"Get a Life!"

“You’ve gotta open yourself up to one another in a respectable way…you learn life by getting involved...it takes two to make war, but two to make peace...” -Roy, modern day prophet

“Get a life!” This is an expression of my generation that means something different than what it actually says. We use the expression when we see someone being peculiarly particular, fixated on something that we see as silly or senseless. Yet the committed fools whom we sling the admonishment toward actually have a life in their “petty” little fascinations. What we really are disgusted about is not the person’s not having a life, but the type of life he is leading. What is really meant by the expression is “Get a new life!”

Yet there is an even deeper goofiness to the expression and its use. The folks typically using the expression are disgusted not by the particular life that the committed fool is leading, but are actually concerned that he has a life. Because the normative claim conveyed by the popular notion of the expression is “cast aside your idle curiosities and be free of your commitments—for such is living.” And that is the goofy thing. “Be free and live,” is a very accurate statement; however, the modern take on freedom is license—do whatever. Therefore, what the expression is really saying is “be licentious and live.” Gee, thanks for the advice.

“Be free and live,” is accurate when freedom is properly understood as carrying with it not only certain rights but corresponding duties and responsibilities. There seems to be a general confusion about what it means to have a life. To be living is to be bound. It was C.S. Lewis who made the apt observation that everyone is ultimately possessed by either God or the Devil. Our lives are not our own exclusively, and when we take the steps toward making them exclusively our own, we cease to be alive. Living is a product of commitments—the things we are living for and giving ourselves to. Have you ever noticed that when you have made every effort to “keep your options open” that all you wind up doing is sitting around alone and wondering what to do? You possess your life at precisely that moment—and with all that pride of ownership you discover that you are alone and have nothing to do and nobody is seeking you out because you’ve made it clear you are not willing to share yourself with anyone.

Communion is the source of life—communion means we must be willing to give and take—to give ourselves and to take others’ lives into our own. It is one of the befuddling beauties of Christian mystery and paradox that we only possess a life when we are willing to divest ourselves of that life. We gain when we lose, we get when we give, we are filled when we are emptied, we are free when we are fettered. Getting a life is not a matter of loosing yourself and keeping your options open. It is precisely a matter of eliminating your options—of having something very particular and peculiar to live for—not yourself, but the Other. We find ourselves in them—we discover who we are and where we start only at the moment when we recognize that they begin. Relationships—these are what give us (our) life because they give us (other) lives—they entrust others to us, giving us responsibilities and duties.

Too, we find our meaning not only when we are in communion with others, but when we are communion with other things. When we have the opportunity to give meaning to “stuff,” by putting our energy and care into “things,” we find meaning in our lives. That is the bizarre reason that we must get involved, we must seek out commitments, things to pour ourselves into. Trying to remain unmoored is simply the recipe for waywardness, not definitiveness.

It is a rude and unsavory action to rotate gifts you have been given to gifts you will give. We all think of the junk trinket some great-aunt got us that we hate and we keep it until next year when we’ll give it away and make it someone else’s problem. Yet this is precisely what we are asked to do with our lives. The distinction to be made between our lives and the trinket we rotate to the next year’s unsuspecting fool is that our lives actually matter, they have meaning, and they are not junk. The Lord gave you an infinitely valuable gift when He gave you your life. In giving that gift of your life to another person or to this world through work is infinitely valuable.

But God doesn’t even stop there with the unfashionable requests when it comes to gift-etiquette. The only other lynchpin about gift-giving norms, is that you make it a gift—which means you don’t ask for it back. We call these folks “Indian Givers,” and it is not a term of affection. Yet that is exactly what God does. He gives and then He wants it back. He actually initiates the rotation of the same gift He gave you from yourself to others with the intention of it finally rotating it back to Himself. Clearly, His thought are not our thoughts, because this is not at all what gift-giving is supposed to be like...right?! Wrong.

We may be wholly confused about why He does this elaborate gift-exchange and we may wonder if it is even really gift-giving if it is not ours (exclusively). After all, it is not ours, so what of all this craziness and hassle?! What does it mean?! It means Life. It is from the chaos that we come to find order. It is only when we lose ourselves that we know not only what we are, but what we can be; when we move outside of ourselves we are forced to unpack all the talents, gifts, strength, shortcomings, weaknesses and limits that the Lord gave us in the gift of our life. We cannot know the infinite value of who we are (and who we are not) until we inventory it for the world of people and things that anxiously seek to know us. And this world so anxious for you—your life—they don’t want to read a biography, but they want the whole thing, not to know by possessing facts, but to know by possessing you, particularly and wholly. They will come to have you by forming relationships and commitments with you. They will invite you be involved in their lives in meaningful ways, wanting to give to you as they seek to take from you. Life is what happens when we participate in this self-emptying gift-exchange. So, please, stop cowering behind non-commitment and, “Get a life!”