Leadership Journal

The pop artist Jewel, a young woman in her middle 20s whose albums have sold millions, talked several years ago with Rolling Stone magazine about her motivations. She said, "I'm just a person who is honestly trying to live my life and asking, 'How do you be spiritual and live in the world without going to a monastery?'"

Her question rattled around in my brain, for neither can I move to a monastery. I'm stuck in the suburbs. Some days I fantasize about moving my family from our western Chicago suburb to a small town in the western United States, edged by a rambling stream and cradled in the foothills of a mountain range with a romantic name like the Spanish Peaks. There, we'd live out our days in simplicity and in natural beauty and with few financial anxieties. Life would be fully aligned. Our frenetic life would slow to a manageable pace, and God would be easier to access.

But I know that what glistens in my mind is a phantasm; I know what small towns are like. I grew up in mostly rural communities whose most notable architectural landmarks were the county courthouse and the Tastee-Freez and whose citizens suffered from poverty and isolation. My high school class numbered 17. At least in the North and South Dakota prairie soil in which I was seeded and sprouted, God did not seem nearer because of the environment. And if beauty and solitude are preliminary to the deeper life, then why does the mountain state region have the highest suicide rate in the United States?

While I esteem the saints throughout Christian history who abandoned the cities to draw close to God, most living in the suburbs and cities can't follow them. And despite the best the 'burbs have to offer my family—security, options, and efficiency—I find myself restless, always pursuing, always striving, finding less and less fulfillment. I don't seem to need simply another Bible study or another church service to find soul satisfaction. My faith often seems to have no effect on my anxiety.

In the opening paragraphs of The Message in the Bottle, Walker Percy asked:

Why does man feel so sad in the twentieth century? … Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? Why do people often feel so bad in good environments that they prefer bad environments? … Why is it that a man riding a good commuter train from Larchmont to New York, whose needs and drives are satisfied, who has a good home, loving wife and family, good job, who enjoys unprecedented "cultural and recreational facilities," often feels bad without knowing why?

In The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis points out that nature, for all its staggering beauty, is limited for the seeker of God; natural beauty can't communicate God's truths about salvation and about the contemplative life of following Christ. "Nature cannot satisfy the desires she arouses nor answer theological questions nor sanctify us. Our real journey to God involves constantly turning our backs on her; ...