Why Do We?

Why Do We?

July 14, 2020

It’s one of my favorite passages in the Bible, although for some reason it startles me every time I read it:

Ho, everyone who thirsts,

       come to the waters;

       and you that have no money,

              come, buy and eat!

Come buy wine and milk

       without money and without

              price.

Why do you spend your money

              for that which is not bread,

       and your labor for that which

              does not satisfy? Isaiah 55:1-2a.

Those profound words come to us from the mid-sixth century BCE, over twenty-five hundred years ago from an otherwise unknown prophet scholars call Second Isaiah, yet they sound like they could have come from some wise sage only yesterday. They originally spoke to ancient Hebrew people in forced exile and captivity in Babylon, but they speak to us today as powerfully as they did to those people so very long ago. They speak to what used to be a major issue in my life. They speak to what is a major issue in the life of my country. When I think back on my life, in particular my work life, I see that I have lived most of my life spending my labor for that which does not satisfy. I won’t go into all of the details, and I don’t say any of this because I think anyone who doesn’t know it needs to know it. I’ll share a bit of my story here because I think it is a good illustration of that major issue in the life of my country.

I  have trained professionally for three careers in my life although I’ve only practiced two of them to any meaningful extent. My first intended career was in academics. I earned a PhD in Russian history at the University of Washington under the supervision of one of the top scholars in the field. I don’t know whether a career in academics, following in my father’s footsteps as a history professor, would have satisfied my psychologically or spiritually or not. When I got my PhD in 1977 there were no real jobs available for historians of imperial Russia. Well, there were two. I applied for both and got neither. Clearly I had to find other work.

So I went to law school. I practiced law from 1981 until 2003, with the last year of that time overlapping with my next career. I’ll spare you all the gory details. I’ll just say that at first I loved it. I remember walking through downtown Seattle as a newly minted baby lawyer and finding it all so exciting I could hardly believe I was there. I worked for three different downtown law firms. I made partner at none of them, I was getting nowhere with downtown law firms, but I thought that was their mistake not mine. I still thought of myself as a lawyer. Looking back on those times I can see that I should have realized that I needed to be doing something else, but that thought never occurred to me at the time. So in 1992 I opened my own law office in the Seattle suburb of Edmonds. I set about trying to build a practice as the Law Office of Thomas C. Sorenson.

At first it went OK, partly because I got work from a couple of those downtown law firms I had worked for. All that began to change in 1994. I began having great difficulty doing the law work I had to do, and I didn’t know why. A Presbyterian minister I had gotten to know when he served as the interim minister of the United Church of Christ church I attended had also been a Jungian analyst. He gave me a book that described a kind of inner work called active imagination. You sit with some way to write, clear your mind, and ask yourself questions about whatever it is that is bothering you. For some reason you’re supposed to write down your questions and the answers you get. I tried it. Sitting in my law office I asked myself why I was having so much trouble doing my legal work. Immediately, with no time having passed in which I could have thought about an answer, the answer came booming out of my subconscious: “You’re not a lawyer!” I was shocked. What was it deep within me that was telling me I wasn’t a lawyer? Of course I was a lawyer. I was a member of the Washington State Bar Association, WSBA No. 11977. I was sitting in an office that said Law Office of Thomas C. Sorenson on the door. I had legal work in my file cabinet. Not a lot of legal work, but some. That voice from deep within me kept telling me I wasn’t a lawyer.

So I asked: “What am I?” Again the answer came booming back so fast I couldn’t possibly have created it consciously: “You’re a preacher!” I was shocked. Preacher wasn’t even a word I used. I belonged to a church and I had actually preached there once; but I called the ordained person there a minister or a pastor but not a preacher. It should have dawned on me right there and then that I was spending my labor for that which did not satisfy, although I doubt that I had ever read Isaiah at that point in my life. It didn’t dawn on me at all. I gave up and went back to trying to do my legal work, all without any noticeable success.

By early 1997 I had become essentially nonfunctional. My daughter, then in high school but already very wise, diagnosed me as clinically depressed, a diagnosis that a psychiatrist I then saw confirmed. I took antidepressant drugs and kept trying to practice law with ever diminishing success. In February, 1997 I started seeing a Jungian analyst that that Presbyterian minister I mentioned had recommended to me back in 1994. For reasons I’ll never understand I still had that analyst’s card in my wallet. I still have sessions with him today more than twenty years later. He knew what my problem was well before I did, and over the next few months he helped me see that my time as a lawyer was at an end. No matter what the difficulties might be I had to find something else to do with my life. Even as I started to realize that truth I said over and over again “You’re too old and you can’t afford it.” My analyst helped me realize that while those things may have been true they just didn’t matter.

I see now that my subconscious had been right back in 1994. I had a law degree. I’d even graduated in the top ten percent of my class. I had more than twenty years of legal experience. I had been a good, competent lawyer though never a great one. I didn’t have any other work I could do. I turned fifty in 1996, and I wasn’t making any money. All of that was true, but there was a deeper truth that I had been avoiding and resisting for years. Lawyering was for me work that did not satisfy. It did not satisfy because it clashed with who I really am. The result of my insisting on lawyering was total burnout and moderately severe clinical depression. I kept fantasizing about getting on my motorcycle, driving east until I ran out of gas, then just sitting there until the end came. I had hit bottom both personally and as a lawyer.

I closed my law office at the end of July, 1997, and in September of that year I entered the Master of Divinity program at Seattle University. Not long after that I started the approval for ordination process in the United Church of Christ. I wasn’t sure why. I just knew I had to be there. My wife, sadly since deceased, asked me how I was going to pay for it. Private universities like Seattle U are very expensive. I said I didn’t know. I said I’d go into debt if I had to, and I did go into debt. I found halftime work as a lawyer in a legal services office in central Seattle defending low income tenants in eviction cases. That at last was law that at least on occasion satisfied because it was working with real people with real problems that sometimes I could actually help. In my time at Seattle U I discovered at long last who I really am. I stopped doing work that did not satisfy. In 2002 I began my third career, this time as a parish pastor in the United Church of Christ. I have grieved deeply the death of my first wife since then, but I haven’t been depressed. I even stopped taking antidepressant medication.

I’ll say again that I tell this story here not because I think anyone who doesn’t know it needs to know it but because I think it is a good example of one of the foundational dynamics of American life today. I burned out and became depressed because I insisted on doing work that my culture honored but that did not satisfy. My country suffers cultural clinical depression because so many of us live our lives spending our money for that which is not bread and our labor for that which does not satisfy. Here are some of the ways in which our dominant white American culture drives us to do it though we would be far healthier psychologically and spiritually if we didn’t.

For our entire lives advertising tells us that our only purpose for living is to buy products whether we need them or not so that other people can make money. We live in a consumer economy and a consumer culture in which personal value is measured more by net financial worth than by anything else. Our culture tells us from the moment we’re born that the highest good is to have the fattest bank account, the biggest house, and the most expensive car. Perhaps it is still more true for us men than it is for women, but we’re all told our whole lives that our goal in life is to “get ahead.” To get ahead means to rise up the hierarchy of whatever institution we work in be that institution commercial, professional, educational, military, or of any other sort. We feel pressure to “succeed” in whatever work we do even if that work is soul killing, as so much work in the modern economy is. Consume! Produce! Succeed! That’s the message we get from our culture from our first breath to our last. It is a message that kills the spirit and stunts the soul. It gets most of us doing work that simply does not satisfy.

As our culture asserts its materialistic values it deprecates spiritual values at the same time. Few of us attend church, synagogue, mosque, or other religious institution much any more except perhaps for weddings and funerals. Don’t waste your time in school studying literature, music art, history, or religion we’re told. Study science, not because you love science or because science can be a very good thing in its own right as we are all learning anew in this time of coronavirus pandemic but because it will help you get that job at which you will be so pressured to succeed. At university we’re told don’t major in history of English, major in business administration. Not because it will feed your soul (which it almost certainly will not) but because it is practical and will help you get a job of which your culture approves, namely one devoted to physical production and making money.

There are other ways in which we spend our money for that which is not bread and our labor for that which does not satisfy. We glamorize the military and encourage young men and women to make a career there all the while not quite mentioning the fact that the purpose of the military is to kill people and destroy property. We make idols of entertainment and sports stars while failing to recognize that they do nothing constructive in their careers except provide a little amusement, the circuses part of our bread and circuses. We make idols of the super-wealthy and allow millions of our fellow Americans to go hungry, homeless, and without decent educations or medical care. None of these things truly satisfy. They all contribute to our cultural clinical depression.

There’s another way that our culture kills spirits that Isaiah didn’t mention but that is immensely destructive among us. We tell our selves lies and convince ourselves that they are true. We say tax cuts for the wealthy help everyone. They don’t, and it’s obvious that they don’t. They help the wealthy who don’t need help and dry up government resources for people who do need help. We say the American military exists to defend our freedom. It doesn’t, not primarily anyway. It exists to assert American power around the world, which is hardly the same thing as defending our freedom. We say we are the greatest nation on earth. We aren’t. Many other nations (starting close to home with our neighbor to the north) do a far better job than we do of caring for their people while still preserving the civil liberties that we think are unique to us when they aren’t. All of this kills souls and keeps a spirit-quashing system in place and in power. There are so many ways in which we Americans spend our money for that which is not bread and our labor for that which does not satisfy.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Some of us, not nearly enough but some, have broken away from work that does not satisfy and found work that does. I did it when I left the law and became an ordained Christian minister. Others have done it by becoming teachers or artists, leaders of charitable foundations or social justice organizations. Yes, we all have to earn a living, but we don’t have to kill our souls working to earn more than we need the way so many of us do. We don’t have live the lie that mere material success produces a worthwhile life. Of course we all need a certain level of physical wellbeing, but we don’t have to deny the spiritual aspects of life to get it. We can remember that a full, complete life is full spiritually not just materially. We can remember or discover for the first time that God is real and wants fullness of life for everyone. We can overcome our selfish egos and work for the wellbeing of others. We can pray. We can learn to appreciate the finer things of life—music, art, literature, knowledge, faith. There are so many ways in which we can be so much better satisfied than most of us are.

So I ask you what I long asked myself and what the great prophet Second Isaiah asked all of us so many centuries ago: Why do we spend our money for that which is not bread and our labor for that which does not satisfy? There are no good answers to that question, only bad ones. Our nation wallows in ignorance, intolerance, hatred, and spiritual malaise. We do so because we keep spending our money for that which is not bread and our labor for that which does not satisfy. We don’t have to. Better lives can be had. All it takes is for us to wake up, to start buying bread not dust, to do work that truly satisfies the soul at the deepest levels. We don’t have to spend our money for that which is not bread and our labor for that which does not satisfy. So let’s all stop it, shall we?