No Reservations: Anthony Bourdain, Kerouac, and Our Longing For Home

I cried today. Honestly, the reason why feels thoroughly foolish and hypocritical. If I were truly integral in my faith in Jesus, the one who welcomes the outcast, the lonely, the refugee, and the little children, I would cry everyday at the things that happen in our world. But I cried today not because of the plight of an ever-growing number of the Syrian diaspora, or because my own government is both ignoring United States citizens in Puerto Rico and separating families at the southern border in an act that is both cruel and demonic. No, today I cried because Anthony Bourdain decided to end his life.

Just last night my wife and I were watching as Bourdain shared a cold beer and some spicy noodles with Barack Obama at a hole in the wall in Hanoi. Parts Unknown became for Courtney and I, a periscope to a world beyond, a no-cost way to satisfy our own curiosity and wanderlust in the decidedly grounded stage of life that is having three young kids. I find myself always attracted to people like Bourdain—grumpy, smarmy, and cynical and yet radically compassionate, humble, and wise. I would assume from the show that Bourdain and I share  different worldviews but I also know, if we could sit down to a cold beer in a sweaty taqueria in Guatemala, we would find ourselves not all too dissimilar.

Bourdain said in a previous episode of Parts Unknown that he spent over 200 days a year traveling, exploring, and filming for his show. Christian thinker Mark Sayers in his book, The Road Trip That Saved The World, illuminates the Jack Kerouac-saturated world that we all live in. For Kerouac, life was not a destination, to be rooted was to be restricted, repressed. For Kerouac, and for subsequent generations of people, life is a journey. Sayers writes:

So why do we choose to view life as a journey? How did Kerouac’s image of the road become so applicable to how we live and think? Well, modern life is a confusing business. The culture of home, in which everyone subscribed to one worldview, has disappeared. Now, every moment of our lives we are faced with countless decisions.^[1]p. 39

The chains of a mundane existence could only be broken “on the road.” Bourdain lived his life as a disciple of Kerouac—complete with an accompanying battle with addictive substances. For many of us, we may forsake the drugs but embrace Kerouac’s ideals. Travel, adventure, freedom, youth. We live an Instagram-filtered life of which Bourdain is the prototype, the veritable “Most Interesting Man In The World”. Perhaps one last time, in his grievous pain, he is beckoning us to a different perspective, saying, “Pay attention, things may not be as they appear.”

I would not presume to know anything about Bourdain’s life other than what he revealed to us on camera.  From everything I have read, it seems that he was a man who had quite a lot going for him: a beautiful daughter, an exciting, fulfilling career, and a great reputation as a friend and advocate. Much will certainly be written on how we should never seek our satisfaction in those things. Whatever his demons were, I simply want to offer a prayer for a man who inspired me to want to live more gratefully in the individual moments of my life, to seek to be delightfully surprised while well outside my comfort zones, and to just shut up and try new things. I pray that Anthony, maybe for the first time, would know what it means to be home.

Anthony Bourdain was a luminary in the modern world, somebody who not only reminded us that life is a journey but that to journey requires humility, a readiness to ask questions, to ask a question, take a big bite of something delicious, and listen. And in living out the modern ideals of freedom and exploration in a way that most of us could only dream (which is why we so readily lived vicariously through him), Bourdain gave us all a quite unexpected gift. I pray that just as he gave so many of us a lens to see places that we would never otherwise see that his life and death would illuminate the world that we see everyday, in all its mundane glory, in a fresh way. He showed us that though our passports may not be stamped full of exotic locales, the most beautiful and interesting things about life truly are universally local. Whenever we share a good meal, cold drinks, laughter and curiosity, we share our lives. We share what it means to be human in the truest sense of the word. Most of all we share a glimpse of what Jesus wants to offer every person. What  it means for us to be at rest, what it means when our striving ceases, what it means to be home.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;

T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Rest in peace, brother Anthony.