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This piece was adapted from Russell Moore\u2019s newsletter<\/a>. Subscribe here<\/a>.<\/p>\n A<\/span> friend told me about a mutual acquaintance who was always a happy, kind person, but who now\u2014at least in some contexts\u2014seems filled with anger and fear. \u201cIt\u2019s like I\u2019m hearing the same voice,\u201d my friend said, \u201cbut now he seems so resentful that I sometimes wonder if I\u2019m talking to the same person I always knew.\u201d Almost everyone I know has experienced something like this\u2014in churches, in workplaces, even at family dining room tables. The whole world seems to be seething with resentment.<\/p>\n Anyone who\u2019s encountered someone in a fit of rage knows that one thing that usually doesn\u2019t work is to say, \u201cCalm down.\u201d That\u2019s like saying to an insomniac, \u201cGo to sleep.\u201d The more the person tries to fall asleep, the more likely he or she is to stay awake. That reality, though, might give us insight into why our culture seems driven with resentment, and how we can counter it.<\/p>\n Falling asleep is, as German philosopher Hartmut Rosa puts it, \u201cnon-engineerable.\u201d The more you try to master it, the further away it becomes. Sleep requires a kind of surrender\u2014a letting go of the frenetic whirl of the mind. Rosa compares the situation to the way a child feels when looking out the window at the first snow of winter. You can <\/em>engineer that, Rosa concedes, in his book The Uncontrollability of the World<\/em>. The child\u2019s mom and dad could buy snow cannons and blast icy flakes outside the window of a house in Pasadena in July. But that\u2019s not the same experience.<\/p>\n The experiences of looking out into a snowy field, standing on a mountain range or at the foot of a waterfall, or meeting the gaze of your newborn child all find their meaning specifically because they are not <\/em>controllable, predictable, and engineerable. Rosa calls this type of experience resonance<\/em>.<\/p>\n To understand this, just think about the language you use for those truly meaningful moments in your life. You might say, \u201cStanding at the Grand Canyon at sunset really spoke<\/em> to me.\u201d There\u2019s a sense in which something almost calls out to you, and echoes somewhere deep within you.<\/p>\n If you ask people to tell you the important turning points in their lives, Rosa argues, those points are almost always unexpected encounters: \u201cThen I met this person, I read this book, I ended up joining this group, someone brought me to this place, and it changed my life.\u201d He contends that people (even those who don\u2019t believe in anything outside the material) will often use the language of being \u201ccalled\u201d to something\u2014again with the metaphor of personal address. And the common factor of these moments of resonance is that they must be reachable but can\u2019t be made calculable or manageable.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is not enough that I have access to and can take hold of the world,\u201d Rosa writes. \u201cResonance demands that I allow myself to be called<\/em>, that I be affected<\/em>, that something reach me from the outside.\u201d<\/p>\n Rosa doesn\u2019t mean this in a Christian sense, of course. I would probably disagree with him on almost every major theological or political point. But at this point, I think he\u2019s on to something the Bible does tell us about the way the world is. \u201cDeep calls to deep,\u201d the psalmist tells us (Ps. 42:7). In describing the way of discipleship, Jesus uses the imagery of a sheep with a shepherd\u2014specifically speaking of the way the sheep respond to (resonate with) the shepherd\u2019s voice (John 10:3\u20135). And the Apostle Paul compares conversion to seeing a light and hearing a voice (2 Cor. 4:1\u20136).<\/p>\n Scripture tells us that at the core of who we are, human beings are created to resonate with a Voice that calls to us\u2014as though from a burning bush\u2014in a way that we cannot engineer for ourselves. We call a seminary degree a \u201cmaster of divinity,\u201d but there\u2019s no such thing\u2014and it\u2019s a good thing too. A God we could quantify, a Jesus we could engineer or master, would be an idol. \u201cThey have mouths, but do not speak,\u201d the psalmist says of the idols we engineer with human hands or imaginations (Ps. 135:16). Rosa doesn\u2019t recognize idolatry, but he, probably unwittingly, describes it perfectly.<\/p>\n In this moment in the modern world, he argues, we expect the world around us\u2014including our own lives\u2014to be predictable, manageable, and useful. Our smartphones seem to reinforce that. We have access to everything<\/em>. The irony is that this \u201cdrive and desire toward controllability ultimately creates monstrous, frightening forms of uncontrollability.\u201d<\/p>\n We lose a sense of resonance in that kind of culture, and the world seems dead to us. The world is then, in Rosa\u2019s words, \u201cmuted\u201d for us. We want resonance\u2014even if we don\u2019t know how to describe it\u2014but we just can\u2019t get it the way we get the sort of stuff we can engineer. One really can\u2019t have the experience of intimacy with a chatbot that says everything you would want your perfect mate to say.<\/p>\n \u201cWhere \u2018everything is under control,\u2019 the world no longer has anything to say to us, and where it has become newly uncontrollable, we can no longer hear it, because we cannot reach<\/em> it,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n Again, the Bible tells us to expect such. Mouths we construct ourselves can\u2019t speak to us. Idols we can carry can\u2019t deliver us (Jer. 10:5). And even worse, Scripture says that once we turn to our engineerable idols, we become like them (Ps. 135:18)\u2014mute and unable to resonate with a world of meaning.<\/p>\n This, he argues, is the answer to the question of why\u2014despite living in more affluence and technological advance than any generation before us\u2014we live in a time of generalized resentment. Our insistence on controllability and resonance at the same time leaves us with neither, and leaves us unreachable by that which actually could give meaning and purpose. We either become \u201ccool\u201d\u2014unaffected by anything and thus numb to wonder, joy, and love\u2014or we become \u201chot,\u201d driven by our libidos and then angry or terrified when the world\u2014or our institutions or our culture or our families\u2014can\u2019t meet those expectations.<\/p>\n Paul tells us, \u201cIf possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all\u201d (Rom. 12:18). Which is to say, sometimes you can\u2019t do much about the anger around you. What you can do, though, is to seek a different way. A life of resonance is one in which you make yourself reachable<\/em>: you cultivate \u201cears that hear and eyes that see\u201d (Prov. 20:12).<\/p>\n You can cultivate what makes for true meaning: worship, prayer, community, service, immersion in the Bible\u2014knowing that such things can\u2019t engineer meaning or holiness by your own power, but they can put you in a place in which you can say, as the boy Samuel did from his bedroom, \u201cSpeak, Lord, for your servant is listening\u201d (1 Sam. 3:9).<\/p>\n And as C. S. Lewis once wrote, the moment you start to find yourself mastering all of that is the moment you lose it, because \u201cit is like taking a red coal out of the fire to examine it; it becomes dead coal.\u201d<\/p>\n If you become the sort of person who seeks, you will find. And if you give up the expectation of a controllable world, you will find yourself less anxious about a world that seems all the more uncontrollable. If you don\u2019t seek ultimate meaning in your career, politics, your relationships, or your culture, you will find that you are less enraged when those things don\u2019t deliver the results we demand. And you will find the freedom to pursue that which truly resonates.<\/p>\n That seems like a contradiction. But remember, Someone once told us that \u201cwhoever seeks to pursue his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it\u201d (Luke 17:33). Those who know they are blind are the ones who can see.<\/p>\n We can choose one: mastery or meaning, controllability or calling, resentment or resonance. But pursuing the one means sacrificing the other.<\/p>\n Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today<\/span> and leads its Public Theology Project.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n