The Road: Intentional Defiant Love.

In a world that can feel as bleak as The Road, what does it mean to love—intentionally, defiantly, and against all odds? Explore resilience, hope, and the power of human connection.

I just finished Cormac McCarthy’s bleak novel, The Road. In it, McCarthy imagines a world incinerated by nuclear war. A few handfuls of emaciated survivors scour the land in search of food and warmth: some predators; some prey. Like Amish furniture, this novel’s writing is sturdy but sparse. The main characters, a father and his ten-year-old boy, travel lightly, and waste nothing. That’s how the sentences are written on the page of this compact book. There’s no room for anything so indulgent as an extra simile or metaphor, or for that matter a name for a dad, or his ten-year-old boy. In a nuclear winter, there’s little difference between day and night. In this setting, McCarthy explores the deepest shadows of the human condition. In it, he’s looking for any small traces of light in the human spirit. As a reader, I kept hoping he’d find that light somewhere…anywhere. In the middle of the novel, I remembered thinking that I’d experienced something like this in a movie theater a few years ago.

I spent the teen years of this century raising…teens. That meant that I had to sit through all three movies of Suzanne Collins’s movie franchise, The Hunger Games (2012-2015). I’d never think to compare the literary qualities of McCarthy's and Collins' writing, but I do remember thinking that Collins was mining the territory of the worst in us as a way of trying to find the best in us. I also remember thinking, “Why are there so many dystopian movies and novels around these days?” There’s more than just a hint of irony in the fact that I consulted with artificial intelligence to research that question! The concept of a future assisted by AI has launched a thousand dystopian novels and movies. Nonetheless, when I asked AI, “How many apocalyptic, or post-apocalyptic novels have been written in the last twenty-five years?” He/she/they told me “thousands.”

Way back in my liberal arts days, I remember studying the connection between early Twentieth Century literature and early Twentieth Century history. Some scholars of that era named it, “The Age of Anxiety.” Despite prosperity on many fronts, an underlying throbbing that would give birth to two world wars was captured by writers like Franz Kafka, and John Dos Passos. I can’t help but wondering if something similar is happening in our literature today. Could it be that the blowing up of dystopian novels and movies is capturing and expressing something unique about our own times?

I don’t read Cormac McCarthy’s novel as a nuclear wakeup call. I read it more as a morality play for our times calling us to wake up out of a kind of hypnosis. In my sixty-five years, I’ve never seen anything like the time we are living in. This moment reminds me of when Mr. Mack, my dad’s friend, horrified my brothers and I by skinning catfish while they were still alive. Bob, Mike, Dan, and I all accepted the need to clean a fish before you could eat it. We just didn’t see that it had to be done with that kind of cruelty. Similarly, there are hard issues to tackle in our times, but it seems to me, that we could tackle those issues while upholding the virtues of compassion, human dignity, and the truth.

I believe that McCarthy, early on in his career, discerned a kind of Zeitgeist at loose in our culture that is playing itself out right now. Like Mr. Mack, so many of our leaders these days would have us believe that cruelty is not only acceptable, but even virtuous. People who aren’t “our people” are fungible like eggshells that can be cracked, or must be cracked, in order to make the necessary omelet for us to survive.

In his novel, McCarthy’s father figure is a good man. His central vocation is the survival of his son, against all odds. His eyes were set exclusively on that goal, as a consequence, this good man did things that weren’t good. His boy was better than good. He listened to his dad’s consistent rationale for walking past people without helping them. That list included a starving orphaned little preschool boy, a feeble old man, and a desperate young man. He’d point out, “There’s not enough for them and us.” McCarthy was unwilling to whitewash anything. The dad very well could have been correct in his assessment. His son’s consistent response was, “Then what’s the point of surviving?” At the very end of the novel, a final plot twist, the equivalent of a candle lit in the darkness, answers the little boy’s question.

In graduate school, I was taught to look beyond symptoms to find systemic solutions to counseling problems. I’m fresh out of anything like a systemic solution in the face of the Zeitgeist of our times. What I do have to offer is a conviction that’s more leap of faith than anything else. That conviction? Love endures. The most important move to make in our times is to develop an intentional, defiant practice of love. Like the boy in this novel, a necessary condition for this practice of love is to find a blessed community of fellow-wayfarers who are equally as defiant and intentional in moving toward the Light.

Dialogue: Use these to dialogue with those in your life or share with Dr. Tom and the Sunday Morning Cafe community in the comments below.

Use these to dialogue with those in your life or share with Dr. Tom and the Sunday Morning Cafe community in the comments below.

• Where do you consistently go to feed yourself with hope?

• When you hear the phrase, “intentional, defiant practice of love,” what comes to mind for you?

• Who have you personally known who practices heroic love?

• Name a time when you believe you came closest to practicing heroic love.

• Can you think of an opportunity in the following week to love with intention?