Recommended Reading

The genius of Steve Jobs wasn't simply innovation; Jobs' genius lay in the fact that he understood the spirit of the age. It was no accident that Jobs found transcendent success by constructing the iWorld, a world in which everything revolves around the individual. The iMac, iPod, iPad, and iPhone speak directly to our souls.

It was Augustine who said there are two ultimate loves: love of God [or] love of self. Apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, we all inordinately love ourselves. Self is the shape, or misshape, of our hearts. Since the fall, man has been afflicted with a deadly condition, what Augustine [ and later Martin Luther] called being incurvatus in se: being turned in on ourselves. A liturgy of self-centeredness, the English archbishop, William Temple, said it best:

"We make ourselves, in a thousand different ways, the center of the universe. But then our soul is bent over, turned in on itself, separates itself from the source of true life and nourishment, and eventually starves itself of spiritual oxygen, shrivels up, becomes hard, and dies."

Living, breathing, hard, dead souls—precisely what the iWorld produces and feeds.

Good Will Hunting

There is a compelling scene in the movie Good Will Hunting. Will Hunting sits with his therapist, Sean, on a park bench. After belittling and mocking Sean, Sean comes at Will with a more direct approach:

"You're a tough kid. I ask you about war, and you'd probably, uh, throw Shakespeare at me, right? "Once more into the breach, dear friends." But you've never been near one. You've never held your best friend's head in your lap and watched him gasp his last breath, looking to you for help.

And if I asked you about love you probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totallyvulnerable. Known someone could level you with her eyes. Feeling like! God put an angel on earth just for you…who could rescue you from the depths of hell.

And you wouldn't know what it's like to be her angel and to have that love for her to be there forever. Through anything. Through cancer. You wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term 'visiting hours' doesn't apply to you. You don't know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much.

I look at you; I don't see an intelligent, confident man; I see a cocky, scared shitless kid."

Will is a genius. He knows something about everything. But he knows nothing. Will's entire life has been one of listening to the record but never hearing it, never living it. Nothing in his life is solid; everything, from his friendships to his romantic life, is disintegrated. Sean tells Will that he [Will] knows nothing about real life, about "real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much. Will would have been an iWorld posterchild, he can’t see past himself.

In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis writes about 'solid' people, contrasting them with 'ghosts.' Lewis portrays solid people as the prototype for 'whole' people, what God has always intended us to become. What makes a person whole [solid]? Selflessness.

The ghosts, on the other hand, are selfish; they are shadows because they cannot see past themselves. Lewis depicts heaven as a place where everything is solid and thus painful to the ghosts. A blade of grass penetrates the feet. An apple is as heavy as a bowling ball. Water is solid even as it flows down river. The metaphors point to wholeness and disintegration. Those in heaven are whole, solid, selfless human beings conformed to the likeness of King Jesus. Those in hell are miserable, disintegrated souls, ghosts who have only lived for themselves, and in living for themselves, have lived for small things, shriveling up in the process.

Shadowy Ghosts

Trevin Wax once wrote that we live in a "world designed for ghosts..." A world where we are becoming less solid and more "selfishly shadowy." Wax writes;

"We live in an era tailor-made for superficiality, for ghost-like transparency. Day after day, we scroll through endless updates, follow all the latest political controversies on social media, jump to games on our smartphones, chuckle at sitcoms or the latest TikTok video—never aware that as time goes on, our souls are shrinking... The currents of culture will tug at us until slowly, almost imperceptibly, we lose the capacity to stand in awe of God, to feel the weight of glory, and to encounter profound and eternal truths. Everything is pushing us toward superficiality, toward the banalities of entertainment or the rush of breaking news. There's no cultural push toward wisdom and reflection, toward those activities and practices that would make us more substantial, more solid."

I meet too many young men who are nothing more than ghosts. Men who have never felt the weight of glory. Chestless men. Men who have never lived for anything beyond themselves.

Aimless and purposeless, these men have no idea where they are going. Some are guessing, groping for answers in the dark. Others listen to the loudest [often most profane] voices in culture. Most, though, have simply resigned—buried at 75, but they die at 26. Their soul has become hard and shriveled because nothing they touch is real.

AI is counterfeit wisdom.

Pornography is counterfeit intimacy.

Drugs and alcohol are counterfeit happiness.

Junk and processed foods are counterfeit nutrition.

Social media breeds counterfeit connections.

Online consumption is counterfeit reward and satisfaction.

And the Church is not immune. Men today are looking for a faith that works, something substantive, something beautiful. Yet, often, they find the opposite: something lacking congruency with little pension for 'adventure.' The opening sentence of The Thrill of Orthodoxy rings true: "The church faces her biggest challenge not when new errors start to win but when old truths no longer wow."

Living in a superficial world that no longer 'wows' takes a toll on a man’s soul. Trying to evade the emptiness, men clamor for attention and likes. Yet, at the end of the day, what does it matter how many clicks, downloads, and followers you have if you're just a ghost being followed by other ghosts?

Men of Substance

I want to be a man of substance. A solid man, perhaps solid enough that others can stand on my shoulders. This is not easy. Pursuing solidness and substance means you are constantly swimming against the tide and always going against the grain. Wax again,

"We face headwinds in structuring our lives and conversations toward solidness. What's more, ghosts are perplexed by solid people, unable to understand or articulate what makes them tick or how selfless habits could bring happiness. They recoil at this strange way of life, preferring the trinkets of triviality to heavy gold inherited by the solid people."

At best, solid people are perplexing. At worst, they are bothersome, chaffing those who prefer superficiality and have no sense of wonder and devotion. No doubt solid people are strange, and yet, that is okay. They should be. After all, they are strangers, foreigners living in a foreign land [1 Peter 2]. Solid people are strange people.

So, how does one become solid? More on that to come.