My Sister Hannah Doesn’t Need God
As science expands and gods shrink, we cling to culture to replace religion. Our culture happens to be a materialist and capitalist patriarchy.
We live in the ‘rat race”, chasing success as if it were the last bottle of Evian in the Sahara. We dress ourselves up in advanced degrees and designer clothing, and measure success in dollars earned, jobs landed, or miles run.
But what does this mean for people for whom the world wasn’t built? Where does their value lie?
I recently read a dime-a-dozen online article entitled, roughly, ‘X Number of Steps to Finding Balance and Wellness and Personal Peace in One’s Life and Blah, Blah, Blah’. It took the form of a list: bold platitudes followed by a paragraph overflowing with well-meaning anecdotes. The advice was typical: go on vacation, sleep enough, encourage affirming self-talk. But a few stood out to me.
In one, the author suggested we play games in order to schedule joy into our months. I imagined bringing home a pack of cards or a puzzle for a playful game some evening. This seemed preposterous, not knowing any other twenty-somethings who sit down to a game of War or Egyptian Rat Screw when nearly the entire archive of televised entertainment is streaming on a device that is likely not more than three feet from our fingertips.
I imagined the scene - a group of young people with alternative-style haircuts, maybe one is a techie, a few are artists - cracking open a beer and sitting down to…Monopoly. I laughed, but immediately realized that it wasn’t so preposterous after all; my older sister, Hannah, loves to play games. In particular, she is an Uno enthusiast. She has such joy for this game and such a good heart that she has been known to thank an opponent when they force her to draw several cards, saying, “Great, I needed those!” (In case anyone else needs a refresher on the rules of Uno, more cards = losing).
I continued through the article and came across number four, in which the author suggested we give away a few possessions every now and again, just to remind ourselves that Things We Own do not address the aching lack that makes us buy them in the first place.
This, again, struck me as a behavior seldom practiced by those our age. We order, purchase, get, find, possess a whole slew of technologies, artwork, and furniture, famously referred to by Dr. Seuss as “thneeds”: everything we think we need.
Once again, Hannah came to mind as the exception.
Hannah is an impassioned thrifter. Several times a week she makes small purchases of teapots, cookie jars, necklaces, small boxes, decorative stones, and the like. She tells me, over the phone, what shifts have occurred in the circus of chachkies. When she has had, for example, one vintage copper teapot for a suitable amount of time and her enjoyment is waning, she gives it away. She doesn’t sell it back to the thrift store to try to recover her financial losses. She simply feels creatively replenished by having enjoyed the teapot’s rusticity in her home, and she lets it go, peacefully back to the sea of Potential Possessions.
It is as if she never really owned it. All the while she understood it as a temporary delight in her home, with many lives still to lead in bringing enjoyment (and tea) to strangers.
I don’t need to own that in order for it to bring joy to my life. I don’t need to control everything in order to live happily.
This kind of thinking could take down a god. The god of materialism shudders at her rebellion: quiet, self-actualized, revolutionary.
In 1985, in her orphanage in South Korea, the staff noted that Hannah showed slow progress through typical developmental markers. My parents scooped up their sweet daughter in a papoose of unconditional love, come what may, and flew her over the pacific, holding her while she wailed with the changing pressure of the cabin.
Thirty years later, Hannah does not participate in the “rat race”. She will not garnish her name with the letters MD, JD, or DVM; college wasn’t for her. She makes ends meet in her supported, independent living community by working part-time at a grocery store.
She doesn’t answer to the neo-gods that rule the rest of us: money, power, prestige. She does not measure her worth by the empty standards that drive me, and many other “abled”, “normal” citizens. She invests her time in activities she enjoys: drawing, thrifting, card games.
The author of the article I read is a stolid participant in the rat race, like me, no doubt with at least one degree under their belt. We both worship at the altar of capitalism, striving for a fabled heaven of fulfilment, purported to come after enough dollars earned.
This author and I, we slip and slide, weighing our actions against these modern day gods: our value to society, our ability to make in impact and contribute, our ability to leave a legacy and raise our names to honor. We are reeling.
Hannah, meanwhile, is balanced like the Olsen twins on a teeter totter.
When I think of Hannah, I can’t help but accept the truth that our value is intrinsic and unconditional.
But this is the truth that will crumble the god of capitalism.
If we are valuable just by existing, then what will motivate us to slog through traffic to jobs we hate as cogs in a machine that suffocates us?
If we all accept the truth that we are valuable in our existing, we will also know that we deserve to explore our hearts and pursue our passions. To paint our painting and write our app and open our adoption agency.
Then topples the god of materialism.
If we all accept the truth that fulfillment is comically unrelated to our possessions, we would accept peace and satisfaction, and be unmoved by the panicky need to own.
We might all become Hannah.
So, as science expands and the gods shrink, we replace them with new gods, less mythical, equally misguided, and prosthelytized by the same zealotry. We would be wise to be mindful of what cultural tenets we are endowing with our belief and fervor.