“A cynic is a person who knows the price of everything and
the value of nothing” (Oscar Wilde) 

“I have seen all of the things that are done under the sun;
all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” (Ecc. 1:14)

 The cynic
is a wounded idealist. In order to summon a true bitterness toward the world,
it is first necessary to greatly believe that the universe is fair and that you
will be loved unconditionally. This idealism is especially evident when you
spend time with adolescents. They are starry-eyed and truly believe in happy
endings. When I was a history teacher, they always insisted on being told which
side was in the wrong and which was in the right. There had to be a good guy
and a bad guy. You see, the idealist looks at the world through rose-colored
glasses: people are good, the poor are noble and the Sixties are still with us.
“Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody try to get together, try
to love everybody right now.” And look! Here comes the New Jerusalem floating
out of the heavens!

Such
idealism is a form of extremism. Imagine the dogmatic idealist insisting that
the poor are good and then spending some time ministering in a soup kitchen.
There are painful realities for which his philosophy has not prepared him.

So how does
an idealist devolve into a cynic? Some have said that if you are not a liberal
in your twenties that you have no heart but if you are not a conservative by
your forties that you have no brain! But is cynicism just a function of aging
and lowering your expectations? Is it normative for our idealists to mutate
into cynics?

Of
course not! The cynic is one who exists under a carapace of hardheartedness,
unwilling to risk caring lest they be hurt again. They have gone from extreme
to extreme: from a tie-died, user friendly worldview to one of bitterness and
expectations of being screwed by the man.

What
is to be done for the poor cynic? Is there an Elisha who can heal the bitter
waters?

I
believe that the cynic is one who has lost connection with the Head, Jesus. How
does Jesus see the world? To him the world is made up of sheep, harassed and
helpless. He is not filled with disgust; rather, he is consumed with
compassion. He spends three days ministering to the spiritual wounds of the
people who flock to see him and insists that his disciples feed the thousands
as well. Jesus loves the poor not because they are cuddly and kind but because
they are his children. If we connect to Jesus as Lord, we connect to his concerns
as well.

Here
is a painful possibility. Is it possible that God purposely frustrates the
merely idealistic? Imagine the poor idealist striving in his own power to do
good and meeting with unlimited success. Such a man will always work out of his
own flesh and why not? I love Bruce Cockburn’s lyrics: “Let’s have a laugh for
the man of the world, who thinks he can make things work. Tried to build a New
Jerusalem and ended up with New York.”
Does God then shake our idealism to cause something more mature to be birthed
in us?

For
cynicism is not maturity. It is choosing wound-licking over compassion. Mature
Christianity takes the commands of loving our neighbors seriously, not glossing
them over to pursue a lifestyle that would make the early Church retch. We are
called to be mature, to see the world through Christ-shaded glasses, to love
even as we are loved. Perhaps at last, healing for the wounded idealist can
only come once they realize that they are loved in spite of their evident
flaws. Perfect love casts out fear and it also does a pretty good number on
shame as well.

Youth
With a Mission has a pretty good saying: “God is good all the time. All the
time, God is good.” Their point is that circumstances might be crappy, people
might be resistant to the Gospel, but God is unchanging and he is good.