Part 1: What is “love of the world”?
Am I allowed to talk about a movie in a sermon? Some people might feel that’s not appropriate – it’s too “worldly.” Some religions would say that I should not only not talk about a movie during a church service, but I should not watch any movies – at any time. There are many religious traditions that emphasize getting away from worldliness, or even renouncing the world. That reading from 1 John 2—“Do not love the world nor the things in the world”—has led many people to believe that they must be “in the world, but not of the world.” For faiths like the Amish and Mennonites, that means not using any modern technology, and separating themselves from modern society. In other faiths, some individuals renounce the world and go live in a monastery or nunnery, where they have no worldly belongings, and live a life of seclusion and solitary prayer. They don’t have to be Christian: the concept of asceticism—which essentially means abstinence from sensual pleasures for spiritual goals—traces back to the Ancient Greeks, and has spread to Buddishm, Hinduism, and Islam. For others, renouncing the world is not about technology so much as it’s about living in a separate community – a compound out in the woods somewhere. So there are many degrees of not living in the world, but whatever form it takes, but the idea that the “love of the world” is dangerous and spiritually destructive has been around for a very long time.
I have been asking people what the phrase “love of the world” means to them, and it is an interesting mix. One friend, who happens to be a Swedenborgian minister, first asked, “Are you asking what I thought when I was a child? Or what I now know as a minister?” I told him to start with the childish vision, and he said, “Of course you’re supposed to love the world! It’s everything – it’s nature, it’s creation! It’s our home!”
Then he answered as a Swedenborgian minister: “We are told that love of the world is one of the two principal sins that we should shun – the only lower sin is love of the self.” So what does that mean? As it says in many places in Swedenborg’s books, that means love of money and material possessions. But this Swedenborgian minister did go on to confess that he bought a new Honda Accord last year, and boy, he loves that car!
But as a scholar of Swedenborg, he also knows another concept that is repeated all through Swedenborg’s books: that the problem is not the love itself, it is the ranking or prioritization. Loving yourself and loving the world are good things as long as they are subsumed under love of the neighbor and love of the Lord. If the love of the world becomes more important to you than love of God or the neighbor, that’s where the trouble starts.
Still, that got me thinking about what “love of the world” means. First, there is nature: we could substitute the phrase “the natural world” or “Mother Earth.” I used to have a bumper sticker that said “LOVE YOUR MOTHER” with a picture of planet earth next to it.
It can also mean physical objects, possessions. To be “worldly” implies being surrounded by luxury items, living in a comfortable house, constantly acquiring new things. When I turn on the TV (which I confess I do a lot), the message from the ads is always the same: “Buying more things is the key to happiness.” Sometimes they even acknowledge the expression “Money can’t buy happiness,” and then follow it up with a “but….” (buy our product anyway, because it will make you happy). To be a citizen, it is implied, you should also be a consumer. If you take that logic far enough, it leads to the expression, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” This is what led Jesus to ask that famous question, “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?”
There is one more meaning of “the world”: society, civilization, the social world. If you think of those people – the monks and nuns and Amish – they are leaving most of those things behind. If you leave possessions and money behind, it is hard to do that without also leaving human civilization and social networks behind. In some cases, “nature” is the exception: you leave the human world behind and embrace the natural world instead. But “nature” has its own temptations – reflected in phrases like “living like an animal” (as opposed to being “civilized” – which brings us back to “civilization” and “the world”). And living like an animal reminds one of the phrase “the sins of the flesh” and all that that implies.
Part 2: Why Leave the World Behind
So it is no surprise, really, that people trying to achieve religious purity feel they must leave the world behind, whatever that means. Perhaps they were inspired by John the Baptist, who lived a life removed from the world: he lived in the desert, wore clothes of camel’s hair, ate nothing but locusts and wild honey, and never drank wine. He is called “the voice of one crying in the wilderness”—which raises the question, who is he crying out to? Well, it also says that the people came out to him to be baptized, so even though he lived outside the fringe of society, he still had an audience. And he renounced the people who did live in society as a “brood of vipers.” He was quite the idealist: not allowing himself to be corrupted by anything or anyone. There is a certain romantic appeal to that image, isn’t there? Later Jesus was criticized for being unlike John: Jesus spent a lot of time around low-lifes and sinners, and unlike John, he did drink wine. Jesus never had a home, but he lived “in the world,” and his parables showed that he knew a lot about how society worked. And yet Jesus told his own disciples that they should own nothing except the clothes on their back.
Curiously, you don’t have to be religious to want to leave the world behind. And this takes me to the movie I want to talk about: a film from 2007 called Into the Wild, based on a nonfiction book of the same name by Jon Krakauer. It’s the true story of a young man named Christopher McCandless, who graduated from college, gave away the $25,000 in his trust fund, abandoned his car, left his family behind and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he lived in an abandoned bus for a few months before he starved to death. You may be familiar with this story: the book was an international bestseller that has been translated into 30 languages, and before it was a book, it was an article in Outside magazine, that they say generated more letters than any other story in that magazine’s history. It really struck a chord with a lot of people. Not only that, but since the article and book and movie came out, many people have gone on a trek to find that bus. It serves as a kind of shrine to people. But it is extremely difficult to get to, and the Alaskan authorities have had to rescue 15 people who were attempting to get there: two of them died. It was getting to be such a problem that this summer, they finally had to remove the bus and put it in a museum.
When McCandless decided to leave modern society behind and escape to Alaska, he was not the first. In Chapter 8 of the book, Krakauer recounts the stories of many others who preceded him. And McCandless himself met many other people who had also left the world behind: he found communities in California and Arizona and Nevada of people who were all living “off the grid.” I doubt that most of those people did so because of religion.
A friend of mine did something like that: when he turned 19, he gave away all his possessions and hitchhiked to California. He only lasted a few weeks, and he looks back on that episode as an urge he just had to get out of his system. Recently I asked him about it: what drove him to want to leave the world behind? Partly it was a desire to seek a purer life, which to him meant living out in nature unspoiled by human contact. Leave the “concrete jungle” behind and head for the real jungle. So, like McCandless, he was running toward an ideal.
But he was also running away from something he found appalling: he looked around at the human world, with its obsession with materialism and wealth and shiny objects, and with all the faults of human civilization – corruption and politics and conformity and cruelty – and he said “Ugh!” That too was part of McCandless’s goal – getting away from things he found immoral and wrong.
The interesting thing is, McCandless succeeded in leaving some definitions of “the world” behind – money, possessions, and the suburb he grew up in. His family even hired a private investigator to track him down, but McCandless was so good at burying his tracks that that investigator never did find him. And yet… in his two year journey up to Alaska, he also picked up new possessions, and new friends. He formed new relationships all the time, and kept in touch with many of them through letters. If his goal was to remove himself from society so thoroughly that no one would notice when he was gone, or mourn for him – well, he was a total failure at that.
Part 3: Why Live in the World
Thankfully, my friend did not starve to death during his escape from the world, so he did something that Chris McCandless never did: rejoin society. What is that like? For an idealist, does that feel like “selling out”? Now he owns a nice home and has a nice car, has money and is quite comfortable living “in the world.”
I’m sure there are nuns and monks and Mennonites and Amish who also gave up on that lifestyle and rejoined the world. Do they feel a sense of failure? They tried to renounce the world but just didn’t have the strength to do it?
Here’s the problem with leaving the world behind: it's really hard to do that and still have a job. If you don’t belong to society, you can’t be a “productive member of society.” When McCandless was winding his way up to Alaska, he worked several jobs. One person he worked for in South Dakota said Chris was the best employee he ever had. Yet Chris’ mind told him that the secret to happiness was to leave all that behind and just exist in the purity of nature. For 114 days, he succeeded. I’m sure that figuring out how to survive was hard work much of the time. But the rest of the time, he must have gotten incredibly bored. Once he arrived at his spot, he never did another thing for another living being.
I’m sure there have been many hermits who thought they would find happiness in isolation and solitude. But that is not where happiness lies. Happiness lies in being useful to others. And yes, some of those groups I mentioned—nuns and monks and Amish and Mennonites—are extremely productive people. But they are only productive because they still live in a world – just a smaller world than most of us. The Amish make fine furniture, and thank goodness they are willing to sell it to us: but that means dealing with money and society, and the chances for corruption and materialism are still there. So, I’ll go back to my other friend, the minister who just bought the new Honda Accord. He says, “I love my new car. And I love my wife. And as long as I love my wife more than I love that car, I’m good.” And, I would add, if you use that car to serve greater society, you’re even more good.
We are put in this world to serve others. And to serve others, we must stay in this world. As it says in Heaven and Hell #535: “Let it be known that the life that leads to heaven is not one of withdrawal from the world but a life in the world, and that a life of piety apart from a life of thoughtfulness (which is possible only in the world) does not lead to heaven at all.”
Amen
READINGS
1 John 2:15
Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
Mark 8:34-36
Then Jesus called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?”
Reading from Swedenborg: True Christianity 394; 400(14)
Love for the world is not only love for wealth and possessions but also love for all the things that the world provides that please our physical senses: beauty pleases our eye, harmony pleases our ear, fragrances please our nose, excellent food pleases our palate, soft touches please our skin. It also includes beautiful clothes, spacious accommodations, and social groups to belong to….
Love for ourselves and love for the world are completely opposite to love for the Lord and love for our neighbor. Therefore love for ourselves and love for the world, as I have just described them, are hellish loves. In fact, they rule hell. They also create a hell in us.
