During the forties and early fifties I was raised in a minister’s home. For several days I’ve pondered over the differences and similarities between our home and the homes of Peru, Indiana. Frankly, I think we were like most Christian families of our community: it would have made little difference to our internal workings or outward relationships if my father had been an auto mechanic instead of a pastor. Dad earned a living, Mom ran the house, and we children went to school, did our household chores, and helped clean the church on Saturdays. Life moved at a steady pace and the church rolled on. My parents’ lives were wrapped up in serving God and providing advantages for us that they themselves had been denied.
This is why Daniel Yankelovich’s book New Rules: Searching for Self-fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down caught my eye. After pointing out that 70 percent of all 1950 households consisted of a working father, a stay-at-home mother, and one or more children, he startled me by saying that this norm has collapsed in a single generation. The “typical American family” now accounts for only 15 percent of all households. There are fewer typical families than there are households consisting of a single person-the fastest-growing category of households reported by the U.S. Census. “In thirty years we have moved from a society dominated by the husband-provider nuclear family to a variegated society with many types of households, none of which predominates.”
What kind of people have we become? “All national surveys show a preoccupation with self,” says Yankelovich. “Seven out of ten Americans (72 percent) spend a great deal of time thinking about themselves and their inner lives-this in a nation once notorious for its impatience with inwardness. We have become a society of individual seekers of self-fulfillment who want to modify life in every one of its 1950’s dimensions-family, career, leisure-the meaning of success, relationships with other people, and relations with oneself.”
What is the fallout created by this massive sociological change? Yankelovich says self-fulfillment seekers deploy defective strategies to achieve their ambitious goals. A typical self-fulfillment strategy presupposes that economic well-being is a citizen’s automatic right guaranteed by the government. But, as the daily headlines remind us, a strategy built on the presumption of an everexpanding affluence is bound to run into trouble even in a country as abundant as ours.
More important, Yankelovich believes most people unwittingly bring a set of flawed psychological premises to their search for self-fulfillment, in particular, the premise that the self is a hierarchy of inner needs, and self-fulfillment an inner journey to discover them.
Among the married people Yankelovich interviewed, those most devoted to self-fulfillment were experiencing the greatest trouble in their marriages. Fulfillment seekers focus so sharply on their own needs that instead of achieving a more intimate, giving relationship, they grow further apart from each other.
“In looking to their own needs for fulfillment,” says Yankelovich “they are caught in a debilitating contradiction: their goal is to expand their lives by reaching beyond self, but the strategy they employ results in constricting their lives, drawing them inward toward an ever-narrowing closed-off ‘I.’ “
It’s hard to imagine what effect today’s cultural flow would have had on our little group of Christian families back in Peru, Indiana. My guess is it wouldn’t make any difference if we had today what we had back then- commitment. Dad was committed to Mom; the folks were committed to the kids; our home was committed to the Lord; and our energies were committed to the church. The idea of individual self-fulfillment in a semi-rural community would have been a contradiction of terms.
With this contradiction in mind, I found myself reviewing a series of sermons, How the World Began, that Helmut Thielicke preached to a West German congregation in the middle 1950s. He asked, “How can I gain the greatest satisfaction in my life? How can I achieve my greatest development and get the maximum from my potentialities?”
Thielicke goes on to say, “Now, for me, it is of utmost importance to make it absolutely clear that it is gravely wrong to put these questions in this way. Why? These questions emanate from the assumption that I stand alone in the world. I conceive of myself, so to speak, as an organism, or- to speak in Goethean terms-‘as a molded form,’ which is supposed to develop in a living way and be brought to fullest possible development.
“Now, over against this view, the Scriptures present the word of the Creator: ‘It is not good that man should be alone.’ It is not good, therefore, that he should be a self-contained organism which proceeds to develop itself; he must rather have a vis-a-vis, a partner, a companion, a thou.
“And here the Scripture touches on one of the fundamental mysteries of our life. It is remarkable-and this has become my personal conviction, confirmed at every step of the way by life itself-that I do not attain the greatest possible development of my personality when I consciously try to develop myself, when I am constantly considering, ‘Where will I have the best chance to live life to the fullest? How can I reach the maximum accomplishment, and where can I experience the greatest pleasure?’ On the contrary, I arrive at this fulfillment of my personality and my life as a whole when I do not think about it at all; but rather, when I forget myself and devote myself to someone else or something else.
“I once knew two elderly sisters. One of them was the mother of a family who seemed to have within her all the fullness of life. She had poured out her life in service to her family, sacrificed herself for them, and in the process she had become a living, vital person who had developed all that was within her to an amazing extent.
“Her sister, on the other hand, was a highly cultivated spinster who thought of nothing but the development of her person, and had absorbed all the benefits culture could provide. It was she, the very person who sought development, who had made her person an end in itself, who seemed dried up and unfulfilled compared with her sister who had forgotten herself and lived for others.”
Commitment to others and the forgetting of ourselves. This is the message taught me at my mother’s knee: God so loved us that he committed himself to others in an incomprehensible way to achieve their redemption.
Between now and New Year’s Eve, I plan to do a lot of thinking and praying about the subject of commitment. I’m developing a self-evaluation survey, which so far includes the following questions:
To what degree have I and the members of my family bought into the illusions of searching for selffulfillment?
How committed am I to God? To what degree do I love him, try to glorify him, and enjoy him?
How commited am I to my spouse? To her growth, development, and achievement? How committed am I to our marriage, whatever comes?
How committed am I to my children? Do I see them as personal possessions, or as significant others who rank first in my responsibilities?
To what degree am I committed to ministry and the call of Jesus? What is my most honest answer when I hear him say, “Lovest thou me? Feed my sheep,”?
Do I really believe that “whosoever wants to save his life will lose it,” and “whosoever loses his life for Christ’s sake will save it”?
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