My sister, A2, is waging war on the word “should.”  All the time, she says that she shouldn’t get hung up in expectations and shoulds like, “exercise more!”  Instead, she should accept and enjoy what is.  For sure, A2 can see the contradiction (she should stop worrying about shoulds), but that’s not what she’s talking about.  A2 is saying that she wants to stop driving herself crazy with expectations and universal theories.  Which is legit: I shouldn’t cram my shoulds down on myself and others.

 

It’s like Montaigne in his garden.  Montaigne says (and I paraphrase), please go away with your problematic and meaningful issues, your big talk of highest goods.  My meaning is right here in my garden, this particular garden, and I accept that my garden will never measure up to the universal standard of garden.  Hence his famous quote: “I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.” 

 

Like my sister, Montaigne replaces one should with another.  He says, I should enjoy more my present experience, live my way, and theorize less about shoulds and highest goods.  Which is true: my dogs don’t think of shoulds and they seem content. 

 

What’s the biggest and baddest should of them all?  It’s the highest good, a.k.a Montaigne’s arch-enemy and the star of this show, Ends and Means.  I should become the best person I can, and my highest good calls me forward on that path.  My highest good is the moral standard by which I live, and it won’t shut up.  If my highest good is to be responsible for the suffering of others, well, I never get to the end of that string.  If it’s self-development, well, my image in the mirror never matches my ideal.  If it’s expressing truth through art, well, there’s always a deeper level of truth.  If it’s God, well, I don’t know if I’ll ever get there. 

 

I never measure up.  I’m always fallen, in theory and in practice.  I want to be part of something higher, but I don’t have the energy or focus to stay in that space for long, and after a while I return to the ordinary comforts.  I hit this tension in my worship.  My pastor puts everything in service of God, and he feels terrible when he falls short, which is all-the-time.  I love and respect my pastor, and I wish I could love God completely… but I can’t keep that energy going in every minute of every day. 

 

For example, my devotional small-group did a week of sacrifice.  One guy did intermittent fasting, another gave up sugar.  C.S. Lewis says, “Fasting asserts the will against the appetite – the reward being self-mastery and the danger pride.”  I guess I should’ve fasted but here’s the problem: I like to eat.  I sacrificed my favorite TV show instead, which at that time was Bosch.  It was a long week without my TV show but at least I got to eat my food.  My friend who gave up sugar was a mess.  In retrospect, I failed both tests from C.S. Lewis: I lacked the self-mastery for a real fast and I was proud of it.  Good grief.

 

Martin Buber says it well in an autobiographical fragment called A Conversion:

 

“Since then I have given up the ‘religious’ which is nothing but the exception, extraction, exaltation, ecstasy; or it has given me up.  I possess nothing but the everyday out of which I am never taken.  The mystery is no longer disclosed, it has escaped or it has made its dwelling here where everything happens as it happens.  I know no fullness but each mortal hour’s fullness of claim and responsibility.  Though far from being equal to it, yet I know that in the claim I am claimed and may respond in responsibility, and know who speaks and demand a response.”

 

“I possess nothing but the everyday out of which I am never taken.”  My friends speak of joy in God, but I’ve never seen eternity.  I only get to live my boring life, and I don’t know how to be anyone else.  If you dropped someone from heaven down to my dinner table, the small talk wouldn’t be good.  He wouldn’t laugh at my jokes.  And I don’t want to change places with him because I like to be with my family and friends, who need me.  Does my heavenly visitor even want to be himself?  Maybe my heavenly visitor is like the extra-terrestrial alien from the X-Files who loved to play baseball.  He broke alien law by staying on Earth, morphed to pass as human, and hid out in the minor leagues to avoid attention.  He was happy riding the minor league circuit and playing ball with his teammates.