Chasing Down the Good Life

I would like to enlist your assistance and support in a Quixotic quest of self-discovery that I plan to undertake this summer. If you are like me, then you can't really stop your mind from thinking about deeply obscure questions about existence, meaning, and identity on a more or less hourly basis. And so when someone asks you a significant question like, "What do you think I should do? Take that job in Milwaukee or stay here in the position I already have at the bank?" You immediately begin to wonder: Is there such a thing as "should do" in this scenario? Is there such a thing as "should do" in life in general? If there is, where does such authority come from? And what does said authority have to say about all of the other decisions I make in my life? And, if you foolishly proceeded to mumble those thoughts aloud instead of keeping them between you and your inner-monologue, your present interlocutor may in fact realize that asking you about anything might in fact be a supremely foolish and time-consuming activity. The better part of valor is probably simply to respond: "Well, what do you want to do? Make a pros and cons list. And then tell everyone I solved your problem through reason and benevolence." Please know that if you are one of those people who have asked me about situations such as that listed above, that existential tumbleweed was certainly passing across the dusty road of my mind behind my glazed over eyes. It is nothing personal.

In short, I would really like to have everything all figured out before I even begin to deal with the small details of life. You know, get the big picture before analyzing the more minute aspects of its beauty. So I am beginning a concerted effort to track down the Good Life. And I plan to do whatever it takes to wrestle it to the ground and beat it into submission whenever I find it. This is not simply for myself, but I am hoping to create an extended sermon series on the topic once I have come to whatever conclusions I find. Hopefully it will be something that helps our church family at FPC. In the meantime, I am planning to use Paper Tiger Can't as a running journal of my quest. And that is where you come in. I would very much appreciate your comments, your questions, your meandering musings on life and its meaning. Please share those things with me as I make this journey, for the betterment of my expedition and your own. Here is my proposed methodology to begin:

As you can imagine, I will mostly be reading books. Old books, for the most part, but some more modern selections perhaps. Here's a rough list of my starting point:

From the Hebrew Scriptures/the Ancient Near East (including the Greek period)/New Testament:
Proverbs
Job
Ecclesiastes
The Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7)
Epictetus: Discourses and Encheiridion

Works from the Far East:
Tao Te Ching
The Bhagavad Gita

Works from American writers and philosophers:
Henry David Thoreau Walden
Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass

Other modern works:
Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov and Notes from Underground
Albert Camus The Stranger
Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged
50 Cent Get Rich or Die Trying (jksers...)

A few caveats: 1) I have read most items in the above list already at some point, but I have never tried to synthesize any of it together into a philosophical outlook on daily life; 2) my ability to read Greek and Hebrew far outweighs my knowledge of Far Eastern or European languages, so I will need to rely on translations of some of the modern works and the far eastern selections; 3) I'm assuming that more will be added to this list, and some will be discarded throughout the course of this project. I fully recognize that such a limited corpus and methodology makes my chances of success limited at best, but the way I see it, my chances of success in anything in my life have been limited at best. So what else is new?

My goal, ostensibly, is to answer the question: What is the Good Life? Is it making lots of money? Is it having lots of friends? Or family? Is it helping other people in need? Is it some kind of combination of all of the above? Is it using the Shake Weight to get wicked cut and slay the ladies? What is the Good Life?

Well, what do you think? Do you have methodological suggestions for me? Do you have a list of your own that you think I should consider? Is it a blatant error on my part not to include The Simpsons in this corpus of great philosophical treatises and literature?

Just a thought to leave you with as we begin this thing together: At the close of Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman, the protagonist Will Barrett stands in the desert trying to work out the meaning of his life. Another character, Sutter, whom he has appealed to in this regard throughout the novel, is about to depart from the hospital in which both he and Will watched Sutter's brother, Jamie, finally succumb to a long illness. As Sutter begins to drive away, suddenly Will forms another question, perhaps the question that, if answered, would put everything into place. And so he sprints after Sutter's vehicle. And there the story ends. If you are like me, a day has never passed in your adult life in which you haven't felt like Will Barrett chasing down Sutter Vaught in the middle of a barren desert with an inarticulate question that may be the key to your own existence.

Yahweh's Army of... Locusts?

Some portions of the Bible just get downright neglected. This is not a new or surprising statement, I don't think. All of us who have grown up with some kind of regular interaction with the Bible realize this. People just don't read Leviticus. People also tend to avoid the opening nine chapters of 1 Chronicles. And, generally speaking, no one seems to have any particular interest in the so-called Minor Prophets that, in our English Bibles at least, close out the Hebrew Scriptures. I'd be lying if I said that I didn't understand. Given my vocation and my particular academic interests, I enjoy reading and studying the entire Hebrew Bible--but I can relate to the common aversion most people have to these works. The cultural distance alone is enough to decimate the morale of a modern reader. And, for whatever reason, it sometimes seems to me that mainstream English translators do almost everything in their power to make certain texts more difficult to comprehend. They have their reasons--including ideological commitments and public opinion concerns (i.e., "Well the King James translated Psalm 23 like this, and that's how everyone remembers it now, so if we update it and make a better translation that is more accurate and helpful for modern readers, many people will reject our entire effort and not buy the Bible because we 'changed' the words of God!"). It is a very difficult spot that translators are placed in by publishers and marketing departments, for sure. All of that to say, I get it. But there are a great deal of insights that are contained in these neglected works--insights about who God is and what he expects from his people.

In the Book of Joel, the reader is confronted with a startling situation. Apparently, at some point in the southern kingdom of Judah's history, a great plague of locusts threatened to destroy the nation's resources. Scholars are greatly divided on when to date the contents of the book (so much so that Calvin famously advised his audience to stop even trying), and some scholars don't even take the plague of locusts literally; instead they suggest it is a metaphor for the invasion of Babylonian or possibly Assyrian forces (an unconvincing suggestion, in my humble opinion). Regardless of when Joel gave these oracles, his audience was probably very startled. This coming plague of locusts would apparently damage the land in a way they had never even seen before. So I'm sure their knee-jerk reaction was, "Oh man, I hope Yahweh will save us." But then came the really bad news. The really bad news was, Yahweh was actually sending the plague. After describing the plague of locusts figuratively, comparing them to an advancing horde of superhuman warriors whose sole focus is destruction, Joel tells his audience in 2:11 that Yahweh himself "thunders [lit. gives his voice] at the head of his army." Apparently, the plague of locusts is Yahweh's personal army! This would be discouraging, to say the least.

But the people are given a choice. The plague, unfortunately, was unstoppable. Yahweh had made up his mind about that. But what came after that plague was partially up to the response of God's people. If they would repent from their disobedience and return to him, God would restore their land, bringing them back everything they had lost to the locusts and then some. And Joel didn't stop there. One day, he said, God would bless them in ways they couldn't even imagine. He would restore their land and resources, he would avenge the wrongs and atrocities that were committed against them, and he would even place his own Spirit among them in a way that would be unprecedented. Such a suggestion leads me to believe the context of Joel should be dated sometime between 515-400 BC, when prophecy was not very common anymore and people were beginning to wonder if God would ever send his Spirit among them again. This prediction, of course, would be seized upon by Peter in Acts 2, during his famous sermon on the day of Pentecost--identifying the outpouring of the Spirit on that day as evidence of the fulfillment of God's promise in Joel's oracle hundreds of years prior.

Several things stand out to me after reading the Book of Joel. First, we see yet another example (the Minor Prophets are full of them) of God's willingness to do absolutely whatever it takes to get his people to return to him and find life. He does not, apparently, shy away from even the most extreme efforts to persuade his people to repent and find forgiveness and reconciliation with him. The announcement that God was behind the plague of locusts would have been shocking, for sure, and his commitment to actively pursuing his people is even more surprising. Second, we see another consistent aspect of the biblical message: the future is not set in stone. God gave his people a very clear choice. Their behavior and decisions would ultimately affect how the future would turn out for them. As Joel says (just as Jonah says, but in a very different context) in 2:13, Yahweh is a God who changes his mind about sending calamity when his people repent. This is the lesson Jonah learns begrudgingly when he delivers God's olive branch to the people of Nineveh, much to Jonah's chagrin. Finally, we clearly see that God avenges all wrongs and does not let injustices go unpunished. Sometimes it certainly seems to us, and seemed to the ancient Israelites, that God lets the crooked and the wicked get away with the most atrocious acts of evil--while the righteous go on suffering with no apparent recourse. But Joel fervently argues that, in the final analysis of things, this is not so. Yahweh does hold everyone accountable for their actions. In 3:16 Joel writes that Yahweh roars [Hebrew yish'ag--it is what lions do in the Hebrew Bible] from Zion as he judges every nation on earth in the so-called "Valley of Decision." God will ultimately, some day, right all wrongs.

There are many other insights about God that one can draw from the Book of Joel, and the same is true for all of the other generally neglected portions of the Hebrew Bible. Hopefully, pastors and congregants alike will realize this. As the apostle Paul reminds us in 2 Timothy 3:16-17: All Scripture has been inspired by God and is useful for teaching us how to live lives that are pleasing to him.

Hegemony

I remember walking to health class when I was a junior in high school and my friend Mike met me in the hallway telling me that New York City had been bombed. Some buildings had collapsed. He didn't seem very clear on the details. I remember doing nothing for the rest of the day, learning next to nothing until we were permitted to go home. And then of course being flooded with media information on the topic for the next year or so. And how could I forget hearing about Osama bin Laden. Public enemy number one. I remember my friends joining the military as a direct result of 9/11, and I remember changing my major in college from English to Political Science, from Political Science to International Affairs, due to the interest that had generated inside my mind as a result of what seemed like an unexpected change in the world order. Then sitting in seminars on terrorism, watching endless footage of terrorist acts of violence and the paramilitary responses to them. And my professor always called Osama "Sammy bin Laden" with a long A in Laden, which I realized this week I continued to do myself ever since. There are many moments in between, of course, but now I will always remember watching the news on a Monday morning explaining how bin Laden was killed by US Special Forces in a more-or-less "suburban" town in Pakistan that was merely 35 miles outside of Islamabad.

And then there was the celebrating. Groups of mostly younger Americans rallying outside of the White House and Ground Zero around midnight on Sunday night/Monday morning to chant USA and celebrate the death of the man who, for them, was always America's foremost enemy. My wife and I talked at length about whether or not we thought God was upset with such celebration. I couldn't ultimately decide, and still can't, for many reasons. God makes clear in the Prophets that he won't stand for nations mocking the fall of their enemies, and that he holds them accountable for such actions. At the same time all of the Bible verses used from Proverbs et cetera in the many arguments on facebook that suggest one shouldn't rejoice over the fall of his or her enemies were taken grossly out of context (those verses most definitely refer to one's personal enemy, not an international criminal or terrorist). And the Israelites celebrated God's deliverance of them from the Pharaoh in the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15), which essentially is rejoicing over God's act to kill the Pharaoh's soldiers. But we're not ancient Israel. We're America. Which is a double-edged sword--we aren't held to the law that Israel was, but God does apparently expect every nation to treat people the way they would like to be treated (cf. any of the so-called Oracles Against the Nations in the prophetic works; e.g., Jeremiah 46-51). So needless to say, I remain ambiguous on the topic.

It did get me thinking of what it means to be a superpower, and what God expects from a superpower's leadership. I am not of the school of thought that is all the rage today that suggests empires are inherently evil, and that God is opposed to them all. I don't think that comparisons of America to ancient Rome or Babylon or Egypt are particularly helpful. Most often I find them to be shortsighted and oversimplified, not taking into account the vast array of cultural differences that separate the US and its current position in the world from those other world empires. On the other hand, I don't consider the US to be God's chosen people. God's chosen people, if the Bible is true, would be the Church--people from any ethnicity, background, language group, etc that choose to follow him. That being said, God certainly has expectations for our leadership. I've touched upon it briefly when I mentioned the Oracles Against the Nations above--but it seems that God expects nations to treat other nations the way that they themselves would like to be treated. The situation may be slightly complicated by the fact that some of America's primary enemies abroad are not nations, but relatively small pockets of individuals hiding out in places like the Pankisi Gorge or Tajikistan. Still, the basic expectation probably remains unchanged. For what it is worth, I think it is important for our President to remain somber and even-handed when discussing the death of bin Laden, and our optimistic hopes that such a blow (if only symbolic, ultimately) will help to dismantle the network of individuals and groups aligned against our nation. Certainly the incident will be used for political purposes, which is to be expected--if everything had gone wrong with the operation, you know it would have been used against our President for political purposes! But I think that, so far, our leadership's reaction to the event has been doing the necessary work of walking the fine line between celebration and relief.

My primary concern is how we treat people going forward. Certainly our tactics and methods of information acquisition in the past have been questionable at best. My hope is that this will provide us with an opportunity to turn down the rhetoric regarding the "terrorist threat" to America (which has existed for a very, very long time--long before we got the media on the bandwagon of fear-mongering). If we can return to speaking of our enemies as humans, and individuals who--though aligned against our interests--are still people made in God's image, I think our leadership will have an easier time making the right and reasonable decisions regarding the treatment of our enemies. I do not advocate ignoring or forgiving criminals and terrorists. God is clear that forgiveness is required in the context of personal relationships--we must forgive our personal enemies (cf. Matthew 5). He is equally clear that those who commit serious crimes must be held accountable for their actions, and that allowing them to go unpunished would actually displease him and destabilize society (cf. the entire OT Law and its philosophy). But there is certainly a way to continue our fight against them and our efforts to defend our nation and allies in a manner that is just and upright. If we use methods that are unjust and inappropriate, how are we any different than those with whom we fight? And if we have become just like those with whom we are fighting in this war, doesn't that mean that they have won?

My prayer is that bin Laden's death will cause a change in our national demeanor, so that we no longer dehumanize our enemies. Defending our nation and pursuing justice is the responsibility of our leadership (cf. Romans 13:4)--neglecting to do so would be wrong. But there is a way to do it that is fair and just, and pleasing to God. I pray that we will choose that path going forward.