March 16, 2010

Manolith has a post about a teacher who is in trouble for running a fight club in LA.

The Christian in me says this is wrong. But the violent, angry pagan loves it. At least, the idea of it. If given the opportunity, would I really beat the shit out of another human being?

Maybe.

But would I want them to beat the shit out of me?

Absolutely not. No sir.

Probably wouldn't do it. Even if I knew I would never lose. But I can't say the idea isn't intriguing. If you've ever seen the movie and you are a male, you know what I mean. You have two reactions: repulsion and fascination.

Obviously the movie gets way out of hand with the anarchy stuff but it's right on about our culture. The culture of men pampered, desperate, alone and hopeless. Men who don't know what they want because they don't know who they are. So they let someone else tell them what they want. Advertising, the corporate world, religion, other men.

Here are some quotes not from the movie but from Chuck Palahniuk's original book:

"And I wasn't the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue."

"You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you."

"All a gun does is focus an explosion in one direction. You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need."

"We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression."

In Palahniuk's world, fight club "turns the volume down." The shouting dies. You stop trying to be perfect, to have perfect things. You stop listening to all the voices shouting for you to "Be!" We are advised to "de-evolve", even as the men in Fight Club seem to transcend.

I feel like this is the part where Christian Barry says something spiritual and tosses some scripture in there to make us all feel more connected to God and each other. But I recognize the hopelessness, I know the voices that shout for me to be more, always more. I know the struggle to be a man, the whole time not even knowing what the hell a man actually is.

Does God offer us an answer to this?

I think he does...I think so. The answer obviously isn't to "de-evolve" to the point where we are violent and numb, disconnected and at the same time, one common lump of men who have stopped trying to have an identity and have thus lost it entirely.

The answer is, in the spirit of Dan Allender (my professor) to war. Not in the physically violent sense but internally and on behalf of others. And to war is to love.

Augustine said to love God and do what you want. Christ said to love God first and others second. One of the reasons we must love is because love is an impossibility. To love is the best act of all other acts and all goodness comes from love. It requires the most of us, the heart of us, the best of us.

The men in Fight Club are hopeless because they have no purpose and without purpose you lose your soul. But God remedies that by calling us to love and so in loving not to transcend our humanity but to become truly human for the first time.

Palahniuk says it best: "I just don't want to die without a few scars."