Trevor Laurence
Pause. Take a deep breath. Remember that the Lord loves you.
These are the words I spoke to my child as her agitation over her inability to quickly finish a puzzle began to boil over into a kind of frenetic frustration. In that moment, I wanted to lift her eyes from the enraging disappointment of an unaccomplished goal to a more comprehensive truth, to recontextualize her perceived failure within a reality defined by abundant love and grace and good gifts from God, to confront her with the promise that her fundamental identity and value as beloved are received from outside of her rather than being contingent upon her immediate successes.
And—as happens quite often in my experience—I saw in my child a miniature model of myself, and I heard in my words to her a remedy that my own heart desperately needed.
For weeks upon weeks now, the instabilities and uncertainties of life amid a pandemic have interrupted my aspirations of productivity. School closures, childcare audibles, the effort required to shift life into a socially-distanced key, the malaise of isolation, the exhaustion of sorrow, and the unpredictability of every new day have all combined to make even the simplest of normal tasks feel like an act of heroism. And in this context, what would at other times be typical inconveniences exhibit a far greater disruptive potential: an emergency home repair demands money and time already in short supply; a minor stomach bug raises the specter of quarantine. For others, pay cuts, layoffs, prolonged illness, and the loss of loved ones have fractured life as it was once known and introduced all manner of emotional burdens, urgent responsibilities, and practical challenges that necessarily take precedence and thus demand that other significant tasks be left undone.
My experience during this pandemic has been no worse than most and far easier than many, and yet with every new interruption, I have felt my low-grade frustration intensify until at times I am stewing in the sophisticated adult version of a child’s tantrum. And this is in part because my inability to accomplish during this season has threatened a deep and dangerous source of my sense of self and security that I could previously afford to overlook. I trust I am not alone.
The shape of modern life enables and encourages maximal productivity. The various technologies that are woven into the fabric of our lives make it possible to communicate, coordinate, travel, gather information, learn new skills, analyze data, multitask, complete complex projects, and publicly advertise our successes with startling efficiency.
But as the possibilities for productivity have expanded (a blessing, to be sure!), so have the expectations. In a context where we seemingly possess the capacity to be always producing—and to be seen always producing—and where we are surrounded by others always producing, we experience a discernible pressure to never stop doing, a pressure that is simultaneously economic, social, and existential. Our liturgies of productivity, the often unreflective practices of everyday life that pursue and embody and celebrate maximally efficient output, train us to live and love and conceive of ourselves in production-oriented terms.
Of course, COVID-19 has knocked the feet out from under our efficiency enterprise. For many, the productivity that once was normal is now an utter impossibility—circumstances simply won’t allow that kind of output—but the internal pulls cultivated over years of unconscious formation persist as strongly as ever. Molded to chase and value productive potency, shaped by all sorts of innocuous practices to ground our identity and measure our value by our tangible achievements, we have a cultivated internal compulsion to keep on producing as we did before, and our inability to do so can be alternatingly enraging and depressing, like we are almost losing ourselves.
The pandemic, however, also presents an opportunity to lift our eyes, to enter into a new and better reality, to be confronted with a promise that affords us an identity received from the outside rather than a manufactured one that is always contingent upon our successes. Here, we may and must recover our humanity, with all of its limitations, and in so doing rediscover the freedom that comes from humbly embracing creaturely finitude and finding rest in the God who gives as a gift the meaning we chase in our production.
One way we might counter the formative potency of our everyday liturgies of productivity—some of which may be unavoidable, but all of which merit careful reevaluation—and begin to unwind their hold on our hearts and imaginations is by structuring our lives around new liturgical practices, which are actually old liturgical practices: the ordinary practices of faith.
Prayer, meditation on Scripture, fasting, psalm- and hymn-singing, Sabbath, corporate worship and its culmination at the Lord’s Table—these practices do not operate according to the logic of efficiency. They are not intended to accomplish something immediately, to render quantifiable results in the quickest manner possible. They are not productive in the normal sense of the word but involve ceasing from production in order to prioritize the inefficient work of communion.
Though such practices may very well nourish us instantly, they often bring transformation in ways that are almost indiscernible in the moment and only revealed across years. They are an embodied rebuke of the culture of hyper-productivity, holy “wastes of time” that witness to and prepare us for a more blessed way of being.
The liturgies of faith thus require and cultivate patience. They practice pausing the technologically-mediated rhythms of the production-oriented life in order to intentionally speak, listen, and worship before God, and in this way they may help to break the addiction of performative productivity. They interrupt our delusions of omnipotence with a pursuit of growth the results of which lie outside of our control. And they embed in us a new basic posture toward life: confronting us over and over again with the grace of God in the gospel, the practices of faith teach us that, rather than being producers whose identities depend upon incessant achievement, we are fundamentally receivers whose identities have been gifted to us in Christ and who move through the world in open-handed dependence upon the faithful goodness of God.
Among the many things we might learn in this season, the pandemic has revealed that we must attend not only to those idolatries that are obviously destructive but also to the idolatries that, in our culture, are quite easy to get away with.
For a long time prior to COVID-19, one could unwittingly organize life around the idols of productivity, efficiency, and achievement, always adopting new methods and tools for maximizing output, without many glaring adverse effects. With help from the dominant cultural narrative, we could frame our bondage as virtue and its evidences as merely the price of industriousness in a busy world, and ever-updating technological capabilities permitted us to stretch ourselves further and further—to continue increasing our efficiency and to experience the temporary jolts of significance that come from doing so much and that make the striving seem worthwhile.
In all likelihood, whether in months or years, our lives will return to “normal,” and we will once again find ourselves in a context that provides safe cover for our production addictions—and the steady stream of novel technologies promising to optimize our every endeavor shows no sign of slowing.
But we have seen that, in God’s providence, something so small as a microscopic virus can turn the world upside-down and leave us at the mercy of our distortedly habituated hearts. For my part, in the midst of all the lamentable losses of this season, if this moment exposes the pretense and unsustainability of life as I knew it and propels me into communion with the God who gives me himself and my self, it will have been a hard season mixed with deep mercy.
Pause. Take a deep breath. Remember that the Lord loves you.
This article originally appeared in the September 2020 edition of the Cateclesia Newsletter, a free monthly correspondence that includes a letter from the Executive Director, the latest articles and updates from Cateclesia, and curated resources to help foster biblical imagination.
Trevor Laurence is the Executive Director of the Cateclesia Institute
Image: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Saint Jerome Writing