[This is the first of a five-part series written to explore the role of faith within the modern world. We look at the response require of people of faith for living out the Christian vocation in the modern world. In the first part, we look at finding a dominant metaphor to describe where we are and what we are doing.]

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses[.]

—T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland, 331-345

Finding a dominant metaphor to encapsulate the plight of man in the throes of modernism is, in many ways, a fool’s errand. What image, what allegory, is capable of tying together the dismembered fragments of the existential, brooding, introspective angst? How can we hold both the Kafka-esque alienation from one’s surroundings, even one’s very self—and the heady, glimmering, exhilarating optimism that so characterizes our hope in ourselves with our social projects, our utopian schemas, our progressive tendencies toward an ever-better future in both hands?

We can imagine ourselves as men become giant bugs: all of the sudden, as though just waking up and finding ourselves inexplicably transformed. We realize our radical alienation and isolation from our society, from our culture, from our families, from our very selves, and move about in an unaffected manner so as to continue to fulfill our duties—for “justice,” be it social, economic, practical, gender-based, or the like, or for the “good of our society,” or for the sake of those impersonal forces that compel but never show their faces. Yet even stranger, we live now in an age when the tropes of modernism—seen largely for the tired schemes they are—fill the psyche with an even more noxious unguent then our modernist forbears could have anticipated. The nauseous angst of yesterday has given way to the calculated cynicism of today; the shocking realization of absurdity in years long past has yielded to a smug sense of irony in our own days.

The contemporary soul wanders in a perpetual wasteland. Is this our dominant metaphor? There is a dramatic and poetic appeal to it; one would like to accept this at face value and move on. It seems self-evident, or at least, to have enough support in common experience that we may assume its truth. If this is what we accept as our predicament, then we may go about finding remedy for our illness. What quasi-mystical elixir shall we concoct in order to give our souls their drink? What social program, utopian ideology, can we advance so as to break the rocks that dam the springs? Or, perhaps we can be content to accept as our lot that we shall always have to stare into the abyss.

I propose that there is more of a real and authentic response bound up in the latter option than in any other. As to our dominant metaphor, let us, by examining our predicament, accept this image precisely in order to subvert it—or at the very least, demonstrate its unintended implications that help, rather than hinder, people of faith to understand their role in transforming a faithless world.

We draw this perspective out through looking to what the life of a Christian is, and always has been, in a world that serves as a temporary holding place before our arrival in our Homeland. The key to this is knowing what faith is—as an act, as a content, as a virtue—and what this looks like in a context that is devoid of faith. It is my belief that modernism and its aftermath, including the post-modern “hangover” we have inherited, provide a unique opportunity to renew our fundamental call as the light of the world and the salt of the earth. But this cannot happen without the Cross. It is through grounding ourselves in a perspective on suffering guided by faith that we may come to arrive at this understanding, and in order to anticipate such vistas, we must examine the role of sin, faith, and mercy as they appear as great chasms before the human person.