Godyssey: A Postmodern Spiritual Adventure in the Lord

By M. Elizabeth Kessler

Anyone who had their corporate coming-of-age during the "live-for-success/look-out-for-number-one" heyday of the 70s and 80s will nostalgically delight and find renewal of spirit in this book by a onetime Yuppie "reclaimed" by her Lord. Like many of her generation who found themselves caught up in consumerist values and careerist lifestyles, the author experienced a sense of estrangement from her own soul...sparking a search for "redemption" that will touch the heart of the most jaded worldling.

A spiritual adventure with a cosmopolitan twist, Godyssey seeks to help the spiritually disenfranchised rediscover that Lord whose gentle "wooing" they still sense within some recess of the soul, and to recover those Christian ideals they had lost touch with in their pursuit of success. By presenting Christ as a kind of "mentor" in the art of successful living, this book provides much-needed shepherding to those left spiritually stranded by their immersion in America's recent corporate and cultural milieu.


CONTENTS

Foreword.........................................................................................................................9

I Strange Gods.....................................................................................................13
In servitude to the self

II The Pearl of Great Price....................................................................................25
A seduction of the soul

III Coming Home....................................................................................................33
God's gentle politics of persuasion and conversion

IV The Good Life....................................................................................................71
A work of art from the canvas of the everyday

V The Greatest of These.......................................................................................95
Life's highest calling

VI Getting Along...................................................................................................123
Grace through gritted teeth

VII The Second Mile..............................................................................................149
The art of "Good Samaritanship"

VIII A Journal of the Winds....................................................................................179
God's potluck providence

IX Crooked Lines..................................................................................................199
The poetry of pain

Afterword.......................................................................................................................221

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 10, 2008
• ISBN: 9781462842858

M. Elizabeth Kessler

An American by birth and lifelong Christian, the author grew up in various places throughout the world and lives occasionally in Israel. When not writing, she works in the library field. Her work first appeared in the Los Angeles Times. This is her first book.

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Copyright © 2008 by M. Elizabeth Kessler All rights reserved

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Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations used in this book are from the King

James Version of the Bible. Other Scripture references are from the following sources:

Good News Bible: The Bible in Today’s English Version (GNB).

Copyright © 1966, 1971, 1976 by the American Bible Society. Used by permission.

All rights reserved.

The Living Bible (TLB).

Copyright © 1971. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.,

Wheaton, IL. All rights reserved.

New American Bible with Revised New Testament (NAB).

Copyright © 1970, 1986 by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc.,

Washington, DC. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The Revised Standard Version of the Bible (RSV).

Copyright © 1946, 1952, 1971 by the National Council of the Churches of Christ

in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Contents

FOREWORD

CHAPTER I

STRANGE GODS

CHAPTER II

THE PEARL OF GREAT PRICE

CHAPTER III

COMING HOME

CHAPTER IV

THE GOOD LIFE

CHAPTER V

THE GREATEST OF THESE

CHAPTER VI

GETTING ALONG

CHAPTER VII

THE SECOND MILE

CHAPTER VIII

A JOURNAL OF THE WINDS

CHAPTER IX

CROOKED LINES

AFTERWORD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

TO MY LORD

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And in loving gratitude to my parents,

John and Eveywn

FOREWORD

I wrote this book basically for one simple reason: because I enjoy my God. An unusual statement, perhaps, for a onetime devotee of the live-for-success school of life to be making, but if anything it proves that even the most determined worldling is not immune to the magnetic pull of its Maker. And how glad I am that this is so, for the Lord I’ve come to know has delighted me beyond anything the world has to offer, and become fully as real and alive to me as any flesh-and-blood human being.

And like any such entity, he has at times enraged me, ignored me, confounded me and gotten on my nerves as much as I’m sure I have his . . . and yet after over two decades of tumultuous togetherness, I can truthfully say that just the thought of him (generally) brings a smile to my face. He gives meaning to every facet of my life, and my days are vibrant because of him. He is Someone I truly could not live without.

I also wrote this book because I see so many people today who can’t begin to understand that kind of joy, that kind of relationship with the Lord.

As we sift through the chaff we have inevitably reaped in living out a philosophy of rational selfishness, we find that by and large we have become a generation estranged from God, alienated even from those of our own household; in many cases so soured on life that we feel the need to cocoon ourselves from the outer world, using our computers as artificial, almost holographic extensions of ourselves in interfacing with an increasingly complex and ominous reality. Or, at the other extreme, we cope by engaging in a restlessly outward-bound, marathon-paced lifestyle that erodes families from within by its sheer overextension, according to an ongoing study begun in 2001 by the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families.

Noted the study’s director in 2005: We have scheduled and outsourced a lot of our relationships, [so] there isn’t much room for the flow of life . . . . And, despite everyone being in constant contact in a so-called BlackBerry world, she found the most troubling trend to be the strange indifference with which people treat one another . . . the chilly exchanges repeated in so many of the study’s households suggesting that something has seriously gone awry.

No doubt we have thrived in a material sense—confirmed by the study’s wry observation that the typical dual-career family literally owns more than most Egyptian pharaohs—but in having chosen a careerist lifestyle and taken a consumerist approach toward life, far too many of us have ended up living what we sense are counterfeit lives: pale facsimiles of what we intuitively feel we were really meant to have.

People aren’t consciously aware of what is happening to them, of course, as they coast along in a state probably best described as a kind of benign nihilism. They cannot actually feel their souls wasting away in the high-tech malaise to the point of serving no more purpose than that evolutionary leftover, the coccyx. They only know that something isn’t right, and in an effort to remedy that sense of something amiss they wander from movement to movement like disconsolate Flying Dutchmen, always searching, yet, as the apostle Paul once put it, never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.

Having been one of those restless spirits who searched for the truth under an earlier regime of rational selfishness, I found little satisfaction in our modern poultices for the pains of the soul . . . but I finally did come, by some magic I still don’t quite understand, to a knowledge of the truth. And so I set forth in these pages my own experiences, discoveries and insights in the hope it will restore a sense of authenticity to our lives by helping us learn to live them, if you will, under the loving mentorship of the Lord.

You may have noticed that I use the term postmodern in the subtitle in describing my spiritual adventure. This is in the sense of reacting against those principles set into motion by the me generation (and that obviously continue to resonate through our society) by offering a regrounding in those timeless polestars for leading more God-centered, gospel-oriented lives. Much of what is written here, then, is not all that earthshakingly new; just, like good manners, very much forgotten. Hence, what is an insight or novelty to one may well be common sense or old hat to another. (And if I draw on an occasional source that seems dated, it’s because I find the ideas still workable and worthy of resuscitation.)

I might also mention that, since the people I most hope to reach tend to read on the run, I have tried to observe the Pythagorean counsel to say a lot in a little and express ideas as concisely as possible, so readers will have at hand something of a condensed guide for Christian living in today’s time-sensitive world.

A book, therefore, could easily be written on any one of the main chapters (the first two being somewhat introductory), but in general I developed those topics I thought would be of special interest or relevance, while others were intentionally left in the background. Each of the main chapters, however, explores some facet of the overall motif of mentorship . . . from the intriguing dynamics of developing and maintaining a relationship with the Lord to unsuspected dimensions of experiencing his providence in our lives; as well as modes for discovering and actualizing that unique inner charism of Christlikeness by which our lives can attain the stature of the near-angelic.

Lastly, another reason for keeping the material fairly compressed is that I was genuinely concerned that people today, with their more or less secularized view of life, simply wouldn’t have the patience for a drawn-out treatise on spiritual things. Not that I am qualified to write on that ambitious a level, anyway. My foremost credential in writing this book, I would say, is simply a close, personal relationship with the Lord. More than anything else, the book is a product of my growth in him, written primarily (though by no means exclusively) for people who have drifted away from God because of today’s values and lifestyles, yet wish to get back in relationship with him.

I see this book, then, as a kind ofcatechism for the disenchanted, that will, I hope, help you rediscover your Lord, and regain the uses of your soul . . .

CHAPTER I

STRANGE GODS

The madman shouted in the marketplace. No one stopped to answer him. Thus it was confirmed that his thesis was incontrovertible.

—Dag Hammarskjold

On a late autumn day in 1980 I stood on a windswept rock rising high above a desert waste, looking out over the twilight-stained reaches of a land older than Solomon. It had been a rugged climb, even in the shade, and I was soothed by this shadow-world of gaunt, archaic beauty . . . its sunset winds dying down to a silence so vast and deep it might have been some airless chasm of the moon.

The starkness was a fitting backdrop, one could well imagine, to both the intensity and austerity of the struggle that had taken place on this site in ages past—a struggle the full heroic dimensions of which one sensed but dimly beneath the relentless glare of the afternoon sun. But as dusk settled over the ramparts, bringing a kind of benediction to this tortured world, it seemed to draw out from the very stones the lonely citadel’s attendant spirits.

The rock was Masada, an ancient mountain fortress at the eastern edge of Israel’s Judean wilderness. A rock where something very poignant, yet very powerful, still lingers among the crumbling nobility of its ruins. For it was here that in the first century A.D., 960 Jewish Zealots—men, women and children—made perhaps the ultimate statement in self-determination. No longer able to maintain their defenses against the mighty Roman Tenth Legion, the inhabitants of Masada chose to die at their own hands rather than submit to the physical and spiritual domination of Rome.

It was a decision made no less horrid by their solidarity; but so intense was their conviction that on the eve of imminent defeat the moonlit summit of Masada became as it were a vast sacrificial altar, upon which they made their final obeisance to their God.

And from that rock . . . overhung with so fearsome a solitude on the morning of their enemies’ intrusion . . . freedom soared.

Never again need the human spirit surrender itself to those who would hold it hostage to the gods of the age, however cleverly devised they may be; for it had faced the most formidable challenge possible—and triumphed.

Nearly twenty centuries have passed since that stoic confrontation on the heights, and still Masada endures as a kind of eternal flame in stone signifying the struggle between light and darkness in every generation. As profound an impression as it made on me, however, it wasn’t until the Masada miniseries aired shortly after my return to the States that I realized just how cogent the drama was to certain developments in our own society.

Although perhaps few grasped the parallels as they followed the events on television, a new breed of pagans was rampant among us at that very moment . . . only the gods they sought to impose upon a nation primed for their seduction were not those of the Caesars, but of the Self: of Success, Power, Status, Pleasure. They did not assert their deities with the brute force of a battering ram, but with a line of reasoning that went down as smoothly as Drambuie over ice, with persuasions as cleanly constructed as a Ceska sculpture.

Success, they assured us via such manifestos as The Art of Selfishness, Live for Success, The Magic of Getting What You Want, etc. etc., derived not from such nonsense as treating others as we would be treated, but from observing the golden rules for getting ahead and having it all.

Power, impossible to attain over anything so unruly as one’s lusts, could only be sought in the plush environs of the executive suite. Class, as defined by those who could no more overlook an insult than a sales deficit, was achieved by an aristocratic stance or a certain way of wearing a stickpin.

That there was a certain prostitution of the spirit at play in all this was obvious enough to most, but the packaging was so slick, the payoff so enticing, that we all but charged into the bondage to which we were being wooed. And in no time at all, it seemed, our tailored suits were just the right shade of blue or gray, our hood ornaments were just the right type, and our desks held just the right trademarks of upward mobility. We knew just the right way—and places—to wear our designer scarves and feathered fedoras; and of course we wouldn’t dream of using stationery other than Crane’s or signing our names with anything other than that standard prop of power, a Cross pen.

Mindful, however, that success was more than a matter of mere accoutrements, we flocked to that darling of the trade, the image engineer, who removed from our voices any atavistic traces of toidy-toid street origins and molded our faces into upper-class masks, so as to project a distant and haughty demeanor. (Today we would call it the Putin look.) We learned to carry ourselves in a way that would get us into the most exclusive soiree with no questions asked—and how to hold a wineglass and work the room once we got there.

In time, as we came to fine-tune the mannerisms that were said to separate the crumbs from the upper crust, we learned that it wasn’t enough simply to address the maitre d’ by his first name or refrain from such vulgarisms as checking the change-slot after using a pay phone. (You never know who’s watching.) To impress the truly elite—the ones we hoped to rub worsted shoulders with someday—one had to prove one’s cultural literacy by pronouncing Haydn correctly and having a few Winston Churchill quotes up the sleeve should the talk turn to politics.

And since the truly elite were said to be put off by anything that smacked of a diamond-studded lifestyle, we quickly learned to discard any notions of if you’ve got it, flaunt it. Making an obvious display of wealth was considered as crass as hanging one’s degree in the foyer of one’s home. The chic thing among those who had really made it (or wished to give that impression) was to understate one’s status through such discreet yet unmistakably monied touches as a well-stocked wine cellar or leather-bound classics in the den. (This, by the way, was before stealth wealth—a certain decent conservatism observed during recessionary periods—came into vogue.)

But, in the event one were too hard-pressed or inept to bother with such shibboleths, he could always get by if he just remembered the 3 R’s: rye in the decanter, Rubinstein on the stereo, and Realites on the coffee table (preferably one by Mies van der Rohe).

Of course, if we were actually going to achieve the success to which we had pretended, we had to be ultra-sharp in the business world, where, as John T. Molloy so quaintly expressed it in his Live for Success, . . . in spite of all the fancy glass doors and the $400 suits, there are those who are doing and there are those who are being done to. Being numbered among the former was not so much, as one would expect, a matter of applying one’s education and abilities as developing a kind of low-profile Machiavellianism. And because we were determined to be among the doers rather than the doees, we soon had tucked under our Gucci belts a battery of sub-skills bordering on the esoteric.

We knew what body language to use at staff meetings and the 38 ways of detecting a lie (as well as a few tricks for concealing them); how to play transferrence (a power game the purpose of which is to spread the guilt [for something gone awry] among so many people that one is no longer individually responsible); and how to activate a person’s 14 secret motivators (while being aware that our erroneous zones could make us vulnerable to such manipulative ploys ourselves).

And as we worked our way up the org by these and other strategies for success, it soon became clear that a certain amount of stagecraft was also called for if we were to cultivate the aura necessary for admission to the corporate inner circle. This was accomplished by such devices as sitting with one’s back to the window at conference tables so others would have to look into the glare of the sun to see you (thereby giving an oracular aspect to what you were saying) and speaking in a hushed voice so they would have to lean forward to hear you (thus creating the illusion of bowing). To further the image of infallibility, it was suggested that we give our offices a similar mystique by dimming the lights and reducing the decor to certain high-toned fundamentals so the overall effect would be as silent and awe-inspiring as a pharaoh’s tomb.

It was heady stuff. There was a certain arcane glamor to it all, you had to admit. The mores of the cosmopolite, the rules of corporate roulette were as fascinating in their own way as the rites of Oriental mysticism were a decade or so beforehand. So much so that even those who were somewhat amused by the phenomenon, like me, found they could hardly escape being at least subliminally influenced by all the variations on the theme of looking out for number one.

I suppose it was almost inevitable, then, given the sheer pervasiveness of this new ethos, that I should enter the promised land of corporate America (having chucked my dangling earrings and fuchsia lipsticks for a kind of pearls-and-pumps Young Republican look) with one eye on the bestseller game plan for getting ahead.

Although I stopped short of the really cutthroat tactics—you don’t throw off all those years of saying grace and singing in the choir at the drop of a hat—I made generous use of some of the more soft-core strategies recommended. I would never come right out and sabotage someone’s project, for instance, but neither would I share any information likely to help it along. And even though I paid lip service to egalitarianism in the workplace, I did subscribe to some of those grimy little stratagems designed to safeguard one’s own imagined omnipotence.

Messenger boys, for example, could expect to stand at my desk for a few seconds before being acknowledged (reinforced their subordinate status, you know). Secretaries knew me to casually pick something up from their desks without asking (helped establish one as a person-of-authority). Colleagues whose space I coveted would occasionally find some property of my office intruding on their domain (a subtle way of usurping territorial rights). And everyone except my superiors (to whom, of course, one had to kowtow shamelessly) came in for his or her share of those quirky little mannerisms considered de rigueur for getting and staying on the fast track: ordering instead of asking (Get me the Annual Report, Fritz!); summoning someone to my office instead of going to his; assigning an impossible deadline just to have an excuse to call someone down (ideally a snotty upstart like oneself).

Oh, I had my good points, of course . . . . I knew how to draw people into idle conversation—but mainly for the purpose of detecting their Achilles’ heels or ferreting out potentially useful trivia like who’s related to whom, who lunches with whom, or, who sleeps with whom. If someone entrusted me with a confidence, I didn’t break it—but only because, as the experts had warned, it was sure to be found out; and the person I’d betrayed could be my boss someday. Whenever I had to correct someone, I always did it privately instead of in front of others, because, as Dr. Joyce Brothers pointed out in How to Get Whatever You Want Out of Life, . . . by letting him save face, you will make him more willing to do what you want [now] and in the future. And I was perfectly willing to do favors for people—but only so they would do the same for me, because, as Robert J. Ringer reminded us in Winning Through Intimidation, In business, no one ever does anything for anybody else without expecting to gain something in return. (A person may say, of course, that he’s doing something just to be nice, but you had better believe that ultimately, his non-altruistic subconscious mind will automatically regulate his actions.)

In short, my ethics were purely pragmatic—the right things done for the wrong reasons—and I doubt that I was even aware of the incongruity. So skillfully had I rationalized my conduct, that it never really occurred to me I could be doing an injustice by it. And if a look of impotent hurt in someone’s eyes told me I had—well, I couldn’t let it bother me. I was a citizen of the Big Time now, where it was considered bad form to take note of any pangs of conscience. One proved one belonged to this rarefied world by ignoring such things . . . the way Californians did earth tremors.

Careerwise, I was doing as well as an ambitious administrative assistant could expect, but as a result of all the imploding pressures from the drive to maintain high visibility and the competitive edge, I began to burn out. I don’t know that it was a burnout in the clinical sense, so much—I was a little too green yet for the really grand mal stuff—as the kind that results from living out Santayana’s classic definition of fanaticism, which consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

Just what was I jumping through all these hoops for, anyway? Letting a place own me to the extent that I was practically running my private life on the concept of management-by-objective? Was I trying to achieve something by this frenetic, work-centered lifestyle—or trying to avoid something? Had I ever really defined success for myself? Ever really questioned the things upheld as comprising the new set of desiderata in life—the stock options, corner office, golden parachute, etc.—or had I just blindly bought into something simply because I had been culturally conditioned to believe this was the sort of life I was supposed to want?

The downsizing of the American dream with its concomitant reality check and soul-searching was but a haze on the horizon yet . . . but the questions subtly began to assert themselves. Interestingly, they did not occur to me through any kind of spiritual trauma or dark night of the soul type of thing (I don’t think I had much of a soul at the time), but through a series of rather everyday vignettes, I guess you could call them—some aspect of which froze in my mind just long enough for me to perceive some unsettling truth about the life I had chosen to live . . .

Maybe it was because for once I was as intent on observing as on making an impression, but it was at the proverbial power lunch, those fabled occasions where knowing which fork to use with the shrimp cocktail counts as much as knowing which buttons to push in a prospective client, that I had my first real insight into the nature of the beast.

The small talk over cocktails concluded, they were segueing into the raison d’etre for the whole affair, when suddenly I caught it. That little group of hotshot MBAs, looking so cool and noncommittal in their preppy business casuals, sipping their Perriers with an air of breezy self-assurance—was afraid. Despite all the glad-handing and thirty-something bonhomie going on, they were very much aware that even on the ostensibly neutral ground of this clubby, fern-drenched watering hole, a simple nuance can ruin a career.

My next perception of something vaguely perverse came via an excursion through the actual physical structure of the corporation: what Edward Abbey called that fantastic, labyrinthine, sky-towering ziggurat of iron and stone, paper and wire, glass and aluminum and concrete, habit and obedience, through which we creep and scurry in our channeled runways.

Trying to find my way one day to a foreign part of the building, I found myself seeing the place from a perspective I never had before—one that caused a strange, almost premonitory chill to come