The ache and the Austinite
Richard Beck, my friend and colleague here at ACU, enjoyed my post yesterday on “Needing Jesus” but pushed back on some elements of it. In particular he thought what I took with one hand I gave back with the other. That is, I denied that our hypothetical 26-year old happy Austinite was “secretly unhappy” before waxing eloquent about . . . just how secretly unhappy he must be, sinsick and lacking Jesus as he is. Moreover, he wasn’t sure just how I am (we are) supposed to get Mr. Contentment into church if we aren’t filling him in, through conversation or other means, just how secretly unhappy he is. Why is he supposed to care enough to go to church? And how is church supposed to “work” on him if it speaks about things he’s already convinced, in his natural happiness, don’t matter and aren’t true of him?
Good questions. A few thoughts.
1. There’s definitely a sense in which I’m wanting to have my cake and eat it too. Our Austinite—I’ll go ahead and call him Kendall for the sake of convenience—is somehow both satisfied with life and, at bottom, absolutely starved for transcendence, fulfillment, and forgiveness. Richard finds this psychologically implausible. If I’m not just wanting to have my cake and eat it, then here’s my defense. I think it’s wholly plausible. Why? Because human beings are walking contradictions who hold together, every day, internal dissonances that would many anyone else dizzy after ten seconds. Moreover, I’m not speaking of Kendall across his life: I’m describing him at a particular moment in his life. And that moment more or less satisfies all the needs he’s been taught he has. Life’s gone well and continues to go well for him, and his various hedonistic and personal-meaning boxes are, at this point in time, checked. It might make sense to help him see that there’s more than those boxes, if he’s open to hearing it. But it still seems unwise to me to tell him that deep down he himself knows that “all this” isn’t enough. I’m not sure he does.
2. Put more simply: It is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Expand the definition of “rich” to include more than mere extravagant wealth, and that’s the perennial problem we’re dealing with when we think about all the many Kendalls of the world.
3. Having said that, Richard rightly pointed to a concept he deploys in his own writing, most prominently in his latest book, Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age. That concept is “the Ache.” The Ache is the existential neediness in the basement of our souls that cries out, day and night, for satisfaction. It’s the spookiness that secularism can never quite seem wholly to exorcise. It’s the tug-of-war between our desire for self-creation and autonomy, on one hand, and for life and deliverance from outside us, on the other. It’s the pull we feel beyond ourselves to surrender, to worship, to praise, to thank, to love. It’s the capital-W Whence and Whither that encompass our existence, which in turn balances perpetually on the edge of a void of nothingess. It’s all that and more. Richard sees it in his students as I see it in mine, including the most unchurched, post-Christian, and non-religious. He thinks the Ache is at the heart of my post yesterday, but instead of foregoing alerting Kendall to it, as I seemed to suggest, we ought to move heaven and earth to fill him in. Apart from that being the only real motive he might have for going to church (and then finding Jesus), Richard suspects that Kendall is playing a nice game on the surface, but if you press on that nerve, he’ll spill his spiritual guts. He knows about the Ache. He just hasn’t found anyone to help him understand or resolve it.
All granted. I don’t have a rebuttal here. When and where this is true, then self-evidently Kendall is in a position to hear, from a trusted friend, just why he feels that cosmic emptiness-cum-desire on the inside, and where he might find rest for his restless soul. To everyone able to do such a thing wisely and with gentleness, I say: Go for it.
My point is more a matter of emphasis. I’m not actually sure that there are that many Kendalls ready, today, in their 26-years-old-and-happy-with-material-and-social-life-selves, either to hear of the Ache or to admit their own. Think again of the rich man. It’s hard to see one’s need when all of one’s needs are met, and then some. I don’t doubt the Ache is coming big time for Kendall: it’s hard to sustain the illusion of earthly contentment through one’s thirties, forties, and fifties. Suffering and failure and disappointment and illness and pain and death await, for him as for all of us. Finitude is never deniable indefinitely. But can you sincerely disbelieve in death and pain in Kendall’s position, as genuine realities for oneself, as more than abstractions, at least for a while? Yes, I think you can.
4. Which is all a way of saying that I wasn’t meaning to propose a comprehensive evangelistic strategy in my post. Only to clarify one misbegotten presumptive posture on the part of the church toward the Kendalls that increasingly fill our major cities. Don’t assume it’s all a front. Don’t assume he knows there’s a problem but doesn’t want to admit it. Take for granted that he might well mean what he says: so far as he knows, he’s a happy camper. And there’s nothing much that a church, not least a church that prioritizes earthly happiness in the form of affluence and consumption, can add to that sort of happiness.
5. But that also reveals my main target yesterday: not Kendall, but the churches. If the churches don’t offer anything but an affirming echo of Kendall’s life and values, then he’s right to ignore them, even if he doesn’t resent them. What the churches need to do is so fashion a common life defined by what Kendall cannot find outside them that, when he does perchance darken their doorstep, he finds something inside that he’s neither heard nor seen elsewhere. That means sacraments, scriptures, sermons, prayers, confessions, creeds, candles, icons, tears, love, faith, courage, truth-talk, hell-talk, heaven-talk, sin-talk, Spirit-talk, Satan-talk, sacrifice, suffering, service to the least of these—to list only a few. Let it be different, exotic, weird, even (at first) alien and off-putting. Let it be, in Jenson’s words, a world unto itself. Let the liturgy be all-consuming: confident, spooky, global, cosmic. Kendall doesn’t know the language before coming, but continuing to come is how he learns to speak Christian. And learning to speak Christian, he will learn to say Christ. Learning to say Christ, he will learn how to live Christ. Learning to live Christ, he will learn how to love him.
I don’t know whether Kendall is coming while still in his 20s. I’m not sure we can convince him, or many of his peers, of the Ache at this point (though perhaps I’m overly pessimistic about this). My instinct is that, eventually, aging or suffering will open him up to the Ache and, thence, to the One who has made us for himself, in whom alone our hearts find peace. The main thing to do right now is to live faithfully as his neighbor and friend. It is our lives that will draw him, now or decades hence, to Christ’s body. And if our churches are faithful in the meantime, when he journeys to the body he will find more than just you and me. He will find Jesus.
