What do you worship?
What do you worship?
Galatians 5:16-21
One of my favorite intellectual partners in my life is the writer, David Foster Wallace. Wallace wrote some amazing things in his brief life, a life that was shortened by depression. Among other things, he wrote perhaps the longest, most challenging novel that I’ve read, “Infinite Jest,” which also happens to be, in my opinion, incredibly prophetic. On the other end of the spectrum, he wrote a commencement address that was short and pithy and seems to function, for me, as a sort of mental defibrillator when it seems like I meet be on the brink of a cognitive flatline. His words wake me up.
In the midst of that speech, Wallace says, “This, I submit is the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.” Hear those words again. The pay off for being awake and aware, for being educated, for doing the hard work of being well-adjusted, is that you get to decide what to worship. He goes on to argue that in day-to-day life, there are no atheists. Everyone worships something. The only choice we get to make is what to worship. He goes on to say that unless we choose something spiritual—(Jesus Christ, Allah, Yahweh, the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles)—the material, worldly things we might otherwise choose will end up eating us alive.
He explains his point this way. If you worship money and stuff—if that is the center of your universe, if that’s where real meaning lies for you—you will never think you have enough. If you worship your body and beauty and sexual things, when time and age start showing, you will die a thousand deaths before you’re ever laid in a grave. Of course, it’s not like these points are new. It’s just that they are so often forgotten. If you worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid and then you’ll just need more and more power. If you worship your intellect, you will live in fear of being “found out.” Wallace argues that if we don’t consciously choose to worship something else, we will fall into worshiping these “idols,” as default settings, without ever being fully aware that this is what we are doing because we live in a culture which worships such things.
It’s not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with money or power or beauty or intellect. People who have access to such things are often able to affect positive changes in this world. The problem is what happens to people when they lose perspective. When we ask one dimension of a human life to mean everything—to mean more than it can possibly mean in the long run—life begins to slowly implode. In our often far too transactional world, being a person who has money or power or beauty or intellect can bring you all sorts of rewards and advantages in the short or run because you have something that others want or at least want to be near. In this sense, organizing our whole lives around achieving a single end can be a formula for short-term success. We can recruit our family and friends to be our support team for our maniacal efforts so that they will take care of us and feed us and soothe us so that we can stay focussed. We get to do nothing but eat, sleep, and breathe our singular goal.
We see this all around us, all the time. It’s the parents who allow their child to be so singularly focused on their academics or their sport or their instrument of choice. In the end, that child has no sense of balance and no sense of their own enduring value apart from their performance. Or, it’s the children who are asked to make their parent’s goal their sole focus. (I remember my friend whose father was a United States Senator. Everything was filtered through making his father look good, right down to the clothing he wore.) It’s any family member with the career that so dominates their lives that all the family decisions are made based on how it will affect that person’s success. Whole groups of people can construct their worlds around allowing someone to go wildly out of balance in the hope for wildly successful returns for everyone.
Wanting and achieving—again, there’s nothing wrong with either of these things. However, without the kind of perspective that allows us to keep such things in their place, a life that is solely about the next wants and achieving the next goals is unsustainable. This is where David Foster Wallace nails his final point. While we are free to make our lives be all about wants and achievements, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.” Otherwise, Wallace insists, we are left with, “The rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”
Among many other things, the current pandemic is a giant invitation to learn about ourselves. Part of what we are being invited to catch a glimpse of is what we worship. If we worship power and control, if we are used to planning and calculating our way through our days, then we are currently lost. No one really knows what things are going to look like a month from now—not even the best planners, not even the people who love being in control. If we worship success, then we’ve been blown away by the sheer speed at which yesterday’s goals have been all but forgotten. You had yourself positioned for that four year full ride to college but now, a football season seems all but unimaginable—even if it’s in the spring. You were all set to go make that big presentation for work—to fly in and dazzle that client at dinner and then, when the wining and dining was done—blow them away. Now, what seems blown away is that account. Whatever it was that you were planning, you had plans, but now, planning itself seems almost impossible.
Of course, it is easy to just adjust our focus. If I can’t have control over things outside my home then you just wait until you see how clean my house is or how amazing my backyard is or how well I take care of my birds! If the world has narrowed, then that doesn’t necessarily stop me from re-defining my goals and re-defining what my achievements will be. Then, I can still define my worth in familiar ways but just in a new setting. “Hah! Do you see? The world has changed but not me! I’ve found new ways to keep trying to prove my worth as a human being!”
Or…and this is a big “or”…I might actually gain perspective. What if I could feed the birds and just notice them and enjoy them without their presence having to prove anything about me? What if I could do the best I can with my work under really difficult circumstances and I could actually be okay with that being the best I can do? What if today doesn’t have to be the best day that I can imagine or doesn’t even have to be the way that my good days used to be in order for me to still claim today as a good day? What if it is possible that we can live and move and breathe in awkward and frustrating times and still be able to find meaning in making today a little better rather than a little worse? Such things really do require awareness and discipline. Such things really do require that we find our way to a sense of perspective. Such things really do require a perspective that runs deeper than just life at its most superficial.
Amazingly, it’s not hard to move from David Foster Wallace to a consideration of our own lives to our text from the Apostle Paul. Paul says that we have a choice: we can live freely or we can allow compulsions to dominate our lives. For Paul (and, I think, for David Foster Wallace and certainly for me), the compulsions that dominate our lives tend to be selfish drives. It is entirely human to dedicate our lives to proving something about ourselves. We are all insecure. It is so easy to think that if I just get enough money in the bank or just get the right person to love me or just get the promotion that is being dangled, then I’ll be done with that insecurity. This is the “if-only,” carrot-on-the-end-of-the-stick, kind of thinking that eats us alive. In Eugene Peterson’s wonderful translation, we hear the laundry list of empty things that can be produced in a selfish life: loveless sex; a big pile of emotional garbage; joyless grabs for happiness: loneliness; all consuming yet never satisfied wants: brutal anger: the tendency to turn everyone into a rivals; unbridled addictions. The list goes on. The bottom line is that a life that has my wants and my needs at its center will end up empty.
There is a lot of emptiness that has been revealed during this pandemic. When people hoarded toilet paper early on, it wasn’t just the shelves at Target the were revealed to be empty. We’ve rolled through all sorts of things trying to fill that empty space: the kiddie pools are gone; the gardening supplies ran out fast; the risks have been taken to do things the way we used to do them, just for one night, just so we could feel whole again—only to discover that none of this worked. Again, who doesn’t love toilet paper or a nice kiddie pool on a hot day or growing some nice flowers? However, isn’t it possible that such things are never really going to fill our empty spaces? When we ask things to mean more than they can mean they end up being meaningless.
Paul says that the alternative to this life of selfish compulsions is a life in which we are led by the Spirit. I am not God. I am not here to set the agenda. I am not in charge. What I am—shockingly—is in relationship to the God who is the source of all that is, the God who gave me life in the first place. No matter how hard today is, the mere fact that I am here and alive at all is amazing. The fact that there are people in my life whom I love who, against all common sense, love me back, is breathtaking. The fact that God is inviting me to be a part of something unimaginably bigger than myself is beyond humbling. We end up thinking to ourselves, “Okay, God…you be God and I’ll be me. You lead and I will follow. Show me the way. Show me how to do this. Just help me see the next step…”
There is a certain integrity to a life that is maniacally focused on wants and achievements. Our compulsions make us very predictable. Our answer, day-after-day is consistent: “If I can only fulfill this desire, then finally I will arrive.” Anyone with eyes can see pretty quickly that they had best stay out of my way.
The life of being led by the Spirit is entirely different, with a deeper integrity, deep enough to be pretty confusing to someone else at first glance. One day, the Spirit might lead me to the food pantry, not to prove anything about myself, but to make sure that someone who was hungry won’t be at the end of the day. Another day, the Spirit might lead me to really throw myself into work because my colleagues really need a hand. On yet another day, you may find me playing hooky to be with my child, knowing full-well that time well-wasted with my child is the very essence of love and will never be forgotten. Then again, you might find me calling time out, altogether, so that I can remind myself that life, itself, is good, even without really accomplishing anything.
Are you here to get or to give? Are you here to master and control or to be loving and to be led? Are you holding onto the hope that you still might master your universe or are you ready to be a part of God’s work in this world? When you are ready to be loving and led, you will know in your heart what you worship. You will know there’s a place for you in God’s kingdom.