Dystopic Minimalism and a Gorilla

Last updated on: May 31, 2016 at 7:36 am by Anne Kennedy

Dystopic Minimalism and a Gorilla 2016-05-31T07:36:12-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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I really really don’t want to talk about the gorilla thing, however much the Internet may squeeze my tender consciousness to weigh in. I have children, I like animals. The whole thing is a great sadness to me, though not the mother who gets to still have her child. But what is a child, when there’s a gorilla to be had.

Actually, it does sort of tie in, because what I really wanted to rattle on about was the Minimalists. I know, again, already. I didn’t intend to. I’ve been listening to endlessly varied podcasts about Trump (just trying to understand, for real, just trying to understand) and then the minimalists came up next while I was busy and so I listened for a while.

They have a movie out. Well, a documentary. And they are traveling around the country promoting it. They played clips of it, and part of the sound track.

And, honestly, I am not far off in my estimation that what they are peddling is a religious exercise. It isn’t about the stuff, however much it is about the stuff. At the root of it (whatever it is), it’s about you as a person and how you relate yourself to your circumstances, other people, and the cosmos.

I was particularly bemused this time by the lamentingly sorrowful nature of the clips they played. The underlying music that moved the experts along was doleful, repetitive, mournful. And the substance of the interviews was, I hate to say it, sort of dystopic. Humanity has sinned greatly by owning too much stuff. Salvation can come through getting rid of the excess and leading a meaningfully purposeful but still hopeless life in which the righteous person is surrounded by an appropriate number of useful items.

The third clip was heartbreaking. The minimalists described their childhoods and the trauma of living through divorce and neglect. At the end they played part of the sound track–an album cut specially for the movie, but really a guttural lamenting cry. The only hope we have, if indeed we have any at all, is to not give in to the consumeristic siren call of the age. Humanity has so erred and strayed and there is no health in us. Therefore, we must do the best we can before we die.

I kept wanting to interrupt them, and get a word in. Just to depress them more. The obvious troubling problem is that even if you get rid of all your stuff, and give it to the poor and have nothing, you still won’t be happy–just like you weren’t happy when you possessed everything. Whether there is much or little, if you are still there, you can’t be happy, because you are the problem. There’s no magic, life changing fix to get around the trouble of sin. There’s nothing you can do or not do, nothing you can own or get rid of that will bring you joy in all your circumstances. Even the very clever tag line, “use things not people”, while sensible and true, can’t be achieved, and therefore can’t bring happiness.

The problem with the world is that we are in it. In some sense, that horrible person on Twitter was right. If all the people disappeared, the gorilla would be allowed to be free and go war against all the other gorillas. Except he wouldn’t war, he would be at peace, or, at the very least, we wouldn’t be around to see it and be upset.

But we are here, even though we are the problem. And, as a Christian, I can comfortably say that I’m meant to be here, that God wanted me to be here, even though I was going to make a hash of everything. God made me, and that poor gorilla, and the mother and her child, and the minimalists. And he knew that we would fashion a lot of stuff and use it wrongly, and use each other. He is not surprised by all the bad useless things we collect and bury ourselves with. Moreover, having brought us in to the world, he’s provided a solution to all the trouble that we’ve spread all over the landscape. There is even a way to be happy, to rejoice, even in the midst of brokenness.

But the solution doesn’t include continuing to perfectly manage the stuff, or backing away from the rest of creation and living in a box. The solution is Jesus, the true minimalist, whose perfect life and death atones for sin. Wherever you go, there you still are, ready to make a wreck of everything. And in to the middle of it, Jesus comes to heal and restore. Once you’ve fallen into his care, and understood that he won’t leave you or forsake you, you are free to have stuff or not to have it, to stay where you are or go somewhere else. Wherever you are, there he is, constantly bringing joy instead of sorrow, rejoicing instead of lament, order instead of dystopia.

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