Silence and Superpowers
First Sunday of Lent
Last week, I traveled with my family to Big Bend National Park, the varied wilderness on the southern border of Texas. From my home in Arkansas it took 13 hours of driving, which we broke into two days of travel. It was a long way, but not so long as if I had ridden my bike—a journey that Google Maps tells me would take 72 hours of peddling. If I had walked, the travel time would have been 279 hours to cover the 850 miles to the park. My car, with its complex machinery and engineering, had given me speed beyond anything merely human—it had conferred on me a kind of superpower.
And yet, at the same time I was diminished. My back ached from being confined to a seat, the readily available food options were less than nourishing. My sense of stress was high as I moved at 75 miles an hour down a road where other drivers merged without signalling or wandered across lanes as they checked the latest ding on their phones. In one way I had taken on superpowers thanks to my car, but in many others the vehicle had left me depleted of something human.
Driving a combustion engine car, of course, is an old and perhaps fading technology. If the tech magnates have their way, all the trucks and cars, the merging and lane changing, will be controlled by computers that will enable vehicles to speed along all by themselves. And with the increased efficiency, I might be able to travel to the deserts at a 100 miles an hour or more, all the while playing a game of Scrabble with my family or enjoying a movie together. My superpowers would be enhanced, but I would not be engaging my humanity.
Andy Crouch, in his wonderful book The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World, defines the human person as a “heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love.” When we live into these capacities in their fullness, we are living into what it means to be a human creature. However, Crouch says, when we take on superpowers that go beyond mere human tools, superpowers like traveling at 75 miles an hour or flying or having access to the world’s data at our fingertips, we are diminished. “You cannot take advantage of a superpower and fully remain a person,” he writes. And yet, all too often it is such superpowers we long for, because we want to be more than human.
The temptation to be more than human is an old one and it has always ended with the same result. As Johannes Baptist Metz points out in his brilliant little book, Poverty of Spirit: “Satan always tries to stress the spiritual strength of human beings and our divine character and has done this from the beginning. ‘You will be like God’: that is Satan’s slogan. It is the temptation the Evil One has set before us in countless variations, urging us to reject the truth about the humanity we have been given.” This is the temptation we see in Genesis 3 and it is the temptation we see repeated down to our technological age where some are even openly talking of a transhuman future. With technology and bioengineering, we are promised that even death may be no more, if only we will reject our givenness for the sake of more-than-human powers. We should recognize this as the old temptation, in a digital guise. And whether such a dream is technically possible or not, I am certain that the result will not be the liberation of humanity, but its ever more profound enslavement.
Lent is a time to follow Christ in declaring no to the temptations of being more than human. By his descent, by the miracle of the Incarnation, Christ opened the way for us to become human, fully human, once again. As Paul puts it in Romans Chapter 5, death is what has dominion over us when we reject our humanity. It was this death that was the result of the first human being’s rejection of the gifts and limits of creaturely life. Because they wanted to transcend their humanity, they gave up their freedom and fullness. As a result, their humanity was lost, it died.
It is the recovery of that humanity that has animated the story of scripture from the beginning. From Noah to Abraham, from Moses to Isaiah—the work of the faithful has been a return to our true creatureliness, a retrieval of our dependence upon God. It was this utter dependence upon God that marked Jesus’s journey into the wilderness. In solitude and fasting, in being brought to the bare realities of life, Jesus grew into the freedom necessary to be human. When Jesus’s ancestors fled into the wilderness from the empire of Egypt, they had fled a person who had claimed to be a god. Since Pharaoh was not in fact a god, he had to take power from others, power he achieved by enslaving the people of Israel. And yet that system of power and its temptation was hard to get free from. So it was that the forty years in the wilderness became the necessary place of purgation from Egypt’s ways; the place in which Israel was able to find its true freedom as God’s people. Jesus, like his ancestors, went to the wilderness—realizing in his own 40 day journey their path of liberation. When the Satan, the adversarial voice that calls us to be more than human, appears to Jesus, he has been readied by his wilderness time to embrace his humanity in all its poverty and limitations, knowing that it is by God’s mercy that he lives.
In each of the temptations, ones that Metz characterizes as “an assault on God’s self-renunciation, an enticement to strength, security and spiritual abundance,” we find an offering to become more than human and so an undermining of the Incarnation. “[W]hat the devil really fears is the powerlessness of God in the humanity Christ has assumed,” writes Metz. And yet Jesus, in his journey in the wilderness, has found out how to live into that powerlessness in a way that embraces the frailty of human and creaturely life. Jesus, rather than taking on superpowers, is able to fully trust his life and survival to the only God there is—the God Jesus called Father. In so doing, Jesus became fully human, more human that most of us. Now, it is through him, learning with Paul that power is made perfect in weakness, that we can learn to be human too. That is what the journey of these 40 days of Lent is all about—a time to go to the wilderness, the place of bare life, to realize our fragility, our dependence, the humanity that is God’s grace and gift to us.
When we arrived at Big Bend, we pitched our tent in a basin surrounded by mountains, formed long ago from volcanic eruptions. Far from electric lights, the stars at night were bright enough to walk by, radiant in their billions. Each day we cooked meals over a camp stove, and hiked through deserts of creosote and cactus, down through river cut canyons and up to fir forests. In the evening we looked for nocturnal creatures and played Scrabble by lamplight before gazing up at the stars. It was a beautiful and varied landscape that despite being a popular national park was wrapped in a deep silence. Over those days in the desert, we were reminded of the joys and gifts of human life.
Eventually we had to leave, returning to work and study, and with them we came back to the city. There are the sounds of engines all around, sirens blaring, and at night, the occasional gun shot in the distance. All of these are examples of efforts to be more than human, to take on godlike powers that in the end diminish us. My hope, moving into this Lenten season, is that I can carry some of what I was reminded of in the desert. My hope is that like Jesus, following Jesus, I can become fully human, embracing even my weakness and powerlessness, so that I can become ever more dependent upon the God who has always sustained me.
