The following classified advertisement appeared in a recent edition of a major city newspaper:
HOT TUB - For sale, complete w/plumbing. Will trade for pick-up truck. Call _________ after 5:00 p.m.
One does not have to possess a Ph.D. in clinical psychology to suspect that, behind those few words, there lies a life in major transition. Away with the hot tub, the gold chains, the Brut, the Alfa Romeo, the wine coolers, and the avocado dip. In with the baseball cap, the Budweiser, the flannel shirt, the Old Spice, and the Chevy half-ton.
One also does not have to be trained in sociology to recognize that we live in a culture rife with these kinds of transformations, what are sometimes called "lifestyle changes." People all across the map are becoming vegetarians, signing up for "marriage encounter" weekends, taking up jogging or sailing, leaving their spouses, changing careers, entering "midlife crises," trying to become "computer literate," working on new relationships, giving up alcohol, "getting into" therapy, joining prayer groups, learning to be more assertive, and making scores of other adjustments to the compass settings of their life journeys.
It is easy to be cynical, of course, about such changes. Many of them are faddishly superficial, containing more conformity than conversion, the kind of chic skittering around the pampered and affluent landscape of pop culture so roundly satirized by Cyra McFadden in her novel The Serial. The book is set in a laid-back, fern-bar-saturated community of beautiful people, all of them frantically fine-tuning their social styles to the rapidly changing zeitgeist. For example, two of the characters plan a party around the renewal of their marriage "contract" and send the following invitation to their friends:
Kate Smith and Harvey Holroyd
request your presence
at a Spring Festival -
a Celebration of Open Commitment and
Feeling Exchange where we can just Be.
Come reaffirm with us our belief
that in Life, it’s the Journey that counts,
not the Goal.1
However well-aimed such parody may be, it is not the whole story. It is true that many of our attempts at change are laughably naive and shallow, but taken as markers of the human condition, they also point to a deeper restlessness, a more urgent quest. However silly or trivial they may appear on the surface, the changes people make in their lives are often signs of a crucial, frequently desperate, sometimes courageous, search. If that is true, what is it that we are searching for? What is it that causes people to contemplate important changes in their lives? What motivates them to leave a place of settled circumstances and values and venture off into a new and uncharted region?
Some of the shifts people make in their lives are simply rebellions against boredom. They are not planned trips to a new destination; they are simply tickets on the first bus out of town. In Herb Gardner’s play A Thousand Clowns, Murray Burns, an open-collared, disorganized, and voluntarily unemployed free spirit, is explaining to Arnold, his disciplined and socially conventional brother, that it was the fear of numbing boredom which drove him to abandon the traditional "nine to five" life:
Arnold five months ago I forgot what day it was. I’m on the subway on my way to work and I didn’t know what day it was ... for a minute it could have been any day ... Arnie, it scared the hell out of me.2
Another playwright, Arthur Miller, stated it this way in an essay:
People no longer seem to know why they are alive; existence is simply a string of near-experiences marked off by periods of stupefying spiritual and psychological stasis, and the good life is basically an amused one.3
Many people, however, have grown weary of making changes simply to alleviate their boredom. They have discovered that the problem with shaking the dust of boredom off one’s feet and heading out the door to who knows where, is that leaving one place always means arriving at another place much like the first. One eventually has to show up somewhere else, and that new place is likely to prove as tedium-filled as the last.
This points to another reason why people make important changes in their lives: not so much to get away from a place of boredom, but rather to find a new place of greater meaning. This is not the kind of change in which a person simply heads out the door, slamming it on the way, but the kind in which a person yearns to become a citizen of a new and richer land. It is not a rebellion again boredom; it is a hunger to discover one’s true self.
In an interview, Garrison Keillor, the host of public radio’s "A Prairie Home Companion," talked about his son, who was at the time fifteen years old. He said that his son had taken up the electric guitar and that his music tended toward the "heavy-metal blues" variety. When Keillor was working at home, writing at the typewriter downstairs, he could hear his son playing, and what he heard amazed him, because the music was so full of soul and was "so wrenchingly sad." Keillor went on to wonder about the source of his son’s anguish:
Where did he learn that? I give him enough money. I’m a nice dad. We get along well. I give him lots of things. He does well in school ... Where’s he get this anguish? I guess we all got it inside of us.4
"We all got it inside of us," and because we do, we are willing to leave the land of anguish in favor of a beckoning land of peace and meaning. Personal or religious renewals are often changes of this sort. As some of the singers in Bernstein’s Mass express it:
What I need I don’t have
What I have I don’t own
What I own I don’t want
What I want, Lord, I don’t know ...
What I say I don’t feel
What I feel I don’t show
What I show isn’t real
What is real, Lord - I don’t know ...5
When life is as confusing and disorienting as a ball bouncing in a wildly spinning Roulette wheel, we are eager for it to come to rest on a number, any number, as long as it promises a framework of identity and meaning, be it losing ourselves in work or finding ourselves in God.
The problem with this kind of change is that when we go looking to "find ourselves," we often find ourselves alone. There is a sadness in a culture like ours, which bravely trumpets the virtue of inner-directed, risk-taking, self-sufficient people who don’t need anybody else in order to be fully human, and which, at the same time is full of achingly lonely people. "Let go ... Let the changes," goes the bad-medicine prescription of Gail Sheehy in Passages:
A way from institutional claims and other people’s agenda. Away from external valuations and accreditations, in search of an inner validation. You are moving out of roles and into the self.6
And so, people do "let go" and "let the changes." People make courageous changes in their lives trying to "get their act together," only to make the bitter discovery that they have written themselves into the starring role in a one-person play with no audience.
One of the sociologists who authored the book Habits of the Heart reported the following interview with a professional woman in her early thirties:
Q: So what are you responsible for?
A: I’m responsible for my acts and for what I do.
Q: Does that mean you’re responsible for others, too?
A: No.
Q: Are you your sister’s keeper?
A: No.
Q: Your brother’s keeper?
A: No.
Q: Are you responsible for your husband?
A: I’m not. He makes his own decisions. He is his own person.7
It is a worthy goal, I suppose, to want to "be one’s own person." No one wants to be pushed around, overwhelmed, and controlled by the demands of others. But there is a deeper sense in which none of us finally wants to "be our own person." We long to hear the sound of another’s voice summoning us, valuing our life enough to make a claim upon it. Sometimes, when parents are scolding their children for unacceptable behavior, they will say, "That was uncalled for!" That is a strange phrase, when you think of it, "uncalled for," but it points, I believe, to the source of our restless searching and of our most gripping fear. There is a dread in our hearts deeper than the fear of boredom, greater than the anxiety that we will not forge a satisfying "self," and that is the fear that we will ultimately be "uncalled for." This is the fear that no one will ever turn to us and say, "Come, I want you. I need you." This is the fear that who we are, and what we say, and what we do does not matter to anyone else. Like neighborhood children choosing up sides for a game, each desperately worried about being the last one reluctantly chosen, we make most of the changes in our lives in an effort to make ourselves desirable enough to be summoned by another.
In this light, the story of Jesus passing along the sea, calling Simon and Andrew, James and John, promising to send them "fishing for people," is a moment of sheer wonder and grace. We are told nothing about the inner life of these men. We do not know if they were restless or tranquil, bored or satisfied. What is important is not what was going on in them, but what happened to them. And what happened to them was this: They were called for. It was a call bigger than self, broader than occupation, deeper even than family. It was a call from the Son of God himself. They were not called for because they had somehow made themselves desirable or competent. They were called for because it is the very life of God to call his people. "Follow me," said Jesus, "and I will send you calling, too." What happened, of course, was that they made the most profound change a person can possibly make: "Immediately, they ... followed him."
There is a moving scene near the end of Jean Anouilh’s play Becket. The King had appointed Becket, his old hunting companion and carousing partner, as Archbishop, and then expected Becket to cooperate in a scheme to bring the church under royal control. What the King had not counted on, however, was that Becket would view his ordination as a genuine call, a summons to serve "the honor of God." Becket, therefore, refuses to capitulate to the King’s plan. The King is astonished and, reminding Becket of their wild days together at the hunts and in the brothels, claims that this new stance of resistance is not like Becket. "Perhaps." responds Becket. "I am no longer like myself." When the King presses for a reason, Becket describes the sense of call, the feeling that an ultimate claim had been placed on his life, at the time of his ordination:
I felt for the first time that I was being entrusted with something, that’s all - there in that empty cathedral ... that day when you ordered me to take up this burden. I was a man without honor And suddenly I found it ... the honor of God.8
I felt for the first time that I was being entrusted with something ... "Follow me," said Jesus, "and I will send you fishing in my name." That same summons comes to all of us. For some of us it will come as a call to leave our nets, our books, our desks, our homes. For others it will come as a call to mend our nets more carefully, read our books more thoroughly, mind our desks more faithfully, live in our homes more lovingly. But in whatever form, it has come and will continue to come, the summons to forsake being our "own person" and to become Christ’s. And when we hear it, we can be sure that the One who loves us best, and cherishes our life most fully, has come near, and, in the deepest of all ways, we have been called for.
1. Cyra McFadden, The Serial: A Year in the Life of Mann County (New York: The New American Library, 1977), p. 314.
2. Herb Gardner, A Thousand Clowns; Thieves; The Goodbye People (Garden City, New York: Nelson Doubleday, 1979), pp. 84-5.
3. Arthur Miller, "The Bored and the Violent," Harper’s Magazine, Vol. 225, No. 1350 (November, 1962), p. 51.
4. "Door Interview: Garrison Keillor," The Wittenberg Door, No. 82 (December/January 1985), p. 19.
5. From the libretto of "Mass," words by Stephen Schwartz and Leonard Bernstein. Columbia phonograph recording, Number M2 31008.
6. Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (New York: Bantam Books, 1977), p. 364.
7. Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 304.
8. Jean Anouilh, Becket, or the Honor of God (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 1960), p. 112.