Who Is My Neighbor?
“Why am I not happy? I thought I would be by now. I’ve done everything that was supposed to lead to happiness.”
Most of my years as a local church pastor I served in suburban settings. It was meaningful to work alongside hundreds of people who were committed to living faithfully - in their roles as nurses, teachers and engineers; in their roles as parents and spouses; in their roles as neighbors and citizens. In our more thoughtful moments, we would acknowledge how difficult it is to follow the path Jesus taught and exemplified. How do we live in an upper middle class suburb and live the values of Jesus, the values of the Hebrew prophets? How do we make responsible choices? How can we partner with those whose situations are very different? How do we move from acts of charity to acts of justice-making? The questions go on and on. In our best moments, we wrestled with them, and with our privilege.
We’re barraged by messages subliminal and overt. If I get into that school, I’ll be happy. If I lose twenty pounds, I’ll be happy. If I post a picture of myself looking happy with a large group of friends, I’ll actually BE happy. Making partner, buying a larger house, a fancier vacation, another trip to Disney, a whimsical photo shoot. THEN I’ll be happy.
I heard it in my office, evening after evening: Why am I not happy? You achieve your ideal body weight and still compare yourself to others, you invest a million dollars and still feel financially insecure, you buy the boat and the vacation home and yet are restless…
In the first episode of the Apple TV series, “Your Friends and Neighbors”, the protagonist named “Coop” relates his own path towards the American dream:
“This is what happens…you land a job right out of college at a large firm. You’re just another cog in a very large wheel, but you’ve got your foot in the door. You get a shitty apartment in the city that you can barely afford, but you know the money will come. You get married …you’re dead broke but there’s two of you now…You’re in it together and that feels good…so you work your asses off and you dig yourselves out…you have the first kid…You buy a house, 30% down…and you’re broke again…so you work harder, longer hours…you start earning some big bucks which only serves to make you aware of the even bigger bucks you could be earning. Kid #2. House #2. Broke again…by now you’ve lost sight of whatever naive plans you once had or the things that mattered to you when you were first starting out. You’re moving too fast to ask yourself those hard questions, like “when is it enough” and “really, what is the point of all this…”. House #3. Then one day about five years after you bought the place you look up and realize that you’ve gotten there, to that hallowed plateau where, for the first time, you can actually afford your own life…”
Coop describes the seductive pull of consumerism. “Your Friends and Neighbors” is not a perfect television series, but it gets this right. Coop sees, at times, that he and his friends and neighbors have all bought into the same lie. They have more possessions and more status, but they don’t have more joy.
Here’s his friend Barney:
“We’ve got rooms in this house we’ve never used. Now we’re building more. Grace spends too much. I spend too much. It’s like a bodily function at this point. We eat, we drink, we buy all this…then we talk about what we bought and what we’re going to buy…sometimes I just walk around the house and look at the sheer volume…of what we have and it…mystifies me. When did we become these people? When did our lives get so empty that we have to constantly stuff them with all this?…I don’t know what happened to me.”
In these snippets of dialogue, “Your Friends and Neighbors” offers a confession: “My name is Coop and I am addicted to consumerism, to the belief that more things will make me happier…my name is Barney and I am also an adherent to that same lie.”
If you’ve watched the show, you know that Coop is not exactly a moral role model, but I still appreciate the way in which this series takes us behind the curtain, exposing truths we often ignore.
Walter Brueggemann, who died last week, reminded us eloquently and often that there is an alternative way to live, one which is counter-cultural, generous and truly abundant.