Reconsecrating Public Space

   This I was glad to do.

   I begin, however, with a very particular and troubling problem: the loss of civic life and social connectedness in contemporary American culture. I will suggest along the way some of the social structures that may have played a role in this decline. And at the end, I will suggest a possible way we can perhaps begin to recover a more adequate notion of the human person and what human life is for. Indeed, I will suggest that that is the only true solution to the problems that currently confront us.

   Let us begin, then, with the problem: the loss of civic life in America and the decline in social connectedness. If, as Aristotle suggest, human beings are by nature political, social animals; and if, as the Christian tradition suggests, we are creatures meant to be in the image of God – a God who has revealed Himself to us as a God-in-relationship: a God in a covenant relationship with a people and a God who is in His very essence a triune communion of persons – if, in other words, our flourishing as full and complete human persons depends upon our being part of a healthy, human community and upon entering into an ever-more profound fellowship and communion with others and with God, then we are forced to admit that in contemporary American society, we are falling far short. The conditions for the possibility for human flourishing and happiness are receding, not increasing. Indeed, that suspicion has been born out by numerous studies done over the past several years.

   Most recently, for example, we might point to Harvard University professor Robert Putnam's best-selling book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, which documents extensively and in painstaking detail the extent of the decline in almost every area of civic engagement and social connectedness in American society over the past quarter century. For those of you who have not had a chance to read the book, allow me to document for you, if I may, a small sampling of its results.

   [click] In terms of the trends in political and community participation, Roper polls suggest that between 1973-74 and 1993-94, the number of those who "served as an officer of some club or organization" dropped 42%; the number of those who "served on a committee for some local organization" dropped 39%; the number who "attended a public meeting on town or school affairs" dropped 35%. The number who made a speech, wrote their congressman or senator, or even signed a petition dropped an average of 23%. Overall, the number of those who engaged in at least one of twelve listed political activities dropped 25%.

   The decline has not only affected explicitly political organizations and activities. [click] Here we can see the decline in the number of club meetings per year. [click] Here we see the rise and fall of the PTA. Notice its precipitous drop since 1960. The demographics are similarly bleak in other areas of civic engagement. [click] Here we see the declining percentages of those who (a) attended a public meeting on town or school affairs, (b) served as an officer of some club or organization, (c) served on a committee for some local organization, or (d) was a member of some group interested in better government.   Churches have been similarly hard hit. [click] Here we see the declining trends in church attendance, particularly since its high in the 1950s.

   Given the polling data on church attendance, it should be no surprise that the trends in Protestant, Catholic, and United Way giving look like this [click] – ever downward since 1960. Here, by the way, for those interested, [click] is the graph for Catholic giving since 1960.

   Not only has the decline affected political and civic organizations, it can be traced in other, more informal areas of social connectedness as well. [click] Here we see the decline in the percentage of those who "spend a social evening with someone who lives in your neighborhood at least once a month or more often."[click] Here we see the decline since 1975 in the average number of times people say they entertained at home during the last year. [click] Here we see the decline in the percentages of those who "have friends in for an evening at least twice a month" and those who "went to the home of friends during the past week." [click] Here we see the decline in the number of minutes per day people spent in informal socializing, as measured in time diary studies. And finally, in line with the title of Professor Putnam's book [click] , here is the graph charting the rise and decline of league bowling in America. Hence the title: Bowling Alone.

   As one might imagine, several decades of dwindling community involvement and social connectedness have brought about concomitant decreases in social capital and social trust. [click] Here we see the declines between 1960 and 1998 in the percentages of those who say "most people can be trusted" instead of "you can't be too careful in dealing with people." [click] And here we see charted the declining perceptions of honesty and morality since 1952, graphed in terms of the declining number of people who answered "yes" to the question, "Do you think people in general today lead as good lives – honest and moral – as they used to?"

   For more of such depressing stuff – lots more – I can recommend Prof. Putnam's book to you ($16 in paperback at Barnes & Noble). But my point today is this: Let us make no mistake, shall we, about the depth of the problems we face in contemporary American culture. If human flourishing requires "community," civic involvement, and social connectedness, then American society, as it is presently constituted, has no stomach for it.

   What can be done? Given my title, "Reconsecrating Public Space: Churches in the Naked Public Square," you might imagine that the plan would go something like this. Churches are our last, best hope as a truly civic institution. Let us, therefore, build churches in the center of town – in the "naked" public square ("naked" because bereft of people) – and if we build churches at the center of our towns and cities, perhaps they will become the anchor, the rock, the foundation, upon which we can build a renewed community structure.

   Well, yes, the plan goes something like that, but I would not wish to be misunderstood. What people might hear me saying is this: Let us once again make Christianity into America's civil religion; let us once again make going to church a civic function or duty. This, then, will help us to recapture the civic spirit that we once had in America when Christianity enjoyed that exalted position.

   Although I am not entirely opposed to that idea, that's not what I have in mind. Quite the contrary, in fact. No, rather than arguing that Christianity should set out to re-establish itself as America's civic religion and that Christian churches should work to become bee-hives of civic activity, I intend to suggest, rather, that Christian churches can best help American society by realizing more fully their role as places "set apart" from our everyday business and busy-ness. In other words, they will help secular society best by being, not another secular space, but by becoming a uniquely sacred space in the midst of the secular city. In doing that well, they will, we can hope, help us to re-establish a needed balance and a sense of the true nature and destiny of the human person.

   To understand why this is so important, however, particularly at this juncture in American history, we must begin by looking more closely at some of the factors that have brought about this dramatic decline in civic association and social connectedness. In his book, Prof. Putnam identifies a whole series of key factors associated with modern suburban sprawl.

   Okay, so why, you might ask, does suburban sprawl cause the loss of civic life and civic association? Isn't it cities – particularly inner-cities – that are the source of America's problems? Not in this case.

   Prof. Putnam identifies three reasons why suburban sprawl leads to the decline in civic engagement:

   [click] First, sprawl means more time spent alone in the car shuttling back and forth between various destinations and less time for friends and neighbors, for meetings, for community projects, and so on.

   Second, sprawl is associated with increasing social segregation, and as numerous studies have shown, social homogeneity (the lack of a healthy diversity) actually reduces civic involvement.

   Third, sprawl disrupts community "boundedness" or integrity, the result of which is more time spent alone shuttling between home, work, and shopping districts.

   Let's take a brief look at some of the statistics involved here, so that we can be sure we have a sufficiently concrete, rather than abstract, sense of the problems involved.

   First, sprawl takes time. And quite a lot of time, in fact. According to government surveys of vehicle usage, [click] between 1969 and 1995:

the length of the average trip to work increased by 26 percent, while the average shopping trip increased by 29 percent. While the number of commuting trips per household rose 24 percent over this quarter century, the number of shopping trips per household almost doubled, and the number of other trips for personal or family business more than doubled. And each trip was much more likely to be made alone, for the average vehicle occupancy fell from 1.3 to 1.15.

(And as Prof. Putnam points out, since vehicle occupancy cannot fall below 1.0 -- one full driver driving [unless, of course, you're talking about certain late nights when I'm driving], these figures represent a decline of a third in passenger occupancy for all trips and a decline of 50 percent in passenger commuting.)

   [click] "Over the last two or three decades," says Prof. Putnam, "driving alone has become overwhelmingly the dominant mode of travel to work for most Americans. The fraction of us who travel to work in a private vehicle rose from 61 percent in 1960 to 91 percent in 1995, while all other forms of commuting – public transit, walking, and so on – declined." In 1995, for example, only 3.5 percent of all commuting trips were made on some form of mass transit.

   Indeed, instead of Bowling Alone, Putnam might have entitled his book Driving Alone, for that is what we spend a great deal of our time doing. [click] By the end of the 1990s, 80-90 percent of all Americans drove to work alone, up from 64 percent as recently as 1980. Not only do we drive to work alone, we take most of our other trips alone as well. Studies show that private cars account for 86 percent of all trips in America, and two-thirds of all car trips are made alone. Thus one of the important consequences, it seems, of how we have organized our built environment is that we spend a great deal of time each day transporting ourselves around alone in our own personal metal boxes.

   [click] What, then, are the results of this increased automobile usage in terms of civic involvement and social connectivity? According to Prof. Putnam, "American adults average seventy-two minutes every day behind the wheel ... This is, according to time diary studies, more than we spend cooking or eating and more than twice as much as the average parent spends with his or her children." Indeed, in round numbers, says Putnam, "the evidence suggests that each additional ten minutes in daily commuting time cuts involvement in community affairs by 10 percent – fewer public meetings attended, fewer committees chaired, fewer petitions signed, fewer church services attended, less volunteering, and so on."

   So, as we have seen, sprawl takes time – a lot of time – time that might otherwise have been spent on family, friends, neighbors, community projects, church involvement, and so on.

   Secondly [click], though, sprawl is also associated with increasing social segregation. And social homogeneity appears to reduce incentives for civic involvement, as well as opportunities for social networks that cut across class and racial lines.

   "At first," writes Putnam, "suburbs were meant to be places where people could escape the impersonal character of the city and rediscover the civic virtues of small-town life. And yet, as suburbanization developed, the suburbs themselves fragmented into more and more finely distinguished ‘lifestyle enclaves,' segregated by race, class, education, life stage, and so on." Anyone who doubts this need only study a bit of contemporary marketing theory and practice. For a good example, one might browse Michael J. Weiss's book The Clustered World. According to Weiss, advertisers think of America geographically in terms of 15 socioeconomic groupings and 62 lifestyle groups or "clusters." These "clusters," then, have been given lively and evocative names by the advertisers in order to aid in identifying them.

   [click] So, for example, in the top categories, we have "cluster" groups such as "Blue Blood Estates," which consists of elite super-rich families; "Executive Suites," upscale white-collar couples; "Pools & Patios," a group that consists in established empty-nesters; and "Kids & Cul-de-Sacs," upscale suburban families. All of these are groups that live in the "Elite Suburbs."

   When we move to the "Inner Suburbs" clusters, we find "Upstarts & Seniors," middle income empty-nesters; "New Beginnings," young mobile city singles; "Mobility Blues," young blue-collar families, and "Gray Collars," aging couples in the inner suburbs.

   Advertisers have learned to use information about these "clusters" to sell the people in them everything from bear to caffé latté, from hot dogs to sushi, and from Chevy Trucks to BMWs, depending of course on where they live and what cluster group they represent. So, for example, call- waiting is most popular among "Boomers & Babies," "Single City Blues," "Gray Collars," and Kids & Cul-de-Sacs." Salsa is most popular among "Upward Bound," Kids & Cul-de-Sacs," "Boomers & Babies," and of course, "Hispanic Mix." Those most likely to be swing voters in an election are "Towns & Gowns," Greenbelt Families," Sunset City Blues," and "Executive Suites."

   Now what is especially important to understand about these cluster groups is precisely that they do cluster. One of the most revealing choices Americans make, as it turns out, is where they decide to live. A good marketer can identify a cluster group, or at least the relevant set of cluster groups, down to a specific zip code. As one marketing executive put it: "Tell me your zip code, and I can tell you where you shop and what you buy."

   Now, one might at least have expected the social homogeneity of these suburban cluster groups to have encouraged a certain social connectedness. All of us here are of the same class and lifestyle; we all buy the same products and have roughly the same lifestyle aspirations; in fact, we moved here precisely to get away from those who were too different from us; so why not get along? Why not be chummy?

   Well, for some reason, we're not. Most evidence actually points in the opposite direction. In a careful survey of community involvement in suburbs across America, political scientist Eric Oliver found that the greater the social homogeneity of a community, the lower the level of political involvement. "Not only are canvassing politicians and Girl Scouts selling cookies excluded from exclusive communities," writes Putnam, "but the affluent residents themselves also appear to have a surprisingly low rate of civic engagement and neighborliness even within their [own] boundaries."

So again, sprawl appears to result in increasing social segregation and social homogeneity. And social homogeneity appears to reduce, not increase, civic involvement. Thus the statistical evidence bears out a truth which everyone should know intuitively, does it not?: that when we keep "others" out (whoever the "other" may be) we end up impoverishing ourselves.

   Third, [click] sprawl disrupts community "boundedness." By "boundedness," Prof. Putnam means what urban designer and theorist Leon Krier means when he says that a community should be like a slice of pizza [click]: each slice should have all the ingredients. Because of suburban zoning regulations, however, we spend much of our time driving -- and usually driving alone -- from one suburb to another. We work in one suburb, live in another suburb, and do the bulk of our shopping at a megamall in a third.

   Malls, in fact, have become our de facto civic space. Going to the mall is a common Friday or Saturday night's entertainment, not only for the adolescents who seem to live there, but for many adults as well. Indeed [click], studies show that shopping has become the most popular weekday evening "out-of-home entertainment" in America. In many communities, the mall is where people, especially seniors, do their walking. [There are some of you who may not be aware of this fact. But try going out to your local megamall in the morning when most of the stores are closed. You will almost undoubtedly find a good number of people walking about briskly from one end of the mall to the other.] And, of course, malls are everywhere. Four billion square feet of our total land area, in fact, has been converted into shopping centers, or about 16 square feet for every American man, woman, and child.

   The problem with having malls as our de facto civic space, however, is that they don't serve the purpose of supporting and sustaining civic community very well. Malls are designed for one primary, private purpose – to direct consumers to buy. When you walk through a mall, you're there not as a citizen among other citizens, or as a neighbor among neighbors, but primarily as a private consumer among other consumers. As Prof. Putnam points out: "mall culture is not about overcoming isolation and connecting with others, but about privately surfing from store to store – in the presence of others, but not in their company." Is it any wonder, then, that shoppers are increasingly turning to the internet to surf from merchant to merchant, thus finally shedding the painful pretense of sociability and allowing themselves to get right to the real order of the day: namely, shopping!

   Indeed, as author Juliet Schor has pointed out in her best-selling book The Overworked American:

"We live in what may be the most consumer-oriented society in history. Americans spend three to four times as many hours a year shopping as their counterparts in Western European countries. Once a purely utilitarian chore, shopping has been elevated to the status of a national passion."

   This increase in shopping and spending patterns has gone hand-in-glove, as one might expect, with increases in work patterns. According to Ms. Schor:

"In the last twenty years the amount of time Americans have spent at their jobs has risen steadily. Each year the change is small, amounting to about nine hours, or slightly more than one additional day of work. In any given year, such a small increment has probably been imperceptible. But the accumulated increase over two decades is substantial. When surveyed, Americans report that they have only sixteen and a half hours of leisure a week, after the obligations of job and household are taken care of. Working hours are already longer than they were forty years ago. If present trends continue, by the end of the century Americans will be spending as much time at their jobs as they did back in the nineteen twenties."

What is especially surprising about these increases is that they have been at dramatic odds with the decreases in working hours seen in the developed countries of Europe. Currently [click] U.S. manufacturing employees work 320 more hours per year—the equivalent of over two months more—than their counter-parts in West Germany or France.

   So the evidence seems clear: driving, working, shopping. That is what we Americans do with our time -- time that might otherwise have been spent on family, friends, neighbors, community projects, church involvement, and so on.

   These three activities -- driving, working, and shopping -- are not unrelated, as we have seen. Indeed, Ms. Schor identifies what she calls America's vicious cycle of work-and-spend. We work harder to make more money, but that money is spent on consumer items that have become "necessities" in the current culture. More spending across the board simply raises the bar for everybody, and the standards for having "made it" go up again. Now we need not merely a car, but a Mercedes S-class. Now not merely a comfortable house, but a 5000 square-foot McMansion (the lowest square footage allowed in certain elite neighborhoods; I know because my brother lives in one near Washington, DC).

   Now for work we need not merely a suit, but an Armani suit and a Rolodex watch. To lack such items, it is thought, is to endanger one's position – not to, in fact, "look the part." A former roommate of mine, when he left Notre Dame to take a job at an elite law firm in the Old South announced to me that he would have to sell his little Mazda Miata and buy a BMW (or something like it) because the Miata just wouldn't be acceptable in the parking lot of his new law firm. He wasn't joking and more to the point, he wasn't altogether wrong either. In an important sense, he did "need" a new and different car. The old car just wouldn't have been right. And what's more, we all know it, because we've all been faced with similar pressures in our own careers and neighborhoods.

   "Oddly," says author Juliet Schor, "it doesn't seem as if we're spending wastefully, or even lavishly. Rather, many of us feel we're just making it, barely able to stay even. But what's remarkable is that this feeling is not restricted to families of limited income. It's a generalized feeling, one that exists at all levels. Twenty-seven percent of all households making more than $100,000 a year say they cannot afford to buy everything they really need. Nearly 20 percent say they "spend nearly all their income on the basic necessities of life." In the $50,000-100,000 range, 39 per cent and one-third feel this way, respectively. Overall, half the population of the richest country in the world say they cannot afford everything they really need. And it's not just the poorer half."

   "The intensification of competitive spending," she continues, "has affected more than family finances. There is also a boomerang effect on the public purse and collective consumption. As the pressures on private spending have escalated, support for public goods, and for paying taxes, has eroded. Education, social services, public safety, recreation, and culture are being squeezed. The deterioration of public goods then adds even more pressure to spend privately. People respond to inadequate public services by enrolling their children in private schools, buying security systems, and spending time at Discovery Zone rather than the local playground. These personal financial pressures have also reduced many Americans' willingness to support transfer programs to the poor and near-poor. Coupled with dramatic declines in the earning power of these latter groups, the result has been a substantial increase in poverty, the deterioration of poor neighborhoods, and alarming levels of crime and drug use. People with money try to spend their way around these problems. But that is no solution for these social ills."

   Let us make no mistake, then, shall we, about the breadth and the depth of the challenges we face.

   But this brings us back to our original question: What is to be done? Many things, obviously. Here, as in so many cases, a clear diagnosis of the pathology should help bring us closer to a cure. If smoking brings about increased incidence of emphysema and lung cancer, then perhaps we should stop smoking -- or at least do less of it. If living the way we do is so ruinous, perhaps we should change it. One thing is for certain: if we keep doing the same things, we shall keep getting the same results.

   But, for our purposes, I think we need to probe still deeper. For all that we have seen so far should, I think, cause us to pose another, perhaps even more important question: If the ways we have structured our society are so ruinous, why do we continue to do it? Why?

   At the beginning of his book The Ascent to Truth [click], Thomas Merton writes:

"The earthly desires men cherish are shadows. There is no true happiness in fulfilling them. Why, then, do we continue to pursue joys without substance?"

"Because," says Merton, "the pursuit itself has become our only substitute for joy. Unable to rest in anything we achieve, we determine to forget our discontent in a ceaseless quest for new satisfactions."

"It is not enough," writes Merton, "to say that the man who is attached to this world has bound himself to it, once and for all, by a wrong choice. No: he spins a whole net of falsities around his spirit by the repeated consecration of his whole self to values that do not exist. He exhausts himself in the pursuit of mirages that ever fade and are renewed as fast as they have faded, drawing him further and further into the wilderness where he must die of thirst."

   Sounds dramatic. Perhaps too dramatic. Perhaps, indeed, we will not recognize ourselves in that description. But what else are we to say about a society [click] in which "twenty-seven percent of all households making more than $100,000 a year say they cannot afford to buy everything they really need" or in which 85 percent of people aspired to be in the top 18 percent of income-earners and in which only 15 percent would be satisfied by living a comfortable, middle-class life?

   What else are we to say about the couple earning $115,000 a year, who tallied up their necessary expenses of $100,000 a year and complained that "something's gone terribly wrong with being ‘rich.'" What are we to say about the Hollywood executive earning $72,000 a year who is worried about bouncing checks: "I have so much paid for by the studio—my car, my insurance, and virtually all food and entertainment," he told researchers—"and I'm still broke." What are we to say about the New York City inhabitant who complained recently: "It's incredible, but you just can't live in this city on a hundred thousand dollars a year." [I've had students who have verified this figure -- indeed, as being on the conservative side.] What else are we to say about the Austin, Texas doctor making $300,000 dollars a year who said in an article in The New York Times that, "we have the same struggles as other people. I feel like a lot of the time we're treading water. America should be a place where you can get ahead, not get dragged down. With what I do, I guess my expectation was that I was not going to worry about money. And here I am worrying about money." Dr. Cline's remedy: "I need a tax cut." And indeed, given his spending and lifestyle aspirations, he does.

   We work so that we can spend. But we spend to such a degree that it drives us to work ever harder in an effort to make ever more money, so that we can "move ahead," "get ahead," "stay ahead."

   This is a life, says Merton, "...a life not merely of deluded thoughts and aspirations, but above all a life of ceaseless and sterile activity. What is more, in such a life the measure of illusion is the very intensity of activity itself. The less you have, the more you do. The final delusion is movement, change, and variety for their own sakes alone."

   When I read that passage from Merton, I can't help thinking of my students -- the good ones, the ones who are at school to get good jobs -- who so often tell me, "I just want to be experiencing new things all the time. I want life always to be exciting and new all the time."

   It is perhaps not without significance, then, that the rallying cry of modernists in the twentieth century has always been the poet Ezra Pound's famous line: "Make it new!" "Day by day," wrote Pound, "make it new/cut the underbrush/pile the logs/keep it growing." "Make it new!"

   This, of course, was merely the early twentieth-century's expression of that old Enlightenment ideal – that unshakeable faith in human progress; progress for the sake of progress; progress that is always clearing away the old and day-by-day making the world anew.

"[Men] are condemned to physical or spiritual movement," writes Merton, "because it is unbearable for them to sit still."

"We look for rest," says Pascal, "and overcome obstacles to obtain it. But if we overcome these obstacles, rest becomes intolerable...."

   Every false idea, Josef Pieper once wrote, has its "insanity form": a formulation of the idea in which its absurdity openly appears. Perhaps one of the clearest formulations of modern man's inability to rest and his ever-pressing need for progress and to "make it new" can be found in the1936 motion picture Things to Come, written by that inestimable futurist, H.G. Wells. In this high-budget British film, with leading Shakespearean actors such as Sir Ralph Richardson, Raymond Massey, and Cedric Hardwicke, Wells gives the viewer not only his predictions of "things to come" historically, but also his vision of how things must be – the inevitable destiny of mankind. In a momentous scene at the end of the movie, the main character, John Cabal, played by Raymond Massey, and his rather timid sidekick Raymond Passworthy, played by Edward Chapman, watch as their son and daughter fly off together in a space ship on a dangerous mission to the moon. In this scene, Cabal speaks to Passworthy's doubts about the value of risking their children's lives.

[movie]

   No rest; no rest except death. And that will come too soon. And if we are just animals like the rest, then we must snatch each little scrap of happiness, and live, and suffer and pass; mattering no more than all the other animals do or have done. All the universe, or nothing.

   Well, given that particular scenario, it should not surprise us that many of modernity's sons and daughters are answering: "nothing." Indeed, they are increasingly becoming nihilists and cynics. As Lisa Simpson says to her brother Bart when Bart praises the music at a rock concert [Homerpalooza, I believe it was] -- but when Bart praises the music for being "deep and "cynical," Lisa replies: "Bart, causing teenagers to be more cynical and nihilistic is like shooting fish in a barrel."

   Or perhaps some of you have seen that T-shirt, particularly popular among a certain sort of grungy teenager, that reads: "Save the earth, kill yourself." Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in his commentary on Genesis, reports that a teacher mentioned to him that he once tried to make a child more grateful to his parents by telling him: "You ought to be grateful; you owe it to your parents that you're alive!" To which the child replied: "I'm not at all grateful for that."

   And indeed, if we are just animals like all the rest, whose destiny it is to snatch each little scrap of happiness, and live, and suffer and pass, mattering no more than all the other animals do or have done," then there would be reason enough, I suppose, for not being at all grateful for our lives. Or there would be reason enough, I suppose, for hanging out endlessly at the mall, hoping the next purchase or the next sexual conquest would bring us that "little scrap of happiness" we were supposed to "snatch" before we suffer and pass, mattering no more than all the animals do or have done." And there wold be reason enough, I suppose, for taking refuge in a 5,000 square-foot McMansion with the Audi and the large-screen TV, or for working 80 hours a week without rest.

   "Fallen man," says Merton, "flings himself upon exterior things, not so much for their own sake as for the sake of the agitation which keeps his spirit pleasantly numb. He has but to remain busy with trifles; his preoccupation will serve as a dope. It will not deaden all the pain of thinking; but it will at least do something to blur his sense of who he is and of his [own] utter insufficiency." Pascal had a word for it: divertissement, "distraction."

   So our question becomes this: What could bring us back? What could possibly turn us away from the "distractions" that drive us out further into the wilderness where we exhaust ourselves in the pursuit of mirages that ever fade and are renewed as fast as they have faded?

   Well, first, I suppose, we would need a somewhat better answer to the question, "What is life for?" In contemporary American culture, we seem to have answered that question very clearly; not verbally, of course -- no one would admit this in words -- but we answer that question with our lives every day. With our actions, we say: "Life is for work," or else "Life is for shopping." Or perhaps, "Life is for working so that we can do more shopping." And given that answer – and this is what I urge you to understand – given that answer, we have arranged our built environment in the best possible way! Indeed, to attempt to arrange it in any other way would be merely disruptive. It would probably be simply annoying.

   In his best-selling book Home From Nowhere, author James Howard Kunstler points out that Americans pay big money while on vacation to stay in traditionally designed neighborhood communities with narrow streets and lots of walking [like Seaside, Florida or HiltonHead, NC or little towns and villages along the Pacific Coast] but then, when they go home, they live in zoned suburban developments that make such neighborhood communities illegal.

   Of course they do! The lives they've chosen to live demand the suburban structure in which they live. During their "regular" lives -- their "real lives" -- the traditional neighborhood wouldn't fit them; it wouldn't fit their lifestyle. In short, our neighborhoods are a reflection of us, of who we are, or at least, who we have become. We have gotten the built environment that we deserve. No, more than that, we have gotten the built environment we wanted -- the environment that human progress demanded.

   Consider, if you will, this film clip describing the General Motors "Futurama" exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair:

[film clip]

   That clip still amazes me. GM had a Futurama at the 1964 Wold's Fair too. I found a description of one part of the display which read as follows:

"Spectators watched technology harvest a jungle. Machines felled towering trees with searing laser light. And a road builder, five stories high and longer than three football fields, followed the timber cutter. Amazingly, it leveled and graded the devastated forest, and it left behind a divided, multi-lane super highway in its path. The road served a city that processed the timber and chemicals derived from the "tamed" jungle.

   Ah yes, the future will be so much more beautiful once we get those pesky trees and rainforests out of the way and replace them with some nice concrete super-highways for us to drive our cars on!

   "Day by day/make it new/cut the underbrush/pile the logs/keep it growing." "Make it new!"

   "I have seen the future," the buttons read. They should have read, "I have seen the future, and it is me." Then the comic strip character Pogo's phrase would have been an apt reply: I have seen the enemy, and it is us.

   When we answer the question, "What is life for" by saying, in effect, Life is for work, life is for shopping, life is about ceaseless activity and unimpeded progress, then we will of necessity get the built environment that the futurists and modernists who held that creed envisioned for us. Oh, we might be able to tinker with the design a bit – add a few more front porches here and there, another park or two – but we all know that, eventually, the highways will be built and the shopping malls are coming. Because, of course, as everyone will tell you, that's what people want. That's the way they live. That's who they are. And until that changes – until we change – the built environment won't change.

   So, what other answer might we give to the question, "What is life for?" other than the answers "Life is for work," or "Life is for shopping"? The German Thomist Josef Pieper [click] has suggested an answer – a very old answer, in fact, which will undoubtedly seem very odd to modern ears -- but one worth considering nonetheless. Life involves work, yes; but "we work," says Pieper, quoting the philosopher Aristotle, "in order to have leisure."

   Leisure? Well, I can tell you, this idea isn't about to go over very well. When I present this idea to my students, I always have the same nightmare. Some angry parent calls me up and in great vexation says to me over the phone: "I sent my child to your school so that he (or she) could get a good job, and you tell him (or her) that the point of life is leisure? What the hell kind of teacher are you?"

   And what can I say?

   Well, I guess I would have to say, "But leisure," Mr. Jones, as the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper has pointed out, "means something entirely different from simply a ‘break from work.'" "That break," says Pieper, whether it lasts one hour or three weeks – has as its purpose ‘recovery from work for the sake of work.'" That would make leisure just a link in the chain of work. And then we would be back to saying: "Life – indeed, even leisure -- is for the sake of work." But if the purpose of life is work, and if we work in order to make money, and yet if money is not an end unto itself (no one wants green pieces of paper for their own sake), but rather money is a means to some other end – the end of buying things – then we would clearly be back to where started: saying that, fundamentally, life is for work – work and shopping.

   "Leisure, on the contrary," according to Pieper, "has not primarily the purpose that the individual may work continually without collapsing, but rather that, while fulfilling his particular utility function, he may remain a man [a full and complete human person] – which means a person capable of seeing the whole of life and the whole of the world, and also of feeling himself as a being who essentially has to do with the whole."

   Think about that: "a person capable of seeing the whole of life and the whole of the world, and also of feeling himself as a being who essentially has to do with the whole."

   Pope John Paul II, at the beginning of his most recent encyclical on "Faith and Reason," says this: [click]

"Know thyself"

"In both East and West, we may trace a journey which has led humanity down the centuries to meet and engage truth more and more deeply. It is a journey which has unfolded -- as it must -- within the horizon of personal self-consciousness: the more human beings know reality and the world, the more they know themselves in their uniqueness, with the question of the meaning of things and of their very existence becoming ever more pressing. This is why all that is the object of our knowledge becomes a part of our life. The admonition Know thyself was carved on the temple portal at Delphi, as testimony to a basic truth to be adopted as a minimal norm by those who seek to set themselves apart from the rest of creation as "human beings," that is, as those who ‘know themselves.'

[click]

"Moreover, a cursory glance at ancient history shows clearly how in different parts of the world, with their different cultures, there arise at the same time the fundamental questions which pervade human life: Who am I? Where have I come from and where am I going? Why is there evil? What is there after this life? These are questions which we find in the sacred writings of Israel, as also in the Veda and the Avesta; we find them in the writings of Confucius and Lao-Tze, and in the preaching of Tirthankara and Buddha; they appear in the poetry of Homer and in the tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles, as they do in the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle. They are questions which have their common source in the quest for meaning which has always compelled the human heart. In fact, the answer given to these questions decides the direction which people seek to give to their lives."

   What if he's right? And by that I mean, what if he's already right? What if the direction you've given to your life is the result of the answers you've given to those fundamental questions about meaning. "But I've never really considered the fundamental questions about meaning," you may say. That doesn't mean that your life hasn't been determined already by the implicit answers you've given (or adopted from others) to those questions.

   When you sit down to work at your computer, you can either personalize the settings or you can just let the computer run on its default settings. When you don't set your own course in life, that doesn't mean your life doesn't operate. Like the computer, it can operate for a long time on "default" mode. But when that happens, you're not living out your life and your script, your living out somebody else's script.

   In his remarkable book, Man's Search for Meaning , Jewish author and psychiatrist Victor Frankl recounts his experiences in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. In the course of that book, he says this:

"The prisoner who had lost faith in the future – his future – was doomed.   With the loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay. Usually this happened quite suddenly, in the form of a crisis, the symptoms of which were familiar to the experienced camp inmate. We all feared this moment – not for ourselves, which would have been pointless, but for our friends. Usually it began with the prisoner refusing one morning to get dressed and wash or go out on the parade grounds. No entreaties, no blows, no threats had any effect. He just lay there, hardly moving. If this crisis was brought about by an illness, he refused to be taken to the sick-bay or to do anything to help himself. He simply gave up. There he remained, lying in his own excreta, and nothing bothered him any more"....

"[A]ny attempt to restore a man's inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. Nietzsche's words: "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how," could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and psychohygienic efforts regarding prisoners. Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why – an aim – for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence. Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, [no meaning] ... he was soon lost....

Any attempt at fighting the camp's psychopathological influence on the prisoner by psychotherapeutic or psychohygienic methods had to aim at giving him inner strength by pointing out to him a future goal to which he could look forward. Instinctively some of the prisoners attempted to find one on their own. It is a peculiarity of man, says Frankl, that he can only live by looking to the future – sub specie aeternitatis. And this is his salvation [especially] in the most difficult moments of his existence."

   Is Frankl right? Is it a peculiarity of the human person that he can only live sub specie aeternitatis – with a vision, somehow, of his place in the whole of eternity?; that without that, his life begins to fade and become meaningless. And this is not only true of prisoners in a concentration camp. After the war, Frankl believed he saw many of the same problems and challenges among his standard, middle-class patients: people who had lost any sense of meaning and purpose to their lives. Is it perhaps not significant that we are the most medicated society in the world?

   Read, if you get a chance, psychiatrist Philip Cushman's article entitled "Why the Self is Empty: Toward a Historically Situated Psychology" (May 1990, American Psychologist) in which he suggest that modern psychology has flourished precisely because it is one of the only things that can serve as therapy for the modern, "empty self." The modern self is "empty," he argues, precisely because of the absence in contemporary culture of community, tradition, and a shared sense of meaning.

   "Individuals in the postmodern era," writes Cushman, "are struggling to find sense and meaning in a confusing world. There is little to guide them, and they stumble and feel despair. Failure is manifested in the particular mental problems of modern life, catalogued by the psychiatric nosology" (i.e., the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – commonly referred to as the DSM III or now IV).

   "Psychology," claims Cushman (and remember, he is a psychologist himself) "is the science most responsible for treating these illnesses. But the argument presented earlier has shown that psychology is also a product of the larger historical context that causes these illnesses. Psychology cannot fully alleviate the symptoms unless it can treat the cause [i.e., the causes of the "empty self" – the loss of meaning and significant connection to others], and yet, says Cushman, that cause is the exact subject psychology is not allowed to address."

   Mustn't we address this "peculiar" character of the human person: our need to live our lives, as Victor Frankl suggests, sub specie aeternitatis? Isn't it only when we restore this more holistic conception of the human person that we will begin to get true psychological health and human flourishing? Everything else is just a temporary band-aid. We must get at the root of the problem.

   In this light, consider again, what Josef Pieper had to say about leisure:

   "Leisure," said Pieper, "has not primarily the purpose that the individual may work continually without collapsing, but rather that, while fulfilling his particular utility function, he may remain a man [a full and complete human person] – which means a person capable of seeing the whole of life and the whole of the world, and also of feeling himself as a being who essentially has to do with the whole."

   Is it not this ability -- the ability to ask the fundamental questions, to understand himself and his place in the world, and to reflect on his own life and future – that sets human beings apart from other creatures, that makes us fully human? Is it not this sense of "wholeness" that needs to be restored?

   Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in his commentary on the first chapters of Genesis, notes that, in the first creation account in Gen 1, the sabbath is depicted as the day when the human being "participates in God's freedom, in God's rest, and thus in God's peace." "To celebrate the sabbath," says Ratzinger, "means to celebrate the covenant. It means to return to the source and to sweep away all the defilement that our work has brought with it."

   Later, he leads us to consider the irony of God commanding us to rest on the sabbath and the consequences of our disobedience to this commandment:

"What this means," writes Ratzinger, "is that the people had rejected God's rest, its leisure, its worship, its peace, and its freedom, and so they fell into the slavery of activity. They brought the earth into the slavery of their activity and thereby enslaved themselves. Therefore god had to give them the sabbath that they denied themselves. In their "no" to the God-given rhythm of freedom and leisure they departed from their likeness to God and so did damage to the earth. Therefore they had to be snatched from their obstinate attachment to their own work. God had to begin afresh to make them his very own, and he had to free them from the domination of activity ... Thus and only thus can the human being truly live."

   "The Gods," wrote Plato in The Laws, "taking pity on mankind, born to work, laid down the succession of recurring Feasts to restore them from their fatigue, and gave them the Muses, and Apollo their leader, and Dionysus, as companions in their Feasts, so that nourishing themselves in festive companionship with the Gods, they should again stand upright and erect."

   [click] It is this sort of leisure – the sort of leisure that comes from the celebration of a feast, that comes from being able to lift up one's head from the plow and see the world about us and rejoice, that comes from seeing the world and one's own life as a divine gift and thus as something meaningful – this is the sense of leisure and rest that Pieper has in mind.

   "And if this is true," writes Pieper, "another unavoidable truth follows: The highest known expression of the feeling of being at one with the world as a whole is the praise of God, the worship of the Creator. Having said this, we have defined the true basis of leisure .... Leisure cannot come about and remain alive unless it is fed by the springs of divine worship. Cut off from that origin, leisure becomes idleness, and work inhuman, which explains the alternatives facing the modern world: inhuman work on the one side and, on the other side, the mere killing of time and boredom."

   What does a ‘day of rest' mean in the Bible or for that matter in ancient Greece and Rome, except that this is a certain day and time that has been set aside and transferred to the exclusive property of the gods. Because what else would be sufficient to pry man away from his obstinate attachment to the illusions of this world but the commandment of the gods? I have always thought it was rather strange that God should have to command man to rest; that he should have to expend one whole commandment – one out of only ten – in order to do it.

   But then ... but then ... there are places, I am told, in eastern Asia, which are approaching (or have surpassed in squalor) the working and housing conditions of nineteenth-century London, the likes of which are described in Charles Dickens Bleak House and Oliver Twist. With one major difference: Many of the people who live in such places have not had a day off in six years! Not one. And let's be honest: If it hadn't been for the insistence in western culture upon the so-called "observance of the sabbath," workers in nineteenth-century London wouldn't have had a day off either. Indeed, as we move into a post-Christian era, workers in the West are increasingly finding themselves without any guarantees about getting time off themselves. One increasingly hears the phrase: "Business is 24/7."

   "Divine worship," writes Pieper, "means the same thing where time is concerned, as the temple where space is concerned. ‘Temple' means (as may be seen from the original sense of the word): that a particular piece of ground is specially reserved, and marked off from the remainder of the land which is used either for agriculture or for habitation. And this plot of land is transferred to the estate of the Gods; it is neither lived on, nor cultivated [nor used for business] .... [It goes without saying], continues Pieper, that: "There can be no such thing in the world of ‘total work' as space which is not used on principle; no such thing as a plot of ground, or a period of time withdrawn from [utilitarian] use. There is in fact no room in the world of ‘total labor' either for divine worship, or for a feast [or for man's rest]: because the ‘worker's' world, the world of total work, rests solely upon the principle of rational [utility]."

   [final click to beginning slide] So maybe there is a need for churches in the public square after all; if for no other reason than to remind men and women that if they are to remain fully human, they must acknowledge a life beyond the life of mere utilitarian ends, something beyond the world of profit-and-loss, something more than just work and shopping and more work. Churches could remind us that there is, as T. S. Eliot says, "another union, a deeper communion" to which we are being called.

   Why churches in the public square? Because churches express visually, concretely, and spatially what life is for. They are concrete embodiments of our need for the Divine and Transcendent, so that we can live lives which are fully human.

   Perhaps the best thing churches could do would be to make sure they are and remain those places set apart -- places where we celebrate great feasts with our friends and neighbors and celebrate the gift of something more lasting and more important than the latest toaster, the latest SUV, and the latest fashion in blue jeans.

Thank you very much.