On Tuesday, November 5th, Donald J. Trump was elected 47th president of the United States. As one can imagine, the national reaction is one giant mixed bag of emotion. In this post today I want to focus on two emotions on either end of the spectrum. Despair on one end, and happiness on the other. Why these two specifically? Because both require belief in a supposition. On one hand, you have those who believe Trump is a Hiterlian figure bound to destroy democracy. The candidate they hoped would protect them from this fate disappointed them. Harris’ loss was their enthusiasm gone astray–that is, their despair. On the other hand, you have those who believe Trump will make America great again. It is upon his administration that they pin their hopes and dreams. Dream Big Again read the sign at the West Palm Beach watch party. Believe in the future again, and isn’t happiness built on the belief of better times ahead?
With the understanding that I’m analyzing the two extremes, I want to explore the characteristics of both despair and happiness and learn how a Christian can use these emotions to calibrate their relationship with God.
Do You Believe In Miracles?
Miracle is one of my favorite movies of all time. It tells the story of the 1980 Olympic hockey team as twenty disparate players unify under one flag. There’s a scene about two-thirds of the way through the movie that is a defining moment in their team bonding. They’ve been playing together for about six months. The 1980 winter games are roughly two months away. It’s Christmas time and spirits are high. The team’s happiness, constructed from values I’m about to discuss, is contrasted beautifully with Jimmy Carter’s Crisis of Confidence speech, which is playing on the radio in the coach’s car as he drives home to his family. Take a look.
“Working together with our common faith,” says President Carter as future Olympic champions unite around football in the backyard one winter evening, their celebration mirroring that of their celebration on ice in Lake Placid two months later. “We cannot fail.”
Carter’s speech defines the problem for us, the obstacle we face as a country, which is really the obstacle we face as individuals.
“The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways . . . It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation.”
Loss of a unity of purpose. Less and less do we think about “our Nation’s hopes, our dreams, and our vision of the future.” Instead, we’re more concerned with, as JFK put it, what our country can do for us, not what we can do for our country. This outlines the first value that I think leads to the kind of happiness exemplified at the end of Miracle. The boys put in the work. They sacrificed time and energy to become the most conditioned team ever assembled on ice. Sacrifice. You see it on Coach Herb’s face in the scene when he picks up the note his daughter left for him. “We left the star for you.” There is tension between being there for his family and coaching a winning team.
“There is simply no way to avoid sacrifice,” as Carter says in his speech.
Proud To Be An American
The other values whose losses in the American culture contributed to the crisis of confidence can be enumerated in Tom Brokaw’s book, The Greatest Generation. “Personal responsibility, honor, duty, honor, and faith.” These are the values Brokaw attributes to the World War Two generation, a generation Carter fought alongside. These are American values because they are largely Christian values. And as America has become a post-Christian nation, the personal, and therefore national qualities that established the United States as a world power are likewise falling out of style.
I’m not saying that if you adopt these values of personal responsibility, honor, duty, and a sacrificial spirit that you will be happy. The Bible does not promise us happiness. What it does promise us is a purpose: to glorify God and make him known. I think happiness comes from fulfilling a role, whether it be a hockey player, a parent, or a president. We can’t all be president, but we can all accept our role as ambassadors for Christ. And as it turns out, this role is one that we can’t age out of. Every other ambition may be chasing after wind–while providing purpose for a little while will not bring us lasting joy–but to become a man or woman after God’s own heart is playing the eternal game.
A nation under God means we are subject to His reality. What He called good, we cannot call bad. We can try, but reality will kick us in the teeth. This is Carter’s Crisis of Confidence; it’s Americans ushering in the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the moral relativity of postmodernism, experiencing disunity and a sense of meaninglessness, and then wondering where things went so wrong. This isn’t to say American life was utopian bliss before the 60s, but it was a time when the values of Brokaw’s Greatest Generation were widespread and socially encouraged.
Carter summarizes this shift in cultural priority.
“In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”
Self-indulgence and consumption. We’re knocking on the door of despair here. A reliance on the finite can only lead to feeling empty, or worse, betrayed. I believe this accounts for much of the anger and tears on display from certain Democrat affiliates since Tuesday.
But first–despair. What is it, what can it do, and what are its symptoms?
The Sickness Unto Death
Since much wiser persons than me have tackled these questions, I’ll spare you from handing in my own definition. In his book Faith and Reason, Ronald Nash gives a definition of despair inspired from Danish theologian and philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.
“Despair is essentially enthusiasm that has gone astray, that has lost its bearings; it is a zeal for things that either disappear when they are most wanted or fail to deliver all that they seem to promise.”
You can also think of despair as repressed hope. Sometimes as a kid, I’d try to ‘protect myself from disappointment’ by always anticipating the worst outcome: not beating my time in a sports event, not getting what I want for Christmas, not getting to watch a certain movie, whatever. Silly examples maybe, but it’s just as easy to do as adults. By denying yourself a chance to dream, to believe, you numb yourself to both success and failure because part of the joy of success is knowing how hard you worked, always with the hope of one day achieving what you’ve just achieved. But what if that success doesn’t last? What if your hope-fueled passion is, as Nash points out, “a zeal for things that . . . fail to deliver all that they seem to promise?” Ten-year-old me might look forward to a Star Wars Lego set all of December and then set it aside before New Year rolls around.
It’s chasing after wind, to quote Solomon a second time. Or to put it more philosophically, here’s Kierkegaard: “Worldliness means precisely attributing infinite value to the indifferent.” Actually, Kierkegaard wrote an entire book on despair. He takes the title–The Sickness Unto Death–from John 11:4 when Jesus told his disciples not to despair concerning the illness of Lazarus. “This sickness is not unto death.” Jesus knew he would raise Lazarus from the dead, just as his death on the cross guaranteed our eternal life in heaven.
A Dream . . . With A Monster At The End
If you want a symptom of despair, then fear of death might be a good place to start. What is my purpose as a blip on the universe’s radar? Why do I matter? This can be a startling reality. So one searches for a cure for this sickness unto death. Unfortunately, without Christ’s redemptive power, the remedies one finds are worse than the disease.
Case in point: Hildred Castaigne from Richard Chambers’ famous short story anthology The King in Yellow.
“The Repairer of Reputations” is the first of four short stories that deal with the heavily mythologized ‘Yellow King’. The lore well goes deep with this one, so I’m only going to scratch the surface of what this entity is commonly understood to be. In short, the Yellow King is an emblem of despair. In Chambers’ stories, he reveals himself through the words of a universally censored play called “The King in Yellow.” The play is known to drive its readers mad. It contains “words understood by the ignorant and wise alike, words which are more precious than jewels, more soothing than music, more awful than death!” (The Yellow Sign, 1895).
Our unfortunate protagonist, Hildred Castaigne, has suffered a head injury after falling off a horse and happens across the play during recovery in a mental asylum. Understandably distraught over his marked fall from social graces, he latches onto the play’s words. Hildred becomes convinced that he’s been living in an America transformed into a fascist empire, an empire waiting for him, the Last King, to take the throne. Infused with a sense of purpose, Hildred becomes a missionary-like figure for The Yellow King, who has promised to sweep through America, punishing the happy and wealthy and uplifting the dispossessed, ‘repairing their reputations’.
Hildred’s warped view of reality strains his relationship with his friend, Louis, to the point where he becomes convinced that Louis means to steal his throne. In retaliation, Hildred claims to have had Louis’s fiance assassinated. Fearful now of his future role as king, Hildred rushes to the house of one Mr. Wilde, an old, diseased man who is to fulfill the King in Yellow’s task of ‘repairing reputations’.
Here’s a conversation of theirs from earlier in the story:
“The ambition of Caesar and of Napoleon pales before that which could not rest until it had seized the minds of men and controlled even their unborn thoughts,” said Mr. Wilde
“You are speaking of the King in Yellow,” I groaned, with a shudder.
“He is a king whom emperors have served.”
“I am content to serve him,” I replied.
Like Adam and Eve in the garden, Hildred has bought the lie that he too can be on the same level as God. He marries himself to an illusion for the purpose it gives him. If only he could be powerful, he would be confident in himself.
“We always desire more than we have,” Ronald Nash writes. “We always want more than we can possibly achieve. The frustration resulting from the human inability to ultimately satisfy all desires is just one manifestation of the tension between the finite and infinite pools of our being . . . Rather than confront the truth about the closed frontiers of their existence, many people prefer to live in a world of dreams and illusions.”
And like all dreams, waking up is inevitable. Running to see Mr. Wilde, hoping that he has anticipated is still coming to pass, Hildred enters the house only to find the old man dead on the floor. Understanding comes at last. There is no empire. No repairing of reputation. No throne for him to rule. There is only the King in Yellow, whom Hildred is stuck serving.
As Hildred is dragged away by the police, he cries, “Woe! Woe to you who are crowned with the crown of the King in Yellow!”
“Repairer of Reputations” makes the point that we need to make some significance of our existence here on earth, some cause to fight for, some crown to place upon our heads. We buy into illusion to avoid despair. But what we’re really doing is trying to find the infinite in a finite world.
I’ll end this section on despair with another quote from Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation.
“Despair comes as a result of lack of infinite, lack of vision, of meaning, of purpose. What does it mean to be a Christian in America? Why do we despair? We are putting are faith in the wrong thing, and we are shocked when that thing doesn’t pan out.”
Great Opportunity
If happiness is constructed around purpose, and despair is the result of lack of purpose, or of a purpose spoiled by disillusionment, then it seems to me that we should pay special attention to the purpose behind our thoughts and actions. Because sometimes what we think of as a good purpose isn’t necessarily a godly purpose. You can value personal responsibility, honor, duty, faith, and sacrifice because it makes you look like a good person. True, embodying those principles can lead to wealth, respect, belonging, and purpose. But there’s only purpose to be found in embodying those values because God made it so. “Every good and perfect gift is from above,” as it says in James 1:17. If we choose to acknowledge the gift but not the giver, then one day the well will run dry and we won’t know who to turn to for the greatest gift of all.
Modern-day America is suffering from hyper-consciousness. We are aware of what everyone is doing, saying, thinking, but informed by thirty-second sound bites. Thousands of snippets of life play through our heads every day. We are being influenced by illusions, encouraged to believe false promises, place our hope in fallible persons, and when we are disappointed or lied to, we must find someone to blame. Disunity comes as a result.
What does it mean to be a Christian in America?
We respect the Presidency. Pray for our leaders. Fight evil. Conserve what God called good. We do it because we are called to a higher purpose. Life is a gift from God and we should fight for it. But death is not the end. As Bonhoeffer said, “Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.”
Hearing “God Bless the USA” in West Palm Beach Tuesday night reminded me of that scene from Miracle I showed above. Is it misplaced happiness? Belief in a future that’s bound to disappoint? Maybe. But maybe not. Kierkegaard said, “The believer possesses the eternally certain antidote to despair, viz. Possibility; for with God all things are possible every instant.”
“We’ve got to stop crying,” Carter said, “and start sweating, stop talking and start walking, stop cursing and start praying. The strength we need will not come from the White House, but from every house in America.”
Yet not I but through Christ in me.
Do you believe in Miracles? Will you give yourself a chance, once again, to believe?