was not wrong to have so much of his heart in this city.

Finally, I came to Exiles. I’ll admit, a love-triangle play that is essentially people standing in rooms and talking to each other isn’t really my thing. But I think there was still a lot there for the interested. And, of course, the play looms large in the real history of its author, who both loved and felt such exasperation towards his own country. Though the actual plot isn’t really for me, it is made infinitely MORE interesting in the background of these characters being, well, exiles, and knowing that all their drama is exacerbated by being in a land not their own. It’s not really my preferred genre, but it’s certainly something I could appreciate and enjoy.

Last but not least, I got to visit two locations from Ulysses, my own little mini-Bloomsday. The Ha’Penny bridge was, of course, beautiful:

And I got a pint at Davy Byrnes’ pub.4

We were very fortunate to have pretty great weather that day, especially by European standards.

But my point is not (well, not really) to brag and say “look at this cool vacation I got to take!” because again, I was only able to go because some generous people helped us on the way. My point is that in these books, you get primed to recognize some of the real life depth that gives significance to all these works. Joyce is powerful not just because he’s a good linguist—he’s writing about the hidden narratives that exist in real places with real histories. It seems like a well duh kind of thing to put it this way, but fiction is meaningful because time and place are contexts of narratives. You have your own. So do I. And I’m glad people like Joyce felt inspired enough to put them to the page. That, probably, is the thing that keeps us sane.

The main thrust of Wallace’s speech is that there is true difficulty in gaining empathy, and that the loftiest goal of higher education is to choose consciousness as often as you can stand—that real freedom is the ability to perceive and sympathize with the people and world around you.

He goes on to say that our default position—our natural, uneducated state—is to condescendingly sneer at those around us, whom we easily begin to think we are above. The challenge of his speech is not to even give any series of moral prescriptions. He merely encourages his listeners to know that within the other individual selves around you, there is a whole independent life of thought and experience inaccessible to you, but nonetheless present. His final dictum is to say that “this is water,” this is as water to a fish, the nature of things, and that this ought to extend us an obligation to consider the complexity, miseries, and perspectives of others.

I think this is as good an introduction to Ulysses as I could ask for in the year of our Lord 2025. Why? Because Ulysses is the function (even if it was written ~100 years before Wallace) of the “this is water” speech. Ulysses IS the entry into the perspective of someone else, moment by moment, thought by thought. If you’re unaware, the basic summary of the book is that James Joyce took almost 800 pages to describe one single 24 hour period experienced by three main characters: Leopold Bloom, his friend Stephen Dedalus, and wife Molly Bloom. That’s the most bare-bones description of the book you can give; there’s a lot more to it than just that.

I was on the cusp of taking a trip to Ireland, and we were going to spend several days in Dublin. So, with a month before my trip, I made a pact with a friend to read Ulysses in the 30 days leading up to my flight on September 1st. I actually did accomplish this. I’m proud I got it done. I’ll not be doing this again.

Ulysses is notoriously difficult to read. Its reputation, if you’re familiar with it, certainly precedes it. So for 30 days, reading at the pace of about 30 pages a day (which took anywhere between 30 and 75 minutes depending on the section) was the literary equivalent of Rocky drinking raw eggs every morning:

And to add to this a little bit, I would say the actual experience of reading the text (which at its easiest is a thought-for-thought stream of consciousness) was roughly the same experience of watching this surreal meme from a while back:

What I’m trying to say is that Ulysses is an assault on the senses, but kind of in a good way.

James Joyce is an author I have a lot of respect for. Learning about his childhood, I’m extremely grateful he became an author and didn’t turn into, like, a serial killer or something. He’s probably the smartest writer I have ever read, and he seems to know it.

I am not a professional scholar nor literary critic. Trying to disentangle the multifaceted depths of Ulysses is not a task I am sufficient for. But parts of the book were gorgeous, and deeply human. Leopold and Molly, for example, are both having affairs, and both suspect the other. And yet, this isn’t a drama, not really. A testament to Joyce’s skill, both still come across as decently likeable (Molly a bit moreso).

I think, maybe, the point I’m trying to make is that Ulysses, for all its complexity and difficulty (one of the final chapters is a surrealist stage play of about 200 pages), succeeds in being an expression of mundane—but still luminously profound—humanity. It reminds me of song lyrics I liked from my college days:

How strange it is to be anything at all.

Even though I wouldn’t describe the book as my favorite, well, anything, I think that I’m glad it exists. Not necessarily because I think everyone should go read this behemoth (please don’t, unless you really really want to. Casual interest won’t carry you very far), but because if you’ve read literally anything in English after it, you’re already reaping the reward of it having existed. I remember reading that Joyce loved the English word “yes.” It is the last word of the novel. It is an affirmation, an acceptance, an invitation in. So to Ulysses, on that score, I say yes. I love that there’s a meticulous attention to the makeup of Dublin, down to the last minute detail. I love that there are beautiful and wholesome descriptions of Gerty MacDowell and Molly Bloom, the two most prominent women in the book. I love that there is a sort of innocence to these two, that in their inner life, with no one to treat them badly for it, they can think precious thoughts without shame. I also love that the book ends with our two main characters drifting off into sleep, their day done.

I’ve ended a lot of these posts with quotes, but this time I’ll just give you two small ones.

“Love loves to love love.”

“Shut your eyes and see.”

Ulysses has more than earned its exceedingly difficult reputation. There were sections that were so inscrutable I was entirely taken out of what I was doing. There were times I found myself thinking (and occasionally saying) “James, what IS this?” There are whole sections that were revolting and gross. But there was a lot of humanity and beauty and even some glory in there too. In a weird sort of way, this book actually succeeds in being about almost everything, because it is such a comprehensive look at that ever so cliché topic: it’s a book about life. Yeah, actually, this one is. I’ve never really read anything like it. I won’t be clamoring to do so again any time soon, but what a ride. Yes.

One final thing I want to mention: my copy is a thrift store find (that I almost didn’t buy!) from long ago. There is a beautiful handwritten love note in the front cover, which I’ll post below. I love buying books secondhand just to see stuff like this—my copy also had handwritten notes in the margins, which is always a delight. Thanks, James Joyce, for writing something that people still want to engage with, 60 and 120 years later.

In case you can’t read that, a transcript:

“December, 1964

Cindy--

Let this book be a monument to our summer, to an evening spent sitting under a bridge or watching a play or playing chess, to an afternoon spent reading on a slope or laughing and kissing underneath a tree or walking hand in hand beside a stream, in love. Yes, the summer is now a memory, but our love is forever.

Love,

Stephen”

I hope Cindy and Stephen had a great life together. We are, all of us, going about such endlessly complex things as our own lives, and Ulysses helps me to know that a little better, I think.

I have a lot to say about Infinite Jest, precipitated on two facts:

1. I’ve been reading Ulysses and it’s pretty obvious IJ would not exist without James Joyce existing first.

2. A friend of mine asked if she should actually read Infinite Jest.

I’m kind of gun shy about actually recommending the book itself to a wide audience. Is it a worthwhile book? No question, absolutely. Is it a book to recommend to specific individuals? Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh maybe? But I think the prospective reader should make that decision herself, more than any recommendation I could give.

So, all that being said, I love David Foster Wallace’s work. I think he had an utterly unique gift for diagnosing and describing, with language like a scalpel, the rise and decadence of the modern world. It’s hilarious and sad that his interviews and speeches have been chopped up into YouTube shorts, a format he would no doubt have a few bemused thoughts about. What’s sadder and funnier is that I actually watch these YouTube shorts.

But Wallace is as incisive as any writer I’ve read. Maybe, you say to me, that just means I need to read more. That is probably true on its own, but it doesn’t take away from Wallace’s ability. And the other thing I love about Wallace’s work is that it is so sincerely interested in sincerity. he is not simply a critic of the modern world, he is someone who wants to redeem any ability to be uncritically and uncynically happy. At least, that’s how I read IJ.

So let me give the brief Matt-synopsis here. Infinite Jest, named after a line in Hamlet, is a 1079 page book, roughly about the pursuit of a film (made by a man who took his own life) by the same title. This film is so perfect and so wonderful, that anyone who sees it, even for a moment, wants nothing more than to watch this movie continually until he or she dies. This is all going on in the background, while simultaneously, the book follows two main locations: the Enfield Tennis Academy, where rising stars learn tennis among a demented cast of characters. Chief among them are the three sons of the aforementioned filmmaker: one, a bright star making his way, the other, a fading talent who needs to take his ability into another sport, and the third, a pity-admission, horribly deformed at birth, and an aspiring fimmaker himself.

The second location is the Ennet House, a halfway house for reforming drug abusers, featuring a patient-turned-janitor named Don Gately. This house has all sorts of interconnected players related to the tennis academy, and not a few connections to a Canadian terrorist group looking for the film Infinite Jest to do terrorist stuff with.

I took 5 years to read this book. It’s got about 150 pages worth of endnotes of varying and insane length. The book taught me a lot about addiction, and loneliness, and how people try to make their way in the world. But ultimately, we all struggle to really define Infinite Jest. How in the world do you summarize something so labyrinthine, winding, and dadgum long?

There’s a definite plot; it’s told at times in a linear fashion and at times in a non-chronological format. I didn’t even mention that it’s also a critique of corporatism and features a 1984-style mega nation across North America. The continent is abbreviated O.N.A.N., by the way, because Wallace can’t help but feature some good old-fashioned toilet humor every now and again.

If you were to ask me what the book is about, I’d tell you it’s mostly about trauma and addiction, but like, in a hopeful, kinda funny, kinda disturbing way, not a morose way. That being said, there are passages of this book that are rough. I’d advise you know the following graphic items are featured in this book (and look to the next paragraph if you don’t even want to see mention of this graphic content): child abuse, sexual abuse, both of these at the same time, dead unborn, depictions of drug abuse in detail, an oedipus complex, explicit racism, disturbing violence, terrorism, self-harm, taking of one’s own life, and more. I’m of the opinion that depiction is not endoresment, but please, know your limits here. Don’t dive into this unless you’re ready to skip some stuff or unless you can learn to let these depictions go.

My speech on graphic content will have to wait for another day, but there’s a lot of that in here, though thankfully a 1000 page novel has plenty of breaks from the graphic stuff. But it is in there, and it’s irresponsible of me not to mention it.

So why do I like this book? Mostly because it connects with me, at a sort of heart-level. I feel a lot of what Wallace is putting down here—we are atomistically separated from others that we want so desperately to love. We do weird stuff that only we think we see but nevertheless defines who we are when we interact with others. Drugs are addictive because, sadly, they work, and walking away from that is incredibly hard. There’s no accident that this book is decently popular with recovering addicts. Wallace has been there. There’s a lot to unpack.

And I love that the book is part of the New Sincerity. Cynicism isn’t cool or edgy. Love the things you love. Don’t get all superior to others just because they like a given thing. Stop freaking worrying about looking cringe.

Here’s a handful of quotes from this book that I love. There’s about a million in my tattered copy that I’ve underlined; here’s my grab-bag of a few I like in no order:

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”

“He can’t tell if Hal is sad. He is having a harder and harder time reading Hal’s mind or whether he’s in good spirits. This worries him. He used to be able to sort of pre-verbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was and what he was doing, even if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can’t anymore. Feel it. This worries him and feels like when you’ve lost something important in a dream and you can’t even remember what it was but it’s important. Mario loves Hal so much it makes his heart beat hard. He doesn’t have to wonder if the difference now is him or his brother because Mario never changes.”

“Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.”

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”

“[S]ometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt.”

“[S]arcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.”

“No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.”

From my favorite scene in the book, wherein Don Gately has been shot and the girl he has a crush on tries to stop his bleeding: “Gately focuses at where the Joelle girl's eyes would be. Her thighs are forked way wide to straddle his arm, which is numb and doesn't feel like his. She's bearing down on him. She smells strange but good. She's got all her weight on her bathrobe's pad. She weighs roughly nothing. The first threads of pain are starting to radiate out of the shoulder and down the side and into the neck. Gately hasn't looked down at the shoulder, on purpose, and he tries to wedge his left hand's finger under the shoulder to see if anything went through. The night's so clear the stars shine right through people's heads.”

“One of the highest prices of sobriety was not being able to keep from remembering the things you didn’t want to remember.”

And many more. So should you read Infinite Jest? I honestly don’t think I can tell you that. I loved it. You might not, and you might think I’m a pretentious schmuck because of that. But if you decide to, I’ll see you in five years.

Recently, between fictions, my wife recommended I give The Black Stallion a try, a children’s story first published in 1941. The idea was that it was a simple, easy read in between bigger books to get through in a short while, and one she had enjoyed as a girl.

Well, she was right. It’s a sweet, and at times, harrowing story. The plot is compelling, and the whole thing is like a warm blanket of sorts. There’s danger, but not terror, stakes, but lives aren’t on the line. Stuff actually happens (more than I can say about some books I’ve read), and the whole thing just drips wholesomeness. It’s hard to think of a more perfect children’s story from days gone by.

But this brief post is merely to brag on one thing about the book. It’s something all good literature accomplishes, at least to some extent (depending on what a book is going for): clarity.

I can’t claim to be the most thorough reader in the world. I can’t claim that I always know what’s going on, but I just power through certain (to me) inscrutable sections of given texts and hope I can figure out what’s going on in a chapter or two. That’s…probably not the way to read well, but alas. I can confidently say of some books “I looked at every word in there.”

What I’m trying to say is that I think Mr. Farley’s greatest skill is in describing a given scene in a way that is easy to follow, coherent, and clear. Action is paced well without getting bogged down in intricate description. Calm scenes are given room to breathe and make obvious what’s happening and why.

And I don’t even think it’s because Farley sacrifices linguisitc flair or style, not really. It’s because I think he’s got the ability to just tell us what he wants to. That is a skill in and of itself. I’m not much of a fiction writer (not for lack of trying), and a common criticism I’ve gotten when I pass stuff out to loved ones is “what was going on here, exactly?” Not as in it was weird or off the wall or blurred the lines of reality or whatever. As in: I failed to give an adequate description of what was going on in a way that was not cumbersome to read nor vague to the point of obfuscating the narrative.

The Black Stallion succeeds as a novel and as a piece of children’s literature. Its effective, concise, and clear prose is a big reason why.

Don’t scoff at children’s literature, my friends. It is a skill unto itself.

P.S. I am contractually obligated to post this C.S. Lewis quote:

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” -C.S. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children.”

When I was about a third of the way through the book, I kind of already had a Substack post in mind. I was going to post this quote from Cowboy Bebop to make my introduction:

I was going to talk about how the book had some high-minded ideas, but it ultimately fell into what I’ll pejoratively and condescendingly call “woo-woo nonsense.” Hence, like Spike from Bebop, I found it “real mystic and all,” but ultimately lacking in meaningful substance.

However, as the novel bloomed into its crescendo, I found that kind of characterization would have been unfair. Yes, Hesse’s novel can lean into the ethereal and, at times, seem a bit hollow. But Siddhartha won me over as it went along.

That isn’t often the case for me. Usually beginnings, not endings, are the source of most of the joy of excitement in reading. I found Siddhartha to kind of be the opposite. The beginning certainly wasn’t bad, but a parable in novel form to give life lessons according to the teachings of the Buddha doesn’t exactly light my proverbial fire.

So what became interesting for me about the work was the lightbulb realization, maybe about halfway through, that this book was semi-autobiographical. For those of you familiar with it, you might be thinking well duh, but bear with my mental slowness here. That realization recast the whole read to me. Now I could plainly see that Siddhartha himself was Hesse, and his meeting with the Buddha was Hesse’s wrestling with his teaching. In the end, spoiler alert, Siddhartha was deeply in love with the Buddha’s teaching, but found he disagreed with some points of it, but loved him all the same.

As a 21st century, western, kinda-sorta-inclined-to-rationalism1, Christian, I did have a bone to pick with suggesting it can be simultaneously true that the Buddha is right in all his teaching, and yet at the same time he is not right to suggest we should not love, not in a fundamental, giving of oneself to another kind of way. That’s philosophically impossible to me, but the whole point is that Siddhartha doesn’t actually care—for him, irrationally, he both thinks the Buddha is the grand enlightened one, and yet he has no qualms in saying he should love others freely and from the heart, and he doesn’t want to approach that this contradiction is in any way a problem. Indeed, he does not even want to say that the Buddha is wrong, merely that the Buddha is right in all his teachings, and he (Siddhartha) is simultaneously right to love others. This is a very feels-based kind of teaching, but again, Siddhartha himself is disinclined to care about what, to him, is mere sophistry. As he tells his lifelong friend towards the end of the book, words are ideas, and ideas are not things. To him, a rock is a thing, so it supersedes all ideas by the fact that it is.

This is an inherently fascinating kind of thought experiment to me, and Hesse’s deep thinking is plainly on display. Siddhartha is a book about life itself and all that that cliché entails, and for that I am grateful. It is also a breezy, approachable read, and for that I am grateful.

But of course, to get twisted up in Siddhartha’s contradictory philosophy is to miss the point—we are rational beings who constantly act irrationally. If logic could save us, it already would have. In the words of the Apostle, I do not understand my own actions; I do the very thing I hate. So while I am somewhat annoyed at the contradiciton (and indeed, I think it presents a real philosophical challenge for Hesse’s system that he just declares doesn’t matter), I don’t want that to keep me from seeing a real beauty—both aesthetically and substantively—in this book.

I actually found the conversion of Siddhartha to be a quite poignant parallel to the stories I’ve heard of Christian conversions. While he is not converting to the religion I wish he would have, Hesse (the son of Christian missionaries) describes quite poetically the experience of undergoing the sense that all things have become new. Siddhartha goes from a proud and masterful student and ascetic to an indulgent hedonist to a humble admirer (but not necessarily follower) of Gautama. It is no accident that the Buddha’s given name was Siddhartha Gautama.

Further, I can’t help but wonder if the boy from late in the book is some kind of allegory for Hesse’s rejection of his parent’s religion. Evidently Hesse still greatly admired his parent’s religion, saying on one occasion, “their Christianity, one not preached but lived, was the strongest of the powers that shaped and moulded me.” This is only my interpretation, but I’m wondering if the fictional Siddhartha’s fraught relationship with his son was sorta/kinda an admission of a feeling of guilt on the part of the author, with Siddhartha himself taking the role of his own father. Given that the son runs away in anger and rejection of his father and never returns to the novel, I could see a parallel in Hesse’s own rejection of his family faith. Obviously I can never know if these two things were related in Hesse’s mind, but the possibility is interesting.

Siddhartha is, at its best, tender, thought-provoking, and reflective. At its worst, it is all the annoying things that incoherent hippie nonsense can lend itself to, but thankfully those portions of it are pretty sparse and don’t detract from the rest of the novel.

I guess if you are looking for this sort of thing, reading this book could be some kind of mindfulness practice. Just don’t forget to eat beforehand before you get real mystic and all.