Being Bleak

By Mike Duran

Mike’s stories have appeared in Relief Journal, Coach’s Midnight Diner, Forgotten Worlds, Alienskin, Infuze Magazine and Dragons, Knights and Angels, with articles in The Matthew’s House Project, Relevant Magazine and 316 Journal. Mike is currently part of the editorial team for the Midnight Diner’s second edition and contributes monthly commentary at Novel Journey. He and his wife Lisa live in Southern California, where they have raised four children. You can visit him at mikeduran.com.

“What branches grow out of this stony rubbish?”
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

This year’s Academy Awards ceremony was one of the least watched in recent years. Variety reported that Oscar ratings fell to an all-time low, with an alarming 20% falloff. While some speculated it had to do with the writer’s strike, most believed it was the Best Picture nominees, a decidedly dark bunch. Of the five films, only Juno carried much levity (and even then, it involved a pregnant teen contemplating abortion and the dysfunctional adults in her life). The rest, including Best Picture winner No Country for Old Men, were not nearly as optimistic about the state of humankind. Whether it was a robotic serial killer, a ruthless oilman, a corrupt attorney, or an adolescent liar, Hollywood rendered a cinematic unfurling of human depravity at its best. Where is Frank Capra when you need him?

Really, it’s not that surprising. Bleak is becoming fashionable these days. The last several decades have witnessed more music, films and books with an unapologetically grim streak. Cormac McCarthy's The Road, for instance, is about a father and son trekking across a post-apocalyptic wasteland, fleeing marauding gangs and resisting the urge to cannibalize. The exceedingly cheerless book only won the Pulitzer Prize. Children of Men, one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2006, portrayed a world of infertility, withering under the weight of its physical and existential barrenness. And somewhere along the way, Batman became The Dark Knight and the Joker went from Jack Nicholson's clownish caricature to the late Heath Ledger's sinister psychopath.

Even a cursory survey of pop culture reveals a bent toward bleak, a trendy morbidity that infuses our worldview and lifestyle. Gothic culture revels in black and our philosophers accommodate by fashioning nihilistic wardrobes stitched with the thread of despair. Perhaps Thom Yorke, lead singer for the band Radiohead, sums up the Zeitgeist of our generation best when, in the song Bodysnatchers, he intones,

Has the light gone out for you?
Because the light's gone for me
It is the 21st century

Maybe more than any other, the 21st century is about the light going out.

This trend towards bleak creates an interesting dilemma for the Christian artist and author. On the one hand, Christian art has come to mean anything but bleak. Allen Arnold, Senior Vice President of Thomas Nelson Fiction, in a interview on Novel Journey this weekend, was asked to define Christian Fiction. He said,

By and large, Christian Fiction has its own man-made, restrictive rules for content and character development. Much of it forces a "precious moments” or G-rated worldview that isn't comfortable with the mystery of God…or with many other things.

Sadly, this “‘precious moments’ or G-rated worldview” is fairly prevalent in the subculture of Christian art. Like a twisted rendition of Groundhog's Day, we reincarnate happy endings ad nauseam, unable to break the cycle, no matter how disconnected from reality they are.

Nevertheless, even the most buoyant believer must admit that the world is a bleak place. The nightly news is full of stories about terrorist bombings, celebrity overdoses, global warming, corporate corruption, political scandal, senseless crime, genocide, infanticide and suicide. Real life, as opposed to the Precious Moments version of life, does not always have a happy ending.

Furthermore, the Bible pulls no punches about the corrosive state of human depravity and the dismal future of our own making. The apostle Paul wrote:

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God… (II Timothy 3:1-4 NIV).

Terrible times. Brutal people. Geez, what a gloom merchant!

But Paul’s not the only negativist. Jesus used similar language in describing the end of the age when He said,

“…there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive…” (Matthew 24: 21-22).

Sure the Bible ends with a celestial city wherein the saints go marching in. But along the way, it describes a society in collapse barreling toward a realm of hideous torment, a spiritual sanitarium where human souls exist in perpetual agony. Hell is as much a part of the Scriptural record as is Heaven, and without it the Story is incomplete.

And who better to write about Hell than those who know the whole Story?

But while Rome burns, many of us are busy fiddling about Shangri-la, sanitizing our stories with the utmost care, bleaching them of the bleakness that is so intrinsic to human experience, drifting further and further out of touch with a world grappling with its own moral and spiritual disintegration.

Contrary to the self-help gurus, Jesus was not a "positive thinker," a first-century Zig Ziglar with a briefcase full of feel-good witticisms. In fact, many of Jesus’ tales did not have a happy ending. The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) is one such story. The poor man has his sores licked by dogs and yearns to eat the crumbs from the rich man’s table. He dies and is carried to Abraham’s side. But the rich man is hardly so lucky. He dies and dwells in a place of torment, longing for just a droplet of cool water. When that is withheld, the rich man begs Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his brethren of this place of inexhaustible anguish. Jesus ends the story with Abraham’s grim assessment, “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead” (vs. 31).

That’s it? No redemptive summary? No Precious Moments denouement? Alas, the curtain closes on a man in perpetual agony, with brothers probably on the way to meet him.

It appears Jesus purposely did not lighten the tone of this story. He forgoes the G-rating in hopes of scaring the hell out of His listeners. Whatever redemptive interpretations occur happen outside the actual parable; the Lord appears content to simply illustrate a very grim reality.

Must rosy resolutions always follow bleak stories? Apparently not. But the Gospel is about hope, you say, the salvation of sinners, the promise of Heaven. Amen and amen! But against the promise of Heaven is the possibility of Hell. And in some ways, until we are willing to elucidate the horrific consequences of life without God, we cannot hope to accurately persuade the reader to appreciate the impossible Other. The Christian artist must do both.

In his poem, The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot writes,

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock...

Depicting despair -- the “stony rubbish,” the “heap of broken images,” and “the dead tree” -- is as much a part of the Christian artist’s calling as is portraying hope. And, in some ways, until we grapple with the wasteland, we cannot ponder "what branches grow" or invite one into the “shadow under this red rock.”