“Is There Anybody There?” Advent in a Haunted Age

Photo by Bryce Wendler on Unsplash

In his book The New Testament and the People of God, author N.T. Wright guides readers on how to responsibly approach a text for interpretive purposes. It was here that I first encountered Walter de la Mare’s haunting poem, The Listeners. The poem describes a lone traveler arriving at a moonlit house in the forest and beckoning phantom listeners to answer the door. After being unacknowledged, he abruptly turns and leaves. 

Even now as I read the poem’s evocative lines, I am chilled by its haunting, mysterious language. Most intriguing is de la Mare’s opening—Is there anybody there?—what Wright has referred to as the dominant question of post-modernity. 

Haunted by Transcendence

Many scholars describe our modern era and accompanying Western cultural consciousness as increasingly secular in its makeup. Space does not afford an appraisal of the various ways secularism has been defined, but, in general, it assumes the world can operate and function without the necessity of God. I remember the atheist Daniel Dennett being asked if God and modern science could co-exist. Sure, he replied, so long as God is understood as a "benign overseer." 

We may balk at Dennett's depiction of an impotent and unnecessary god tucked in the corner of the universe, but the Western operating system seems to presume we are on our own. "Western Culture is now set up to make you doubt," quipped Sociologist Peter Berger. As a rebuttal, some may point to the most recent Religious Landscape Survey, where 83% of respondents assert belief in God or a universal spirit. However, "[e]ven though we may profess belief in God," writes Peter Jensen, “most of us live like unwitting, anthropological nihilists.”

And yet, observes the Philosopher and Christian Scholar James KA Smith, those who reject the transcendent cannot shake a prevailing sense that there is something more than a flattened, dis-enchanted material reality. Like the traveler in de la Mare’s poem, we find ourselves occupying a secular realm “haunted” by transcendence. 

Examples are not hard to come by.

In his poem Church Going, the English Poet and nonbeliever Philip Larkin laments the loss of traditional religious belief and the cultural anchor of robust Christianity. Similarly, Author Julian Barnes opens his treatise on death titled Nothing to be Frightened Of with this line: “I don’t believe in God but I miss him.”

Cormac McCarthy describes himself as “not particularly religious”—and yet his work raises questions that draw on Christian hopefulness. In The Road he invites readers to consider meaning, purpose, and transcendence. That is, if we strip society of all its features down to a bare minimum, would it only be about survival?

In the realm of music, the contemporary Folk Band Fleet Foxes opens with this provocative line in “Helplessness Blues”:

I was raised up believing I was somehow unique, like a snowflake, distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see. And now after some thinking, I’d say I would rather be a functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond. But I don’t, I don’t know, what that will be…

In other words, it is better to have purpose than to be a “snowflake”; better to serve something bigger than me than to make myself the center of the universe.

Or consider John Lennon's famous song "Imagine"—penned a half-century ago but still occupying our airwaves today. Imagine, says Lennon, the bliss and peace of a world drained of heaven, hell, and religion. The sentiment is reminiscent of nihilistic Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose Madman famously declared, “God is dead.” But people often fail to understand his context. In his Parable of the Madman, Nietzsche is deliberate to point out that we are not prepared for a world without God. That is, he knew our best virtues, communal values, care for the weak and marginalized, etc. were desirable social properties hued to a Judeo-Christian framework. This is why atheists like Richard Dawkins reject the truth claims of the faith but are hesitant to erase its heritage and widespread social contribution.

Unsurprisingly, a haunted age lends itself to distraction, much of which is engineered by external forces. Author Derek Thompson has made the point that it is not accurate to call our moment a “loneliness crisis.” Loneliness registers a desire to be with others; it suggests sadness when you are deprived of another’s company. More accurately, we are in an anti-social moment. That is, there are powerful forces that keep us affixed and addicted to a digitized world, fueling a dopamine carousel in the pleasure center of our brains. 

Think of pornography, gambling, or gaming. Billions of dollars are poured into these areas to strip-mine our attention and steer it in a particular direction. To be lonely is to miss others, says Thompson. To be anti-social is to forget other people exist to be missed.

But much of our distraction is purposeful. The temptation to self-select into diversions that circumvent existential realities is all too real and enticing. “It’s hard for me to enjoy anything because I’m aware how transient things are,” said Woody Allen in a 2000 Boston Globe interview. “Yes, there are times when you think, ‘My God, life is sweet, it’s nice,’ and thoughts of mortality are in abeyance. You know, watching the Marx Brothers or a Knicks game or listening to great jazz, you get a great feeling of ecstasy...but then it passes, and the dark reality of life starts to creep back in.”

WH Auden’s line from “Age of Anxiety” captures the instinct to distract ourselves from life’s darker realities. He writes:

“Faces along the bar,
Cling to their average day,
The Lights must never go out,
The music must always play.
Lest we should see who we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night,
Who have never been happy or good.”

Auden observes a people “lost in a haunted wood” who amuse themselves with lights and music to avoid confronting their fears and moral shortcomings as “children afraid of the night.”

At the advent of the 21st Century, singer Robbie Williams presciently spoke to distracted despair under secularism’s new patterns in his song “Millennium.”

“Live for liposuction, detox for your rent, overdose at Christmas, and give it up for lent. My friends are all so cynical, [they] refuse to keep the faith, we all enjoy the madness because we know we are going to fade away.”

Williams speaks to a liturgical calendar that, drained of faith, now mirrors the rhythms of our addictions and material obsessions. And why not? It’s all madness and it is all going to fade away, he says. 

“Is there anybody there?”

Recognizing these voices, the Philosopher Charles Taylor appeals to what might be described as a spiritual sensibility—that there is more to reality than the flattened, subtraction story secularism suggests. “Don’t you feel it?” writes Taylor. “Don’t you have those moments of either foreboding or on-the-cusp elation where you can’t shake the sense that there must be something more?” 

The Hope of Christ Among Us

During this Advent Season—this season of waiting, anticipation, coming, and arrival—we declare there is something more. Christmas, particularly in the West, conjures images of a consumer frenzy layered with various traditions, indulgences, parties, shopping mantras, and other cultural trappings.

But the essence of Christmas is that God came. Jesus Christ the Savior signals God for us. But Emmanuel is God with us. And, as my graduate advisor would say, not just God with us but God among us. Shoulder to shoulder. Eating. Drinking. Talking. Walking. Laughing. Crying. Listening. Guiding. 

"[I]n America we produce Christians that say things like, 'I believe Jesus is Lord, but that's just my personal opinion,'" says Theologian Stanley Hauerwas. “Now, you wonder what could possibly produce someone with a soul that shallow". He is right. If Christ has come into the world…This. Changes. Everything. 

If Christ has not come into the world “then,” as Paul says in I Corinthians 15, “we are of all people most miserable and to be pitied.” If Christ has not come into the world, it is up to us. We are just beating the air. We are just people doing things. We are like Sisyphus, rolling a rock up and down a hill, left on our own to manufacture meaning but haunted by the specter of transcendence. 

But if Christ came into the world, all the maps have been redrawn.

“Is there anybody there?” Yes, there is. 

And this belief lies at the center of everything we do. Our Christian faith forms our mission, regulates our “yes” and our “no”, and gives shape to our intellectual life. It not only answers who we are but how we are. As C.S. Lewis once observed, Christians who made noteworthy contributions in this world were “precisely those who thought most of the next.”

Finally, there is a reason the first Advent candle symbolizes “Hope.” Author Tish Harrison Warren writes, “To practice Advent is to lean into an almost cosmic ache: our deep, wordless desire for things to be made right and the incompleteness we find in the meantime.” 

There is a cosmic ache; a massive, unmistakable, collective groan across society. “Things are not the way they should be.” But there is an answer. There is someone behind the door unto which we knock. Hope in Christ. Christ with us. Christ among us. Christ our Savior. Christ who will put the world right. Christ who will snuff out the darkness. 

In the Christian story, it is not a haunted traveler knocking on the door of phantom “listeners”; it is Christ who knocks on the door of our hearts. “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and eat with you, and you with me.” Revelation 3 does not portray Christ as the listener but the seeker; He is knocking, asking, reaching out for us to listen and receive. 

Advent is not just marked by waiting. It is marked by hope, joy, peace, faith, and love. God has come. And this changes everything.

Kevin Brown is the 18th President of Asbury University.