I was amused the other day to pick up a newspaper in a faraway town and to read a feature article about a minor official in the local county government. A reporter had interviewed the deputy assistant director of the water authority or some similar civil servant, and the resulting article included a number of fairly predictable and humdrum quotes about some recent changes in the water system, the official's selfless commitment to public service, his goal of improved water quality and the like.
What was so amusing, however, was not the article itself but the accompanying color box, a small town imitation of a USA Today feature, showcasing selected tidbits from this fellow's private life. It was a local version of the "Dewar's Scotch Profile," and it treated this water department bureaucrat as if he were a rock star or a matinee idol. It supplied such fascinating facts as this man's "role model" (Abraham Lincoln), his "latest book read" (something by Robert Ludlum), his "drink of choice" (Corona beer, with lime), his "prime leisure activity" (tennis), his "personal clothing store" (the men's department at Sears), his "favorite musical performer" (Bruce Springsteen) and his "current wheels" (a brown 1985 Olds Cutlass).
Whether this local official rejoiced in his sudden and unexpected celebrity or was embarrassed by the billboarding of the rather commonplace facets of his fairly conventional existence, I do not know. But the fact that the newspaper was at least as interested in the superficialities of his personal life as it was in his public role does seem to point to a cultural fascination with "life styles."
A "life style" is a carefully assembled set of personal choices. It is the blend of our preferences in clothing, automobiles, books, recreation, music, food, and other aspects of the way we consume ideas and things. Something either does or does not "fit into our life style," which is put together with an interior decorator's eye for total effect. Life style magazines and programs like Life Styles Of The Rich And Famous allow us to monitor the choices we have made, to compare them to those who are more tasteful, affluent and influential, and to signal to others that we belong in their set. Indeed, we tend to seek out those whose life styles are similar to our own, herding together in what have been called "life style enclaves."1
What this means, of course, is that a life style is different from a life. A life style can be adjusted with a twist of the television dial, a shift in reading patterns, or the purchase of a new car. A life, on the other hand, is all of us. A life, therefore, tends to be messier than a mere life style, harder to change, and it often involves untidy facts, like a problem with alcohol, a parent in a nursing home or a child with a learning disorder. A life style, like the longest suit in a bridge hand, is composed of the cards we lead with, the ones we lay face up on the table to show our strength. A life, on the other hand, is every aspect of who we are, every card we hold, weak and strong. Renting the video of Saturday Night Fever is life style; staying up all Saturday night with a child with a fever is life.
Our life styles can lose luster, but with sufficient cash flow, they can be improved; our lives, on the other hand, are more desperate and in need of being saved. It is worthy of note, then, that Jesus, gathered with his disciples around the table for the last meal before his death, pointed down the road he would soon be traveling and said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life." He did not say, "I am the way, the truth, and the life style."
The difference is significant. Jesus came to save all of us, to lead every bit of our human being down the road of redemption, all of the untidy, unraveled ends that compose a life. Jesus offers us life, "abundant" life (John 10:10), not a pinch of religion tossed in as a "prime leisure activity" but a life where every facet of it, the suffering as well as the joy, is the arena for God's saving grace. Our faith is not a spiritual applique among other life style features but an all-encompassing and demanding reality.
A recent college graduate, writing in The New Yorker, commented that, as he moved into the professional world and began to earn some money, he was feeling the tension between two cravings: to live, on the one hand, "the good life, full of bay windows and summer vacations and dinner out whenever," and to live, on the other hand, "a good life, at peace with ourselves ...." He was, of course, describing the tension between a "life style" and a "life," between fitting the pieces together to make a pleasing whole and finding in the whole of life that which makes for peace.
As he considered the dilemma, he cited Tolstoy's moving reflection on Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, in which Tolstoy wrote, "The antagonism between life and conscience may be moved in two ways: by a change of life or a change of conscience." Tolstoy chose to preserve his conscience; he began to live like a peasant. But such a fearsome choice, this young man admitted, was out of his reach. People in his situation, he observed, could stand the chafing between one's soul and one's life style more easily than they could face the awesome choice.
In one of the scenes in Herb Gardner's play A Thousand Clowns, the main character Murray is having an argument with his older brother Arnold about what really matters in life. Murray is something of a gentle social rebel with a refreshing vision of what human existence is all about. Arnold is his opposite, a business executive who makes his compromises and plays by others' rules.
At one point in their exchange, Arnold says that he, unlike Murray, is realistic, willing to deeal with the available world. He has no desire to change the world, just to accommodate to it Arnold says that he does not consider himself to be an exceptional man; he has a wife and children, and "business is business." He continues: You cannot convince me I am one of the bad guys. I get up, I go, I lie a little, I peddle a little, I watch the rules, I talk the talk. We ... have those offices high up there so we catch the wind and go with it, however it blows. But ... I will not apologize for it, I take pride; I am the best possible Arnold Burns.2
Arnold Burns had settled for a "life style" but not a life. He had sadly persuaded himself that his quilt of shallow compromises made him "the best possible Arnold Burns." Jesus, however, calls us not to catch the drifting trade winds of culture but to set sail in the gale force winds of the Spirit, to venture into the open sea of faith where there is life.
Another difference between a life style and a life is that a life style is a matter of personal whim, a life is a matter of calling. A life style is a composite of choices. We choose the Ivy League look or the Banana Republic look; we choose a vegetarian or a steak-and-potatoes diet; we choose to be a Scotch drinker or a teetotaler, a jogger or a backgammon player.
A life, however, is not always about choice. Life takes us places and gives us experiences we would not choose. This is especially true of a life made rich in faith; such a life is not a getaway vacation but a vocation that will inevitably take us down paths not of our choosing.
"When you were younger," Jesus told Peter, "you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished." But now, Jesus said, "someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go" (John 21:18). Jesus was speaking, John writes, of "the kind of death by which [Peter] would glorify God" (John 21:19). Being led captive to your own death is not to have much of a life style; offering one's all for the glory of God, though, is to have life, and to have it abundantly.
In his memoir about his career as a physician and a professor of medicine, Lewis Thomas recalls his early memories of Bellevue Hospital in New York City. One early morning in 1959, Thomas, just beginning his service as a medical school teacher, was hearing a report from a student, an intern at the hospital, about a patient who had spent two weeks on one of the wards with advanced pneumonia and meningitis. This young intern had been up all night, moving back and forth between the patient and the senior physicians and consultants in infectious diseases. The intern had done everything he could, everything he could think of, for the patient, but the patient had died. Halfway through the formal presentation tears appeared in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks, and he wept while he finished. I knew that these were tears not of frustration but of grief, and I realized, for the first time, what kind of hospital I was in.3
This young intern had a life, not a life style, a life that sent him to situations he could not fix and to pour out his all for people he could not heal. Tears and grief would never be his life style choices; but a vocation of healing and tearful compassion will lead him to the place of peace.
"I am the way," said Jesus, "the truth and the life."
1. Robert Bellah et al., Habits Of The Heart.
2. Herb Gardner, A Thousand Clowns, p. 86.
3. Lewis Thomas, The Youngest Science: Notes Of A Medicine Watcher (New York: Viking Press, 1983), p. 135.