What Jim Morrison Taught Me about the End

I once had a roommate who was really into the Doors. I think the only two books I ever saw him read were a biography of Jim Morrison and a collection of “poetry” by Morrison himself. It probably doesn’t need to be said, but he listened to the Doors a lot. Since the Doors were lame, I tuned most of it out. Although I would never publicly admit to actually liking it, there was one song that sort of stuck with me: “The End”. It’s a hard song to ignore.  At 12 ½ minutes, its an epic hallucinogenic trip replete with over-wrought emoting from the dark prince himself. The lyrics themselves are an impressionist smattering of self-destruction, violence, ego, and finality as the narrator embraces his own end: “this is the end/beautiful friend/this is the end/my only friend, the end”.

While Morrison would have us believe the meaning of the song is open, it seems to me that for him, the end was simply the end. It was the finish. The point-of-no-return. It was the abyss that cannot be crossed.

For me, then and now, the end is something different. It is something new. With Bonhoeffer, I say the end is the beginning of life.

This is something that 2000 years of Christian thinking backs up. The end is not some cataclysmic decent into a nihilistic void, but flush with energy, vitality, and … life. It is the hope for the resurrection of the body, union with Christ and life eternal.

But is this end a beautiful friend?

On more than one occasion the Church has been accused of shirking the responsibility of our present historical reality and slipping into a passive waiting for this end. Why fight for justice now when you got your ticket punched for the big dance? Pop critics of the Church love pointing out all the times we have been on the wrong side of progressive social change. And guess what? They have a point. Sort of.

One of the greatest treasures of 20^th century theology has been a revitalized vigor for a Christian eschatology that can embrace both the otherwordly nature of “the end” and combine it with a passion for justice in the here and now. Biblical scholar George Ladd referred to it as the “already/not yet” aspect of Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God. God’s Kingdom was and is present in the person and work of Jesus Christ but is waiting its ultimate consummation in the end. In this sense, “the end” includes a vital social component. Just as the kingdom Jesus proclaimed and actualized involved care for the marginalized, the righting of wrongs and a cosmic renewal of the creation, our “end” reflects that same reality only in its total fulfillment.

But my favorite contributor to this movement has been the writing of German theologian Jürgen Moltmann. According to Moltmann, “the end” can, is, and should also be realized here and now. In this present moment, we live into “the end” by practicing the reality of our “end”. In his epoch-making The Coming of God, he affirms our very existence is one in which we live in “an expectation of the future in the eschatological context of the end, and the new creation of the world.” (192)

This means the end is already present in an anticipatory form. In anticipating the end, we are called to participate in the proleptic human struggle for God’s justice. Of this he writes specifically of the apocalyptic book of Revelation. It

… was not written for "rapturists" fleeing from the world, who tell the world ‘goodbye’ and want to go to heaven; it was meant for resistance fighters, struggling against the godless powers on this earth (153)

So while the book of Revelation imaginatively depicts a revealing picture the end, it becomes an invitation for resistance against the present evil world order.  For John and the early Church that was Rome. Today you have a different Rome. You might even be Rome. Just don’t let waiting for the end get in your way.

A Happy Marriage and a Lonely Death

I have been spending time reading Rafael Yglesias’ novel A Happy Marriage. The novel, loosely based off the author’s own experience of meeting, falling-in-love, and marrying his own wife only to lose her to cancer 30 years later. The novel alternates between the characters Enrique and Margaret’s few weeks of courtship and the last few weeks of her life. Told entirely from the perspective of Enrique, we are given a first hand look into the emotional anguish he experiences as he faces the death of his beloved. In this paragraph, we see the true solitude in facing the death of a loved one:

He could not and did not ask Margaret or his boys for comfort. His father was dead. His mother too old and too self-pitying to be a solace. His in-laws too frightened and too bereft themselves. His half brother, Leo, to anxious and too selfish. His male friends too distant from the realities and too uncomprehending of the experience. Margaret’s best friend, Lily, too preoccupied comforting Margaret and herself. His half sister, Rebecca, who had been present and understanding and so great a help, could spell and reassure him, but she could not provide, no one could provide, what he had forsaken for nearly three years, what cancer had taken from him, and would soon take from him forever: Margaret’s attention.

Thank God I do not understand Enrique’s suffering. How could I? For each person’s suffering is unique is his own way. The best I could offer is my own sufferings.

But more to the point, thank God I have never had to face the loss of Lindsay. I do not think I could cope. It is something I do not wish to face, nor think it particularly helpful or healthy to speculate on what losing her young to a drawn out terminal illness might do to my psychological state.

What strikes me about Enrique’s pain is the solitude he faces. For thirty years Margaret has been his life and he is now facing a life without her, he is alone. Sure, he has children. Sure, he has family. He has friends. But there is no one to enter into his suffering. To know it as their own.

As I’ve read through this book and glimpsed into the mind of a tortured soul, I can’t help but think of Jurgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God. At it’s heart, it is a profound theological reflection on Jesus Christ’s final cry from the cross: “My God, my God why have you forsaken me.”

Traditionally, theologians and pastors have interpreted this in a number of ways. Most link it to a doctrine of the atonement similar to that of Anselm’s satisfaction theory where Jesus Christ made restitution on the cross for the sins of humanity. Or closely related is the penal theory where Jesus Christ is punished for the sins of humanity. In both theories there is a transaction between God the Father and God the Son where either Jesus incurs the wrath of God or makes a payment to God.

What Moltmann did was flip the transactional theories on their head and address the cross of Jesus that lead to his death as a death within the life of God. So not only did Jesus Christ suffer and died and experienced the throes of a godforsaken existence, but God the Father suffered in the real loss of his beloved Son. Thus, Moltmann argues, there is mutual suffering within the life of God in the death of Christ. This, of course, would frustrate those whose who deny the passion of God the Father.

But, I ask, what God has something to say to the suffering of Enrique? The God who punishes his beloved Son? The God who pours out his wrath upon the cross? Or is it the God who has foolishly and riskily loved and lost? The God who knows the solitude of death?

Ivan Karamazov, Jurgen Moltmann, and The Crucified God

Lately, I have been thinking about Ivan Karamazov. As one of the three protagonists of Dostoevsky’s The Brother Karamazov, Ivan, the intellectual, represents humanity’s striving to move beyond God. Ivan envisions a post-religious world dominated by the rationality of human reason. While God may have had his moments, the use-by date of God has long since expired. Ivan asks, “how can one look upon the world and confess faith, love, and admiration of God?” The world has been forsaken by God. The human plight is so abysmal, Ivan had no choice but to reject the God that rejected the world. Of course, the rejection of God left a moral vacuum. A vacuum that left Ivan to opine, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”

For quite sometime Christians have used this conclusion as an argument against an atheistic morality. The argument goes: With no moral arbiter, there are no moral absolutes. If there are no moral absolutes, everything is relative. If everything is relative, it is impossible to evaluate ethical choices in any meaningful manner. As Ivan put it, “everything is permitted.”

Although atheistic ethicists have fought to counter this argument, there is some truth to it. In a 1946 lecture on Existentialism and Humanism, French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called the aforementioned quote by Ivan Karamazov as the “starting point” of all existentialist thought. There is no determinism in which we can appeal. Nor may we describe a person’s choice with reference to nature. Instead, humans are radically free to do whatever he or she wants. And as a radically free creature, it is only the individual who is ultimately responsible for his or her actions.

In what would bring Dostoevsky sadness, it appears Ivan has won. It does not take much imagination to believe we live in a time and a place where everything is permitted. Looking beyond the random acts of violence that occur ever day, we might point to the radical inequity of resources where some eat and drink wastefully and many more go without basic necessitates. In the United States, our pets are treated better than many people the world over. Let us not forget the increasing polarization of ideologies. One wonders if it is possible to engage constructively in any political dialogue, especially when the final arbiter is me. Add this all up and I can’t help but hear Ivan Karamazov and feel sympathy: how can we honestly look at the world and affirm the existence of God?

In November of 1969, six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter were murdered in a university in San Salvador. As they dragged the bodies back into the building they pulled one into an office, bumped a bookcase, and dislodged a book which became drenched in blood. The name of the book: The Crucified God by the German theologian Jurgen Moltmann. When reflecting upon that horrible incident, Moltmann found it reassuring that it was his book that was soaked in an innocent man’s blood. For a profound, rich, and complex book, the thesis is simple: only a crucified God can provide relief, hope, and salvation for a world stained by radical individualism and ceaseless violence. For Moltmann himself, it is the words of the martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Only a suffering God can help.”

Ivan Karamazov sees a world abandoned and forsaken by God. In the world’s godforsakeness, Ivan saw no alternative but to reject the very existence of God and turn to himself.

As a theological work, The Crucified God is an extended meditation on Jesus’ last cry from the cross “My God, my God why have you forsaken me.” In the cross of Jesus, the Godhead experiences death. There is a death within God.

There are many explanations for Jesus’ death. In one version, he died as a blasphemer. In another, he died as a political dissident. But in another, Jesus died as the godforsaken. On the cross, Jesus was the true innocent suffering the sins of humanity. And what did he find in his suffering? A God who looked the other way. On the cross, Jesus was utterly abandoned by God the Father and exemplifies a Godforsaken world.

But Jesus’ death upon the cross was more than the death of God who became flesh. The death Jesus died upon the cross was a death “within God”. Within the triune life of God, the Godhead experienced death. In the Trinity, the second person Jesus Christ suffered death and abandonment. Yet, the first person of the Trinity, God the Father experienced the heartbreak and loss of his only beloved and begotten son shamefully murdered upon the cross.

On the cross and within the life of God we fix our eyes on Jesus who suffered and experienced our own Godforsakeness. But on the cross and within the life of God we also encounter the Father who suffered and experience the loss of his only begotten and beloved son. When we approach God in faith, we approach a God who identifies and experiences the heartbreak and suffering of this world. God takes it upon Himself and suffers along with us. In the suffering of God, we have a God who helps and saves and transforms this present age.