Choose Wisely

At the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade [spoiler alert], the hero reaches a chamber lined with cups. One of them is the Holy Grail, while the rest are fake. Choosing the wrong one means death. He is told to “Choose wisely.” Indiana studies the cups, choosing plain clay one over anything ornate and drinks. The whole scene works because everyone agrees on one assumption: somewhere among the counterfeits sits the one true cup.

I want to suggest that most of us imagine that in some way we live inside that scene, and it’s that the assumption which is the trap.

In myself, my friends, and my students, I’ve often recognized the exhaustion that comes from continually reaching for the next thing. The promotion arrives and the restlessness doesn’t leave, so we start looking again. Maybe the job wasn’t the answer. Maybe what we need is God, so we find a church that promises rest. Then rest starts to feel like sleepwalking, and what we need is authenticity, so we find a therapist, a practice, a plan. Each time, the ache quiets for a while until it returns. And each time, the verdict is the same: you must have chosen wrong. Try the next cup.

Philip Cushman argues that the self most of our therapies, self-help programs, and even theologies were built to serve is what he calls the empty self. Shaped by the loss of tradition, community, and shared meaning in the post war period, the modern self experiences itself first of all as a deficit. It is an interior emptiness waiting to be soothed. To be human, on this account, is to be empty. The crucial move, the one everything else rests on, is that this emptiness becomes a problem to solve.

If the self is empty, it needs something external to fill it. So everything from the sanctuary, to the therapist’s office, to the car commercial arrives offering the next candidate. We imagine God, mental health, and success as rivals—different answers competing for our allegiance. But far from being genuine alternatives, they are actually competitors in the same market, selling the same product with a different name to the same wound. Same hole, different fillers.

None of this means the products are necessarily worthless or bad. This is the part I want to be careful about, because I am a professional counselor and I believe in the value of psychotherapy. Reflection, meditation, better habits, the slow work of vulnerability and counseling, these are good things, and I’ve recommended every one of them. But a good thing changes character depending on the job we hand it. The moment any of them becomes the answer to our emptiness, the thing that will finally quiet the question underneath, it has begun to turn into an idol.

Peter Rollins notes this in The Idolatry of God. The mistake, he argues, is not choosing the wrong cup. It’s believing the chamber works the way the knight says it does. The moment we imagine ourselves completed by the right object, we’ve already stepped into the structure of idolatry. It hardly matters whether the object is money, success, therapy, or God. Every cup becomes a fraud the moment we expect it to do what no cup can do.

For more on the idolatry of God, see my earlier piece.

There’s an assumption powering the whole apparatus. The advertiser, the pastor, the coach, the therapist, even the critic of consumer culture all agree that something essential is missing. They disagree only about what belongs in its place.

However, the lack at the center of us may not be a defect to solve but the very condition that keeps us open to the world.

The Teacher in Ecclesiastes notes this in his famous lines. He tried every filler in the catalog: wisdom, pleasure, wealth, great works, and pronounced each one hevel, vapor, a chasing after wind. His conclusion wasn’t that he’d chosen badly and should keep shopping. It was far more disturbing “For in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.” The point is not that wisdom is worthless, the entire book is about it. The point is that wisdom cannot abolish the human condition any more than wealth or pleasure can. The vexation is the continued insistence to maintain the gap.

I’ve previously written in more depth on this passage in Ecclesiates here.

Play has been teaching me this for years. Nobody finishes a wonderful game wishing it had completed them. If anything, the best games leave us wanting to play again. They don’t end desire; they refine it. The joy of play has never depended on closing the gap, but from inhabiting it together in what Winnicott calls a play space. The game continually calls us back to keep playing.

Love works the same way. To love someone is not to close the distance but to stay open to a person who always exceeds your grasp of them. We keep talking because words never say all of it. We keep making art because something stays inexpressible. We stay in community because no relationship is ever finished. The gap is what keeps love alive.

Idolatry begins the moment we stop treating that openness as the condition of life and start treating it as a defect to overcome. Every idol makes the same promise: this time the search can end and you’ll finally be complete.

Faith requires resisting the fantasy of completion It is not the insistence of the one object that finally completes us. It involves learning to receive good things without demanding that any of them bring our longing to an end.

Indiana Jones survives because he chooses the right cup. Most of us spend our lives assuming that’s our story too. We keep searching for the object that will finally justify the search itself, but I’m no longer convinced there is one.

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