The Spiritual Practice of Shopping

Before I (Ben) worked in retail, I was a youth minister for four years at a Presbyterian church in Pittsburgh. Moving from one to the other as I did, I was struck by the similarities between ministry and retail. Both are, in part, about service and meeting people’s needs. Both, in another sense, are about marketing; the examples are obvious in retail, but a church must also craft and present a message to its audience in the hopes of making a transaction. The language is different (the phrase “seeker sensitive” may be the closest hybrid of ministry and retail, with its nuanced understanding of both a message to pitch and a specific demographic to target) but the means are similar. You have needs: we can meet them. This is not to say that ministry is one big sales pitch with a gloss of holy-sounding spin. It is to say that a church which fails to care for and fill the needs of its members will fail just like any business would.

What five years in retail have taught me is that Christians need work on the spiritual practice of shopping. Ask anyone who works in retail or the restaurant business when his or her least favorite day of the week is, and many will say Sunday when church lets out. Are these highly visible shoppers — billboards for all of Christendom in their Sunday best — symptomatic of all Christians? Yes and no. Yes because Christians believe we all in some small, imperfect way are representatives of Christ, and to take that lightly would be to miss the point. And no because you can’t blame everyone for a few bad apples. But I’ve had enough firsthand experiences to know it’s not just a few bad apples.

I’ll give a non-retail example first. My dad is a pediatrician and my mom a nurse, and they work together in the same family practice. My mom also works as a receptionist a few days of the week, so she’s on the front lines answering the phones. When she answers she gives her name, Donna, but not the last name. Once a member of our home church, who sits on a committee with both my parents and cheerfully greets them every Sunday, called to complain about missing an appointment for her child. My mom recognized who the caller was but did not identify herself. The caller said it was not her fault she had been unable to keep a previous appointment and that she should not have been inconvenienced to reschedule and furthermore that she knows Dr. Vore and that he would not be pleased with how my mom was obstructing her access to him, and could she speak to someone higher up who wasn’t a lowly receptionist? This begs the question: What disconnect happened in this woman’s life that someone she worships with on Sunday is the same person she can belittle and bully on Monday?

Now, we are all hypocrites. No one can escape the gap between actions and words. We all have a bad day, or an outburst we regret, or comments we wish we could take back. And Christianity is insistent on the matter of forgiveness.

It’s also, to come back to retail, about serving one another. Yet we have a culture that encourages us to think of people who serve us as disposable. They are here to meet our needs, to give us what we want. If what we want is unreasonable, there is the unspoken assumption that superior customer service will go out of its way to meet the unreasonable. 

There is a legendary customer service parable, possibly apocryphal, about a man who returned a tire to Nordstrom’s. As the story goes, Nordstrom accepted the return despite the fact they don’t sell tires. The moral: Win the customer by going above and beyond what’s normal for what’s exceptional. That is undoubtedly good advice for world class customer service. But it also reinforces “The customer is always right” when it’s more accurate to say, “The customer is sometimes lying, pushy, condescending and simply wrong, but he’s still a customer.”* Where is the line between accommodating a customer and getting walked over? How do you provide great customer service yet not enable abusive customer behavior? And how do you meet exceptional needs and hold a standard that is still fair but (one hopes) profitable?

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But back to Christians and shopping. Since you never hear a sermon about how to shop, let me offer a few, humble suggestions for Christians to consider when they’re pushing around a shopping cart. (Of course, we think these suggestions are good advice for everyone, regardless of spiritual beliefs. But the point is that Christians talk about being a light on a hill and spreading good news to all the world, which is what we’re called to do, yet some seem to conveniently forget that this applies as much at your local shop as it does in, say, Africa. And if we really care what people think about the church — which we should — then one segment of people who definitely need to be won over are those of us in retail.)

Enough throat-clearing.

1. The people working in retail are people. Some are Christians too. Whether they are or not doesn’t matter. Treat them with respect. (When Jesus said “Love thy neighbor” he meant everyone, and just to be clear he said your enemies are your neighbors too.) Don’t condescend to them. Say “thank you” and make eye contact and ask them how their day is going. Forgive them when they mess up. Please please please put down your cell phone when you’re checking out.

2. Complain productively and respectfully. When customer service is poor and you feel compelled to complain (which you should), do it the right way. It is invaluable to hear how we can improve what we’re doing wrong, but the way you complain makes all the difference in how it’s received. There’s no need to make a scene. When you speak to a manager, tell them exactly what you need from them to address the situation. They’re not a human punching bag either. And if they don’t respond appropriately, figure out where you can take your complaint up the chain. 

3. You can regulate too. My sister-in-law Bevin was in line when a customer checking out began dressing down the cashier. So Bevin said, “You know, acting like a jerk isn’t going to help solve the problem here.” And the other customers in line chimed in by nodding their heads up and down! Chastened, the customer stormed off in a huff. Besides illustrating the point Bevin is awesome, it’s a reminder that you’re never just a spectator.

4. Reward good customer service. Put your money where your mouth is and shop where you’re valued. Your money is your vote. At Coffee Please in Madeira on Friday mornings where Ben’s small group meets for breakfast, Lisa knows us by name and takes the food out to our tables (which she’ll push together for us). The same way that a church needs to be rooted somewhere to have real value in the community, support businesses that do the same. Places still matter. Support stores that make your town different than ours.

5. Be a good tipper. Look at where retail employees park and look at the cars they drive. They’re not driving Beamers. Sometimes they’re not even driving cars that should be on the road. If you can afford going out to a nice restaurant or a cup of joe every day, you can afford to be a generous tipper. If someone in retail is frugal enough to stash those tips away, it’s eventually going to pay for the unexpected but essential emergency like, say, new tires. (Poor customer service does not let you off the hook. There are ways to address this [see #2 above]. But when the cooks make a mistake, don’t take it out on your server.)

Enough preaching. Fellow retailers, I’m sure, can offer many additional suggestions which I’ve overlooked or neglected. I hope they do.

 

*=This truth needs to be told too: Nine out of ten customers are perfectly fine, and some are wonderful, at least in my line of retail. The lying, pushy, condescending and simply wrong ones are few and far between, but they tend to be slightly more memorable. 

(Special thanks to Jenny, Scott, Seth, Bevin and Erin for all their suggestions and feedback on this post.)

Home, Marilynne Robinson

 

The great Tobias Wolff wrote an essay called “Winter Light” about the spiritual experience of seeing the Bergman film of the same name when Wolff was an undergraduate. Wolff feels a certain stirring — “buried things churning to the surface” — as he watches the film, about a pastor struggling with his own faith and unable to provide for a parishioner in need. When the film ends, Wolff and those watching with him — twenty-five or thirty people gathered at a church to view then discuss the film — sit in silence until the church’s minister begins talking. The minister acknowledges the bleakness of the film, its challenge to those like himself who are believers, before using it as a segueway to preach the Gospel. He does so by projecting William Holman Hunt’s “The Light of the World” onto the same screen the movie had played on. Wolff, who was not a churchgoer, had up to that moment begun “to feel a sense of grudging assent” to the pastor’s message. But when he sees the painting, he writes, “I lost it. Because I really disliked that painting.

“It seemed to me a typical pre-Raphaelite production: garish, melodramatic, cloying in its technique and sentimentality; pretentious humbug,” he writes. “The contrast between Bergman’s severe, honest art and this painting, on the same screen, chilled me. Was this what the minister held in his mind as the answer to all our problems — a kitschy figure from a calendar?”

Wolff’s friend Rob, who watched the movie with him that night, reacts differently. Wolff suggests they cut out for a pint, and Rob tells him to go on. Rob went on to enroll in Bible classes at that same church and become a missionary in Africa.

Wolff wonders if a different picture, like Caravaggio’s “Conversion of St. Paul”, might have kept him sitting in the pew. “We like to think of our beliefs, and disbeliefs, as founded on reason and close, thoughtful observation. Only in theory do we begin to suspect the power of aesthetics to shape our lives.”

Wolff ends the essay by describing the first moment he found himself on his friend Rob’s side. The poetry of George Herbert, Gerald Manley Hopkins and T.S. Eliot point Wolff toward what he calls “the possibility of faith.” As he reads the poem “Little Gidding” to a friend, fully convicted of the meaning of those words, Wolff looks up to see his friend observing him “with kindly amusement.” “So,” his friend says. “You really like that stuff?”

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The first book of “Christian” fiction I (Ben) recall reading was Joseph Girzone’s Joshua, sometime in late elementary school. I was a voracious reader as a kid, but I was conscious that this book — a gift to me from a member at my church — was meant to be different than anything else I had read, and possibly more spiritual. I read it with a certain apprehension. It was polite, earnest, and utterly without conviction. Thus ended my short-lived pursuit of “Christian” fiction.

I am thankful that I had read enough by that age to know the difference between good books and bad books. And I had read enough good ones to be swept away by so many emotions, a few of them something like spiritual ones, to know that a book that walked and talked like a pastor could be total claptrap while the most rousingly far-fetched and subversive books – stuff by Roald Dahl, Madeleine L’Engle and Lois Lowry, or titles like Tuck Everlasting and Bridge to Terabithia, to say nothing of The Chronicles of Narnia or my personal favorite, Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles — could say more about faith and doubt than a hundred sermons.

Once at a Christian retreat I was making small talk with someone and told her I liked writing. “So you want to be a Christian writer?” she said. “Like Frank Peretti?” Well, no, I thought. Not at all like Frank Peretti. But I was talking to someone for whom a Christian writer was Frank Peretti or Joseph Girzone or nothing else. Like seeing Rob staring rapt at “The Light of the World,” I didn’t want to ridicule her for experiencing God through This Present Darkness. It’s just that a book like that makes me want to puke.

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My “Little Gidding” was probably Oscar Hijuelos’s Mr. Ives Christmas. I read it when I was a freshman in college, for pleasure, not as an assignment. I was a Christian at that point in my life, but after I finished reading that book I began to wonder if I had ever understood the first thing about being a Christian at all. It is the story of a father whose son — just seventeen, and planning to enter the priesthood — is shot on the streets of New York by a Puerto Rican teenager. The rest of the story is, simply, a story of grief, doubt, anger and soul-searching. The father tries desperately to forgive his son’s murderer, and the two meet at the end of the book. Like Wolff watching “Winter Light,” reading the book was “a harrowing experience … [with] its scrutiny of the human face in anguish, uncertainty, and yearning.” I have not read it in over ten years, but I wonder what my reaction would be today. Reading the Publishers Weekly review on Amazon just now, I was startled to see the book through the skeptical eyes of another. “The author’s attempts to render all this as a Dickensian tale of redemption through dignified suffering — Dickens is invoked more than a dozen times — are crude and work no wonders,” the reviewer writes. Wow. Really?

Faith and aesthetics are clearly subjective. I’m quite happy that God has chosen to reveal himself to some through Frank Peretti and William Holman Hunt, and to others through Bergman, Eliot and Caravaggio. I walked out of a Flaming Lips concert in Pittsburgh feeling as if I had participated in nothing short of a religious experience. I remember thinking, “This is what church must feel like for people who don’t go to church.” What’s clear to me is that art contains within it deeply spiritual qualities. Tastes differ, but the transcendent possibility for art to reveal something numinous is hard-wired into everyone.

Which brings me to Marilynne Robinson. Her novel, Gilead, walks and talks like a pastor because it is told by a pastor: John Ames, an aging Congregationalist minister, who writes a letter to his young son (Ames is seventy-six, his son seven) explaining his life and faith before he passes on. The book itself assumes the form of that letter. Things take an unexpected turn when John’s godson and namesake, his friend and fellow pastor Robert Boughton’s wayward son, returns to town and kindles feelings of anger, jealousy and uncertainty in John. Gilead is dense with philosophy and theology, and is best served by slow, careful reading, the way one might dwell on scripture in a spirit of meditation. Its themes are in many ways identical to a book like Joshua; it is a book about “what it means to lead a noble and moral life,” to borrow Ann Patchett’s words. (“I would like to see copies of it dropped into pews across our country,” Patchett continues, and I heartily agree.) And yet Gilead expands the mystery of faith rather than diminishes it. It is honest about doubt. Its grace is hard-won. It is Bergman and Eliot and Dostoevsky and more.

When I finished Gilead, I did not want to speak of it to anyone. I could not bear the thought that someone else could read it and not be as moved as I was. The critic Lev Grossman articulated this feeling to Laura Miller in her essay “Your Best Friend’s Reading List”:

“I love certain books so much, I would not recommend them to other people. There’s one novel that spoke so deeply to me about what I thought was sad and funny and beautiful about the world, that I didn’t want anyone else to know about it. If I were dating someone and truly felt a profound connection, I wouldn’t go to my friend and say, ‘You’ve got to try sleeping with X. It’s fantastic!’ There are some books that I don’t want to whore around.”

I may not have used those words, exactly, but it took me a long while before I could recommend Gilead to anyone else. And when I did that person said, “Oh, I read it for a book club. It was slow and kind of boring.”

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Home, Robinson’s new novel, is also set in Gilead, Iowa. It is the story of Jack Boughton, the “lost” son of Reverend Robert Boughton who returns home as a prodigal. Certain episodes overlap with Gilead, and Robinson is deft at touching on minor themes and asides from the prior book in this one. Home is told mainly from the perspective of Glory Boughton, who has returned home to care for her dying father. The youngest of the Boughton children, Glory is there when Jack finally returns to Gilead after twenty years away.

I have heard the Parable of the Prodigal Son preached so often, and usually so unimaginatively, that I have to confess a certain boredom with it. It is the fallback text of choice when pastors are in a pinch; guest pastors in particular abuse it with alarming regularity. Henri Nouwen’s book The Return of the Prodigal Son gave me a renewed appreciation for it, as he spoke of identifying with each of the three main characters at separate stages of his life. But that book also spoiled me even further to hearing the text preached, because pastors frequently reduce it to a simplistic message, assuming that their listeners will first and foremost relate to the prodigal and leaving the rest of the text unexplored.

I much prefer to see the parable fleshed out in art, its ambiguities and open threads (it ends, after all, on a rather puzzling note, with the older brother going off for “an angry sulk,” as Eugene Peterson puts it) still intact. The movie You Can Count on Me is a near-perfect retelling of the parable minus the father figure. (I nominate Mark Ruffalo to play Jack Boughton in the film adaptation of Home.) Home pushes those same ambiguities into several thought-provoking directions. Was the prodigal truly changed the minute he arrived home, or was he only taking the first step of a long journey fraught with peril? Did the father’s love and forgiveness sustain itself through days and weeks and months, or did he too continue to work out his own salvation in fear and trembling? What if, in fact, the father found he could not forgive? And in Glory Boughton, Robinson presents a compelling portrait of what is usually the parable’s most remote character, the older son, revealing the burden of being forgotten and ordinary, less wayward but no less lost in her own way.

Reading Home, I had an uneasy feeling about two hundred pages in that darkened my reading of the rest of it. And it was this: As sharp and luminous and beautifully written as Home is, it was no Gilead for me. It is slow and a bit too enclosed. I began it certain that I would experience what I did before, and my fear that I wouldn’t became a burden that is perhaps unfair to the book itself. But I felt what I felt. Save for a revelation in the final five pages that casts everything that has happened before in a different light, bringing poignancy to Jack Boughton’s pilgrimage and capturing the redemption still possible even in deep doubt, Home is a good book but one I do not need to keep as a secret for myself.

An Ode to Chesterton

There is an excellent essay about G.K. Chesterton, written by Adam Gopnik, in the July 7 & 14 issue of The New Yorker. Gopnik begins by noting that Chesterton’s most famous book, The Man Who Was Thursday, turns one hundred this year. Chesterton, he writes, “is an easy writer to love … [but] a difficult writer to defend.” In the easy-to-love ledger, Gopnik lists Chesterton’s prolific literary output and bustling good humor, illustrated in some of his better known “zingers”: “The tall building is itself artistically akin to the tall story. The very word skyscraper is an admirable example of an American lie”; “The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.” In the hard-to-defend column, Gopnik cites Chesterton’s reputation as an anti-Semite and religious convert whose literary sensibilities were diminished by the dogmatism of his later beliefs. Both judgments are fair. Today, though, I (Ben) am interested only in the first one.

Gopnik identifies a central theme to Chesterton’s life and work in a chapter in Chesterton’s autobiography titled “The Man with the Golden Key.” In that chapter, Chesterton describes a scene from his childhood watching toy theater puppet shows. He is still young enough to believe in the fiction of the puppet show and just old enough to know it is also an illusion. As Gopnik writes, “Chesterton’s point is that childhood is not a time of illusion but a time when illusion and fact exist (as they should) at the same level of consciousness, when the story and the world are equally numinous.”

Chesterton hints at this blurring of fact and fantasy, and makes a “case for the romance of everyday existence” to borrow Gopnik’s words, in his essay, “On Running After One’s Hat”:

Most of the inconveniences that make men swear or women cry are really sentimental or imaginative inconveniences — things altogether of the mind. For instance, we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and the green light on the signal are like a new sun and a new moon. Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of trains. I myself am of little boys’ habit in this manner. They also serve who only stand and wait for the two fifteen.

Later in the essay, Chesterton mentions a friend who is aggravated daily by a stubborn drawer that will not open smoothly. Chesterton admonishes him to reframe his understanding by refraining from the assumption that, every day, “the drawer could, should, and would come out easily.” Instead, Chesterton tells him to imagine that every battle with this drawer is like “a tug-of-war between French and English,” an epic contest requiring all of his friend’s wits and perserverance. He concludes,

I have no doubt that every day of his life he hangs on to the handle of that drawer with a flushed face and eyes bright with battle, uttering encouraging shouts to himself, and seeming to hear all round him the roar of an applauding ring. … An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

The brilliance of this insight is almost so commonplace as to be overlooked, as every one of us is prone to do on a daily basis. We always have a choice. We all know people for whom an inconvenience is no adventure at all, and life nothing more than a utilitarian exercise where mystery is a fancy. We have all seen the driver thrown into a rage by the oblivious senior who yields when there is no yield sign, or the co-worker whose entire day is ruined because a copier/computer/fill-in-the-blank is being uncooperative, and said co-worker just knew it would be so today, knew it in his bones, and carries on with an aggrieved spirit that colors everyone and everything around him. We know these people because, if we’re not attentive, we are them too.  

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I was introduced to The Man Who Was Thursday by Chris Cooke, who described it as one of his all-time favorites. The charm of the book for me, aside from Chesterton’s prose and the scenes of elephant chases, jousting, and pursuit by hot air balloon, is how deeply philosophical it is. The man who is Thursday, Syme, is a poet who becomes a policeman in order to fight a society of anarchists. Syme, once embedded inside the society, is named Thursday. The others are all named after days of the week. Sunday is the dreaded chief: elusive, terrifying, and mysterious even after he removes his mask in the final pages.

The paradox of fact and fiction, reality and fantasy side-by-side and sometimes existing within the other, runs throughout the book. There is the artifice of the story, where no one is quite who he seems. (The reader catches on to this as more and more of the secret agents are revealed.) And yet the story is utterly convincing; Thursday’s pseudo-life as a double agent becomes a more pressing and urgent reality than the life he knew before he went undercover. Gopnik writes, “[Chesterton] recaptures a childhood sense of what it feels like to be frightened by a nothing that is still a something, and by the sense that ordinary things hold intimations of another world.”

Chesterton wrote The Man Who Was Thursday as he was wrestling with the Book of Job. The battle between anarchy and order, good and evil — and the (sometimes interchangeable) faces they wear — echoes Job’s existential crisis with a God whose ways are inscrutable. Just as the Voice in the Whirlwind points Job toward hints of God’s existence and providence over all creation, Chesterton’s book is sprinkled with these same intimations of holiness in a world verging on chaos.

The great achievement of The Man Who Was Thursday, though, is its ability to capture the romance and adventure of everday faith, and while it can certainly be read as an allegory, it is a strange, bizarre sort of allegory that enlarges — rather than reduces — its themes of good and evil, and the theological knot of free will that forces us to navigate between them. “Chesterton’s conundrums of imagination and fact retain their grip on us,” Gopnik writes,

because they remind us that we know two things. We know that we have our experience of a limited world. … We also know that this experience doesn’t feel limited, that it includes far more — all of myth and religion and meaning, as the children’s puppet theatre does. The desire for mystery and romance can’t be argued out of importance, but it can’t be willed into existence, either.

As with so much in life, faith is a paradox. It is the hope in things unseen which must thrive in a seen world. Chesterton’s vision, unlike so many writers of faith, is not diminished by his fiction. It is compelling, challenging, hilarious, complicated and subversive. “Chesterton himself said that the modern age is characterized by a sadness that calls for a new kind of prophet,” writes Philip Yancey in his own ode to Chesteron, “not like prophets of old who reminded people that they were going to die, but someone who would remind them they are not dead yet.”

Slayer Is The Best

There is a novelty book out now, popular in stores such as Urban Outfitters, titled Church Signs Across America. The signs, collected by Steve and Pam Paulson during cross-country road trips, run the gamut of spiritual corniness, from “Searching For A New Look? Have Your Faith Lifted Here!” to “Be An Organ Donor. Give Your Heart To Jesus,” with occasional forays into sturdy old maxims you might’ve heard your grandparents say once upon a time (“A Clear Conscience Makes A Soft Pillow”; “Forbidden Fruit Creates Many Jams”).

One sign that was not included in the collection is one Erin & I saw when we still lived in Nashville, a k a “The Buckle of the Bible Belt.” On my daily five-minute commute to work, I passed six churches, all of different denominations, all dispensing the same kind of spiritual truthiness sampled above.

One night when Erin & I were driving home down Murphy Road in Sylvan Park, we passed Calvary Baptist Church, which used its marquee for both high-minded spiritual platitudes and more prosaic announcements for Vacation Bible School and the like. That night, however, we were greeted with four words that can instantly put us in a good mood whenever we recall them today:

SLAYER IS THE BEST.

After a moment of stunned silence we erupted in laughter, then pulled a u-ee to confirm that we really had seen what we thought we saw. We pulled up to the marquee and saw, below SLAYER IS THE BEST, all the other letters from the pre-Slayer message jammed into the bottom of the sign.

“That’s a beautiful thing right there,” I said.

“Slayer really is the best,” Erin chimed in.

Why we never took a picture, I still don’t know. The next day those four beautiful words were gone, replaced only by blank whiteness. The sign stayed that way for several weeks, until finally another announcement went up, this time behind a glass enclosure that locked at the top. No doubt a humorless committee had gathered around a table and concluded, gravely, that no expense must be spared to lock up the church marquee so that vandalism such as this would never transpire again.

What I still appreciate is the politeness of the anonymous spiritual tagger. He or she had plenty of letters with which to write any number of profane things, but no curse words were used. No anti-church sentiment was expressed. All the other letters were left there to be used again, not stolen or strewn about. Just SLAYER IS THE BEST. Silly and juvenile, yes, but also — for me, anyway, in the humid religious climate of Nashville — subversive and endearing. What if Calvary Baptist had kept it up there? That’s the kind of church you might really want to visit.