Create Against the Dying Light
Finding courage in the face of cynicism and cancel culture
I was under attack. Yet I kept on, because there was work to get done. There were places to be. People to see.
How was I? I was good, but busy. (You know the clichés that give responses yet deflect what’s really happening.)
I was under attack. Yet I was shielded from dealing with it.
I ignored the tingling in my arms that pulsed into my face every few steps I walked down the office hallways. My breath and feet ran in sync. Fast.
“Just think about something else,” they said. “Don’t think about the proverbial elephant I just told you not to think about.” Easier said than done was my clichéd rebuttal.
Deflect, step. Deflect, step. Maybe I’m dying, stop.
Suddenly, every part of my being felt like it was being attacked. Was that pain I just felt in my arm? Is my face numb?
Is it getting darker in here, or is that my vision tunneling? Where are all the people to see? How do I get out of here and somewhere safe?
Funny how what was repeatedly deflected now suddenly demanded my sole attention.
I was under attack, but it wasn’t physical. The same thoughts that culled my concerns now were the pot calling the kettle black.
It wasn’t my heart; it was my head.
That was back in 2013 — but it was going to take another 3 weeks after that first episodic panic attack for me to be able to name that it wasn’t my heart. Several doctor visits and a heart monitor strapped around me at all times are what it took for me to finally come to terms with perception being more to blame than the state of my cardiovascular health. My perception was the problem.
My perception shaped reality. It did feel like tunnel vision. It did feel like pain shooting up my arm. My brain told me that’s what I was experiencing because it told me it was a heart attack, not a lack of water and a too-fully-packed workday on top of a too-fully-calendared month. As a result, some of what I perceived became reality — my arteries tightened, adrenaline coursed through my system prepping my body to flee certain death.
In the Christian Scriptures, Jesus equates how we see as whether one is filled with fullness or emptiness, light or darkness (Matthew 6:22–23). Perception matters.
And we don’t have to look to history to prove that point — although I will. I just read this week that Spaniards justified enslaving First Nation peoples in the Caribbean because they exaggerated, sensationalized, and fabricated stories of the Carib natives all being cannibals (elements of truth disproportionally highlighted) — and reported their findings in such a way to spread that perception like a contagion and justify their business (see Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery, 2016). Perception matters.
Abundant Fear of Scarcity
Five hundred years might have progressed, but our tendency to myopically view or purposely misview our circumstances remain.
Perceived problems kept me from addressing the actual problem. It wasn’t until I shifted my paradigm that I was able to address what was really going on in my body, prescribing myself increased water intake and boundary setting instead of heart surgery.
What I’m getting at is this: behind culture wars, cancel culture and cynicism in the US exists a perception of fear. The perception breeds the physical and social manifestation of these things, not the things themselves.
Underlying a lot of our experiences, we are filtering the light that we see and decoding the information that we receive through a lens and software whose foundational premise are fear. This fear manifests broadly in three ways: a flight/fight response to aging, mundanity and powerlessness.
American culture is one of chasing after permanence, purpose and painlessness, yet despite our best efforts at being Limitless, we cannot stop degradation, disillusionment and death.
Each of these is a fear of scarcity: scarcity of prominence, scarcity of worthwhile endeavors, scarcity of health. They harbor cynicism. They foster buyouts and invasions, oppression and systemic ostracization, mistrust of others and forced migrations of the elderly and ill to walled-in spaces away from our day-to-day.
Ironically, scarcity also plays out in the opposite when considering solutions. Just as my perception of my panic attack as a heart attack further enhanced my experience of a panic attack, so does my perception of scarcity actually multiply my problems. Cancel culture breeds in such a climate. A celebrity's good actions are scarce compared to their problems. One good deed is scarcely sufficient to outdo another word spoken 10 years ago on social media. All of our society's woes can simply be solved by removing the scarce signs of brokenness and deprave corners and blights in our world. Our fear creates reductionistic reaction.
It’s interesting then that one of the earliest recordings of God in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures is one of naming himself as the God of abounding (Exodus 36:4). It’s a name that counters Moses’ sense of scarcity for his people: a powerlessness to the oppression of the Egyptians.
But it doesn’t stop there. God reveals himself by the Prophets of the same Scriptures as a Rock of Ages (Isaiah 26:4) — in response to destruction and death and exile that Israel experienced in the 600s BC. In the New Testament of the Christian Scriptures, God is described as the Architect of a City Unshaken (Hebrews 11:10) — the God that is said Abraham looked to as he experienced being a foreigner and nomad with no permanent place of residence. Jesus in the Apostle John’s Revelation says he is the Alpha and Omega as a promise to those experiencing a full range of human existence: religious persecution, political oppression, strife, division, illness, everyday pursuits.
In each of these, God is revealing himself with abundance, abundance of love to overcome injustice, abundance of steadfastness in the seas of time that wash away memories like footprints in the sand, abundance of safety and peace from a city whose gates always remain open, abundance of presence in every moment between start and finish. In them, God invites us to receive his foreverness for our finiteness, his favor for our failure, his fortitude for our frailty.
Ultimately, to our culture of fear, he offers freedom by naming our agency and power. Not in us, but outside of us, now ours to receive and live out of in restored relationship to him through Jesus. This is good news.
This is good news to our fear of What if war overtakes us (scarcity of peace)? What if the economy collapses (scarcity of provision)? What if I am forgotten (scarcity of prominence)? These fears paralyze us to scramble and build a vain tower rather than sow a simple seed with hope.
Plant Anyways
I want to offer — and think the Christian Scriptures provide — an alternative lens. An alternative OS. A reboot to the narrative that we tell about ourselves, our world and the people within it.
To the human who deceives themselves of permanence, provision and painlessness with all they have built and acquired (see Luke 12:16–21), God offers us the example of Jeremiah.
Jeremiah was a prophet to the people of Israel both in judgment for their injustices, religious malpractice and spiritual adultery as well as in their exile after this judgment. And in the midst of so much scarcity, scarcity of family, of memory, of history, of religious gatherings — Jeremiah states the well-known promise from God:
Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat their produce. Find wives for yourselves, and have sons and daughters. Find wives for your sons and give your daughters to men in marriage so that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there; do not decrease. Pursue the well-being of the city I have deported you to. Pray to the Lord on its behalf, for when it thrives, you will thrive.
(Jeremiah 29:5–7, CSB)
To their fears and apparent scarcity, they are invited to plant anyways. Jeremiah takes this so to heart that he actually buys a deed to land that will not be his with the belief that one day it will be returned to future generations.
To plant gardens and pursue family is to say yes to abundance in the face of scarcity. It is believing injustice, displacement and abandonment don’t have the final word. It is believing that even in scarcity, God is in her midst.
Abundance Over Scarcity
This posture really brings up three principles by which I try to lead my teams, raise a family and position myself in relationship to those around me and the land I inhabit.
Rather than a fear that there’s not enough to overcome abundant problems, I posture myself from a place of abundance. It’s believing God at his word that he is a God of abundance, and apparent lack does not have the final word.
This principle reminds me to start from a place of what is there rather than what is lacking. Problems will still arise, but it will be the gap in abundance rather than in the exception to scarcity.
You can do this too: the next time a problem arises and a question creeps in like “Why did this happen?” or “Why are we so disconnected?” — ask, “What resources do we have available to help us overcome challenges?” or “What does connecting regularly with one another look like?”
These questions can help you reframe abundance in all areas of your life, not simply in response to loss.
Death Over Life
To the fear of life and its end, I take on a posture of death.
This might seem dichotomous to my whole argument, but think this through with me. My emphasis on life and clinging to it believes in a scarcity of my whole world summed up in me, myself and I. That what doesn’t happen in me isn’t of value.
To live for a life that is always up and out fights against the grain and groans of the created order that is much more like a bell curve. I will die. But the death of this ego actually allows me to come alive more fully to God, those around me and my own physical and emotional well-being. I can step off the hamster wheel and place the brick down to my Tower of Babel. Time will wear the stone down; that’s reality. But a planted tree endures through the perpetual deaths of its fruits.
It’s not denying scarcity. I don’t deny people as part of the problem. I don’t deny that death feels inhuman and unnatural even though it is the only definite thing in a cosmos that always changes. But Death Over Life invites me to plant anyways. To build anyways. To defiantly stake a claim that the full stop on the human story won’t occur. To create is to rage against the dying of the light.
In HBO’s adaptation of the Last of Us, a depiction of humankind infected by fungus and reeling from reminders of death and human depravity, Ellie (Bella Ramsey), the 14-year-old charge of apathetic and worn-down Joel (Pedro Pascal), asks him
“If there’s no hope in the world, why do you continue on?”
“Family,” Joel replies.
As a follower of Jesus who has walked through college days and career choices, the fervor and excitement to be saviors in the world are more like gasoline to a spark than a well-tended pyre. It generates excitement but doesn’t sustain through the night. Gathering sticks and striking a match are mundane and lack pizzazz, yet they will bring you safely to the morning.
There’s nothing glamorous about weeding a backyard, voting at a polling station, engaging in town hall meetings, changing diapers, grabbing a meal with long-time friends, staying put in a community for the sake of community. There’s no fire from heaven, no mighty winds filling upper rooms, and yet, God’s handiwork and presence are promised. Thriving results.
Integration Over Isolation
We scarcely see ourselves as interconnected beings. Soul and body. Individual and family. Family and community. Community and economy. Ever-expanding nodes of connection and relationship.
American culture posits the human experience as likened to actors on a stage, with everything around people as props and movable sets rather than living enmeshments that take a toll every time one uproots. There’s a reason we have a word like uproot to describe moving away. It isn’t a zero-sum transaction.
Because of this framework though, we isolate a problem and come up with an isolated solution and are left with just as many tangled webs as when we started. It’s why we relocate when community becomes dull or annoying. It’s why cancel culture is so prevalent (and now in the Merriam Webster dictionary for all future generations to know we came up with it in 2016): You’re shameful, I’ve blocked you or moved 1,500 miles away. Problem solved.
But it isn’t, and our isolation thickens the echo chambers and breaks down creative solutions made possible through vulnerability and humility. To be vulnerable is to say I’m part of the problem. To be humble is to say I don’t have claim on all experiences.
Choosing to listen to another, to believe their story matters and is as authentic as your own, enhances your perception. It is a counter to something that is truly scarce: our view of things.
Our fear of scarcity blinds us to the perception driving it: our own scarcity of presence. We are not omnipresent as much as the Internet, social media and airfare would like to make us think we are.
In isolation, we think the world rises and falls upon our country’s success; that history began in 1607, that God just talks about salvation in terms of innocence and guilt. With these, we are left out from experiencing the fullness of the glory and story of peoples that are welcomed in that City Unshaken and invite room for greater fear from places of ignorance.
Their glory is their perspective, their experiences in their contexts that shaped their culture. We are bettered by them as much as they are bettered by us. The equation isn’t me or you. It isn’t superiority or oppression. It is we. Interdependence.
This statement of presence is put so well by the Apostle Paul in the book of the Acts of the Apostles:
From one [human], [God] has made every nationality to live over the whole earth and has determined their appointed times and the boundaries of where they live. He did this so that they might seek God, and perhaps they might reach out and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being….
(Acts 17:26–28a)
It’s actually his design to place limits so that we might seek him and be reminded of our interconnectedness in and through him. Nothing is overlooked by God. It all matters. It all is swept up in his longsuffering arc of replacing tears with abundant joy, dishonor with abundant privilege, decay with abundant newness.
It is an act of rebellion against the current state of things and spiritual powers that be by saying there’s more. To create is to say there’s more than what is. To create is to say I need to put an end to some individual things to bring life to something new. To create is to take things in seeming isolation and bring about beauty.
A story is the death of paper and letters and words to become something new: a story that reminds us of who we could be. A painting is the death of canvas and paint to become a masterpiece that offers beauty and hope. To plant is to say there is fruit for a future generation. To build is to say there’s still room for welcome in this world. To wed and labor are to say that I’m not the end of the story.
In the Christian calendar, I don’t know of a more poignant illustration of this than this week’s Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday. One day, marking a period of reflection and renewal with a feast to start it all by reminding ourselves that God, in one of his earliest revelations of himself, made himself known as the God of abundance who is reconciling all things. Loss over the coming 40 days doesn’t have the final word.
Ash Wednesday is a day when we draw from the ink of death a portrait of hope that, even as we are reminded that we are to return to dust, invites us to look to the future when all dust comes alive again. We speak to and behold this hope upon one another.
From dust to dust and back again. I courageously create to remind myself I am created, and my own creation doesn’t have the final word. Re-creation does.
Don’t lose heart. Let it be so.
