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McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 2006.
I’ve just returned from a marvelous week-long adventure in the Canadian Rockies with my family. It was a quintessential Canadian winter experience. We went nordic skiing, cross-country skiing, snow-shoeing. We even rented a sheet at a curling rink and had a family bonspiel. It was great fun. It also offered a tremendous opportunity to pray, to think, and to be refreshed.
I read two profound books during the week. Both spoke to the matter of eschatological hope, but each spoke from a dramatically different perspective. One of these books offered hope. The other only craved it.
First, I read Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Road, a post-apocalyptic literary masterpiece. The book tells the story of an unnamed father and son who travel a road across America several years after the world has been virtually destroyed by some un-described environmental disaster. Survival is difficult given that there is no fresh food and that the world has been picked over by the few remaining human scavengers. What people still exist are left to their basest instincts. Fear rules in kind of reverse-darwinism. Survival, however short-lived, is not to the fittest, but to the most ruthless, and perhaps the most inventive. God is a rumor, unknowable, and apparently unaccountable.
This would be unreadable, were it not for McCarthy’s infusion of hope provided through the compelling relationship of the father to his son. They just keep going fueled by their love for one another and by the “fire they carry” inside themselves. This “kept fire” is also a theme in McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, which in its film version, just won the Oscar for “Best Picture”. No Country is a similarly bleak portrayal of the extent to which people can descend when they have no hope. The book (and movie) ends, however, with the description of a good man’s dream of his father, heading toward a waiting camping spot, clutching a flame close to his chest. It is an image of hope. In a world, obliterated by human greed and violence, we can keep going if we carry the flame.
Of course, McCarthy seems to have no idea what that flame is, or if he does, he isn’t saying. The final words of The Road are as follows: “Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. ...They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
The second book I read last week was N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope, a book I have recently commented on in this space (see below). I don’t gush about books without reason, but this book is simply one of the most important and helpful books I have ever read. Preachers must read it. Everyone should.
Like McCarthy, Wright understands the imperative of hope. Without hope, there is no life or meaning. But unlike McCarthy, Wright knows where to find it. Where McCarthy describes a scorched earth, Wright describes a redeemed earth. No doubt some Christians read McCarthy with a certain glee, seeing in it a confirmation of their direst eschatological predictions. I remember hearing people speak disparagingly about the earth. “It’s all going to burn,” they used to say, “and the sooner it does, the better.” Earth is under judgment and the sooner God gets on with it and removes us all to heaven, the better off we’ll be. Wright, one of the ablest biblical scholars of our time, shows this thinking for what it is: escapist, cynical, and anything but biblical.
Wright reminds us that it is God’s intention to redeem the world. The earth will be re-created, not abandoned. Our goal as preachers is not to round up as many people as possible for the great escape to heaven. Heaven is not where we are trying to go so as to get away from the pain of planet earth. Earth is the place where heaven will be realized. “You are not planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a bulding site,” he writes. “You are – strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself – accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world. (208).
“Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honored in the world – all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make. That is the logic of the mission of God. God’s recreation of his wonderful world, which began with the resurrection of Jesus and continues mysteriously as God’s people live in the risen Christ and in the power of his Spirit means that what we do in Christ and by the Spirit in the present is not wasted. It will last all the way into God’s new world. In fact it will be enhanced there.”
Wright continues to say that he doesn’t know the details. He is putting up a signpost, not a photograph of God’s future for the earth. But what he is saying is that this earth is not scorched. There is hope because God is at work. Cormac McCarthy would have us protect the environment so as to avoid the coming cataclysm. Wright would have us serve God by stewarding the environment so as to embrace the coming Kingdom. We may end up doing some of the same things, but for a much more powerful motivation.
Kingdom preaching is a hopeful word. Preacher who peddle fear induced by apocalyptic eschatologies need to return to their Bible and rediscover the hope that Jesus offers. The hope is precisely that God’s kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven.