How could a loving God allow us to live lonely and grotesque lives outside the imago dei? Not exactly conversation for date night next time Liz and I go out, but I was thinking this tonight.

Ephesians 5:14 – For the light makes everything visible. This is why it is said,
“Awake, O sleeper,
rise up from the dead,
and Christ will give you light.”

I have been reading a spectacular book called Faith, Film, and Philosophy, edited by one of my former professors at Talbot, Doug Geivett. I’m halfway through it, and the best chapter is Consciousness, Memory and Identity, about the films of Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). The chapter that got the “makes-your-head-spin” award is on counterfactuals by James Spiegel (It’s a Wonderful Life and Run Lola Run), but it was a good refresher since I already took a semester racking the lil’ gray matter on free will and determinism. This excerpt is from a chapter called The Sleeper Awakes by David Hunt on Gnosticism and authenticity in The Matrix (ironically he taught my free will class during seminary):

The Matrix is a story of a sleeper who wakes up. This is a very powerful metaphor. Saint Augustine, the great Christian Platonist, uses it to express the difficulty of breaking free from old habits and bringing his will into sync with his intellectual acceptance of Christianity: “I was held down as agreeably by this world’s baggage as one often is by sleep; indeed the thoughts with which I meditated upon You were like the efforts of a man who wants to get up but is so heavy with sleep that he simply sinks back into it again.” Descartes echoes this passage from Augustine when describing his own efforts to awaken from the sleep of doubt. “There is no one who wants to be asleep always,’ Augustine adds. This is the moral of both the Experience Machine and The Matrix.

This got me thinking about the Waking Life, a digitally enhanced rotoscoped movie about a young guy named Wiley walking around in a lucid dream state. The movie is almost entirely dialogue, as he has these fascinating chats with other figures about free will, existentialism, politics, the meaning of life, you name it. And even though it’s not the most definitive ending, he seems to conclude he can’t wake up because he’s dead.

At one point a woman bumps into Wiley and says,

Hey. Could we do that again? I know we haven’t met, but I don’t want to be an ant. You know? I mean, it’s like we go through life with our antennas bouncing off one another, continuously on ant autopilot, with nothing really human required of us. Stop. Go. Walk here. Drive there. All action basically for survival. All communication simply to keep this ant colony buzzing along in an efficient, polite manner. “Here’s your change.” “Paper or plastic?’ “Credit or debit?” “You want ketchup with that?” I don’t want a straw. I want real human moments. I want to see you. I want you to see me. I don’t want to give that up. I don’t want to be ant, you know?

I wonder if the deepest tragedy embedded with the “problem of evil” may not be cancer, death, wars, etc, but maybe “lives of quiet desperation?”

Cheers.