Bright Lights, Big City is Jay McInerney's searingly-witty, emotion-ripping novel of one man's perilous drift down an alcohol and white-powder-polluted stream of delayed adolescence. The young man is bright, creative, and desperately lonely. His language is marked by the kind of sarcasm which forms at the intersection of keen intelligence, comic conceit, and human desolation. (He describes a woman he meets as having a voice "like the New Jersey state anthem played through an electric razor.") Barely holding on to his low-level job at a New York City magazine, he spends most of his time playing with casual relationships in strobe-lit Manhattan bars, wandering through graffiti-scarred scenes of urban decay, and finding his personality to be unraveling at an increasing velocity.
At one point in the novel, the young man, riding an uptown subway and trailing behind him the wreckage of a marriage, a career, and possibly a life, finds himself seated next to a Talmud-reading Hasidic Jew. Watching this Hasid move his finger across the lines of Hebrew, the young man observes,
This man has a God and a History, a Community ... Wearing black wool all summer must seem like a small price to pay. He believes he is one of God's chosen, whereas you feel like an integer in a random series of numbers. Still, what a ... haircut.1
A God and a History, a Community ... but what a haircut. In some ways, that comes close to the reaction of contemporary people to John the Baptist, an amalgam of awesome piety and just plain weirdness. He strides into the opening scene of the Gospel of Mark, inevitably bringing with him, for the modern reader, his Hollywood-shaped image. Out of Central Casting, by way of Wardrobe, John stands there with his tumbleweed hairdo, animal skins draped over his out-sized frame, popping honey-dipped locusts as his rough baritone howls like the desert wind to the gathering crowds, "Repent!" A God and a History, a Community ... but what a haircut!
There is a truth, and there is a falsehood, in this portrait of John. The truth in the image is that John is intended to jar the readers of Mark, to shock our sensibilities. His presence sounds a willful note of discord in the initial harmonies of the gospel narrative. John is as out of place as a dayglow orange "Ye Must Be Born Again" sign alongside a tranquil country highway. But what is genuinely shocking about John is not his weirdness. This is the falsehood in the popular conception of him. He is intended, not to jolt them with a memory. John is not an exotic; he is a living anachronism. His vestments are not outlandish; they are the clothing of the past. John is not "Stranger in Paradise"; he is "Auld Lang Syne." To be precise, John is dressed like the old prophet Elijah, no question about it, and the moment of his appearing is as sobering in its context as would be the arrival of Thomas Jefferson, waving a copy of the Declaration of Independence, in today's Senate chamber.
So, now we know that John is not out of this world, he is simply out of sync ... but so what? Simply put, if we do not understand that John represents the past, we also cannot understand what he has to say about the future. John, like Jesus who follows him, preaches a message of repentance, but "repentance" is a slippery word, a "weasel word," as someone else has phrased it. We cannot fill it with meaning for our lives until we have come to grips with this character who has stepped out of the pages of the Old Testament and into the pages of the New.
Some people, for instance, think of repentance as something which just naturally happens to people as they move along through the journey of life. We travel along the track, accelerating smoothly, our goals established, our values set, when ... wham ... we crash into the wall of some experience we cannot handle, for which our resources are inadequate. Our loved one dies, or we get rejected by the school of our choice, or we have a heart attack, or we are laid off from our work. It happens in one form or another to everyone, and such experiences call for a changing of goals, a reformulation of values, an alteration of the ways we cope with life and make our key decisions.
This is, of course, a kind of repentance, but only a mild form. It is really more like growth, or maturation, since, in most such experiences, we do not draw a new hand, but only make a few discards and rearrange the cards we have. We adjust, but do not fundamentally change. This is not the kind of repentance preached by John the Baptist.
There are others for whom repentance is a larger, more profound, and more theological version of a New Year's resolution. The old year passes to the new, and we feel the extra inches around our waists, or taste the bitter nicotine on our tongues, or think of the hurtful and spiteful things we have said to one near to us, and we repent. We toss the butter pecan ice cream into the disposal, flush the Marlboros down the commode, or stammer out a few long-overdue words of affection and affirmation. When we repent in this fashion, what we are doing is repudiating our past, wiping the slate clean, turning over a new leaf, beginning all over again. Carl Jung was groping toward this when he wrote,
In the second half of life the necessity is imposed:
Of recognizing no longer the validity of our former ideals, but of their contraries;
Of perceiving the error in what previously was our conviction;
Of sensing the untruth in what was our truth....2
In his article "Returning to Church," which appeared in the New York Times Magazine, novelist Dan Wakefield movingly described his own repentance, a turn from despair to faith. Wakefield portrayed a treacherous time in his life. A long-standing relationship with a woman had just dissolved. He was out of money, and had just buried, within the span of seven months, both of his parents. His work no longer satisfied him, and drugs had become an all too attractive means of escape. "I was," he wrote, "headed for the edge of a cliff." A chance conversation in a neighborhood bar with a house painter, who was looking for a place to go to mass on Christmas Eve, led to Wakefield's own attendance at a Christmas candlelight service, then to participation in other services of worship and Bible studies, and to a gradually developing devotional life.
As Wakefield's religious involvement increased, he experienced a growing freedom from his sense of drifting purposelessness and from what he called "my assortment of life-numbing addictions." He wrote:
... at some point or other they felt as if they were "lifted," taken away ... The only concept I know to describe such experience is that of "grace," and the accompanying adjective "amazing" comes to mind along with it.3
Christians are familiar with this, the deepest form of a certain kind of repentance, and indeed we celebrate it. "Once I was blind, but now I see," we sing. Christians rejoice in the kind of repentance which buries the rags of a soiled past in favor of the white garments of a new future. But even though this comes closer to John's message, this is not yet fully the kind of repentance which John proclaimed. The repentance John preached is not a mid-course correction; it is more radical than that. The repentance John preached is not repudiation of the past; it is more complex than that. The repentance John preached calls for a revising of the past. It calls for us to look behind before we dare to move ahead. It calls for us to encounter the past we have lived through but have not fully experienced, the past we have inherited but not inhabited, before we enter a future we do not yet comprehend.
What does this mean? Consider the experience of a business executive on the verge of implementing a shrewd business plan. The scheme involved temporarily dropping prices below the level of profitability in order to starve a smaller competitor out of the market. Then, with the market to himself, prices and profits could rise. The fact that the competitor was a struggling family-owned business, not really a major factor in the market, but the sole livelihood of a family with three small children, was known to the executive. The plan was technically legal, though, and all competitors are fair game, since business, after all, is business.
Just as the arrangements were nearly in place, the executive was called back to his hometown for the funeral of a cousin. During the graveside service, as the man sat under the funeral tent which was stretched over the family plot, his eye fell on the gravestone of his grandmother, who had died when he was only a boy. Inscribed on her stone were words from the Book of Proverbs: "She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue."
"The teaching of kindness ..." The words seemed to be written in fire as they burned in his heart. He had read them many times before on nostalgic visits to the cemetery, but now they leapt from the past into his life. He did not merely recall his grandmother; he was confronted by her memory, judged by the commitments he vaguely knew she held, but had not considered to have any claim on his life. It was a strange and disturbing experience, and he returned to his city with no will to destroy, but to seek somehow to know and live "the teaching of kindness."
The essayist and short story writer Eudora Welty wrote in One Writer's Beginning about the deep insight which can result when people explore memories of experiences they thought they already fully understood. "Connections slowly emerge ... cause and effect begin to align themselves ... And suddenly a light is thrown back, as when your train rounds a curve, showing there has been a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you've come, is rising there still ...."4 A mountain of meaning rises behind you ... rising there still. That is the soil of the repentance John preached. John wears the clothing of an old prophet, embodies the history of God's people, in order to proclaim that all that God has done before, which we did not fully see, all that God has said in our memory, which we did not fully believe, has pointed to this moment, to the coming of the Messiah. What does this repentance look like in our lives?
Whenever we return to an old and well-worn passage in the Bible and do not, through nostalgia or willfulness, force it to say only what we expect it to say, but allow it to encounter us anew, creating new and demanding possibilities for our lives, we have repented. When we invoke some experience in our memory and discover, in our remembering, more evidence of the hand of God there than we first saw, more signs of the grace of God than we ever knew were there before, more call for gratitude to God than we have yet expressed, and we find in ourselves a will to live a different, more faithful and obedient tomorrow because of what we have discerned, we have repented. Whenever we return to the faith we have been given, to the gospel we have heard so often, to the stories which have been told again and again, and find there not a retreat, but a renewal. Whenever we discover that all that God has done in our common yesterdays is pointing us anew to the Christ who comes this day, to forgive our sins and to make possible a tomorrow of faith and joy, we have repented.
1. Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), p. 57.
2. Carl Jung, as quoted in Bernard Martin, If God Does Not Die (Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1966), p 9.
3. Dan Wakefield, "Returning to Church," The New York Times Magazine (December 22, 1985), p. 26.
4. Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 90.