We're Not Adapted For Security and Utopia

In college, I studied abroad for a semester in New Zealand. New Zealand is almost like a paradise--great weather, amazing geography, friendly laid back people, low crime, low cost of living, egalitarian. I had a great experience.

After five months of living there, though, a very odd thing happened--I began to miss America. Not just for the hamburgers and baseball and driving on the right side of the road, but the dysfunctions as well--the crime, the poverty, the politics, the backwardness. Why would anyone miss those kinds of things? I don't know why, but I did, against my better judgment. It was as if the social utopia of perfect New Zealand eventually became--boring.

A friend sent me a lecture by Dr. Jordan Peterson he thought I might enjoy recently on Genesis and consciousness. When Dr. Peterson basically named what I had experienced (quoting Dostoevsky) in New Zealand..something I hadn't thought about for years...it made sense that such a strange thought would come to my mind there and made me feel less crazy (@ 47min) :

"Dostoevsky said that in Notes from the Underground...and I love this..he was an early critic of the notion of a political utopia. He said, if you gave people everything they wanted..they had nothing to eat but cake, and nothing to do but sit in warm pools and busy themselves with the continuation of the species...the first thing they would do after a week or so would go half insane and smash everything up just so that something they didn't expect would happen so they would have something interesting to do. We're not adapted for security and utopia!"

He goes on to say that the right way to be in the world is half in what you know (the secure) and have what you don't (the unknown), and that human flourishing occurs in the mediation between the two--reality manifesting itself, where we should be; the balance of the cosmos. We don't grow in security. We weren't made for it.

And yet we were also not made to exist strictly in chaos and meaninglessness. God formed the world ex nihilio, ordered it, and declared it good. Light, life, order...all good. Animals were named, and naming was important because in effect naming brings something into existence. God speaks us into existence, and so speech, language, word (logos) takes on a divine dimension.

We see the temptation to "set up camp" in the secure known in Peter's words at the Transfiguration "Lord it is good that we are here, let us set up three tents..." And we also see the inability to exist entirely in the unknown for any sustained period of time, as in Exodus 20:19 when the people plead with Moses to speak to them instead of God directly, "lest we die," or in Ex 19:12, that the people not go up to Mt Sinai, lest they die.

We are not born saints--saints are made, for those who strive to inhabit the space between. They are not content to rest safely in the security of familiarity and seeing through the sham promises of social utopias promised by governments or political leaders, but to step out in to the deep, going after the Lord who says to them "Follow me," dropping their nets for the unknown. If Jesus were someone not to be trusted this would be lunacy, and this is an act of free will, this faith. Because he calls us out of our safe and known spaces in order to grow, stretching us beyond comfort and familiarity, while walking with us with the assurance of his presence, we can make manifest that space between the known and the unknown where human flourishing takes place. 

I thought I was crazy for being bored in paradise, but it makes sense if we were made to strive. Faith is a walk; it is not an escalator or wheelchair ride. It demands assent and action; it is not passive, and it is not handed down generation to generation by passive means either. It must be exercised. It is dynamic. Religion gets a bad rap, but it is the spiritual skeleton for the body, that which allows us the known structure, order, and doctrinal protection to set up "home base." Yes it is secure. Yes it predictable and established. That is not a bad thing! Outside of it is chaos and disorder, darkness and post-modern subjectivity, that unless one is schooled and prepared spiritually, no one can flourish in it for long. 

We don't send our kids out in to the world without schooling and formation at home--how to look both ways before crossing a street, not to talk to strangers, what is right and what is wrong. Why do we think we can survive and flourish in the same way in a post-modern world at odds with the Word without first preparing to inhabit it?