By Barry Casey
Jonathan Franzen, author of multiple best-selling novels, including The Corrections, found himself as a young writer feeling distinctly ill at ease in American culture. Although he was successful, his marriage was falling apart and he couldn’t seem to concentrate enough to finish the book he was working on. He felt cut off—or more honestly, he felt he had withdrawn in frustration—from his friends, his peers, the people he loved and respected, and the literary world.
In an essay for Harper’s Magazine titled, “Why Bother?” he says, “Not only did I feel that I was different from everyone around me, but I felt that the age I lived in was utterly different from any age that had come before.”1 He felt alienated and uneasy, cursed with the perception to see the damage being done to personal relationships as people retreated behind their computers. He wondered if there was still a place for a literate audience in a world in which everything seemed an artifice, a show, done for commercial reasons and lacking authenticity. He felt himself to be in a darkness that he called “depressive realism” where everything he saw seemed to contribute to his sense of alienation. He realized he had given up on the possibility of an imagined world, practically a necessity for a novelist. All he could see was the glittering superficiality of this one.
Eventually, he arrived at what he called “tragic realism,” and what he meant by “tragic” was fiction that raises more questions than it answers and that serves as a counterfoil for the rhetoric of inevitable optimism that pervades American culture. He says, “For me the work of regaining a tragic perspective has therefore involved a dual kind of reaching out: both the reconnection with a community of readers and writers, and the reclamation of a sense of history.”2 And he found that in its insights into the darkness and unpredictability of life, as well as the beauty and clarity of it, tragic realism has an intensity that is almost religious.
I read Franzen’s essay with appreciation, not only for the penetration of his insights and the skill of his writing craft, but also because it spoke to my experience as a member of a religious community. As a Christian, I believe in an imagined world too, the Kingdom present in spirit and still to come. Like Franzen, my individuality and humanity spring from an appreciation of history and a deep regard for the intellectual legacies of writers, thinkers, artists, and musicians. As an individual and a Christian, I am convinced that an authentic search for Jesus enlivens and ennobles my humanity. Like Franzen, I am temperamentally inclined to tragic realism, to its acceptance of the light and dark of life, and to the intuition that our very finitude creates a longing for transcendence. Christians know something about tragic realism, living out of the crucifixion and with the continuing presence of evil.
Franzen’s dis-ease with our times and our culture is echoed in the paradox of being a spiritual pilgrim who nevertheless loves this Earth. One pole of this creative tension for me is my appreciation of the goodness of humanity and what it has achieved in its cultures and religions. The other pole revolves around a keen awareness of the disparity between the transcendence of God and the hobbled finitude and misery of humanity. A tragic realism finds a workable way forward between hope and fear.
But as a Christian of the Adventist variety, I am also at odds with the position of those in my religious community who seem to value perfectionism over grace and conformity over a willingness to be led by the Spirit. It seems to me that an authentic Christian experience widens its scope to be as inclusive of others as it can be, while becoming, through prayer and action, as focused on Christ’s life as it needs to be. Grace gives us the liberty to work within our human limitations as we aim to follow Jesus. This is not cheap grace. It is to recognize that God is with us at all times, especially when we fail, to be there and to say, “Well, that didn’t go too well, did it? Let’s try it again!”
Like novelists and poets, people of faith learn, through necessity, to become masters at handling ambiguity. Most situations in life are not binary; we must be wary of those who sell the either/or model when both/and is more often the case. Tensions arise between our roles as members and as individuals. Organizations, churches included, aim to accomplish their mission with the least amount of internal friction possible. But as individuals, we are constantly called to find our way around, over, and yes, through conflict. It teaches us patience.
A lot of us are ambivalent about who we are as Adventists, and we spend quite a bit of time struggling with it. Are we still a movement? Does a movement have assets in the billions, properties around the world, and thousands on the payroll? Even more critically, are we the hinge of history or just another Protestant denomination? The questions point to our sense of mission and that, in turn, to our identity.
We began as a movement set against much of nineteenth-century America. We opposed slavery, ostentation, and the accumulation of wealth; we were pacifists and believed that the body was the temple of God. Because the first Adventists had stepped out of existing denominations, they tended also to define themselves by what they were not—a kind of via negativa of church polity. That energy carried them for years and sustained mission work around the globe. As they trained to be servants, they benefited from their education. Their institutions thrived—education, health care, hospitals, publishing—and they became prosperous.
Movements through time evolve or die, and we evolved. We are far from the agrarian, self-sufficient, and experimental movement that survived through tenacity and God’s grace. A curious thing happened on the way to the twenty-first century: for many Adventists in North America and Western Europe the church’s identity as a nineteenth-century millennial movement smacked into our experiences in our post-modern societies.
Jonathan Franzen went through a period of silence as an author, expecting that his novels and essays would speak for themselves. Alas, nobody noticed. Franzen says, “Silence, however, is a useful statement only if someone, somewhere, expects your voice to be loud.”3 If we opt out of the culture, will anyone notice? And do we opt out so that they will notice? Is that our reason to be a movement, to be known as singular, what we liked to call “peculiar”?
Speaking to Southern regional writers, Flannery O’Connor noted that, “An identity [as a Southern writer] is not to be found on the surface . . . It is not made from what passes, but from those qualities that endure, regardless of what passes, because they are related to truth. It lies very deep. In its entirety, it is known only to God, but of those who look for it, none gets so close as the artist.”4
If Adventism asks itself what makes its identity unique and distinct from other Christian groups, it asks the wrong question. The question that gets at our authentic identity is not what makes us different from other religions or even other Christians. It is, “Are we being faithful to the vision of Christ as we understand it?” O’Connor thought that Southern identity in its clearest form was often found in the extremes. In religion today, extremes are part of the problem.
A better word, at least for now, is “radical,” referring to that which goes back to the root, radix, from the Latin. Asking whether we are faithful to Jesus’ message is radical simply because Jesus was radical then and His message, still today, is extremely radical. If we still want to be unique in our society, even peculiar, we need only align ourselves with Jesus’ radical message of love conquering hatred and prejudice.
Franzen pulled himself out of his dis-ease with the realization that he was not in this world alone. All of us are muddling our way through life; we are a community of the stumbling but hopeful. He quotes Flannery O’Connor who said, “People are always complaining that the modern novelist has no hope and that the picture he paints of the world is unbearable. The only answer to this is that people without hope do not write novels.”5
Neither, it could be said, do Christians write their life stories without hope. In a fractured world like ours, hope is the path toward our true, authentic selves.
–Barry Casey taught religion, philosophy, and communication for 37 years in Maryland and Washington, D.C. He is now retired and writing in Burtonsville, Maryland. More of his writing can be found on his blog, Dante’s Woods. Email him at: [email protected]
References
- Franzen, Jonathan, “Why Bother?” in How to be Alone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, p. 93.
- Franzen, p. 93.
- Franzen, p. 87.
- O’Connor, Flannery. “The Regional Writer” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.
- Franzen, p. 92.