Life As Performance Art 137

You gotta serve somebody. I have two friends who hate (or, simply strongly distrust and dislike) Christians and Christianity, though for reasons I cannot fathom they want me to be their friend. Both these individuals totally shrink at the idea of serving God, or serving anyone, outside of their own precious selves. Both these friends of mine are slaves to addictions. Alcohol, food, sex, cigarettes, marijuana and the internet. And fear. One has a diagnosed mental illness, the other is just neurotic. But they are free. They serve only themselves. No one else. They must be the happiest people on earth. If only! I am only a servant to God, and I serve no one and nothing else. Except in the sense of extended servanthood, where by serving the Creator, I am also by extension serving his creation. Which also includes you, Gentle Reader. Yes, that's right, even if you don't believe, we are all his creation, and yes, we all likely evolved, but evolution is part of God's plan, or so I believe, but really, don't ask me. I wasn't there. Neither were you. I have no addictions, no compulsive behaviours, and in my service of the one who is the very source and cause of our being and all being, I have freedom. Complete freedom. Because my service is coming from a relationship of love, not compulsion or force or obligation. We are all, by our very human nature, slaves. Service, or it's evil twin, slavery, is encoded in our DNA, right there with rebellion and individualism. You gotta serve somebody, as famously sang Bob Dylan. Slaves in ancient, and even more recent eras, had to serve their masters by compulsion, force, and a sense of ownership. But their masters were even more slaves to their slaves, than the slaves were to their masters, since they were completely unable to cope or even live their lives of entitlement and privilege without the constant and perpetual ministrations of their slaves. We no longer have slavery, at least officially we don't, even if there is a thriving underground slave trade occurring in Africa, the Middle East, and in some Asian countries. And this toxic dynamic has shifted into our consumerist culture and market economy. For all our vaunted freedom and independence, we have become slaves to market forces. I will mention here the subject of women's cosmetics, which is a 445 billion dollar global industry. I mentioned previously on these pages of one of my colleagues who spoke of when she was hospitalized with a mental illness. One of the nurses recorded that, because my colleague refused to wear makeup, she must be getting worse. That's right, Gentle Reader. My colleague's mental health was being indexed by a mental health professional to her refusal to enslave herself to the beauty myth. She says she has never worn makeup in her life, and was understandably outraged by the insult. But so many women have been duped and brainwashed into believing that they are ugly or incomplete because they're not smearing garbage on their faces. In one mental health ward where I was working for a while I overheard a couple of nurses talking about what they were paying for a tube of lipstick (a lot!), and I quipped that I wouldn't pay that much for a tube of paint. One of them snapped at me that I had no right to be listening, much less contribute to the conversation (and those are custodians of the mental health of vulnerable people!). Then there are the very stupid young women putting on makeup on the bus, already beautiful, and somehow they have to still do it because they have been taught to believe that they are ugly. They have become slaves to the fashion industry. "The urge to buy terrorizes you", as screamed out one of my favourite bits of graffiti that adorned for many years a brick wall on Broadway and Fraser (in Vancouver's "gritty" east side!) My take is that we are all slaves, and we all choose our masters, and that we all live the lie that we are free. No one is free. But when we are serving the good, and love, then that is the service that truly sets us free.