I have a compulsion to be useful. Growing up I absorbed/adopted the idea that usefulness was next to godliness. Or perhaps usefulness was godliness. I think I’m really good at being useful. I wish I wasn’t.
Christian usefulness is an important value and characteristic of north American white Mennonites. But I wonder when our emphasis on usefulness as a personal religious value is really just an expression of extractive capitalism. Just as a land’s value is based on how much economic worth we can get out of it, a useful person’s value is dependent on how many service hours they can provide. How much hardworking good can a person do to achieve greater good for all. Any evening spent tying comforters for MCC is more useful and of greater value than an evening reading a novel or playing with Lego®.
I think usefulness is a distraction from our true work.
I want to sing the praises of the useless Mennonite. The useless Mennonite shifts the location of their value. The useless Mennonite detaches their value from their accomplishments, or the good they achieved. The useless Mennonite rests in God.
Some of the greatest Christian activities are prayer and worship. This is not prayer for the purpose of negotiating some transaction with God. Not prayer to cajole God to accomplish something, no matter how good. And this is not worship for the purpose of being a pre-cursor to fellowship hour. But rather, useless prayer and worship is simply recognizing one’s presence with God’s presence. In useless prayer and worship the only transaction is God freely loves you and you freely love God.
We are all familiar with the two greatest commandments: to Love God with all our heart and mind and soul, and to love others as ourselves. How often do we Mennonite skip over the loving God part and get to the loving others part? Do Mennonites have conferences, working groups, and retreats to reflect on loving God? We may have, but I’m not certain. But Mennonites do have conferences and working groups to think and meet about loving others. This Mennonite understanding of loving others is best expressed by serving others for the cause of justice.
Service itself is not a bad thing, but I think the motivation for service can reshape service from useful to useless. I’ve been pondering service as a sacramental activity; service as an act of worship. The purpose and practice of sacramental service is to open ourselves to bear witness to God’s presence in the other and to then love and worship God through your interaction with that person. The purpose of sacramental service is not to achieve great social change, but to love God. Brother Lawrence’s mode of life was to do everything, even flip an omelet in his frying pan, for the love of God.
Being a useless Mennonite does not mean not getting anything done, it means not doing something primarily to accomplish something, but first to do that thing for the love of God.
I used to work at the Hermitage, a contemplative retreat center that offered space for silence, solitude, and rest. During my time there I began to realize that rest was one of the greatest gifts for a person to receive on retreat. Too often I had people arrive with stacks of books to read and an agenda of all that they wanted to accomplish. A I welcomed them I would often encourage them to start first with a nap. The useless practice of rest and silence creates space within ourselves to hear God. And what could be more valuable than that? We do not accomplish God’s presence. We do not achieve a listening heart. We let go of all our useful activities and allow God’s presence to fill us.
The goal of the useless Mennonite is to detach themselves from their striving, serving, and accomplishing. The useless Mennonite may still be active in serving, and accomplishing great things, but that is not their goal. Their goal is simply to love and worship God in all they do. The useless Mennonite lives out the moniker “the quiet in the land” not by holding the world at a distance, but in resting with reverence and awe in the loving presence of God.
* My use of Mennonite in this piece is referring to north American, white Mennonites. And my use of Mennonite includes poorly informed, over-generalizations for my own convenience.