rose the morrow morn

below is an opinion article from my column in the school newspaper

Last Friday I decided to skip all my morning classes and sleep in. It’s ok, I’m a senior, I can do that. I allowed myself to sleep until I woke naturally—no alarm. When I was a child that usually meant 1 in the afternoon. Last week I made it until 11.

I woke up quite contented, despite my guilt for missing class, and consequently ate my cheerios with an air of jovial absurdity. I felt so good, I decided it was necessary to divide my last remaining cheerios into opposing fleets to conduct a naval battle.

“Mr. Bottomswell, alter course to engage the enemy.  And watch those port guns!” I muttered derisively in a sort of pirate/Captain Ahab accent.  I dipped my spoon in the milk and prepared to empty the volley on the invading navy.

“All’s ready Cap’n.”

“Fire Mr. Bottomswell and spare not a shell!”

I whistled the descending fall of a cartoon bomb and dropped the dairy projectiles on the enemy cheerios.

The conflict was short and decisive.  I swiftly ate the losers and antagonized the victors with a whirl pool caused by none other then Posiedon himself. I then ate the winners.

“The sea gives and the sea takes away, Mr. Bottomswell.”

“Aye sir.  She was a good ship.”

I tell you this story because I have very strong feelings about the intricacies of naval warfare…wait.

Actually, I tell you this story because I have very strong feelings about the necessity of absurdity.

Unfortunately, our society suffers from the persistent delusion that everything works according to a very reliable order. We divide our time and our resources into predefined investments, hoping to gain love, entertainment, success, power, or any number of things that should provide a return. We find our guarantees in the ones who went before us, the people who—we assume—got everything they expected.

We see this played out in our advertising, in our entertainment, and in our politics. Is it reasonable to assume that a single pill has the ability to solve all of our weight problems, our emotional problems, or our sexual problems? The commercials we buy into seem to think so. Reality shows only proliferate this sense of a perfect system. They most commonly represent what is either a dysfunction or idealistic fantasy of the acceptable order in society. Do we really believe Barack Obama or anyone else could be the miracle-worker our political system needs to be restored to “normal”—as if the previous establishment was only a critical square peg, in an otherwise well-oiled, and sensible system of round holes?

My experience seems to suggest there is more absurdity in this world then it makes us comfortable to realize. When pampered and neglected teenagers gun down their classmates before turning their weapons on themselves, it’s not something we can simply explain away in a heartless prattle of diagnosis. When children grow up without dads, when entire villages die of exaggerated chest colds, when a girl breaks up with you, when you stub your toe while shuffling to the bathroom in the middle of the night, when tyrants are given medals, and heroes are given pink slips—sometimes things just happen, for no reason other than absurdity.

Last week I presented an article at a theology conference that argued that a person cannot come to faith in Christ’s resurrection from historical, or reasonable evidence alone. Everyone ultimately has to make a decision within themselves whether or not they will believe in something as absurd as the resurrection. Only then will they interpret the evidence in a way that complements a Christian perspective.

We live in a post-Christian society that is growingly skeptical of religious truth. The popularity of Brown’s Da Vinci Code and Dawkin’s God Delusion are great examples of this trend. Unfortunately, many Christians hope to counter this tide by presenting books, sermons, and media that suggest Christianity is not only reasonable, but actually probable when studying the evidence. If belief in Christ is really all that obvious from the evidence, why hasn’t every sane, reasonable person who’s ever studied spiritual matters ended up calling themselves a Christian?

As long as the church continues to present the gospel as the easy and obvious answer to the equation of life, it will continue to foster distrust from a society that is slowly realizing life was never designed to make perfect sense. Instead, we must realize that Christ never came to be the final piece to the system of this world. Instead, he came to defy the system, to act completely counter-intuitive to every shred of existing order.

Our role as the Church should be nothing other than the same radical, self-sacrificing nonsense that Christ exemplified. As my personal friend, Søren Kiekerkaard wrote: “My intention is to make it difficult to become a Christian, yet not more difficult that it is, and not difficult for the obtuse and easy for the brainy, but qualitatively and essentially difficult for every human being, because, viewed essentially, it is equally dificult for every human being to relinquish his understanding and his thinking and to concentrate his soul on the absurd.”

Could the Church seriously concentrate on not taking our pat answers so seriously? Is there room for nonsense in our westernized religion that interprets the supernatural so systematically? I don’t know. Neither do you. Let’s go eat cheerios.