'Eternal Life' According to the Preachers of Death
A letter from Nullman
Dear No One,
I’ve been disturbed by a recent encounter with a hyper-religious woman. Within minutes of meeting her, she mentioned that she was taking a class on hermeneutics as part of a theology degree. I responded in a way that indicated my familiarity with hermeneutics. She took this to mean that my religiosity was like hers.
She abruptly shoved her phone in my face. “Look, there’s my hand in front of Jesus!!!” It was a blurry, heavily cropped picture from the set of The Chosen, a popular TV show that depicts Jesus’s life as it is understood by mainstream Christianity. She paid to be an extra on set, created and brought her own historical costume, and managed to raise her hand toward Actor Jesus, just in time for it to be caught on camera. When I finally made out the forms in the grainy image, my stomach dropped so low that I couldn’t muster a timely response.
She spoke out of consuming ecstasy. Religious joy from simply remembering this moment on set radiated off of her as she described the image to me again. I watched as she mimed her exuberance. She held the picture close to her face and luxuriated in its profundity, head blissfully tilted. She acted as though Actor Jesus was Real Jesus. She talked about him as though she were still on set…
The interaction haunted me for weeks. I’d find myself replaying it in my mind, subconsciously re-analyzing it as though it contained an important yet hidden truth. This continued until I finally opened my second bible and re-read Zarathustra’s words about the preachers of death.
There are preachers of death: and the earth is full of those to whom departure from life must be preached.
The earth is full of the superfluous, life has been corrupted by the many-too-many. Let them be lured by ‘eternal life’ out of this life!
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
Only those who secretly yearn for death can experience religious joy on the set of a TV show. If I catch a taste of life’s greatest fulfillment in something that I consciously know to be fake, then I must be living a lie. I think that I love real life, but I actually hate it. This is why a fantastical escape from my life is for me a glimpse into the majesty of ‘eternal life’ – the most vibrant kind of life.
Finding Jesus on set vividly represents an inverted religiosity that secretly worships death. It typically manifests in more subtle ways. There are, for example, two radically different times to pray. I can pray a life-affirming prayer when I want to live or a life-avoiding one when I secretly want to die.
There are the dreadful creatures who carry a beast of prey around within them, and have no choice except lusts or self-mortification. And even their lusts are self-mortification.
They have not yet even become men, these dreadful creatures. Let them preach departure from life and depart themselves!
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
A man makes terrible investments, loses his job, and then throws himself into religion to save face in front of his wife and children. Shame weighs so heavily on his soul that he can’t motivate himself to apply to any job for months. He doesn’t trust himself enough to try. He’s going into debt, his marriage is straining.
Ask him what he is waiting for so diligently, and he says a sign from God. He casts his shameful paralysis as faithful patience because he can’t face himself. He trusts God completely because he completely mistrusts himself. He prays so often and so deeply because he dreads actually living his life.
The secret he keeps even from himself is that he hates living. He prays not to God, but to death. For him, closeness to God is distance from life.
They would like to be dead, and we should approve their wish! Let us guard against awakening these dead men and damaging these living coffins.
They encounter an invalid or an old man or a corpse; and straightaway they say, ‘Life is refuted!’
But only they are refuted, they and their eye that sees only one aspect of existence.
Muffled in deep depression, and longing for the little accidents that bring about death: thus they wait and clench their teeth.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
Inverted religiosity conflates life with lifelessness and turns people into, as Zarathustra puts it, ‘living coffins.’ Inverted people are zombies. The inverted man compulsively worships eternality because he dreads the here and now of his life. He experiences the joy of eternity the most when he remembers himself the least. He feels God the clearest when he has most forgotten life. In his jumbled repression, he mistakes death’s emptiness for divine liberation.
The woman with false joy haunted me because my heart related to hers. Every ghost I’ve unmasked has borne my own horrified face. I have felt the shame that represses. I, too, have abused God like a drug to avoid remembering the past and seeing how it impacts my present.
Many times I have started to invert my faith out of dread. What has eventually straightened me out of my inverting faith is not more faith, but my friendship with Death.
My friend Death returned to me in the aftermath of a violent Texas flood. She walked me through the destruction, pointing out every fallen tree and lifeless bird on the ground. I felt heavy with grief at this apparent refutation of life.
This offended Death, but she overcame her frustration and comforted me. She led me further down the path and showed me how bright life shines against the backdrop of lifelessness. The remaining trees seemed invincible, the surviving birds flew with courage.
Look, Death gestured under the bridge on which we stood together. There was a snake that I knew and had been greeting regularly from the bridge when I walked the trail alone. This time, in Death’s fatal presence, it was flanked by several smaller snakes that I had never seen before. I am the Force of Life, Death reminded me in a whisper before she kissed my cheek and disappeared.
Life is Death, which is why those who invert their lives do not really know Death. Their existential blindness traps them in a paradox where they aren’t really living or truly dying. They are half-alive zombies, living coffins. They are preachers of a death far worse than actual Death, a living death that merely prolongs a life of suffering. They renounce themselves, self-martyr, and yearn for a drug that they can righteously abuse. Their Jesus is Actor Jesus, one merely pretending to live.
‘Life is only suffering’ – thus others of them speak, and they do not lie: so see to it that you cease to live! So see to it that the life which is only suffering ceases!
And let the teaching of your virtue be: ‘You shall kill yourself! You shall steal away from yourself’!
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
Death kills me when she visits me. I emerge from my corpse eternally grateful and with a fresh lust – a lust for real Life and Death!
Yours,
Nullman