Hungering for Food That Doesn't Exist

           Are you happy?

           What would make you happy?

           A bigger house? A better job?

           Roko Belic's documentary film Happy (2011) begins in a muddy slum of Kolkata. There we meet a rickshaw driver named Manoj Singh. Manoj exudes happiness. "My home is good," he says, "we live well." He points to some sticks covered by a tarp. True, he admits, during the monsoon season one side of their tarp leaks. Nonetheless, says Manoj, "When I come home from work and my son greets me, I feel like I'm not poor but the richest person in the world. My neighbors are good, we stay together, we're all friends."

           Belic's film then travels to fourteen countries, including Brazil, Bhutan, Denmark, and Japan, where they have a special word, "karoshi," for people who die from overwork. Various experts theorize about what makes people happy. They consider the epidemic of loneliness and boredom in the richest countries of the world.

           For those of us pounded by propaganda day after day, whose sole purpose is to make us discontent, I recommend this film (I watched it on Netflix Streaming). It's a modern reprisal of an ancient question that the prophet Isaiah asked almost 3,000 years ago in this week's lectionary: "Why do you spend money on what is not bread, / and your labor on what does not satisfy?"

           But that's exactly what we're continually tempted to do. Consider a character in the novel Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

           About half of Infinite Jest takes place at the Enfield Tennis Academy, a boarding school where kids hone their skills in the hopes of making it to The Show. Accepting a tennis scholarship to college is an admission of failure. LaMont Chu, for example, is obsessed with tennis fame. He imagines pictures of himself in tennis magazines, television announcers analyzing his stroke in hushed tones, and corporations paying him to wear their logos. He's so obsessed he can't eat, sleep, or even pee. His performance is suffering. Ambition is eating him alive, and so he goes to the ETA guru, Lyle.

           LaMont admits his rabid ambition to Lyle. He's ashamed of his hunger for hype. He feels lost and lonely.

           Lyle is the perfect listener: "the supplicant feels both nakedly revealed and sheltered, somehow, from all possible judgment." Lyle never condescends, but never candy coats the truth.

           "Trust me," he tells LaMont, "the pros whom you envy do not feel what you burn for. They are trapped, just as you are."

           "Is this supposed to be good news?" asks LaMont. "This is awful news."

           "LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about what is true? The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you. You have been snared by something untrue. You are deluded. But this is good news. You burn with hunger for food that does not exist."

           "This is good news?"

           "It is the truth."

           "The burning doesn't go away?"

           "What fire dies when you feed it?"

           "Would I sound ungrateful if I said this doesn't make me feel very much better at all?"

           "LaMont, you suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of the oldest lies in the world. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage."

           "So I'm stuck in the cage from either side. Fame or tortured envy of fame. There's no way out."

           "You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage."

           In Luke's gospel this week, Jesus responds to two stories of sudden and premature death. When Pilate slaughtered some Galileans during their religious rituals, instead of blaming the governor some people blamed the victims. Similarly, in a bizarre accident of fate, when a tower collapsed and killed eighteen people in Siloam, some people concluded that they must have been "worse sinners" than the average person.

           No, said Jesus, don't demonize your neighbor. Don't presume to invoke God's judgment on someone else. You can't purchase God's favor by projecting your fears onto others. Then, as he often did, Jesus flipped the story so that its moral applied to the living rather than to the dead.

           Jesus compared his audience to barren fruit trees. Unlike the victims of Galilee and Siloam for whom time had run out, they still enjoyed a future with choices. If they let the tragedy speak to them, instead of using it as a vain attempt to validate their moral superiority, they could rearrange the furniture of their lives, adjust their priorities, and make changes while life was left. But the window of opportunity wouldn't stay open forever, Jesus reminded them. Mere length of years was no guarantee of a fruitful life, just as premature death could not diminish it. Sooner or later the tree will be cut down.

           And so Isaiah asks, "Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?" That's spiritual deficit spending of the worst sort, accumulating depreciating assets that lose value every day. When the clock stops and time ends, Jesus said, your life will not consist of your possessions, the wealth you hoarded, the vanity you perfected, or the power you wielded.

           There's a deep hunger and thirst in all of us, says the Psalmist (63:1), a palpable longing for human nourishment that no amount of power or money, no prestigious job, nor any glamorous home in an upscale neighborhood can satisfy. Your anxieties will not disappear by winning the lottery tomorrow. A new lover will not bring true love.

           Thank God for the season of Lent, in which Jesus warns us: "Unless you change, you will perish." This isn't a condescending judgment; as Wallace's novel shows, it's a tragic statement of fact.

           Lent also comes with Isaiah's invitation: "Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear and come to me; hear me, that your soul may live."

           Roko Belic's film Happy ends where it began, in Kolkata, only this time with a former German banker named Andy Wimmer who's worked at Mother Teresa's Home for the Destitute and Dying for seventeen years. Why? Because it nourishes his soul like his former life never could.