Letter #58: Christ Bandicoot

In "Jesus the Video Game," Victory is Joy

Sponge!

Oddly enough, I’ve been watching Baby Reindeer too. I haven’t finished it yet. But so far, I confess, I don’t find it “compulsively watchable.” Rather, I have to force myself to return to it.

I share your sense that it's a more or less accurate depiction of “our present degraded situation.” What’s missing for me is that “palimpsest” effect you spoke of in your previous letter, that feeling we are seeing “one moment, two realities… The grim machinery of a world in the grips of sin’s dominion,” grinding away while a more “fearsome cosmic drama” plays out simultaneously.

That description reminded me of a different kind of art. We’ve remarked that these conversations are a continuation of talks we’ve had on hikes and over drinks and cigars. But what about video games? If memory serves, we've also talked a lot while playing everything from Crash Bandicoot to Prince of Persia to Gears of War.

Ah, Gears of War!

As I watch the spiritually dead characters in Baby Reindeer — and the spiritually dead children chanting mindless slogans on college campuses — I can’t help thinking of NPC’s, those automated Non-Playable Characters who populate the video game landscape over which the hero marches through danger to victory. A hero among automatons: that strikes me as a good depiction of the soul in the world.

Jesus: The Video Game. That’s my kind of salvation!

Here’s some dialogue from one of the Cut Scenes: “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

This suggests a vision of how to live, how to live joyfully, right here, right now.

C. S. Lewis once wrote: “I have often thought to myself how it would have been if, when I served in the first world war, I and some young German had killed each other simultaneously and found ourselves together a moment after death. I cannot imagine that either of us would have felt any resentment or even any embarrassment. I think we might have laughed over it.”

He wasn’t talking about quietism or moral relativism. But Lewis knew that we are eternal spirits and therefore “what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature.”

To live and act in that knowledge is to develop what therapists call "the observing self." This is the part of you that knows and loves yourself even when you are caught in the grip of anger, envy, greed or lust. This is the spirit that can be taught to know and love others in the same way, and so see the world with sorrow and yet live in joy.

To become fully that spirit is to morph from NPC to hero. Which might be what it looks like to win the game.

Yer Pater.