Marilu Thomas, “Spiritual Drive-By”
Could it really be the end of summer? This was the summer when we were ostensibly set free—free to travel, have birthday parties, go out to eat, see people we haven’t seen, cheer at weddings, go back to church, attend sports events, —whatever freedom has meant to you this summer. I know classes start at UVA Tuesday, Charlottesville schools go back on Wednesday, and other counties and private schools have been back for a few weeks, but I want to hold onto every, last drop of this feeling of being free.
While in this expansive mood, I ran across an article in the New York Times that seems the antithesis of freedom and a vivid image of what I am avoiding facing—the tick, tick, tick of workday time. The article was titled, The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score and it described how companies are monitoring behavior with cameras and digital trackers. Maybe you have this at your job now. Blue collar jobs such as Amazon, UPS, and McDonald’s have been joined by Wall St., hospitals, administrators, engineers, and even hospice chaplains in productivity monitoring. The authors said they wanted to give the reader an experience of what the monitoring felt like so, as you read, messages scroll through, saying, “Are you still there? You’ve been idle for 37 seconds. Your productivity score is pending.” “Warning: You appear to be inactive. Your reasons may be legitimate but we’re recording your idle time.” Hundreds of interviews and submissions by white-collar workers described being tracked as “demoralizing,” “humiliating,” and “toxic.” Of course, this also led to the invention of the “mouse jiggler,” which makes it look like you are digitally active so you can go to the bathroom in peace. Is this the price we pay for getting a paycheck now?
Some people interviewed loved the monitoring because it made sure other employees who were sloughing off got penalized. Ahh- another rule for us to revel in keeping better than others. What about the hospice chaplains? Points were higher for visiting actively dying patients and lower for visiting suffering ones, which led to what the chaplains termed, “Spiritual Drive-Bys.” Federico Mazzoli, the genius who developed WorkSmart software, got so anxious after experiencing his own product that he quit his company.
I got a grade of “Poor” reading the article. I found it externalized the panic-inducing internal voice. The same voice that tells you to quit wasting time, be above-average like other people, and make something happen today to justify taking up space on the planet. How will we climb the corporate ladder, or even get onto the ladder after college, if we can’t point to our metrics of productivity? And if you think you have escaped the voice because you aren’t on a ladder, then let’s talk parenting, dieting, paychecks, clothing catalogs, or work-out programs. The voice never ends because we have limitations. Dave Zahl, in his new book Low Anthropology: The Unlikely Key to a Gracious View of Others and Yourself (due out in September) writes, “Modern ears tend to hear talk about human limitations as defeating, even shame-inducing. Far more defeating and shame-inducing is the belief that I am capable of transcending my limitations but just have been able to pull it off yet.” (47)
We sometimes think of our spiritual and religious life in these same terms. How could we not? We are climbing the ‘ladder’ of spiritual success by doing good things. And we are glad to point out what others could be doing to be better Christians. We’re desperate for a sense of progress—knowing how much farther up the ladder we need to go to get the voice to be satisfied. Gerhard Forde wrote, “the law becomes a ladder, a scheme by which God supposedly rewards those who live up to it and punishes those who don’t.” Truly, it’s not what the software or the law says, it is how it makes us feel, and what it does to us inside. We feel isolated and lonely, turned in on ourselves and away from God and the people around us.
This is the law at work, haunting us and terrorizing us like the productivity mavens who want us to be more than human, telling us we must handle life completely on our own, and trust only ourselves to make it in the world. Gerhard Ferde gives the best description of what is happening to us when we are spiritually weighed down and bent over by the demands of life as this woman is in Where God Meets Man when he wrote,
“Unmistakably [the voice] arises from the demands which society makes of us, the demands of family and friends, and the voices and faces of suffering humanity. It arises from the inevitability of death, the fact that life is precarious and fleeting. And above all, it is the command of God that we must love him with all our heart, and our neighbor as ourselves…the law is that immediate and actual voice arising from the sum total of human experience ‘in this age,’…a voice that man can never stop in this life.”
We all know the voice that tells us we are not measuring up, not producing enough work or raising our children to meet some mythical standard, not pretty enough or young enough or old enough to be of consequence, not smart enough to make the grade, not rich enough to live here, not faithful enough to be in church. The voice of the law cannot be silenced by human effort. Martin Luther said that the voice, “sounds in your heart, exhorting, piercing the heart and conscience until you do not know where to turn. It is a voice which goes on and on- in endless forms and an infinite variety of disguises. As long as man remains in sin, the voice never stops.”
In our gospel reading from Luke 13 today, we are introduced to a woman with a ‘sick spirit.’ We know what this feels like, to feel sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. But as the old spiritual says, there is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul. The gospel says, “and just then there appeared a woman,” preceded by a little Greek word “Idou!” which means “Look out! An amazing thing is about to happen!” It is amazing how the woman is weighed down and bent over and healed through absolutely no productivity or energy of her own. She just appears. She didn’t come to be healed. Jesus calls her to himself and tells her, “You are set free.” Your sin-sick soul longs for this word of freedom. Jesus is the only one who can set us free from the voice that terrorizes us. This is what the death and crucifixion of Jesus Christ does—stops the tyrannizing monitoring and judging voice of the law that seeks to isolate us from God, our only hope. Jesus frees us to say to the accusing voice, “Jesus loves me, this I know.” Martin Luther’s reformation was based on this reality and he wrote, “The gospel comforts because it puts an end to the voice of the law…The gospel is a living voice great enough to stop the voice of the law and bring in here on earth the beginning of the new life of freedom.” Idou- something amazing is about to happen. A new life of freedom as a gift of grace from Christ.
I’d like to close with words from Frederick Buechner, who died this week at the age of 96. Buechner inspired me to continue in the ineffable experience of faith in a loving God through his honest descriptions of his encounters with Jesus. In his book Peculiar Treasures, he wrote:
A Christian is one who points at Christ and says, "I can't prove a thing, but there's something about his eyes and his voice. There's something about the way he carries his head, his hands, the way he carries his cross—the way he carries me.”
Jesus is not monitoring your productivity or checking out your position on the faith ladder today. He is carrying you like a small, sick child because you belong to Him and he has overcome the voices of the world. Amen.
