by Andy Crouch
A Path Appears
Every session of the weekend conference on faith and work, held at an energetic and growing church in Santa Barbara, California, was to begin with an interview between Kyle, the pastor hosting the event, and a member of the congregation talking about their work. The very first story we heard is what I will always remember about that weekend.
Isabel, poised and impeccably dressed, joined Kyle on the stage. She gave a brief summary of her story in proficient, Spanish-inflected English—born in the city of Viña del Mar in Chile, trained and credentialed there as a family counselor. A few years before she had immigrated to the United States with her American husband, awaiting the birth of their son. They settled in Santa Barbara to be near family members. But Isabel discovered that her professional credentials from Chile were not recognized in the United States, and her husband struggled to find steady work. Still, Isabel said gratefully, she had eventually been able to find full-time work.
“And what is that work?” prompted Kyle.
“I clean houses,” Isabel said. The Santa Barbara hills are full of spacious homes, and nearly every one employs a Hispanic woman as a cleaner. That was the work that Isabel had found—and could speak about in theological terms.
“How do you see your work reflecting God’s work?” Kyle asked.
“If you look in the book of Genesis, in the beginning, the world is in darkness,” Isabel said. “There is no order. God is a God of order—he orders every single life, changes every life from darkness to light in Jesus. And that is my motivation as I work. Everything I do is from God, not from man. Jesus washed the feet of his disciples, and we are to do the same: be a servant with love. If I am cleaning a toilet—well, that is something that needs to be done to order the world and to wash the feet of others. There is no sadness about that; it’s a joy. The greatest example of servanthood in my life is the Holy Spirit, because he guides me. I listen to his voice, and I say, ‘Yes, sir.’”
Just to make sure you understand the significance of this near-verbatim transcript from her interview: in a few sentences, Isabel had just given us a trinitarian vision of the work of house cleaning.
In a few sentences, Isabel had just given us a trinitarian vision of the work of house cleaning.
“Do you encounter brokenness in the work you do?” Kyle asked.
“Of course,” Isabel replied. “It’s sad to see people who have everything beautiful, everything perfect. They contract with you so their world can continue perfect and clean. But you realize their life is empty. So I have to be light for them. Every single home I go to, I pray for that family, that they can find him. If he will use me, amen. If not, amen—he will send somebody else.”
When Isabel is not working or caring for her own family, she is volunteering with a center called Immigrant Hope that serves other women from Latin America, most of whom also clean houses. Isabel teaches courses that help them prepare for drivers license exams and the tests required for citizenship in the United States. “The Lord Jesus is teaching me that we are all immigrants,” she told me, “and our real home is with him. So we should be showing others his love and mercy, and how much he loves those whose lives are broken. By addressing very practical needs, we show them the one who makes everything new.”
I called Isabel to ask her permission to quote from that interview in this book. She asked for time to pray about it, then asked if we could speak by phone a few days later. It turned out that Isabel had not primarily been praying about whether she should give permission for her story to be in this book—God had apparently settled that question quickly, and it was fine. Instead, she had been praying for me, by name, and God had given her specific words to speak to me, specific instructions for my own prayer life and a set of verses from the New Testament letter 1 Peter to guide me. Printed on a piece of paper, they sit on my desk as I write.
Isabel has authority, something you discover the moment you meet her. She speaks and acts meaningfully in everything she does. Her authority does not come primarily from her circumstances—those reflect the vulnerability of the countless immigrants who, their deeper gifts so often unrecognized and unused, serve in jobs that few Americans will take at all, let alone take gladly. There is much in Isabel’s life and story, both spoken and left unsaid between the lines of her testimony, that speaks of the vulnerability without authority that comes to so many in a broken world.
But her story has been transformed by another story—her life’s action has been made meaningful by being caught up in the story of the gospel. She has moved from quadrant II to quadrant I, from Suffering to Flourishing—and she is bringing others with her.
This can be true for us as well. No one escapes this quadrant of human experience. As we will see in the final chapters of this book, we actually will be called to seek out suffering, to go to its depths, if we truly want to bring flourishing to the world. But when we journey to the heart of suffering, whether by circumstance or by choice, we are only going where Another has gone before us. When we find our place in that story and in that journey, our vulnerability, too, becomes the path to flourishing.
4
Withdrawing
As a father, I discovered what exactly the Gospel of Luke had meant by “swaddling clothes.” My newborn son loved nothing so much as to be tightly wrapped in a blanket, arms and legs neatly tucked into a package, and held. Unswaddled, he would fuss and squirm; properly swaddled, he became both calm and alert, able to take in the world around him without anxiety. The swaddling clothes bound him but also comforted him. It is worth pondering that the Savior of the world, too, was swaddled in his own infancy—protected from both action and risk.
Within a few weeks, of course, my son outgrew his swaddling blankets and his desire for them. (And not all babies take to swaddling, as his sister made fiercely clear when she came along a few years later.) But for the first years of his life, it was my deepest desire as a parent to protect him from too much of either authority or vulnerability. We moved tantalizing but fragile objects out of his reach; we swooped in to pick him up when he wandered too far on the sidewalk or the playground; we scanned every room for sources of risk. A healthy childhood is one where both capacity for action and exposure to meaningful risk are meted out in measured doses, gradually increasing as the child matures.
So if Suffering is the quadrant none of us have been able to avoid, the quadrant of Withdrawing is where we all began—and at the beginning it was called Safety.
No authority and no vulnerability—or at least no awareness of either one. Unborn, we had no capacity for meaningful action, and we were blissfully unconscious of meaningful risk. We had not yet discovered the world with its history, future, possibilities and dangers. Just as well, because we were unformed and unready for them. If we had been too exposed to either authority or vulnerability at that most tender stage of human life, we would not be alive today.
Such safety is a fleeting thing. Far too many childhoods are compromised by the early introduction of too much vulnerability and too much authority. This very day there are children picking through smoldering heaps of garbage in the ports of Africa and Asia where our discarded electronics go for recycling, making tiny sums of money to support their families while exposing their lungs to toxic fumes and their hands and feet to jagged metal and glass. Others are being handed lethal weapons and trained in killing before they have developed the moral compunctions of adulthood; still others are exposed to the degraded passions of desperate men. Few parents would wish this kind of crash course in the cruelty of the world on their children, but many parents themselves live deep in the quadrant called Suffering. There is no vulnerability deeper, no lack of authority more crushing, than the inability to protect your own child from harm. Millions of parents on this planet know that reality all too well.
One night as I tucked my daughter into her bed, safe beneath her down comforter and properly lavished with kisses and hugs, and prayed for her safety, I unexpectedly sensed the
unmistakable voice of Another addressing me in return. “I hear your prayers,” this voice seemed to say kindly but sternly. “But I also hear the prayers every night of parents who can offer their children no protection.” It was not a rebuke; it was an invitation to understand exactly how much anguish is brought before “the Father from whom all fatherhood takes its name.” And perhaps it was a reminder that there is another way to fail your children: too much swaddling.
The Only Thing Money Can Buy
For almost all of human history, parents’ nightly prayers for their children’s protection were offered in the face of urgent and unavoidable vulnerability. Only in these last decades, in privileged corners of the world, has any child been tucked into bed with such utter security as my own children have known. Perhaps parents have always been tempted to swaddle their children for too long, protecting them from as much of the world as they can—but only recently have we been able to actually succeed.
The only thing money can buy is bubble wrap.
We have a saying in our family: The only thing money can buy is bubble wrap. Affluence cannot ultimately remove the vulnerability that is our human condition and our true human calling, but it can swaddle you in so many layers of insulation that you will never be able to fully feel it—or to freely move. It can keep you swaddled far beyond your tender years, well into an adulthood of risk-averse entitlement.
If you settle down in this corner, even your ambitions will become carefully circumscribed, following well-marked paths to good compensation and social respectability. The slippery pole of ascent to an Ivy League education may be fiercely contested—a friend who works in college admissions jokes that “helicopter parents” have now been replaced by “bulldozer parents,” who clear every obstacle from their children’s paths, and “drone parents,” who hover invisibly overhead and then swoop in with overwhelming force when their progeny is endangered. But the competition is so fierce precisely because the prize is so predictable: a golden ticket to career paths that are carefully staked out in advance to maximize reward and minimize risk. If you look at life this way, there is nowhere so safe as Harvard Yard. If you aim for real flourishing, there is nowhere more dangerous.
The greatest challenge of success is the freedom it gives you to opt out of real risk and real authority. Entrepreneurs who take on substantial authority in the face of real risk, and have the fortune to be rewarded for that venture into the quadrant called Flourishing, can cash out of the game, turning the fruits of their success into so much stored wealth that they can retreat from risk—and authority—altogether. The more that you know, or sense, that your success was as much a product of luck and timing as of skill and character, the less likely you will be to ever dare to risk that much again.
The Eternal Cruise
We have to begin in Safety in order to flourish, but to cling to it in adulthood is folly. When I think about this quadrant, and the strange allure it holds for us later in life, I think about one of the leisure fantasies of the modern world: taking a cruise. Not a crossing, mind you, the epic journey from the Old World to the New across the Atlantic that some of my ancestors undertook, a one-way trip with a destination and something different and difficult waiting at the other end. And not even the kind of cruises, like those up into the glacier bays of Alaska or the f jords of Norway, that allow you to come close to natural wonders impossible to apprehend any other way—the kind that leave you feeling awed, humbled, properly small and full of praise. I’m thinking of the cruises without destinations that circle around the tourist-friendly ports of tropical islands, cruises where the real desire and delight is to be on the ship itself.
We have to begin in Safety in order to flourish, but to cling to it in adulthood is folly.
As you can guess, I am firmly in the non-cruising part of humanity—the part that chortles at David Foster Wallace’s epic essay about such a cruise, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” and hopes never to do it in the first place. But I can appreciate why my cruising acquaintances think that a cruise, with its languid days and nights, its bountiful buffets, its complete disengagement from terrestrial life, is a marvelous vacation. After all, a cruise is about as pure a return to the quadrant III of childhood as you could ask for. Food is abundant, demands on your time are minimal, the sun is bright. You have absolutely no authority—even if the captain invites you to visit the bridge, you will be forcibly restrained if you attempt to take command of the ship—and, for all practical purposes, no vulnerability either. (We will set aside the handful of cruises from hell where the engines give out, the ship starts turning in slow wide gyres in the Gulf of Mexico and the passengers spell out “HELP” with their bodies on the Lido deck—as well as the surprisingly frequent cruises where some virus colonizes the kitchen and half the crew and passengers become ill, or those where the steady rolling of the ship leaves you bedridden for days. As you can see, I’m just not that much of a fan of cruises.)
This is all fine—as vacation. It is delicious for a few days or perhaps even a week.
But what if your whole life were a cruise? Year after year of others deciding where you will go, what’s for dinner, anticipating your needs and protecting you from any real harm? That would be less than human. Indeed, it would be something quite like hell. The magnificent Pixar film WALL-E depicts exactly such a cruise gone wrong, set in a not-so-distant future in which all of humanity has fled the mess their own greed created. The first passengers are told it will be a brief excursion, but instead it goes on for centuries with no hope of return, and each generation becomes less capable and more dependent on the robots who take over their image-bearing calling.
Like all Pixar films, WALL-E is about what it is to be fully human. With his insatiable curiosity, his delight in both order and abundance, and his willingness to fall in love with a lovely and lethal robot far more advanced than himself, the little trash-collecting robot is the truly flourishing character in the midst of Earth’s garbage and the spaceliner Axiom’s decadence.
But for all of WALL-E’s charm, he turns out to be a supporting character. Once we meet the ship’s captain, who has been reduced to pudgy inactivity deep in the corner of Safety and Withdrawing, the real conflict unfolds. The captain represents all of us human beings in all of our infantilized incapacity. His awakening to the delights of an almost-forgotten Earth and the call of stewardship—and his decision to wrest command of the ship from autopilot—is the laugh-and-shout-out-loud climax of the movie (hilariously accompanied by the strains of Also sprach Zarathustra). We cheer for the captain because he is claiming his authority and embracing meaningful risk—exiting Withdrawing in hopes of a return to Flourishing.
We are not meant to be eternal cruise-ship passengers. We are meant for more than leisure.
We are not meant to be eternal cruise-ship passengers. We are meant for more than leisure. This is true for our own sakes, but it is also true because, like the diminished human beings aboard the Axiom, we are still responsible for a world gone wrong. The deepest reason for the call out of Withdrawing is not our own health, though this quadrant is none too healthy or satisfying a place to live. It is far more about the neighbors and the created order we have neglected, who have no option to board a cruise away from vulnerability, who live, in some cases quite literally, among the trash our affluence has discarded. To disengage from the profound needs of those caught in suffering is to reject the call to bear the image of God. We all began in the protection of paradise, but attempting to make that safety our final state will in fact consign us to hell.
Simulated Authority
There is, however, a subtler version of withdrawing than the pure vacancy of a cruise. Most of us would in fact find ourselves bored to tears after a few weeks of perpetual vacation—our thirst for flourishing is too strong to completely abandon the call to authority and vulnerability. But the technological culture has another, stronger trick up its sleeve—not total disengagement, but powerful and rewarding simulat
ions of engagement. The real temptation for most of us is not complete apathy but activities that simulate meaningful action and meaningful risk without actually asking much of us or transforming much in us.
If you really want to see what withdrawing looks like in affluent, technological America, you just have to turn on the PlayStation in your living room.
So if you really want to see what withdrawing looks like in affluent, technological America, you don’t have to visit a port of call. You just have to turn on the PlayStation in your living room.
Just like cruises and other forms of vacation, games have an important place in a healthy life. For children, games are a primary way of practicing the authority and vulnerability that will be their calling in adult life. For adults, games’ simplicity and rule-based rewards are a welcome break from the open-ended, complicated demands of maturity.
But just as a cruise starts to degrade from heaven to hell if it becomes your daily life, games, especially technologically enhanced ones, are a dangerous place to live. Very few of us can afford a perpetual cruise. But we can afford video games—they are priced at the sweet spot of consumer discretionary demand. We would have to rearrange our whole lives to spend our remaining years on cruises. Video games, however, gladly take up residence at the center of our homes. Most of us would start to get fidgety after a few days onboard a ship. Video games are a far more satisfying version of withdrawing—because while you are engrossed in them, you feel totally convinced that you are flourishing.