The Not-So Yuppie Word

Everyone dies. Everyone loves a fight. Nothing is sound. Nothing is right-side-right.

Happy is a yuppie word. Nothing in the world could fail me now. It's empty as an argument. I'm running down a life that won't cash out.

I went to a museum today, the Orange County Museum of Art. It wasn't fun. But if you're looking for a thorough collision with the world that exists underneath the make-up and advertisements, the reality behind the curtain—this is where you'll find it.

We walked up to a plain, square-ish building with a few flags and dark cobwebbed windows. We thought it was closed—maybe abandoned—but it was as alive as it would ever be. A few visitors milled around inside, their eyes glued to the white walls, to the pops of color composing the artwork which hardly pretended to decorate them, to the concrete floor, or to their own shoes—never to each other. We walked to the front desk, paid for our admission, and proceeded to explore the museum itself. The first room was okay...strange, I think, but okay. You must know that all the art in the museum was abstract. We knew that coming in.

We tread slowly through the rooms of the museum, our initial curiosity fading into a somber disquiet as our eyes introduced us to the hard-edged remains of consumerism. Every piece of art, from the gloppy paintings to the careful geometric sculptures, throbbed with emotion. I saw pain there, very raw pain, captured in the distant swirls of paint, in the dank, unforgiving colors, and in the struggle to call it all order. Even the most natural thing I could find, a block of wood crafted into the exact likeness of a giant pink eraser, tore my heart. An eraser? What are they trying to forget? Every work seemed to be drooping. Every almost-human figure was wailing. Eyes burned everywhere with an anxiety I didn't know art could capture. The whole display was aching, trembling, it seemed. It was, really, the embodiment of the unquenchable thirst that drives us all, that undeniable angst that reigns in the wake of any even momentary realization that our culture has told us a great lie. We sink when we realize it. They said one more, one more...one more...They said one more would do it. But it doesn't. We're stuck in an endless cycle down here. Nothing fulfills.

Happy is a yuppie word.

Nothing is sound. Nothing is sound. Nothing is sound.

We get it now, we think. The splattered paint and the dark colors...they get it too. "Happy" is just for the yuppies: the young professionals with sunshine in their pockets and gold in their skies. But they're blind, aren't they? Trouble will come. It always does.

Nothing is sound. Nothing is sound. Nothing is sound.

Looking for an orphanage. I'm looking for a bridge I can't burn down. I don't believe the emptiness. I'm looking for the kingdom coming down. Everything is meaningless. I want more than cash can buy. Happy is a yuppie word.

Switchfoot nailed it. That italicized stuff is theirs, if you were wondering. That's what we're feeling, even if we can't quite explain it. Happiness seems to be an illusion in a world that is gasping for air, straining to find some hope somewhere.

But look at it again.

Nothing is sound. Nothing is sound. Nothing is sound.

This is not how the world's supposed to be, is it? We know what soundness is, and this isn't it. And doesn't that—mustn't it?—mean that there has to be something more? something that is sound? We'd be content, wouldn't we, if the "not sound" is what we were made for, if sadness was all for which we could dare to hope? But we're not content.

G.K. Chesterton puts it this way, "The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless...it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live."¹

You see, we know that the hopelessness is not the end, that it really must be a small corner in the vast universe of a joy we can't yet comprehend. But the problem is that we can't comprehend it.

But we can know One who could. And that makes all the difference.

Chesterton enlightens us again: "The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth."²

You know what mirth is, don't you? It's joy. It's the incomprehensible delight, the sheer gladness, that isn't restricted to the yuppie.

So why does it matter that Jesus had it? Wonder at this. Chesterton's Jesus—the Jesus smiling through the Gospels—came down on earth and suffered and died not because He had to. Chesterton's God—the God smiling through all of Scripture—created not because He had to. This God, our Savior, did all this because He knew joy and wanted to share it. Jesus walked through life with an almost secret smile on His lips, nearly bursting—sometimes really bursting—with a joy that could scarcely be contained. Look! Paul writes, "I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us" (Romans 8:18, NIV 1984).

What the joy of Jesus means is that someday we will know fully, in Him, the joy that He knows. But you know what it also means? It means that right now, right here, we can know that joy. We can have a relationship with Jesus Christ. We are indwelt by His Holy Spirit. We can begin to taste that joy—and the taste will be absolutely as much as these mortal bodies can handle. Why? When you walk next to Jesus, it just bounces off of Him and lands on you. You can't help it.

So what now? Let the fact that nothing is sound remind you of the not-so yuppie word: the joy of Christ that really comes from a life surrendered to Him.

Blessed is the man who's lost it all.³

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¹ Orthodoxy, p. 151. Barnes & Noble, Inc. (2007).

² Ibid., pp. 152-3.

³ All bold and italicized words in this post are lyrics from Switchfoot’s “Happy Is a Yuppie Word” (2005).