Downward Mobility
Originally Published in the Love (Spring 2008) Issue
Most people in our generation of young, twenty-something people, seem to recognize that we have a responsibility to change the world in some way. Because of technological advances (and other cultural factors), our world is smaller than ever before, and we have become aware of a bewildering array of needs that beg meeting, problems that beg solving. We’re unable, as our parents may have been, to think just about our own little place and not address the wider concerns of a rapidly-changing world.
There are a few of us, of course, who in full awareness decide to seek only self-aggrandizement, money, power, and a life of self-gratification. But for the most part, it has become, dare I say, popular to think about the world’s problems and how they might be solved or ameliorated. And if this is actually the case, excellent! But, it seems to me that there are two broad ways we can go about facing these problems: the way most of us tend to do it, and the way Jesus did it.
Most of us, including myself, tend to answer the question, “How can I impact the world for good?” with this train of thought:
1. The world’s problems are bigger than myself as an individual.
2. Therefore, if I want to do something about it, I need to get in a place where my individuality counts for more than it does now (as a young college or post-college person). In other words, I need to get into some position where my desire to help the world can actually command more resources than those already available to me.
3. Getting into those positions, whether in politics or business or large non-profits, will take a long time of working within these various systems, but there aren’t really any other options.
4. Therefore, I should pursue opportunities which promise to increase my own power and sphere of influence, that I might use these for good.
And so, we try to move “upwards”, into the upper echelons of society or a global business community, or the US government, thinking, “When I arrive at a position of power, then I will be able to use my authority to effect dramatic change.” This kind of thinking makes sense, especially from our cherished, modernist, Western perspective where change is implemented “top-down”, in a cascade from those with more power to those with less. In fact, this paradigm seems so obviously the one to adopt that it has been a weight of responsibility to many of us personally, as people who have, perhaps, at least some opportunities to move “upward”. From our experiences at Stanford or another university, we could move easily into strategic places in Silicon Valley. Or, the more erudite of us might pursue Ph.Ds and become respected authorities on questions of science, philosophy, or theology. Who knows—maybe one of us is the next C.S. Lewis! (Or insert your favorite author here).
Whether or not those possibilities are probable doesn’t matter—the fact that they are there at all has made us ask whether we don’t have a responsibility to grab hold of those opportunities to effect “top-down” change on a large scale. Those of us with talents in the political arena are faced even more acutely with this question.
At the same time, if we call ourselves Christians and believe (as I do) that somehow Jesus effected the best kind of change possible for the world and indeed is calling us to do the same, we are confronted with this:
“Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus, Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:5-8)
So, the man who, if we believe the Scriptures, had the most potential authority of anyone who walked the earth, intentionally chose not to exercise that authority. His strategy for change seems to have been, perhaps somewhat obtusely from our perspective, to become the least of women and men, serving them rather than ruling them. God, in other words, chose not to be God, but to be a creature, to be like us. His answer to the problems of the world was not to “fix” them from on high, as he assuredly had the ability to do, but to live in the problems along with those affected by them.
Jesus’ choice frustrates me, because it seems inefficient. I can even imagine his friends and family, at that time when he chose to leave his profession of carpentry, accusing him of foolhardiness in discarding a growing business. We might further imagine that he was the best carpenter in the region, with a clear “upward” path to greater power and influence in that arena. But without a second glance, he left behind that path, and chose a “downward” path instead—wandering the wilds with a group of men and women, staying at sympathizers’ homes, hanging out with the unintelligent and socially ostracized, and literally as well as symbolically emptying himself for these unworthy recipients.
I can clearly picture those who knew him since the days when he sat at the temple and conversed with the rabbis as an equal, as they commented on his last few years of ministry, shaking their heads and sighing, “He had so much promise! He could have been a great teacher; but then he had to go waste his life with those roughnecks and tax collectors.” Right under their noses, God’s great work of world-redemption was flowering, but it was not recognized because of the manure in which it had chosen to take root. The question is, would we have recognized it? Probably not.
And so I wonder, in a fearful sort of way, when I look at Jesus’ choice—is that how I’m supposed to be? Is that how we’re supposed to be? Never mind the theological reasons for such a choice, but on a purely visceral level, could we handle our friends and families thinking that we’d left behind promising “upward” paths for less efficient “downward” ones? So much of our identity has been wrapped up in that “promise”, in our potential for “great” things from the perspective of our culture. Could we give that up?
I don’t know, but I do know that some of us are not afraid to wrestle with the question. We have only to look as far away as East Palo Alto or San Francisco to find people quietly building the Kingdom of God after having left behind opportunities to serve in more “top-down” ways. And they’re doing it without trumpeting their success or using it as an “in” for keynote address invitations on the Christian conference circuit. Or, if these locations are too close to home for us to pay attention (for as we have read, a prophet has no honor in his home town), perhaps our eyes are willing to see what individuals are doing on other continents, like Africa?
Still, the Western addiction to efficiency, and the admittedly-wise-seeming feeling of obligation to use our abilities most strategically, are strong. Hanging out with AIDS orphans in Kenya for an extended period of time seems “good”, but is it the most good I can do? No, certainly to do more good I need more money, and that means I should pursue a career in investment banking… and so the paradigm is propagated.
But every time I read that passage from Philippians, I’m struck with the alien nature of Jesus’ intentional involvement with pain and suffering. It’s so different from the way that we naturally think about dealing with those problems that it draws us in, magnetized. It seems like there’s no way it can work! Yet through his laying down of all power and authority was born the most miraculous sequence of events in human history. So I think, what would happen if we turned our idea of social change upside down? What if all the brightest and most proto-influential people of our age decided, rather than to pursue an “upwardly mobile” philosophy of change, to hang out with the dejected and downtrodden of our world, becoming in truth one of them?
The inexorable (and for some reason acclaimed) march of “Progress” would certainly lose momentum. We might not have new, cool technological toys. If we let our apocalyptic imaginations run wild, we could see the transition causing the dawn of a new Dark Age! But in return, might we not get peace, justice, unity, love? At least, that is what came of Jesus’ unique response to the problems we face in our world. And it’s certainly true that as much as we’ve tried other ways to solve them, we haven’t even come close. Maybe, just maybe, we should think more about this strange idea of “downward mobility”, since, against all intuition, it seems to have been the path that God himself chose.