Along with the Bible, I began reading Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Samuel Beckett while in high school. For school I read some Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, and Joseph Conrad. Like a hyperactive child calmed by stimulants, I discovered that all these secular writers had a spiritual impact on me. The roaring and nihilistic hedonism of Kerouac’s On the Road encouraged me face life fearlessly, but also revealed the utter emptiness of living for pleasure or the next high. The absurdist drama of Samuel Beckett echoed the truths of Ecclesiastes, “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” Unlike many who rid the world of God but want to keep the purpose and morality theism provides, Beckett was honest enough to fully face the absurdity of a godless existence. Conrad’s Lord Jim chronicled the impossibility of self-redemption and self-transformation—the horrifying chasm between what we long to be and what we actually are. Fitzgerald showed the power of self-deception, the utter deceitfulness of the human heart, and the emptiness of the American materialistic dream. Hemmingway who had written so much about grace under pressure committed suicide in Idaho. After reading Ginsberg’s “Howl”, I wanted a Jesus who walked down the same streets and alleys as Ginsberg’s burnt-out hipsters in search of an “angry fix”. We needed a God who went downtown—who took truth and holiness into the dirty streets of America.
I journeyed to the east with Hermann Hesse while listening to Santana. In Steppenwolf Hesse beautifully expressed my own alienation from bourgeois society. The centrality of a spiritual quest resonated with me in Siddhartha. In Magister Ludi Hesse affirmed the emptiness of intellectualism detached from love and service. Just as I was about to be seduced by the glass-bead game of graduate school, Hesse reminded me that without love we are, no matter how erudite, just “a clanging cymbal.” All my travels to the east brought me back to the cross–where east meets west.
Admittedly these writers offered no cure—no real hope. But their diagnosis of modern man’s disease was devastatingly accurate and biblical. In some passages they recorded the achingly beautiful moments of life. But they had no one to thank for such beauty. In the end, no human works, no grace under pressure, could change the human heart or give meaning to existence. A godless existence should make us howl for meaning.
These writers drove me to re-read the Bible as a document of razor-sharp realism. As the Bible and modern writers proclaim, we are hopelessly corrupt but never happily corrupt. We long for holiness but fail to find it in ourselves or in one another. We inescapably know we are more than animals, so we can never happily live as animals. We are fallen but haunted by God because we are made in his image. Isaiah’s mocking of the absurdity of idolatry and Ecclesiastes’ despair over the meaningless of all things under the sun are confirmed by modern literature. Modern writers sent me back to the Bible where I found a bracing philosophical sophistication and the truth about the human heart.
