c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest in Winston-Salem, N.C., an author and former Wall Street Journal reporter. E-mail him at journey(at)interpath.com.)

UNDATED _ The problem with McDonalds, say fast-food experts, is lack of focus. Are they selling burgers to boomers caught in a `60s time warp, or to middle-aged boomers wanting less fat AND to boomer puppies wanting more fat AND to 5-year-olds wanting toys?

No wonder McDonalds can’t agree on an advertising strategy.

Same goes for AT&T. Are they selling computers, Internet access, telephones, long distance, or advanced technology? Is it all of the above, or, to judge by recent executive upheavals, not enough of the above?

Same goes for national politics. Are Republicans for minimal government or aid to the wealthy? Wait until North Carolina’s Sen. Jesse Helms and ambassador-in-waiting William Weld of Massachusetts square off over what it means to be a Republican. The Democratic Party hasn’t had any focus in years.

Same goes for organized religion. I returned from vacation eager to see what the Episcopalians had done at their General Convention. It took 10 minutes just to scroll through the Internet file listing convention actions by title. Imagine reading the entire file. Indeed, imagine being in Philadelphia for 10 days forced to attend to all of these matters.

The typical large church nowadays sees itself as social service agency, dating service, school manager, cultural center, old-clothes emporium, landlord, homeless shelter, goad to the community conscience, and, when the sanctuary is available, house of worship.

And the same goes for our work-saturated lives. For more and more people, boundaries between work and home are gone. We want to have it all, do it all, and be it all.

The result is that we are worn out. McDonalds can’t give burgers away at 55 cents. AT&T bounced the No. 2 guy and has No. 1 on a short leash. National politics cease to engage the populace. And churches are paralyzed by conflict and lassitude _ expressions of the very self-willful consumer mentality church leaders have been chasing.

So now what?

When we are broke and exhausted, maybe it will go like this:

_ My 18-year-old son Nathanael, truly a have-it-all guy like his dad, was visiting relatives in New Hampshire. He discovered he could walk to a coffee shop. It made him happy.

_ My wife sat on a rock in a river. She felt at peace.

_ A hard charger has decided she wants to work only three days a week. That’s all the money she needs.

_ A fast-moving lawyer catches trout in Montana and calls Montana State to see if they need any law school faculty. The dean says he gets several hundred serenity-chasing inquiries every year.

Or maybe it won’t be like that. Maybe we’ll get more and more surly, as evidenced by a recent spate of articles on angry drivers. Maybe consumer debt collections will become a growth industry, pensions based on AT&T stock will dwindle, and someone we know will die in an auto accident while doing cellular-phone work at 65 mph driving from job 1 to job 2 and eating a Big Mac.

Why are we like this? A reader sent an impassioned e-mail asking why our values seem so bizarre. My answer: self-loathing.

Self-loathing is at the heart of all addictions. People who dislike themselves don’t want to spend time with themselves. We work seven days a week to pay for stuff we hoped would fill the empty place. We can’t just sit on rocks, because if we stopped running, we would have only ourselves for company. If we didn’t have cellular phones, pagers, voice mail and laptop computers always linking us to work, what would be our identity?

Facing up to self-loathing is hard work. No employer or consumer vendor will help us do it. In my opinion, it’s the work of organized religion. Dutch theologian Henri Nouwen once devoted an entire three-day conference to one insight:”We are the beloved of God.” I cannot imagine a message that would do more to get our lives into focus.

Imagine the compulsive work addict _ speeding, eating and telephoning. She nods, starts to run off the road, and asks herself,”Why am I doing this?”She throws burger, beeper and briefcase out the window, walks to a coffee shop, and asks with a smile that only she understands,”Are there any good rocks nearby?”

MJP END EHRICH