All our talk last week about the spiritual sickness in the culture was pretty heavy, so I figured I’d watch something on Netflix to lighten the mood. Great plan, except I forgot Netflix is a product of our culture, which has…a spiritual sickness. Like, whoah.
The runaway streaming hit of the moment is Baby Reindeer, a limited series by one of these confessional anti-comedians whose life stories spiral off into excruciating tales of mental illness and drug abuse. This is the same as the old kind of stand-up comedy except not all that funny. Baby Reindeer is at least well produced and compulsively watchable. It’s about a guy who gets sucked into a twisted cat-and-mouse game with his stalker, in which his own psychosexual trauma leads him to self-destruct using her as an accessory. It sure did lift my spirits.
My actual reaction was one I’ve never quite experienced before. I’ve always felt that any corner of human life, however grimy, can be usefully illuminated by a skillful artistic portrayal. But here was an obviously true-to-life portrait of a woefully damaged man, rendered in painfully expert detail. And all I could think at the end was, ok, what did I get from that?
It reminded me of nothing so much as another passingly viral micro-sensation, the New Yorker short story “Cat Person.” That too was an exacting catalogue of botched and emotionally ambiguous sexual encounters. The details were very different, but it left me feeling similarly unsure what I had gained from peering so closely at such a tortured soul. Some stirrings of compassion, a little revulsion if I’m honest, and a few more wisps of despair at the state of things that quickly diffused into an already clouded atmosphere.
I guess my sense of it is this: in our present degraded situation, even our pain feels muted and hazy. I don’t know that Hannah Arendt was right about the banality of evil: I think it’s more like the monotony of evil. Any Christian revival worth the name will have to solve this problem, the problem of not-enoughness. There is simply not enough of us.
We confuse joy with happiness, and so we take a kind of shallow cheer as a measure of piety, as if Christ died so we could all be as convincingly chipper as possible. But my experience since being baptized is that pain and pleasure both have grown sharper, like a picture coming into focus. I cry more now—like, way more, and for every possible reason. Because death is so hideously unjust. Because the meanest flower that blows is so titanically beautiful.
That’s what I meant last week when I said it’s Christ’s humanity that saves us as much as his godhead: whatever the church looks like in the future, its members will be marked by the size of their sorrows as well as their delight. We weren’t offered enjoyment of life so much as more of it—in abundance. More than even the grave can swallow up.
Certain things always made me a bit emotional: uncommon valor, self-sacrifice, military funerals. Nowadays, more things get me misty-eyed than ever before, such as honor and integrity. I can only assume that is because these things once were so commonplace as to be expected, whereas now they seem so rare. When I see them now, it fills me with emotion.
Our culture has become so egocentric that the thought of patriotism or death-before-dishonor are jokes. Objective, moral truth doesn’t seem to exist within a certain segment of society, and that segment will be running the country—or what’s left of it—before too long and they have been taught to hate the very foundations of the Judeo-Christian West. Self-sacrifice? This group wears black bloc and shouts in pain when handcuffed, or cries aloud about their bonafides, as if it should be a proof against apprehension. No, there is no honor, valor, sacrifice, or integrity in this group.
No wonder I get emotional when I see what once was commonplace.
Souls so damaged. This is why it is so urgent we protect our children. From pedophiles, from sex trafficking, from teachers indoctrinating their version of sex ( or should I say) gender “education”, from woman-face men in women’s bathroom and locker rooms, and so called doctors abusing Olympic athletes or college women. Anyone who saw the movie “The Sound of Freedom” - with its heartbreaks and even its “triumph” felt that - though saved, these kids experienced things that no child should ever encounter. The more kids damaged, the more heartbreak ensues. Christ had a forgiving heart, to be sure, but he made it quite clear -in Matthew, Mark and Luke - “But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.”