How I Got To Be Useless For All Practical Purposes

I’m thinking about suicide a lot lately, not because I want to die.  I have a far too well-developed survival instinct: I like Me continuing saecula saeculorum, just as I am, ad infinitum, usus and fructus, salve substantia.

And, to quote Daffy Duck, I’m not like other people: pain hurts me.

And if you are in America and thinking about suicide and stumbled on this blog, call 1-800-SUICIDE.  They will not put you on hold, and they have things to say you might like to hear.

But I’ve been thinking about insurance and the fact that, now that I’m unemployed and deeply in student loan debt, I’m worth a great deal more dead than alive.

I’ve got lots of friends who seem to be temperamentally disposed not just to have money, as I am disposed, but to actually make it.

They sell things.

In lots of cases these are things nobody needs.

In a few cases they are things we need very much: unemployment insurance, for instance.

But these soldiers march on, hurling themselves into the economic breach, pulling in paychecks.

I’ve tried selling things.  I wasn’t terribly good at it.  It was difficult to convince myself, and therefore my audience, that their lives would be substantially improved with an Amish solid oak table.  It was pretty cool, no doubt, and could seat an intimate four or, when fully extended, a hundred and twelve, but it was not necessarily what a newlywed couple in graduate school needed, and I had trouble pretending it was.

My sister, brother, and I all wound up being teachers.  None of us is particularly skilled at managing money, though we do alright with our small retirement investments.  We just haven’t got the interest in it, and I’ve sometimes wondered why.

In fact, I’d say that my siblings and I are pretty useless for any practical purpose.

I think it’s because we had a perfect storm growing up: our parents had money, we all had faith, and we all had a tremendous amount of fun.

The downside for a child growing up well off is well-documented.  You come to think of money as something that’ll be there when it’s really needed.  It might get choked off for a bit, but it’ll turn up eventually.  A disastrous habit of mind, and unavoidable, really, when you grow up with a lot of security. 

I’ve seen parents pull every trick in the book to teach kids that money is a thing that you have to go out and create out of sweat and dirt and a half-broken shovel, but they rarely succeed.  Withholding privileges creates resentment, which creates angry heavy-metal garage bands emerging out of suburbia that grow at such a rate that (by my calculations), if parents don’t start paying for the 32 gig iPod soon, one in every three of us will be a member of an angry suburban heavy-metal garage band by the year 2025.   One relative of mine, a really good salesman, had to bail out his long-haired kid for driving drunk with weed in the front seat.  “I tried to teach him,” he lamented.  “I never gave him anything.”

I think the kid’s got a gig at a dive in East Lansing next month.  He’s really proud.

But that doesn’t explain my personal uselessness to the capitalist system.

For that we have to look very deeply into the mysteries of God.

Or rather, we should stop doing that if we ever want me to earn a steady paycheck and pay back my Overlords at Citibank To Whom Be All Glory and Thanks For My Subsidized Student Loan.  (Hint: It is not a good risk to put that sort of money on the line to create a Ph.D. in medieval literature.  I really don’t know what you guys were thinking.)

I mean, the Good News as I received it in my eighth year was that there was a place called hell where everybody suffered forever and I was going there.  But wait, there was more: I could pluck myself out of hell by asking Jesus to pluck me out of hell.  Lord and Savior.

So My Salvation (version 1.1 Beta) began on October 8, 1976, a date I took down in the inside cover of my Children’s Living Bible, a version that has some considerable coyness about sex but disarming frankness about violence.

From that moment, more or less, I embarked on a fool’s errand: believing what I was told.

I don’t mean that I was particularly credulous.  From an early time in my life I saw what I now call “freaky shit,” the miracuous, the otherworldly, the strangely inexplicable or at least unexplained meanderings of love and faith that create ripples through time and space.  Much of it was bogus, a tremendous amount was what I might call “group psychology,” but there was always a remainder, some experience or thing I had seen that said, “This may be 98% merda taurorum, but there’s something here.”

Which, if the Christians had half a brain between them (I’m not sure this was always the case) meant that The Other World, or This Hidden Nature, or This Freaky Shit, was of considerable importance.

Ransacking the gospels confirmed that: Paul was busy telling people that the present age of this world was passing away so that marriage and family was a distinct distraction (I had moved on from the Children’s Living Bible).  Jesus likewise seemed to think that nothing mattered so much as laboring for the Kingdom.  And when Keith Green came out and said that Christians should all be on the mission field, I was not an easy sell, but really.  That was a full house slam dunk against getting a good career as manager of the Almagamated Poppet-Valve industry.

Salvo beneficio competentiae.

I early on started playing music in church, giving away a pretty decent acoustic guitar, mandolin, and piano performance that I flatter myself helped create a pretty fine mood for conjuring the Holy Spirit.  (You really have to consider your audience.  Baby boomers just need you to hit the second note in any tonic chord and to swell an emotional crisis in the music with a full spread of two octaves, high and low.  I’m not sure why.  I think it comes from growing up on the Beatles and Steely Dan or something.  But they worship better if you do that.)

The kingdom never pays you for that.  It’s ministry.  It’s your gift, your offering.  You’re glad to do it.  After all, that’s why you were allowed to survive as an infant, as my parents reminded me.

Evangelical Christians in America (and in other places I’ve been) have it both ways.  They believe with all their heart that the Kingdom is either among you or on its way, but they also believe in a comfortable here and now.  Lots of defenses for this get provided that amount to, “Hey, we’d be a burden if we didn’t.”  Never mind freaky shit.  Never mind the actual content of the gospel, which is pretty apocalyptic (that is, “Your current endeavors are part of a system that is not the Kingdom and therefore judged and pretty much screwed”).

What Protestantism didn’t teach, what I had to learn on my own, was that in fact there was a point in church history somewhere in the third and fourth centuries when the church gave up on its otherworldly character for exactly this reason.

Well, not gave up on it… freaky shit erupts in the Christian churches (as in other religions) somewhere or other all the time, and of course it never does give up on its we’re-different mojo.

But it had to make its peace with history and to admit that, whatever the apocalyptic message of Jesus had meant, the Church was in for the long haul.  Well, I mean, John’s Revelation could call the emperors of Rome the Beast and the Anti-Christ, the enemies who will be slain by Jesus, a rider in white.  But when the Roman emperors start professing Christianity, you have to start rethinking your rhetoric.

Suddenly it’s not such a contradiction for a Christian to hold down a steady government job.  Or even a military job of all things.  Unheard of.  What happened to that old time religion?

But nobody told me that stuff: they said the Bible mattered.  They expected us to read it and believe it and for us to be changed, which I guess meant not making out after Youth Group (this was a forlorn hope of our parents and youth leaders, and they knew it).

Well, I read it.

Over and over I read it.

And it amounted to one thing.

Christians were double-dipping somewhere.  They had the best of this world.  They had the best of the next.

That wasn’t biblical.  It just wasn’t.

They were not living a biblical faith that had forsaken the world and its systems.  But they were enjoining me to, to give up summers on the mission field, to prepare for a career in the pastorate, to sell all I owned and give to the poor.  Well…. that’s what the text said, and they revered the text.

And don’t get me wrong: they were (and remain) the kindest, gentlest, most generous, best people I know (so long as you’re not gay… if you are, your mileage may vary).

My siblings and I though, I think, took these things with a great deal of hilarious seriousness.

We all went to Wheaton to learn what it meant to live in this world.  I never did get a clear answer to the question, “If Jesus has really overturned the world and its powers, why does Shakespeare matter?”  I heard a lot of carefully chosen words about that.  The world matters because…

Anglican sacramentalism helped with that a bit: the world is good.

But once admit that, and you have to start to worry about how bad we are to begin with, and why.

It all gets awfully confusing.

And sorting it out takes time, thought, prayer, a ton of reading, and good medicine for Attention Deficit Disorder.

To make matters worse, my family had, and still has, a tremendous amount of fun.

Last night I went over to the house, and my sister and brother and father and I played music while my mother listened and made requests.  We laughed a lot.  My brother and sister got into an argument with my dad, who is as pronounced a Fox news addict as ever equivocated about the words “fair and balanced,” about fossil fuels.

They had fun there in the elegant dining room my dad’s hard labor had paid for, that mom’s painstaking care and taste had made beautiful.   It was a labor that seemed effortless to us, growing up.

We filled it with music, something as useless as love, but more lasting than the room itself.

How it is that we ever came to believe that Christians meant what they said, I’ll never know.

We weren’t plucked from hell.

We were plucked into heaven for no good reason at all.  It was a heaven we all labored to make.

And you can have it both ways, when that’s the case.

Comments

[Lori]

In fact, I'd say that my siblings and I are pretty useless for any practical purpose.

I think it's because we had a perfect storm growing up: our parents had money, we all had faith, and we all had a tremendous amount of fun.

That pretty much describes my childhood, except that my sister has somehow ended up being useful in any variety of practical ways. I still don't know how that happened. I took last semester off from teaching since I was having the baby, and I still haven't heard back from the English department about whether they have teaching for me this coming term. I'm hoping they do but am starting to feel pessimistic.

I was raised under the happy delusion that if I just did well in school and managed not to get pregnant or arrested, I'd end up doing at least as well as my parents. My father actually encouraged me to be an English major, thinking like any doting father that people would be lining up to hire his lovely, brilliant, charming daughter, and all the better if she followed her passions. Little did he know. I feel like this entitles me to hit him up for money for the rest of my life.

For what it's worth, I think you're pretty useful. And I try to convince myself that having no place within the market economy is a good thing. ;)

[Otter]

Lori,

I was raised under the happy delusion that if I just did well in school and managed not to get pregnant or arrested, I'd end up doing at least as well as my parents. My father actually encouraged me to be an English major, thinking like any doting father that people would be lining up to hire his lovely, brilliant, charming daughter, and all the better if she followed her passions. Little did he know. I feel like this entitles me to hit him up for money for the rest of my life.

This.

There's a great Mark Heard song called "Another Good Lie." "Darlin', they all told me / that I could do anything / Climb the highest mountain, swim the oceans, do the damndest things...It was another good lie."

And thank you for the kind comments: I'll resist saying "Haha! My campaign of delusion and misdirection is succeeding!"

[Tresa]

I'll resist saying "Haha! My campaign of delusion and misdirection is succeeding!"

Only for those of us who think normalcy and direction are over-rated.