I have lately been immersing myself in some of the theology of the age, trying to wrap my mind around the Christian-ish thinking that makes up a lot of what passes for church these days. And at the same time as that we (Matt and the children and I, when I have time to sit down) have been watching Grand Designs—that fascinating British program whereby very very rich people build the houses of their dreams while we gape at them, open-mouthed, wondering what on earth. Often the dreamy home builder can only and best be described as decadent, in the literary sense, rejoicing over something that embodies death and decay—in one case, expensively cladding a house in ugly rusting metal.
And then there’s this, a piece in the Washington Post about the new trend in house building, Wellness. For an amazing sum of money, like a million dollars or so, you can either build from scratch or remodel a mansion in consultation with a specialist in wellness architecture.
To create her home, Ms. Mathis and her husband, Gil, 47, a real-estate agent, turned to Wellness Within Your Walls—an organization that offers guidelines on building practices that reduce contaminants, and certifies products low in toxins, including paints, textiles, and formaldehyde-free doors. The house has large windows and high ceilings for maximum airiness.
The profiled homes featured beautifully serene lap pools, yoga studios, tea ceremony tables that disappeared into the floor at the push of a button, a green labyrinth, hand-crafted floors that “have been pocked with dents and ripples to provide some of the stress relief of reflexology, hitting pressure points on the foot.” The article is replete with pictures of happy homeowners, curled up with mugs of organically mindful tea, standing at their kitchen counters chopping a single perfect piece of pineapple, hanging from the roof in ergonomically insane yoga poses.
What if any of these people came to church? I wondered to myself. There’s very little that could be construed as “mindful,” and certainly “wellness” isn’t a category that comes up in the lectionary much, or at all. But as the whole wide world gets a little more anxious every year (me included) and ordinary people evermore endure the constant dripping unhappiness of dissatisfaction, the idea that one owes it to oneself to do whatever it takes to make life more bearable, creeps in.
The trouble is, everybody is a little unhappy, even the ones smiling out from their wholly mindful, perfect surroundings that cradle their psyches like a gently padded coracle floating a baby atop a sunlit sea. After all, they’ve just spent the moon, and they probably have to pay it back. Everybody else is too poor to buy such wellness. They have to muddle along in the mire of self-care—trying to find time to take a walk outside after being at a desk in an office with no windows for eight hours, staring glumly at the wilted vegetable display at Walmart with three kids crying around the ankles, sitting miserably “to pray” when there’s too much in life to cope with, so why even bother.
Many of the Christian-ish thinkers of today would suggest that the cure for the modern person, even in church, is to just expect less of herself. She should be gentle with herself and do whatever she has to to thrive “in this season.” Take some stuff off your plate and concentrate on what makes you happy. That’s what Jesus would want. He came to deal with all the bad stuff so that you don’t have to. If things are still bad, you really only have to concentrate on loving yourself “well” and loving other people, which is totally possible, because of grace–a theological word usually ill-defined.
When that becomes the posture of the church, both denominationally, and in the little congregation mucking along on the corner of normal America, it makes the weekly gathering of the faithful not very different from a wellness exercise, an exhausting and not very fancy morning of moving deck chairs around on the Titanic, in a cosmic sense.
Indeed, if any person comes to you, purporting to be a Christian, and says lots about you and what you have to do and how you can be happy, and says little or nothing about God…you’re not only going to end up not well, your unhappiness is only going to increase, both temporally and eternally. The path to true happiness comes with finally being willing to be curious about God, as he is in himself, objectively. Who is he? What does he want to be called? What is he like? How does he speak? What has he said? What has he done? What does he like? You don’t reach down into yourself to find the answers to these questions, you pry the Bible out from under the stack of paper and other books and begin reading, digging around trying to make sense of what it says and why.
Take your spiritual eyes off of yourself. Put them on Jesus. Go to a church that helps you do this, that is saturated in his work, his person, his personality, his mercy. Don’t constantly examine yourself and what you want. Instead painstakingly consider God. The results will not be wellness, nor perhaps not even happiness, and the anxiety might still hover. But you will get something better. In the middle of all the mess of who you are, a deep joy, a peace that is impossible for you to really understand, will take hold. That’s because your dying self won’t be center of a decadently arranged corroding celebration. Rather, the one who is the very source of life will be remaking, remodeling, at a price you couldn’t possibly know or understand, your very soul. He is more fascinating than you, wiser than you, more beautiful than the place you live now.
Go to church.
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