Electricity is Everything: The Parable of the Refrigerator Explains All Human Relationships
In ‘Help,’ John Lennon and the Beatles explained why our hearts are anxious until we find someone greater than ourselves
Perhaps the greatest lesson learned in a year of Catholic seminary studies? One remark forming the seeds of a modern-day “parable of the refrigerator.”
The second most memorable line? The same professor, Father Bryan Patterson, gave a homily showing how all human anxiety and restlessness could be explained by John Lennon’s Beatles song, “Help.”
“Everybody is going through something,” Father Patterson stresses. “If there’s one thing that unites all of us? Every one of us experiences suffering.”
What ‘Help’ by the Beatles and a refrigerator both teach us about life
Father Patterson, now rector of St. James Cathedral Basilica in Brooklyn, N.Y., jolted the Orchard Lake St. Mary’s high school kids by reading the words from a young man who had achieved every worldly dream.
“When I was younger, so much younger than today, I never needed anybody’s help in any way,” he said, quoting Lennon. “But now these days are gone, I’m not so self-assured. Now I find I’ve changed my mind and opened up the doors.”
Even at age 25, as the leader of the most popular band in history, Lennon sang of how his life changed, how his independence seemed to “vanish in the haze” and “every now, and then I feel so insecure,” how much he still needed help.
The answer to feeling helpless and needing help? Help someone else
Father Patterson explained that we all feel this helplessness, and the answer is often as simple as focusing on helping someone else. When we start focusing on helping someone else, he added, our own fears seem to fade into the background.
This brings us to the related parable of the refrigerator. While teaching our seminary class, Father Patterson said to imagine yourself as a refrigerator and the electricity powering the refrigerator as God.
As long as you’re plugged in, everything works as it should. But what happens when you pull the plug?
When the power goes out, everything in the refrigerator seems the same. We might not even notice a change — but the change is instantaneous. Eventually, the food spoils.
We are all are like refrigerators? An empty box with or without electricity?
A refrigerator is the main appliance in nearly every dwelling, the only home appliance that needs to be “turned on and left running’’ 24 hours a day, seven days a week to work properly.
The main job of the refrigerator is to protect and preserve its contents from the degradation and dangers of the world around it.
Every time we lose power (even if the power, lights, and internet go out only for a few minutes), we are reminded that working electricity is “everything’’ in our modern age, just as we realize we are lost when it dawns on us that we have somehow managed to lose our essential connection with God.
The refrigerator, like humanity, must be connected to its energy supply to work properly (electricity for a refrigerator or God through the Holy Spirit for humans).
If you shut off the power to your house, the refrigerator will immediately stop working. Still, the food will remain safe for a certain period of time because the past work of the electricity lingers.
But slowly, the lack of fresh power causes conditions to degrade, and ultimately, the food will be no safer in the refrigerator than it would be sitting out on the counter. Similarly, every time we allow our connection (our lifeline, our line of connection) to God to be cut off, we invite all the unhealthy forces of the outside world into our life.
Ultimately, our job (to protect the contents of our home and family) becomes harder and harder and subject to decay because our connection to the light of God has been cut off. We can restore that connection by calling to Him, but we must maintain it to function as we were designed to function.
When we are continually connected to God, every part of His plan can make sense. As a result, we can live up to our full, healthiest potential: we are, in fact, designed to do many things as we see fit because God gave us complete freedom and free will as well as unique missions and callings and specific gifts we alone possess.
But to function as we were designed, as Children of God and ultimately as saints, we must maintain, preserve and protect our connection to the source of power and light.
Three ways to handle a situation where you feel overwhelmed
Even young people from some of the most affluent families can feel so distressed that they contemplate ending their lives. Father Patterson offers three ways to handle a situation where you find yourself feeling overwhelmed:
- Pray. “We pray to God because God, in fact, wants to help us. God wants to reach out to us, but God also needs our permission. We have to ask God. We have to say to God, ‘It’s OK for you to enter into my life, to intervene on my behalf.” If you don’t go to Church or doubt God, he adds, “Don’t worry about it. Whether you believe in God, God’s still there.” All you need to say is, “Help, Lord, I need your help.”
- Reach out for help. Whether it’s a friend, parent, teacher, or therapist, we need to trust that there is someone else who can address your issue, “somebody who’s gone through what you’re going through. There’s somebody who can help, but you’ve got to reach out. I can’t handle this on my own.”
- The saving power of helping someone else. Monsignor Vincent Keane taught him, “when you find yourself in a bad state, one of the best things you can do is go and help somebody else.”
We tend to think we can’t help someone else when we are in a bad state ourselves, “but I’ve found over and over, when you go and reach out to help somebody else, one, you’re not focusing on your problem but two, somehow reaching out to the other person channels all kinds of assistance to you. And your problem gets solved simultaneously.”
Somehow, “opening yourself up to the other person opens up something to assist you,” he adds. “There’s an innate need in people to nurture, to assist in making things better. So you’re giving another person an opportunity to gain by helping another person.”
