Why It's Good to Be Useless

Jo came home a few weeks ago from the St Peter’s book room, a Christian book shop attached to St Peter’s Eastern Hill. She bought me two Henri Nouwen devotionals which she found in the bargain bin. In one of the books Out of Solitude I came across an argument which has stuck with me around the merits of being useless. 

Nouwen tells a story borrowed from the Taoist tradition. A carpenter and his apprentice are walking through a forest when they come across an enormous old tree, tall and gnarled and beautiful. The carpenter stops and asks his apprentice whether he knows why this tree has lived so long. The apprentice has no idea.

"Because it is useless," says the carpenter. 

Its wood is no good for furniture. If it had been useful, someone would have cut it down years ago and turned it into tables and chairs. Nobody bothered. So it kept growing, and now its branches spread wide enough for people to sit underneath in the shade.

Nobody wants to be called useless. Most of us spend a great deal of energy trying to be the opposite. And fair enough! Wanting to be useful is a good instinct. We want to help our families, do our jobs well, care for people, fix what's broken and improve our neighbourhood. 

Christians have extra reasons. Jesus calls us to serve. The New Testament says our gifts are given for the good of others. A life spent entirely on yourself is nobody's idea of discipleship.

But usefulness also casts a shadow. The shadow falls when one question takes charge of everything: what is this for?

We ask it of our time. What did I get done today? We ask it of education. Where will this lead? We ask it of hobbies. Am I getting better? We even ask it of sleep, which many of us now track on our wrists so we can perform tomorrow. Before long, everything in a life has to earn its keep.

The grown-up version

That question has a grown-up version in moral philosophy, and the family resemblance is right there in the name. Utilitarianism says we should judge an action by its consequences: by its utility. The right choice is the one that produces the greatest overall good for everyone affected.

There is a lot to like about that. Consequences matter. Christians should care a great deal about whether our decisions relieve suffering or add to it.

Australia's best-known utilitarian is Peter Singer, and he is worth taking seriously. He asks us to imagine walking past a shallow pond where a child is drowning. Of course you would wade in, even if it ruined your expensive shoes. So why do we baulk at comparatively small sacrifices that would save the lives of children far away? It is a confronting question and a good one. Singer has lived it, too, giving away a large share of his income over many years.

Follow the same logic further, though, and it arrives somewhere troubling. Singer explicitly rejects the traditional "sanctity of life" ethic. What counts morally, he argues, is the capacity to suffer and, when it comes to the wrongness of killing, a sense of oneself as existing through time. A newborn doesn't yet have that. So Singer has argued that when parents and doctors conclude it would be better for a severely disabled baby to die, actively ending the baby's life can in some circumstances be permissible, rather than merely withdrawing treatment. In fairness, he now says he is reconsidering parts of his earlier account.

These are serious arguments and they deserve more than outrage. They also show what happens when "what is this for?" becomes the only question. Once the goal is to maximise wellbeing overall, a person becomes a kind of container for wellbeing, and containers can be compared. One life can be weighed against another according to capacities, interests and outcomes.

Christianity starts somewhere else. It says the child in the pond matters because she is a child, made in the image of God, before anyone has calculated anything. Her dignity comes before her intelligence, her independence, her productivity, or her ability to add to anyone else's happiness. The newborn, the person with profound disability, the woman with advanced dementia and the high-achieving adult all stand on exactly the same ground. None of them has to prove their usefulness to keep their place among us.

Pharaoh's question

Most of us will never read a philosophy textbook. The softer version of the same instinct gets to us anyway. We judge institutions by what they produce, days by what we accomplished, relationships by what they give us. Eventually we judge people by what they contribute, and the person we judge most harshly is usually ourselves.

The Bible knows this world well. It is called Egypt. In Egypt you are worth the number of bricks you make, and when Israel asks for a few days off to worship, Pharaoh has his answer ready: "Lazy, that's what you are." (Exodus 5:60-9). Then he takes away their straw and keeps the quota exactly where it was.

So it is striking that when God gives his freed people the Sabbath, he ties it to that memory. "Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there." (Deuteronomy 5:15). One day in seven, Israel was to produce nothing at all. The Sabbath was a weekly declaration that they were no longer slaves, and that their worth had never depended on the bricks.

We have mostly lost the habit. Sit on a park bench for half an hour and do nothing, and you will start to feel that you ought to be somewhere else. Take a walk without a podcast and it can feel like a wasted opportunity. Even prayer gets recruited as a technique for becoming calmer, wiser or more effective.

Nouwen noticed all this decades before smartphones and fitness trackers. He saw modern people treating life as a scoreboard, with accomplishments to list, comparisons to make, and always another level to reach. His real interest was what the scoreboard does to us. When everything must be useful, we grow possessive about results. We defend what we have built. Other people turn into rivals or judges. Failure becomes terrifying, and success is hardly better, because yesterday's success is tomorrow's expectation.

Nouwen's remedy was solitude. He found it in Jesus.

The barbecue question

At any party, the second thing people ask you is "So, what do you do?" It comes straight after your name, and it is really the same question. We are asking who you are.

For forty years most of us have an answer ready. I'm a teacher. I'm a nurse. I run a plumbing business. Then one Friday there are speeches and a cake, and on Monday the answer is gone. "I used to be a teacher." Listen to the grammar of that. People who have retired will tell you how strange it feels to say aloud. Plenty reach instead for "Oh, I'm busier than ever," which is a way of assuring everyone, themselves included, that they are still useful.

We prepare for retirement as a financial event. Hardly anyone asks whether we have enough self to retire on. If I am what I do, then the day I stop doing it I become nobody, and a lot of people feel exactly that, six months in, on an ordinary Tuesday with nothing in it that requires them.

The Christian answer was given long before the career began. In baptism we are named as God's children before we have achieved anything, and for many of us it happened when we couldn't hold up our own heads. "See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!" That identity was handed to us when we were no use to anyone. Retirement can't take it away, because employment never supplied it.

Jesus disappears

Mark 1 describes an extraordinary day in Capernaum. Jesus teaches and heals, and by evening the whole town has gathered at the door. His reputation is spreading. Any modern organisation would recognise this as momentum. This is when you expand the program, recruit volunteers and capitalise on the opportunity.

Instead, "very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed."

Eventually Simon tracks him down, and you can hear the exasperation: "Everyone is looking for you!"

Of course they are. There is work to do. And for a few hours Jesus has been unavailable. The sick have waited. The disciples have waited. Measured by output, the Son of God has spent the morning being remarkably unproductive.

Notice what comes next. Jesus doesn't go back to Capernaum. "Let us go somewhere else," he says, "to the nearby villages, so I can preach there also. That is why I have come." Everyone had a use for him. In the dark, in prayer, he had recovered his freedom from all of them, and he knew again what he was for.

He had heard it earlier in the same chapter. At his baptism, a voice from heaven said, "You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased." In Mark's Gospel, Jesus has done nothing yet. There hasn't been a sermon or a healing, and no crowd has gathered. The Father's delight comes first, and the work flows out of it. Jesus was beloved before he was useful.

I suspect this is why solitude is hard for us. To become unavailable is to discover that we are dispensable. Most of us like being needed, at least a little. There is comfort in the email only I can answer, the problem that needs my expertise, the person who wants my advice. Being needed gives shape to our days, and over time it starts to tell us who we are.

Solitude interrupts that. For a little while you are no use to anyone, and the world carries on.

This is one of the gifts of prayer. In prayer our usefulness stops mattering for a while. We come before God with nothing to show. We don't have to fix anybody. We don't even have to pray well. We are simply there, and there we begin to learn what Nouwen was pointing to: life is received before it is used.

Why this waste?

The whole creation says the same thing. God did not need a world. He made one because he delighted to. Jesus points to lilies that neither labour nor spin. He welcomes children who can contribute nothing to his mission. He goes to weddings, lingers over meals and walks with his friends.

Then, in Mark 14, a woman breaks open a jar of perfume worth more than a year's wages and pours the lot over his head. The disciples are appalled, and their objection could have come straight from an ethics seminar. "Why this waste? It could have been sold and the money given to the poor." By any calculation, they are right.

Jesus says, "Leave her alone. She has done a beautiful thing to me."

He isn't brushing the poor aside. You can help them any time you want, he says, and he plainly expects his followers to do so. But he refuses to let love be put through the calculator. Some things are good simply because they are beautiful and because they are given. Grace is like that. It is gloriously inefficient. God gives before we can repay, and he gives far more than the job requires.

So we need some useless things in our lives, because they remind us what sort of world God has made. Music that earns no money. Gardens that feed nobody. Long dinners that achieve nothing. Painting badly. Sitting in the sun. The conversation that keeps going long after the useful part is over. A church that spends an evening praying when it could have held another meeting. 

And an enormous old tree that was spared because nobody could think what to do with it.

The shade

There is an irony in the story, of course. The useless tree turns out to be useful after all. It gives shade.

Be careful with that, though. The shade was never the plan. Nobody planted the tree for it and nobody measures it. The moment we say "rest, because rest makes you more productive," we have handed the tree back to the carpenter. The shade came because the tree was left alone to become itself.

People are like that. Some kinds of goodness only grow where nobody is trying to extract a result. Friendships deepen when no one is networking. Prayer gets honest when we give up chasing a spiritual experience. Children play for hours without once asking what it will achieve. A person with profound disabilities can teach a whole congregation to receive presence as a gift. The elderly saint in the third row, who can "do" less every year, may be holding up more of the church than the rest of us realise.

So here is a modest spiritual discipline. Waste some time.

Find a solitary place. Leave the phone at home. Sit under a tree. Pray if you can, and if you can't, sit in silence. Resist the urge to turn it into an achievement.

The world will manage without you for a while.

And God will still be there.