Ascetic Assumptions

A year or so ago I was perusing the book rack of a thrift store and chanced upon several books that looked intriguing. One in particular, The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, solicited itself as the most widely read Christian spiritual work apart from the Bible. I finally picked up that book a couple of weeks ago, and it was quite an interesting and challenging read.

Thomas Hemerken was born in 1380 and became a Catholic monk in his twenties. After losing a brother to illness and moving his entire monastery due to exile, he penned The Imitation as a straightforward treatise on how to be a diligent follower of Christ. At times his pain is clear, showing how much he longs to fully delight in and enjoy God despite what is happening to him.

Of this Thomas talks at length, revealing how fervently he wants to obey God’s word and hold steadfast to the truths of scripture. In this Thomas clearly articulates what we see in the Bible: those who realize they have been saved from a great punishment delight in a great reward.

But inevitably things get in the way, and this is the cornerstone of his work. About halfway through the book he writes a section titled “How we should forget all created things, that we may find the Creator.” Thomas hovers around this idea that created things detract from focusing on and obeying the God of the universe, and does so throughout the entire book.

Which is kind of true and kind of untrue. In the Bible, Paul of Tarsus writes about how prone we are to worship created things rather than the Creator (Romans 1:18). In fact, we’ve all done it; our rebellious nature is bent towards supplanting the Creator with his creation.

But at several points in his work Thomas tends towards a drastic impression of this. At one point he writes, “Behold-meat, drink, clothing, and all other necessities of the body are painful and troublesome to the fervent spirit which, if it might, would always rest in God and in spiritual things.” And yet verses like Ecclesiastes 2:24 show how good it is to delight in what God has given us, things like good food and being satisfied in your work.

It’s this dynamic that I think is so telling. Whether it’s really the most read spiritual work or not, The Imitation has nevertheless been very popular. It talks about delighting in an awesome God, yet focuses so readily on denying the “things of this world.” In fact, on several occasions, Thomas advises against having many close friends, as they would only be a distraction from contemplation (and yet Jesus had 12 guys who followed him everywhere).

I think The Imitation crystalizes (and predates) many assumptions about believing in Jesus, namely the centrality of asceticism. Being a Christian gets so easily distilled into spurning all things that might be enjoyable, which is just another incarnation of rule following. It’s assumed that being a Christian means being a bookish hardliner who tries to remove themselves from the disdainful world. All this rule following is really about needing to get on God’s good side, and nothing is farther from the truth.

But in scripture we see that Jesus came to set us free from rule following in the name of pleasing God, and instead of renouncing the world we can be in the world and not of it, enjoying the things God has said are good (like food, wine, spouses, family, and an honest day’s work) while staying obedient to God.

Jesus is all about saving his people so they can enjoy him. That doesn’t mean that everything else must be unenjoyable. It just means that when we bite into a juicy apple or kiss our loved ones we can look to Jesus and say, “Wow. Good idea.” In doing we will only get a clearer and clearer picture of just how awesome the God of Creation really is.

– Eric

Apocalyptic Obsessions

Aside from vampires, the most common, verging-on-stereotypical, element in pop fiction is the dystopian/post-apocalyptic setting. It’s been this way for a while; reaching back towards “Mad Max” and 1985, the fingers of dystopian fiction have laced into much of our cultural fictive mindset. “V for Vendetta,” Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I Am Legend (yes, it was a book before Will Smith muscled into the role of Dr. Robert Neville), and, of course, The Hunger Games all lay claim to this popularity.

Perhaps briefly I need to distinguish between dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction. Dystopian has to do with a repressed or controlled social system, while post-apocalyptic describes a post-technological world in which some catastrophe has left humanity without communication, transportation, digital information, etc. Admittedly these often overlap, like Will Smith’s computer in I Am Legend. Literature never really fits into our neat categories.

Despite the difference, the shared elements are so popular. Perhaps the best example lies in the realm of the zombie apocalypse. The Walking Dead is a fantastic work of fiction, but how that kind of zombie fiction makes its way into the real world is fascinating. Once, over chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant, my friends and I plotted our escape plan if the nuclear holocaust or zombie apocalypse instantly occurred. Instructables even has plans for zombie apocalypse survival kits.

Honestly, I love dystopian and post-apocalyptic scenarios. Thinking about the break down of social order, loss of technology, and survival led to my first flash fiction story, Shards. For me, the most interesting part is figuring out how to act when utter freedom with space and material goods is tempered with the need to survive and possible competition. The struggle to stay human inside that framework is substantial and scary.

But I don’t think the philosophical implications really appeal to everyone. No, I think dystopian and post-apocalyptic stories are interesting to us because we are so freaking bored. Consider the following: we live in a (somewhat) orderly society, yet we love the escapism of a broken down society that longs to be orderly like the one we have now. We intimately know a longing for things to be right, and we give voice to that longing through fictive mindsets in which the problem is completely obvious; stories in which social order is broken, stymied, or dictated are easy to perceive, and the fight for rightness or peace is equally envisioned. The explanations to this provided in the Bible are extensive and exposing; suffice me to reference Revelation 22, where the longing for Jesus’ return is exhilaratingly palpable.

Being an American is a little deceptive, though. When you call internationally, you have to first dial the country code. The US code is 1. The US has the most billionaires of any country in the world, and is the largest of the top 10 richest countries to boot. If you’re reading this right now with your own computer you are in the top 10% of the world regarding personal wealth (myself included). Our government hasn’t been replaced in more than 200 years, and we’ve never been invaded by an army we couldn’t manhandle. All the stats tell us that America is one of the most well-off countries in history, despite experiential or personal arguments to the contrary.

But apocalyptic obsessions don’t purely intimate a subconscious dissatisfaction with American life (though the 30 million anti-depresant prescriptions in our country might speak to that). Fiction is inherently escapism, a safe mental vacation. Few Hunger Games fans, given the chance, would really hop into the arena and fight for their lives. How quickly they would long to be back in civilized society with friends, innate politicians, and Netflix. The best part of fiction is that, no matter how dangerous or disturbing, it always ends. We always end up right where we were sitting to begin with.

The existence of fiction as a whole is stimulating. We like coming up with stories that satisfy our longings; “The Avengers” for adventure longings, “The Notebook” for love longings, and every Adam Sandler movie for being mildly entertained by someone you feel superior to.

Perhaps dystopian fiction shows us our longings for adventure or drama, but I think it shows a deeper element of humanity. We don’t just long for rightness, we want to know what rightness is; we just want to know what it is we want. We believe in something better, and I think we honestly long to know what that better thing is and to have it realized in our life-time. In the end, though, we might just choose comfort over rightness that might cost us comfort.

– Eric

Science Fiction and the Christian

I am a weekend writer. I’m neither published or all that good; I don’t write as a trade, though the possibility has some appeal to me. I write because I enjoy creating worlds, characters, and events for those characters to encounter. More than anything I like literary moments, the particular feel of a certain time, place, event, and emotion. I try to recreate these narrative moments I have in my head by spinning stories around them, and the exercise is both incredibly taxing and rewarding.

Writers by nature write what they enjoy. More often than not, a writer is an aficionado of whatever genre s/he is writing in. They write what they know and are accustomed to, allowing expertise and familiarity to enrich their capabilities as a writer. Since my youth I have dearly loved space science fiction. My love for the genre has grown steadily over the years, from my Star Wars obsession of the early 2000s to recent trysts with Firefly (arguably one of the best science fiction TV series ever canceled) and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. I love the thrill of a new world, discovering an alien race, voyaging across space, and fighting whatever inter-planetary evil that might arise along the way. If I lived in the Star Wars or Star Trek universe, where aliens are usually humanoid and relatively relatable, I would be a xenobiologist, no question. The idea of studying an entirely different sentient race is fascinating to me.

But I just can’t write it. I can rarely bring myself to actually pen a space story, much less one with other beings from other planets. Because I believe the Bible, which says God created the world for the express purpose of showing created beings how good he the Creator is, I have an incredibly hard time writing a story that lies outside of that worldview. I don’t readily abandon what I know to be true to create a work of fiction that disagrees with the truth of scripture. And yet I love reading about these worlds.

It’s this interesting dualism that I came to while trying to begin my latest idea. Why do I enjoy fictional realms that don’t agree with the gospel? I think there is one redeemable aspect to the whole business, namely the constant struggle of good and evil and the need for good in the universe, however undefined that term may be. However, the other side of the coin is more sinister.

In every space science fiction story, we or some other race are voyaging outward, making contact, and discovering new things. It’s adventurous and interesting, far more so than this dull earth we know. We enjoy space fiction for the same reason people have always enjoyed fiction: it’s limitless escapism. We can get out of the life we are oh so familiar with and, voyaging out, find a more agreeable reality to live in, if only briefly.

I’m not claiming any inherent wrongness to enjoying fiction. But I wonder, from my experience, where the line must be drawn between enjoying a world devoid of Christ and professing a world in which Jesus is King. I think, when it comes to fiction, we have to watch our hearts carefully, and ask ourselves which world we would rather live in, and why. If it’s a fictional realm, it’s because we want the story to cater to our liking, maybe even revolve around us. And that’s the story we’ve preferred since the Garden.

– Eric