Continuing in the series of Things You Won’t Hear Anywhere Else (But Church), an in-person version of which I’m presenting as a class at Christ Church Charlottesville on Sunday mornings this fall. Click here to read the intro and many caveats.
Having trouble sleeping? There’s a great new pillow you should try. Up cause you’re worried about your kids’ schooling? Here’s an app that allows you to monitor their grades. Online too much as a result? Check out this hip new device that locks you out of the internet. Still feeling overwhelmed? Maybe you should change your diet. There’s an app for that as well. Or, hey, start coming to church! Too many obligations on Sunday morning already? You should try our virtual service.
Much of life these days involves being inundated with formulas and fixes. Login to Instagram, or simply talk to peers at a dinner party, and you’ll hear about new ways to consolidate your energy, organize your priorities, maximize your property value, get bigger, stronger, faster, younger, happier.
French sociologist Jacques Ellul had a term to describe our obsession with streamlining everything under the sun. He called it ‘technique’, which he defines as: “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity” (Technological Society, xxv). Technique tries to clarify, rearrange, rationalize, and “bring efficiency to everything” in life. This extends to both machines, apps, and other technologies, as well as any method that tries to increase output with less effort.
In short, technique refers to any time we use machine logic (optimization) and apply it to humanity. Technique is so ingrained in our day-to-day we hardly notice it. Efficiency and productivity are the unquestioned goods toward which an inordinate amount of our energy is directed. No wonder the pillow market — nay, the entire “cushion space”! — is exploding.
Needless to say, technique promises to make life more convenient, affordable, and easy, but in practice makes it more exhausting, expensive, and complicated. Each new technique we adopt creates problems for which we instinctually look for another technique to solve, and so on and so on.
Most of what passes for wisdom in our culture is repackaged technique. The church has its own forms of this, of course (“Do X, Y, or Z more, and you’ll get such-and-such spiritual result”). Anytime someone is handing out a roadmap to guaranteed sanctification — along a reliable timeline — you are in the realm of technique.
But any church that settles for technique does so at the expense of the gospel. Concerns about efficiency and results are entirely foreign to Jesus. He was terrible at managing his schedule. He did not make strategic use of the resources at his disposal. The movement around him shrank profoundly during his life.
What you’ll hear at church that you won’t hear anywhere else is that, when it comes to what really matters in life, surrender trumps technique every time. The aphorism intended to capture this truth is “Pray for a Nervous Breakdown.”
Nervous breakdowns aren’t talked about as much as they used to be. Today we speak instead of meltdowns, panic attacks, breaks with reality, episodes of anxiety, and so on. But I’d venture that much of the above could fall under the less scary banner of nervous breakdown. In each case, we are talking about a person coming to the end of their sense of control, to a place of relinquishment, acquiescence, giving up, freaking out.
Such breakdowns cannot be engineered, but they very often double as breakthroughs. Which means that the spiritual life, at least in its Christian iteration, looks less a religiously branded technique and a bit more like this meme:
I suspect this is part of what Jesus is getting at in Mark 13:
As Jesus came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”
Peter, James, John and Andrew sidle up to him later and ask him how this is going to happen and how they’ll be able to tell. What they’re after, to Ellul’s way of thinking, is some technique so that they might predict, manage, and essentially exert a little control over the coming catastrophe.
Jesus’s response is telling. He mentions wars and rumors of wars. He paints a picture of escalation (acceleration!), destruction, and disaster. This collective breakdown is not to be avoided, however, it is “but the beginning of the birth-pangs.” Um, thanks, Jesus.
What are birth-pangs, though? They are the pain that precedes new life. God, it turns out, is present in the dismantling of carefully constructed edifices. Based on the passage above (as well as many others), I’d go so far as to say that death-and-resurrection should be our chief paradigm for understanding God’s work, not action-consequence. What we have to offer the world, in lieu of another formula, is the hope of surrender. This means church is not a place to get it together so much as a place to fall apart.
It may sound grim, but there is an undeniable upshot. Namely, if life feels like an organized assault on your sense of control, then 1. welcome to the human race but also 2. that is not a bad place to be. As the truism says, “God comes to us disguised as our actual lives.”
Put another way, if you are being led to a position of surrender in some area of your life, you can be assured that God is there. No matter how painful the breakdown feels, something is happening that technique could never accomplish. And if this is true, then there is nothing worth praying for more ardently than a nervous breakdown, as soon as possible, and with as little damage as possible.
This is not a one-time thing, either. Surrender often happens moment by moment. You might call it a way of life. Repentance in practice.
The aphorism goes hand in glove, by the way, with an addiction model of life, in which recovery begins with a bottoming out. All of which brings me to that miraculous passage in Heather Kopp’s Sober Mercies, a memoir of what happens when a successful writer/editor of Christian books and mother of two finds herself in rehab in mid-life. The following about two-thirds of the way into the book, after Heather has relapsed.
One of the first books I picked up [during this phase of my recovery] was Seeds of Grace, written by Sister Molly Monahan, a practicing Catholic nun. She wrote that she honestly believed she’d learned more of God and come closer to Him through recovery than she had during all her years of religious training. Yet she expressed bafflement at how and why this could be the case.
I skipped forward in the book, searching the part where she finds the answer. But the closest she came was her conclusion that “in my alcoholism I experienced myself as being utterly lost and unable to help (save) myself in a way that I never had before.”
Something about her observation resonated. I thought back on all my years of being a Christian, including the early years after I was newly “saved.” Sure, I had always known in my head that I was a sinner saved by grace. But utterly lost? Unable to save myself?
Like the nun, I couldn’t remember experiencing that kind of spiritual desperation until I admitted that I was a hopeless, helpless alcoholic. Only then did the truth of my absolute need for saving and my complete inability to save myself finally become real to me.
Up until that day when I fell on my knees and sobbed beside my bed, God’s grace had been a nice option, a convenient option, but not my only option.
It was a painful epiphany with enormous implications. Among other things, it meant that if I was ever going to experience the kind of ongoing spiritual transformation I so desperately wanted, I would have to learn the difference between ascribing to a set of Christian beliefs that had no power to change me, and clinging daily to an experience of God’s love and grace that could.
On that note, let’s hand the mic to Mister Hewson:
Next week: Blessed Are the Type-B’s.
COMMENTS
5 responses to “Pray for a Nervous Breakdown”
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This is so interesting/good. Also “Um, thanks, Jesus,” captures my general attitude.
Thank you for your reflection of all the apps/techniques that purport to solve our every problem, but don’t. It’s difficult to reckon with the pressure to be perfect and to be humble.
Thanks for this. So true. Only by grace, only by grace.
Fantastic. The only thing I quibble with is the subtitle- it should be “Things You Won’t Hear Anywhere Else (often including The Church) 🙂
[…] means that when it comes to the spiritual life, passivity trumps activity (and nervous breakdowns are more welcome than a can-do attitude). In fact, your endless activity may be a problem when it comes to […]