Loss

Tom Brady: "you get motivated by the losses"

Our inherent brokenness generates a feeling like loss. It makes us feel like we had something, like we were whole and complete at one point, and it was lost somehow. We erect the idea of a fall from grace, which our myths reinforce. And we fantasize that the loss can be overcome  through a “sacred object” of wholeness. Then we spend all our energy trying to get that sacred object, whether secular or religious. This puts us in a pendulum swing between suffering (not having the sacred object) and boredom (the feeling after we achieve the sacred object, with a staggering realization that it was not, in fact, the sacred object). Most people simply reset the sacred object to something else, or they place it beyond this life in death, rather than admit that the sacred object is actually the annihilation of the sacred object; it is lack itself. This is the Christian message that has been perverted throughout the years: the sacred object must be crucified to achieve liberation from the idols we put in its place. What is left is Absence. This is the good news on this Good Friday. There is an inherent brokenness, as even Jesus felt as he cried out on the cross. We are not meant to run from it, or hide it, or cover it over with sacred objects. Today, Christianity turns God from a sacred object that we can achieve, to the wound created by our inherent brokenness. Turns God from a mountaintop to reach, to a depth, a void, which can be ever descended. God as the sacred object is dead, but our freedom exists in the worship of its absence.

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