ICYMI: Revival ❤️🔥
Zach Dives Deeper
...into story, creativity, & culture
Pre-S: In case you weren't aware, this is Zach Hoag, author of The Light is Winning (from 2017). And this is my newsletter, Zach Dives Deeper. It's a once-weekly essay that dives deeper into story, creativity, and culture, along with some miscellany at the end. Without further ado, the essay...
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Revival ❤️🔥
One of my favorite books by Stephen King (and in general) is called Revival. It's about a Methodist pastor who loses his faith.
When the wife and child of Charles Jacobs are senselessly (and gruesomely) maimed and killed in a car crash on a Maine country road, the young preacher becomes convinced that there couldn’t possibly be a God. His Terrible Sermon after the funeral is a barnburner, ripping apart the very notion of the existence of God and the insurance-scam that is Christianity itself. For him, now, his once-beloved faith and calling are nothing but a cruel joke and a destructive con. Needless to say, the congregation is shocked.
But my response was different. When I first read that passage several years ago, I found it to be a stunningly beautiful lament in the face of harsh reality. A word I needed to hear, really.
As the story goes on (all of the above happens in the first act!), Charles takes his one-time hobby of harnessing electricity and turns it into an obsession. He is especially obsessed with the awesome power of lightning. He (rather cynically) trades ministry for the life of a phony carnival magician, using the money from his grift to fund his secret mad science experiments (as one does), believing they just might open up a doorway into a parallel world.
In his vengeful rage over his inexplicable loss, he wants to disprove Christianity’s claims about the afterlife once and for all. In his desperate sorrow over that same loss, he wants to see if perhaps his wife and child still exist beyond the high-voltage veil.
Spoiler Alert:
He’s right, and they do — but that world is no heaven. And it’s even worse than many conceptions of hell, an alien place of unimaginable suffering. One that involves giant ants. 🐜😱
What I find refreshing about the story is that it doesn’t try to weave some kind of redemptive thread into the darkness (this is Stephen King, after all). There’s no subtle evidence that God is behind the scenes, mysteriously and meticulously making sure it all works out for good. Quite the contrary.
Perhaps you, like me, have gone through times in life where the truest and most comforting explanation is that there is no explanation. There is no "plan." There are no hidden forces moving the pawns around on an invisible chessboard. There is just the chaotic and random reality that sometimes strikes in the worst possible way, like lightning.
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As a kid, I was no stranger to revivals. Some of them were planned, as in: "The church is having a revival next week." Some of them were unplanned, at least at first, as in the outbreaks of strange spiritual manifestations that occurred in the "Toronto Blessing" and the charismatic renewal movement that spread as a result.
One year, the Christian middle school that I attended became enamored with the story of Nora Lam, a Chinese evangelist who had supposedly escaped a Communist firing squad when God shined a bright heavenly light and blinded the shooters. Once she successfully reached the U.S., she started a worldwide healing and miracle ministry based on this and other stories steeped in the supernatural.
None of which, of course, were verifiable.
I was a good, obedient kid, but I was also smart and resistant to the kind of groupthink or power of suggestion required to really get bowled over by revival. So when our class went on a spur of the moment trip to see Nora Lam in person at a healing service held in a hotel conference room an hour or so away, I was really excited to see the genuine article — someone who not only experienced the lightning-like intervention of God on her behalf, but who could also transmit that same lightning to others through the laying on of hands.
At the service, Nora invited our class up to the front so she could lay hands on us. Previously, we had watched grown adults fall down, slain the spirit, shaking, as soon as she touched them. My classmates fell like dominos as she came down the line. When she touched my head, there was nothing.
No lightning. No power. No vision of anything beyond the veil.
Frustrated at my vertical orientation, Nora began to swat my forehead with increasing force. At that point I knew: I needed to just give in and fall, and let the carnival magician continue with her grift.
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During a TV appearance to promote Revival, Stephen King was asked about whether or not he believes in God. He talked a bit about being in recovery, and then said this:
“I made a decision to believe in God because it’s better to believe than not to believe… If I’ve got a power greater than myself, I can use that to make life livable, and good.”
The neuroscientist David Eagleman, in light of the surprising discoveries in his own discipline and in science more broadly, calls himself a Possibilian when it comes to the existence of God or other spiritual and theological questions:
"Science had taught him to be skeptical of cosmic certainties, he told me. From the unfathomed complexity of brain tissue—'essentially an alien computational material'—to the mystery of dark matter, we know too little about our own minds and the universe around us to insist on strict atheism, he said. 'And we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story... As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.'"
I find myself precisely at the convergence of these two perspectives: Unwilling to deny the realities I have experienced and learned, and thus aware that claims of astounding supernatural intervention, meticulous divine control, and unflinching theological certainty are a carnival magician's game. But also choosing to embrace the Possibilianism that hopes in a God who permeates all of life with the power of love — and thus makes it livable and deeply, truly good.
If Charles Jacobs teaches us anything, it's that the spiritualized lies and theologized cognitive dissonance around the stark realities of indiscriminate suffering and tragedy, overwhelming darkness and despair, or just, I don't know, verifiable scientific facts, must be laid bare (even if by a Terrible Sermon) and totally rejected.
And yet, dedicating one's life in pain or sorrow or rage to the disproving of that which you must leave behind can fail to account for other beautiful and powerful realities, and take one to an even darker place.
There will always be times and seasons when we must lament the lightning that strikes and destroys. When we must call out the carnival magicians and their grift.
And there will be times when we become conduits for a different kind of power, the one that makes life livable and deeply, truly good. I know at least in my own life, when my heart is the most open and alive, my mind the most illuminated and creative, and my actions the most in sync with my deepest and truest self, I am conscious of God in all his possibility, and I can feel love's power all around me, even moving through me.
Like lightning.
Miscellany
Watching: We finally watched The Zone of Interest. Someone had talked about this movie as portraying "the banality of evil," and I couldn't think of a better description. You can't really call this movie "good" — only disruptive, unsettling, and necessary.
Also: Literally just finished the new 28-minute Bluey episode, The Sign. This one I can confidently call "good." 🥲
Listening: Vampire Weekend has a new album out, and it is brilliant from start to finish. The final track "Hope" had me in tears almost instantly (and it pairs quite well with the subject matter in this letter).
Social: It isn't new but I just came across it recently: this poetic riff on the reality that before the Big Bang "there was no up, there was no down, there was no side to side." Also, the consideration of this "time before events" is another one that beckons us into the realm of Possibilianism...