Clean, but empty

  • A book I’m read­ing about con­fes­sion touched on the need to help oth­ers and do good works, and the author included this quote with­out telling its source:

    “Lord, you can see that my hands are clean of sin,” said a soul to the Lord.

    “Clean, but empty,” replied the Lord.

    In the many rip­ples of thought that came from these short sen­tences, I was sur­prised that the end of a com­puter game came to mind. That may seem just too silly of a thing to rec­ol­lect at that time, but when I thought about it, I could see why I did.

    riven_1.jpgThe game is the sec­ond Myst game called Riven. In Riven you wan­der in a bro­ken world that is — as com­puter game worlds tend to be — com­plex, breath­tak­ingly beau­ti­ful but essen­tially ster­ile. As you begin, you have only an inkling of what it is you’re sup­posed to do. You become famil­iar with the world, which is hav­ing strug­gles on sev­eral lev­els. Even­tu­ally you know what the nature is of the inter­link­ing prob­lems, and so you have a sense of the solu­tion. But since clear infor­ma­tion is hard to come by, you have to guess (or cheat, of course — and I do both when I play). At the end, you have either trapped the evil dic­ta­tor of that world or he has trapped you. If it’s the for­mer, you make your way back to where you began and solve the last puzzle.

    At that point, the man named Atrus who sent you into Riven returns, comes up to you with joy and — if ALL you’ve done is neu­tral­ize the evil in that world — his face falls. Because you were also the only one who could free his wife, and she in turn is the only one who could free the many other pris­on­ers in that world and allow them to escape. The poignancy of that moment is more acute because unlike more recent games, this sequence isn’t done with dig­i­tal imagery, but with live action. It’s a real per­son atrus.jpgwho was filmed for the sequence, and per­haps because he’s not an actor by trade (he’s Rand Miller — one of the game’s cre­ators, and a Chris­t­ian, for what it’s worth), there’s some­thing really gen­uine and heart-breaking about the sec­ond in which he looks at you and asks where his wife is. When Atrus real­izes that you failed him, he goes on with a ter­ri­ble calm­ness to give you the promised reward — with Riven col­laps­ing all around you, you’re sent away from its demo­li­tion to a place where you’ll be safe. But you know that you failed.

    That moment when he looks at you and you know that you were think­ing too small — that’s what the quote above made me think of. The world can seem like such a dark place some­times, and when you wan­der it as a Chris­t­ian, you’re con­stantly aware that the Truth that you know to be life, light and our only real hope is deemed dan­ger­ous non­sense by many. And so you can think small some­times — how do I save myself?

    It’s for cer­tain that sal­va­tion has to begin there, and it takes no end of con­stant vig­i­lance to attend to it. But it seems to me that if our thoughts end there, we may win some kind of safety from the destruc­tion around us, but we won’t have won any­thing, we won’t have done the truly need­ful thing. Our hands will be clean, but empty. And the moment in which we meet the Lord will be a ter­ri­ble one.


    Related posts:

    1. Empty nesters
    2. Bright Fri­day and my wooden heart
    3. To rant or not to rant
    4. The destruc­tion of hearths
    5. Churches and com­puter games

    July 6th, 2007 | Grace | 4 Comments |

4 Responses and Counting...

  • david+ 07.06.2007

    Wow. Utterly amaz­ing. Such a worldly and there­fore extremely appro­pri­ate anal­ogy. And if we, as the Fathers say, help in the sal­va­tion of the world, then your com­par­i­son is all the more apt. Thanks for bring­ing this to light in such an explicit way for me.

  • Grace

    Phew! Glad you had that response. This is one that seemed really pro­found first thing in the morn­ing and then later on seemed like it might just be weird.

  • david+

    You’re wel­come.
    Fear not.
    Your post inspired me to go back to fin­ish Riven “the other way.”

  • Grace

    Woo! Glad to be an inspi­ra­tion. Of all the com­puter games I’ve tried (which aren’t that many) the Myst series is my favorite, and of that series, Riven is my favorite, even though the problem-solving aspect was well out­side of what I could do with­out get­ting a lot of clues. (On my own, I got trapped by Gehn in the link­ing book. @%#!!!)

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