A new app named Are You Dead? encourages users to check in every two days to confirm that they are alive. It is now the most downloaded paid app in China, a country with a well-chronicled loneliness epidemic. The app will get in touch with a designated emergency contact if users do not check in regularly. Launched in May last year, it has attracted a lot of new customers in recent months, especially among young people who live alone in Chinese cities. And of course, the loneliness epidemic is not exclusive to China.
You’re permanent: the belief that you won’t die.
You’re the most important thing: the sense that you’re the center of reality.
You’re separate: the feeling that you are fundamentally distinct and isolated from others.
Saunders frames these as Darwinian beliefs that have served evolutionary purposes but are fundamentally untrue. He believes that death is the moment when reality confronts you with the falseness of all three assumptions.
There is a great deal in our culture that is organized to support these delusions –first, to make you think you’re invincible, second to place you at the center of everything, and third to build walls between you and everyone else. Saunders explains that getting “clear” of these delusions even momentarily, through practices like meditation or deep engagement with art, is what he means by being “saved.” Once you are free of them, he asks, “What’s to be afraid of?”
Saunders does not make any claims to faith, but I will. What comes after we dispel these three illusions? What’s next? For those of us drawn to a life of faith, the answer to that is not an app, but life with God.
The late Walter Brueggemann continues to offer gifts to us through his writing. He thought deeply about identity and community through the lens of scripture. In his commentary on Job, (published in 1988 with certain telling cultural references from that time), he wrote:
The poem of Job is put together to assert that Job’s integrity, crucial as it is, is penultimate. His integrity lives tentatively in front of doxology. Job stands before the one who asks sovereign questions, who calls to account, who blows Job off the map by daring to show how limited and contained is Job’s field of vision. The speech of this Other who wants praise and not virtue, yielding and not bargaining, risk and not answers, this other speech recontextualizes Job’s integrity. Yes, hang on to your integrity, Job, for it is never questioned.
But learn a second language. Learn to speak praise and yielding, which let you cherish your virtue less tightly. Job said, “I will hold fast to my integrity until I die.” Well, hold on too tight and you will die soon, because such integrity becomes a screen against the awesome reality of God. And when cut off from God, even by virtue, you will die, bored, self-satisfied, utterly unsatisfied with an unresolved restlessness.
The battle to be fought in the church now, in our society generally, is for speech and faith that will sustain us. Job, and even more his friends, are models of ideological certitude.
That kind of moral certitude, however, does not matter ultimately, because we are not saved by our virtue. No one can stand in the face of the whirlwind on a soap-box of virtue. Virtue has many ideological faces in our society—and they all kill. It may be the over scrupulousness about sexuality and piety and all those treasured old-fashioned virtues. Or it may be the ideological agenda of the right, getting things settled about prayer in the public schools or homosexuality or the Panama Canal. Or it may be the strident programs of the left and being correct about abortion and welfare and divestment. Whichever party we belong to, we hold it all dear and precious and we brood in our virtue, confident that the others are without credibility.
Job learned what we all learn sooner or later. Virtue does not suffice. Integrity does not give life. Being right is no substitute for being amazed.
This is faith’s opportunity and the church’s open door: to rediscover our own amazement about the Living God and share that with the world. If we can learn the “second language” of praise and amazement, I am convinced that the world will change.
In what ways do you see Saunders’ three illusions (permanent, central, separate) expressed in our world today?
What might it look like for our faith to move from “being right” to “being amazed”?
In what specific ways could our congregation deepen connection in a culture of loneliness?
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