Dreaming of the “Hard Life”
Maybe it’s the books I’m reading, but being reminded of home makes me yearn for something that is neither home nor school. There is an overwhelming satisfaction, even rightness, about living outside the realm of persistent goals and aspirations—school thrives on that realm. But also I wish for the chance to start over, to leave behind every shred of luxury I’ve accumulated at home and every ounce of moral pickiness I’ve crafted for myself here. Paradoxical, perhaps, since it’s my moral pickiness that begot my distaste for luxury. Instead, I want to carve out a new life that cares about now, that cares about (or at least suffers through) frustrating responsibilities, that rests on a lifestyle that finally—or better, temporally—satisfies me. I’d say a lifestyle that fits my purpose, but I can’t get my head around what my purpose might be; I have serious difficulty believing that anyone really can.
It’s not that my passion for ethics, for theology, has at all diminished. It’s just that the whole process seems endlessly theoretical, and haven’t we all too often been witness to the futility of abstractions? Of course there are exceptions, and I hope my life so far has borne testimony to one of those exceptions. But what to do when a theology nurtured in riches comes to focus on one who, though rich, became poor for the sake of others? What to do when a theology nurtured in cleanliness and purity finds its fullest manifestation in a story perpetually about lust and greed and death? At some point, purity feels like more of a hindrance than a help. I even wish for a life like Ian Bedloe’s, a carpenter (how delightfully pedestrian!) and raising someone else’s kids.
But this is all pure hypocrisy, all theory trying to justify its dominance. Because desiring Ian’s duties defeats the purpose of having them, and those frustrating responsibilities I so naively dream about are in fact with me, at school and at home. I rebel because I fear falling into the overworn path of conformity: a legitimate fear, but dangerous when it keeps me from living the kingdom in my present circumstance. It’s a difficult tension to hold, between allowing God to act through my current situation and allowing God to place me on the path to a new situation. I wonder, are these poles merely imagined?
20 December 2004 |
tags: Personal
![[RSS for this post]](/images/feed-icon-14x14.png){kind=icon}
Are we disillusioned/hopeful/crazy enough to be anxious to suffer? Here we are, both daydreaming of the “hard life,” both dismayed that we’re daydreaming instead of bearing it. You make a good point: we don’t need to await frustrating responsibilities in the future, when we can accept them in our present circumstances, like relationships and obligations at college. I define frustrating responsibilities as long-term messy attachments that interfere with one’s self-interests/expectations/ambitions, like Ian’s guardianship of his orphaned nieces and nephew. I feel the say way as you, that a clean theological mindframe can miss out on so much to life (was it Yaconelli that warned against getting straight A’s and flunking life?, and in protest to a irrelevant stiffness, I find myself more willing to make mistakes and mess up. The resultant lifestyle seems fuller with experiences, bottom-up from the reality of brokenness that teaches one how to love, instead of a top-down approach with theories and ideas evaluating life, or rather, evaluating the illusions of a life which hasn’t actually been lived. Yet, I know my own life has not been an exception to the futility of abstractions. So much I’ve read and so much I’ve heard has not been applied to my life, indeed, it would take a few lifetimes just to apply all the rich lessons from the spiritual/ethical books and people I’ve encountered.
I pose two semi questions: 1) I agree that “finding a purpose” for life’s fulfillment is a crude notion. Purpose is always contingent on present circumstance. But this need not detract from discovering your identity, right? Like understanding your gifts, zeal, and the activities that bring you life, like I would imagine for you, political reconciliations and theological writing and reflection. Now of course, Jayber Crow makes us all content to be barbers for the rest of our life, but I doubt Berry’s characters should be normative for ethics. Well…maybe they should.
2) I think there’s a difference between resisting the status quo and desiring to be a noncomformist. I think the compulsion to be different, even ethically, is a dangerous desire, and maybe this is what you meant by that sentence. I think Jayber Crow will testify that, as I have mentioned before, being a normal member of a community is a better humbler self-perception than being different and standing out.
I like your definition of frustrating responsibilities—attachments that get in the way are where true faithfulness grows. I think your life is a testament to the usefulness of theory, though, not because you’ve applied every bit of what you learned (of course we haven’t applied all of our rich experiences either) but because you allowed those at least a few of those abstractions to shape and mold you into a different kind of person with a different kind of priorities. Isn’t that all we can ask of any encounter, academic or mundane?
(1) Identity is certainly a different issue altogether, much more profound and far-reaching than purpose. I don’t know what to do with identity either, though, because I haven’t the slightest clue what mine is. All I can do is try to identify and enact those activities that bring me (and others?) life in the present, whether or not I know how those activities will shape me. A counter-question: what do we do when we worry that our current “zeals”—maybe academics for me, maybe social interaction for you—actually work against the identities God would make of us? The question almost sounds nonsensical (does God desire one particular identity for us?), but it has to make sense if ethics at all make sense. What if our current zeals, maybe even the practice of our “gifts,” make us out to be a barrier between God and community instead of a channel?
(2) I agree that desiring to be a nonconformist might be dangerous for humility, but I’m not sure yet that since it’s dangerous it is to be avoided. It seems obvious to me that a life in Christ will look somehow different (or else how can Christ be explicitly known?) and so the closer we are to status quo, often (not always) the farther we are from discipleship. But then again, you’re certainly right about normalcy contributing to a humbler self-perception. What then? Does it come down to some hierarchy of priorities, be separate or be humble?
Stringfellow actually talks about how the zeal Paul had when persecuting Christians was the same zeal affirmed and fulfilled after his conversion used for spreading the Gospel. If you have a zeal for academics, you’re not supposed to renounce that, but just remove all idolatry from it, idolatries like the pretense of certainty, knowledge as self-indulgence, scholarship as justification of your worth, and separating the theoretical from the common human experience. Honestly I want to know for curiousity’s sake, do you think your identity is not based on peacemaking and theology? From the outside looking in, it seems evident, but I could be wrong.
In response to your other questions, as soon as a gift becomes a barrier, that when it’s not a gift but a self-indulgence. Second, I can’t help but think being separate is no valid priority, unless interpreting it in some personal sense as apart from sin and bondage. But speaking of holiness as becoming whole, it’s a matter of restoring relationships, with others and with yourself. Let me try this another way, yes, conforming to the world is bad, but that’s not the same thing as wanting to be different from the people surrounding you. I know that’s funny distinction that could be argued easily, but in some way it makes sense to me.