Blessed Are the Commuters

Our pastor preached a sermon yesterday on the theme of “running on empty” and how our suburban lives often leave us empty and depressed. Since our community is becoming more of a suburb instead of a stand alone small town and since I am one of the many commuters in town, I am pleased that the preacher is paying attention to the commuters’ situation. Just last week, I ended up putting 13.185 gallons of gasoline in my 13.2 gallon tank, so I know something about running on empty. I also know about the rat race and substituting having for being in the consumerist trap.

One of the nearby developments of McMansions, the pastor related, had 25 homes in foreclosure. I don’t know what this had to do with the rat race and emptiness and all that. Perhaps the pastor included it to make the dreaded McMansion dwellers seem more human, folks to be pitied rather than despised. In East Fishkill, farms are growing McMansions more and more. Traffic is getting worse. The commuters have kids in the local schools, and they blithely vote to increase taxes. They are resented mightily by the townies who see their arrival as the end of the bucolic paradise that drew them to the area. Those Hummer driving, McMansion dwelling, tax increasing, resource hogging newcomers are turning the place into a suburban hell.

Mrs Vache Folle reckons that the reference to foreclosures will just incite some good old fashioned schadenfreude. The townies already believe that they are morally superior to the commuters, despite their having been blessed with enormous homes and SUVs, and I fear that many of them will take the sermon and the rest in the series as a confirmation that the commuters’ lives are crappier than theirs. This is not what the pastor intends, I am pretty sure.

If our church is to grow, the increase in members will come from the population of commuters. The townies are all churched up by now, and townies are getting scarcer. Some members and visitors are commuters even now. Mrs Vache Folle and I are among them, although we have neither McMansion nor Hummer. When the McMansion and Hummer fail to satisfy, the church can be poised to offer the meaning that the commuter currently seeks in vain in acquisition and status seeking.

And the townies are not immune to the same problems that the commuters face. I counted quite a few massive SUVs in the church parking lot, and I’ll bet some members own some big houses and have pretty big nuts to cover themselves.

In any event, I am looking forward to the series of sermons and to the church’s outreach to the commuter community. We have different needs and more time constraints than townies, and I hope the church makes some programmatic changes to accommodate us.