You Are Now(here)

Introduction

It has been said that there is nothing new under the sun. Solomon, in all his sagacity, gave us that little nugget, and so we ought to take it to the bank, while also acknowledging this observation was written during his gloomy, proto-existentialist years of Ecclesiastes.

But there is such a thing as a new version of an old thing, just like when Cap’n Crunch revolutionized his brand by adding crunch berries. And so I would like to submit for your consideration that we are at a time of a new and improved version of lostness that history has not yet had the misfortune of laying eyes on.

I am speaking of the lostness that comes with estrangement from physical realities seen in its most insidious and pathetic form in our broken relationship to gender. I have written on this in the past here and here, but my goal today is to offer an analogy that I have found helpful in understanding just how lost we are.

The Coming Crimson Tide

Man can only live for so long without the essentials. Air, water, food, homeostatic environments – these can only be ignored for so long before the body will begin to disintegrate. In the same way, a soul can only exist for so long without an identity. Identity is the marrow of the soul, what gives it weight and shape in the world.

The public search for identity that all the world seems intent on helping out with is a symptom of this lostness. You don’t search for what ain’t lost. And the advice given by those with the microphones is that this necessary identity is found in the chaotic abyss of the feelings; in particular, how one feels about their gender. They are not wrong to direct the lost to consider gender for the soul’s direction. They are wrong because they first severed gender from the solid ground of sex, and then offered in its place the ephemeral fictions of the appetites. The resulting disintegration and destabilization was both planned and achieved.

In the ER, we are seeing more and more teenagers presenting with suicidal ideation. They keep getting younger. Two days ago there were seven patients admitted for suicide attempts with the average age of fourteen and a range from nine to twenty one. Were I to ballpark a figure, I would say 60-75% of these self-identify as something other than their biological gender. Of course, a sociologist will tell you the suicidal ideation is a result of the lack of affirmation in their chosen identity, which these young souls took as a brave and necessary step towards integration. The opposite is true: mismatching gender and sex has caused a further disintegration and the predictable psychological scrambling that followed.

As you know, this disintegration does not only stay in the mind, but increasingly is being hacked out of flesh. Mastectomies, orchiectomies, and hysterectomies are carved out of the taut skins of the young. Skin, like play dough, is pinched off from one part and sewn back onto another, fashioning a fictive vulva and phallus with all the deft cunning and skill of Frankenstein. Buckets of wrong sex hormones are needed to fund the corporal coup.

This will not work. The end result will be hacked bodies that are neither here nor there, neither a functional sex of either kind. Even if the physical transition were done with perfection in such a way that all were fooled, the gangrenous smell of the psychological death is so obvious to all that one must hold a cloth to the nose. A one way ticket was bought and sold to psychic integration through gender invention and there will come a mid-flight realization that there isn’t enough fuel to make the trip, and the final destination they had in mind doesn’t even exist. But there is a terminal.

What is a such mangled, sterile person to do? Bear the whips and scorns of an amorphous, sterile, nowhere body? Or perhaps take Hamlet’s not-to-be option; the less painful path of suicide. When it becomes clear that any meaningful identity in bodily form has been mangled beyond possibility, the promise of peaceful rest from this tumultuous life, I fear, will become all too alluring.

The church must be ready to receive the crimson tide of suicides and be ready to pull them back from the brink and offer lasting identity and peace through Jesus Christ. But we will have a double duty – to lead them in reconciliation to God and to their bodies.

Topo Maps of Meaning

Jordan Peterson came on the scene in 2016 when he refused to abide by the Canadian Bill C-16 mandating people use others’ pronouns and such. At the time, I had already been listening to Peterson’s classes online, particularly his Maps of Meaning class. I was listening to Peterson before he was uncool.

In his class he meandered through the history of psychology, sprinkling in historical contexts, and following those interminable rabbit holes he tumbles down. The purpose of the class was to understand the architecture of belief: why we believe what we do and where it comes from. Pretty interesting.

This was at a time when the transgender vivisection of body and soul was in full swing and I was starting to see some of the victims coming through the ER with what seemed a new kind of lostness. Certain key locations on their maps of meaning had been erased. The legend was labeled a cultural myth, latitude and longitude were the wrong kind of intersectional, and the destination deleted as some obsolete archeological site of no importance.

Below you have a topographic map. If you are not familiar with these, they are pretty simple. The brown lines are called contour lines and indicate altitude, which is denoted by the number. The tighter the altitude lines are to each other, the steeper the mountain or slope. Lines that are spread out indicate flatter areas, good camping spots. Blue is water. Other features can be deduced from the how the contour lines swerve and stretch.

The skill of orientation is when you use your compass to orient yourself and the map to coincide with the landscape; you want yourself, your map and the landscape all pointing in the same direction. Then you can look find the prominent features of your surroundings, find the corresponding shapes on the map, and triangulate your approximate position. If you see a very steep cliff off to your left and right, and a river running up the middle, you can find an area on the map where the tight contour lines straddle a river and there you are. You are no longer lost. Now all you need to do is navigate to the destination on the map, to home.

So if you are lost, you need only use the tools to orient yourself to the landscape so you extract yourself from lostness and get home to crackling fires and sizzling sausages. But the sexual and gender orientation has introduced a new, subversive set of skills. In fact, they are not so much of an orientation as a re-orientation of how to navigate the map of meaning. And it goes something like this.

We were born into a world where our map came with a legend which told us which direction was North so we could orient ourselves to the truth of the terrain. Home was the destination of masculinity or femininity and the growing up into the glory of what this meant. No one is born at the destination; boys and girls must be trained up in the way they should go, boys into manhood, girls into the resplendent and civilization-building beauty of femininity. The destination was given to us by God. Mother, fathers and other role models were the compass rose to help children orient their maps and navigate the terrain as they venture towards Home. The contour lines corresponded to the curves of the body; the unalterable terrain of the external realities of gender.

God was ditched. When God goes, so goes any certain destination for our gender purpose or our ability to orient our maps in the right direction. We are left with the cultural expectations for our gender, which is not nothing, but lacking the transcendent certainty and fulfillment God intended. But still we had our compasses, a northward orientation and the ability to orient ourselves to the landscape. Our location could still be known; even though the destination was lost, we were not.

But then came the boundary eating acid of Queer. Gender dripped scarlet being marked a “social construct” and erected as a power play to oppress. There goes North. And with the dissolution of the family, the compass of masculine and feminine role models was demagnetized. A young boy or girl was left with a contoured map and a fading mark of where they could locate themselves. But still the they had the wordless contours which corresponded to the topography of their bodies.

Even this was still too much of a reminder of the Creator. Contour lines do not at all correspond to the landscape. Perhaps you were born in the wrong curves. Landscape is irrelevant. So the topography of the map was erased and young men and women were set adrift in on blank canvas to redraw the map around themselves. Wherever they are is the destination, that is home. You are now here; you are no where. Start building an identity out of whatever bits of forest fodder you can find.

Conclusion

What is being peddled to the children of men is a new brand of lostness; one which has decoupled mind and body, gender and sex. The map of meaning that God gave to us came with the destination of a hearth of fulfilled gender, directions for orienteering through the bush, and the contour lines of sex as solid reality that could be counted on. This has all been taken away save the single, solipsistic point of self reference. There is a kind of slavery that comes with unbounded and directionless possibility. When you cannot locate yourself you are here and you are nowhere; you have arrived and are forever lost.

And so I say we must be prepared for the crimson tide, ready to meet them with the stabilizing and comfort of meaningful contour lines, a solid destination and an identity which is rooted in the earth and transcends to the heavens.