Light as Air: Practicing Authenticity, Depth, and Purpose in a World of Empty Promises

By Jonny Morrison

Light as Air offers readers freedom from unmet desires, a way to disrupt broken systems, and an invitation into a life of depth and creative action. How? By exploring the story of Jesus and the way his kingdom engages our dissatisfaction and invites us into the life we were made for. Jesus' kingdom is a political reality that overthrows broken systems, cultivates meaningful connection, and empowers us for creative action. Light as Air shows us how to live into and out of Jesus' kingdom in a way that gives hope to a dissatisfied world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Sep 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666713176

Jonny Morrison

Jonny Morrison is a church planter, pastor, and writer known for his integration of creativity, spirituality, and culture. Jonny and his wife, Tory, live in Salt Lake City, where they like to explore, host their friends, and spend time outdoors. Jonny graduated from Western Seminary with an MA in biblical and theological studies and received his doctorate of contextual theology from Northern Seminary. You can find more of Jonny’s work at jonnyis.com.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

It was an unorthodox class for a prestigious university like Yale to offer but, by just a few days after registration opened, 300 students had already enrolled. The number doubled three days later and by the time registration closed, nearly 1,200 students, about one-fourth of Yale’s undergraduates, had enrolled, making Psych 157 the most popular course in Yale’s 320-year history.

Psych 157, Psychology and the Good Life, focused on teaching students to be happier and more satisfied versions of themselves. Dr. Laurie Santos, who developed the course, told the New York Times that students want to change, to be happier themselves, and to change the culture here on campus, because there is a mental health crises we’re seeing at places like Yale.¹ A student registered for the class said something similar, telling reporters, In reality, a lot of us are anxious, stressed, unhappy, numb, which corresponds with Yale’s Internal Mental Health report.²

Psych 157 focused on positive psychology and developing practical tools for a better life. Dr. Santos called the final assignment a Hack yo’self project in which students apply the practices of the course to their actual lives. Psych 157 was pass/fail, meaning no letter grades were assigned because Santos’s didn’t want success to be defined by traditional metrics. She explained this saying, Scientists didn’t realize this in the same way 10 or so years ago, that our intuitions about what will make us happy, like winning the lottery and getting a good grade—are totally wrong,³

Psych 157 was only offered in-person once, but in the spring it was adapted into a free online course entitled The Science of Well-Being, which drew hundreds of thousands of online viewers. Two years later, during the COVID-19 lockdowns, attendance skyrocketed, and by March 2021 over 3.3 million people had signed up.⁴ In a follow-up interview, Dr. Santos said, Everyone knows that they need to protect their health . . . but people were struggling with what to do to protect their mental health.⁵

I think this is fascinating.

Why, in America’s most prestigious university, did a class on happiness become the most popular course ever? Going to Yale is a sure sign that life is set. The education is remarkable and the doors it opens and connections it provides are almost guaranteed to ensure a life of success. So why offer a class on happiness? Maybe it has something to do with the culture at Yale specifically? But when Harvard offered a similar course, nearly 900 students enrolled. So maybe the issue is prestigious universities, but we’ve also seen successful tech companies try to address happiness by hiring chief culture officers, chief happiness officers, or in the case of Google, the Jolly Good Fellow (cringe)—all responsible for company culture. It’s not hard to imagine that high-powered tech companies and prestigious universities exert similar pressures, nor is it hard to imagine why people would look for mental health resources during a global pandemic, but it’s not just private institution or folks quarantining in a global pandemic. Even before the pandemic countries were trying to solve for happiness. In 2016 the United Arab Emirates created a post of Minister of State for Happiness and in similar moves, Japan and England created the post of Minister of Loneliness.⁶

And again, I think that is fascinating.

If you were a Martian anthropologist (go with me on this) and you visited earth, what would you think? If you walked the streets of LA, visited the heartland, browsed bookstores in Toronto, saw art in Paris, drank coffee in Mexico City, visited Seoul, and scanned social media, what would you think? Would you think we’re happy? Or would you think we’re playing at happiness while the stuff of it slips out of our fingers and into air? And the real question is why? Why does our cultural moment feel so unhappy, anxious, dissatisfied, and even angry? Is it unique to us and our moment? Or is it something deeper?

Dissatisfaction

I began writing this book in 2016, after the election of Donald Trump. Trump wasn’t the reason I wrote, but his election felt like an expression of something I had been seeing and experiencing for a while. I’ll call it dissatisfaction. From the election to the women’s march, to the white nationalist shouts of we will not be replaced, it felt like American was rending along lines of dissatisfaction and discontentment.

But it wasn’t just America. Nationalist movements had been sweeping across the globe: the authoritarian Rodrigo Duterte was elected in the Philippines, India elected the nationalist religious fundamentalist Nerendra Modi, 60,000 white nationalists marched in Poland and elected an authoritarian government, and England left the European Union and elected Boris Johnson, the bombastic nationalist, as prime minister. Each of these movements were expressions of dissatisfaction, and, as in America, one gesture of dissatisfaction was met with another as, largely, people of color, women, and students took to the streets to express a different and deeper dissatisfaction. From the Yellow Vest protests in France to the democracy movements in Sudan, people were, and are, demonstrating a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo. And all of that happened before a global pandemic added weight to the already laden scales of dissatisfaction.

But it wasn’t Trump, or the protests, or the pandemic that initially motivated this book. In truth, it was my small church in Salt Lake City, Utah, where I was experiencing, from people I know and love, a growing dissatisfaction with church and faith. We’re tempted to call all religious dissatisfaction deconstruction, but deconstruction is only one possible way we can process our dissatisfaction. This book is not about deconstruction, though it might help you both deconstruct and reconstruct. No, this is about a feeling underneath deconstruction—a sense of something we experience in our bodies and hearts before we do in our heads and minds. And before I noticed the dissatisfaction in the world I saw it in my friends, church members, and even in myself. I watched in my own church as dissatisfaction metastasized into something raw and dark. This is a feeling that makes us act out in ways so different from what we believe. A feeling that can lead grown men to yell at young girls to take a mask off. That can fill us with hate for a spouse who can’t seem to make us happy. Or sometimes a feeling that just leaves us bored and disenchanted.

Into Air

What’s happening in our world, our communities, and even our churches? I believe, if we pull back the layers and excavate our dissatisfaction, we will find we are suffering from something very similar. That might seem like a bold statement, but the rest of this book is about making sense of our dissatisfaction and proving that we are all more alike than we care to admit. We all are living out of a similar imagination, a similar vision of what life is supposed to be. The problem is that our imaginations are tragically too small to deal with our deepest desires—we keep running after empty promises in the hope of new fulfillment. We need a renewed imagination, a vision that liberates us from dissatisfaction by showing us something bigger is possible.

What do we need? There’s only one thing that can speak a word that good, only one story with the power to evoke a new reality, and only one politics that can confront a world built on false hopes and broken promises. We need the story of Jesus. Not the mild, whitewashed story that offers the same empty promises covered in a religious veneer. And not the shallow story that’s tamed the church and led to disillusionment and dissatisfaction. No, we need Jesus’ story in its fully political, disruptive, and subversive form, because in the fullness of his story we find the world we were made for and the power to make it real.

A Few Important Disclaimers

Before we look at the outline of this book, I’d like to provide a few important disclaimers about certain language I’ll use.

Disclaimer #1: Talking Politics

First, I will often use the word politics. This word can be triggering as it is deeply associated with the divisive partisanship of our culture. We hear the word politics and think about politicians, voting, protesting and all the heat, scandal, and frustration modern American politics can conjure. Sometimes throughout this book I’ll talk about that kind of politics. But more often, I’ll talk about Jesus’ politic and when I do, I am not talking about Jesus within the systems, structures, and ideologies of American politics. Jesus’ politic is above, beyond, and regularly in opposition to state and national politics of any kind.

Further, I am approaching politics from the perspective of political studies or even political theology. What I am most concerned with is, how and why a people are gathered and organized. That’s what political studies is at its simplest, the study of how and why people come together. A politic is the thing empowering and giving us imaginative resource for a way of life. It’s what binds us together into communities and helps us make sense of the world. It’s how and why we live together, or don’t. In that sense, we can’t, or at least shouldn’t, talk about politics without talking about God. Theologian David Fitch describes a political theology as follows:

Political theology brings together the study of politics (how and why people come together) with the study of God. It asks how our beliefs about God (and the way we practice those beliefs) order the way we live politically (our way of life together) in the world.⁷

To say it even more simply, a politic is a story we believe + practices that shape the way we live.

The reason this matters is that we all have a politic and that politic has a formative affect us, meaning it shapes us into a certain kind of people who live in certain kinds of ways. Throughout this book, I am going to argue that we have a politic of dissatisfaction. Our story and practices form us into a dissatisfied people, that engage the world in dissatisfied ways. But, I believe, the way or politic of Jesus offers us a story and practices of depth, authenticity, and purpose.

Disclaimer #2: Talking God

The second disclaimer has to do with the way I will talk about God. Our cultural habit is to talk about God using exclusively masculine metaphors, such as he and himself, but I believe that when we do, we do ourselves a great disservice and often idolatrously limit the transcendent God to human categories. I understand this may come as a surprise and may even frustrate some readers. So let me provide a brief defense of my choice. I ask for grace and patience as you read.

First, the biblical authors tell us that men and women are made in the image of God. Likewise, Jesus (who is God) tells us that God is Spirit (John 4:24). In both, we see that God is neither more male nor more female, but that God transcends our gender distinctions. God, according to the Bible, is not gendered. To speak of God in gendered terms is to apply to God metaphors that help us understand God’s character. God is like a father and God is like a mother, both metaphors the Bible uses for God. When we speak of God in exclusively masculine pronouns, we, often inadvertently, reinforce the false idea that God is more masculine than feminine. This can lead us to apply cultural understandings of masculinity to God and can cost us the beautiful insights that open to us through the biblical usage of feminine metaphors like mother (see Deut 32:18; Hos 11:3-4; Ps 131:2; Isa 49:15; Matt 23:37). In the Bible we find masculine and feminine metaphors for God not because God is essentially gendered but because both sets of metaphors help us understand a God that is bigger than our gender conception.

Second, as we are all aware, the Bible uses predominantly masculine metaphors for God, but I believe this represents God accommodating to ancient understandings more than it reflects God’s identity. Throughout the biblical narrative God accommodates Godself to cultural understanding. God speaks about creation in archaic terms and never updates Israel’s scientific knowledge. In the Law, God accommodates divorce due to hardness of hearts (Matt 19:8), despite a desire for no one to be divorced. Similarly, God accommodates the practice of polygamy throughout the Old Testament, using it to form Israel. God also accommodates Israel’s demand for a king even though it’s a direct rejection of God’s rule (1 Sam 8:5–7). Throughout the Bible we see God, in compassion, step toward us and meet us where we are so that we can know God. In this way, I believe God accommodated to patriarchal cultures to be known and accessible. But today, through the revelation of Jesus we have a clearer understanding of God that empowers us to speak of God in more truthful ways.

Practically, I will most often use the words God and Godself (rather than he and himself") when