The Resigned Optimist: A Paradox of Inevitability

I’m intrigued by paradox. I’m more or less convinced that we’re surrounded by senselessness and contradiction: life is paradox. I can’t say for sure if that’s an objective senselessness or purely subjective senselessness, because all I have is my subjective observation. But what I observe is this: humanity is constantly confused and contradictory. For example, what we do in the name of God. The paradox of faith: we can transcend petty humanity and incarnate Love. And yet we can also justify horrible exclusions (slavery, segregation), we can celebrate genocide (Joshua, Judges), and we can explore and embrace child sacrifice (is that not what God did on the cross, but feed his own child to the maw of humanity to appease our endless sin?). In one emotional second we can navigate both love and hate. We experience jealousy even while speaking genuine joy in others’ accomplishments. I could argue that paradox, rather than making life obfuscating and impossible, actually makes life rich and complicated. Or, I suppose, I could argue that there is therefore no such thing as paradox, because two things that are opposite almost always seem to find a home together, in some move a cosmic balance.

So, too, is my experience with optimism and resignation.

I am an optimist. I have taken Strengthsfinders, as any good Western, impericallly-driven businessperson or student or pastor or human being has, and “Postitivity” is one of my strengths. This is not particularly surprising to anyone who knows me. I tend to believe in the best. I tend to hope for the best. I tend to expect the best. Because what is the point of hope if it is less than? What is the point of love if it is untrue? (Incidentally, this is vastly different than perfectionism, which requires one’s self to be the best, rather than a more macro/situational view that conveniently avoids fusing expectancy with responsibility for the expected result.)

And yet my experience of life, of humanity, of love and hate and safety and fear is that it is not the best. God seems to have come to grips with this “less than” living, and responded in extreme measure (the cross). Solomon (or whoever, I’m not so dogmatic on authorship to really care) dallies around that point, wallowing in Ecclesiastes around depression, resignation, and the general ennui of carrying the fullest measure of human wisdom and wealth. So if then life itself is destined to be flawed, to fall short of some goal, and if God himself surrendered his son in resignation and grief, then the inevitable end of optimism is that same experience: resignation and grief. 

For the optimist then, whose hindsight is always disappointment, the future remains hope and potential that will, with seeming inevitability, end in resignation and cynicism as a flawed present is experienced in persistent repetition.  The future is potential. The past is disaster. It’s this paradox that I live in: I wish I could give up on hope. Without hope, there is no hopelessness. Without the impossible potential of the future, the past moves from disappointment to realism: past, present, future; all simply are. 

Similarly, I think, the curse of nostalgia (exaltation of the past) is pessimism, for it is impossible to experience a present that is as pure as the (false) idealized past. If the present is insufficient, then the primary promise of the future is disappointment. 

So what? I don’t know. We’re all screwed. Everything balances eventually, and none of it well: optimism and resignation, nostalgia and pessimism, or the monotone experience of a past, present, and future that simply is, which is void of hope. And yet here I am, unable to give up on hope. I know its cost. I know its inevitability. And I stand with my hands up, bracing against the great steamroller of life hoping, praying, and believing (help me in my unbelief) that the other end of death is resurrection.

Art is Faith: Hopeful, and Fragile.

One of the things I love most about the creative world (arts, literature, music, all these categories that overlap and interplay) is the way that, as people give themselves to art, there’s this beautiful interplay of the sacred and the secular. Of course, NT Wright would say that there is no such thing as secular anymore; that after the death and resurrection of Christ all things are reclaimed and made sacred. 

That may be true theologically, but in practice we know the difference. Maybe. Or maybe not. Because I think, particularly in the arts, the draw and the impulse is always to something transcendent. It is to create; it is to take on the task that God names himself with: Creator. Sometimes this takes the form of the offensive. Sometimes it takes the form of the mysterious. Sometimes it takes the form of tear-inducing beauty—or heart-wrenching brokenness. The thing about art, though, is that it is always trying to reach towards some sort of Truth. It is always trying to be more than it is. Art has a soul. Art has a piece of the eternal. Art transforms, even as it offends. 

Those emotional and spiritual places that art explores are actually places we see Jesus explore in the gospels. He tells offensive stories, like when a Samaritan is the hero. This story is so intentionally culturally offensive. It is combative. It is not a surprise that the Pharisees charged Jesus with blasphemy. The parables were deeply mysterious; Christ said he taught that way because people weren’t ready to see. They weren’t ready to hear. And in the same way I think sometimes art hits us in a visceral and subconscious place that maybe heals and maybe transforms, but we can’t handle consciously. We don’t have eyes to see, yet, the truth of our brokenness or bondage or frustration. Jesus weeps along with a grieving family when Lazarus dies—heart-wrenching brokenness—and then in a moment of beauty and power he commands death to heel. Jesus turned water to wine so the party didn’t end (because his mom asked him to, even though she knew it wasn’t “his time”), he aggressively forgave sin and violation, he consorted with the dregs of society, and he indulged in anger and violence towards those that would warp and control truth to their benefit.

Art is never done. There’s always more. There’s another story, picture, interpretation. Art is forever seeking. Faith, I think, is the same. It is never complete. It is never safe. It is always nested in this place of incredible hope and overwhelming fragility. I don’t think that’s an accident, and when faith moves from wonder to certainty, I think we ought to grieve the size of that god and the death of his art.

Art can get too esoteric for me at times. It can get too inaccessible. As I wrestle with what to do with contemporary poetry or conceptual visual arts, though, I'm challenged to find a way to receive it. Because maybe sometimes that’s what we need—just like we need, to really live in a place of faith, a Bible that’s at one time pacifist and at one time genocidal; it is poetry and symbolism and history and mystery. Perhaps, just as we encounter truth through art, we encounter truth through Scripture as we are offended by it, as we are challenged by it, and as we have to try to reconcile it to itself, to our experiences, and to our understanding of God. And perhaps, as weird as it seems, the world needs a Church that’s imperfect. That’s inefficient and broken and rampant with insecurity and misunderstanding. A Church that in the midst of its flaws suggests that there is process, and that is reason enough to have hope.

April 25, 2015

Forty-six degrees with cold, biting rain and intermittent burst of obnoxious wind.

Today sucks.

On Jacob and Esau and Psychopathy

I’ve been toying with the story of Jacob and Esau, really most of my life. I keep reading this story and every time I see something else. Sometimes I read it heroically—things make sense, align, God is provident. Sometimes I read it and it seems like every damn person is a villain. Jacob for stealing the inheritance, his mom for helping him, his dad for trying to give it to Esau against God’s will, Esau for trying to take what he traded to Jacob (even if Jacob was a real opportunistic jerk about it) ,and God himself for setting the whole situation up in the first place. 

I keep reading this story because it’s my namesake. It’s my middle name, Jacob, that I get from my mom and I get from the Bible. He’s the deceiver. He’s weirdly chosen and gifted, but deals in deception most of his life. It’s hard to figure out how this guy stays in God’s favor. Everything he does is a con, and he’s got the greatest ally you could ask for. 

And fair warning, I might be reading personal experience into theology. There’s a hell of a lot of projection that goes on in the theological world, particularly with bad theology (but even in good), and perhaps I’m trying to rationalize some belief set that makes sense of my family and my flaws. Or maybe the best we can do is read and interpret, to meditate on these stories over and over and dig into the core of who God is as best we can know him, given the cumulative sum of our own experiences. That seems to be how Paul approached scriptures, at least as far as I can tell.  

Regardless, this is what I have: my brain, my lens, my dysfunction applied to God. Sorry God. I’m doing my best. 

On to the matter at hand: there’s this really powerful theme in the story of favor and abandonment playing side by side. Particularly in the relationship between Jacob and his mom, Rebekah. Warning: hot button, completely biased zone for Patrick here. Buckle up. Jacob’s mother effectively destroyed Jacob’s relationship with his father and his twin, and really everything he knew. When she dressed him in goatskins and deception, Rebekah severed any paternal loyalty or brotherly affection that existed among Isaac, Jacob, and Esau. Those relationships became dead—and in doing so, Rebekah killed her own relationship with her favorite son. She would remain with Isaac, and send Jacob off (with God, but nothing else) into the desert. For the favor of a son, she removed everything that he had ever know, she destroyed stability, and she split a family. Guys, we teach this story to kids. There’s some awful, divisive, destructive stuff going on.  There’s no, “And Esau went to counseling for the rest of his life, because his mom really screwed him over on this one.” 

How do you even carry that weight as Jacob? It’s heavy. And honestly, if we want to take it a bit more extreme (why not, right?) let’s blame God, shall we? He’s the one who decreed that Jacob would have the inheritance. He’s the one who set the events in motion. He’s the one who broke up the family, so that his blessing could go on to the second son instead of the first. Jacob was complicit, yes. But he was a pawn in a plot of his mother to fulfill a prophecy by his god to give him everything—and to burn everything to the ground. Scorched earth theology. He lost the whole world, but I guess won his soul? 

So Jacob ends up fighting with God. They wrestle all night. And I’m not sure if it matters if it was really God or if it was Jesus or an angel, or if the whole thing is metaphor. Whether in act or in mind, Jacob was pissed, and Jacob was scared, and Jacob was swinging for the universe. He’s wrestling, I think, with his parents and—perhaps—himself. 

You see, what Jacob is about to face across the river is his brother Esau. But more than that, it’s his own complicit deception. And I wonder if what Jacob finds most offensive or daunting is the fact that he has to face his brother, whom he duped and abandoned, without saying that he’s sorry. Because I don’t think he is. Everything he has, if we believe the narrative, his flocks and his wives and his family, his great riches that drove him from his father-in-law’s lands, is because of that deception. What Jacob is wrestling, what Jacob is afraid of, is not just the confrontation. It is not just the presence of a God who seemed to bless deception, and at such cost. It is not his brother, waiting for him. What Jacob is wrestling is his own psychopathy. He’s not sorry. He wouldn’t take it back. He lied and he cheated and he took the greatest blessing he could find and at some point he has to acknowledge that he’s not a victim, but a willing accomplice. And he would do it all over again. 

So what do we do with that? According to the Bible, we fight. We get pissed and we wrestle and we refuse to be lost even though we feel irredeemable. And we take what blessings we've been given, even in the midst of chaos, and we hold to them until it breaks our hip.

In which Narcissism Collides with Selflessness

My blogging career is off to a bit of a slow start. You see, after my great declaration of narcissism, I found myself suddenly needing to be very selfless: my wife gave birth to a daughter. She has nothing to offer. She has two states, sleep and discontent. And she sort of has the flat, wrinkled face and squinted eyes of an old Asian man.

And, of course, she has ripped my heart to pieces, and rebuilds it every time she peeks out at me with her grumpy blue eyes.

In commemoration, I’m going to share a poem—not one about this moment, but about the moment that my wife gave birth to our first child, Hudson. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with poetry; not unlike my relationship with blogging. I’m a bit of a skeptic (this is a nice way to say cynic) when it comes to life, which creates a weird tension because I'm also a bit of an optimist. Figure that one out, and I’ll owe you some sort of counseling fee. The thing about loving and hating something is that they’re not all that separate really; these are measures of intensity, not necessarily pure motive. Although I think I have a fairly liberal definition of the word love. Most of our feelings actually land somewhere on the continuum of the concept of Love, and where they get so conflicted is that each feeling is bent through this series of lenses: how we love ourselves, how we love those we intimately know, how we love those we don’t know, and how all of these sum together in how we love God (with an extra dose of how we love our parents, our authorities, and, well, the list goes on). So in that love and hate are one in the same, because if Love is the pinnacle of emotion, then we can only hate that which does some damage to one that we love—and often that "one" is our self. Or, we can hate ourselves in proportion to how we (perceive we) hurt those we love, even if that generic “those” is all of them encompassed in our understanding of God.

All that to say, I have this love/hate relationship with a lot of things in my life, because when I feel strongly about something that tends to be the result. I plan on exploring that tension in this space over the next however-long. Poetry, art, the Church and its churches, colleges, social media, faith, apologetics, responsibility, structure, the oxford comma, and so forth. But that’s not what I promised in this post, I promised a poem, and I also promise a future post that explores a bit my relationship with poetry, which is both the most beautiful art there is and the largest cauldron of bullshit you can dip your spoon into. 

The Weight of Blood 

It’s a hard thing to hold blood.

I’ve given blood and preached blood and

     eaten blood and spilt blood and

     shared blood and feared blood and shed

     blood.

Then I watched my wife

fair-haired and straining

muscles corded a

Viking shieldmaiden yelling

curses at Odin

because today is not a day for death but for life.

And she split herself in two to make way for a son.

He flailed out, purple and gray and red,

a gollum golllum cry for air for warmth for regret

and I wasn’t going to cut the cord until

and I never knew how to hold a baby until

and I can see the blood on the floor

and count the cost in stitches

because I am a father now.

And he cried until laid on his mother

and sweat and exhaustion

and tears and pain and blood

lift as my wife increases

as she weighs the cost of love and becomes it.