As for me and my house

Saturday, August 19, 2023

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As for me and my house

If it does not please you to serve the Lord, decide today whom you WILL serve. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

Nearing his own death, Joshua asked his people for a statement of individual commitment. They had spent 52 years together in Israel’s new home, years of war and peace, years of famine and plenty, all following on each other then as they have ever since Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden. Now they must settle on “whom they would serve.”

Last week Margaret and I read David Brooks’ August 10 column. He caught our attention immediately.

In earlier cultural epochs, many people derived their self-worth from their relationship with God, or from their ability to be a winner in the commercial marketplace. But in a therapeutic culture people’s sense of self-worth depends on their subjective feelings about themselves. Do I feel good about myself? Do I like me?

I’m a Christian therapist. Margaret and I are spiritual directors. How people feel about themselves matters. But it is not the only thing that matters. Who, after all, are we going to serve? Do we even have a plan? If not, the “therapeutic ethos” hurls us toward the culture of those who serve themselves – cutting us off, as Brooks says, “from moral traditions and the normal sources of meaning and identity.” We are very likely to become self-absorbed.

It doesn’t matter where we live. Could be on the west bank of the Jordan River, where Joshua lived. Could be in New York City, where Mr. Brooks works. Could be in Lincoln, Illinois or Madisonville, Kentucky, where Margaret and I grew up.

Who are we going to serve?

Brooks refers to The Culture of Narcissism, written in 1979 by Christopher Lasch. Lasch refers to the 20^th century, but it applies even more in our 21st.

“The ‘psychological man’ of the 20th century seeks neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence but peace of mind, under conditions that increasingly militate against it.”

I think of young Bobby Zimmerman from Duluth, who became the older Bob Dylan from New York. He described the culture of “trauma” but seemed mostly to rise above it. Like Joshua, he asked his listeners to think what lay beneath their fears or peace.

Well, it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord,

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

I imagine the Zimmermans were typical Jewish Minnesotans, who did their best to rear Bobby well, giving him reasons to go beyond narcissism and choose a life of service. He left Duluth in the first place to find Woody Guthrie and to “minister” to him (my word). He found him. He spent lots of time with Woody before he died of Huntington’s Disease, the generational disease that tracked Woody Guthrie down through generations of his family.

Why did young Bobby do that? How did it change him, and allow him to move through the culture he helped create without falling into narcissism or paranoia? Perhaps it didn’t entirely, but as I listen to his song, I appreciate how he can make a little fun of himself:

You may call me Terry, you may call me Timmy

You may call me Bobby, you may call me Zimmy

You may call me RJ, you may call me Ray

You may call me anything, no matter what you say … you gotta serve somebody!

After several other very interesting thoughts about how we variously respond to the call to self, Mr. Brooks suggests some alternative ways to live:

If we’re going to build a culture in which it is easier to be mature, we’re going to have to throw off some of the tenets of the therapeutic culture. Maturity, now as ever, is understanding that you’re not the center of the universe. The world isn’t a giant story about me.

In a nontherapeutic ethos, people don’t build secure identities on their own. They weave their stable selves out of their commitments to and attachments with others. Their identities are forged as they fulfill their responsibilities as friends, family members, employees, neighbors and citizens. The process is social and other-absorbed; not therapeutic.

Maturity in this alternative ethos is achieved by getting out of your own selfish point of view and developing the ability to absorb, understand and inhabit the views of others.

Joshua was barking up the same tree, wasn’t he? Choose this day whom you will serve. And find others who want to serve the same God, and stick together.

The people promised Joshua, “We will serve the Lord, our God, and obey his voice. Then Joshua made a covenant with the people that day, and he took a large stone and set up there under the oak tree that was in the sanctuary of the Lord. Joshua dismissed the people, each to their own house. And then Joshua died.

(Joshua 24, Psalm 16, Matthew 11, Matthew 19)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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