“Because I’m irresponsibly mad …”
— Sammy Cahn
Some friends are reporting recently that they have been “adulting.” Emblematic of this is one woman’s recent decision to purchase tires rather than more shoes. These are the sorts of decisions that become inevitable in adulthood. “Adulting” decisions are not the urgent ones that people who live in poverty know: food or diapers? Electricity or children’s Christmas gifts? They are less urgent, the types of things that pinch a little but that one knows have to be done.
Adulting is when the carefree, freewheeling lifestyle of our youth runs up against the choices necessitated by the complexity of our adult lives. There are always things anyone would rather do than spend an hour on the phone with the insurance company, but good adulting demands it, plus washing the dishes while you’re on hold. We have another way of talking about this: taking responsibility. Some things are no fun, we know, but being responsible requires getting them done.
We rarely consider, though, how we know what being responsible is. What are the values and assumptions that determine what being responsible — in the sense of “adulting” — means? To whom are we responsible, and for what?
Such a question has a variety of answers, of course. I am responsible to and for my children in a way that is unlike any other relationship in my life. Other people, places and things we are responsible to and for include spouses, friends, families of origin, the land on which I live, a bank account, businesses we run and so on. Generally speaking, I am successful in America if I am exhibiting the ability to control and/or maintain care of all those persons, places and things. Being successful in this way is the essence of The Dream.
But I don’t believe in The Dream. The Dream is a Lie. Having recently been able to give some secret spiritual direction to a large group, I did my best to expose the Lie. My first counsel to them was this: ignore your property values. I admit this may seem a bit reckless. We’ve all been told that owning property, especially the house where we live, is the most significant means we have of building wealth. This is in some ways true, but this is also a part of the Lie that has been used to justify all manner of evil, including slavery and genocide. As we discover that land is not a commodity for trading and betting on, we begin to reimagine a more ancient relationship to it. It nurtures us, and not only us as rights-bearing autonomous individuals, but us as communities, in families, in co-housing, in neighborhoods, in towns and cities. To those who believe the Lie, refusing to treat our places as commodity will appear irresponsible. The cold logic of the world is that profit must be maximized.
Those who are willing to risk prophetic irresponsibility begin to note that the protection of property value is not a “neutral, apolitical act.” The commitment to commodified property values is but a small part of a series of so-called common sense decisions that have us “endorsing the existing legal and political order as the frame that guarantees the stability of our… lives” (Slavoj Zizek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism). But the existing legal and political order does not guarantee our stability. In fact, it actively destabilizes some to privilege others. Responsibility sometimes has us moving against our own interests. The lives of the poor and people of color are almost always destabilized in our society. Increasingly, so are the lives of almost everyone else.
Prophetic irresponsibility is part of the legacy of Christianity. We need to look no further than the prophets of our tradition to see this. Isaiah and Micah wanted ancient Israel to melt down their fighter jets into farm implements. Daniel didn’t have the good sense to stop praying. Jeremiah wouldn’t shut up. John the Baptist kept rousing the rabble, Paul and Silas could not stay out of jail, and according to Paul, Jesus did not value his own life enough to hang on to it (Philippians 2). Prophetic irresponsibility cuts through the Lie to reveal a truth worth building our lives around, one that can sustain our communities and our families far “beyond what we could ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20).
Peter Maurin of the Catholic Worker movement used to sit in Union Square in New York City for hours on end, holding counsel with passersby who wanted to debate. Inevitably, the crowds would call him “mad” for the nature of his ideas about life in community, abolishing war and radical sharing. “If we are crazy,” he would say of his brothers and sisters in the Catholic Worker, “then it is because we refuse to be mad in the same way that the world has gone mad.”
Here’s to being irresponsibly mad.