I am an Optimist.
“Neither glib, nor glum”
What does it mean to be a Christian person?
It means, at least, this: we are to be people of unbridled hope. After all, Christ is victorious! He has won. He has defeated death! He has made “public spectacle” of the powers, namely Sin and Death. And this victory is both irreversible (nothing can change it!) AND eschatological (it is the future). As Jenson joyously wrote, “The end is music.” He is “a fugue song.”
In other words, God is successful… and “… the church is the sign and the historical manifestation of the victorious success of God’s self-communication” (Rahner).
This is true success, unlike “success” in the vernacular of today which is merely a descriptor of means. This is the “success” that is descriptive of the real End of all ends: the music of God, our fugue song!
And so I’ve been thinking about what that should mean attitudinally. Doesn’t it mean that we should be at least optimistic? Even happy? Not in a glib way, of course. Shouldn’t the fact that things really will work out (read: eschatological triumph) make us happy? Not because of our capacities or our devices. But because of Christ?
After all, as Dom Boylan says, “He can make a success of every soul whose love he seeks.”
And yet… I meet SO many Christians who are glum! Or possess a kind of brittle gaiety. Not triumphant. But triumphalist.
What is it about Christianity today that breeds glumness? Deconstruction? Reconstruction after deconstruction? The Gnosticism smuggled into our thinking about the life worth living, which ends up amounting to techniques of survival (read: Han)? The raft of pastoral moral failure that has not just destroyed the confidence of those watching the church, but also those who attend church?
Glumness spreads. It’s not inertial. It goes somewhere. Where?
Ressentiment.
I read once in a survey of the philosophical situationist Vaneigem that those in “the Christian church” are “purveyors of ressentiment to the masses.” Ressentiment is the Nietzsche-an deep seated resentment that comes from envy and powerlessness. James D. Hunter also invoked ressentiment to describe the modern day church, especially the wing that funded the Religious Right. What animates the Pat Robertsons et. al. of the RR? This deep seated resentment. Injury. We have been injured, so we will whinge and injure in return.
But it’s not just the RR that is subject to ressentiment. It’s also found, as Hunter asserts, in the Anabaptists and the liberals. It’s everywhere, infecting even our most beloved Christian poets who write not so much luminously as morosely. The end of the fine anthology of Christian poetry “Christian Poetry in America Since 1940” (that I hand out liberally) tends toward the somber.
But… this should not be!
I’m not at all saying that we should glibly ignore grief, trial or hardship. After all, lament is the frequent song of the Psalter. There are valleys. Psalm 23 is a song for the valley. And we should not be platitudinous in our comfort of those who long for “the Rock that is higher than I.” We do undulate, as creatures both animalian and Spiritual. We are “hybrid creatures” and this binds us to ups and downs on this side of the eschaton, as Lewis once wisely wrote.
And of course, this is about a certain kind of humility. Christ is the success, and not we, or at least not we in the sense that we are the agents of this success. The Gospel is that Christ has done it. And has done it for us in love and boundless regard!
Lewis, again:
“Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody.
“Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him.”
It’s the cheerful part that gets me. Not the “real interest” (though I could stand to work on that part, too - Christ, help me!).
Perhaps reading the Psalms is the way, because the Psalter is not just about lament, it’s charged with praise. It ends on a high note, riding the songs of Ascent. And I submit to you (and of course, to me!) that your attitude should reflect the reason for the praise. Christ is triumphant! And as a result, so are we.