Earlier today, I was listening to an interview with the writer George Saunders on the New York Times Book Review’s podcast. Three of Saunders’s books—two short story collections and the novel Lincoln in the Bardo—appeared on the NYT’s recent list of the “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” Saunders’s work is, well, weird, but in the least JD Vance way possible: it’s full of tortured, broken, and sometimes dead characters running around dystopian theme parks and maudlin graveyards until they bump into each other in moments of fleeting but genuine kindness.

Saunders was raised Catholic and is currently a practicing Buddhist, so I was surprised when something he said rang a Reformed bell in my brain: Life’s “nice moments” of joy and connection and delight, Saunders said, are “purely by grace. And when you see someone who’s having a terrible moment, that also is by a kind of inverse grace.”

In other words, “luck doesn’t prove virtue.” We like to believe that we earn the good and bad things that happen to us, and that therefore we can fix the bad stuff and trumpet the good as evidence of our own righteousness. But in fact so much of who we are is way outside our control, and every day can bring both joys and horrors that we did nothing to earn.

I’m not interested in wading too deep into theology here: the classical Reformed position, after all, is that we do deserve all the bad stuff and that it’s just the good that God bestows upon us unmerited. I don’t think that’s morally or theologically tenable, but that’s a different post.

Instead, I’m drawn to an impulse in the Reformed tradition that I still value even as I’ve given up (repented of?) my college-freshman enthusiasm for predestination and sovereignty. At its best, Reformed theology dissolves the boundary between the deserving and the undeserving. It says that we’re all entangled in systems of oppression and cruelty we didn’t create, and that we can’t work or think or strive our way out of those systems, especially not on our own. Escape and resistance come from outside ourselves, from those who love us—divine and otherwise.

This is one message of the show The Good Place, too: it is literally impossible for us to become good on our own; all goodness is a gift from outside us, forged in relationships with other, equally f’ed-up people.

But it’s not the message of our current systems of politics, economics, or education. We are obsessed with merit, with ensuring there’s a “level playing field” so that only the right people win and only the right people lose. This attitude arises in part from liberal Protestantism, which has spent over a century insisting that we (especially a white, male we) have been blessed with the capability of self-improvement, of fashioning ourselves into better and better vessels of God’s civilizing grace. More recently, it’s been filtered through neoliberal capitalism: we have to market ourselves, make ourselves efficient, avoid wasting time or money or potential. Then we can be solvent, successful, satisfied. Then we can be saved.

It’s love and solidarity, not just my weird Reformed hangups, that demand we say no to this. Whether they come from God, fate, or quantum fluctuations, the tragedies and victories that happen upon us are not our own doing. We don’t live in an Olympic stadium, where medals are awarded by almighty judges according to atomic-clock measures of our strength and speed. No, we live in one of Saunders’s theme parks: a tragicomic, exploitative, rusting bizarro-world where we keep stumbling into each other and, for some reason, holding on.

Josh Parks

Josh Parks graduated from Calvin in 2018 with majors in English and music, and he is currently a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia. When not writing, he can be found learning the alto recorder, watching obscure Disney movies, and making excruciating puns.