Tailored for comfort. Everything from suits to shoes, skirts to shirts. Ease into an armchair, or the first-class ‘Comfort Seat’ on an airplane. Adjust air conditioning or heating to the most comfortable temperature. Dim or brighten the lighting till it’s just right. Pop the proper pill to alleviate unwanted symptoms. Issue warnings on disturbing news content so it need not be faced. Arm homes with sophisticated systems to ward off fires and invaders. Today, money and human ingenuity are channeled into designing away discomfort while the pursuit of safety trumps most forms of solidarity. Comfort and security have become the elusively disappointing mantras of consumer society.
Why elusive? Why disappointing?
Arthur Brooks, a writer for The Atlantic, wrote a provocative piece six months into the Covid-19 pandemic, wondering “Are We Trading Our Happiness for Modern Comforts?” In this piece, Brooks remarks that “One of the greatest paradoxes in American life is that while, on average, existence has gotten more comfortable over time, happiness has fallen.”1 Brooks attributes this drop to the dissatisfaction produced when the things we expected would improve our lives, such as consumer products, government services, and the latest technology, fail to do so. They simply cannot deliver.
As I was pondering this talk and the theme of this gathering, the title of an old Pink Floyd song came to mind: “Comfortably Numb.” In Pink Floyd’s case, the numbness was drug induced. But I dare ask: Might it not describe the condition of far too many US Americans? Might it be that even followers of Jesus Christ in this context are so numbed by comfort that we are desensitized to the effects of our action – or inaction – and calloused towards those who are suffering its impact? What is the calling of those who claim to follow the Lord who had no place to rest his head? I propose that, if we are going to insert our lives in the story of the good news of full life for the entire creation, we need to learn to receive the blessing of discomfort.
An old blessing, often attributed to the Franciscans, pleads:
May God bless you with a restless discomfort
About easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships,
So that you may seek truth boldly and live deep within our heart.2
Now, praying for discomfort goes against the grain of both Western society and a dominant strand of Protestant Christianity. This stream of our faith identifies a-critically with the dominant values of current globalized consumerism, justifying and reinforcing those values religiously, giving them a stamp of approval. Health and wealth, popularity, and overall comfort are seen as things to be aspired to as God-granted blessings. More hits on social media, more book sales, more invitations to speak at conferences like this one: These signs are all seen as expressions of God-sanctioned success.
Again I ask, why would anyone pray for discomfort?
Money and human ingenuity are channeled into designing away discomfort while the pursuit of safety trumps most forms of solidarity. Comfort and security have become the elusively disappointing mantras of consumer society. Click To Tweet
Sketchy Theology participated in Awakenings 2023 by creating these fantastic sketchnotes of most sessions. So great!
Might it be that even followers of Jesus Christ in this context are so numbed by comfort that we are desensitized to the effects of our action – or inaction – and calloused towards those who are suffering its impact? (1/2) Click To Tweet
I propose that, if we are going to insert our lives in the story of the good news of full life for the entire creation, we need to learn to receive the blessing of discomfort. (2/2) Click To Tweet
Well, let’s zoom out of this room and look at the world. This year, over 117 million people are being forcibly displaced. That’s as if 1/3 of the entire US population were forced to pick up and move right now. Over 70 percent of displaced people come from the most climate vulnerable countries, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. After persecution and war, the biggest cause for the refugee crisis is climate change: extreme weather events and disasters like hurricanes and cyclones, rising sea levels, floods, droughts, and so on. These conditions make it impossible for people to live off the land they call home, so they are forced to flee and start over, much like the ancient Israelites in Joseph’s time (Genesis 47:13-31) or like Naomi and Elimelech (Ruth 1-4) later on.
The current climate situation in Central America is deeply critical: first, the dry corridor that runs through Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador became an inhospitable desert where nothing grew. Then, Hurricanes Eta and Iota flooded the region. Too little rain was followed by too much rain! With no chance to grow food, and gang violence increasing in the cities, hundreds of thousands of Central Americans were forced to seek refuge and a new life in the United States. You know what awaits them on this end: mostly discrimination, labor trafficking, and exploitation, if they ever actually make it beyond the border and the numerous immigration detention centers. They flee one hot spot only to fall into another! On top if it all, many of these refugees are children.
Of course, from the comfort of this auditorium or our climate-controlled homes and offices, we could easily dismiss migration as a social-political matter that the government should take care of, and global warming as an issue that is far too distant and abstract to require our attention. We simply let it fade from our consciousness, hiding our heads in the sand of our own needs and preoccupations, as if these interwoven realities had nothing to do with us. We are managing our own discomforts from our position of privilege. Of course we are not fueling the violence in Central America nor provoking devastating hurricanes, we could argue. We are simply living and minding our own business. What is more, we send money and mission groups down to Central America help the poor! Good for us!
Praying for discomfort goes against the grain of both Western society and a dominant strand of Protestant Christianity. This stream of our faith identifies a-critically with the dominant values of current globalized consumerism. 1/2) Click To Tweet
Health and wealth, popularity, and overall comfort are seen as things to be aspired to as God-granted blessings. These signs are all seen as expressions of God-sanctioned success.(2/2) Click To Tweet
Why, again, should we pray for discomfort? How could discomfort ever be a blessing?
I offer up two challenges I believe we must face, if in faithfulness to the Servant King, we want to be shaken out of our comfortable numbness:
- Firstly, we need to admit that inaction is not neutral.
- Secondly, we need to face the truth of our complicity.
Regarding the first challenge: We should pray for discomfort because inaction is not neutral. We might be tempted to write off the conditions of climate migrants with easy answers and half-truths, saying: “They should stay home. They should try harder. Their government should take care of them.” Martin Luther King once said “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”3 And you might recall similarly incriminating words from Jesus himself: “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” (Mat 25.45). Indifference to the plight of the pain of suffering siblings around us as well as for refugees at our door is indifference to the Lord we claim to follow. Inaction is far from neutral.
But it gets more serious yet. Our second challenge is that we need to pray for discomfort because the truth is that we are deeply complicit in the current state of affairs. It is the marginalization suffered by migrants in US cities and the weapons sent from this country that fuel the gang wars in Central American neighborhoods. And it is our calloused consumption and rampant exploitation of the planet and burning of fossil fuels that is contributing disproportionately to the global warming that is causing the displacement of millions of people the world round. The United States, with a 4.24% of the world population, accounts for 25% of global emissions while the whole of Africa accounts for only 3%, as does the whole of Central and South America. Every person living in the United States emits 16 tons of CO2 per year on average while the typical person outside of the US and Europe emits less than 7 tons. The irony is that it is precisely the countries least responsible for the global climate emergency that are suffering its effects the most. While millions lose home and livelihood because of global warming out there, we have the means, the insurance, and the safety nets to insulate ourselves from it over here. While millions wander deserts and die in oceans, we continue allowing our penchant for comfort to drive our financial decisions, our daily lifestyle, and our national policies with little if any thought about their impact on people and planet.
We need not be reminded that what God most expects from God’s people is love: Love of God and love of neighbor. Obviously, neither inaction nor indifferent complicity are expressions of love. Dare we then pray the Franciscan Blessing?
May God bless you with a restless discomfort
About easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships,
So that you may seek truth boldly and live deep within our heart.
Dare we sit in this discomfort?
Sit in the discomfort and allow it to shatter our numbness, awakening us to the truth of our responsibility in this unbalanced world. We must engage questions like these:
- Once God’s Spirit has turned our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh, dare we boldly seek truth and enact justice from the inside out?
- Dare we confront our comfortableness with the status quo and embody sacrificially alternative lifestyles?
- Dare we take concrete steps toward reducing our personal and collective carbon footprint?
- Dare we advocate for the generation of low-cost energy alternatives, for the use of renewables, and the imposition of energy efficient standards, not out of partisan allegiances but out of love for God and neighbor?
At Casa Adobe, the intentional Christian community my husband, James, and I are a part of in Costa Rica, we have chosen this discomforting path. For over a decade, we’ve been seeking to live as God’s people from Monday to Sunday, sharing morning prayer and evening meals, gardening, composting, and recycling grey waters, organizing the neighborhood for river clean-up and re-forestation, opening our shared home to migrants and refugees, and awakening environmental awareness in children. We are currently taking yet more ambitious steps in conservation and environmental justice, building an urban park and taking on a cloud forest property.
I must confess that plenty of things about this lifestyle are far from comfortable. It would be far simpler to cook meals for two than for 15 or 20 people. It would be far easier to stick to ourselves as a couple and not have to deal with other people’s messes, nor to vulnerably let them into ours! It would be far calmer to let the river flow by without worrying about its health and that of our neighbors. But without some level of discomfort, we would never be pushed to change, to grow, to learn. And we are convinced that community living is a gift that continuously kindles God’s kin-dom imagination in us and makes possible a way of living which contrasts with the self-centered dominant one. And yes; you are welcome to visit!
When our world pushes us to love things and use people, the Good News of God-with-us draws us to love people and use things. And in that process, discomfort is a blessing!
///
Ruth yearns to see peace and justice embrace in the beautiful and broken world we call home. A wife of one and mother of many, theologian, missiologist, educator, and story-teller, Ruth Padilla DeBorst has been involved in leadership development and theological education for integral mission in her native Latin America for several decades. With her husband, James, she leads the Comunidad de Estudios Teológicos Interdisciplinarios (CETI), a learning community with Master’s and Certificate level programs across Latin America. She coordinates the Networking Team of International Fellowship for Mission as Transformation (INFEMIT), collaborates with Resonate Global Mission, and serves on the board of Arocha and the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies. She and James live in Costa Rica along with fellow-members of the Casa Adobe. Her studies include a Bachelors in Education (Argentina), an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies (Wheaton College) and a PhD in Theology (Boston University).
Community living is a gift that continuously kindles God’s kin-dom imagination in us and makes possible a way of living which contrasts with the self-centered dominant one. Click To Tweet
Footnotes
1 Arthur Brooks, “Are We Trading Our Happiness for Modern Comforts?” The Atlantic Magazine. Published October 22nd, 2020. Accessed at https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/10/why-life-has-gotten-more-comfortable-less-happy/616807/.
2 The Franciscan Blessing can be found here: https://www.worldvision.org/ignite/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2019/11/12.11.a-Teacher-Resource_-Benediction.pdf.
3 The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. quote can be found here, among other places online: https://fisher.osu.edu/news/learning-history-lessons-ethics-and-leadership#:~:text=%22He%20who%20passively%20accepts%20evil,Martin%20Luther%20King%2C%20Jr.
*Editorial Note: The plenary keynote lecture above, entitled “The Blessing of Discomfort: A Global Church Perspective,” was given by Ruth Padilla DeBorst. Ruth challenged us deeply at Awakenings 2023, asking: Who among us does not seek comfort and security? But is that the calling of those who claim to follow Jesus as Lord, who had no place to rest his head? This plenary proposed that if we are going to insert our lives in the story of the good news of full life for the entire creation, we need to learn to receive the blessing of discomfort. Would followers of Jesus in the most privileged corner of the world dare to face the impact that our action – or inaction – has on sisters and brothers from around the world who are unable to insulate themselves from the impact of climate change, forced to migrate from one hot spot to another? ~CK
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