By the time you’re as old as I am (31), you’ve surely happened upon the outer limits of your cool. Maybe I’m speaking for myself, but even as I’ve experienced more of life than today’s young bucks, even as I’ve gained the substance to back the bluster I once fronted, whatever cool I had has slipped past me.
Not that I ever had much to show for myself. Cool is a performance art, and I’m a lousy performer. I once walked into a pole while trying to impress the girls. I’ve killed more than one party with anecdotes from German philosophy. And as a lifelong semi-outsider (first as a missionary kid overseas, then as a white member of a mostly black church), I’ve always been just a half-step behind.
But here’s a secret I’ve discovered: life is bigger and sweeter than whatever cool has to offer. I once thought cynicism was smart; now I know it’s just a limp safety blanket. I once thought being cool meant being relevant; now I know that relevance touches the places of the soul where joy is found, and sorrow. Cool lives only for the moment and thus cannot possibly be relevant when it really counts.
Cool contains enough contradictions and illusions to make one’s head spin. But those after-party moments of honesty, when we know – really know – that we’re lost and going nowhere, are moments of opportunity.
Weakness, not success, is our way out. When we feel lonely and vulnerable – when we feel uncool – God is inviting us to a whole life. When we look around and ask, “What am I doing with my life?” we can begin to live real lives.
My family moved to Wisconsin while I was still in high school. Though I initially resisted – Wisconsin is far less cool than the cosmopolitan European city I had grown up in – I grew to enjoy the place, to the point where I am still here fourteen years later, while the rest of my family has returned to our homeland in Idaho.
I went to college in Madison, at the University of Wisconsin. This Big Ten school is one of the country’s most politically active and is also one of the country’s most debauched party schools. Study hard, party hard, the campus culture says. The UW is thus an easy place to figure yourself out, if you don’t smoke your brains out first. I believe I chose the former.
In an environment dedicated to “ever encourag[ing] that fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found” – that’s the motto of the UW – I discovered that Jesus’ offer of “life to the full” (John 10:10) and Paul’s message that it was “for freedom that Christ has set us free” (Galatians 5:1) were far more compelling and life-giving than the cool culture around me. I found the beloved community of the church.
Here, then, is the crossroads we face: a cool moment, or a freeing, healthy life in Christ. We can’t have both. The church’s greatest power lies in its being the “beloved community” – the supernatural community created by none other than God Himself through His Spirit. God’s love is the most deep-feeling, creative force in the universe, and the incredible truth is that this love lives in the church.
In its sharing of Christ’s suffering and in its practice of inclusive hospitality, the beloved community displays cool’s fundamental phoniness to the world. Cool in one corner, and the love God gives His followers in the other? It’s not even a fair fight. The beloved community shatters cool’s rebellion.
As God’s people living out the full life Jesus promised, the freedom Paul claimed for us, the beloved community must escape the cult of cool. We’re so used to pursuing cool that being uncool is scary. But what other honest option do we have? We have been given Jesus’ words of life, and stewarding those words in a world suffering the effects of cool is a serious matter. Jesus proved His kingship by dying as a contemptible criminal. Following His example, we can and must die to ourselves. We must die to cool.
But when we open our hearts for Christ’s sake, we will live authentically: at the level of human suffering, as theologian Ray Aldred has said, because that is where God’s power is greatest. The sooner we understand the impossibility of the church’s being simultaneously cool and authentic, the better.
When we open our hearts for Christ’s sake, we will gain authenticity. God calls us sons and daughters. He can protect us and make us whole. He can make us into a family. Christian love is vulnerability before God, which for all its uncoolness is the very substance of abundant life, love, and worship.
Love, not cool, is a life worth living.
