The Three Specters

The Three Specters

I consider losing my faith to be the greatest achievement of my life. It opened the door to a new world. But it didn’t happen without struggle. In fact, losing my faith was the most painful thing I have ever experienced. Because faith met three vital needs in my life: my need for meaning, for need for motivation, and my need for belonging.   

Meaning, Motivation, and Belonging

My faith gave life meaning. Even when things seemed confusing pointless there was no need to worry. I was part of God’s story. The Bible explained where I came from, where I was going, and what the point of my life was, and most of all, who was in charge. All I had to do was trust in God and keep the faith.

The Christian narrative also gave me hope for the future which met my need for motivation. I might not know what the future held, but I knew who held the future. God had things under control. When I was going through a hard time I could rest assured that weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning. I was bound for the Promised Land, on my way to a happy ending.

Best of all, the Christian story met my need for belonging. Was the world treating me badly? Jesus understood and felt my pain. My sufferings were the fellowship of his sufferings. I could rest assured that just as God loved Jesus, God loved me. Plus, I had a Christian family. I belonged.

Christianity met three essential needs: meaning, motivation, and belonging.

Maybe you’re not religious. You’re still in the same boat. Foundational stories don’t have to be religious. Maybe you put your faith in a story of family, or nation, or money, or conquest, or accomplishment. Whatever your story, I’ll bet if you look at it, you’ll see that it satisfies these three basic needs.

This is why the breakdown of story is so terrifying. You lose all three. Without meaning you are cast into nihilism. Without motivation you fall into despair. And if you don’t belong you feel alienated. Life seems stupid. You lose the will to live. Without a story to believe, what’s the point?

When my story shattered, the first thing I felt was the three Specters. It was as real as if six malevolent eyes were glowing at me in the darkness. I hated them. I tried to avoid them. I told them to beat it. But they remained such frequent visitors that I learned their faces and gave them names: Ignarus, Vanitas, and Rapax. Today, we face the Specters together.

Ignarus: Dissolver of faith

Back in the early 2000’s millions were all captivated by the television series LOST. The survivors of Oceanic flight 815 found themselves in the wreckage of a burning plane on a mysterious island. No one could remember where they had come from or how they got there.

When they explored the island, thing got even weirder. There were polar bears, a smoke monster, and a tribe of “others” on the other side of the island. Each episode added to the mystery. As the questions piled up, we tuned in, eager for answers. As the seasons dragged on, it became clear that no answers were coming. The writers were good at raising questions but when it came to answers, they were, well, lost.

The primary appeal of LOST is the way it mirrors our existence. Just as the survivors of flight 815 arrived on a mysterious island, so we arrived on this tiny blue ball. Was it an accident? Is there someone or something behind it? Is there any point to it? Will there be a rescue? Like the survivors in LOST, you set out to explore, and have a similar experience.

The closer you look the stranger things get. Einstein discovered that time is woven together with space. Astronomers tell of an invisible force called “dark matter” which is clearly there but for which they have no explanation. At the quantum level all of our assumptions fly out the window. Every discovery raises a dozen new questions. Like the writers of LOST, we can’t find the answers. 

One thing is for sure. We are lost. You would think this would be all we talked about but we rarely discuss it. Our ignorance is hard to look at so we turn away from it, the way we avoid looking at the sun. We lower our gaze and get on with the day. Since the real world blows our mind, we build a narrative world and live in that instead.

But our narrative world is made up. Reality could crash it at any time. All our belief is make-belief.  It’s not safe. Humans have discovered a lot in our short stay on this planet but nothing has changed the fact that we are lost. If anything, the harder we look, the more mysterious things get. The more we learn, the deeper our sense of lostness.

If we are lost, how can life have meaning? How can we know the meaning of it all when we don’t even know what “it all” is?

And so, Ignarus dissolves our faith.

Vanitas: End of hope

Vanitas ruins your story by eliminating a happy ending. The problem with happy endings is not so much with the “happy” as with the “endings.” We come to a happy place in life, but time marches on. You reach the end of the rainbow and find “No Camping” sign there. The only final ending is death. Father Time becomes the Grim Reaper.

When you are young you don’t think about these things. Life stretches out before you like an eternity. But as the decades roll by and you reach the end of a few stories, you start to notice that hope is a carrot on a stick. That thing you thought would make you happy didn’t last. You kept having to say, “What’s next?” Eventually, you realized that what ever was next, it would not satisfy.

During my dark night, when I was at my lowest, a children’s song got stuck in my head. 

Three blind mice, three blind mice,
See how they run, see how they run.
They all ran after the farmer’s wife, who cut of their tales with a carving knife.
Have you ever seen such a sight in your life, as three blind mice?

I spelled tails t-a-l-e-s. Getting married, becoming a pastor, building a house, having kids… all of these were happy moments; they were not happy endings. It’s no coincidence that Cinderella and the Handsome Prince disappear over the horizon to live happily ever after. If we followed them, we might learn that the Handsome Prince forgot the directions and Cinderella had a stomach ache, or that they started to argue about how many children to have. The Promised Land is always somewhere over the rainbow, in the AFTERlife, not in this one.

This is not a new discovery. The writer of Ecclesiastes said, “Vanity of vanities! All if vanity!” and went on to complain, “Everything is wearisome beyond description.” He is not alone. Jagger can’t get no satisfaction. Bono still hasn’t found what he’s looking for. Me neither.

Emily Dickinson called hope “the thing with feathers” but the Biblical image of hope as an anchor is more apt. Hope is the thing that takes you straight to the bottom of the ocean and drowns you there. Every Paradise is soon a Paradise lost.

Life is a game you cannot win. Why play? Why not sit it out? Just as Ignarus destroyed the meaning of your life, so Vanitas erases the motivation to go on. You go to bed and pull the covers over your head. What’s the point?

Ignarus destroys faith. Vanitas brings an end to hope. The worst is yet to come.

Rapax: Devourer of love

Looking back, I see that I based my life on three lies: faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these was love. If love had proven true, I would kept patching up my story and making do with it. I would have been willing to keep believing that somehow God would fulfill my hopes at some future time. But I could not ignore the pain of Rapax.

The death of love was excruciating, like a splinter in my foot. I had to face it. I did not give up on love willingly. I fought it every step of the way. But four painful facts were impossible to ignore.

Painful Fact #1: God is not love

I bet my life that God loved me and would care for me. I took Matthew 6:33 literally.

“Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you.”

I read that to mean that if I put God first in my life, there was no need to worry about things like finding a wife or making money. But it didn’t work that way. I would wait and wait on God, then take matters into my own hands. You might say that my action was God’s way of providing, that the Lord helps those who help themselves. To me, this is just another way of saying the Lord does not help at all, that I am on my own. That’s sure how it felt.

In my junior year of college, a teenager drowned on a water skiing outing I was in charge of. Where was the love of God that day? So many things could have prevented his death. It seemed so random. Good things happened. Bad things happened. It was hard to believe in a God who did good all the time, who worked all things out to everyone’s benefit. This was neither my observation nor my experience.

Hell didn’t make sense either. Jesus commands us to forgive sinners and not to judge. He proceeds to judge the whole world and cast millions into eternal torment. This is the God of love?

One day, out of the blue, my teenage daughter had a seizure. That night at the hospital, I didn’t pray. Not a word. I had come to the conclusion that no one was listening. I had to face it: God—if there was a God—did not love me.

Painful Fact #2: Predation (not love) makes the world go round

When we were living in Seattle and I was in the midst of my dark night, I went to the mountains for inspiration. The mosquitoes were so thick I could not take a bite of food without swallowing at least two. As they buzzed around my head, I wondered who set things up like this. It looked to me like when God commanded Adam to “kill and eat,” he accidentally hit “Cc all.” Bugs are a feature, not a bug. The word prey so woven into our existence that it describes both what we are and what we do. Let us prey.

The world is beautiful to behold but don’t look too closely. Beauty is the mask nature wears to hide her atrocities. If you investigate, you’ll discover it is not love that makes the world go ‘round. It is predation. It’s a food fight and everything is on the menu, including you.

Painful Fact #3. Nobody loves me

In church, we were supposed to be a community that embodied the love of God but I quickly learned that people came with agendas. If I failed to meet them, there was a problem. Some tried to correct me. Others tried to force me. In the end, if I failed to comply, they left. 

I was raised by good parents and have two kind sisters. My wife is the finest person I have ever known and I’m proud of our three kids. But I found the limits of love, even within my family. If I said the wrong thing or let them down in some way, it created tension. As in nature, everyone is in it for themself. The only one in it for me, is me.

As much as we would like to pretend we are apart from Nature, we are very much a part of it, red in tooth and claw. We are like everything else in this word: predators, pure and simple.

We live in a cult of human goodness and love is the Kool-Aid. Love is our most cherished illusion. We like the idea that we are good and giving, like God. But just like God, we are not good or giving. We’re just hungry.

Another children’s song echoed in my mind.

Nobody loves me,
Everybody hates me,
Guess I’ll go eat worms.

Poor worms. Poor us. Poor everything.

Painful Fact #4: I am not a loving person

What was true of others was true of me. Love was a mask of virtue I wore to disguise my teeth. Nearly everything I do in the course of a day is an effort to gain an advantage with others in some way. I want to think of myself as a giving person but the truth is that I’m on the prowl, just like everyone else.

I decided to stop gaslighting myself. I can no more escape the fact that I am a predator than I can escape the fact of gravity. I am the center of my gravitational field, just as others are the center of theirs. I may not like it, but that is how it is.

And so, I faced four painful truths about love: 1) God is not love. 2) Predation (not love) makes the world go round. 3) Nobody loves me. And 4) I am not a loving person. Rapax was the hardest Specter to face.   

Conclusion

And so, the three Specters devour every human story.

• Ignarus destroys our faith, leaving us in nihilism, to live a life without meaning. 
• Vanitas brings an end to every hope, leaving us in despair to live a life without motivation.
• Rapax bursts the illusion of love, leaving us alienated from others with nowhere to belong.

Ouch. This is dark. Where do you you go from here? There are only two choices. You must either face the Specters or spend your life hiding from them. There is no way around them.

Nearly everyone chooses to hide. Next week we will visit the Devil’s Playground. This is where we go to avoid the Specters. It’s crowded there.

I know these chapters are hard. Don’t lose hope. This journey is not over. In the coming weeks we will see that the darkness not a dead end. It is a door.