This is Absurd
Or Why I’m Still A Jesus-Follower, Part III
The hardest part of the deconstruction experience is losing your system of meaning. Not just shifting beliefs around, but the very way you see the world and your place in the world coming undone. Our brains work by building a narrative and fitting everything into it, and when that apple cart gets upended it’s very disorienting and unnerving. We tend to scramble back to some semblance of a new narrative, a new framework for making sense of the world. We long for the familiar, so our new narrative tends to look a lot like the old, like fundamentalist believers becoming fundamentalist atheists.
My problem was that every time I cobbled a few cognitive waypoints together from what was left of my faith, another wave would break them all apart again. It was like trying to keep your feet in relentless surf. Like anyone who’s been in that kind of water knows, fighting it is useless. You have to work with the waves, they’ll bring you to shore eventually.
It wasn’t until Peter Rollins showed up on The Liturgists podcast that a new way of seeing the world started to take shape, built around a concept that he terms the absurd. As he puts it, the absurd is “a being, seeking meaning, confronting a universe that resists meaning.” To unpack this properly takes a PhD and an Irish accent, but here’s my riff on his work.
The crucifixion is the central facet of Christianity, and is the ultimate expression of meaninglessness. God dying. The Messiah, the Savior of the world, the chosen one, killed as a criminal. We’re quick to point to the resurrection, or to pull out our atonement theories, and that’s all fine and good but it misses something profound in the absurdity of the cross. As he points out, the fact that there are many atonement theories and none of them fit quite right gives credence to the idea that the crucifixion resists meaning.
We tend to think about resistance or tension as a negative thing, but what would music be without tension and release? Electrical resistance heats my home in the winter, and lights up the screen you’re reading this on. We don’t celebrate the gravy train, we celebrate those who struggle and overcome. If you want to get real quantum nerdy, the very nature of reality as we know it is dependent on resistance from the all-permeating Higgs field.
So this event at the center of our tradition that resists meaning, then becomes a catalyst that sits as a gravity well opposite any system of meaning we build; tugging at it, pulling it apart, not letting us become comfortable and complacent, always nudging us to stay engaged, always pushing us to go deeper. Peter illustrates this by riffing on Albert Camus’s Rebel. He says the conservative always wants things to go back to some bygone golden era. The revolutionary always wants things to get to some future utopia. Both are miserable, because neither is happening. But a third option, the Rebel, lives presently engaged in the world, always working to make it a better place, but never expecting to “arrive” anywhere. They’ve fully embraced the struggle of life, the tension, the friction, and their lives are vibrant.
But right about here is where this concept dips over the horizon for me. It’s been a good six months or more just to get to this point, but this way of seeing, more than anything else, has kept me in the pursuit. It’s given me something tangible to grab ahold of and face the world with, something that engages on a visceral, messy level. You’ll be hearing more, as I’m able to put better language to it.
Peace and tenacity,
PB

