The Uses of Adversity

 



 

I was reminded of a Charles Schulz Peanuts cartoon this week on GoComics that I last recall seeing when I was in college when perusing my Peanuts books. It is about adversity with Lucy "Dr. Is In" telling hapless Charlie Brown that "Adversity prepares one for the things of life." Charlie Brown gets quizzical and asks "What things?" and she replies "More adversity."  

 

That comic created a place for me to contemplate adversity seriously yet to also get the last laugh so to speak.  

 

Let me take a quick jog down Memory Lane here. I had scored a slew of Peanuts books, all of them original editions or close to it, from a childhood neighbor. Us kids would get together and trade stuff occasionally. Usually, it was crap for crap. An eye for an eye commerce. Nothing special. But, on this given day, I got the better deal by far. I have no idea what I bartered on my end but I cannot imagine it was anything worthwhile. My neighbor was as Esau.

 

The Peanuts books, which I still have, became a constant companion for me during childhood. I know that I was hardly the only one who was impacted by Peanuts, but I think I was more so. Schulz's work was a peculiar and paradoxical combination of humor and pathos, amusement and melancholy. "Good Grief" as it were.  Being a kid with a philosophical orientation and significant learning problems, I intuitively grasped from Peanuts that life is painful and even tragic. Yet, not so much so that one should crawl in a hole and die. For whoever Charlie Brown was, he persevered despite his haunting failures--to keep flying his kite, to talk to the little red headed girl, to kick the football.

 

With Linus as his sidekick, a smart kid with a blanket fetish and delusions of the Great Pumpkin, I joined the two often at that wall in the strip, and pondered things great and small from the angle of life being sweet and bitter all in the same bite.

 

I think I had put the Peanuts books away for quite some time as a teenager but I did bring them with me throughout adolescence in my soul. I believe, in retrospect, to have been severely depressed most of my teenage years. I didn't have a name for it. I suffered pretty much in silence where those around me were so caught up in their own funk trying to work it out, that I was on the wayside quietly weeping. These days I probably would have been medicated into zombiehood which would have done zero to change the circumstances around me. My depression was a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation. I couldn't escape it. I had to take it. I made some bad decisions too.

 

I remember the context of the comic well. Lucy had been playing the Inquisitor role blaming the burning of Snoopy's doghouse to some hidden or overt sin of Snoopy. Maybe Joe Cool pride? Like Job's friends, Snoopy was fingered by the mean-spirited Lucy--who had very little redeeming about her--as guilty and deserving of God's judgment.  Schulz persistently imbued biblical references and scriptural tones in his work, even though he himself went astray from the faith as he got older--a sad tale befitting of a Charlie Brown obituary where he seemed to have become a man who lost hope.

 

I had gone to college and brought most of my life's possessions with me which were not very much. I had little money so I had little to buy and own. College was my best opportunity to leave my Hades of a Home behind and it became a refuge for me. A chance to run like hell and never look back. I was still drawn back into the family gravitational dysfunction Death Star at break by having no money and nowhere else to go but I began to understand to some degree that I was fucked up for some pretty solid reasons and that Truth was my only way out. I had to be honest with myself about my guilt which then gave me the moral courage to call others out--not so that I could cast stones but to understand how get boulders off of me. It was a lifesaver and an exercise in sanity. We are to judge ourselves with the same standard we judge others and all saints must acknowledge their sin and renounce it before becoming the Soul Doctors to others afflicted. Self-righteousness is the most lethal of moral cancers. Otherwise, explain why Jesus was so hard on those caught in it?     

 

When I became a Christian, it was a logical conclusion to pursuing Truth. I found the Bible to ring true to the ear of my soul. Jesus was far more than I had imagined. Calling out the Pharisees for being Vipers and Sons of Hell, forgiving a weeping woman caught in adultery. This was no ordinary man. Anyone who pursues the Truth earnestly will eventually encounter Jesus on the Cross. There is no evading it. If a person passes by, he or she is not really devoted to Truth with a capital T. Instead, the  pick and choose of truth a la carte. Not the whole meal. Communion of the Body and Blood of Him given for us. Snackers instead of a spirituality which is typically a sanctified self-centeredness. Dainties of indulgence.  

 

All faith systems ultimately have to face adversity. Is it random or purposeful? From the pantheistic Catch 22 of endless Karma,  to an atheistic materialistic universe with no ultimate purpose, or is adversity a door to the drama, a primer into the cosmic battle between good and evil, where there are causalities. Babies killed in the womb, children molested by sick and sinful men, terrorists desperately trying to right wrongs, real or perceived, with a drawing of blood that slakes not their thirst. The battle lines are drawn. Where do you stand?  

 

With the disintegration of the biblical worldview in the West, we no longer have a common vocabulary to discuss our differences, a common well to draw from. Adversity parches our soul and we pop pills, drown our sorrows in drink and food only to see them rise like again like deadly monsters from the sea, and suck down entertainment, like some soma sugary soda rotting our souls.

 

Cedars of Lebanon - U2

 

Yesterday I spent asleep
Woke up in my clothes in a dirty heap
Spent the night trying to make a deadline
Squeezing complicated lives into a simple headline
I have your face in an old Polaroid
Tidying the childrens clothes and toys
You smiling back at me I took the photo from the fridge
Can't remember what Emily did
Haven't been with a woman, it feels like, for years
Thought of you the whole time, your salty tears
This shitty world sometimes produces a rose
The scent of it lingers but then it just goes

Return the call to home

The worst of us are a long drawn-out confession
The best of us are geniuses of compression
You say you're not gonna leave the truth alone
I'm here 'cause I don't wanna go home
Child drinking dirty water from a riverbank
Soldier brings oranges he got out from a tank
Waiting on the waiter, he's taking a while to come
Watching the sun go down on Lebanon

Return the call to home

I got a head like a lit cigarette
Unholy clouds reflect in a minaret
So high above me, higher than everyone
Where are you in the cedars of Lebanon?
Choose your enemies carefully, 'cause they will define you
Make them interesting 'cause in some ways they will mind you
They're not there in the beginning but when your story ends
Gonna last with you longer than your friends 

 

Psalm 63:1

 

A Psalm of David, when he was in the wilderness of Judah. O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is;