I have begun to participate as a "select blogger" for The Ooze which has started sending me books, often review copies before the books hit the stores. So I will be periodically writing reviews of these books. Thanks to the good folks at The Ooze!
My Beautiful Idol is an autobiographical tale in which Pete Gall takes us through his rather flawed, or at least self-delusional journey from advertizing whiz, to "poor fat white guy" in the inner city, to the unresolved questions of the misdirected journey of a failed "hero for Christ". The metaphor for Pete is a collector crab. This is a shellfish that, like other crabs, lives off of the dregs and excrement of the glorious creatures' that grace the currents above. But it also has one talent: "The collector crab, or decorator crab, as it's also called, attaches to his shell bits of what it finds on the sea floor…(T)he idea is to protect itself by becoming invisible to its natural enemy, the squid" (p. 18).
Pete starts off in a cab in Chicago talking about his profession with the cabbie, revealing that the entire job of advertising is to sell people back their beliefs and translate those beliefs into needs that people can no longer do without. It is the grand feedback loop of plucking people of their whims and even latent desires and packaging them into something that dazzles and amuses long enough to make desire conform to the shape of an object that will earn a company profit.
Pete wants more than this in his life. He wants a deeper connection with people and with God that goes beyond the normative structures of the church or the casual relationships he encounters along the way. So he leaves everything behind to pursue this depth. Whether it is working with people down on their luck at an organization called Turnaround, the mentally challenged, or with convicts at a housewares startup business, we learn that Pete himself is the embodiment of all those with whom he finds himself in the role of the minister. You see, Pete does not just grab those things of his environment to conceal or protect him, he holds onto an idealistic image of God and what his relationship with God should be rather than what it actually is.
What we learn with Pete is that all of those tactics he would use to convince people that they need something that they really do not have imploded on his very sense of self in a feedback loop that does everything but rest in God even though he tries so hard to find that rest. But the rest he seeks is on his own terms and rooted in the stuff of not only his environments, but in his very image of who God is, and the person he believes he should be before God. Clinging so desperately to the idol of this version of Pete and this version of God, leads Pete into despair – over and over again.
So what's Pete's problem? I share his wife's sentiment who "said, 'You know, you were kind of a butt'" (p. 9). Pete frustrates me because he is so irreducibly wrapped in his own self-created and self-delusional tension of masochistic victimization and the audacity of self-importance. I want to slap Pete around a bit, tell him to get over himself, and stop creating the idol that is this ideation of Pete Gall. He has constructed this image of himself and has convinced himself that this is who he ought to be. As he tells us, the reason why he left Five Points Christian Church was, "because it was too hard being there, too unimportant, too low-profile, and playing the role of outsider was wearing thin. It made me a poor fit for the simple work the church needed me to do" (p. 172). And that's the rub.
The tale somewhat concludes with an interesting dialogue that can perhaps be better summed up with a line from Kierkegaard at the opening of The Sickness Unto Death which in large part gives us a framework for why Pete is often so miserable in this fraction of his life:
The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.
Pete can't find St. Augustine's "rest in God" because the only source he truly has to rest in is this image – this idol – of himself. This is like "Diary of a Seducer", only Pete seduces himself. He is not Hamlet pondering his existential crisis in the eclipse of his father's legacy. He is not the prodigal son who wishes his father dead in order to carouse only to come back. True his father offers a moment similar to the father in this parable in Luke. But Pete is really none of these. His character is Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman who said, "The man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want." Pete and Willy suffer from the same problem – they want to be well-liked and they want the world to find favor with them. For Pete, God is one more part of that world. For Willy Loman there was no resurrection and no great legacy. But it seems that from Pete's point of view now, that killing off this idol of himself is the only way that he can truly rest in the grace of God.
These stories are not ones that I tend to read looking to find someone like me in them. But stories of failures and loves lost remind us at how fragile we are and how culpable before God we are of committing the same transgressions that killed Christ. And this is something we do over and over again. What Pete shows us is how we take this one step further by deluding ourselves into believing that we do not behave or believe this way. And sometimes we can only see that we all do these things by resonating with the travail of someone else. Then we have a choice to be hypocrites, or penitents. Our tendency is to be the former. The purpose of our created existence is to be the latter. And that is why you should read Pete's book.
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