Laura Ferris

Shalom, the Pursuit of Happiness, and Big Girl Idealism

— Posted July 23rd, 2008 at 5:57 pm // Permalink

A couple weeks ago, I accidentally wandered into someone else’s mission trip. My roommate’s older sister had invited her to the “Bay-UP” open-house, and I had tagged along, not realizing that I would be attending the first large group meeting of the InterVarsity Bay Area Urban Project 2008. The students had only arrived two or three days ago, and the feeling of pre-mission jitters and bonding was palpable. Even though I felt like an outsider—knowing no one except them that brang me, neither participant nor alumna—I did not feel uncomfortable. My original plan for the evening had been to watch old episodes of The West Wing, but I got the sense that I was supposed to be there. Then the speaker for the trip, Lisa Harper, gave her first talk in her series on Shalom.

I went to public school, so I can sing the Dreidel Song and I know what “shalom” means: peace. Well, yes and no, it turns out. The thing with biblical Hebrew is that there are only a couple thousand words of it, and every word is loaded with double, treble meaning, unlike English and its bazillion understudies for any given concept. Shalom means more than peace: it means that everything and everyone is in right relation to everything and everyone else. Shalom is the world as it should be. Shalom is what got broken at the Fall, and we have been suffering the consequences ever since. Peace is in pieces, and the piece we have can only give us a limited understanding of the whole. Lisa Harper said that Jesus Christ was an agent of Shalom, an agent of reconciliation and restoration. If we follow him, we can be too. I’ve done the Sunday school thing and I’ve read my up-to-date TNIV, so this jives with me. But I’ve done the Sunday school thing and I’ve read my up-to-date TNIV, so this language also torments me. Because, see, I kind of feel more piece-full than peaceful most of the time, yet according to my good evangelical, vaguely-Calvinist upbringing, I “was saved” long ago. I have always been bothered by the air of finality to born-again rhetoric, the exclusion of liminality that feels so inappropriate in this increasingly complex world. We’ve lost our mysticism in an age of the matter-of-fact, the ability to appreciate the paradox of the “is come, is coming” Shalom of God. And the consequences of that loss, at least for me, has been paralyzing inertia, misplaced doubts, and guilt. Because frankly there’s something a little off, a little foreign, a little strange about trying to be a good middle-class American consumer and a good Christian at the same time. That’s only to say that one’s cultural context can limit one from seeing the world from God’s biggest-picture point-of-view. The trouble is, American Christians have done everything they can to try and ignore or dismiss this distinction, confounding Shalom with the American Dream.

* * *

Don’t get me wrong: I love my country. Even though I’m a blue-state baby whose only cultural shock coming to Berkeley was the fact that there were so many Republicans on campus, I have a profound affection for and loyalty to my country. I love baseball, apple pie, and the Constitution. I think federalism and checks and balances are the bees knees and I’m still nursing a schoolgirl crush on Alexander Hamilton (an informal poll of my girlfriends has declared him the cutest guy on legal tender). Because I love my country, I think her failures and the injustices she has tolerated and even perpetrated hurt me more. And the fact is, though I love America the Beautiful, at the end of the day I love Jesus so, so much more. And when I really think about it, Jesus may want something different for the world and my life than what America wants. America, so saith the Declaration of Independence, guarantees me the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I’m pretty sure, so saith the Bible, that Jesus grants me life, liberty, and Shalom.

The first thing you learn in high school social studies about the Declaration of Independence is that Thomas Jefferson ripped off the “unalienable rights” from John Locke, but that he changed a fundamental right to property to the “pursuit of happiness” because it made him uncomfortable to declare a right to property when many American colonists owned slaves, that is, when some people considered other people property. Pursuit. People. Property. That’s a mighty euphemistic trifecta of words that begin with “p” there. We don’t let them touch most of the time, because we don’t like what they spell out. We don’t like the fact that economic injustice, exploitation, pollution may in some way result from our actions. That happiness, that illusive coquette, eludes us: responsibility and guilt do not. Do you know that I sometimes suspect that our current intellectual fad of saying everything is subjective and objectively meaningless came into such forceful fashion just because we all feel so guilty? In our optimistic hubris, or “realistic” despair about the state of the world, we either forget that everything is still in pieces or that we each hold a piece. Upholding pie-in-the-sky-high principles is meaningless if you don’t apply them to the way you live your life, just as keeping both feet on the ground is pointless if you have no idea where you’re going.

I have a hard time remembering this: my Declaration of Independence, after all, promises me the ideal of happiness instead of merely securing my right to eat the bread that I make with my own hands, because Thomas Jefferson was a pansy who refused to call a spade a spade because he had a losing hand of cards. (I have a thing with Thomas Jefferson.) I sometimes feel—and suspect that many other evangelical American Christians also feel—that I’m a Pharisee whining about the plank in my eye without being able to get the damn thing out. That I’m the young rich ruler who walks away from Jesus sadly. That I’m a camel stuck at the Eye of the Needle. I’m an American dreamer who’s sick to death of the American Dream: we, the young folk of the new millennium, have seen where it has taken us. We live in a world of broken systems and paper-thin idealism, and it pains me that I feel like part of the problem—because I am. That’s what sin means, that any piece of Peace is evidence of brokenness. Only the restoration of Shalom, the whole kit and caboodle, will do.

* * *

At the end of her talk about the Fall, Lisa Harper looked us straight in the eyes and asked, “Do you believe that Jesus has the power to overcome systems? Do you really believe it?” Well, Ms. Harper, I believe: help me with my unbelief! The currency of Shalom is relationships, the coin is people. The borders of the kingdom of God are marked by His image living in the slums of Cairo, of Mexico City, of Bangkok. Do you know how much that scares me? It scares me enough to fall to my knees and repent of my self-indulgent realism and overly-abstract principles. It’s time to admit that God takes poverty and injustice and despair personally, and that we have to too. How else, I ask you, can we take anything in the end, other than personally? It’s time for me to open my eyes instead of trying to blink the stars out of them. This world full of broken images, broken people, is disillusioning, but Shalom is on the move, so I can either be a Big Girl who trades in her idealism for faith and her guilt for humility or I can screw my eyes shut and run around saying, “lalalalala not listening.” Your heart is going to be broken in this world, and I bet it already has at least once or twice, so you might as well have it broken by something that matters. If you’re going to make a fool of yourself, or fail miserably, you might as well do it extravagantly. You might find that you love more, know more, and fail less when you do. Trade in your stunners for a rosier point of view, pursue Shalom instead of happiness, and see where it takes you.

You know that West Wing episode I was going to watch instead of sneaking into an InterVarsity pow-wow? I watched it the other day; it was “Ellie.” Eleanor Bartlet, the president’s second daughter, has angered her father by speaking out on behalf of the Surgeon General who had made a political blunder when she herself hasn’t spoken to him in months. She, called to the carpet of the Oval Office, hides her face with her hair and tells her father: “I never knew how to make you happy.” I can relate. I’m a shy girl who has been taught to talk sense, but never did it very well, so I get a little embarrassed when I talk about trying to be an honest-to-God Christian: I’ve been trying for most of my life and I still don’t really know what I’m doing. I have this awful suspicion that my piece of Peace is just a little too broken to fit back into Shalom. After my roommate, her sister, and I left the meeting, the sister told me that the IV students were going to paint tiles with their ideal of Shalom, and that then they were then going to be ordered to break their beautiful images of Peace. Her sister told us what was going to happen to those dream-shards, but she swore us to secrecy, so I can’t tell you yet. But I can tell you the end of “Ellie.”

At the end of the episode, the president comes into the White House movie theater and sits beside his daughter. He tries to make her laugh, and then he says: “The only thing that you had to do to make me happy was to come home at the end of the day.” Ellie blinks back tears, and so did I. Changing the world and coming home is the same thing. God sees the world as it is and the world as it should be with the same eyes, and maybe someday so can we. Shalom.

* * *

1. To learn more about Bay-UP, check out their page on the IVCF website.
2. To learn more about Lisa Harper.
3. To learn more about how to sneak into InterVarsity events: I can hook you up. It involves those stick-on nametags and whooping appreciatively.