The Problem of Optimism

Has anyone else ever noticed how much the Church in America has to say about self-image? Maybe it's just me, but whenever I look out at how Christians are talking about the love of God I keep noticing the same phrases repeated again and again about how God values us and how beautiful we are to Him and how no sin is beyond His forgiveness. It's all perfectly true, but I feel like it's responding to another culture's issues. It's as if Christians were convinced anyone who hasn't accepted Messiah is being held back because they don't think they deserve God's love.

Before I go any further, I need to clear up two things. The first is that I am a big fan of what might be called "easygoing pessimism"(the idea might be summed up with the statement "life sucks and we're fallen, but God is good and the only way out is through") and also extremely distrustful of anything that strikes me as "cheesy." In other words, I'm quite biased on this subject, but emotional objectivity is not the same as rational objectivity and I will try to be as rationally objective as possible. The second preliminary issue is that I realize our culture really is plagued with low self-esteem. We are bombarded every day by advertisements that tell us how we are supposed to look and how we should act and what we need to achieve, and it gets to us. We have all fallen short of the glory of God and we all know it.

The problem is that while we all feel our fallenness deep down, we still feed on the cheap slogans and secular spirituality of lukewarm optimism which exists as a reaction to that epidemic of self-loathing. I may be wrong, but based on my own experience as a former agnostic and my time among non-Christians I would say that the average American's resistance to the Bible comes from the optimist side of our cultural coin rather than the pessimist side. People don't reject the Crucifixion because they think God wouldn't do that for us, they reject it because they think God wouldn't have to do it. They think that there shouldn't have been a cost to our forgiveness and that we're all good enough (except for a few notable dictators and murders) for our goodness to outweigh our sins when the sheep and the goats get split up. Our culture is filled with happy thoughts that never quite satisfy our inner sadness but are nonetheless the first cliches to rear up when the Bible is mentioned. We who live in constant fear of our neighbor's judgment have lost all understanding of what it means to fear the judgement of God and are posed instead to look down and judge the Creator of every single thing that has ever existed.

The Glass City

They climb up into the sky
The glittering domes and shining towers
Catching the sun's light, the dazzle us with a stunning display
Look up and see the hundreds of false suns
Tell me if you can tell them apart
The real sky, sun, and clouds
From their reflections
And the clever artistic replicas

Take a good look at the shops
Look at the fun little baubles
The spinning gears and swinging levers
And that bouquet over there
With the marvelous glass roses
And the tinfoil lilies
But you must be careful
The petals cut like knives
And if the aroma is a little toxic
Lean back if you feel faint

Well what would you want with a real flower?
You know those things go bad, after all
Well so what if it's a little cool or hard?
See now, I've no time for your quirks
I've got to go now, tight schedule and all
Try the theatre, and forget those odd questions
Nothing good will come of them


The guide is gone
Marching away
His face to the shiny pavement
Just like the rest of them
All looking at the sidewalk
Or the windows
Never looking at each other directly
Not even with the masks on
You look down too

The garden is lovely
Never aging
Always shining
The theatre is amusing
The casino is the most fun of all

Time to work
Pull the levers
Work the machine

Work
Theatre
Shop
Bet

On and on
Again and again
All with a smile
Always cheerful
On and on

And then comes the jam
Out of nowhere
Things are just blocked
You move on
Adjust your route
It closes in
The jam
The Something
That is getting in the way of things
You move on through alleys and side streets
Out of the usual flow
Away from the Watchers

Here is pavement that doesn't shine
Here there is a deep, terrifying silence
Here the stars shine through
Here the stars shine true
And it's almost more than you can bear

You look out from the dread hill
From the corner of Creation
That had been hidden before
And see the glass city
All splayed out below

Clockwork
All of it a mad dance
A horrid, bejeweled machine
Slick with blood and sweat
Grinding its way into the pit
That's all it really is
That skeletal spectacle
That miserable pleasure palace

But there is another dance
Driven my a wonderful, terrible symphony
Barely audible amidst the infernal noise
But unshakeable once it is heard

An armada seizes the sky
Swirling and rumbling about
Lit up in pulsing flashes
And down below
In the cracks and corners
Nature, our sister, stirs at the Master's touch
Arising from her slumber
Ready to brush away our pretty things

All the while
The melody is in the city
Passing subtly in whispers and glances
Slipping in between busy schedules
Invading the diabolical gears
Jumping about in the daily dice

The Anointed is coming
To rescue us
To romance us
To war against us

The Bridegroom is coming to the Glass City