Despair and faith

The only way to get from the one to the other

I let loose with quite a volley of hopelessness this morning in a post over at Late in the Day. You might say my fed-upedness got the best of me.

As my day progressed, it had the effect of holding my feet to the fire. I’ve professed to be a Christian for some years now, but am I just full of ka-ka? Why don’t my daily devotionals and church on Sunday sufficiently gird me against such a state of mind?

So this afternoon, I’ve revisited a couple of offerings from Christian public intellectuals whose work I greatly respect. I had to start somewhere, and these two thinkers came to mind.

A couple of weeks ago at World, Carl Trueman wrote an essay entitled “Where Is Hope To Be Found?” There is one assertion in the third paragraph that I’ve put in boldface, because it makes a demand that gets to the heart of what I am grappling with:

One temptation that arises from the ideological fragmentation is despair. It is hard to be hopeful about anything when the world seems marked simply by the endless clash of incommensurable opinions. And yet despair is not an option for the Christian, nor is the burn-it-all-down attitude that springs from desperation. So where is hope to be found?

Okay, so that’s off the table. What, then, is to be done?

Trueman offers three reasons why we can give despondency the heave-ho. The first two I don’t find entirely convincing, which is strange for me to say. I’ve never found Trueman’s arguments about these things to be incomplete, but here I think he might have more thoughtfully considered holding them up as grounds for encouragement.

“The first is in the health of their country’s institutions and the involvement of her citizenry in the big issues of the day,” he says. Yes, as he goes on to offer in the way of substantiation, Roe was overturned [and] 303 Creative was correctly decided.” He goes on to point out that “Congress still exists and free elections still take place,” but I’m unconvinced that either institution is in anything approaching a robust condition. In fact, they’re looking more like jokes all the time.

The second reason he offers is the family. It is certainly true that families characterized by deep commitment provide fertile ground for turning out citizens with their heads on straight and their hearts inclined toward the transcendent good, but the collapsing marriage rate holds scant promise of this front being able to move the societal needle.

But there’s no escaping the ringing truth of his third reason:

And finally, let us keep hold of the hope of the gospel. The promise in the New Testament is clear: Christ will triumph and His bride will be given to Him on the great wedding day at the end of time. That eternal weight of glory relativizes everything here on earth. If we think that the wedding feast of the Lamb depends upon our nation, our denomination, or our church, then of course we will despair. But if we see that the promise is not to nation, denomination, or congregation but to the church as a whole, we will rejoice. No matter how weak or corrupt we are, the grounds of hope are solid and guaranteed to remain so.

The unshakeable kingdom will indeed resolve all that troubles us in this realm.

But hanging onto that thought is still tough, at least for me.

And that is where the conclusion - as in the last seven seconds of his twenty-four-minutes-and-fourteen-seconds talk - of Paul Kingsnorth’s video presentation for UnHerd entitled “What Is There Left To Conserve?” is helpful.

I relate, to a significant degree, to Kingsnorth. He’s a recent Christian, and his path to the faith included immersions in atheism, Buddhism, and even witchcraft. His feet are firmly planted behind his plow now, and his faith is visceral and no-nonsense. He doesn’t trade in platitudes, pep talks or devotional balm. He asserts that the West, as a sweeping project that humankind has undertaken, and which, for several centuries, imparted nobility to the life of our species, is a spent force and putting hope in its revitalization is a fool’s errand.

His UnHerd

talk covers this territory. He has coined a term, The Machine, which he uses a lot in his writings and talks, and here he says that The Machine has swallowed up our ability to understand what we were actually made for.

I’m going to flat-out give your the spoiler. He concludes with this: “What can you do when there’s nothing left to conserve? The answer is pray.”

That’s it. There’s no systematic walk-through of some method for effectively praying. That’s for us to go forth and grapple with.

But prayer is indeed all that’s left to us. In a sense, it’s all we ever had.

I’ll never surmount my morass if I don’t get myself out of the way and invite God to take over my entire being. It’s the breastplate, helmet and armor of any soul that’s going to spend eternity as it was designed to.

So I have my instructions for how I am and am not to spend my time.

I can waste it, or I can draw near to the Lord of all that exists and must at some point be folded back into him.

This is serious stuff. It’s the only way out.