If you’ve been reading my work for any length of time (and once again, I recycle this joke only because it’s too good not to: thanks Mom!) you’ve likely at one point or another come to at least 2 conclusions about me:
1.) “Eric must have an inordinate amount of time on his hands to work this hard at unpaid internet stardom.” (And yes, it’s quite obvious by the number of spam accounts following me on twitter, that my quest is going INCREDIBLY well).
2.) “Wow, I’m sure the breathless cynicism Eric brings to almost every moment is a riot at dinner parties and stilted elevator conversations with people he doesn’t know. And to think, from a man of God no less, Mr. Beauregard, I do declare!”
Yes, while I admit, the staccato-Lewis-Black-esque criticisms almost constantly filling my brain-space do occasionally work their way autonomically into much of my writing,
I can’t believe you called me cynical!
For starters, I, at great interpersonal and financial expense, pursued not one but TWO humanities degrees in Psychology and Religion, fully expecting to earn pennies the rest of my life at the helm of a dying institution.
And, secondly, despite over a decade of evidence to the contrary, I still cling with Evangelical fervor to the ardent belief that a Tennessee football renaissance not seen since at least the second Clinton administration is upon us.
(Nods knowingly at a totally normal left calf tattoo of Peyton Manning’s face on the 75 year old reading the USA Today next to me. #VFL)
Perhaps your confusion comes from a common misunderstanding about the definition of “cynicism,” which I’ve come to describe as a militant belief in one’s abilities to control and predict the future. Meaning, a cynic is someone who, by parsing the tea leaves of past experience, effectively sets the course for what can and cannot happen in a given situation.
For instance, cynics have told me:
I have a better chance of winning The Voice than becoming a professional writer in the internet age, especially, given my sentence structure.
My calves are too bulky for skinny jeans.
The wealthy knowingly oppress and profit off the backs of the poor.
Men can’t wear calf-length yoga pants.
The poor are unemployed, lazy, and only interested in gaming the system.
Democrats are close-minded and illogical.
Republicans are close-minded, illogical, and heavily armed.
Tennessee doesn’t have the depth to compete this year.
And, gas station cappuccinos rarely live up to the hype.
However, the confusion probably isn’t your fault.
Within my own faith tradition, cynicism has been bred into us since we flannel graphed our way through the gospels during something misleading termed “VACATION” bible school. In this stream of thought, cynicism insidiously takes up residence in our spoken and unspoken theologies, commanding us to fear the world, to reject the world, to be skeptical of the world, and to discover in the ongoing degradation and destruction of this life, our own individual and collective salvation in the one following it.
In short: it is only in the condemnation of others that we find our acceptance.
So, with every head bowed and every eye closed...
In the 24th chapter of Luke’s gospel, we happen upon the activities of Jesus’ closest followers as they come to grips with a world newly absent of their hoped for savior. Following his gruesome death at the hands of the Jewish and Roman authorities, the disciples of Jesus (fearing for their own lives) lock themselves away in a crummy motel on the outskirts of town. While it is only the women who, after witnessing Jesus’ final breaths, return to his tomb in order to give their friend and Messiah a proper goodbye.
Expecting, as every other person in human history had up until this point, to find a lifeless body on the other side of the giant stone blocking the entrance to the tomb.
But, as the story goes, they did not.
I’ll let Luke take it from here:
“When they came back from the tomb they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others. It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles. But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense.”
Once again:
“But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense.”
Which always leaves me thinking: “Surprisingly, comments alienating people from the cheap seats of anonymity are not, in fact, a new phenomenon forged from the dumpster fires of youtube cat videos.”
Misogyny and Politics aside here (just go with me, I know a chief reason their testimony met with disbelief was due to their gender) is it little wonder the fantastical stories of Jesus’ resurrection were rejected so harshly by his closest male companions?
For the record, they had just seen the Son of God die a quite gruesome death, and (once again) were at the moment fearing for their own lives in the aforementioned Bates Motel of ancient Jerusalem.
Put simply: If there were ever a time for blistering cynicism, this would be it.
Yet, all the same, the tomb was, in fact, quite empty.
There are countless reasons to believe we have within us, thanks to numerous let downs and successes, the ability to accurately predict the future.
She left.
He got sick.
You got fired.
The market crashed.
He just used it for drugs.
Honestly, I believe in the resurrection not because it proves the superiority of my faith, or lets me into some heavenly apartment complex at the end of things, but because without it, I myopically and solipsistically end up believing the arbiter of all that was, is, and can be, is me and my own baggage and doubt and fear and pain and success and failure.
Without the resurrection, God seems strangely self-depricating and poorly-complected.
(hint: I am self-depricating and poorly-complected)
So, as people who claim to worship a crucified, penniless and decidedly difficult to kill Rabbi from the 1st century, we best leave the door cracked a bit when it comes to what can and can’t happen.
Because, people don’t come back from the dead,
except of course, when they do.
And, who’s to say that part of your own story, the part you left for dead years ago, can’t find a pulse against all odds, and disappointments, and relapses to the contrary?
Meaning: If that first tomb is empty, maybe yours is as well.