When I was a child in the roaring 90s, people in our working-class small town were starting to (how do I put this mildly?) buy more stuff. It was becoming normal to have more than two pairs of shoes. Christmas gifts were on the verge of being a Big Deal. Some of my friends even went on vacations to Disney World! The general consensus was that, if you could afford it, there was no problem with accumulating things and experiences. In fact, you deserved it as a reward for working hard, and, as an added benefit, it helped the economy!
Consuming is so easy, so passive, and it has not slowed down since the 90s. It has become normalized. We use it as a way to distract, pacify, or put a band-aid on deeper problems. Kathleen Norris says that "consumerism is fed by a desire to forget our mortality." Our society tells us that more is better, and also that there exists out there, somewhere, the perfect pair of jeans that will complete your life and everything will be wonderful.
Several years ago, I read Madeleine L'Engle's Crosswick Journals. In these books, I found the voice of a mentor and kindred spirit, each book reflecting on a different phase of life. In particular, L'Engle spoke about losing herself to early motherhood with an honesty that took my breath away.
I also read words that began an internal reckoning:
Today we live in a society that seems to be less and less concerned with reality. We drink instant coffee and reconstituted orange juice. We buy our vegetables on cardboard trays covered with plastic. But perhaps the most dehumanizing thing of all is that we have allowed the media to call us consumers--ugly. No! I don't want to be a consumer. Anger consumes. Forest fires consume. Cancer consumes.
The maw-mouth, a fictitious monster that appears in The Scholomance series by Naomi Novik, consumes. Maw-mouths are described as being blobs, with thick rolling folds of a semi-translucent, glossy mass. They are aptly-named, as they rove around, indiscriminately grabbing and devouring anything or anyone in their path. The surface of a maw-mouth is covered with the eyes and mouths of victims, and their bodies are made up of their prey, mashed up after they are pulled into the maw-mouth. In the world of the Scholomance, being consumed by a maw-mouth is the absolute worst way to go.
Yikes.
Have we allowed ourselves to become little more than maw-mouths, monsters roving over the planet consuming land, resources, even other people? Do we indiscriminately grab whatever is in our path, shoving it down before squelching on to the next thing, never satisfied? It is a disquieting image.
Well, how should we then live? Perhaps we could fight back against the "consumer" identifier and become, instead, contributors, servants, working diligently to bring forth the Kingdom. We could be humanized again, recognizing limits and considering what brings us and our communities toward flourishing. We could shout, "Enough!" and go on to, as Wendell Berry puts it, "practice resurrection."
