Your Life is None of Your Business

This weeks’ blog comes from David Zahl. You can find this post (lightly edited below for context) and others at mbird.com. This week’s post is part of a series David wrote based on a class he was teaching, Things You Won’t Hear Anywhere Else (But Church). For fuller context, read the intro to the series.No one wants to be a doormat. I certainly do not. Not even a funny one. To be walked all over by another person — or the entire world — is undignified at best, degrading at worst. A human doormat isn’t respected; indeed, they are taken for granted, used, and even abused.

“The research found that among great composers like Beethoven,
a 37 percent increase in sadness led to, on average, one extra major composition.”

I have read some pretty jaw-dropping entries in the Cult of Productivity playbook over the years, but that one, taken from Anthony Lane’s review of Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey’s new book How to Build a Life, sits near the top. The idea here is that negative emotions can be leveraged for personal progress. So do not despair if you’re feeling blue (or experiencing Ludwig levels of misery); even your saltiest tears can be fashioned into an offering on the altar of achievement. Phew!

To be fair, I haven’t read Brooks and Winfrey’s book. But I’m not sure one has to have done so to see the all-American absurdity in such quantification. Lane’s review is one of those periodic overviews of the self-help self-improvement self-care leadership genre that sheds a light on the deeper presumptions governing how we view ourselves these days. It reveals the outlook that generates giggle-inducing statistics like the one above. Here’s the gist:

"To anyone browsing “Build the Life You Want” and books of a similar ilk, it soon becomes clear that the care and maintenance of the self is no longer a branch of the social sciences, if it ever was, or an offshoot of popular psychology. Restructuring your inward being, and increasing its turnover, is now akin to running a company. Personhood, like religion and politics, is a business.”

Lane is not exaggerating. Underlying the whole schema here is an injunction to always remember: “You are your own CEO.” Oh boy.

Presumably Brooks and Winfrey did not mean for this bit of high anthropology to read like a parody of late-capitalism #seculosity. Maybe some readers feel empowered by the sentiment. Lane’s tone suggests that I’m not alone in finding it depressing. The overt dehumanization is one thing. Another is that it implies a level of agency that 1.) doesn’t exist and 2.) makes people hate themselves when their quarterly reports fall short of projections.

If you are not just a brand but a business, what does that mean when your child gets sick? When your addiction relapses? How about when your country goes to war? Moreover, how is marriage any different from a merger? What does death do for your bottom-line? And if I don’t capitalize on my sadness with any major compositions or breakthroughs, what then?

On the upside (ha!), this notion makes for the perfect introduction to the final aphorism that you won’t hear anywhere else but church, “Your Life Is None of Your Business.” I can’t believe I need to write this but the self is not a business. Your life is not one either. And even if it sometimes feels that way, you are definitely not the CEO. If anything, you’re in PR.

Worldly wisdom — an admittedly amorphous category, if anyone fits, it’s Oprah — relies on a flattering estimation of personal power. This is why its guidance invariably takes a law-like (or if-then) shape. If you do as I say, think the way I think, then you will build the life what you want to build. Here are the steps you not only should but can take toward happiness, success, etc.

At church, however, we hear about how human beings lack in power. How you and I are fundamentally in need of help, from each other and ultimately from God. Deliverance even. Our problems seldom boil down to a lack of information, but to a lack of wherewithal. We have roadmaps galore, what we lack is gasoline. “We are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little,” says Anne Lamott.

Heather Havrilesky, in a brilliant installment of her Ask Polly newsletter, went so far as to say our obsession with control lies at the root of much of our suffering:

“So many of the letters I get are about control … We apply the full force of our brains to the things we can’t control until we’re obsessed, mapping out ways to bend each relationship or life circumstance or friend or relative into a shape that might bring us satisfaction and peace.

But this fixation on control is a big part of what makes most of us unhappy. We can’t control our careers, can’t control our friends, can’t control our spouses, can’t control our kids. We will never have enough money, we will always be short of beautiful, we will never be loved enough, we will never be successful and joyful. Our need for control is a dirty lens through which the whole world looks misshapen and dissatisfying.”

“Your life is none of your business” is another way of saying, you don’t actually have that much control, and that’s okay. You are not at fault for everything bad that has happened to you. Nor do you deserve credit for all the good things that come your way. What you will hear at church, one hopes, is that the burden of your life is ultimately not yours to carry.

The Heidelberg Catechism (1563) makes this clear from the get-go. Its first question is “What is your only comfort in life and death?” to which the Christian answers “That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.” The Catechism goes on to assert that it is God’s business to preserve our life and guide our will. Every hair on our head is in his care. That is to say, just because my life is none of my own business doesn’t mean it isn’t God’s. What sounds like a negative statement is actually a liberating and reassuring one.

This means that faith often looks like trusting that the true CEO (sigh) knows what he’s doing. God has been at this far longer than you have. He has the full picture and the long view. This tends not to go down well with us control freaks, who need to know what’s going to happen and when. Yet perhaps it is also part of what Paul meant when he wrote in Romans 14, “For none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone. If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.” Your hope is none of your business.

“Non-contingent” is another word that might help us here. Our relationship to the God who imputes righteousness to sinners is non-contingent. Meaning, God’s disposition toward you and I is not contingent on anything we bring to the table. It is not contingent on our PR department’s ability to spin our behavior (or our sadness) effectively. Philip Yancey captures the essence of non-contingency when he writes “Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more. And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less”.

This stands in stark contrast to the contingency of, well, every other relationship under the sun. Just ask Jim Lorge from a moving NY Times story about the Minnesota Board of Pardons. The piece introduces us to Mr. Lorge, a man who had been convicted for manufacturing and selling methamphetamine in 2005. His crimes had not only disgraced, but bankrupted his family. After being released from prison, Jim got clean and began work as a drug counselor. The article details the collateral damage that he and his loved ones live with as a result of his conviction. And thus, with the help of his church, he seeks a hearing with the Board of Pardons.

“Do I have to carry this burden for the rest of my life?” Mr. Lorge, 48, asked before his hearing. “I want to be forgiven. I just want to be forgiven.” But formal forgiveness in Minnesota comes only through the pardon board.

A pardon, he said, would help him and his fiancée find better housing and allow him to volunteer at school activities involving their blended family. It would also send the encouraging message to his struggling clients that “we can change our outcomes and eventually remove the label of felon.”

Jim’s future, in that moment, is none of his business. And that is profoundly good news! After all, his track record is pretty spotty. The Board of Pardons meets, he does not get a vote, yet their decision is a happy one.

Theoretically, church is the place where that same decision is handed down, week after week. Our brand may be bankrupt, but the judgement against sin has been overturned, the condemning label has been removed, and the guilty have been shown mercy. Not 37, but 100 percent.