“Hell is other people.”
-Jean-Paul Sartre

“The only certain happiness in life is to live for others…”
-Christopher McCandless

In recent weeks a smaller, somewhat unexpected film is getting some Oscar attention. Into the Wild is based upon the true story of Christopher McCandless, who after graduating from Emory University in the early nineties, gave all of his money to charity, loaded his sub-compact with his few possessions, changed his name, and headed west. Judging from McCandless’ detailed journals, he was disgusted with the wealth of his parents, along with the greed and corruption he saw all around him, and so he determined to fight the American way of life by going “off the grid”. It was a quest for adventure, and at the heart of that adventure, for McCandless, was anonymity and solitude. It seemed the way to escape the mess of the world would be to escape the presence of other people.

It’s not an entirely foreign concept to me. Upon graduating high school, I had the strong desire to go to a place where no one knew me. To be anonymous seemed adventurous, but to be honest, there was something deeper than that at work. The true appeal of anonymity is exactly the opposite of adventure—it is safety. Anonymity means not having to deal with the mess of another person. Anonymity means not having to deal with someone else’s opinion of you. The illusion of anonymity is freedom. But it is just an illusion, and as I found, freedom comes not through running away from people, but by running headlong into them.

By the time McCandless realized this it was too late. He was in the middle of his ultimate adventure: a prolonged, solitary quest in the Alaskan wilderness. The plan was to live off the land, gather his own food, sleep under the stars, and be completely alone. But even in the wilderness McCandless was not entirely alone. He brought along voices from the past in the form of books. The desire to hear someone else speak is so strong that even those who are vehemently determined to be alone cannot really bear to be without some form of human companionship.

While McCandless was reading one of those voices from the past he realized why his ultimate adventure was not satisfying. It was utterly selfish. There was no one to share it with. He scribbled in the margins, “The only certain happiness in life is to live for others…”. The director, Sean Penn, did an excellent job of showing that the places where Christopher found the most joy, and discovered the most about himself, was not in solitude, but in relationship. Unfortunately for McCandless, his attempt to leave the wilderness and reenter society was unsuccessful, and he died alone.
The Desire to Escape and Hide

The story of Christopher McCandless is an extreme example of what happens to so many people, Christians included. We often live in a voluntary state of isolation. By this I do not mean that we remain in our rooms with the door closed, or that people start referring to us as the town hermit. No, we can be in the midst of a great crowd and yet remain isolated. We can go to church, Sunday School, and bible studies and yet remain anonymous. We can go to school and sit in class with thirty or more people, and not really know any of them. We can enter into old age harboring bitterness due to the fact that no one really understands us, when in reality, we never allowed ourselves to be known. Many die in what seems like an Alaskan wilderness—cold, isolated and unknown.

Why is this the case? The desire to escape and hide is as old as sin, but not as old as creation. We see none of this before the first sin. Man and woman were created to be completely exposed and vulnerable with one another and with God. Before sin there was security; man was not afraid of being rejected by God or his neighbor. God was the supreme being, no one argued that fact, and his creation believed that He truly loved them and wanted only what was best for them. This world without sin was a world of peace where there was truly nothing to hide.

It was not until Adam and Eve sinned that we see them hiding from each other and from God. Sin causes shame, and shame drives us into the shadows. Sin causes us to build walls to keep people from seeing our junk. In Genesis 3 God calls out to Adam and Eve, “Where are you?” And Adam, sitting behind a shrub and wearing a fig leaf loincloth, answers, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” Sin is more than simply disobeying a law, though it is certainly not less than that. When man sins, he breaks the harmony; he disturbs the peace. When man sins he is in essence saying that he is tired of God being God; he is tired of this relationship. One author says it in even stronger language, “The essence of sin is not the violation of laws but… a wrecked relationship with God, one another, and the whole created order.”

When we start to understand this, we begin to understand ourselves much better. We find that often our motives are not as pure as we once thought. Maybe it’s not that we are simply “into fashion”, but that we build a beautiful wall around ourselves with the latest clothes so that no one can really see past it—we are petrified of someone seeing our ugliness. Maybe it’s not that we just have a sarcastic slant to our sense of humor, but rather that we “slice and dice” people with our tongues in order to cover our own shame. Maybe it’s not that we are so spiritual that we must attend four bible studies a week, but that we are hurting so badly inside that we are covering up our true lives with a thin, religious veneer.

Sin kills true fellowship because, like Adam and Eve, it thrusts us into hiding. We know our sin must be covered, and we know that it makes us ugly. The problem is that when we try to cover it ourselves, it turns us into lonely, defensive, tired people, who may have hundreds of “friends” but do not have anyone who really knows them.

Jesus Draws Us Out of Hiding

True fellowship can only be regained if we know that sin has been dealt with. Jesus had to become man in order to fix the mess that we created. Our relationship with God was broken, and subsequently our relationships with each other are near impossible. What Jesus did while on earth was perfectly trust God. It’s not simply that He kept the rules, but that His heart was full of trust and love for his Father. And yet, when this perfect life reached its end, Jesus was not presented with a crown, but a cross. Jesus, who deserved all glory, laid it down and took all of our shame and guilt upon himself. And so, God poured out all his anger against sin upon Jesus.

We’ve all heard that before, but what does it have to do with fellowship? Primarily, it means that for those of us who trust in Jesus, our sin has been perfectly and eternally punished. God is not angry with us who belong to Jesus, so we do not have to hide behind shrubs anymore. Instead, we must see that when our sin has been covered, punished in Jesus, and fully dealt with, then we are free to enter into true fellowship with one another without fear of being exposed. We have already been exposed by the gospel—God has seen ALL of our ugliness and freely given us the beautiful righteousness of Jesus.

Therefore, Jesus says that the world will know that we are His disciples if we love one another. Those who have been known by Jesus are now set free (and even commanded) to know others and be known by them. Perfect love casts out all fear.

Some of us who claim to know Jesus are living in isolation, and it is time for us to come out of hiding. Our anonymity betrays the fact that we really do not believe that what happened on the cross could be true for us. It is time for us to experience the freedom that comes with the good news of Jesus—the freedom of no longer obsessing over ourselves, of building up walls to cover our shame, and living in fear of everyone’s opinion of us. The gospel calls us to love like our Jesus loves, and to lose our life in order to find it.

The real adventure is not in Alaska; it is in the marriage, the parent-child relationship, the classroom, the not-so-exciting job, and the church. The real adventure is found when we trust Jesus in such a way that we move towards hurt, broken people instead of running away from them.

Rev. Tim Udouj is the RUF Campus Minister at Furman University.

1. Barbara B. Taylor, Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation (Cowley, 2000) pp. 57-67.