I have recently started listening to a new podcast, The Nathan Jacobs Podcast (also on YouTube here). Nathan Jacobs is an academic, artist, and filmmaker, but what I find most interesting are his views on realism vs. nominalism and how this distinction is underlying our most troubling personal and social issues today.
He is also an Eastern Orthodox Christian, who came at this by first walking away from some form of Protestantism, became a “none” (religiously unaffiliated – “none of the above” in surveys), then found his way to the Orthodox Church. I offered a brief introduction of him and his work at my other blog, but have decided that the content of this post belong here.
In his recent video, Longing, Nostalgia, & Spiritual Simplicity, he closed with a very powerful point. I might describe it as the best liturgy or sermon I have heard on the topic of despair. This part of the video begins here, and runs through to the end (about 15 or so minutes).
I suggest just watching the video, but for those who might not, following are my notes – not quotes, just usually paraphrases, some more directly taken than others.
The experience of despair that can come from looking backwards is demonic. One of the things that the demons do is that they want you to look backwards at your past. They want this because it is immutable; it cannot be changed. This fact is despair inducing.
If the demons can get you to fixate on what you have done wrong, on the past that cannot be modified, they can successfully induce despair.
Jacobs contrasts Peter and Judas. Both crashed hard, in betrayal. Judas despairs and kills himself; Peter repents, and Christ restores him.
Then there is the despair that we can build for the future. It is using the mind and reason to build the case that things won’t get better, in fact, things will go off the rails. It is just the same demonic despair, but projected into the future.
Where is the solution?
It is in Christ. All the sense of home and peace is in Christ. In having Christ, we have home, we have peace, we have love, we have joy, we have rest. If we have Him, all of the goods we want we also have. But in staring past all of these things and looking through to Christ, we look past the pain, the struggles, the hardship – all of the things that drive us to despair. In the end, all things are made new. Christ will return; good wins. All things are set right.
We look past these things, and see the one thing – the one person – that promises us good.
By looking at Christ, we stare through the fabric of time. We see in the periphery the past and future that drive us to despair. But as long as we continue to look to Christ, we realize that these things don’t deserve our attention.
Conclusion
We have all had failures and disappointments in our past; we will have them in our future. We can say “what if” all we want; doing so won’t change our past. We can whine all we want about the risks we see in our future, few of which we can do anything about anyway.
Yet we allow all of these to lead us to despair. What a wasting away of the gift we have been given.
All of the good things we want now we can have, as long as our focal point is Christ. Like Peter walking on the water. As long as his eyes were focused on Christ, all was well. Once he lost this focus, he began to sink.
Look through all of it to Christ. This is the message delivered by Nathan Jacobs.