Life is very busy, and life is very good. I’m about to post something very bad, and I don’t want you to think that it characterizes how I’ve been lately, but it is something I felt I ought to share. There’s more going on at the moment than I can even begin to put up here, but something occurred today that made me stop.

I was headed out of the grocery store, in my car and on the way out, when a lady carrying a baby stopped me and asked if I could spare her two dollars. I looked at her and said, “No, I don’t have any cash on me,” rolled up the window and drove away. I didn’t even think about it until I was nearly out of the parking lot. But there in my wallet were twelve dollars in cash, and this quote from Jesus (glorified and sitting on his throne) materialized in my mind:

Whatever you have not done for the least of these you have not done for me.

This was not a chance encounter. God had set up for me an opportunity to bless someone he loved, and I had failed to. Why? What is two dollars to me? Was I afraid of being “had”, of being used? But what is it to me if I had been: God is witness to her, not I, but he is witness to me too, and there is no partiality with him. What hellacious selfishness! For that is precisely the cry of hell: “It is mine!” But I only need to protect what is mine if I am in need. Am I a wretch? Am I an orphan? Do I not have a God who provides generously for me, even recently giving me opportunities for internship and housing and community… do I not believe he will continue? Should I not have emptied my wallet of all twelve of its measly dollars and given it with joy? He’s given me such glorious riches in himself and I didn’t, even at the lowest level, give in kind. Hell hoardes, and if I claim to be a son of heaven, I cannot hoard: there is no need to.

By the time I arrived home I was already feeling sick. My heart was tried – in the most trivial of ways – and found lacking; I had dishonored Christ. I was broken over it, and it’s still bugging me: Papa, forgive me. My heart is not nearly so upright as I thought it was. Am I really so different from Ebenezer Scrooge? Papa, take care of her: you might have through me, but I didn’t, and so take care of her anyway. I need you to remake me. I just need you. There are no do-overs, and how I wish there were. But there is grace, for even with a thousand do-overs I would still have a sinful heart. Wretch that I am, who will save me? Praise God – through Christ Jesus our Lord.

After writing this, I realize that it is in many ways related to my previous post on Singleness, as I again (in my dualistic nature) bring up what I see as the two chief systems which compete with me for the attention I owe only to God. So if you’d like, you may read that one first, and see this as a continuation: but in reality it is just a continuation of the line of my own thought patterns.

A few weeks ago we had an ‘ice storm’ (it was really pretty light), and my roommate and I stayed inside and watched movies. One of the ones we watched was Fight Club. Now I’d never seen Fight Club, being as out of it as I am in terms of pop culture, but I enjoyed it. It was interesting to me how it seemed to be both parallel and opposite to another Brad Pitt movie, Meet Joe Black. Both of these films stem, I think, from a fundamentally existentialist view of the world.

The existential crisis, which I think is at the core of both Meet Joe Black and Fight Club, occurs when a person comes to a place in their life – and everyone does, sooner or later – where they realize their own transience and insignificance.

In Meet Joe Black, our main character, William Parrish (played by Anthony Hopkins), is faced with the ultimate reality: his death. Death comes in the form of ‘Joe Black’ (Brad Pitt), and informs Mr. Parrish that he has very little time and, in his last days, will be showing him about the world as he, Death, is on a vacation visiting life. Parrish is a successful businessman, and it’s evident from all the painfully awkward and distant relationships in his life that he’s been building himself an empire of niceties and rituals to keep himself assured of his place in the world. He goes to work, he has dinner with his family (but not too often), and is surrounded by the toys and trivia that make life more comfortable for the wealthy. There is never any remorse expressed, only a sense of slight discomfort, a little bit of unease imparted to the audience. The movie concludes with the notion that, in view of our ultimate end, love is all that matters in life. Nevertheless, it rings a bit hollow, considering how much of the ‘love’ of the characters was at a distance: how Joe Black’s feelings for Parrish’s daughter are strictly biological, how Parrish’s protection of his daughter and his beloved ones is always at a distance, from behind the scenes. There is something a bit plastic about it.

But if Meet Joe Black is plastic, Fight Club is precisely the opposite. Our main character (name ungiven, but played by Edward Norton) begins with a life ambition that looks conspicuously like Parrish’s:

Like everyone else, I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct. … If I saw something like a clever coffee table sin the shape of a yin and yang, I had to have it. … I would flip through catalogs and wonder, “What kind of dining set defines me as a person?”

But it isn’t satisfying. What does it mean to have all the best Ikea furniture? It is just a search for self-worth in a world of insignificance. And so through a series of events the narrator gets pulled down to the level of the street and the level of the gutter, and becomes involved in fight club, headed by Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). Fight club is where men go to beat each other up, to feel within their own stench and sweat and blood that yes, there is something real to that meaningless life they’ve been living cooped up in their offices and homes. After beating the crap out of someone, and having the crap beaten out of you, there is something that can say in satisfaction, Yes, this is real. It is a sort of cult, a gang which searches through pain for some purpose, some significance to its members and to its own existence.

And so here, embodied in these two movies, are the two typical responses to existentialism. There is the numbness of a pleasurable, or at least comfortable, well-defined life, as seen in Meet Joe Black. And there is the ‘reality’ of a life of pain, a life out of control, as seen in Fight Club.

Don’t think that this problem is anything new: it’s as old as man and his religions (Hinduism, for example, embraces nihilism as the ultimate form of happiness). It’s also in Scripture: read Ecclesiastes, or look at how God first reveals himself to his people, when Moses asks for his name:

I am who I am

I can think of no greater existential statement: God simply is. His existence is permanent, and his greatness dwarfs all other things.

How do we respond to such a revelation? Do we pursue pain, a la Fight Club? Do we pursue numbness, as in Meet Joe Black?

Sadly, both of these responses fail to address the real issue of self-significance: rather, they only hide it within a wrapper, either of pleasure (leading to numbness), or of pain. Though some religious people may claim that a search for self-significance is nothing other than pride, I disagree: this desire is meant to be filled. It is not self-significance, but self-preeminence, that is pride. It is not pursuing significance, but pursuing self-sufficiency and self-rule that defines the proud.

If we struggle with it genuinely, we are left with the only inevitable conclusion to existentialism: we must agree that, after all, we do not matter. There is something out there – God, displayed in piecemeal by the splendor of the universe – so much bigger, so much heavier with meaning, that makes us as human beings utterly meaningless. If there is something that existed before all else, and will exist long after all else, then that something is the only thing in all Creation which contains any intrinsic meaning.

Ah, but that is just it: intrinsic meaning. For the problem of the search – and the reason it terminates in numbness or in pain – is that we have no intrinsic worth, nothing within us to grant purpose. Purpose has to come from outside. If we have any meaning, it can only be because the Ultimate Meaning has somehow imparted it to us. And this is a mystery: why he should do such a thing! We have already confirmed that there is nothing within us, no secret store of self-worthiness, that should grant us this favor: it is only by grace that we are given a love beyond understanding, a love which by its existence imparts meaning and purpose to our lives. And so the Psalmist says, concerning this mystery

How priceless is your unfailing love! Both high and low among men find refuge in the shadow of your wings.

and

Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love, for I have put my trust in you.
Show me the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul.

Over and over again, he cries out to God in joy for his ‘unfailing love’. It is a surprise and a mystery that we should ever receive this, and the heart’s response is gratitude. John says, concerning this

How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!

Our Lord himself said to his disciples

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.

and speaking to the Father

I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.

Who may call worthless that which Christ has died for? It is his blood that has given us meaning and worth in his everlasting eyes!

This is the mystery: the knowledge of our own insignificance, and yet the reception of purpose through the love of Christ: not to build ourselves up, but only out of his own overflowing goodness. And as he comes into focus, questions about our own response, our own deviations into hedonistic pursuits of pleasure or searches for reality within pain, begin to fade away before his solitary light, and while pain and pleasure may still ebb and flow, they no longer hold us captive, and we are moved about by the beating of his heart.

Once again, this has done more to convict me than anything else: I am more prone to idolize pleasure, and how often do I take something to numb myself? But when I enter the religious world, I tend to run into the arms of pain: to condemnation and legalism and the pursuit of ascetic righteousness (for surely you have noticed that pleasure and numbness has its correlate in hedonism, and pain in legalism). Yet what I ought to do is run to Christ. I will do so much to assure myself of my own non-existent significance, when there is only one from whom and to whom all things take their being.

My God,
Whatever caused you to look down on me and say “I love him”?
For there is nothing lovely in me
Here lies the mystery some call “grace” and others “love”
How wonderful and unknown you are to me
You are near, even residing on my lips and dwelling in my chest
You move in my inmost being; you stir up my soul
I cannot escape the eternal surprise of the richness of your love
Praise your name, Jesus the Christ, Lord and Savior
You are who you are

I’ve recently had the opportunity to hang out with some other gay Christians, who I met through Nick, who I met via GCN. This is a big deal for me because up until then I’d never known any gay Christians, and the stigma (and propoganda) of who and what gay people were was – and to a large degree still is – there.

What I met was a group of guys who are entirely normal. I went to Nick’s church and then we all went out to eat afterwards. Above all I noticed how Christlike everyone’s attitude was. Though I was the youngest person there and new to everyone (save Nick who I’d met once before), I was never made to feel out of place or out of the loop. We didn’t talk about our orientation any more than a group of straight believers do. That was weekend before last.

Fast forward to this past Saturday, when we got together to plan a Bible study. Again, I was overwhelmed by what I cannot describe without religious terminology: the Holy Spirit was so obviously there. We all gave brief testimonies, and seeing that most of us have relocated here only recently, and seeing how God has moved in similar ways in our individual lives to bring us to where we are, I cannot help but think that God is planning on doing something in bringing us together. We decided to meet every other week for a study – for now, on Job – and just get together to do something fun on in-between weeks. There is a decidedly outward focus: to bring in those who may be struggling with reconciling their faith and sexuality or simply want a group of friends to hang out with or take a deeper look at Christ. At the end of the meeting we had communion. I’d never had communion at someone’s home, outside of a church setting, and I loved it because it was a visual and ceremonial reminder of the focus of our meeting: our Lord Jesus Christ. In short, the whole meeting was profoundly Christocentric.

This has reaffirmed and reassured me of the reality that there is no lifestyle that I have to live. That is actually a huge struggle, because there are two sources that promote the same sex-centered life for the gay person:

1. Fundamentalist Christianity (and mainstream too, I just want to differentiate it from ‘mere’ Christianity)

To be gay is to be a sinner. If you’re already sinning in this manner, it probably means you’re sinning in other ways, too: lasciviousness, adultery, sex addiction, lust, pornography, etc. (Mind you, hetero’s are all prone to such things, but no assumptions are made on their behalf.) This is the expectation for gay people – it is simply assumed, and it’s why I hear homosexuality discussed in terms like addiction, promiscuity, and the beloved term lifestyle. Most fundamentalists usually don’t even consider that gay people may exist outside of this paradigm, and readily presume it when dealing with any homosexual person, which is so demoralizing, as I admire them in other respects. It is also why I dread coming out to them, because I have the impossible task of trying to defend myself from having a presumed lifestyle that I in reality do not engage in and have no desire to enter. To be honest I’d rather be called a ‘fag’ than told one can’t support my lifestyle (what lifestyle is that again?). If I am living in a self-damaging manner, then fine: rebuke me, but don’t push on me a set of presuppositions that isn’t reality.

2. Pop Culture and the Media (The World)

To be gay is to fit within a narrow range of stereotypes, which includes – you guessed it – sexual promiscuity. At the very least you have no concept of sexual morality, certainly not monogamy. The liberal media, which supposedly loves homosexuals so much, has done a great job promoting this viewpoint. The homosexual isn’t a human created with the imageo Dei – he’s a representation of idealized sexual liberation. We’ve all seen him in such “gay-friendly” shows like Will and Grace or Rent. Yup, we all fall into that broad brush stroke. So the world encourages the homosexual to live in a degrading and self-destructive manner, and many embrace this, following an activism of the grotesque ‘Pride Parades’ and their own ’sexual liberation’. I have to say that I understand the pressure to live this way: those claiming Christ already assume you’re living the lifestyle and often there’s very little you can say to convince them otherwise; on the other hand, the culture encourages you to pursue such a life.

The truth is, most people’s views fall somewhere between the two of these. But the problem is that both of them are sex-centered: neither promotes responsibility or fidelity for the homosexual, and both are damaging. We ought to be viewing sexuality as an opportunity for the mutual building-up of one another in Christ. Perhaps I should take the time sometime to describe where my sex ethic is coming from, and how I believe it to be Christ-centered, Scriptural, and philisophically and theologically consistent?

So I’m glad I’ve found some brothers (and hopefully sisters soon, too!) where we can encourage and uplift each other by our lives of following Christ as gay persons. Not to say we should only hang out with each other – not to say that at all – but that it helps me to throw off the expectations that I’ve been handed down by both my earthly environments – Christian fundamentalism and the American culture – and see Christ as preeminent above all. I’m not pursuing sexual indulgence nor ‘reparative’ sexuality, but Christ, humbly accepting whatever gifts he may give along the way with thanksgiving (including my sexual orientation, and perhaps one day in the future a partner in ministry and in life).

Now, I have pretty good gaydar and I’m pretty sure there are other gay guys in my on-campus ministry. What my task is for this week is to find a way to talk to them about it, and hopefully invite them to come hang out and bowl with us this Saturday, and show them too that they don’t have to be straight and that they don’t have to live in anyone’s prescribed lifestyle: Jesus is Lord, and he is all that matters.