Works for Me

My car recently got banged up and had to go into the shop, and while it’s been there I’ve needed a rental. My insurance provided me with one – and because I had no choice in the matter, it ended up being an SUV. I’m not a fan of cars that burn gas, but this has been a perfectly pleasant car to drive for the time being.

The first evening I was out past dark, the vehicle’s lights came on automatically and I discovered that they were remarkably bright and high-aimed, so that they gave a huge radius of vision. I remember commenting to my wife how nice those lights were.

But then, just a few seconds later, it struck me … these lights were exactly the same kind of high-level extremely bright SUV lights that have regularly burned holes in my retinas from the opposite lane as I’ve been driving my low-lying EV down the road at night. These lights, which had before blinded me and made it hard for me to drive, were now working for me and making my night vision incredible, presumably now at the expense of those other drivers.

I chatted about this with my wife for a bit, and then said wryly, “Well … works for me!”

And in that moment I suddenly felt quite deeply one of the core illnesses of our culture. It is the life orientation – which we have completely normalized – that has no problem saying, “Works for me,” and leaving it at that.

In our fast fashion culture, we buy new clothes all the time to stay current with the ever evolving trends we are sold. These clothes are very cheap for us – which is possible only because the people sewing them together (usually in other countries) are not receiving living wages. And we discard them so frequently that we pile up more and more trash in communities around the world. But most of us don’t see those underpaid workers, and most of us don’t live next to that trash, so we very often just shrug and say, “Works for me.”

In our love of convenience, we accept the concept of single-use almost without question. Why would I bring my own mug or utensils and wash them when the fast-food joint can just give me plastic ones I can use once and throw out? Why host a reception for a lot of people with items I will have to wash later, when I could just throw them all out? (I did this recently myself.) Plastic pollution has already formed an island the size of Texas in the middle of the Pacific, it has filled harbors and rivers in lower income communities and nations, and it is constantly being incinerated near poor communities, poisoning families and giving them cancer. Plastic itself is also a fossil fuel product, contributing carbon pollution and accelerating climate change simply through its manufacturing process. And yet … single use plastic is so often convenient for us in the moment. It works for us.

We want beautiful roses, but they’re prone to disease, so we spray them with toxic pesticides – even though they kill pollinator populations. We want high yields on our crops now, even if our methods are depleting the soil and turning it into a desert over time. It works for us. We don’t divest from fossil fuel stocks because we think that with the current administration oil companies may make us more money than renewables near term – and more money is better for our family than less money. It works for us. We cut down forests to make room for more human developments. It works for us. We extract and burn more and more oil to make money now – even if it destroys our planetary future. It works for us. We invade places not our own and take people’s land from them – I’m thinking of European settlers (the people we currently call “Americans”) and Indigenous Americans (the people we “Americans” don’t remember exist). It works for us. We enslave people or “employ” them and pay them dirt so that we can make more money off their labor. It works for us. We support government immigration policies that hunt people down that we don’t like, suspend their rights, and deport them to horrible situations. We would be appalled and terrified if our families were targeted this way – but as long as it’s not our families, it works for us.

Only it doesn’t work for us. Because we are all in it together. And if something “works for me” at the expense of you, it works for no one.

When Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment is, he says, “‘Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength’ – and the second commandment is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the law and the prophets hang on these two.” He also says, “Those who seek to save their life will lose it, but those who lose their life for me will find it.”

There’s a lot to explore in both of these sayings, but by lumping in love of God with love of neighbor and love of self, Jesus presents them all as inseparably intertwined. And it makes sense – because if God loves me, and God loves you, and God loves creation (which we can see blatantly in the Gen 1-2 creation story and many other places in the Bible), then to love God is to love what God loves, which is all of the above. Loving God is designed to nurture in us love for our neighbors and all of creation. It’s designed to stretch the concept of love away from the tribal (me and mine) and towards the universal (God and all that God has created). According to Jesus, love is a comprehensive life orientation that is, in its practice, where you find yourself. “Those who seek to save their life” – those whose focus is on “me and mine” – lose themselves in their focus on themselves. It is only in shifting your gaze away from “me and mine” that you can find your true self in the love of God and others – which is what real love actually is.

And so when we, as Americans, embrace a “works for me” mindset, we are seeking to save our lives … and losing them in the process. Living for “me and mine” may feel self-preserving in the moment, but this is a deception. We are losing the experience of love in the process. Our life – our true self as it is meant to be lived – is found in shifting our gaze away from the self and towards God and the other. The other person, the other non-human creation. All of these are subjects of God’s love, just like us, and understanding this is what opens the door to experiencing love and nurturing life.

And this is so deeply true from an ecological standpoint – and I include human relationships in in this, because we are all part of our planetary ecological system. If we keep choosing the “works for me” approach with our use of plastics, our use of fossil fuels, our use of pesticides and fertilizers, our treatment of forests, our piling up and burning of trash, our colonial exploitation of indigenous communities and lands, our demonization of and violence towards people we don’t like, and our abuse of the people we have power over … through all of this we will whittle away at the rest of life’s ability to flourish or even to survive, and in the end there will be no world left to “work for us.” As Robin Wall Kimmerer says in her amazing new book, The Serviceberry, “All flourishing is mutual.” There is no such thing as flourishing as an individual. Because we on this planet are a closed and utterly independent system of life and humanity, we rise and fall together. The person who oppresses another person degrades and impoverishes himself, even as he degrades and impoverishes his neighbor. When populations of humans degrade creation and exploit and expel populations of our non-human neighbors for near term gain, we impoverish all of our collective future.

There is no way to love yourself alone. There is no way to find yourself without others. There is no way to live without the rest of life. “It works for me” is a farce. The only question of any value is, “Do we love God and one another, creation included, in such a way that we all flourish together?”

And so … what can we do to be rescued from this individually and collectively suicidal prioritization of “me and mine”? This is a deep journey. But it is one we must all go on for the sake of the world. It’s a journey that is fundamental to any hope for healing ecologically, relationally, and spiritually.

There are many ways to start this journey, but today I will highlight a wonderful book by Robin Wall Kimmerer I mentioned above called (more completely) The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. In it, she explores the gift economy found in creation, how it has inspired many indigenous cultures (of which she is a member) towards a sustainable and reciprocal love-based way of doing life together … and how it could inspire Western culture to do the same. The gift economy is actually highly resonant with Jesus’ concept of finding your true self in the love of God and others. It’s in the love orientation outwards, rather than the preservation orientation inwards, that is essential to nurturing a flourishing human and non-human living system together. The book is a short read – but it’s rich. Love yourself by reading it.

All flourishing is mutual. Life and love are found, inherently, in interdependence.

And so we must be looking hard at our choices. What are we sacrificing on the altar of what “works for me”? What changes might we make to reorient ourselves outwardly towards the needs of others? And how might this reorientation help us discover God’s richer definition of love? It is in this journey of love that we will find healing for our suffering world, and our true selves in the process.

RESOURCES:

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer