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