Duty, Motivation, and Joy

Some kinds of religious writing talk a lot about ideas like duty. You go to church because it's your duty to God; you're honest in your dealings with others because you have a duty to do so; you go visit your aunt in the hospital because it's your duty. It sometimes makes religious life seem like a set of rules: go to church on Sundays, give to the poor, volunteer, be honest, put yourself last. The problem for me of putting things that way is that it sounds so dreary! It makes life seem like a series of unpleasant chores that you have to just grit your teeth and get through. It does not sounds like a life of joy and love. Rather it seems like a life that would take the terror of hellfire to make someone embrace it. I'm not convinced that that's what God intends for us.

I'm not claiming that we shouldn't worship together and give of our time and money and live with integrity. I definitely think that those are very good things. But I find that if my reason for doing them is only that I think I should do them, that's just not enough motivation. I need to care about what I'm doing for its own sake, not just for the sake of doing what I should. In psychology, the distinction is sometimes made between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation: intrinsic motivation is the motivation to do something just because you want to, because you find it personally satisfying. Extrinsic motivation is the motivation to do something because you will be rewarded for doing it or punished for not doing it, like doing a job to get paid or paying your taxes to avoid the IRS. People will act from extrinsic motivation, certainly – having food to eat and not being thrown in jail are highly motivating. But it seems that people get joy from intrinsic motivation. And, interestingly, there is research that seems to indicate that extrinsic motivation kills intrinsic motivation for the same activity. So I'm not entirely alone in finding duty to be a poor motivator – though I can imagine that there are people who find it personally satisfying to see themselves as dutiful and therefore are intrinsically motivated to act according to what they perceive as their duty.

For someone like me, though, duty mostly means doing stuff you don't want to do because some authority says you have to. Getting duty mixed in with my worship or volunteering tends to make me feel resentful and insecure. Certainly it kills the idea of living from the abundance that God has given me. I also have a tendency to absorb ideas from my surroundings unless I aggressively challenge them. At some point, this led me to an idea of church as duty, which made me not want to go to church, which led to my mostly disappearing from the church for most of a year until I realized that I did actually want to be there. (Oddly, this particular idea of duty didn't come from my church or my family. I'm not sure where I picked it up).

One of the challenges I faced with throwing off the ideas of duty was the question of how I would still be a good person. How would I still care about the world and contribute if I didn't have a sense of duty making me do it? In my particular case, I had to take the risk that maybe I wouldn't – I decided that actually being myself, whatever that was, was more important to me than being good. This seems very much less like a “surrender to God” sort of decisions and more like a “throw off your shackles” sort of decision, but in this case I think it was actually the decision that brought me closer to God. By throwing off all my ideas of what I should be and do and want, I was able to find out what I actually wanted. And I learned that I do want the church. I want to sing and pray and break bread with other people; I want to think and write about how my faith informs my life; I want to be part of a community that welcomes everyone; I want to help change the world; I want to live as if love and joy and hope are more powerful than fear and death. I want to do these things not because I'm afraid of being punished if I don't or because I'm trying to earn a reward, but because the attempt to do so is satisfying and meaningful here and now.