The Grief and Reality Behind Burning Man’s Celebration
By Elizabeth Prata
SYNOPSIS
Burning Man, an annual event in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, showcases a temporary city of self-expression and artistic endeavor, rooted in principles of radical participation and self-reliance. However, it also reveals deep spiritual emptiness, with many attendees searching for meaning and purpose, unaware of their need for spiritual fulfillment through Christ.
It’s Burning Man week in the Black Rock desert.
Burning Man is an event begun in San Francisco in 1986. It moved to the dry lakebed desert in Nevada in 1990. The event promoters resist it being called a festival, rather, they say it is a temporary, experimental city constructed by its participants without government, who then adhere to ‘founders’ principles’ (not government rules) and go on to indulge in every sort of hedonistic, artistic, and spiritual endeavor in which they care to indulge.
There is a huge temple in which participants pray to their unknown god, a tent to abandon themselves to wild physical hedonistic pleasures, art installations, and at the focus, the large “Man” which is an effigy burned at the end of the event.
About 70,000 people flock to the desert to endure harsh conditions so they can experience “radical self-expression”, create art (which are really expressions of paganism), and experiment with alternate community.
Some of the 10 principles of Burning Man event include Radical Self-reliance where “Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on their inner resources,” radical Self-expression as an outflow of their individual, personal expression, and most tellingly, “Participation”:
We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.
The underline is mine. At its core, Burning Man is a monument to man’s desperate need for Christ. It is a panoply of paganism. It is a testament to splendidly terrible display of lostness. It is a place where tens of thousands of lost, foolish sheep wander in an inhospitable desert trying to build a meaningful monument to life, but it is only a Tower of Babel upon which the shifting sand under their feet sinks them into further despair rather than lifts them into the exaltation they seek and expect.
The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17:9).
No one will ever find anything ‘real’ by looking at the heart and what which flows from it.
For from within, out of the hearts of people, come the evil thoughts, acts of sexual immorality, thefts, murders, acts of adultery, (Mark 7:21).
The founders chose the location because of its remoteness and lack of government oversight. It is held on Federal land which only requires a permit to use and is easy to obtain. But the location is a true metaphor for the desert they feel in their hearts, and the actual desert sand that blows by them and into them is a counterpart to the sand Jesus said the lost stand upon and eventually fall.
Vicious sandstorms pelted the participants on day one, with some saying they could not see a foot in front of their face. Wearing goggles, masks, kerchiefs over their faces, they were blindly stumbling in the storm trying to re-gather their camping items, which was soon followed by rain, making a sticky muddy cement in which they could not walk.
Why do I write about this? Because there are fewer places in the world during any calendar year where more lost people collect to glorify their pagan ghastliness. We know there are lost people in the world, but seeing them collected in such numbers, seeking worthiness and meaning to their lives, yet failing to find it in this bizarre city they create, is devastating.
In fact, what many people do not know is that aside from the focal point of the Burning Man, next to him is a Temple. This temple is enormous, open 24/7. It receives its visitors who stream in to pray, wail, cry, and seek, only to find spiritual emptiness and a kind of hell opening its mouth to swallow them and their vain search for meaning.
interview of burning man Melissa Dougherty interviewed Carl Teichrib about Burning Man. Listening to this Christian man who goes with a team to witness, hearing about this should move one to tears. He goes to the event with a team, sets up their camp named “Camp of the Unknown God”, and witnesses to the Burning Man participants, helps with practical needs, and provides comfort to the lost. In the interview he described what happens in the Burning Man Temple:
“Since the year 2000 they have a huge, huge temple and it is an incredibly ornate structure. At least it was last year. Other years not so much. But it’s always grand. It’s always large. It’s always imposing. And the temple is a place where there is weeping and mourning and gnashing of teeth for 8 days. It is a 24-hour week-long funeral. That’s the only way to describe it. And so people will be depositing on the walls within the building itself. They’ll be depositing pictures of loved ones who have been lost. They’ll be writing on the walls their anger, their hate, their pain, their rage, their sorrow, their joy. Long poems and long stories are written out.”
“I have a picture. I’ve covered up the individual’s name on the picture. It’s me holding up somebody’s suicide note, saying, ‘if I was successful in my suicide, bring my note to the temple to burn’. Wedding dresses hanging up with the words fraud written across it. And it’s really a place of deep, deep grief. That’s the contrast to what people think Burning Man is because the typical stereotypical view is this is a place of party. No denial and it’s pray raw party stuff. No denial. We see hard, hard things. At the same time, it’s a place where people have been pouring out their humanity in the search for some healing, some sense of purpose, some sense of meaning, some sense of forgiveness.”
If this vivid picture described by Mr. Teichrib of the lost wailing at a temple to their pagan god in their spiritual grief doesn’t move you, I don’t know what will.
The spectacle of emptiness at Burning Man is a testament to the fact that most of the people on this world are absent Jesus, need Jesus, and feel a deep connection to a God they do not know and vainly search for replacement idols and gods to fill their emptiness.
Jesus felt compassion for the crowds-
Seeing the crowds, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and downcast, like sheep without a shepherd. (Matthew 9:36).
The Bible records Jesus sighing twice, both times in the Gospel of Mark. (Mark 7:34, Mark 8:12). Each time was prompted by a different type of human suffering. The Greek words used for sigh imply His deep, visceral emotion at seeing the lost gathered to find meaning in something besides the vanity fair they were living.
Dave Mathis writes about Jesus’ first sigh, (Mark 7:34) born of a compassion about sin’s curse, saying: “Biblically, sighing is not an expression of joy, but of grief. [S]ighing expresses (audibly) a kind of inner languishing, the opposite of a merry heart (Isaiah 24:7). Sighing is a soft, more quiet form of mourning (Ezekiel 24:17).
Jesus’ second sigh was a deep one, a groan in His spirit. (Mark 8:12). This time it was a groan born of the grief of the Pharisees’ rejection of Jesus into unbelief. Rejection of the Savior distresses Him.
Dave Mathis again, “To this, we might ask ourselves how much we groan as Jesus does. Do we sense, with him, the seriousness, the atrocity, of unbelief? Or do we soft-pedal it, in ourselves and in others? Our Savior may find not that we groan too much, but too little.“
Does the Burning Man spectacle grieve your spirit? Do you grieve for the lost? Dies it distress you to know hell opens it mouth to receive so many who blindly seek but fail to find? If anything, the Burning Man event should revive in us a passion for praying for the lost, witnessing with our words and our holy lives, and to grow as close to Jesus as we can- there for but for the grace of God, go I.
FURTHER RESOURCES
I Used to Want to Go to Burning Man
The roots of the festival were the brain child of Larry Harvey who attended a few solstice ceremonies on Baker Beach in San Francisco back in the 1980s. The culmination of the solstice festival was a bonfire, where a wooden wicker man was burned. When the original organizers stopped putting on the pagan festival, Harvey developed the idea and ran with it. Harvey says that the he was unaware that a wicker man was a large human-shaped wicker statue allegedly used in Celtic paganism…
Burning Man Reminds Us to Preach the Gospel
However, it is not the debauched, pagan style celebratory worship that drives me to write this article, well, not entirely anyway. As I said, the Burning Man festival is literally the hallmark event of post modernism. Virtually every lifestyle choice and belief system is represented at this gathering. And were you to ask those attending how they felt about the competing beliefs being in all in the same place, they would tell you how wonderful it is to have such a non-judgmental environment where everyone could live as they chose without fear of being told they were wrong. In other words, Burning Man is the utopia of post-modernism…