The Worst Rescue Plan

A Bad Poem, the Lie of the Salvific-Self, and the Resurrection

There are few poems I strongly dislike. In fact, I could probably count them on one hand, and I could likely find some reason to appreciate each of them if pressed. However, there is one poem that takes first place and that I will always hate. It is an ostensibly innocuous poem one could easily find scrolling through Pinterest or Instagram. It is titled “You Can Save Yourself” by Lana Rafaela.

Before you imagine I spend my spare time mulling over my hatred for various pieces of art, allow me to provide some context.

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I will keep the place and the people involved anonymous, but it must be said that this occasion took place around a dinner table: the kind of setting where great triumphs or great despairs often originate. Other relevant context: these individuals are doctors and scholars, great admirers of antiquity and of what one might call the intellectual life.

To begin, I was the lone American in the group, so the conversation inevitably turned to politics. To be clear, it was not a conversation I particularly wanted to have, or even start, in this case—nuance tends to take the back seat. Somehow my constitution weakens, and I find myself apologizing as I morph into a one-person embodiment of all three branches of government. (I promise this is necessary context.)

These individuals turned next to Christianity and not as its own subject of conversation. Instead, it entered merely as a subcategory, and perhaps worse, an appendage of politics.

The usual talking points flew across the table, addressing all ranges of the political spectrum and speaking of the failings of the church as indicative of doctrine itself. I was happy to stay out of it and eat my pasta since I really did not think I could use my limited knowledge of Augustinian theology to convince agnostics and atheists in that moment of anything lasting.

I was content with my resolution until one person said: “Christianity is just badly designed cult that takes your money and makes you feel bad about yourself.”

Again, that’s a lot to unpack in twenty minutes and it didn’t seem anyone wanted their minds changed so I just said “Well I’m a Christian and I think those are called donations.”

It got really quiet for a moment.

They said quickly, “Well as an atheist, I just don’t like religion in general, but I do admit that Christianity is perhaps one of the most accepting and loving ones if I had to pick. I like that it gives people hope while they’re alive. They aren’t very realistic about death though.”

Laughter rippled across the small group of people who were uncomfortably half realistic about death themselves.

Again, I kept my response measured. “As an atheist then, what gives you hope?”

This person answered quickly. “I don’t know, myself I guess. Humanity.”

I wish I could say that some great conversation ensued in which my new atheistic friends asked questions and meshed their love of antiquity with what Tacitus said about Jesus. I wanted to take the scenic route to them admitting Jesus is the son of God by discussing morality, ethics, and historical precedence.

None of that happened.

Instead, I spent the next couple of hours after we all washed our plates and parted ways for the evening thinking about the “cult that makes you feel bad about yourself” and hope in oneself.

And then I remembered the poem I hated. I hate it because it is, frankly, a terrible lie. I also hate it because of the comments people leave underneath it wherever it is posted. Things like “I needed this today” or “I love it! Telling it how it is.”

In order to utilize the text of the poem efficiently, here it is in its entirety:

“Let me tell you something: no one is going to look at you, broken and shattered and think - you are beautiful. No one is going to come pick up your broken pieces off the floor and assemble them into a beautiful whole. Hell, you won’t even look at yourself and think - I made broken look beautiful. You know why? Because all those writers lied to you. yes, all those with their poems of scraped knuckles and blood dripping down chins, pomegranate songs and loves that ripped through you like hurricanes. Liars.

So, you and I, we are going to make a plan. you are not going to romanticize days when your brain tells you to smash that mirror, you are not going to romanticize the lover who doesn’t understand you but still writes about you. here is what you are going to romanticize instead: you are going to romanticize the first day of spring, its gentle hands all over your body, lifting you up until you are as light as a feather.

You are going to romanticize the tea and honey kind of love, no hurricanes, but sunshine that builds you up from within, that helps you make it through the worst days. you are going to romanticize gentle hands of a friend in yours, telling you that it is going to be okay. because it is. And don’t trust poets, we’re no good, we love pretending that our jagged edges tantamount to a beautiful disaster, but in reality - there ain’t nothing beautiful about shaky hands holding a cigarette and empty eyes staring at the cracks in the walls. you know what is beautiful, instead? The days when you can look at yourself in the mirror and smile, scars and all. music that makes your soul flow like a river, books that offer comfort, families flocking together like overgrown birds to keep you safe and warm, friends that give you strength when you can find none, lovers who make you laugh through tears.

From now on you are going to romanticize healing; honey dripping down your fingertips, August nights that stick to your skin, the day you find your purpose, long car rides and singing so loud that no one can shut you up now.

Bad news: no one is coming to save you. Good news: you can save yourself.”

My atheist friends staked their entire foundation for hope on themselves and humanity. After reading that poem and from my own personal experience of being a human, I can say that that basis for hope is profoundly flimsy and disappointing.

And yet, I did say I have a penchant for finding ways to compliment even poems I dislike. Read the poem again, and you’ll notice something strange and antithetical to the staunch conclusion. For a poem whose whole thesis is that no one is coming to save you, an awful lot of people show up to do exactly that. Spring arrives with “gentle hands all over your body, lifting you up.” Friends take your hand and tell you it’s going to be okay—and the poem insists, “because it is,” as though that were a fact and not a hope. Families “flock together like overgrown birds” to keep you warm. By the end, “you can save yourself” has quietly become “you can be saved by spring, by friends, by family, by lovers, by music, by books. You can be saved by everyone, that is, except God.”

This is the same sleight of hand my friend performed at dinner without noticing. Christianity, they said, is one of the most accepting and loving worldviews. They’d pick it over any other religion, if they had to. It gives people hope, allegedly. And then, in the same breath, they located their actual hope somewhere else: in themselves and in humanity.

They wanted the sense that someone, somewhere is keeping watch, but without the One that the poem and the dinner table both seem unable to fully write off.

I don’t think this is hypocrisy, exactly. I actually think this is more so an admission. You cannot build a life, or, let it be said, a successful poem on “no one is coming to save you,” because it isn’t true to experience, and everyone—poets and atheists included—knows it. We are rescued constantly by people and circumstances we didn’t earn and can’t control. The poem just refuses to ask the obvious next question: rescued by whom, ultimately? Spring and good fortune don’t arrive because you “manifested” them correctly. Friends don’t show up in your life because you brilliantly scheduled them to do so.

This is where “yourself” and “humanity” run out of road. They are wonderful as far as they go—I myself am grateful for the ordinary mercies the poem describes so well—but they are not foundations. They are gifts. A foundation has to remain when the gifts stop coming. It has to hold when humanity lets you down, when the friends don’t call, when the family is the source of the wound, when spring arrives and you can’t feel it.

“You can save yourself” is not bad advice because it’s too hopeful. It’s bad advice because it’s not hopeful enough. What my friend called hope (“myself, I guess. Humanity”) is, I believe, mostly just an unwillingness to name that her hope lives in the gentle hands she didn’t choose and can’t summon on command. And here is where the poem gets the order tragically backwards. It says: bad news, no one is coming to save you; good news, you can save yourself. But the actual gospel runs the other direction, and runs much deeper. The bad news isn’t that no one is coming—it’s that we are the broken pieces on the floor, and we are not capable of assembling ourselves into anything whole, no matter how much spring or honey or singing in the car we manage to romanticize. We are dead, not merely scattered.

Yet, genuinely, structurally, against every expectation the stories trained us to have, someone does come. Not a friend with gentle hands or a well-timed summer season, though those are real and good. God himself, in Jesus, steps into the wreckage, takes on the brokenness as his own, and at the cost of his life turns the worst thing that has ever happened—and what history itself hinges on—the murder of the only truly whole person who ever lived—into the means by which everyone else gets to walk out alive.

That is the shape my least favorite poem can’t quite reach. It desperately wants a turn from “no one is coming” to “you can save yourself,” but that turn is far too small to be good news. It asks the broken thing to be its own rescue. The actual turn is stranger and bigger: someone does come, and the worst news becomes the best news, and the broken pieces are not merely picked up but raised. In a word, it is a resurrection, not a romanticization.

That’s the conversation I wish we’d had.