Walking and talking with You yesterday afternoon up to West Falls reminded me of two things:
I feel most alive when I am expressing myself with intensity, and
it would be best if I arranged my prayer-walk time to allow for freedom to pray expressively, intently, fervently.
*Correction, 7:19 PM same day: I feel most alive when I am expressing myself with intensity because of love. The point is not the intensity but rather the love—the purposeful regarding of others as at least as important as myself and wanting their good—that sets off the intensity. When I am praying fervently because I have set my face toward love, I feel very alive. And I think it’s the kind of praying that leads to action.
I think we’d all be saner if we opted for an eight-day week: Five days for professional working, one day for rest and relaxation, one day for household maintenance and administration, and one day for working toward larger, non-professional goals. (Hopefully all days for socializing of various kinds.) The Romans used to do it. And the seven-day week, its salient place in the Genesis creation story, has no observable basis in the created order, although it is probably based on an old, inaccurate understanding of that: At least two ancient civilizations, Sumeria and Babylonia, explicitly based their seven-day week on how many planet they thought there were—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn—plus the sun and the moon. So why keep it, other than cultural inertia?
I suppose I have to figure out how to dovetail an eight-day week with a 365-plus-day year with a proposal for year. (Ten four-week months plus a five-week month plus a five-day party?) And of course, if we can’t even muster the political will to eliminate the Daylight Savings Time switch…
I deal with interruptions and pop-up requests at work much more gracefully than I do at home. I haven’t yet internalized and automatized “doing everything without grumbling or arguing” (Philippians 2:14). This despite the facilitation that my realizing that the Prime Desire is always fulfillable should bring. I must be missing a piece at home, something I have at work but don’t have at home. What is it?
At work, I’m glad when work piles up. At home, that stresses me out. At work, when someone approaches me about something they want done, I smile and sometimes even thank them for the cool thing to work on. (Naturally, this is not true when the thing they’re approaching me about is something I built that has broken.) But when someone approaches me about something they want done at home, I grumble and resent.
What are the contextual differences that might account for the differences in my response?
“I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living” (Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air, emphasis mine). I want to carry this thought with me all the time as I age; it teaches me how to relate to others, all of whom will die someday, and how to relate to myself, who will also die someday.
It’s not regimen or self-discipline I’ll need if I want to write songs, silly. I have that. It’s company. In the sea of commitments I swim in, it’s commitments alone that cause efforts to float. It’s time to start a songwriting group.
The Bible says nothing about the importance of setting or achieving goals per se. If you set no goals, yet you love—that is, if you act as though God and those around you are important and their good matters to you—you’re doing alright. If you achieve no goals, yet you love, you’re doing alright.
That’s it! I think that for me, although I know in my head that this is what I should want, I actually really want other things. If I truly only wanted to love Him and others, to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly, to rejoice, pray, give thanks and make peace, then I would have opportunity to do what I want, every moment of every day. But I find in myself anger at setbacks, annoyance at disruptions, fear of failure to accomplish something, longing to be understood and liked, and desire to “feel good” through a panoply of means which I have discovered over years of living. So my prayer lately has been: “God, I am powerless even to want what I know I should want!”
me:
I hear you! “I am powerless even to want what I know I should want.” True.
Some disjointed follow-up thoughts:
For my part, l am so motivated by a desire to steer clear of feeling bad (angry, disgruntled, disappointed, frustrated, resentful, petulant, argumentative) that I’m thrilled to have found a Desire that is always fulfillable.
That this Desire is so prosocial and thus means that I can apply my dopaminergic drive toward the production of the more durably happyifying serotonin is a major bonus.
I think ridding ourselves of our secondary desires is neither advisable nor possible. John doesn’t write that we should shed the yearnings of the flesh and the yearnings of the eyes and the pride of our estate—he writes that we shouldn’t love those yearnings and pride. The trick is to subject those desires for other things—even if those things are plainly altruistic—to the absolute lordship of Jesus the Messiah and His Father, who usually do not require specific action but rather only the fulfillment of The Royal Law.
friend:
Hence discerning the “will of God” is kind of a fool’s errand since we know His will and we have secondary desires. Where I used to work, we used to say “love God and do what you want.” I always hated this because the some people took that as, “Sweet! I love God—and I’m going surfing. Screw those hard missions.” Yet I think your point remains.
In any event, we could also say “If you acquire and achieve all the most kingdom-focused secondary desires you could think of, but you don’t love, you lost the plot!”
me:
I think there are two kinds of people in the world: those who need to ask “What do I want?” and those who need to ask “What’s the right thing to do?”
As for “love God and go surfing,” I talked with another friend about that this morning. We agreed that there there’s nothing wrong with going surfing, and that if you surf in joyful thanksgiving to the Lord, it is worship. However, we also agreed that if all you do is eat, drink, and surf, showing no concern for the things that concern God, it can hardly be said that you love God. That’s the corrective.
I have many such desires. This world is overstuffed with opportunities to do and enjoy good. But it doesn’t often matter which I choose to fulfill, or even that I fulfill any of them at all. What’s important is that I fulfill the Prime Desire to do the will of God—even, I should emphasize, when that Desire runs counter to my secondary desires.
This frees me to accept interference, interruptions, and redirects (most of which come in the form of other people’s secondary desires), or to at least field them gracefully, without grumbling or arguing.
Over the summer, my primary prayer for myself was that everything I do, say, and think be done, said, and thought in total love for You and love for those around me like they’re myself. A week or two ago, that prayer became more specific: that all my talking be full of grace (gift), as though seasoned with salt. And today, You’ve narrowed the focus even more: Let me do everything without grumbling or arguing. In the thick of this stressful period of home improvement that has often heavily dampened my mood and occasionally strained my relationship with Carla by its insistence that I keep working and my frequent ignoring of that insistence because of my antipathy for this kind of work—I couldn’t think of a more perfect directive. Thanks.
If one is going to spend one’s free time working, it should be work one enjoys or work that directly benefits others—ideally both. Do-it-yourself home improvement is neither of those (for me).
When I’m old, I won’t regret not traveling more, like so many listicles indicate many people do. I’ve already traveled more than most humans do—certainly more than almost all humans of the past. No, I’m most likely to experience regret about insufficiently fulfilling my two most basic moral desires, desires I’ve found to be at odds in me for thirty years: to prioritize deep connections with those around me and to accomplish accomplishments, mostly for the sake of others, some for the sake of self-expression, sometimes both, that require sustained application of my whole self.
Given how continually at odds these two desires are in my life, there’s only one possible way for me to avoid end-of-life regret: Favor working toward accomplishments that can only be accomplished in close collaboration with those around me.
I am deeply, intrinsically inclined to be subject to nothing and to no one. I wish to be in my own driver’s seat as much as possible. Yet, as Burkemann writes, there is a direct relationship between individual sovereignty and loneliness. I do not wish to be subject to loneliness. Moreover, I am, by dint of my creaturehood, unavoidably subject to the Lord of all. That’s true whether I’m acting so or not. Hence, trying to live my life by exercising unalloyed individual sovereignty is both maladaptive and false. What’s more, the Lord of all actually explicitly commands me to subject myself to others and even says that unless I die, I will be alone.
Yet a clear pattern has emerged in my own life: I do not initiate much social activity and decline much of it that is offered to me. I do this largely because I have used my considerable, insistent autonomy as a waymaker for productivity, energy preservation, and, to some degree, spatial and other kinds of order in our household. As a result and as predicted by Burkemann and Jesus alike, I feel more and more alone.
So what’s the trick? Bend my powerful autonomy to intentionally subject myself to others. Here I don’t mean volunteer to serve people, like when they’re moving or something. I have no problem doing that. I mean three things that I’m not already doing consistently:
When someone proposes a social activity, join in!
Initiate my own social activity, too!
And when I’m among others, be intentional. Engage. Be fully there. Bring my whole, powerful self—my “loving others really well,” my “tremendous interpersonal skills” and potential for being “one of the best communicators out there”—to the table.
My independence and power themselves are assets to others—but only if I exercise them for the sake of and in subjection to others.
In any given day, myriad people and circumstances will be both out of my control and impinging on my own autonomy. What will I choose?
The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.
If I didn’t time myself at work, I’d be apt to spend less than forty hours a week working for DiamondBack, not more. And that’s no sleight to DiamondBack, who are doing good things; instead, it’s an indication that I’m interested in everything and am easily distracted.
Screen addiction, which I define much more broadly than the APA might, is harmful for the same reason suicide is harmful (and thus called by many religious people a sin): It removes people, with all the skills, humor, and other virtues they might bring to bear on the world, from the social nexus and destroys human attachments. It is a hermitage.
Roughly my sophomore year in college, I started using Georgia for school papers instead of Time New Roman. Why? Because it’s bigger at the same point size, hence easier to get to “four pages, double-spaced, size 12 font.” (Not to mention it’s easier on the eyes.)
To insist it is my civic duty to read about, think about, and talk about tyrants only augments their tyranny. Ignoring tyrants is my preferred mode of protest. NB: This is not the same as saying I will ignore the effects their tyranny has on my neighbors.
Part of 1 Corinthians 16 is as a good a motto as one can find: “Do everything in love.” Since so much of my life comprises words, and since the biblical proverbialists, Jesus, and James all emphasize the power and importance of our words, I’m going to provisionally subset the motto to concentrate its effect: “Say everything in love.”
Forgiveness: An Alternative Account, which Ruth and I both got excited about roughly simultaneously and thus co-purchased (co-purchasing books—what a fun idea! an interpersonal nano-library…),