“Rent-a-Stranger” is not a headline easily passed over; it caught my eye back in 2022 in The Washington Post. The article spoke of the generally accepted practice in Japan and South Korea of hiring a stranger as company/companion to attend certain social functions as a matter of saving face/observing social expectations for public events. Interesting enough, but then it went on to focus on a person named Shoji Morimoto. Morimoto, after losing some jobs for ‘doing nothing,’ realized that ‘doing nothing’ had the potential to become a genuine occupation.
So Morimoto started offering himself as a ‘rental person.’ He became available for hire for an hourly fee, for the simple purpose of accompanying, as a stranger, those who hire him. He promises to ‘do nothing’ while he does this job. That means his main point is to be present, to be ‘there’, but not to offer advice or direction. He will be a listening ear, but he will only offer basic verbal affirmations in response, solely to indicate that he is hearing what the person is saying.
Some have hired him to sit near them while finishing a thesis or a letter-writing project; others have needed someone to simply listen to them talk through difficult or painful things without offering advice; others simply want another human nearby.
Since starting this work, more has come to light about Morimoto’s background, particularly through his recently published memoir: Rental Person Who Does Nothing: A Memoir. In this memoir, Morimoto notes the difference between a person who is valued for what they can do, what they contribute, versus what it means to be valued simply for who they are. In his own life he has experienced first-hand loss based on this difference, and this informs his work of accompaniment. Morimoto comments that “he has learned not to judge others, and to have empathy for people who may be going through deep personal challenges but aren’t showing it” (Lee and Inuma, “Rent-a- Stranger,” Washington Post, 2022). “Doing Nothing” thus becomes connected to simply “Being There.”
In spiritual terms, this speaks to the value of presence. It goes against the grain of so much of what we assume in daily operations about what matters most about ourselves and about our perception of others through the lense of accomplishment. And I think it speaks to the importance of the character of the church in our times.
Back in 1906 Albert Schweitzer published “The Quest of the Historical Jesus,” exploring Jesus as an apocalyptic figure whose teaching cannot easily be lifted from that historical context and plunked down in the present – simply because Jesus’ teaching carried the radical anticipation of the end of the world/ apocalyptic judgement. Notwithstanding that take on Jesus as a singular reading in itself, Schweitzer’s work ruptured scholarly confidence in the quest for the historical Jesus to that point, and New Testament scholarship had to find new paths of inquiry in the wake of Schweitzer’s work. But the point that seems to me to stand out is precisely that there is a rupture, a not-easy-to-cross distance to bridge the gap between one world and another, one life and another, and this gap very much matters as the space in which Christ operates.
Schweitzer’s book concluded with these well-known words: “He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow thou me!” and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience “Who He is.” (Schweitzer, *Quest,* 1911)
Morimoto is of course not really ‘doing nothing.’ Accompaniment is something — and the fact that people will pay him to do so is very telling about the need for simple presence, for someone, even a stranger, to ‘be there.’
The more I reflect on this, the more I think it reminds us of the heart of our faith and the heart of the church. *Stabilitos* — stability — is a long-held value of the church: to simply be there. To offer a place/space for prayer, worship, service, care. In short, to accompany one another, and others, in the midst of life. And to create and sustain the space to do so.
This can’t necessarily be quantified — it is often ‘unknown’ in terms of its effects or longevity, but it is in the “toils, conflicts, and sufferings” that we encounter the “ineffable mystery” of Christ’s presence in our own time and place, and in the midst of the life of the church, lived together from day-to-day and week-to-week. Who knows for how long, but while we’re at it, people like Morimoto are, I think, mysteriously and rather strangely, pointing toward something deeply important, and something that includes that “ineffable mystery” at work beyond us.
