Introduction

Note to the reader: Unlike Malcolm, the recipient of C.S. Lewis’ Letters about prayer, David is a real person. We met through the Internet in the early 1990s, while we were both in college, because both of us liked the band Genesis and joined the thriving community of Genesis fans back then. We kept in touch as the years unfolded, and our free-format, e-mailed conversations ranged from music discussions to the pondering of metaphysical questions. He came from a liberal and spiritual background, while I am a Reformed Christian. Our common ground, which allowed us to understand each other, was a shared Jewish background, him by heritage, and me as a by-product of being Christian. The incisive questions David sent me about what I believed served to sharpen my own beliefs. Eventually, I came to an impasse of a sort because I could not articulate what I knew to be true in a way that David could understand it. I knew what I believed, but I lacked the concepts, framework, and language to express these jumbled-up ideas. Until I wrote this letter.

Dear David,

Over the years, we’ve been slinging various metaphysical discussions around. I’ve hinted at some of what I believe, hopefully enough to stimulate your thinking, but I have never been able to fully articulate my beliefs as a coherent system. That changed after I heard a talk by (Reformed theologian) R. C. Sproul in which he explained existential philosophy. I had one of those “that’s it!” moments when everything fell into place. This letter doesn’t begin to articulate what I believe, but it’s as close as I think I will ever come.

I talk a lot about “philosophy”, and even theology. What I mean by this is not the sum and total of either field, but a subset of useful ideas about the meaning of our existence which we can take from each. A lot of philosophy and theology is useless to answer the kinds of questions we have. But I’ve found some pieces that are useful.

Most philosophy touches on ontology and epistemology. Ontology concerns what exists, what has being. Epistemology concerns how we learn about what exists. The third leg of the tripod is the most neglected, teleology, the purpose or ultimate end for what exists. I’ll be the first to admit a lot of philosophy is largely concerned with topics that have no practical relevance to anyone, and that few people understand. A lot of theology is the same way. What I’ve been doing is gleaning from the speculations I’ve encountered. I have uncovered a thread of thought which ties together existence in a coherent way that fits the facts. What I am about to relate is a road map, a way to navigate through my own writing and through philosophy itself. The books I mention are an integral part of my ideas; without being familiar with them, there’s not much chance of understanding what I am saying.

(A) The Telos

The Greeks had a word for the ultimate purpose or end of something, its telos.

We live in a narrative. We can’t not live in a narrative. It’s not optional. We can’t not eat. We can’t not drink. We can’t not think. We live in time as it unfolds, and we must connect one moment to the next. Because we have no other choice than to tell a story about how one moment connects to another, we require a story which gives our lives meaning. We need a coherent, meaningful purpose to function. We need a telos.

In the Poetics, Aristotle says (at the beginning of chapter 7) that a tragedy must be a complete (or whole) action, which means to have a beginning, middle, and end. This is the key distinction. Perhaps the most key distinction in human thought. For a story to make sense, it has to progress through a beginning, middle, and end, that is, to be a narrative. The whole must have a purpose for it to make sense as a narrative. For example, we have a book called The Odyssey, but it’s really a collection of loosely related episodes, told by the poets of the day, which were finally joined together into an “epic” after the fact. In the days before Aristotle, and Greek philosophy in general, Homeric stories were simply loosely connected chapters which could be woven into longer stories. Yet that wasn’t enough to satisfy. The episodes had to be put in order, so they had a larger meaning.

And look at our entertainment to see what I am saying. It’s no accident that Star Wars is the Odyssey of our generation. (Can you even name any other movie from that era, now?) The movies which make the biggest impact, like Star Wars, tell more than just a series of events, even if they are exciting. They speak about a deeper narrative that we instinctively want to be part of, or to be caught up in. They endure because they help us realize something we can’t articulate on our own.

In our lives, in this world we exist in, all stories end. But we don’t want the story to end. I’ll return to this shortly.

The author John Eldredge has an interesting book called Waking the Dead. In it, he presents a lot of what I’m saying. It’s an underrated, almost unknown book, but well worth reading. The discussion is too long to be summarized, so this gem will have to suffice: “myth is a story, like a parable, that speaks of Eternal Truths.” File that away for later. His book makes the point that the Christian life, and by extension any life, only makes sense when it is seen as part of an unfolding narrative that gives it a telos.

(B) Our Existential World

We grew up in a world of existentialism. There’s no way to escape that, just as a fish can’t escape the water in which it swims. Every thought we’ve ever had has in some way been conditioned by the existential world in which we grew up. As a result, our generation sees reality differently than any which has come before. We have been unmoored from the narrative which gives life purpose. We exist, but don’t know what to do about it. Previous generations simply didn’t have this problem. Even the most “free thinker” types of the past defined themselves in opposition to the narrative. We were born with nothing at all. Ours is the first generation for which this was true. It certainly wasn’t true of our parents.

Why was it first true of our generation? The rise of the existentialists came after the Second World War. When the world has had one world war, it can be “the war to end all wars”, but when this first war is closely followed by a second, the philosophies of the “modern” era have to be reconsidered by the intelligentsia. The progressive world of reason and science could not explain the 20^th century catastrophes. But these thinkers had already rejected Christianity, so they had to come up with a new approach. They taught their new existentialist approach to our parents’ generation in the 1950s and 1960s, and these people became the authors, movie makers, textbook writers, news reporters, and so on who shaped the world into which we were born. They also ran our schools. They taught us their philosophy as if there were no other viable alternative, so we were fed their existentialism, evolutionism, Marxism, and materialism (what you see is all you get because there is no transcendent reality).

The music group Tears for Fears made an impression on both of us in the 1980s. The lyrics of Roland Orzabal sum up the feelings of our generation. He talked about “the hurting”, something which has gone wrong with a person as a child, the repercussions of which are felt as an adult. He was heavily influenced by the Freudian psychologist Arthur Janov. Most psychology has this belief somewhere at its core: The hypothesis with which psychology works is that something has gone wrong with a child, either during birth (Janov’s idea) or in the months shortly after it. Anything abnormal about a person later can somehow be traced back to this time. (Psychologists are safe on this ground, since its truth can neither be proven nor disproven.) Different schools of psychology recommend different methods of treatment for “the hurting”, but none seems to have much effect. Certainly this “hurting” traces back to birth, but I think the most natural explanation that fits the facts is that we as children are “hurt” simply by being born into an existential world. After all, no one had psychological problems (as our generation knows them), until we had an existential world unmoored from a narrative which gave life its purpose. The hurting is simply being born. We have a deep need to be part of a coherent, narrative framework. But we’re not. Therefore we hurt.

John-Paul Sartre figured out what the hurt was. He was not a Christian, but he is probably the best friend a Christian could have in explaining the world we live in and showing others what Christ has done for us. (I’ll get to that at the end.) Our most direct exposure to existentialism is probably King Crimson’s first album. The lyrics are deeply existential. But notice it ends, in a strong way, with the one song that’s in a narrative form.

Sarte articulated existentialism. I know his writing is a slog. It’s hard to penetrate. But so is our world. No one understands us easily. He is saying: Each person is isolated and alone. Each person exists, but this existence is devoid of meaning. A person must try to find or invent meaning, because that person has been born into a world that gives the person no intrinsic meaning. Our minds, as we grew up, were impoverished by this empty, hollow world: There is nothing but what appears in our world, and what does appear has nothing to it but what we see; no mystery, no transcendence, no nothing. The philosophers of the existentialist era took away all that made the world an interesting place to live in, and were dissatisfied and uneasy with what was left.

If Sarte had written his philosophy like a writer (and he was gifted in this respect) instead of like a philosopher, we would be able to understand his philosophy more readily (or perhaps the original language is more approachable, and we have difficulties only with the English translation, although I somehow doubt it). For example, he could have called the In-itself the Listener, and the For-itself the Storyteller. The Listener is the consciousness itself (the self-awareness), and the Storyteller is the mental model that forms when the Listener tries to make sense of what its consciousness experiences. A human being makes sense of reality by telling a story. We're born to do that: We exist, by design, in time, from moment to moment, and connect the moments with a narrative. As we build the narrative, we create a mental model of reality through storytelling. In this sense, Existentialism is remarkably true to reality, and is even compatible with Christianity in that it is a "bottom up" description of Christianity's idea of fall of mankind (which Christianity presents from a "top down" perspective). In both cases, we are adrift, unmoored from the larger narrative which gives our existence meaning and purpose (telos).

The problem with Existentialism, and all materialist philosophies, is they can't explain how self-awareness happened. It's an insuperable problem: how did something passive and unaware become self-aware? Philosophies of a materialist orientation tend to sink into their most dense, impenetrable nonsense with this problem, and never have any sort of satisfactory answer. How does this Storyteller emerge? They don't know, and I am confident that they never will. The only coherent answers come from either Pantheistic or Creator-based philosophies. The Pantheistic philosopher says all which exists is part of the same Self, and individual consciousness breaks off from the Self and takes on independent existence: the unified One splits into individual self-awareness. The Creator-based philosophies say it is the Creator who breathes the spark of life into humans.

I would also add that Nietzsche makes a lot more sense when you realize his philosophy arose from the 19th century resurgence of Pantheism, and his early influence was Schopenhauer (whose thought owes much to the Upanishads). While Eastern thought sees individuality as a sort of disease that must be eradicated from the Self, the European resurgence of Pantheism saw the individuals as an expression of the Self which must be fully realized. If the universe is a Self acting out a play by splitting off its consciousness into individuals (a metaphor frequently used in Pantheistic explanations), the European resurgence suggested individuals live their lives by Method Acting: not "acting" at all, but becoming the part you play fully and taking it as far as you can go. This is the idea of the Superman, one who transcends amateur acting in summer theatres and devotes his whole being to playing the role the Self wants that individual to play. "God" is dead, i.e. the traditional religious idea that freedom is a test from God to see if the individual will obey or ignore what God demands of the person. Replacing the dead "God" is the new idea of the Self creating individuality with freedom, and then taking that freedom to the ultimate extremes possible, throwing off all limits to see how far individuality can be taken. And this is the world we grew up in.

I mention Nietzsche because he was a storyteller. He knew how to take his philosophical ideas and put them into a form that would speak to those who read them. (Sarte was trying to be a philosopher, and missed this important aspect.) Even an atheist can't transcend the basic narrative structure of human consciousness. By discarding God, they're not achieving anything. They're still doing what God designed them to do, which is to interpret reality through narrative. But the stories they tell are strangely hollow and incomplete. When I was growing up, my grandfather told me masterful stories about imaginary places, spaceships, and adventures. After exposure to these stories, I was swept up in imagination and possibilities. I tried to immitate him, to create my own stories. Looking back at the work I produced, I lacked any fundamental storytelling ability, including the ability to transcend what influenced me to create something original; not only were the stories I produced not any good, they don't even make a lot of sense. God has shown us the greatest story of his creation and purpose, and those who reject it do not reject telling stories, they just replace God's story with their own inferior one. (In other words, humans are not able to simultaneously act their parts completely in character while stepping out of character to write the next line.)

When individuality is taken to the extreme, what is its end (telos)? We don't know. We can't create an end for ourselves. All we have been able to create so far are substitutes which distract us from the fundamental problem of humanity without God: we can't come up with a purpose for our lives. All we can come up with are distractions. Human society is a parade of distractions which promise, but never deliver, a reason for existing. Our generation grew up at a time when the world of distractions was in full flower.

We have free will, Sarte is careful to insist. Total free will. That’s the problem. Total free will drives us to insanity. Being able to do anything at all is horrifying, because if we can do anything, no thing which we do has any distinguished meaning over any other. It doesn’t matter if I build a cathedral or throw myself off a bridge, because both actions are equally valid choices. What could give my choices meaning? Telos. My life has to fit into a narrative, in which each thing I do (i.e. each moment I spend) contributes to the purpose.

Using the fish analogy from earlier, we do not want “free will”, we want to stay in the water. Human beings function and are sane only when they’re given a purpose and what they do works to some higher end. When we do not have a narrative, it’s like we’re a fish that can live in the water, on land, in a vacuum, or on the surface of the sun. But a fish would not want to be anywhere but the water, even if it could survive. A fish which could survive on the surface of the sun would likely be as insane as a human being whose life has no purpose. As it is, our life in an existential world is empty and meaningless to us.

I remember reading a news report about poor people in a desert country who had absolutely no food. But they had to eat. Their bodies demanded they go through the motions of eating. They couldn’t escape the demand. So they made little cakes of dirt and ate them. They were not eating food, and were not surviving, but they were going through the process of eating which their bodies nonetheless demanded, right up until the end.

Modern society is the same way. We have discarded the Christian world view, but have replaced it with nothing. At the same time, we can’t exist without a story to explain our lives, so we invent one. We try to create our own meaning. Not only do we try to create meaning for ourselves, but also our whole society is based on creating (ersatz) meaning for others as a service. Instead of baking little cakes of dirt for ourselves, our society has us bake little cakes of dirt for others and sell them. The profit we make is used to buy little cakes for ourselves. When reduced to a human need like food, this is absurd; but the need for telos is no less real than the need for food, and the ersatz meaning we give our lives is no less worthless than the little cakes of dirt.

Our society functions by having everyone engage in buy-a-reason-to-exist commercialism. Although we are isolated and alone, we can give our lives meaning by the things we buy. We buy meaning. We can buy it from commercial products, sports teams, political parties, financial markets, and so forth. There is always “news” in the newspapers and on TV, regardless of what is actually happening, or how newsworthy the items in the news are, because we demand to be given news as a narrative. We now have a 24/7 news culture where an industry creates and distributes news for the sake of news (not because we particularly are interested in any items), weaving a narrative around random events in the world to create a meaningful narrative where there is none.

Professional sports has become a religion, one of distraction. People follow sports the way people in the past would follow their religions. For almost any game, a sports fan can find some reason to call it “the big game”. A stream of utterly useless and meaningless statistics is generated for every player and team in every situation. Each team has stories, the narratives of the great players and the most pivotal plays. People who use sports as meaning live from game to game, saluting the winners and dissing the losers. Meaning is defined by associating with a winning team, or at least sticking with a losing one as a “real fan”. Even the amount of money, often an absurd amount, paid to athletes (who seem to spend a lot of their time while under contract hurt and unable to perform) is part of the narrative of the sports world. It is “controversial” only in the sense that the sports world needs this controversy to make their product more interesting (to compete with, say, the news).

Sports are just an example. The same system is happening with popular music and movies. We create “stars” and give ourselves meaning in following the day-to-day details of their lives. The same basic pattern applies to almost anything in mass-media, from race car drivers to game show hosts to pop singers. We even have a class of people who don’t do much other than be famous for being famous, in other words people whose usefulness almost entirely rests in how easy it is for us to weave a narrative around them. Even “the market”, which is completely an invention of mankind, is a narrative that gives meaning to those interested in financial matters.

You have lamented over the years that teachers don’t make much money, and professional athletes and movie stars do. This is an unavoidable fact of a society based on buy-a-reason-to-exist commercialism. Those who create meaning are paid more money than those who don’t. You can follow the money and see who creates meaning for us in our society.

In fact, we don’t want teachers to do their jobs well. Society as we know it could be undermined as a result. We want the dullest, most uninspiring teachers to drive children away from any sort of meaning they could find (from the narratives of human thought), into the arms of the consumerist society. Education must give children a vocational training to be able to function well enough to hold down jobs to have money to buy stuff, but society does not want them to truly be educated, or they’d see through the emptiness of buy-a-reason-to-exist commercialism. Even the most innocent mention of the Pythagorean theorem could lead a curious child to Pythagoras and Plato, so educators in our society must be extremely careful, because they’re playing a dangerous game. There will always be some who are curious and search for the truth, but they’re branded (in the media, which has every reason to do it) as weird and abnormal. (Who created the “nerd” or “geek” stereotype, after all, but the media? Contrasted with the “cool” person who consumes the media without question, and is “cool” only insofar as the person conforms to the expectations of society?)

Education is always going to be a battleground. So much is at stake for it not to be. What issues do people really fight about? What won’t they back down from? Something which assaults the narrative story they’ve formed to give their lives meaning. For example: Do extreme environmentalists really care about losing some species no one knows exists, or do they care about losing their identity as the protectors of these helpless species? (After all, by their own evolutionary philosophy, an extinct species deserved its fate!) And so on: I could give examples all day. The key point is, if you see a fight brewing on almost any front you can imagine, it’s almost always going to be about a core issue of life narratives.

Do we buy products, or meaning? Look at how almost anything is sold. All people really need is a basic, dependable automobile, but that’s not how automobiles are sold. Nor watches, nor clothes, nor almost anything else. Products are sold as part of a narrative. If I buy some product, I will associate myself with a celebrity, or be part of the elite group who buys the right thing, or be better than someone else. Even people who consciously reject this system are like the free thinkers in the Christian age, defining themselves by what they oppose.

Look at television infomercials (an extreme example of buying meaning), which are successful because they tell a narrative story. We live in a society where anyone can buy the secrets to losing weight and building muscle tone, generating wealth, succeeding in life, cooking better food, getting divine healing, and so forth. Yet we are a society with an obesity epidemic, poor people, unsuccessful people unhappy about their jobs, fast food restaurants on every corner, and a lot of sick people! For that matter, America’s foremost success and achievement expert has seemingly little to show for his life: he is mostly known now as someone who divorced his wife, and who sells quack health products. He may (or may not) be able to help others, but he has been unsuccessful in creating a life of meaning for himself. Whatever you buy from infomercials doesn’t seem to have any real effect. It’s like a placebo for an authentic narrative experience. But people keep coming back to these infomercials, because they satisfy the need for a narrative, like the little cakes of dirt satisfy the need for the process of eating.

An alternative to the buy-a-reason-to-exist commercialism world is Eastern philosophy, which has become big in America since World War II, which was the time when existentialism took over as the dominant world view. We know this philosophy best largely from our music, especially Yes, although King Crimson has some Eastern ideas as well. (With Yes, “Close To The Edge” explores Buddhism, while Tales from Topographic Oceans and “Awaken” explore Hinduism/Yoga.)

The Eastern thinkers get it exactly backwards. They agree that we hunger for a narrative (they usually call it “discursive thought”), but then say that this desire is wrong, because what is real in the universe is eternal and unchanging. (The assumption that what is real does not change is, itself, meaningless, because the universe exists in time from moment to moment. Nothing exists which is not part of passing time, and therefore changing, which means by this measure there is nothing real. This sort of logical contradiction is quite naturally part of Eastern thought, and does not bother them. I suppose there is no reason why a narrative that explains life has to make any sense.) We should still the desires within us until they are extinguished. Instead of being seen as an essential need of humanity, the need to connect moment to moment, discursive thought is seen as a disease the universe has which must be gotten rid of.

On the surface, no one should want that cessation of their most essential need. Yet Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, and other Eastern philosophies have a great appeal. Why? I think it’s because people hurt. Eastern philosophy offers a way to stop the hurt through the cessation of individuality, and the extinction of individual consciousness is not too high a price to pay for some people. Not existing at all, which is what the East offers us, is better than existence in pain.

Someone people know that the buy-a-reason-to-exist commercialism is a lie, but they don’t know where to go. They hurt, so the world of Eastern philosophy offers them spiritual Novocain. It may not be the best solution, but it helps. (And, in the end, non-narrative religion falls back on narrative to explain itself. Arjuna talks to Krishna. One of the Upanishads has a boy talking to Death. The Buddha has countless discourses. The only way to explain no-thought is by discursive reasoning! It does not take long to see that Eastern religion is hollow and unsatisfying, and is more of an exercise in denial than anything else.)

Many religions say we have forgotten that we are divine, but that is the exact opposite of the truth: we remember we were divine, and know we are not anymore. Existentialism wouldn’t be so bad if that was all there was to life. We’d anaesthetize ourselves for a few years with a made-up meaning for life and die. So what?

Our problem is that each of us senses, to differing degrees, what is missing. We see clearly that what is gives us so much less than we instinctively know, a priori, is possible. We know because we were specifically designed to live in a world with telos, and instead we’re in an existential world. We are unable to be content with the cheap, worthless meaning we create for ourselves. We know we are feeding ourselves dirt, and know it is not nutritious and can’t sustain us. Deep inside, we want more: we want a telos, not our made-up, ersatz narratives about life.

Every culture has desired reunion with God in some way, because the cultures know that is where the telos will be found. There are no “atheistic” cultures. Even our modern atheists are creating their own meaning (through the narrative of evolutionism). They don’t call the telos they’re looking for “God”, but it serves in the same role for them. All people through history have tried to fill the gap, and none has succeeded. We can’t create our own story and tell it to God, and expect him to make our wishes reality. That’s because God is a personal God, not an idol. The only way we will ever connect with God is to hear his story and respond to it.

(C) Lewis and Joy

Immanuel Kant thought that all of reason and experience boiled down to three questions. I quote: “All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?”(Norman Kemp Smith translation). No one needs a narrative to know. No one needs a narrative to do. But to hope? Here is what sets the human apart from all the rest of creation. Hope means a longing, a desiring. We want something more than our current experience. We want to be swept up into a story that doesn’t end. To be present in it. To know we are going somewhere, and what we’re doing now has some purpose (telos) which will ultimately be plain to us.

The Bible has two technical terms for this longing: Shalom (Hebrew) and soteria (Greek). Both have the same basic meaning of wholeness, a return to the completeness and wellness we sense so clearly is missing. Because they mean completeness, they offer us a telos.

In the story that is told by the Christian faith, we find the telos we’re longing for. It’s been there all along. Through the sustained efforts of countless people over several centuries, Christianity as a narrative to explain life has been snuffed out and replaced by existentialism. The ultimate purpose has been replaced by the ultimate absurdity. But we still, as isolated and alone individuals, can’t find a telos which satisfies the desires and longing in each of us.

That leads to the next question: Why was J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings the book of the century (as voted by readers) in the 20^th century? One would expect something by John-Paul Sarte to have taken that prize, since he so completely diagnosed the problem that the century faced. If not him, then someone who turned his ideas into fiction, like Jack Kerouac. (Or, James Joyce: Shippley suggests Joyce’s monumentally pointless work Ulysses was the rival to Tolkien for the honor. I’ve never managed to slog through more than the first chapter or two of Ulysses, but I can certainly guarantee you it is devoid of any hint of telos that you might long for!) The critics were astounded by this turn of events. Why would a vote taken by readers put Tolkien on top?

Because Tolkien understood telos and the narrative. His long essay, On Fairy Stories, is a distillation of his ideas. His Lord of the Rings is their practical outworking. For countless isolated, alone individuals over the century, Lord of the Rings gave them their missing narrative. Maybe life has a telos after all. And, of course, it’s fantasy. Tolkien wrote in an era of time when no other vehicle could be used for such a purpose. No one would take him seriously if he used any other form.

Good fantasy is not escapism. What good fantasy does is give us practice: the practice of existing in a narrative that gives us telos. Once we try it, we like it. Once we see it is possible to understand the world as a narrative and to have a telos, we want more. We want to partake more fully. Sure, bad fantasy is escapism, which just gives us a distraction from reality for a few moments without changing anything. But good fantasy is a pointer, which points us towards true myth.

Tolkien understood true myth. We think of “myth” as a false, or made-up, story, but that is a modern degeneration of the word’s original meaning. Myth is simply a narrative that explains something. And that’s what I’ve been saying we require to live successfully. Tolkien explained this idea to C. S. Lewis, and C. S. Lewis became a Christian as a result. Lewis had heavy artillery that Tolkien lacked, a background in, and aptitude for explaining with clarity, philosophy.

Lewis’ principle contribution was his idea of Joy. Lewis defines his term Joy as “an unsatisfied desire which itself is more desirable than any other satisfaction”, from Surprised By Joy, chapter 1, “The Early Years”, and says Joy’s “experience is one of intense longing ... acute and even painful, yet the mere wanting is felt to be somehow a delight. ... [T]his desire, even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, continues to be prized, and even preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it.” (In the “Afterword to the Third Edition” of Pilgrim’s Regress.) Lewis’ Joy is evoked by experiences, but the experience itself is not the cause of Joy, which arises spontaneously within a person.

The most important distinction Lewis made is that Joy is a longing that only increases longing and can never be satisfied. We want the experience to go on forever.

Lewis never fully created an articulation of what Joy was. His works hint all around it. It took Peter Kreeft to take these loose threads and create a narrative out of it, weaving in the various ideas of human thought with an explanation of our need for narrative, and how Joy was the telos we’d been looking for all along. This is the book Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing, which systematizes Joy and contrasts it with other belief systems.

The fact is, existentialism is true. Completely true. Life is truly absurd. Life means nothing. But we want it to mean something. We do not, necessarily, have a priori knowledge of the world (as Plato suggested in his theory of Recollection), but we do have an a priori design to see the world as a narrative, because we are designed to cognitively function in a universe of successive moments and connect the moments together. What we lack is the true myth that accurately gives us the telos.

Christianity calls this situation the fallen world: the world in which God no longer teaches us this myth when we come into the world, because we have chosen to go it alone (i.e. live in an existential world rather than a world with God-given telos). We’re on our own, and create our own narrative, but it is not satisfactory. For whatever reason, when God created us, he did so in a way that let us choose our own narrative to explain life. He wanted us to choose his narrative, and be totally fulfilled. But we did not. We coveted the freedom to be like God, and write our own story of why we existed, and now that we have this freedom, we realize that we don’t want it.

I am a Reformed Christian because that particular branch, which I consider to be the most doctrinally pure branch, believes in total depravity. I am not sure I like the name, since “total” can be misleading. Total usually indicates extent, while the sense of the word in the classic Calvinist phrase means pervasiveness. The best way I’ve found to think about it as a taint. This sin nature is not merely about keeping the rules, God’s or whoever else’s. It is about a pervasive inability to achieve the telos we are meant for. No matter how much we want our telos, the fact that the world is tainted with sin means we will never get what we want. Our desires and longings will never be satisfied.

Probably the best book ever written on the sin nature is Soren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death. If you read that book, you’ll see what I mean about a taint. There is no concise way to summarize the book. He is discussing how we are free to create our own meaning, but when we do so, we despair. We need more and know we can’t give more to ourselves. Kierkegaard’s view of the sin nature is the most profound Christian discussion I have encountered.

You may not like the Christian story. You may not want it to be true, and you may prefer to create your own narrative for your existence. But the Christian story is the true myth. The story fits all the facts of the fallen world with its taint, and is the best comprehensive explanation for the life we are living that has ever been offered.

God has communicated to us by telling us a story. It’s the Bible. How else would he communicate with creatures who see life as a narrative, other than by giving them a narrative? God is a personal God, and he created us to understand meaning and telos through narrative. So, after we fell, he told us a story about how we can get back to where we should be. The narrative is about Jesus, who was both God and man, and how he is The Way we have been looking for to get us back into the true narrative which gives us our telos so life makes sense again.

(D) You Can’t Get There From Here

Where does this leave us? We are left knowing what we want, but not how we can get it, or even if we can get it. We know there is a true narrative in which we can live, and be completely caught up in the most satisfying experience possible while still longing for more, and we want this narrative to continue forever. And we can’t have it! Not in this life.

We see this everywhere we look. Here is a real-life example: The New Mutants.  In 1986, right at the time I moved, right before I got sick, I found this comic book. I had read comic books, as a sort of escapist habit, for years, but this was the one single comic which utterly, totally engrossed me. It presented the perfect narrative form: A group of outcasts about my age, in their teens, are mutants who go to a new school and try to shape a new life for themselves that, while not perfect, will at least give them a foundation and support for existence. It was a group of imperfect kids who tried to hang together as friends in spite of their problems and differences. That’s a narrative that gives meaning to what happens in their lives. (This achievement of mythos creation is unknown in the world of comic books, and may be unique. This may be the only good fantasy ever in a comic book.) But, and it’s a big but: This comic’s magic ended so quickly, it was like a drug withdrawal. As soon as I discovered it, the artist who brought these characters to life moved on. Then the writer who had this magnificent vision left the comic. It turned into garbage which I couldn’t stand to read. While I might have lost a new comic each month, what captivated me wasn’t drawings on the page. Remember the Zen story: the finger which points to the moon is not the moon! This comic book wasn’t the mythos, but the finger that pointed to the mythos. I lost the comic, but had captured the mythos forever as a part of me. I had tapped into the feeling of Joy. That’s the way it always is.

(The few stories and music albums I’ve encountered which suggest Joy, and are composed of more mythos than escapism, fascinate me because they are flotsam. No thread connects them, and they appear to have nothing whatsoever in common. There is no rhyme or reason to be found in who created them, when they were created, or how I discovered them. I often wonder if mythos which points to the true myth is not, itself, a true story; but one which comes to us only as echoes or shadows of the actual story. We haven’t begun to understand the organization of the universe, and there is no way to dismiss that our universe doesn’t have other dimensions. Could dimensionality have been affected by the fall, too? Could Heaven be the reunion of splintered dimensions? Does God give storytellers in our universe brief glimpses into others? A telling clue is the fact that most authors like Tolkien claim they are simply writing down something that seems to already exist in their minds. Maybe some day we’ll find there really was an Xavier’s school, in another dimension, and the author of the comic was given only a brief glance into the stories unfolding there. And, even more surprising to us, we’ll find our stories influenced them as much as their stories influenced us! I suppose the resolution of this line of speculation will be one of the best elements of going to heaven. And always remember: the finger is not the moon, and we are only seeing the shadow of the finger.)

The experience was gone as soon as I had found it. But that’s life. An engrossing lecture ends. You realize you’ve pretty much learned all you can about a computer system. You read the last page of a book, and hear the end of a song. There’s a lingering. But it ends. Even Tales from Topographic Oceans must end, even though it seems like it never will once you start listening to it, especially when the third movement begins and your finger itches to press the fast-forward button. Even if you can wrap yourself up into Tales completely, and abandon yourself into the music without any other thought or interruption, in about eighty minutes, it will be over. Then you’re back where you were! Nothing has changed.

What is the final end? Death. The finality of the end of life gives us the key. If existentialism and the isolated individual is a truth we must cope with in life, and there can’t be any other conclusion about this life (and no one has ever found any other satisfactory conclusion), how do we find, or go back to, this Joy? We have to end our stay in the world of existentialism and transfer ourselves to the world of Joy. That is where we will find our telos.

When I die, it’s either The End (total annihilation), or more of the same (reincarnation, eternal punishment, etc). Or, I can be made whole. I can have the soteria I long for which will put me back into the telos I desire. My only chance is: if this world is fallen, and if it can be put back whole and right again, and if I can somehow share in the experience I have been longing for, then I will be saved. That’s a tall order, and an almost impossible hope. Yet it’s all I have. Otherwise, this life really is meaningless, and I’ll never have more than this life offers, and every second of my existence is a waste of time.

Conclusion

I know that existence can’t be (or at least shouldn’t be even if it appears to be) a waste of time, because I am wired up a priori for my life to have a narrative structure through which I interpret the world, and a telos which gives my life meaning. I can’t not know that any more than a starving person can’t not know he needs to eat, even if he doubts that food exists. As a result of this built-in knowledge, I search for salvation: the grace of soteria which will put things right again.

If there is even a chance to be saved, though, my task, and indeed my obsession, is to find out my telos and realize it. This is what I have been doing over the years, looking in all the different places I’ve looked.

At this point, Jesus Christ comes in. He is, at the same time, both God and man. He is both the desire for Joy, and its telos. Through him, and only through him, can we ever find what we are looking for. He will remove the taint from us. Through Christ, we have the shalom and soteria we long for. Through Christ we are made whole. In Christ, I have found The Way to experience the true myth and give my life the missing telos.

In the final reflection, I have come up against my inability to articulate these beliefs, any more than a fish could articulate the ocean in which it exists.

Sincerely, with the hope that these thoughts will help,

Scott