I thought momentarily about waking up before the rosy-fingered dawn to write something scintillating, but, narrator, I did not. I slept until a reasonable hour and then stared into the middle distance. Then I took the bold, brave step of figuring out how to start a chat thread here on Substack, where I am haphazardly letting paid subscribers know what’s happening here at the Anglican Diocese of the Living Word’s annual Synod. Which is a too long way of saying that I don't have seven takes, but only one—the technological fog of this age invites too many of us to mistake arrogance for humility and humility for arrogance.
Some pink young man, who ought to clad himself in a shirt, plunking away on a keyboard in front of a pool, sings a dumb song about how nothing matters and so it doesn't matter what you do. The lyrics are so much cope:
I'm pretty sure that life doesn't have a meaning!
And if there's a god then he doesn't look like me!
And I'm just a member of the current apex species!
(But there will be another when the humans go extinct!)
We've only been around 200,000 years of 13.5 Billion years!
How can we think the pinnacle is here?
Isn't that arrogant?
There's a couple hundred billion trillion suns
And we act like it was all made for us?
There ain't no way that we're the only ones!
I'm not important, and neither are you
So let’s do whatever we wanna do
Bask in our cosmic insignificance, soak up this blip we're living in
Cause nothing matters anyway
Isn't that GREAT?
No, actually, it isn't great. It’s not great because it isn't true. The young man, at least in the back of his darkened mind, knows it isn't true. Else why use the exclamation point over and over again? If you’re really looking for justification to “do whatever you wanna” you need to try a little harder than this. Not being “important” is not the same as "having no meaning.” Of course God doesn’t look like a slightly sunburnt, sarcastic, pasty young person. But that doesn’t mean that he didn’t make all this for us. He made us for himself and gave us the earth. And no, you can’t just do whatever you want—neither can I—because you do matter. You have an eternal soul that was created by God. It’s not hard to understand. All you have to do is put down your phone and think a few new thoughts for a couple of minutes.
I'm interested in the question of insignificance--or rather significance, which has to do with the meaning the “singer” says doesn't exist. How does he know that “life” doesn’t have “meaning?” He couldn’t even express such an idea if that were true. He’s using language, after all, and a set of musical notes that are deeply mediocre, obviously on purpose. If he can use language with his mind and body and spirit, to communicate with all those who happen by across the interwebs, if he can conjure up a leer and exhort us to regard our unimportance as people, if he can grasp that strange and perilous idea of humility, of taking a lower place, all to deny the God whom he declares does not exist, then he is a poor fool. He cannot possibly really believe what he is saying, not really.
Not to change the subject—but to go about in a different way—someone named Jason Pargin, who I have never before heard of, explains why it's so hard to face responding to the avalanche of incoming messages that has become the background of ordinary life for everyone who can’t afford to hire a private secretary to handle the sheer volume of communication. I have lately--again--begun to feel the "overwhelm," to lean on a Gen Z word, of having to face my inbox. It weighs heavy on my mind, but I lack the power to deal with it. In fact, doing email feels like having one’s liver picked out again by a large predatory bird several times a day—who was that? Oh yes, Prometheus. Replying to email feels like the Prometheus and Sisyphus have come to live in my heart.
It didn’t used to be that way. Email, when it was the only thing, was perfectly fine. But when it is one way out of ten of being contacted, it becomes the straw that breaks the back. What a delight to be reminded that being "on call" has never been a thing in human history, except for very important, very stressed people. Of which I do not consider myself one.
I think of other atheists like the poet Phillip Larkin who sort take the horror of the abyss and walk away with this conclusion (spoiler alert, not do whatever you want):
The Mower
BY PHILIP LARKIN
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
“Replying to email feels like the Prometheus and Sisyphus have come to live in my heart.” Ha! So much yes. Makes me want to chuck all the devices into the pond. But I won’t and instead I’ll go to church and have my soul refreshed. Happy Sunday!