Ending It All

End-ing It All

I’ve been thinking about endings lately…last week marked the end of 2008, of my sabbatical, and of my 44^th year on the planet. Each of these events offers an invitation to reflect. Together, they are something more like a home invasion: a scary, masked, well-armed demand that I somehow account for this past year.

The best I can come up with is some thoughts on ends—and means—and how easy and destructive it is, those times we get them jumbled up.

During the past year, I ran across this startling proposition: that human beings are their own ends. Not only that, but this notion of our end-ness was founded in some basic and uncompromiseable premises of Christianity—that we are, each of us, formed in God’s own image, and we are all, already, irrevocably redeemed. In some fundamental way, the author argued, we are each, already, done.

There’s a piece of this that’s sort of easy: If we accept one another as ends unto ourselves, then we are not allowed to treat one another as means to our own ends—we shouldn’t use each other. Spouses and partners weren’t put on earth to make us happy, the poor aren’t planted here and there so we can test or prove how generous we are. These people—all people—are individuals, created and redeemed (if the doctrine makes a difference to you): complete.

The tough part of this proposition, as far as I’m concerned, is believing it about ourselves. I spent a lot of time and energy last year chasing after paths that might have led me toward some external notion of completion. Much of my energy throughout my life has been spent this way—waiting (sometimes working ) to become: a novelist, an essayist, a teacher, a theologian. This looking toward creates a kind of looking past—that fact, for instance, that I am a daughter, sister, partner, citizen, and friend. When I privilege what I might do, what I might become (rather than what I already am), it gets possible—and easy—to use relationships to “network,” or excuse some obligations in the face of deadlines, general busy-ness. This is where the using other people slithers in.

Unfortunately—and maybe unintentionally—church has, for me, reinforced this dehumanizing calculus. In Catholic school, the focus lingered on the one who did the most good deeds. The kid who raised the most pennies for the pagan babies somehow seemed that much the better than the rest of us. And when Girlfriend and I went through the preparation for our commitment ceremony, our priest warned us against assuming our relationship should be a “mutual appreciation society.” Since we were asking our community to uphold this relationship, we’d better be sure that our relationship paid dividends, somehow, to them. Never was it suggested that the simple fact of being: faithful, loving, and together was enough.

I wonder if this focus on what we can give back fuels the ways we sometimes strain each other and ourselves—financially, emotionally—in order to “do good.” We have emptied wallets, filled up calendars for other people’s needs, and wondered why we have so little left for one another.

My sister is taking a class is Buddhism. She told me, over Christmas, that she’d learned that the Buddhist precepts were not like our commandments. Rather than being prescriptions for behavior, she said, they were the symptoms of enlightenment. A saint, for example, would be recognized through his or her right action, right speech, and all the rest.

This reminded me of the song and statement, that Christians will be known by their own love. Perhaps the point is not to force ourselves to act in loving ways, but instead to recognize within ourselves the ways of living that incline us each toward loving-kindness. What if we were to trust ourselves, assume that love and kindness, justice and compassion are natural inclinations, and tried—instead of checking off some boxes—to live in ways that brought these natural urges to the fore?

I am reminded of our grocery stores…where so much attention has been paid to the means of food that sometimes the food’s no longer recognizable. Do you want the look and taste of cheese—try some pasteurized processed cheese-flavored food. There are drinks to calm you down or make you jittery, foods that will keep or make you slim. It’s often easier to understand just what our “foods” will do than what in fact they are. And there are children who can’t recognize an ear of corn or artichoke—who do not understand that much of what we (used to) eat was once a living thing—a plant or animal—and not a product or a process made for us.

I’ve been to a Mass in which the priest said he assumed the only reason we were gathered was to get ourselves to heaven. He congratulated us on prizing heaven over football games. He never once remarked upon the presence of community, the creation of communion.

When Jesus sat at his Last Supper with his friends, he shared his bread and wine. He mentioned what was coming—but he asked his friends: remember me. Perhaps he knew we would be challenged to recall the man against the glare of what we tell ourselves he did on our behalf. Did he have value as a carpenter, a friend, a teacher, a peculiar guy? Did he matter on the day before the Resurrection?

Last year, I changed the way I had been living in the hopes those changes might change me, might make me someone I could more comfortably describe. If I measure my year against those means I had in mind for it, it has been and is a quite complete and utter failure. An expensive one, at that.

But if I “end” the year—if I look at it just for itself—it was a year filled with unknowing, a year of practicing surprise, of welcoming new gratitude. It was tough year and quiet one, a year shared with my loved one like no other year before.

If I look back on what it was, instead of what it did for me, the year that’s passed seems real-er, more tangible, more full, complete, and blessed. I wonder what will happen if I look at others in this way or if I bring this way of looking to the mirror, to myself.

This is my new year’s resolution and experiment: to try to “end” it all (or at least what I can manage)—to look at people and events for just themselves, rather than as stepping stones or processes or pathways. To try to understand what my life-time is, rather than persisting in the worry of how it might all turn out.

[This notion of people as ends in themselves came to me from

Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, by Margaret Farley. I’ve taken this

idea much farther afield than Farley does; to the extent her notion’s been distorted, all the fault is mine.]