Quite a number of years ago, when I had finished my second year in seminary, I was home on summer break and just kind of laying around the house, waiting for the phone call telling me where I’d be assigned for the summer. And the day that I’m thinking of kind of happened the way these summer break days tended to. I would sleep until about 10 o’clock, and by that point, my brother had gone to school, my parents had gone to work, and I was just sort of alone around the house.
And I happened to turn the TV on and find that we had a free weekend at one of the movie channels. And there was a movie on that was one of those that, in spite of the fact that it had been out for a long time, that I’d seen most of it fragmentarily over the years, I had never actually seen the whole movie all the way through and unedited for network television. And this is true of a lot of the movies I was exposed to as a child and teenager, that you catch 30 or 40 minutes that’s been edited for broadcast here and there of certain movies, and it gives you a different sense of these things.
So I sat down to watch this movie, which I thought was just sort of a funny kind of screwball comedy type movie. And as I watched it, I concluded two things. One is that following the development of the main character, it actually was an incredibly dark movie.
And there was a lot going on in terms of the themes of his humanity and who he was as a person and kind of how his engagement with reality played out morally. The other thing I concluded after that first conclusion was that having gone to college for four years and studied philosophy, which one of my professors said was back when the Greeks had the bright idea to think about thinking, and then two more years in the seminary where you have to do even more philosophy, that those studies, that thinking about thinking for over half a decade, had ruined me on movies. And now I’m not going to be able to not think about all the things going on there.
You add that to ready analytical temperament, and I promise you I’m quite annoying to watch movies and even sports with. One time while on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, I entertained myself in my off hours in my hotel room by reading a book about the philosophical themes that we can glean from thinking about baseball. So all of that ruined me on movies, and now I analyze every movie as some kind of snapshot of the human condition.
It ruined me on a lot of other things too, one of them being the short, hithy, aphoristic sayings that we use to try to capture the truth of reality. And there’s one of them that sort of comes to mind today upon reading this passage, this rather stern passage from the book of the prophet Jeremiah. We might think of how we relate to other people in a couple of different ways, and it seems that history is divided between those that paint a rosier picture of human relationships and those that are more cynical about them.
The phrase comes to mind, “no man is an island.” This is from a prose work by John Donne, so those words are about 400 years old. “No man is an island” can be viewed, I think quite positively, in that nothing we do is not influenced by somebody else, and nothing we do doesn’t influence other people.
It’s a helpful reminder every day that none of us exists in isolation, that everything we do and everything that is done to us is part of a sort of a chain of events. I’m having lunch today with someone that I happened to meet at a funeral of someone else I had met several years before because I just happened to be in the right place on the right day in those years and happened to be there because of other things that happened to me in my life. So that’s borne out by our experience, no man is an island.
And again, that’s usually cited quite positively. It can be a bit of a warning that we do not exist in isolation and so we need to be careful about how we might influence people, but it’s also a good positive reminder that again there’s a sort of chain that leads from the hand of Providence to the moment we’re in now and the relationships we engage. The counterpoint to this tends to be the saying of the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre that “hell is other people.”
And “hell is other people” is one of those things that’s put on bumper stickers and t-shirts and worn by quite cynical people who just don’t like other people. That they adopt misanthropy as a brand identity. There’s a lovely little vocabulary word for your Thursday morning and it literally just means to hate people.
That any miso word is the hatred of something. Misogyny is literally the hatred of women. Misophony is a medical condition whereby you can’t bear to be in the presence of loud sounds.
Misanthropy is when we don’t like other people. And it’s become a bit of a badge of honor for some people to cultivate a grumpy and cynical personality that rejects the idea that no man is an island or has embraced the idea that no man is an island and rather wished that he were. And so then they say “hell is other people.”
And while that’s not what Sartre meant by it, what he meant in the play No Exit when he wrote that is that something actually more similar to what John Donne means, that once we have passed on we’re sort of locked into the memory that other people have of us. That the bad impressions people had of us sort of forms our legacy because Sartre didn’t believe in any kind of real meaningful afterlife. So what he means is that we are sort of formed by other people’s impressions of us.
It’s an astoundingly similar statement. But the way in which it’s used most often, the way in which it becomes a motto for the misanthrope is perhaps how we are most familiar with it. And so that’s one that I began to overthink and to find reasons to reject.
We can’t say that hell is other people because the simple definition of what hell is, according to Christian dogma, is a place where there could be no love, there could be no relations, there could be nothing good. And so hell is precisely the absence of other people because if there were any possibility for love, what we describe is by definition not hell. But we come to the book of the prophet Jeremiah and we find Jeremiah getting awfully close to saying that hell is other people.
Cursed is the man who trusts in human beings, who seeks his strength in flesh, whose heart turns away from the Lord. He is like a barren bush in the desert that enjoys no change of season, but stands in a lava waste of salt and empty earth. Emptiness and dryness and desolation are the words he uses to describe what happens when we place our trust in other people.
And so again, Jeremiah finds himself sounding less rosy like John Donne and more cynical like John Paul Sartre. Jeremiah is typically fairly cynical. Among the prophets, he is one of the tougher ones to read because he is at best a bit gloomy and at worst quite harsh, as he is here.
But then he goes on, blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose hope is the Lord. He is like a tree planted beside the waters that stretches out its root to the stream. Something that we hear repeated elsewhere in Scripture.
This is the beginning of Psalm 1. That to be rooted in the Lord is what gives life and refreshment. It’s what really gives us meaning. And this is contrasted to rooting ourselves in other people.
So how then do we resolve this when it seems that so much of our life reflects more that no man is an island and that that’s not a bad thing, that our relationships with other people are what prop us up, what build us up, what seem to edify us? Are we really doing it wrong and rooting ourselves in the wrong thing? And that’s where we have to look at it in terms of the fact that beginning by being rooted in God is what rightly orders everything else. We must begin with the love of God. That’s why the greatest commandment is to love God above all.
Start by loving God and then everything else will fall into place, including our human loves. Because human love is not a bad thing. It has its source and end in God if it is to be a good love.
So we have to begin by being rooted in the love of God. And this will give us life. A life then that we cannot help but strive to share with others.
Because one of those great little philosophical aphorisms that you get when you go off for over a half a decade and are ruined on good movies and hippie sayings is that the good is diffusive of itself. That what is good desires to give itself to others so that goodness may abound. And we think of this in terms of our human loves, that when I have something good, I want to share that with others.
I have good news, what do I do? I immediately call or text someone to tell them. What do I do when I have, say, nice things? I want to show them off or I want to even give them to other people. I buy a lot of books for a lot of people.
Some people have become quite annoyed by this because now they have to buy more bookshelves. But we want to share what is good and this is because God, who is goodness itself, desires to give of Himself. And so we have to begin by receiving His goodness first or we have nothing to give.
We have to begin by being rooted in Him so that we have life in Him, a life that we can then impart in our human loves. Because the first and greatest commandment in its totality is you will love God above all and you will love your neighbor as yourself, which is to say, you will love God so as to be transformed by Him and then love God by loving your neighbor in whom you see His image. So may we remain rooted in God, drinking from the stream of delights that He pours out for us and giving us His goodness so that knowing His love, we may give His love and all of our loves will be ordered toward Him.
Note: The aforementioned movie is Cable Guy, starring Jim Carrey. I am not sure why I didn’t mention it by name as I preached this, given that Cable Guy and Jim Carrey are far more edifying and far less spiritually harmful than No Exit and Sartre. The person I mentioned I was having lunch with happens to be something of a celebrity that I have a connection to, though I won’t say whom. But suffice it to say that this is quite a mixture for a homily: Donne, Sartre, Carrey, and [redacted]. It’s a lot for a Thursday morning.
