Occasionally you’ll hear a quote that sticks in your mind and you don’t even know why at the time. One such quote for me that I’m thinking of now was something I heard Eugene Peterson say in an interview on Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75. He said, “I’m on a campaign right now to eliminate the word dysfunctional from the church’s life. Because people aren’t dysfunctional, they’re sinners. You can fix a bicycle, but you can’t fix a person.” 

Peterson was trying to weed anti-human language out of his vocabulary. He’s pointing out that “dysfunctional” is a mechanical term, appropriate when referring to machines, but not people. People are not functional or dysfunctional; instead, people are sad, hurting, joyful, tender, sinful, anxious, hilarious and so on. A bicycle needs the right tool, people don’t need the right tool, they need a Savior. 

A further implication is that the words we use carry formative content, they literally in-form, or inwardly form, the way we think and feel about thinking and feeling. In other words, the more accustomed you get to using machine language about people, the more normalized feeling about and thinking of people as machines will become. If we want to relate humanely, we must begin to take care with our words, if we are to take care of our neighbors.  

Yesterday, I was on a walk with a friend, and part of our conversation was about how we feel an incredible pressure to be productive, efficient – to somehow remain in constant and precise motion throughout the course of the day. I said that I spend more time every day than I’d like to admit feeling like a total loser because I’m not accomplishing enough or functioning at a high enough output level. 

The truth is, I have come to realize I’m a relatively low-capacity person. I don’t multitask well. Or at all. I can’t even listen to music and type at the same time. I often get overwhelmed in conversation because I don’t feel able to think on my feet quickly enough. And it’s perpetually on my to-do list to try and make a to-do list. There are folks who seem to breeze through mountains of tasks and maneuver life-circumstances so complex that it wears me out just to imagine it. (Of course, I’m probably just imagining that they breeze through all that.)

My life is relatively simple compared to most, I think. But, simple as it is, it still feels like too much at times.  

In my conversation yesterday, my friend and I asked where the pressure to be more and more and more comes from? Is there some inhumane expectation in place that is crushing us? I think there is, but I don’t think it came out of nowhere, and I don’t think it showed up suddenly. Every moment or movement in the present accumulates out of the material of the past, and has a history. That means, thankfully, that there may have been a time before things were this way, and we may be able to trace how we got here. Often knowing how we got here reveals that we have more options than we may have thought with regard to where we might go from here.  

For now, I’m interested in asking where this pressure to be so high-functioning comes from? How did we come to place expectations on people that only a machine could ever possibly achieve? 

It seems to me that one part of the puzzle is that since the industrial revolution, machine characteristics have captivated the human imagination. Fascination with machine capability and how technology might elevate or serve as an index of human power got in the blood, so to speak, until what people can do became more interesting to us than people. 

And in what must have seemed a harmless habit of metaphor, machine language entered everyday idiom and was more and more applied to people. “She shows up like clockwork.” “He’s clean as a whistle.” “He’s got a screw loose.” But that is a degradation, since machines, though impressive, have no intrinsic life or glory, they are lesser things. People are the more glorious and awesome spectacle. In other words, people are not like machines, as if we were derived from them, instead machines are derivative and lesser: machines are like us. But they are like people in an incredibly narrow sense, merely mechanically. But humans are not mostly or primarily mechanical, we are primarily spiritual. Henri Nouwen says, “Spiritual identity means we are not what we do or what people say about us. And we are not what we have. We are the beloved daughters and sons of God.”

Do you think of yourself primarily in terms of a loving relationship to God? Or is the primarily imaginal resource that our thinking and feeling about our lives conforms to mechanistic? Does the woman feel she must aspire to be like the machine-augmented photoshop image? Does the man feel he must be faster and stronger than a locomotive, a man of steel? Now, I grew up on Superman, and dream regularly of flying, but I’d rather fly like a bird than an airplane, one is closer to the truth of humanity than the other. I’d rather be as handsome as a tuxedoed penguin (and no doubt as silly-looking) than to be as crisp as a new dollar bill. 

That last analogy touches on consumerism, which naturally followed industrialization and mechanical proliferation. The primary pigeon hole for our imaginations these days – part of the conformity St. Paul warns us about in Romans 12 – is the cramming of all the wonder and transcendent glory of a human person into the ledger sheet. Humans must be accounted for like an accountant tallies numbers on a spreadsheet. All quantity and little quality.  

But some things are unaccountable because they count far more than we can measure. The ugly ones, the useless ones, those wasters-of-our-time, the obsolete and out-of-date ones, the inconveniences and idiots – their precious presence cannot be accounted-for by a consumerist, materialistic, or mechanistic imagination. I think I first read it in an Andy Crouch essay, but much of Henri Nouwen’s work centers around it too; I mean the idea that these overlooked areas, these no-account areas, are precisely where we should be looking if there’s any hope of recovering our true humanity. 

Specifically, Crouch and Nouwen point to the mentally handicapped or disabled among us as representatives of God’s Sabbath economy. My brother spent twelve years working at a group home and day-center for adult mentally handicapped, mainly Down’s Syndrome folks, and he can bear witness to the unaccountable value of those friends and the way they serve as flesh and blood ambassadors of the outlandish economy of the Kingdom of God in the midst of this world. They are not highly functional, they do not meet the mechanical expectations, the airbrushed images, nor do they squeeze easily within the ledger lines.  

Crouch and Nouwen suggest that what they offer is something unaccountably rich though; they offer us God’s rest. They offer us God’s rest, because they, like Christian worship, which is equally unaccountable in the world’s terms, remind us what it really means to be a person and a human. Worship is the protected area into which we are commanded to seek refuge from anything that would seek to own and name us other than God’s abiding love in Christ. In God’s presence, we rest from productivity, efficiency, achievements, capability, function or dysfunction, or any dependence on intellect, possessions, or public opinion. We are laid bare in the most relieving of ways when we worship, because all the pressure of the unrealistic machine expectations are laid to rest. We can be beautifully useless, graceful wastes of time, lavishly loved losers, perfectly impractical and endearingly imperfect, marvelously messy and deeply deeply precious. 

A Closing Prayer to be More Human

Lord Jesus, creator and sustainer of human beings, who became one of us yourself. You are God, and yet you are the most human human there ever was. Even now, you are the only one who can teach us to be truly human. Jesus we feel ourselves becoming like the machines that surround us and that take so much of our attention; but we are not machines, and trying to be wears us out and increases our loneliness. Jesus, you taught Martha and Mary that listening was necessary, not busyness. Contentment, not accomplishments. Prayer, not programming. Presence, not productivity. Gracious Lord, on the cross you poured out your very life like Mary’s “wasted” perfume, and showed us how beautiful and precious human life really is. Now you yourself are the Vision of Beauty we long to be untied to and to become like. Lord, may all the things of this world serve that end. Amen.