I have a little circle of cardboard hanging in my room, and that's what it says:
you could put your life where your faith is
It's from MCC, and it's meant to sort of prod you into thinking about traveling to do missions. But it came to mind earlier today when I was well into my second hour of talking to Comcast representatives, trying to get my bill for internet access straightened out.
* * *
Most of what I've written this summer on this blog is about rejoicing in the mundane. I have even quoted David Foster Wallace, which totally came back to bite me today.
I have to confess - I basically have this speech memorized. Not word for word (except a few parts), but I know the ideas really well. I've read this speech dozens of times. I think that it is brilliant, and it pretty much articulates the way that I want to live.
So that is the history of this funny, ironic, enlightening moment today.
* * *
I was getting so, so frustrated today when I was talking to the Comcast people. I kept getting transferred around on the phones, and the hold music was starting to drive me up the walls. The first guy had this really heavy accent, and after that it was like my annoyance threshold had been crossed. Everything else just put me more in the red zone. After getting transferred the third time to a different department, I could feel my anger settling into my body. And then I heard the hold music on the phone, and thought this line: soul-killing muzak or corporate pop.
And then I was sitting there, thinking are you kidding me? I was thinking - this is where the rubber meets the road. This is my chance to put my life where my faith is.
* * *
"By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up
in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate
job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day
you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and
have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack
early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all
again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had
time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after
work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the
end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting
to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get
there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time
of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some
grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with
soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place
you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to
wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the
stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all
these other tired, hurried people with carts and eventually you
get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't
enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So
the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating.
But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the
register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and
meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a
prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.
Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.
You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do. "
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.
Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.
You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do. "
* * *
Like he says - like I've put on this blog before - it is almost unimaginably hard to force myself to consider the other person. I am always the center of my own existence, and to try to get outside of that is so, so hard. But today, after a struggle, it happened. When the 3rd (or 4th) person I spoke to on the phone told me I had to go chat with someone on the internet, instead of flipping out (what do you mean I need to USE THE INTERNET! I DON'T HAVE ANY INTERNET, LADY!), I said thank you, have a nice day, good-bye now. And I went and internet-chatted a comcast guy in the EMU library, and he told me that the deal I had signed up for wasn't available in my area (my computer screen clearly showed "available in zipcode 22802," which is Harrisonburg), and though I could feel my blood-pressure rising again, I told him thank you for your help, I see, thank you, goodbye. And I thought about how dismal it would be to sit by a phone every day, answering to people like me who were so annoyed and angry. I thought about the new testament verse that says "in humility, value others above yourselves." I thought about Jesus living as a servant.
It seems impossible, sometimes. Impossible to live the way that I know I ought to. But little by little, as I grow and experience grace and meditate on the life of Jesus, I bring more and more of my self in line with my ideals. Little by little I learn to put my life where my faith is.
No comments:
Post a Comment