I’m kind of obsessed with Charli XCX. I love her punk vibe. I mean, her last album was called Brat. Says it all.
Her new one is called Music, Fashion, Film. I’m not sure it’ll be as well reviewed as the last few, but you should listen anyway, if only for the final track. It ends with a litany from David Cronenberg. Yes, that Cronenberg, of body-horror fame. Turns out a career like that gets a man thinking about death, loss, and oblivion.
The sample comes from a conversation the two of them had about the day he collapsed on a sidewalk. She asks what went through his mind. Did he think about his art? Of course not, he says. He thought about people. He thought about life. And then a single line, which Charli loops over and over, 27 times: “They are dead. They are gone. No one lasts forever.”
It’s for effect. It’s so you and I can feel the oblivion.
And honestly? I appreciate it. In a world of Hallmark-card death denial, Charli and Cronenberg have looked in the mirror and come to grips with the fact that nothing lasts forever. That you and I, and everyone we love, will die.
Sorry to be a downer. But also, not really. If anyone should be free to stop pretending, it’s Christians.
The best atheists always understood this. And no, I’m not thinking of Dawkins or Hitchens. I’m thinking of Freud and Feuerbach, who said that faith is death denial. That it’s wish fulfillment, a projection of everything we want onto the sky. And those aren’t stupid arguments. Some of them are the best ones out there.
Charli isn’t interested in the denial either.
So now I’m sitting on the floor of a Parisian apartment
With a French girl talking ’bout philosophy.
And I know deep down that it’s here and now
‘Cause nothing’s gonna last forever
And later, that same French girl tells her:
No one really knows what the future holds
But we know nothing’s gonna last forever.
That’s bold. That’s brave. And if you thought I was bringing her up as a foil, I’m not. I want us to sit in what she’s found. What some of us have found at three in the morning on the bathroom floor, in the middle of a panic attack, because we were thinking about oblivion. The fact that one day you will not be. And, maybe worse, that one day you’ll have said your last goodbye to the people you love. Some of us don’t even get the goodbye.
Now here’s the thing. Cronenberg says one more line on that track, and it’s the part I keep coming back to. He says that oblivion is freedom.
So this isn’t a disagreement about whether we die. It’s a disagreement about what death is. He’s not just being honest about death. He’s telling you it’s good news.
One reviewer, Carl Wilson in Slate, heard it that way. He called the closing litany a proclamation of faith, “the central litany of a whole new afterlife-free church,” and said he’d like to attend that revival meeting himself, the one for people who are never going to be revived. Notice what he had to reach for. To describe oblivion, he reached for church.
That’s depressing. It’s also honest, which is more than most of us manage. I’m the guy watching the twentieth episode of some show in a row. Not because it’s good. Because I want the pain dulled. Because I want to escape.
I bring all of this up because of a verse in Romans 8. Most of us know it: “All things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”
That verse is often read schmaltzy. You can imagine it pinned under a Thomas Kinkade painting. But that verse is not death denial. It isn’t sentimentalism. Paul is not saying life is fine, and you just need to change your mindset. He’s not saying that if you do the right things, your kids will get into the right schools and your life will go according to plan. I’d like that to be true more than almost anything. It isn’t.
What the verse says is that in all things, and sometimes despite all things, God is working for the good of those who love him. Not that the wrong things were secretly right all along. That God will make right what has gone wrong. And more than that: God will undo it.
Paul is not naive here. Read the rest of the chapter. He’s talking about persecution. About being reviled. He’s not a TV preacher promising that if you believe hard enough you’ll be blessed, or worse, that if you send in a certain amount of money you’ll be blessed. Paul has seen too much for that. He’s not suggesting here that the bad things you experience should be ignored or that the worst things in this world only appear to be bad.
The careful readers of this text say almost the opposite. The resurrection is what frees you to stop pretending. You can look the bad thing in the face. You can call a spade a spade. You can cry and take it in. And you can do all of that precisely because you have hope.
So here’s the response to the litany of the afterlife-free church, to the anthem that they are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever. You’ve fought for good things. For justice, for art, for a person. And it felt futile. But the good news is that nothing done in love is done in vain.
We know that because a man once conquered death, which means that in the end everything bad and sad will somehow become untrue. Not smoothed over. Undone.
This is not a gotcha aimed at the Charli XCXs of the world. They’re more honest than most. It’s just that there’s one who makes a way out of no way, and he isn’t finished. He’ll make right what has gone wrong, in the world, sure, but also in your life, in the exact place where you felt it. And he won’t only make it right. He’ll undo it.
That’s not a Hallmark card, because it stares the bad thing in the face. That’s not death denial, because you and I are dying small deaths every day of our lives. It’s hope.
You can take “nothing lasts forever” and make it an argument for hedonism. You can also make it an argument for decency: be good to people while you’re here. But you can just as easily make it a shrug. Shrug at injustice. Shrug at somebody else’s pain. We’re all going to die anyway.
Hope does something else with it. If nothing is done in vain, then the promise isn’t only for after you die. It’s for right now. Everything you do for love, everything you do for justice in the name of Christ, gets gathered up and made new.
So even if you only half believe it, lean your whole weight on it. That’s the good life. Not just for the day you die, not just for seeing again the people you’ve lost, but for the moment you walk out the door and back into a city that will tempt you toward despair, or toward the jadedness I fall into about every other day here in New York.
Nothing is done in vain. All that is bad will be undone. And not because of anything you or I manage to pull off, but because we serve a God who makes a way out of no way. A God who raises the dead.
