Falling in a Forest

“When you’re falling in a forest and there’s nobody around,

Do you ever really crash or even make a sound?”

Dear Evan Hansen (2016)

I have to say, when the basic premise of Dear Evan Hansen was first explained to me – henceforth be spoilers – I was definitely not sold on the concept. American high-school student Evan Hansen is told to write letters to himself as part of a programme of psychological therapy, only one such letter is stolen by one of his schoolmates – a hostile, drug-addicted, paranoid outsider called Connor Murphy, who subsequently kills himself. When this letter beginning ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ is found on Connor’s person, the grown-ups assume that he wrote it as a kind of suicide note, which leads them to the conclusion that Connor and Evan must have been intimate friends, despite there having been no prior indications whatsoever that this was the case. And Evan somehow can’t manage to tell Connor’s grieving parents otherwise. He goes along with the lie. In fact, he feeds it; he constructs and perpetuates an entire narrative of his and Connor’s secret friendship. Which definitely has nothing to do with the fact that he really fancies Connor’s sister Zoe and this is the first time he’s had a good excuse to talk to her.

 

A bus advertising the show in New York, kindly uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Tdorante10 under the usual conditions.

So as I say, I was definitely not sold. Why exactly am I supposed to be rooting for this unprincipled, lying scoundrel as he plays games with the emotions of a mourning family? But then I took someone I know loves the show to see it in the West End as a birthday present,¹ and my scepticism waned. A cursory listen to the soundtrack had not prepared me for how moving and true-to-life and totally empathically understandable the portrayal of Evan was going to be (kudos to Sam Tutty who absolutely shone in the role). Evan struggles to articulate himself in any and every social scenario, so when he’s faced with two profoundly distraught adults who are not only convinced of their false assumption to the extent that they dismiss Evan’s first attempts to deny it (“Connor didn’t write this”) as, well, denial (“He’s in shock”), but also desperately wanting to believe that their son had, contrary to what they had seen for themselves, enjoyed some kind of meaningful connection with another human being before he died – a connection that they might be able to tap into to help deal with the pain of having had him so suddenly wrenched away from them – well, he really can’t manage to contradict them. And once the lie has been upheld that first time, it becomes unthinkable for him to come clean.

Plus, it turns into more than that. Check out the following chunk of ‘Disappear’, a track from the first act in which Evan’s mental projection of Connor makes a case for the value of maintaining the lie:

Guys like you and me,

We’re just the losers

Who keep waiting to be seen. Right?

I mean, no one seems to care,

Or stops to notice that we’re there,

So we get lost in the in-between.

But if you can somehow keep them thinking of me,

And make me more than an abandoned memory,

Well, that means we matter too.

It means someone will see that you are there.

No one deserves to be forgotten.

No one deserves to fade away.

No one should come and go,

And have no one know

He was ever even here.

No one deserves to disappear.

Even if you’ve always been that barely-in-the-background kind of guy,

You still matter.

And even if you’re somebody who can’t escape the feeling that the world’s passed you by,

You still matter.

If you never get around to doing some remarkable thing,

That doesn’t mean that you’re not worth remembering.

Think of the people who need to know.

They need to know, so you need to show them.²

On this basis, Evan sets up an initiative called the Connor Project, dedicated to honouring Connor’s memory and promoting the ideal that everybody should matter, and know that he or she matters. As part of the Project, Evan ends up sharing various of his faked emails on social media, and, at the end of the first act, delivers a speech all about his friendship with Connor in front of the entire school, a recording of which also makes its way onto the Internet and starts racking up views, likes, and comments like no tomorrow.

In his speech, Evan tells an entirely fictitious story – one of the first things he made up for the Murphys – about how he and Connor spent a day at an orchard and climbed a tree together. Evan fell and broke his arm, but Connor came and found him and took care of him. (In truth, Evan did fall out of a tree and break his arm, but it was on a summer work experience programme as a park ranger, and nobody came to find him.) This story pulses right through the entire musical as a metaphor for the human connection Evan – and, as it turns out, everyone else – so deeply craves: being seen, being sought, being remembered, being cared about; mattering to someone, not being able to merely disappear without a ripple. Not being able to fall in a forest like the proverbial tree that never makes a sound because nobody hears it.

The online response to Evan’s speech is overwhelming, with people from all over the world applauding his message, and the way the first act of the show ends feels so utterly uplifting, so good and wholesome and worthwhile and meaningful and real, that you sort of forget that everything Evan’s saying is based on a lie. Act Two, on the other hand, is marked by a rather more sombre tone, as Evan’s lie and everything he built on it comes crashing down around him the way it was always inevitably bound to. And yet even subsequent to that, there persists this strange, paradoxical notion that, even if the entire premise of the Connor Project was absolutely untrue, the Project itself was still a good and valuable thing. There’s this lingering suggestion that the lie did at least as much good as it did harm, that it produced things people needed, that it actually did honour to Connor’s memory to misrepresent his life story when he was too dead to offer corrections, because this was the means by which other misfits and losers like him might receive the message that they mattered.

 

The Project also raises enough money to buy the old orchard where Evan supposedly broke his arm and turn it into a memorial garden for Connor.

But, I mean, really? Can we excuse the entirely falsified basis of the message just because the message itself is a commendable one? Can the value of an idea supersede the validity of the foundation on which that idea is constructed? That has to be a no. It just has to be. Because fundamentally, how are we supposed to work out which of the myriad ideas out there are valuable ones, other than by assessing which ones most closely reflect the truth? Do we not want to believe things that are true and disbelieve things that are false? Is that not, of necessity, the route to discovering which ideas are worth upholding? How are we supposed to debunk a bad idea, moreover, except by demonstrating its untruth? Where does value judgement begin, if not with truth?

Surely the reason why it’s good to believe that everyone matters is because it’s true? After all, if you say it’s not true, you don’t, as it turns out, believe it. But the trouble is, finding a truthful premise on which to base that message isn’t necessarily a very straightforward task. If we’re all just accidents of nature, products of evolutionary happenstance who owe our existence to the deaths of those beings less well-adapted to their environments than us, and who will ultimately die and be forgotten and fade away, because that’s just the way this great big indifferent universe works – well, what basis is there there for the idea that everyone should matter, that no one deserves to disappear? You can perhaps try to justify that humans matter by finding worth in things they do – scientific and artistic endeavours, works to improve the lives of others, even mere perpetuation of the species – but that still doesn’t justify the notion that everyone matters, even if they never get round to doing some remarkable thing. It doesn’t offer much to a troublemaker like Connor Murphy, who, as far as we can tell, achieved nothing of note, had no friends, and caused his family such heartache while yet alive that in one memorable song in Act One, Zoe refuses to mourn for him and calls him a monster.³

And so Connor relies on Evan’s lies for his posthumous rehabilitation; the Connor Project and all it stands for relies on this myth of their friendship and their having been there for one another. Did Connor really matter in and of himself? Or was his only function to have his memory appropriated to the end of helping other people understand that they matter? Like, other, less troublesome people who aren’t hostile and paranoid and addicted to illegal drugs. When Evan says everyone matters, does he really mean everyone? What truthful premise can we find that someone like Connor doesn’t deserve to disappear?

Well, when you believe in the God of the Bible, finding that premise actually is a really straightforward task. It’s right there in Genesis 1: human beings are made in the image of God. Scoot a few pages forward to chapter 9, and you can see that principle being leant on to justify that every human life has worth, such that taking one warrants an equal penalty: whoever sheds the blood of humanity, by humanity shall his blood be shed, for God made humanity in his own image. No exceptions, no further qualifications. God himself is of supreme worth, and every human being contains some fractional echo of that worth. So as far as God’s concerned, everyone really does matter, whether they be Connor Murphys or Evan Hansens or whoever else. And whether or not anyone else heard you fall in the forest, God did, because there is nowhere you could go to flee from his presence.⁴

You don’t have to rehabilitate someone’s memory with made-up stories to justify that he mattered according to this premise; you don’t have to whitewash over the pain he inflicted on other people with invented tales of friendship. Indeed, part of mattering as a human being is being held accountable for one’s misdeeds: shed the blood of other humans and yours will be shed in turn. But it isn’t just ostensibly troublesome people like Connor who have misdeeds to be held accountable for; we have all of us exchanged worship of God who made us in his image for worship of mere images we have made; we all of us have blood on our hands. So God shows exactly how much human beings matter to him by paying for our sins with the blood of his Son, the truest, most perfect human image of the invisible God.⁵

This is our true premise for the message that everyone matters. God made humans in his image, such that anyone who sheds human blood must have his blood shed in turn; and on top of that, he then made himself in human image, so that he might meet that requirement by shedding his own blood. If you’re human, God says you matter. And given that he’s the ultimate measure of everything true and right, you really couldn’t ask for a truer premise than that. We don’t need any other premise. We don’t need to make stuff up, or to make people out to be better than they actually are, to be able to assert with absolute conviction that everyone matters.

And if we’re going to assert that, we’d better act like it. We’re to treat everyone as if he or she matters, Evan Hansens or Connor Murphys or whomever else we meet. We’re not to shut our ears to the sound of someone falling in the forest. We know that the message Evan gave in his speech is valuable, not in spite of the fact that it was based on a false premise, as if there were some other criterion that could provide recompense for that, but rather because it is, as it turns out, based on a true premise, even if not one Evan himself recognised. Our God says everyone matters. Think of the people who need to know. Who’s going to show them?

Footnotes

¹ Tickets available here if you want ’em: https://dearevanhansen.com/London/.

² An abridged but very nicely recorded version of the song, for your enjoyment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObE5GVCUF50.

³ For that one you can have a stunning animatic by beeyoungkah that’s actually kind of more moving than seeing the show live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT-8SDOwRh4.

⁴ I’ll give you Genesis 9 and you can click back to check if you don’t believe me about chapter 1: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+9&version=ESVUK. Oh, and that last allusion was to Psalm 139, of course.

⁵ Primary Biblical allusions in this paragraph are to Romans 1:23 and Colossians 1:15.

Some Things That Are Not Sins

“ ‘So, after the tests, should we offer you a place here?’ Mac asked.

‘Probably not, I guess,’ James said.”

Robert Muchamore, The Recruit (2004)

There are some things that are not sins.

It’s not a sin, for example, to get up late.

 

I bet you anything she wasn’t really asleep when they took this.

We attach virtue to early rising, sort of by instinct, it seems to me, but the more I consider it, the less sense it makes. I mean, granted, scripture’s not very complimentary about people who laze around in bed all day instead of actually doing any work,¹ but it doesn’t prescribe that that work has to begin early in the morning. On the contrary, it is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep.² We’re limited little creatures and we need to sleep. If we believe that God who neither slumbers nor sleeps is working out his plans for our good, then we know that we don’t need to be working every hour he sends to achieve our aims, as if the onus for making sure what needs to happen happens were on us rather than him. There’s massive relief in that, massive peace and certainty in an environment of frantic scrambling to Get Things Done, and our trusting God enough not to try to steal his job can be a powerful witness to his greatness and his goodness before the eyes of the world. But so often we forgo all that for the sake of indulging our own pride. Ever boasted about how early you got up today, how early you started doing Productive Things? Like, yeah, I’m that organised and self-disciplined, look at how together my life is, how terribly On Top Of Things I am. Ever proudly told people how few hours of sleep you’re functioning on as if it were some kind of achievement? Like, yeah, I’m that strong and capable that I can still behave like a normal human after a mere six, five, four hours; and moreover, yeah, I’m that Busy doing Extremely Important Things that Simply Can’t Wait, that I haven’t had the time to provide for my basic needs as a finite mortal being. Sleeping in late, then, carries the opposite significance: not being On Top Of Things, not being strong and capable, not proving my worth and importance by getting on with Productive Things from an early hour. That doesn’t mean, of course, that I don’t sleep in late (I do, a lot – thanks, PhD lifestyle); it just means that it feels like failure every time I do. But getting up early is a standard I hold myself to because the world tells me that that’s what it looks like to be succeeding at life; it’s not a standard God holds me to.

It’s also not a sin, for example, for your room or house to be a bit of a tip.

Again, we attach virtue to tidiness, and insofar as that involves creating a safe, hygienic, and comfortable environment for us, our households, and guests to exist in, it seems a worthwhile goal to pursue, but there’s no demand that everything has to be pristine and perfect. When Martha, preoccupied with household chores, asked Jesus to tell her sister to help her, he rebuked her: Mary, in sitting at Jesus’ feet and listening to him, had chosen the better portion, and it would not be taken from her.³ There are, we conclude, more important things to be doing than the washing up. If my room is a total mess but I haven’t prayed yet today, then I should go into my room and close the door and leave it a mess and blooming well get on and pray. And yet how often, again, do I let my pride usurp those priorities, because I want to convince myself that I’m On Top Of Things by having everything nice and clean and tidy? I want to convince myself that I have my life together, that I’m a Competent Human Being, that I’m in control of stuff; tidiness, somehow, in my head, represents all of that. That doesn’t mean, of course, that I actually keep everything nice and clean and tidy; it just means that it feels like failure that I don’t. But keeping everything perfectly tidy is a standard I hold myself to because the world tells me that that’s what it looks like to be succeeding at life; it’s not a standard God holds me to.

It’s also not a sin, for instance, to be poorly informed about significant cultural oeuvres, or indeed about anything, really.

We attach virtue to educatedness, and perhaps that begins from the entirely valid and commendable premise that it’s good to pursue truth, but it quickly turns into snobbery. God is not impressed by worldly learning; in fact, he deliberately chooses what is foolish in the world to shame what is considered wise. The gospel itself is folly to anyone who has not undergone the undeserved, unsolicited miracle of regeneration.⁴ When we stand before the judgement seat of the Lord Jesus Christ, it won’t make any difference what we do or don’t, did or didn’t, know, except as to whether we have known him. So why do I still get it in my head that having read, or seen, or listened to such-and-such a thing will make me a better or more worthwhile person? That doesn’t mean, of course, that I actually do read and see and listen to all these significant cultural oeuvres (there are far too many of them, ain’t nobody got time for that); it just means that it feels like failure not to have done. But being well-informed about certain aspects of worldly culture is a standard I hold myself to because the world tells me that that’s what it looks like to be succeeding at life; it’s not a standard God holds me to.

One thing I have read – if you’ll permit me a digression to construct this week’s fictional analogy – is the CHERUB series by Robert Muchamore, and if I were to try to pitch it as a significant cultural oeuvre, I might describe it as a game-changer in the children’s/young adult genre in that it dared to deal with mature topics without treating them as carefully curated centrepieces in a moralising frame, and also broke new ground with the sheer unsanitised realism of its narrative voice, such that it made you believe that there really might be a secret wing of the intelligence services devoted to the training and employment of children as spies.⁵ The first book in the series, The Recruit, follows our young protagonist James as he finds himself first orphaned and in care, and then in trouble with the police, and then, sudden and inexplicably, at a secret facility undergoing a series of tests under the supervision of someone called Dr. McAfferty, or Mac for short, to see if he might be a suitable candidate for the CHERUB programme. There’s a martial-arts match with a current CHERUB agent (James gets pulverised), a written intelligence test (he doesn’t finish), a bit where he has to kill a chicken (he does, reluctantly), a suspended obstacle course (he gets through it but not without wanting to throw up), and then they ask him to retrieve a brick from the bottom of a swimming pool (he point-blank refuses; James can’t swim).

 

The CHERUB logo. Apparently in the Hebrew translations of the books, CHERUB is called מלאך (malakh), which means ‘angel’ - bit random given that ‘cherub’ is a Hebrew word anyway.

James really wants to join CHERUB, but after that performance, his hopes of being allowed to do so aren’t exactly high. This is what happens next:

James was back where he’d started, in front of the fire in Doctor McAfferty’s office.

“So, after the tests, should we offer you a place here?” Mac asked.

“Probably not, I guess,” James said.

“You did well on the first test.”

“But I didn’t get a single hit in,” James said.

“Bruce is a superb martial artist. You would have passed the test if you’d won, of course, but that was unlikely. You retired when you knew you couldn’t win and Bruce threatened you with a serious injury. That was important. There’s nothing heroic about getting seriously injured in the name of pride. Best of all, you didn’t ask to recover before you did the next test and you didn’t complain once about your injuries. That shows you have strength of character and a genuine desire to be a part of CHERUB.”

“Bruce was toying with me, there was no point carrying on,” James said.

“That’s right, James. In a real fight Bruce could have used a choke-hold that would have left you unconscious or dead if he’d wanted to.

“You also scored decently on the intelligence test. Exceptional on mathematical questions, about average on the verbal. How do you think you did on the third test?”

“I killed the chicken,” James said.

“But does that mean you passed the test?”

“I thought you asked me to kill it.”

“The chicken is a test of your moral courage. You pass welll if you grab the chicken and kill it straight away, or if you say you’re opposed to killing and eating animals and refuse to kill it. I thought you performed poorly. You clearly didn’t want to kill the chicken but you allowed me to bully you into doing it. I’m giving you a low pass because you eventually reached a decision and carried it through. You would have failed if you’d dithered or got upset.”

James was pleased he’d passed the first three tests.

“The fourth test was excellent. You were timid in places but you got your courage together and made it through the obstacle. Then the final test.”

“I must have failed that,” James said.

“We knew you couldn’t swim. If you’d battled through and rescued the brick, we would have given you top marks. If you’d jumped in and had to be rescued, that would have shown poor judgement and you would have failed. But you decided the task was beyond your abilities and didn’t attempt it. That’s what we hoped you would do.

“To conclude, James, you’ve done good. I’m happy to offer you a place at CHERUB. You’ll be driven back to Nebraska House and I’ll expect your final decision within two days.”

James thought he’d failed the final test, but he was wrong. Why? Because he hadn’t comprehended what he was being tested on – the standard to which he was being held. To his surprise, it wasn’t his swimming skills that were being assessed, but his self-awareness and decision-making. And to be fair, he had an excuse for that: nobody had told him the criteria, for the sake of obtaining an authentic and accurate result. I have no such excuse for thinking I’m somehow Failing At Life because I often get up late and have an untidy house and am uninformed about great works of culture, and so on and so on and so on. I know that none of those things play any part in the standard to which I am held by the only one whose assessment of me really matters in the end. In fact, I know that, unlike James, my acceptance into the place where I want to be – for him, CHERUB campus; for me, the presence of God – is not conditional on anything I do or achieve. I know that it would have been impossible for me to pass any test that would rightfully earn me that privilege, but that another took the test in my place and gifted me his top marks across the board.

But maybe that explains why I keep running back to these false standards: because I want to have rightfully earned some kind of meaningful success for myself. I know that the moral standard necessary to warrant God’s approval – you must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect – is light years beyond anything I could achieve, and I don’t like that, because I want to achieve something. So I hold myself to other standards instead. I nick them from the world, mostly, tweak them a bit to suit my particular inclinations and values, and set about trying to achieve them – because they, unlike moral perfection, seem achievable, and that means that I’ll be able to hold them up as proof that I’m Competent and On Top Of Things and Not Failing At Life, which I have come to realise is basically a way in which my subconscious articulates the idea of having worth. A person who is On Top Of Things is a worthwhile person. Trouble is, I never do manage to stay On Top Of Things. There are moments, brief flashes, of smug pride, but mostly it’s just a constant nagging sense of failure. I know God’s standards are impossible to meet, so I set my own instead – my own stupid standards that bear no resemblance to his – but it turns out I can’t even meet those.

And do you know what, it’s just as blooming well. If I could meet my own standards, I might be able to kid myself into thinking I didn’t need the cross. As it is, every avenue leads to failure except the one where Jesus takes on my every failure, my every sin and shortcoming, and pays the penalty for them, crediting me his perfection in return. You must be perfect – well, in him, I am. In him, I meet the impossible standard, because he has already met it for me.

I so often, like James, imagine that I’ve failed, simply because I haven’t comprehended the standard to which I’m being held. It isn’t my being On Top Of Things, my being a Competent Human Being, my fitting with the worldly ideas of what success looks like that I’ve imbibed; nor is it even my own moral character and conduct, because God knows I could never pass by that criterion. Rather, it’s Jesus’ moral character and conduct. That is the criterion according to which I am assessed. If I don’t doubt his perfection, I have no cause to doubt my position. It’s only my pride – my determination that I have to prove myself worthy of something – that creeps in and tells me otherwise.

So if you see any echo of yourself at all in what I’ve been describing, I exhort you as a fellow beggar who’s been lucky enough to learn where the bread’s at,⁶ let’s stop holding ourselves to these meaningless, invented standards; let’s stop wasting our time and trouble and emotional energy on pursuing goals that God has not asked us to pursue; let’s stop letting things of our own creation leave us feeling like failures (can you see how much of a classic case of idolatry this jazz is?). Let’s throw down our pride, and replace it with awe and gratitude and love towards the one who met the impossible standard on our behalf. If his sacrifice for us has not failed according to God’s standards, then neither, adelphoi, have we.

Footnotes

¹ Try Proverbs 6, from about verse 6, for instance: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+6&version=ESVUK. Proverbs’ main point about laziness is that it leads to financial ruin, in which respect the ‘sluggard’ definitely belongs to the category of fool rather than wise.

² That’s from Psalm 127: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+127&version=ESVUK.

³ As we’re told in Luke 10: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+10&version=ESVUK. Try that response the next time your housemate complains that you aren’t pulling your weight in terms of chores. (I jest, obviously. You do have time to both read your Bible and show your housemates the love and honour due them. And if you don’t, neither of those should be the first to drop off the to-do list.)

⁴ 1 Corinthians 1: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians+1&version=ESVUK. What a chapter. Massive implications here for how we preach and teach, and engage with the world on an intellectual level.

⁵ They’re a rollicking good time, and so utterly readable than you can devour a whole book in an afternoon without really having to think: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Robert-Muchamore/CHERUB-The-Recruit--Book-1/848678.

⁶ A cursory Ecosia search tells me that the famous quotation to which I allude is attributable to someone called D. T. Niles. No, I’ve never heard of him/her either.