You shall be holy to me, for I the LORD am holy and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine.
W. H. Auden observed that “It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one’s nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.”1 In this book we’re going to suggest that Christians should begin by looking at their homes. The home is, of course, much more than a habitat or a mere physical shelter. We need a more capacious word to capture its essence: a home is a place. It’s a place with a wealth of sights, smells, textures, and memories. Moreover, it’s always a haunted place—a place where the departed continue to smile at us from framed pictures, where we hear the echoes of laughter and feel the tension of lingering arguments, a place filled with the fragrance of past meals and mountains of dishes in the sink. In short, it’s a place filled with the evidence of human life in all its messy and mysterious glory.
From the emergency stashes of cigarettes and junk food to the items in the search histories of our devices, our homes are also places filled with secrets. In a deep sense, if we want to know about our true religion—“the shape of our ultimate concern”—we need to look no further than our homes, especially their hidden nooks and crannies.2 It’s a sobering thought, but nothing tells the story of our actual convictions like the places we live, and these convictions are often spelled out most clearly in the spaces we think no one sees. Consequently, most homes have a two-tier culture, one where the surfaces are always dusted and the sheets are always turned down, and the other where we do our actual living.
Christ offers a vivid picture to illustrate this common divide between appearances and reality: Those who invest all of their energies in outward appearances are tantamount to people who clean only the “outside of the cup and the plate” (Matthew 23:25-26). It’s a shrewd observation that flows directly from the biblical emphasis on a person’s inward condition: “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life” (Proverbs 4:23). Concerning many so-called Christian homes, devotion to Christ is often a matter of mere ornamentation—a framed verse or a decorative cross above the living room sofa. But if we look at the state of our relationship with God, our marriages, our relationships with our children, and the manifold addictions we can’t seem to shake, it’s clear that we often clean only the outside of our homes while neglecting the inside. That is, according to our Lord, our homes often fall prey to an outside-of-the-cup culture, all shiny exteriors and festering interiors.
Since culture is such an overused word, let’s venture a modest definition. Broadly speaking, culture is “a way of life lived in common,” to borrow Os Guinness’s phrase.3 This response includes everything from music and poetry to architecture and food. Naturally, time levels a good deal of the culture of the past. What does survive, however, often serves as both a treasure and a relic. Consider the vast distance between an ancient cathedral and a skyscraper and you’ll have an idea of the rapidly shifting mindsets surrounding our achievements. Given time’s speed and ruthlessness, we rightfully cherish those voices and institutions that survive its ravages. Thus we often call these survivors “timeless,” whether they be symphonies or Sistine ceilings. Unlike most of the hallmarks of a given era, these achievements seem to lack expiration dates. They are courses in a seemingly inexhaustible banquet for humanity. But as much as we treasure the legacy of our abiding achievements, we know that everything—even the Sistine Chapel—has an expiration date. Ultimately, no human culture is immune to the ravages of time.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:1-3). This majestic opening to John’s Gospel firmly establishes Christ’s supremacy over all creation. When this divine Word becomes flesh and sets foot on the stage of his creation, we see that he alone can transcend its limitations. Shakespeare may boast of “eternal lines”4 that forever preserve his beloved for the world, but Christ alone can say, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). It is this eternal Word who established his church on earth. Consequently, those who belong to him are not simply card-carrying members of yet another passing cultural institution. Rather, they are parts of his eternal body: “You are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Corinthians 12:27). Herein lies the central tension of being in but not of the world: Christian men and women are members of an eternal body who for the time being must make their homes in a temporal place.
Given these portentous claims, what exactly distinguishes a Christian home? Does it shine like a miniature city on a hill? Does it glow with the angelic light of a Thomas Kinkade painting? Do its members lead quiet lives of perpetual comfort and stability?
Here’s the way it’s supposed to be: Christians ought to cultivate homes that reflect their membership in the household of God (1 Timothy 3:15). If culture is indeed a way of life lived in common, consider Paul’s lovely description of the common life of the church:
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. (Colossians 3:16-17)
Sadly, we often underestimate the insidious nature of the world outside the church, and our households end up paying lip service to the gospel while walking in lockstep with the surrounding culture.
We’re not naive; we understand that you make your home in the twenty-first-century world and that this particular era, like all eras in human history, carries a unique set of challenges. Though we don’t claim to be exhaustive, we’d like to offer three arguments regarding the home that we hope will help to make sense of the strange place we live: (1) Far from being airtight shelters from the world, our homes are porous and highly susceptible to outside influences. (2) Though it often goes unrecognized, the key influence shaping our homes is always a story. (3) The true distinguishing factor of Christian homes is not that they are free from significant hardship and adversity, but that they’re shaped by the story of Christ and his coming kingdom.
Here’s the bad news: If we’ve bought into the notion that mere intellectual assent to the gospel makes our home immune to the surrounding cultural forces, chances are those forces have already thoroughly shaped our homes. As we’ll see in chapter two, it’s more than possible to master the language of Christianity while giving our hearts to something else entirely. For the time being, it’s worth noting that this assumption is itself a peculiarly American pathology; we might call it the tradition of no traditions. The ironic truth is that Christians who believe their homes to be shelters from the world often mirror its deepest assumptions in myriad ways they don’t even recognize, let alone understand. That is, they’re shaped by a story that’s profoundly at odds with the gospel. In the end the assumption that a home has no culture simply leads to cultural assimilation. Consequently, many so-called Christian homes already belong to the very culture they wish to challenge. For this reason many young people believe they’re outgrowing Christianity when in fact they’re simply outgrowing a cultural husk that’s easily discarded when they face the onslaught of life’s many challenges. Our book aims to show that, while it’s impossible to outgrow authentic Christianity, the Americanized spin on the gospel is a hollow shell that doesn’t survive spiritual maturity.
The good news is that Christian homes have and always will withstand the gales of cultural opposition because they are defined first and foremost by Christ and his church. Theirs is the story of the crucified and risen Lord who is returning to judge the living and the dead. Thus Christian homes are inhabited by men and women who see their surrounding world from the standpoint of eternity—the men and women who are the true realists about the human story. The three arguments that follow will provide a kind of map of the deeply strange and challenging world where we make our homes.
As we gaze out on a landscape that looks increasingly dystopian, many of us worry that we’re already living in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. If the 2020 pandemic made our world look like the scenery in a sci-fi story, we could always turn back to our entertainment for confirmation. From the bleak worlds of Black Mirror and The Handmaid’s Tale to the posthuman musings of the Terminator franchise and Blade Runner, we don’t stop worrying about our Huxleyan condition when we kick back on the couch.
Because the cultural landscape is so surreal, our most incisive thinkers are resorting to increasingly creative strategies for describing it. For instance, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s monumental work A Secular Age offers a dense array of exotic terms and concepts for capturing our present moment: “immanent frame,” “buffered self,” “closed world structures,” and “nova effect.” At times, his narrative reads like a sophisticated sci-fi novel.5 Though it’s initially a bit overwhelming, once these concepts sink in, they can help us make sense of the bizarre place in which we make our homes. A story from Cameron’s early adulthood will help to make this clear.
Cameron worked as a cashier at a grocery store when he was in college. It was the kind of job that makes shy and deeply introverted persons flee to personality tests to prove that something isn’t wrong with us. “Good afternoon, ma’am. Find everything all right?” “I’m sorry, sir. This is an express lane.” What’s so hard about that? Just stick to the script.
But customers never stick to the script, especially when the store is thronged and the lines are bulging with disgruntled folks coming home from disgruntled offices. During these barrages, Cameron would console himself with a distinctly modern myth: he’d tell himself that his body was a kind of organic fortress behind which his true essence (his mind) was protected. If it was a particularly trying day, this fantasy grew more and more elaborate, transforming his body into a highly specialized machine with a soul at its helm. This mechanistic conception comes to us courtesy of French philosopher René Descartes.6 If you’ve got some Hollywood imagery in your head, this only further illustrates how deeply we’ve internalized this Cartesian vision. Think of Sigourney Weaver donning the P-5000 Work Loader, an industrial exoskeleton, in order to do combat with the enormous queen alien in James Cameron’s Aliens.
Charles Taylor has a name for this modern fantasy: “The buffered self” pictures us as “insulated in an interior ‘mind’” and thus shielded from any outside forces.7 In Taylor’s words, “For the modern, buffered self, the possibility exists of taking a distance from, disengaging from everything outside the mind. My ultimate purposes are those which arise within me, the crucial meanings of things are those defined by my responses to them.”8
While the phrase may sound outlandish, a number of our everyday practices quickly show its practicality. Think about our habit of avoiding the threat of chatty neighbors on public transportation with noise-canceling headphones. Or the even more common habit of falling through the digital trapdoor of our phones whenever we want to escape from our surroundings. It’s especially unnerving that our phones often help us escape the people we love the most. Whether it’s phones, tablets, or Bluetooth headsets, our public spaces are increasingly filled with people hiding behind their respective digital fortresses.9
A sobering confirmation of this fact arrived one afternoon when Cameron—long out of the grocery business—found himself in his toddler’s room assuming that most modern of poses: supine, one arm raised in a kind of supplicating gesture while holding his talismanic phone above his yearning face. Meanwhile, his little boy just wanted the attention of his father. If this scene were captured by a painter or a photographer, it would serve as a grim picture of our self-imposed loneliness and isolation. A disturbing question occurred to Cameron: Why am I using my phone to hide from my son?
One of the paradoxes of our digital world is that it makes us feel simultaneously invincible and more vulnerable than ever. On the one hand, from smartphones to tablets the unvoiced assumption seems to be that technology functions as a kind of specialized armor, keeping us invincible to the world around us. Philosophers often use the prospect of invisibility to explore the thornier challenges of personal integrity. How would you behave if you were invisible? Would you show restraint, or would this new power lead to ethical compromises?
So far, no direct physical invisibility technology is available to us. However, our online interactions betray what can only be called an invisibility mindset. We traverse the online spaces like ghosts, freely spying on the numerous lives and conversations in our orbit. We also exhibit an increasing lack of restraint—one that leads to escalating levels of tension and outright hostility. It’s a kind of animosity that resembles road rage in its ability to transform seemingly polite, mild-mannered folks into salivating paroxysms of rage. You can almost see people foaming at the mouth behind their screens. The anonymity of the online world only compounds the issue. There’s a reason more and more websites are disabling their comment sections. How many of us have lost friends because all manners, all social decorum, and all decency went out the window in the online jungle? The sobering fact is that many of us act like unhinged invisible people when we’re online, believing that our technological armor protects us from the risks of face-to-face interactions.
But our technology also makes us more vulnerable than ever. We’ve already mentioned the damage to our friendships, but let’s not overlook our careers and reputations. How many careers have been derailed because of one thoughtless post? For that matter, how many of us have suffered at the invisible hands of a digital mob? What about campaigns of online persecution? As we’ll see later, the digital world also tends to foster a deep-seated craving for constant affirmation and personal validation. When it’s absent, many of us move from dejection to despair. Never has such apparent invulnerability given rise to such intense frailty.
A more insidious form of vulnerability is our near-total dependence on our machines. It’s revealing that many of our postapocalyptic nightmares turn on the failures of technology. For many of us it’s the end of the world when things break. There’s a level of truth to these fears: the most influential and lasting innovations are usually irreversible in the sense that they’re now integral parts of our society’s function. While it’s technically true that we don’t need cars, the consequences would be catastrophic if they were somehow subtracted from our world. The same goes for the World Wide Web.10 A severed internet connection is a kind of existential crisis. When a landscaper delivered the fateful news to Stuart’s wife, Mary, that he and his crew had accidentally severed their internet cable, it brought the McAllister household to a temporary standstill—the end of the world in microcosm.
In sharp contrast to Cameron’s mechanized daydreams, Stuart had an unnerving encounter in his pre-Christian years that forever shattered his illusions regarding the “buffered self.” Stuart and a group of spiritually intrepid friends gathered around a Ouija board in an effort to channel the spirit of a recently departed friend of a famous actor. All the initially ominous feeling soon gave way to disappointment and vague embarrassment. Nothing was happening. A Ouija board is, after all, only a board game. How was it different from any of the other games that littered our closets? And what were they, a group of scientifically minded kids, doing with this outdated ritual anyway?
Then things suddenly got out of control. The temperature plummeted, and a malign presence announced itself when one of the men in the group was lifted into the air and thrown across the room. The group was petrified. They quickly blew out all of the candles, opened the windows, and fled into the street. This was hardly a spiritual experience on par with what people experienced in the ancient world. The group viewed the ritual as little more than a game with some potential thrills involved—more experimentation than belief—and they certainly had no intention of following the logic of what happened back to a real, dark power and the possibility of God.
Still, though not yet a Christian, Stuart wasn’t able to shake the conviction that he and his friends had just learned firsthand the immortal lesson from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”11 There was more to the world than met the eye, and the self was not invulnerable to this truth.
Taylor’s phrase for this mindset is the “porous self.”12 Unlike the buffered self, the porous self is under no illusions about its profound vulnerability in the face of innumerable influences, and these many influences blow through it like wind through curtains. You might say that, like curtains, the porous self dances and billows in response to the forces surrounding it. We find the sharpest embodiment of this mindset in the premodern world, where people saw themselves as inhabiting an enchanted universe filled with myriad unseen spiritual powers, some of them good, some of them wicked. Replace the modern fear of identity theft with demon possession and you’re a step closer to the enchanted world of our distant forebears.13
But it wasn’t all devils and possession. The physical world also seethed with a rich inner life. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s celebrated excerpt from his poem “As Kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame,” conveys a measure of this enchantment:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same;
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.14
For Hopkins a tree in full bloom is exhibiting more than a natural life cycle; it is “selving,” “dealing out that being indoors,” and displaying the life God has endowed it with and which it is called to.
In this sense, nature doesn’t reveal an impersonal inventory of “natural” processes. Rather, the created order reveals mystery—a word that’s liable to mislead us modern, buffered types on two counts. On the one hand, we frequently see mystery as simply referring to something inscrutable or beyond explanation. People who use the word in this sense sound a lot like politicians who manage to sound profound when they’re just being evasive. If, on the other hand, mystery signifies nothing more than a problem demanding a solution, like an elusive medical diagnosis or a detective story, we’re still missing the full meaning. Mystery in the premodern sense does not reduce to a puzzle.
The theologian Hans Boersma says that for the premodern mind “‘Mystery’ referred to realities behind the appearances that one could observe by means of the senses. That is to say, though our hands, eyes, ears, nose, and tongue can access reality, they cannot fully grasp this reality. They cannot comprehend it.”15 That is, mystery in the full sense is neither merely elusive nor inscrutable; it is inexhaustible. God’s world exceeds our full comprehension. Eustace Scrubb learns this lesson in C. S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader when he tells Ramandu that in his world stars are “huge ball[s] of flaming gas.” Ramandu—himself a former star—corrects him, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”16 The modern belief that material explanations exhaust the phenomena they describe, whether stars, plants, or persons, is as naive as it is typical.
Those who understand that they are porous recognize their susceptibility to these manifold influences. Here, many of us will automatically point to the dangers of superstition. After all, seeing a demon or a hobgoblin behind every rock and tree can put a damper on a person’s social life. However, our naivety toward human frailty and vulnerability is a uniquely modern pathology that continues to wreak havoc in our households. The spell is so strong that it often takes a crisis to break it. Witness the fact that many of us don’t realize how much we’ve been ignoring God until we come to a place where prayer is our last resort.
But no piece of technology punctures the convenient fantasy of the buffered self quite like our smartphones. The smartphone is, among other things, a portal into vast and unfathomable worlds—a kind of digital cosmos.17 These worlds range from the uplifting to the amusing and all the way to the depraved and the demonic. Ironically, by showing us human vulnerability in the face of untold influences, our smartphones can help restore a measure of our lost enchantment. To be clear, we’re not arguing for a superstitious fear of phones. We’re using them to show that none of us live in buffered homes—that, like the people who inhabit them, our homes are always porous and permeable.
Not everyone writes a memoir, but everyone has a story. If you’ve had the distinctly unflattering experience of stumbling across an old diary of yours, you’ll probably agree that this is a good thing.
For all of its complexity, life consistently yields a narrative shape. Telling stories is thus our most profound means of making sense of our place in the world—a practice not unlike deciphering ancient cave paintings. As Roger Lundin observes, “Stories channel the aimless flow of time and turn our wanderings into quests.”18 We’re all existential detectives trying to solve the riddle of our existence. It’s one of the reasons that pastors, counselors, and spiritual directors are always on our case about keeping a journal. Our own stories are often so deeply internalized that we have to discover them before we can adequately express them. Before recitation, stories first require excavation.
But our stories are never just our stories; they’re always shared. We are inescapably relational creatures. We don’t just have a story; we’re part of a larger story, and this larger narrative unites us and defines the shape of our lives. Not only is this overarching story frequently unvoiced, but it’s also often simply assumed. Generally speaking, the more oblivious we are to this story, the more powerful it is. Consequently, discovering this story is of the utmost importance for our households. If we want to address the many challenges in our homes, we need to begin by asking what story is defining them.
To get a handle on the story that shapes the lives of most Americans, think of the six abandoned characters in Luigi Pirandello’s celebrated play Six Characters in Search of an Author. In the play the titular author withholds the one thing his characters most desire: “What was I denying them? Not themselves, clearly, but their drama, which interested them most.”19 Abandoned by their author, these six characters are dismayed to find themselves wandering into other plays in progress without a script or a guiding narrative. They are despairing, forlorn, and lost. It’s a very un-American response.
In the “land of the free,” we flaunt our authorlessness. We believe we choose our scripts and stories, and we like it that way. From Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal essay “Self-Reliance” to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the habit of waxing rhapsodic about the healing balm of restless self-determination goes to the very heart of the American imagination. Think of Emerson’s searing words on the subject: “History is an impertinence and an injury, if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.”20 Whether we’ve read Emerson or not, we’ve all deeply internalized his message. It’s a poetic description of our abiding conviction that freedom is synonymous with unrestricted choice and self-definition. From Caitlyn Jenner to Rachel Dolezal, Emerson’s words continue to nourish our increasingly radical approaches to freedom and self-expression. In essence we believe that any limitation, be it geographical, ethnic, social, creedal, or biological, is “an impertinence and an injury.”
It’s fitting that former First Lady Michelle Obama chose Becoming as the title of her massively popular memoir. Her own words on the subject form an ideal complement to Emerson’s musings: “For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self.”21 Many Americans, whether we recognize it or not, are in hot pursuit of this ever-elusive “better self.” Sometimes we think we’ll find our better selves waiting for us at the end of the Appalachian Trail or a backpacking trip through Europe. Maybe a wine tour in France. Maybe a new house in a better, safer neighborhood. Maybe a new marriage or a new car. Maybe a new church. It’s hard to say, but of one thing we’re certain: we have to keep moving, evolving, becoming. The all-American story is a quest without a destination.
For many, Disneyland is still the “happiest place on earth” because it’s more than an amusement park; it’s a kingdom of endless possibilities, a bewitching haven in a world that feels more and more lifeless. For all its magical charms, though, it’s highly revealing that Disney’s Imagineers have yet to solve the riddle of Tomorrowland. Originally constructed in the 1950s, this section of the park is meant to dazzle us with a utopian vision of a distant future we can all eagerly anticipate.22 But, as Walt Disney said himself, “The only problem with anything of tomorrow is that at the pace we’re going right now, tomorrow would catch up with us before we got it built.”23
With all due deference to Mr. Disney, there’s a deeper problem. The all-American story doesn’t include a destination. It’s a vision that’s never at rest. Disneyland itself may remain a dream destination for millions, but the failure of Tomorrowland offers a stark reminder that Americans still can’t imagine much beyond the present.
Let’s turn to one of America’s premier theologians, Stanley Hauerwas, for a devastating but ultimately helpful diagnosis.
The narrative that you should have no story except the story you chose when you had no story obviously has implications for how faith is understood. It produces people who say things such as, “I believe Jesus is Lord—but that is just my personal opinion.”24 The grammar of this kind of avowal reveals a superficial person. But such people are the kind many think crucial for sustaining democracy. For to sustain a society that shares no goods in common other than the belief that there are no goods in common other than avoiding death, there must be people who will avoid any conflicts that might undermine the order, which is confused with peace. So an allegedly democratic society that styles itself as one made up of people of strong conviction becomes the most conformist of social orders, because of the necessity to avoid conflicts that cannot be resolved.25
If you’re a Christian living in North America today, this is an uncompromising description of the spiritual location of your home. This is the story that’s so deeply entrenched we have to speak it out loud to break its spell. Maybe you’ve had a professor inflict the celebrated philosopher and political theorist Thomas Hobbes on you. With his best-known work Leviathan, Hobbes achieved that most distinctive of literary honors: his name is now an adjective. When we want to describe any kind of ruthless, law-of-the-jungle environment, we can now call it “Hobbesian” because Hobbes argued that, in our natural state, we are radically free and fierce. Society therefore depends on the necessary evil of the law to constrain our unfettered freedom—otherwise, we’d all claw one another’s eyes out.26
Most of us simply assume Hobbes’s basic arguments. In the realm of pop culture think about how many of our postapocalyptic stories operate with a very simple and effective formula: subtract all modern technology and conveniences and watch the chaos ensue. But why is outright savagery a foregone conclusion in such circumstances? Even taking into account the pervasive issue of human corruption in all of its many forms, don’t we also have ample evidence of people banding together in times of crisis? To be sure, Christianity makes it clear that human beings are fallen and thus predisposed to all manner of destructive behavior. But even so, the automatic assumption that we naturally revert to the laws of the jungle whenever the societal barriers are breached belies our deep-seated commitment to Hobbes’s views of human nature.
Most of us think we chose our own stories. So let’s have a quick look at some of the stories we tell about our lives and homes.
Many popular podcasts and television shows highlight our obsession with fraud and deception, but we don’t need any famous impostors to put us on intimate terms with the gap between appearance and reality. Nowhere is this gap more apparent than in our homes, where we see and feel the awkward discrepancy between the stories we publish for the world and the brittle fragments of our actual lives. And, as we all know, the real story is often more Hieronymus Bosch than Thomas Kinkade.
In our increasingly disenchanted world, the word story still seems to hint at some hidden wholeness, some lost region where life is more than a monotony of scientific laws and static facts—a region where our lives make sense. Joan Didion famously said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”27 Wrenched from its native context, this sentence might sound uplifting, but read Didion’s full essay and you’ll soon find that it’s not meant to serve as an inspirational quote. Didion is reflecting on five particularly turbulent years—years in which her own basic sense of life’s comprehensibility was unraveling. She makes clear that, in her view, any wholeness hinted at by stories is nothing more than a consoling myth, and her essay is getting at the artificial nature of the narratives we impose on the inherently formless shape of human experience. Imagine her response to our numerous “stories” on social media.
In many ways the desperate stories we tell on social media do confirm Didion’s conviction. Much attention is paid to the amount of oversharing that takes place online. What is less noticed, however, is the subtle manner in which our various technologies enable an unprecedented level of secrecy. Social media provides us with a plethora of tools to carve away every unflattering pose, scar, and blemish. It’s not just that our audience is seeing a carefully sculpted vision of our lives that bears little to no relation to our actual existence, but that we can communicate all of this on our terms, with none of the vulnerability that characterizes face-to-face interactions. It’s never been easier to put a glossy finish on the chaos of our lives. Over and over again we shine our digital spotlights on our best moments while inwardly we’re punctuated by increasing levels of distress. This is not story as an avenue onto a hidden wholeness or even a means of describing reality; this is story as a desperate coping mechanism for bringing together the disparate pieces of our lives. For Didion, storytellers are survivors, not poets.28 Unlike most Americans, you might say that she is a character in search of an author. It’s a step in the right direction.
As a teenager Cameron experienced a good deal of cognitive dissonance when he read from authors like Joan Didion, William Faulkner, and Albert Camus. For all their pronounced differences, these writers all converge on the theme of humanity’s essential lostness: Didion says that storytelling is a frantic coping mechanism. Faulkner channels Shakespeare to argue that life does indeed play out like “a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Camus compares our lives to the futile labor of Sisyphus, whose punishment from the gods is to perpetually push a stone up a hill, only to have it roll back down again. According to Camus, when your alarm goes off in the morning, you wrench yourself from the bed, and there sits your stone. His solution to this torturous existence? “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.”29 None of these writers would be surprised by the failures of Tomorrowland.
But if Christ is real, how can this be? Why do Didion, Faulkner, Camus, and so many others seem to be onto something when they imply that human life is hollow? If they’re wrong, why do their stories resonate? For that matter, if the all-American story of Emerson and Michelle Obama is false, why does it ring true for so many of us?
As it happens, the book of Ecclesiastes has beat all of modernism’s brooding existentialists and stoics to the punch line. In it Solomon shows that there are two broad ways of looking at life. On the one hand, there’s the human perspective, which he designates “life under the sun.” Its abiding feature is “vanity,” which signifies the overall impermanence of all human aspirations. Think of Camus’s stone waiting for you in the morning. But there is also the divine perspective, which regards the world from the standpoint of eternity. If we limit our gaze to life under the sun, it’s clear that Didion is right: We eke out a meager existence and try to tell ourselves some consoling story about what it all means, when in fact it simply means nothing. Likewise, life under the sun isn’t very kind to the vision of Tomorrowland. If we’re true to the spirit of Solomon’s portrayal of human endeavors, it’s a safe bet that he might simply design Tomorrowland as a graveyard. After all, that’s the one future destination we can all agree on. For all its implacable finality, death is remarkably nonpartisan.
Those who limit their gaze to life under the sun may appear to be grim realists. But they’ve fastened onto only one aspect of human experience. Andrew Delbanco, not a Christian himself, argues, “I stand by my claim that the most striking feature of contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence.”30 The preacher in Ecclesiastes simply says that God has set eternity in the hearts of humans (Ecclesiastes 3:11). The true realists therefore will not overlook the flattened dimensions of our modern, postindustrial world. But neither will they overlook our “unslaked craving for transcendence.” The true realists will see life from an eternal perspective. This is a vision that’s capacious enough to include all of the besetting limitations of life under the sun as well as the glories of a future designed not by an Imagineer but the author of our salvation. The true realists are therefore hopeful realists who can observe all of culture’s seismic shifts with hearts animated by great expectations.
Unlike Americans, Christians are the ones who recognize their author, and their homes are defined by his story, rather than that of the surrounding culture. Roger Lundin conveys this story with majestic force.
That the God of Abraham, that the force that rules the universe, that the power behind and beyond all events and all accidents, took on a body and became a child as fragile and delicate and vulnerable as this little one—this seems to me to be almost beyond imagining. But so it was, for the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. And so it still is. And so it will forever be, throughout all ages, world without end.31
In Christ, we have an author, a story, and a destination. This book aims to describe households shaped by the true story of the Living God.