going beyond Candide

Watching the musical Candide at Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theater was an interesting discovery in interpretation. Voltaire, the author, is questioning how optimism and the church interpret the world. He intended to strip away the naivety of “hoping for the best” to see the depravity of men, the cultural stuckness of women, and the need to get used to being disappointed.

I wonder if this philosophy of the Enlightenment is not a common vision. Though the theater was full and delighted in the quality, people seemed equally happy to dismiss the hope of a creative God engaged in this world. Candide communicates much truth about the uses and abuse of humans toward one another, which I took as an apt description of the state of fallen humanity. But I left wondering why we have to give up hoping and focus only on our garden of survival.

Churches have a great task in creating hope in the alreadyness of God’s activity in the world. Yet so much is focused on what we can do, and we dismiss the story of God in creating our own. Yes, we need to be honest about our weaknesses and failures, compassionate toward the needy, and active in loving those who dance around us. But we also need to be able to speak of God’s future with a grounded optimism that extends beyond the mental twisting portrayed in Candide. How do you live the story of God’s hope in your context?

finding our story

I finished reading Who gets to Narrate the World?: Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals by Robert Webber. He contends that through a story of Allah’s conquest over all non-Muslims, radical Islam is on the rise in our world. At the same time, the Western church and culture are weakened and fading as they accommodate civil religion, rationalism, privatism, and pragmatism -- meaning that as we are all about our individual selves and what works for us as individuals, we are losing a unifying story that holds us together. Competing stories will determine the future of the world.

For better or for worse, a culture is sustained by having a story that gives meaning to the existence and direction in which a people live and dream. A dream where everyone does his or her own thing is a dream of disintegration. It is kind of like people wanting to say there is no truth (a unifying belief) and then wanting others to believe their truth about this. If we aim at giving everyone their own truth, there is a built-in self-destruct for everyone to disregard what others think and to become insensitive and indulgent. One definition of hell is everyone serving himself or herself.

Webber proposes that we need to regain the Christian story, to sing, pray and enact God’s creative, nurturing, and restoring work in the world. Our stories find meaning within that narrative. We need to go to church for more than a fill at the gas pump. We need to find meaning in the context of God’s ongoing story. What story does your church tell -- its own, the story of individuals on a private spiritual journey, or the story of God’s Creation, Incarnation and Re-creation? What story do you live in?