Severance is a sci-fi show in its second season on AppleTV. It’s a wonderfully bizarre, funny, and thought-provoking series about Lumon, a mysterious family-owned bio-medical company that invented a brain implant that can induce a separate consciousness.
The device can be used in a number of applications where someone needs to be fully conscious but have no memory of their experience.
The plot centers around “severed” workers at Lumon who do top-secret work for the company. Though it appears all they’re doing is organizing sets of numbers based on a feeling, much of the show’s intrigue centers around what their “Cold Harbor” project is accomplishing.
On top of that secrecy, Lumon has developed a mythos and cult-like adoration for its founding father, Kier, complete with folklore, speech, paintings, statues, historical landmarks, and employee handbooks that read like religious tracts. And goats. What are they breeding goats for?!?
As viewers, we first see the life of “innies” of severed workers who awake to consciousness while lying down on a conference table in a board room. After that, they awaken in the elevator on the way to the SVRed floor. Eventually, we meet their “outies” who live without knowing what happens on the inside. Or do they?
The company says one application of the device is for blocking out painful experiences where full anesthesia isn’t possible - but in reality, a new part of yourself awakens into consciousness, experiences that trauma, and then loses consciousness when your ‘true’ self is reawakened. This sets up an interesting tension between one’s selves and the utility of pain.
It becomes clear there is something nefarious going on at the company - no spoilers - but it got me thinking about work/life balance, corporate culture, salvation, and whether it is better to live a life free of pain and trauma.
Corporate Cult-ure
Sometimes by viewing an extreme version of something, we can better grasp the imperceptible oddities in our “normal” reality. The deification of Kier in Severance shines a light on the silliness to which corporations glorify CEOs and how nations idolize leaders.
We consume their sacred texts on leadership, tithe large sums of company profits to them (no matter if they fail), and pledge allegiance (sign that employee handbook!) to adhere to the values and mission that rule the company. Or maybe they call you family (wait…so you’re my daddy?!?). Or a nation (wait..like an authoritarian regime?!? I didn’t see a ballot box).
As church attendance has dwindled, there has been a trend to relocate that greater spiritual calling in life to one’s work. So corporate language becomes loftier: “We power health and wellness throughout the world! AND THE UNIVERSE!” And so we devote more of our time and energy to that higher cause.
I have struggled to find the right balance throughout my career. However, it recently became easier while working at a for-profit company whose real motivation is to maximize shareholder wealth (outside venture capital). My identity has become less defined by this day job now that I am getting clarity on a career re-alignment.
Once VR Study Trips takes off (God willing), I’ll have to remember: your work can be just a mission field and it doesn’t have to be an all-consuming higher calling at the expense of your relationships, health, and time.
Conscious Torment
In one episode, we learn the back story of an employee (Christopher Walken!) who sought out Lumon as a means for salvation. The character’s conservative Lutheran faith condemns his homosexuality to the fires of hell, so he joins Lumon to split his consciousness (and his pastor believes one’s soul too) with the hope that maybe his innie would be straight and spared eternal suffering after death.
There are several views on the afterlife within Christianity. Some believe in a hell for unbelievers, the academic term for this punishment is “eternal conscious torment.” My professor of Systematic Theology was careful to differentiate “torment” from “torture” because torture means God is the active agent doing the harm as opposed to us choosing to harm ourselves.
I’m not sure that distinction makes much difference. If God is also all-powerful, doesn’t that make God somehow complicit in not stopping the torment? Wouldn’t this mean that our sins are more powerful than God? At this point, many theologians will do jazz hands and say “FREE WILL!!”
Another group is the Annihilationists who believe God mercifully destroys the souls of the damned to save them from eternal torment. Apparently, God invented the Thanos finger snap. Wait…wasn’t Thanos a supervillain? FREE WILL!!
Finally, there are the more positivistic views that provide a means for purification after death through purgatory.
Purgatory usually focuses on retributive justice (as opposed to restorative justice), where sinners have to be equally harmed in the same way their sins or unbelief harmed others or a thin-skinned God. Wait, what the hell was Jesus dying on the cross to pay for?! JAZZ HANDS!!
There is a less violent version of purgatory that says hell is like a room with a door that locks from the inside and that all the damned have to do is repent and profess what is now obviously true to unlock the door and walk out into heaven.
But what about restoring those who have been harmed?
Perhaps the people in heaven are those who have been able to transform their pain into compassion and are ready to forgive whenever repentance finally happens. Isn’t that the cruciform life that Christians are called to? If not, then an eternity in a heaven filled with self-righteous and untransformed Christians sounds like an unliving hell. GIVE ME THE DOOR THAT LOCKS FROM THE INSIDE!!!
Out of Office
For those who regularly experience stress and secondary trauma through their jobs, I would imagine a Lumon device might be quite appealing.
What would your personal life look like if work could never leave the office? Do you remember what a full night’s sleep feels like?
Pain that isn’t transformed will always be transmitted. But when that pain is transformed, I believe it creates the growth that makes us and the rest of our community more compassionate. More Christ-like.
We often think there was no pain or death in the Garden of Eden - it was “very good,” right? But that contradicts what we experience: some of my greatest growth has been through adversity and pain. Then on the other side of transformation, we remember that pain as something different - like a refiner’s fire that burned but purified.
By our wounds, we are transformed.
Perhaps heaven is a place where pain will always be transformed into something better. Where repentance and forgiveness come instantaneously. I believe this can happen right here, right now. In John’s first letter to Christ-communities, there seems to be this expectation too.
May we also pursue this reality with sincere and glad hearts that are ready for transformation.