Enchantingly Axiomatic: The Snakeoil in the Water We Drink

DWYL

As-Long-As-Your’re-Happy . . . Follow-Your-Heart . . . Be-True-To-Yourself . . . Believe-In-Yourself . . . Live-Your-Truth . . . Be-Your-Best-Self . . . Do-What-You-Love — the aphorisms of our day are elegant. They sound like beautiful advice. They’re certainly enticing.

Who wouldn’t want to be their best self? Who wouldn’t want to do what they love? Who wouldn’t want what makes them happy? Who wouldn’t want happiness enshrined in their own personal declaration of independence on the road to curating their self-identity?

Tara Isabella Burton’s sweeping history, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians (PublicAffairs 2023), has shown that the quest of our selves has been integral to the evolution of Global Northwest's capitalist culture since the European Renaissance. Meanwhile, Walter Isaacson’s portraits of Elon Musk (Simon & Schuster 2023) and Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster 2011) provide exhaustive examples of how these iconoclastic influencers incarnated the ethos of self-curation — albeit under the alias of assertedly altruistic aspirations — down to the exacting minutiae of their lives. And as the allegedly amoral algorithms of our social media feeds reflect, self-curation appears to be the implicit metanarrative of the average person, not just celebrities. Clearly, much of the Happiness Industry, the Nomadic Economy, the monetized Self-Care movement, and, soon if not already, CRISPR human engineering run on the engine of self-curation.

But are our enchanting axioms true? Are they good advice? How do they compare to the wisdom of the ages — let alone stand up to life? Are the biographies captured by Burton and Isaacson prescriptive or merely descriptive . . . or perhaps proscriptive?

As a Christ-follower, I have no interest in pointing the finger at the world, or as Paul and Sosthenes warned the Christians in Corinth, “For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge?” (1 Corinthians 5.12 ESV). Pew Research Center shows that 61% of self-identified Christians in the USA engage in New Age or occult practices or beliefs (published January 2024). That means 3 out of 5 American Christians mix things like tarot cards, Reiki, the underlying Hinduism of yoga, or belief in reincarnation into their religious life. If the majority of Christians are actively dipping into the fountain of paganism in these ways, then surely they are imbibing the potent potables of our culture’s axioms — I, for one, have.

One fair test of these second-person singular imperatives would be to consider the lives of famously ethical and wise people. If the advice is true, then certainly it should be true of those whom history has esteemed highly through the ages. For Jewish readers, there may be no greater hero than the amanuensis of God’s code of ethics, Moses; for Christian readers, there is no greater hero than the Jewish Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, so I will consider them. As a shorthand for all of our axioms, I will use Do-What-You-Love or its hashtag acronym DWYL.

Moses

Did Moses do what he loved? His life was a celebrated success by all accounts, so his narrative should be replete with lessons about doing what one loves or enjoys. Moses had at least four diverse careers according to Exodus.

Did he enjoy his first career as a prince of Egypt? He was thrust into the royal family. Once he discovered the injustice of how his adoptive master-class treated his native people, he certainly did not enjoy being an Egyptian ruler. And so he left his post posthaste.

Did he enjoy his second career as a shepherd? Once he became a refugee and married into a sheep farming family, he became an accidental herdsman, helping his new father-in-law’s agribusiness. And so Moses unwittingly follows the pattern set 444 years earlier when his patriarch Jacob fled home and fell into his in-laws’ animal husbandry.

Did he enjoy his third career as an abolitionist? God didn’t give him much choice. Moses made every excuse he could, but he could not deny the reality that he had been given access to Pharaoh’s court in order to save Israel, even as Jacob’s son Joseph had become prince of Egypt in order to save people. If Lincoln was a reluctant emancipator, Moses was an involuntary one.

Did he enjoy his fourth career as the leader of a renegade nation? Moses made the seamless transition from liberator to apostolic leader of the people. From Israel’s grumbling to Moses for water right after the miracle of walking through the sea, to 40 years later when Moses rebukes Israel as a stubborn and rebellious nation, his career of frustrations is an open book. Once again, it was not his ambition that led to this occupation, but his obedience to God.

Moses would fail as the poster child for Do-What-You-Love. Rather than chasing self-actualization — or seeming to work effortlessly or being himself or following his passions or fulfilling his aptitudes — he fell into one career after another. One could even say, to mix metaphors: God hammered Moses’s camel through a series of needle eyes. There’s never any inkling in any text that Moses was particularly well-suited for, let alone loved, what he was doing — if anything, quite the opposite. We come away from story after story with the sense that he did what he nearly hated.

Jesus

Certainly with Jesus of Nazareth, the DWYL advice should fare better. Surely if anyone could and would do what they love, it would be the Son of God, the anointed Messiah, the King of kings. So: How did Jesus do according to the DWYL metric?

Jesus’s first career was as a builder because that was the family’s line of work. There’s a good chance that Jesus had a hand in building the 1st century stone roads and columns in the city of Sepphoris of Galilee. Did Jesus enjoy picking out rocks, breaking them down, moving them, chiseling them, and setting them for the Roman client state? Perhaps that was just his first career so that he had blue-collar bona fides to identify with the common man as he climbed the ladder of axiomatic success.

But of course: If Jesus ever climbed a ladder, it was downward. He said that he came not to do his own will but the will of God-the-Father whose agenda included valiantly suffering by, with, and for the world. Why? Because the Father loved the world.

Jesus was no masochist. Like Moses, he tried to avoid suffering. But in the end: Jesus loved the Father too much to say No to him. Jesus’s trust (also known as faith) in the Trustworthy One resulted in an expectancy (a.k.a. hope) that while mortal suffering is real, it is not the demise of life because the Father is the God of self-sacrificial attachment (a.k.a. love).

Jesus shared the analogy of a mother anguishing in labor: Her sorrow is temporary and serves the joyful purpose of giving birth to new life. Likewise, Jesus himself endured suffering for the compelling vision of joy set before him.

What I Love

Perhaps Do-What-You-Love is more relevant for less celebrated, less successful people. Take me, for example. I have loved a lot of things. If DWYL were true, then I should have had any number of yellow brick roads to follow in my life. Here are but a few brief examples:

I loved US Constitutional law regarding hot-button social issues. But that did not mean that God had called me to be a culture warrior even though I started on that path in a Pre-Law program in college. While my internship under Judge Robert Bork could have been my ticket to follow in his footsteps, I think God let me brush up against this cultural icon so that I could see what it’s like when someone has so idolized their presumed vocation that they are unable to begin to let go of bitterness even several years after being unjustly foiled.

And so I said goodbye to law and said hello to loving its slightly more sanguine cousin, political philosophy. But almost as soon as I was awarded a full assistantship to get a PhD in that discipline, the givenness of life foiled me. My grandmother’s Alzheimer’s was progressing and there was no one else able to stand between her and being relegated prematurely to a nursing home.

The day I faced my crossroad was a beautiful July afternoon. I lay down on a wood bench in the backyard and stared up at the blue sky and pondered: Do I leave her and start my promising academic career, or do I stay home to become her primary caregiver? Immediately I had a moment of Divine clarity and peace.

And so I traded in four years of grad school for four years of changing her diapers. Not because I loved cleaning her up. But because I loved her. Loving her more than Doing-What-I-Loved required an ordering of my loves.

Ordo Amoris vs Posse Mori

The Mosaic code of ethics (a.k.a. the Law or Torah), given for slaves from North Africa, called them to reorient their lives around the twin imperatives: Love the God who loved them — the God who created them, who fed them, who clothed them, who called them to a hopeful adventure, and who emancipated them — and love their neighbors. Nearly 1,500 years after Moses, Jesus underscores these two loves as the way to life.

Four centuries later, it is Augustine of North Africa around 400 CE who defined virtuous character as the proper ordering of loves. The order of love (ordo amoris) is necessary to overcome humanity’s slouching toward death (posse mori). In the 1200s, Clare of Assisi explained that “We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become.” Thomas Cranmer’s keen anthropological observations in the 1500s are summarized by Ashley Null as “What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.”

Sages of the 21st century echo the wisdom of the ages: Author Steven Garber, drawing on a lifetime in the classroom and the boardroom, has observed that “moral commitment precedes epistemological insight. We see out of our hearts. We commit ourselves to living certain ways — because we want to — and then we explain the universe in a way that makes sense of that choice . . . it is always a matter of one’s heart leading the way, one’s loves shaping one’s vision of the world and the way that a person will live in it” (Visions of Vocation, IVP 2014).

Philosopher James K. A. Smith put the human predilection this way: “We are essentially and ultimately desiring animals, which is simply to say that we are essentially and ultimately lovers. To be human is to love, and it is what we love that defines who we are” (Desiring the Kingdom, Baker 2009).

Neurotheologian Jim Wilder explains that “we are lured . . . rather than being pushed by beliefs . . . at a precognitive level, we are attracted . . . We feel our way around our world more than we think our way through it. . . . our primary orientation to the world is visceral, not cerebral. . . . The brain functions that determine our character are most profoundly shaped by who we love” (Renovated, NavPress 2020).

The anthropology of the ages resonates throughout this side of eternity because it has proven true in generation after generation for the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. Likewise: Moses’s simple narrative about Adam and Eve in the opening turns of the Torah scroll proves pivotal for the rest of the biblical scrolls. The prototypical humans, even in the perfect environment of Paradise, disordered their loves.

Instead of resting in the perfect fidelity of their Creator, they were aroused by a lowly creature. Craving what was verboten appealed more than God. Even with a smorgasbord of God’s gooddness on offer, they did not eschew the appetite to taste evil.

The Irony

Ironically, the evil on offer was their own. Their evil was merely grasping after doing-what-they-loved. Doing-what-they-loved turned out to mean loving-themselves-over-God, and loving-themselves-over-God turned out to mean I-wish-God-were-dead.

Their acquisitive acquiescence prophetically declared: Heil Nietzsche! When God is dead, then I can be my Self. When God is dead, then I can be God.

Their eyes were open to their own infidelity. But it was too late. Having traded in the purity of their relationship with God, they had nothing to cover over their guilt.

They had not set out to reject God, they only presumed they could hold on to God with one hand and to forbidden fruit with the other. But it was an untenable tension. They couldn’t handle both.

Nor did their progeny fare any better. The Hebrew Scriptures are as long as they are not so much to celebrate Israel’s fidelity to loving God and neighbor, but to remember their infidelity. They are us writ large.

The Human Condition

Adam and Eve warn us from the grave. The twelve tribes of Israel who embraced the paganism around them warn us from the grave. The conservative cultural pundits who crucified Jesus warn us from the grave. Even if we lived in Paradise, even if we lived in the Promised Land, even if we saw Jesus perform miracles with our own eyes, it would not be enough. We can be surrounded by God’s goodness, we can arrive at the place our ancestors longed for, we can be in the presence of the Promised One, and yet disorder our loves.

Faced with the temptation that some morsel is being kept out of reach, we would rather trade in Paradise and our trust of God than live without satiating our curiosity. Seeing a majority of people seeming to get along just fine without the God of Abraham and Sarah, we would rather give up the Promised Land than be devoted to just one god, especially one who dares have high expectations of us. Given the opportunity to doubt that Jesus is whom his devotees make him out to be, we would rather take him down a notch than sacrifice our right to sit in judgment of him and dare let him judge us.

God’s love is such that he lets us let go. And let go we do. We take advantage of the latitude extended by the liberality of God’s self-sacrificial love.

It’s like Jesus’s wisdom story of the Lost Son. The prodigal left his father in order to go do-what-he-loved which was to consume the world which ended up consuming him. He detached and distanced himself from his father so as to attach himself to the morsels of the world which were nearly the death of him.

If you sense echoes from Genesis, it is no mistake. Jesus is giving the metanarrative of humanity’s condition. He is turning up the contrast on the tragedy of Adam and Eve.

Instead of being the children who attach to our benevolent Creator, we self-sabotage. Instead of living into our potential to reflect Divine nature (a.k.a. the image of God), we muddy the mirror. We do this because we want to do what we love.

Left to our own devices, we will devise our world so as to achieve what-we-love, even if someone has to die for it. We conveniently set aside all the normal questions of wise discernment, lest they get in the way: Why? How? When? Where? Who?

More often than not we do not recognize and acknowledge — let alone attune to, receive, or reciprocate — the love of God. Because that is who we are. It is part of the condition of not being God.

Birds of a Feather

Birds of a feather flock together. The nature of creatures is to be able to attach to their own kind. And when they do, creation may result.

But a flock can also be a scourge of mosquitos, a den of snakes, a frenzy of sharks. Or it could be a gang of juveniles enforcing the harsh code-of-the-streets because in the critical first thousand days of life that begins in the womb they lacked the nourishment of healthy, loving attachment. As Stephen Sondheim would have it, “I'm depraved on account I'm deprived.”

To the extent that humans deprive one another — failing to rightly attach to and love one another and the rest of creation — we corrupt our reflection of the Creator, thereby distancing ourselves from the One who alone is the ultimate source of self-sacrificial love and thus of life. Detachment and distance rend the heart of God and thus the fabric of life, threatening death not only for ourselves but for everyone and everything everywhere impacted by our personal pursuit of what we love.

Insidious

Do-What-You-Love is not the panacea it’s cracked up to be. In fact: The axioms of life are precisely why the world has been groaning under the dominion of Eve’s sons and Adam’s daughters. DWYL is successful at neither ameliorating creation’s entropy nor facing the corruption of our souls.

Siren songs are not sung for human flourishing. They have a catchy beat, but we are the ones caught. The lyrics deceive us into detachment, distance, and death. It’s like a horror movie poster that uses the corrupted beauty of sex-appeal to titillate us into watching.

All potent deceptions have a lure: a sliver of truth or goodness or beauty. DWYL’s lure is a sliver of truth. Its sliver is that love is at the heart of our life’s vocation. The axiom’s love, however, is immature. It is immature because it is detached, bereft of the relationships to God and to others that will force it to mature into a self-sacrificial love.

All humanist visions try hard to do life without the God of Abraham and Sarah. As a result of this detachment, they are both overly optimistic about the human condition, and overly pessimistic about God. With such an outlook: It’s no wonder that Do-What-You-Love emerges as the best our culture can do.

But: DWYL is not up to task. It’s insufficient for navigating life. It can neither give us what we need nor even deliver the love we want.

The Nature of the Ultimate Metanarrative

The Triune God’s nature is that God and only God can fully attach with God. God does not allow snakes or tasty morsels to get in the way of who he is. God — being perfectly, completely true and good and beautiful — naturally attunes to, receives, and reciprocates love with himself. God attunes to God. God receives love from God. God reciprocates love to God. And out of this attachment of the Godhead within itself, God creates, redeems, and recreates.

We — being birds of a flock — do not lean into attaching to God. If God wants to continue to attach to us, he must become one of us. And become us he does. God-the-Son is made in the likeness of humanity. God becomes the mortal Son-of-Humanity.

Jesus — being born of Miriam of Nazareth — is bound to the same threat of death as everyone everywhere. And succumb to mortality he does. King Jesus subjects himself to mortals who would rather have innocent blood on their hands than give up what they love.

Jesus’s mortal denouement reveals the understatement of his Lost Son story where the prodigal demanded his inheritance before his father was on his deathbed. Jesus himself is the ultimate metanarrative. What Adam and Eve did with their Creator, what the prodigal did with his father, is what we do with Jesus. What we do with Jesus is what we do with God. Jesus is how we treat God.

Thankfully

Thankfully, just as Moses continues the chronicle of Eve and Adam past their DWYL episode, Jesus continues his Lost Son story. In Genesis, after Eve and Adam invert their esteem for God for themselves, God fashions tailor-made leather clothing to cover their shame. In Jesus’s recasting, the father covers his prodigal son with the best from his wardrobe, his jewelrybox, his flock, and first and foremost with the embrace of his own body. More than the metanarrative of humanity’s condition, Moses and Jesus are providing the metanarrative of humanity’s redemption.

Thankfully, the Christobiography of Jesus continues past his lynching. Not unlike the father of the Lost Son, God-the-Father reattaches to the dead Son-of-Humanity. The Father reattaches to what is dead for the exact same reason as the prodigal’s father had: to recreate life. Inert, inanimate matter neither impedes nor intimidates the Living God.

The resurrection of the expired Son-of-God was the result of the Father reattaching to him. When the self-sacrificial God reattaches to dead things, resurrection happens. Thus, the Son is regenerated to a recreated enfleshed life.

Re-Creation

God — being who he is — cannot help but to love his creatures, adulterous though we are. He longs to redeem us, hellbent though we are. He longs to recreate us, dying though we are. There are no intractable problems for God.

Given the way we are, God is exactly whom we need. We don’t need the sliver of truth or the veneer of goodness or the shadow of beauty. We need the whole shebang.

In the God-made-a-bird-of-our-own-flock we get the whole shebang. In Jesus we find Whom we need. In this One we see Who has embraced and covered every prodigal since Adam and Eve.

To the extent that we attach to the resurrected Jesus, we attach to God-the-Father who attached to the dead Jesus in order to recreate life. At the end of the universe as we know it, this is what will bring the Re-Creation of all that has been lost: The Son-of-Humanity, who overcame death through the Father’s attachment, will fully attach to the dead whose life will thus be recreated. This God is exactly what dying persons need.

If God is what we need for life-after-death, then God is what we need in life-before-death. One’s relationship with God is not merely hyperopic. The relationship is about eternity which covers our past, present, and future.

The relationship on this-side-of-eternity will be the relationship we carry with us to the-other-side. If we live a relationship of love now, that is what we will know. If contempt, then that is what we will take into the grave. What we bury with us is what will grow.

Love God And Neighbor

Jesus’s imprimatur is stamped on Love-God-and-Neighbor for good reason. This is the only twin sun which can rightly orient the orbit and order of all of our urges, desires, and loves. Loving anything else will not do. Not all loves are equal. Doing-what-I-love — even seasoned with a sprinkle of Stoicism — does not lend itself to self-sacrificially loving what is unlovely in the short-term, let alone doing the hard work of rescuing and recreating things for eternity.

“Love God and Neighbor” is not nearly as sexy in our ears as “Do What You Love”. Distributive economics is not nearly as enticing as capitalism. Being lynched as an international convict is not nearly as self-actualizing as calling on a legion of angels and being coronated as king. Changing diapers on an adult is not nearly as rewarding as earning a PhD.

What Love-God-and-Neighbor lacks in charm, though, it more than compensates for. By prioritizing loving God, we attach ourselves to the Sovereign who self-sacrificially suffers with us through life and death so that we may partake in Re-Creation. By loving our neighbors we sanctify our loves by strategically extending God’s self-sacrificial love to them.

In loving God and neighbor, we participate in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, whether we know it or not. We become more like Jesus, whether we feel it or not. The human condition and the nature of God require no less of us.

Love-God-and-Neighbor is the human mission. Love-God-and-Neighbor is the human vocation. To love God and neighbor is to be human.

Thanks to Front Page Republic which published an excerpt of this essay here:
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2024/05/enchanting-axioms-the-snake-oil-in-the-water-we-drink/