One-Eyed Prophet

One-Eyed Prophet

This is a continuation of the past two weeks’ posts on cynicism, which you can read here and here, but not here.

“I met a man who’s looking for perfection

Said he’s never met a girl who’s good enough

His eyes are getting old, like they’d love to love again

Such a lonely man.”

-Jon Foreman, “A Mirror is Harder to Hold”

We’ve established that cynicism has some flaws, but is there any alternative?

Like a guy who’s afraid of his ex-girlfriend, I jump into the arms of her opposite. “Why hello there, sentimentality!”

If pessimism fails me, then the answer must be optimism.

Flannery—God rest her blessed soul—addresses this issue in her (Insightful! Life-changing!) essay, “The Church and the Fiction Writer”:

We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our return to it is through the Redemption, which was brought about by Christ’s death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence.

If I indulge in sentimentality, I skip death and thus never find resurrection. Cynicism mocks the disease, while sentiment covers it with a Band-Aid, a kiss on the head, and an “all better.” Neither offers a cure.

So what now? Like the college grad I am, I’m tempted to say we need a “richer understanding,” a compromise—in other words, “Can’t we just mix the two and call it even?”

A good slap to the face from GK Chesterton stops me from being such a pansy.

“What we need is not the cold acceptance of this world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent.” He then asks if there is someone who can “hate [the world] enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing?... Is he enough of a Pagan to die for the world and enough of a Christian to die to it?”

Love and hate the world? This is a greater demand than I expected!

So often, I can only uphold love by blinding myself to the truth. Here I am doing my darndest to love, when I’m suddenly confronted by an obstacle in the form of a rude or selfish or arrogant person, someone I just can’t handle right now. Instead of asking God to grow my love, to make it better than it is, I avoid the situation altogether by one of two detours.

I can choose cynicism, putting up defenses against this unlovable person, shutting the door so quietly that they will never realized they’re outside. Or I can choose sentimentality, pretending they “aren’t so bad” and glossing over their more distasteful qualities—a path that ultimately leads back to cynicism because I’m really not so good at pretending.

At the foundation, cynicism and sentimentality are both malfunctioning love, a sign that my love is a lot weaker than I thought.

A parable that has consistently encouraged me in the past months is that of the wheat and the tares. Basically, a farmer plants seeds in his field, only to find later that weeds are growing up among the harvest. His servants’ response is similar to my own: “Should we get rid of the weeds?” They’ve seen the problem, and now they have a diagnosis.

The farmer’s answer is unexpected, at least to me: “No, lest as we gather up the tares, the wheat be pulled up with it.”

This is true wisdom. I consider myself perceptive to notice the weeds among the wheat, not knowing that as I reach to eradicate evil I am also uprooting good along with it. When I turn my eye against the ills of this world, I always end up destroying more than I intend. I’m a bumbling surgeon, unable to remove a tumor without cutting the heart.

Earlier this year I finished writing a song called “One-Eyed Prophet.” Like so many things I’ve written, I didn’t realize when I wrote it how much I would need it later. It tells the story of a prophet who is “always honest but never tells the truth.” Here’s the last stanza:

You’ll admit that you don’t know a cure

But you sure love playing doctor

You love the part where we take off our shirts

And uncover all our sores

Oh, what a great relief to see we’re all the same

But lately I’ve been wondering why

There’s no healing in your house

This song was inspired by a cynic I observed, but in the end I found it is actually about me. I’m the one-eyed prophet. I’m the one who is able to see the problem but lacks a cure.

The very end of the song offers a plea: “Your justice and mercy never kissed, so turn your good eye to the things you’ve missed.”

Each of us is constantly vacillating between two goods, justice and mercy. Only one man has ever held both equally, not in a dirty brown hue of compromise, but each in full strength.

Jesus is startlingly blunt about the wickedness man perpetrates. But then he turns around and lavishes love on those wicked people. He sees the most clearly, and He loves best. His love is not accomplished by a smearing of the facts. No, it’s stronger than that. He looks us in the face, and He loves.

His mercy and truth meet; His righteousness and peace kiss.

Somehow, I must do the same.

I’ve been a cynic, a man who’s so afraid of getting hurt that he locks himself in his own house. Now it’s time to try something different, something that requires more bravery than I possess, and more love. I go out as a lamb among wolves, and sometimes as a wolf myself. I think I may have only one eye, but I’m training it to look at God.