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I grab my Tupperware of leftover chicken and rice from the microwave and start eating as I listen. Office Ladies is one of my favorite podcasts (second only to The Mockingcast), and tonight I am finishing an episode where Jenna and Angela are interviewing writer Mike Schur about the episodes of the show that he wrote. They are discussing the creator and showrunner, Greg Daniels, and how remarkable it is that he opened up the process of making a show to the actors and writers so that, rather than being siloed, everyone had input on the different aspects of the show. Each of them is so grateful for their experience, Mike especially saying that it was so formative for him as a budding writer.

He then describes his experience writing a particular episode and getting Greg Daniels’s feedback. While watching the episode after Greg had edited it together, Mike felt his heart sink, because it was so different from how he had written it. It wasn’t right at all! So Mike sent Greg an email about his qualms, thinking that surely Greg would rethink his editing decisions and put the episode back closer to how Mike had originally envisioned it. Instead, Greg responded by explaining in detail why he made each and every decision the way he did. Mike recounts his response:

And then I remember, it was like my heart sank again, somehow, because I was embarrassed, but also like rose back up into my chest because I was like, oh, this guy knows everything, like this guy is seeing the matrix code behind the show in a way that I could never in this moment in my life.

And I just remember thinking like, there is nothing that I could suggest to Greg Daniels that he has not already thought about. He knew the show from beginning to end before he started working on it somehow. And like, when you know that you’re in the hands of someone who cares that much and knows that much about what he’s doing, it’s so freeing.

You’re just like, I just trust that the decisions that are being made are like coming from a place of like thoughtfulness and understanding and like love of the characters and love of the world that makes me just very at ease, you know?

I pause mid-bite as the words wash over me. Mike is describing what it’s like to work with a boss who is not only more knowledgeable than anyone else in his field but also caring enough about his employees to explain to them why he’s doing what he’s doing. How amazing would it be if we all had a boss like that?

But as I gaze around the hospital room again, I realize that I don’t need a boss like that, because I have a God like that. As I am wondering what is going on with my daughter, I am reminded that he knows everything. There is nothing I could suggest to God that he has not already thought about. He has written my daughter’s life, hospital stay and all, from beginning to end before she was even born.

How personal and kind and loving is my God! He who sees me in my sorrow and weakness, who hears the anxious cries of my heart. I had been worried about what the future would hold, wondering why God allowed my daughter to be so sick, wondering how our plans would unfold given her diagnosis and treatment. And then this. From Office Ladies of all places!

And Mike is right: to be in the hands of Someone like that is the most freeing thing in the world. I am loved. I am not forgotten. I am held. My daughter is loved. She is not forgotten. She is held.

As I sit there weeping, clutching my unfinished dinner, wiping my tears with my napkin, I know that everything is going to be okay. Because I have a God who loves me so much that he would speak to me in such a specific and tender way at just the right moment through a random podcast episode that I put on to distract myself from praying. To be cared for by a God like that, what more do I need?

Our situation has not changed at all — my daughter is still in the hospital, and it still doesn’t seem like she’s getting better — but I am now joyful, hopeful again. I have a God who loves me, who sees me, who is working all things for my good. And because I have a God like that, everything is going to be okay.

The post Grace From Unexpected Places appeared first on Mockingbird.

As usual, the fourth star of the show was the music, featuring Tina Turner, Andy Squyres, ABBA, the Mountain Goats, and so many more deep cuts. Here’s a solid three hours of captivating tunes.

The post <em>The Brothers Zahl</em> Soundtrack appeared first on Mockingbird.

We weren’t meant to gaze at ourselves. We weren’t meant to be so self-aware. Or so says Catherine Shannon this week in her brilliant article “All This Staring at Our Faces Is Messing With Our Heads.” The quintessential invention of modern world is the front-facing cameras, and they are inescapable.

It’s curious, especially given how little we looked at ourselves in the past, and how rare and imperfect mirrors were for thousands of years, that traditional wisdom teaches us to be wary of the act of regarding the self. The three major American faiths — the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam — all warn against the dangers of mirrors, vanity, pride and excessive concern with the self. […]

The message is clear: Self-obsession is spiritually dangerous, and we need to keep our guard up. In all three faiths, the mirror is a poor, incomplete way of seeing. It is covered, dark and smudged. It does not reveal God, truth or even ourselves as we are. It is only through private contemplation, face-to-face encounters and an inner spiritual transformation that we come to know truth. […]

Today, we treat our own image — both in the mirror and online — as something psychologically protective: a way of stabilizing our identity, managing our reputations and securing a coherent sense of self.

But all of this suggests the opposite possibility: The more we try to stabilize ourselves through repetition, doubling, self-observation and — I’ll say it — posting to the grid, the more uncanny and fragile we become. A preoccupation with the stable self produces instability. These days, we don’t approach our doubles with caution; we invite them, and go so far as to curate them.

It’s like an inverted version of “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” In the novel by Oscar Wilde, Dorian keeps his beautiful public image, while his portrait bears his inner corruption and ugliness. Under modern image culture, we attempt the reverse operation: We present a perfect digital double at the cost to our real selves, who are left to absorb the discomfort and tension between the two. If you post the good picture, it hardly matters that you feel sad inside.

An inverted picture of Dorian Gray!

In a world of mirrors, we naturally obsess over our own self-image, which leads to constant curation aimed at avoiding or appeasing judgment. So how do we escape the insanity? Here, Shannon commends something far better than neo-Ludditism:

When we look solely at ourselves, we fail to encounter anything that resists us; there are no contradictions, no interruptions. We need the honest gaze: the gaze of others and the gaze toward others. To see ourselves clearly, we don’t use mirrors. We use relationships.

2. As if to elaborate further on a point Shannon makes in passing, Kathryn Jezer-Morton checks in on the social media apps and notes that after twenty-plus years, there remains just one taboo: thou shalt not appear to be struggling. In the year 2025, this observation isn’t exactly novel, but the persistence of the taboo tells you how durable it is. So much so that at this point, we take it for granted that we should project to the world a different identity than the one we see in the mirror.

When people do find themselves in trouble — illness, job loss, heartbreak, death — instead of admitting to suffering, they instead talk about journeys through hardship that ultimately make them better. GoFundMe appeals have emerged as some of the only places where tragedy and suffering are openly discussed, but it’s notable that most GoFundMe pages are created on behalf of someone else, which ultimately protects the dignity of the person in need. When we’re speaking for ourselves, we express ourselves with a communication style intended to reassure our friends (or are they our shareholders?) that the best is always yet to come. […]

Social media’s most embedded de facto rule is that you can’t ever feel like you’re out of options. You can’t be out of money, or on the wrong side of a decision you now regret making. This rule makes it very difficult to describe painful changes and transformations in our lives without simultaneously insisting on our own resilience. This is why we tend to admit to suffering only once the suffering is over — when the chemo has ended and the scans are clear or when the first wave of grief has subsided and we’re ready to pay tribute — and we’ve come out the other side. We announce divorces and illnesses in the style of corporate comms, reassuring our audiences that everything will be okay, that the ship is being righted as we speak.

Within a country with some of the most dramatic income inequality in the world, what does it say that people who are struggling are compelled to pretend they aren’t? To me, it suggests a set of cultural scripts that are totally at odds with how people really think and feel, which produces media that appears hollow and is ultimately alienating. Anyone who has ever been truly broke knows how totalizing a cognitive experience it can be. Every step of every day is a math problem that refuses to add up. The brain adapts by constantly calculating and recalculating the same figures in an attempt to find a loophole. This is the ambient hum in the background of millions of lives, but there are no art forms, no narratives and sagas, that ennoble what this feels like. It’s an experience muted by a collective shame, born of the conventions of social media.

It’s no wonder why the turns toward personal branding and then self-improvement have happened so seamlessly. We create digital avatars to placate the personal and social judgments but then spend the rest of our energy trying to bridge the gap between the dissonant online and real selves. Perhaps by self-optimizing one can unite our inverted Dorian Gray lives? By doing the work and being your best self, focusing entirely on your faults to correct them, one can finally live as good a life as everyone else seems to think you have? What could go wrong?

3. So what happens when you subject yourself to intense self-scrutiny? There’s a prominent idea in physics (called Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle) that says the act of measuring something changes what you are measuring. As told by Clay Routledge in his recent article “Stop Pathologizing Ordinary Life,” something similar happens psychologically. The act of measuring your mental health, turning your gaze inward for self-assessment, can itself change your mental health.

Americans are more focused on mental health today than at any other point in our history. Public health campaigns urge us to check in on our feelings and talk openly about our struggles. Schools have adopted mental health curriculums. Employers offer mental health days. There are thousands of mental health and wellness apps.

Yet our mental health appears to be getting worse. Over the past several decades, the percentage of Americans who report being in poor mental health has been rising. Over half of U.S. doctors surveyed in 2023 reported a decline in their patients’ mental health. That same year, more than three-quarters of companies reported rising mental health concerns among their work forces.

Could our preoccupation with mental health be part of the problem?

In some ways, encouraging people to think and talk more about their mental health is a good thing. There is now less stigma around mental illness, and more people who can benefit from professional help are getting it. But there is also reason to believe that efforts to bring attention to mental health struggles are inadvertently making us more vulnerable to psychological distress.

Start with our expanding conception of mental illness. The more fixated we are on mental health, the more sensitive we become to anything that might qualify as a symptom and the more we use clinical language to describe normal emotional experiences like grief, burnout and loneliness. This broadening of what we think counts as a disorder — known as concept creep — encourages us to pathologize ordinary life and see ourselves as mentally unhealthy.

Routledge’s solution to this downward spiral is perhaps a familiar one: getting out of your own head and looking outward.

The more meaningful that people find their lives, the more resilient they are when facing stress and the lower their risk of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and suicide.

Finding meaning is often characterized as a contemplative exercise, something arrived at through deep deliberation. But while our ability to turn inward and ponder existential questions makes humans unique in our quest for meaning, finding meaning tends to involve outward-oriented action. That’s because we feel the most meaningful when we are doing things that provide social significance — a sense that we matter, that we play an important role in other people’s lives.

4. This next article by Aaron Horwath, “Why Is Everyone in Tech So Sad?” I think has its finger on the precise malaise that afflicts so many people today.

Say you turn your optimizing goals outward toward the world. You actually do what Routledge says and find meaning in something beyond yourself in your career. You are a card-carrying believer in “workism,” but now your career and world have been turned upside down. Now, “AI is being forced on organizations in ways that call the value of the entire enterprise of Workism itself into question”:

Among my Knowledge Worker peers, I am hearing this more and more often: people who want to pick up pottery, painting, crochet or other old-timey analog hobbies. In coffee shops and in the low-lit corners of bars, professionals are sharing dreams of “disappearing” or “living on a farm somewhere” or “going off the grid.” These aren’t fantastical daydreams; they are visions of escape shared in a tone that betrays an underlying existential angst, a fundamental doubt about work and careerism inspired by a seemingly increasingly common experience: waking up one morning at an existential precipice, struck with a sudden sense that knowledge work is, and perhaps always has been, pointless. Perhaps you too have felt such a feeling, a rising tide of overwhelming, indescribable melancholy, slowly threatening to envelop you in your Ikea office chair.

Horwath then proceeds to outline all the various ways that LLMs expose the lie of Workism for tech workers. The technology Workism has produced has now taken away your job, trivialized what you do by doing it instantaneously, or it has otherwise made your work more miserable by requiring excessive productivity. On the other side of this disillusionment, Horwath sees something worthwhile:

And once freed from the false satisfaction of believing we are changing the world with our day jobs, perhaps we will be inspired to fill that hole with something real — true altruism, not its artificial Workism substitute — by actually trying to impact real people, in our communities, in real ways.

Now, I’m not entirely sure that losing one’s income is as uncomplicated as Horwath is making it out to be (isn’t this the plot to Office Space?), but I appreciate the effort to find some counterintuitive good news in the AI apocalypse.

5. In laughs this week, there’s McSweeney’s “A Packing List for the Woman I Will Become on My Summer Vacation to Cape Cod” and Little Old Lady Comedy’s “A Field Guide to Getting Ghosted”

Top marks, however, go to the New Yorker’s “What My Life Would Be Like if All Those Spam Texts Were Legitimate“:

I’d make three thousand dollars an hour working a remote job whose only requirements are disclosing my Social Security number, access to my Ring camera, and a somewhat stable internet connection.
I’d rescue dozens of my own children, who are being held hostage, by paying their ransom exclusively with iTunes gift cards.

I’d have a private meeting in a highly secure location with Sam Bankman-Fried to discuss exciting investment opportunities.

I’d have quality health insurance.

I’d have dozens of packages shipped to me from USPSS, USP, and FidEx that only require my signature to obtain.

I’d have the world’s safest streaming services because I would constantly click on links to change my passwords.

I’d be making a hundred-and-seventy-three-per-cent return on all of my investments while also not having to pay taxes on them because the returns are above the taxation threshold!

I’d have a coveted seat on the board of Theranos 2.0.

And calling all Seinfeld fans! Check out this phenomenal data visualizer put together by Andy Kirk and his team. I think this is the favorite thing I’ve seen this week …

6. To close, here’s a fascinating except of a new book by theologian Miroslav Volf and poet Christian Wiman. Framed as a continual email exchange between the two, here Wiman asks Volf a question, “How would you define faith at this point in your life? Not before God but before humans — in an email, say?”

For Wiman, faith seems both “necessary and impossible,” and he feels caught by the quandary. In response, Volf recognizes, I think, problem of subjectivism and faith. Or to say that one “has” faith as a possession implies that one can identify it by looking inward.

What sometimes assails me, a giant that I cannot but let be, is not so much the instability of “faith” as it is the experience of its content just vanishing, which may be what you mean by big words slipping “free from meaning.” In the space where God was present to me, there is — nothing.

My life continues in its inertias, but at the edge of my experiences, I sense a cosmic motherlessness: I am in my little boat on the open seas with no land in sight. When the seas are calm, things seem bereft of meaning; when the seas rage, terror is on all sides. I am channelling Nietzsche here, a section from his The Joyful Science just before the famous passage about the madman and the death of God (Nietzsche borrowed the metaphor from Schopenhauer and, like much he borrowed, used it in his own way). Nietzsche’s way of seeing the world is my temptation, as I am sure I’ve told you.

As I have aged, I have come to believe that my faith matters much less than I thought it did when I was younger. I am saved by God’s faithfulness, not primarily by my faith. My faith is a fruit of God’s faithfulness, not the condition of God’s arrival into my soul — and into my speech. I have always had as much faith as was needed to say, if there is God, then nothing can separate me from God’s love — not the instability inside the abstraction that faith might be, not even utter lack of faith. I don’t trust in my faith. Nor my love.

Even at my best, I am incapable of the “whole-souled attention” that God actually commands. (What a wonderful rendering of the first commandment!) When my faith becomes empty, I wait for God to return into my faith, to dock my little boat on the shore. Faith is not a way to hold God close. Faith is trust that God will see me, hear me, know me … and come. […]

When I “hear” God say, “I am who I am”, I gloss it with “and I will remain that always, also for you.” I then become one of the children of Israel. I feel myself taken out of my own narrowness, out of the dominion of some little Pharaoh, and transported into the wideness of God’s self-commitment to me — and to the whole world. I always think of “God,” a word whose meaning shifts more than the restless flame from which God spoke to Moses, as a promise. Sometimes I also experience it as such.

— Miroslav

Dear Miroslav,

I find it very consoling to think of my faith not mattering so much, of it being mostly a form of patience. I’m always quoting to my students Karl Barth’s statement that faith is not an achievement, but I live with a kind of restless and appetitive drive that often seems to belie that. The thing is, I can’t help but see this hunger as a “gift” from God. All of my writing has come out of it, every word, even in works that seem to have nothing to do with God. I am after something, and that something is also after me.

Strays: 

• The New Parent Trap
• The Surprising Benefits of Small Talk
• Bonhoeffer’s Message to America
• Attention Is a Form of Love

The post August 1-7 appeared first on Mockingbird.

Told you.

We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine by Alissa Wilkinson, author and film critic at The New York Times, uses Didion’s connection to Hollywood to see how the moviemaking industry shaped American life, from relationships to politics, morality to personal taste, and the competing forces influencing them. Wilkinson follows Didion as she becomes the ultimate Hollywood observer from her perch as a screenwriter. John Wayne also makes several cameos, serving as a cultural avatar or time traveler from an earlier era of filmmaking. Didion and Dunne wrote several feature film screenplays, Panic in Needle Park, A Star is Born, and True Confessions, among others, cementing their position in Hollywood. Stories were what she and her husband told to live, to pay the bills, to connect with the world around them, but they also served a purpose far beyond being merely a means to an end.

Stories, as Wilkinson explains the phrase that inspired the title of the book, helped Didion survive.

Examining the human need to make sense of existence is Didion’s whole project. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” the first line of The White Album, is probably her most quoted sentence. It’s also her most misquoted sentence. […]

But Didion meant to be anything but inspirational. The paragraphs that follow that famous sentence are an anxious woman’s attempt to piece together a world that seemed to be flying into chaos in the late 1960s, the period covered in the essay. We concoct stories so we can keep on living; we pleasantly delude ourselves so as to ward away the terror. We look for patterns and symbols, links that will give some meaning and order to what feels dangerously like madness. We take messy reality and craft legends around it that reassure us.

For Didion, this was built into the business designed to make sure we all dreamt the same dream together, projected above our heads in lights. But what she saw went further: show business had given us vocabulary not just to entertain ourselves, but to understand our own lives.

Show business, as Didion calls it, and politics often go hand in hand, because they both start with mythmaking, the collective dream. Where those two powerbases actually meet, and who ends up holding hands with who, can be rather shocking. To wit: Joan Didion was an unexpectedly and unapologetically die-hard fan of the late Senator Barry Goldwater. Particularly for a person so deeply ensconced in Hollywood’s liberal fortress of the 1960s, Didion’s politics often come as a bit of a shock to her readers. Her background as a native-born Californian Republican and her love of John Wayne (whose politics and political activism Wilkinson also explores in the book) makes it slightly less shocking when readers also discover she wrote for the conservative magazine National Review in the 1950s and ’60s.

Didion eventually left the Republican Party after Goldwater’s failed run as a presidential candidate and the party’s backing of Nixon. The party’s later offerings didn’t lure her back to the fold, either. The essay she wrote for The Saturday Evening Post in 1968, titled “Pretty Nancy,” about Nancy Reagan during Ronald’s tenure as Governor of California, gives one a sense of what she thought of them. Oof! Wilkinson does a masterful job of deciphering the sweep of America’s political history during Didion’s life, which could be tedious reading in the hands of a less skilled writer.

But, since we are talking about Joan Didion, this cannot just be about Hollywood, politics, American history, or even the writing life. It’s about what’s revealed when those things are exposed to the patented Joan Didion “sandpaper treatment.” Suddenly, within a sentence or two — sometimes less — the boring beige surface paint of  banality is scoured away, revealing something stark and troubling and beautiful: real life. In researching for this piece, I came across a 1977 interview from The New York Times by Sara Davidson. Her question to Didion about religion pulled things into a different direction, away from politics, toward ultimate reality — which gets us right down to where we live. 

Q. What has been your experience with politics?

A. I never had faith that the answers to human problems lay in anything that could be called political. I thought the answers, if there were answers, lay someplace in man’s soul. 

Q. Are you as skeptical about religion as you are about politics?

A. I am quite religious in a certain way. I was brought up Episcopalian, and I stopped going to church because I hated the stories. You know the story about the prodigal son? I have never understood that story. I have never understood why the prodigal son should be treated any better than the other son. I have missed the point of a lot of parables. But I like the words of the Episcopal service, and I say them over and over in my mind. There’s one particular phrase which is part of every service: “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.” It’s a very comforting phrase to a child. And to an adult. I have a very rigid sense of right and wrong. What I mean is, I use the words all the time. Even the smallest things. A table can be right or wrong.

Q. What about behavior?

A. Behavior is right or wrong. I was once having dinner with a psychiatrist who told me that I had monocular vision, and there was no need for everything to be right or wrong. Well, that way lies madness. In order to maintain a semblance of purposeful behavior on this earth you have to believe that things are right or wrong.”

Didion’s rather unnuanced and overly literal reading of the parable is not dissimilar to that of the disciples present at the time of the original telling, or the disciples presently, myself included. And yet, notice the phrase that comforted her, from a child to adulthood, “As it was in the beginning is now, and ever shall be, world without end.”

Something changed in the years since that 1977 interview. Her husband John Dunne suddenly died in 2003, followed by her daughter Quintana’s death in 2005, the same year her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, was published. The childhood comfort she found in the words were now rewritten into a nihilism-tinged axiom as she sought meaning in the loss of control she felt after John’s death.

I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the scheme could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No one was watching me. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. On the day it was announced that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima those were the words that came immediately to my ten-year-old mind.

Death reveals and shrouds simultaneously. Comfort is hidden by uncertainty, while the new reality of loss and pain is thrown into sharp blinding contrast. Didion reported her experience with magical thinking as she navigated the stark realities of her loss. Grief becomes the great destroyer of illusions, and certainty becomes one of its first victims. Something has to fill the void.

Wherever Joan’s eye turns, whether it is politics, movies, Martha Stewart, or life and death, we want to read what she has to say. Because of this, the icon status she achieved fairly early on in her career cannot have been an easy burden. I may be a bit presumptuous with that assumption, so I decided to ask an expert on the subject: Alissa Wilkinson. Here’s what I asked her:

Didion always felt a bit like a prophet to me, maybe a proto-prophet. The disillusion that prophets often prompt in us allows reality to start peeking through. Auden, who I know she admired, would be another example of this type of writer. As Christians, we believe that the ultimate reality we are drawn to, spending our lives trying to find, has a name, and is already found. Moreover, that we have been found. While Joan may not agree with my conclusion, I have come across many Christ followers who find her lifelong attempts to see what’s really happening behind our constructed narratives extremely helpful. Do you think she was aware of her influence, confident in her own viewpoint, which kept her from being bogged down by self-doubt? Or put another way, did she think of her work as of use to others similarly engaged in pulling back the curtain; that this was part of her vocation?

Wilkinson’s response didn’t disappoint:

After years of reading Didion, I think she would likely have been very wary of any suggestion of things like influence or vocation, which would sound self-important to her, like just another story we tell ourselves in order to convince ourselves of something. The best example of this that I know is that she expressed confusion later in life about the way that people, particularly women, sought her out for advice; she seemed to believe that she was less equipped than anyone to offer wisdom. (In fact, the only place I can really find her doing that with any kind of confidence is the 1975 UC Riverside address.)

I think Didion considered herself more of an observer — her criticisms, as you may note, particularly in her political writing, almost entirely consist of describing what she sees. In essays like “Fixed Ideas” she does say prescriptive things, but in a descriptive manner. If I can read between the lines, it feels like she was immensely bogged down with doubt, and John (her husband) was important to her in part because she always felt that she had someone backing her up. Reading “The Year of Magical Thinking,” you can see exactly what happened after he died, though she of course was self-aware of it. And I believe she would have balked at the idea of being influential, even as she knew that she was widely read and admired. She was not a traditional journalist — she’s one of the most important figures in New Journalism — but she had a reporter’s modesty about what she was doing, just watching the world and trying to figure out what she thought about it.

She did however very much believe in responsibility to the reader to tell the truth as she saw it, and believed that showed up in the craft of the sentences as much as the words themselves. Again: a reporter’s instinct.

There’s often a temptation to try to fit Didion into Christian terms, but I think a lot of her ideas about the world were actually formed, for better or worse, in an attempt to correct for a kind of unseeing piousness and refusal to face the truth that she might have experienced in her youth in church. This shows up in “Year of Magical Thinking” again (just look at the last few lines). That doesn’t mean that her core insights were not, at base, important and perhaps vital ways of seeing the world that fit with a truly Christian perspective. But she had a horror of “thought-terminating cliches,” and I suspect she initially developed that horror sitting in pews.

“The last few lines” Wilkinson is referring to includes a heartbreaking reprise of the phrase Didion used earlier in the book, “No eye is on the sparrow.”

Wilkinson’s reticence to “fit Didion into Christian terms” is a point well taken, and one to learn from. Matter of fact, it helped to crystallize some of my own thoughts on the topic. For myself, as a Christian, it’s impossible for me not to think of Joan — or anyone else — in anything but Christian terms. Joan also engaged with distinctly Christian language and phrasing throughout her work and interviews. This doesn’t make her a Christian, but even in her attempts to steer away from the blandly offensive pap of her early church experiences, she was still wrestling with the faith. It’s particularly sad to me because Didion had a lower — and more accurate — anthropology about herself and others than many Christians do.

But I also believe that, in the words of Isaiah (55:11) the prophet, God’s word doesn’t return void. Neither do the words of God that followed Joan since her childhood. Instead of thought-terminating cliches or nihilistic worry stones, they are words of life, transcending our abilities to alter them to our perceived reality. I don’t know what happened in the years between 2005 and her passing in 2021, if those phrases from her youth comforted her once again. I do know the words she repeated, “In the beginning” was God, and in him is life, a Word that cannot return void, a Word without indifference, demonstrated by Christ’s love on the cross, the hope of the resurrection, a Word without end, is now and shall ever be.

Here we repeat, with Joan, “Amen.”

The post The Stories Joan Didion Told Herself appeared first on Mockingbird.

(Spoilers ahead!) The film begins with Peter discovering he now possesses terrible, potent powers, and he doesn’t know why. He can hardly understand them — let alone control them — so he does everything he can to suppress them. Meanwhile, a faceless horror that inhabits minds is building a presence in New York alongside Peter’s personal crisis. Peter is stuck. He can’t control his own actions, a faceless new enemy threatens the city, and he has lost every meaningful relationship to him in his life. In a tailspin, Peter hits rock bottom in a grim scene when he loses control and nearly kills a police officer. Peter becomes the very villain he sought to subdue.

In a desperate grasp for help, Peter reaches out to Bruce Banner, aka The Hulk, the only man Peter knows who has tamed his inner beast. Banner gives him the idea for what he needs to stamp out his new powers. Building on the technology Banner invented to suppress the Hulk, Peter designs a new gadget that neutralizes his DNA on a molecular level. Peter can now suppress his inner spider. In his genius, Peter asks Banner if he could use this tech theoretically to limit any superpower — an invention that would have a massive impact on the greater MCU. Here, Banner asks him the most important piece of dialogue in the film, paraphrased, “How would you decide whose powers deserve to be limited, and whose do not?” Peter can’t answer him, but Peter doesn’t really care in this moment. He is so fixated on his technical problem, he can’t imagine the antidote is far deeper than a piece of technology can provide.

This piece of dialogue with Banner highlights a key question: What makes a monster, and what makes a man? This question, which I draw from Disney’s adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, is still important today, and Destin Daniel Cretton’s spin on Spider-Man centers a similar question in the story. Parker joins a list of archetypal characters — Hulk, Quasimodo, Elsa, Frankenstein’s monster, etc. — who know the destruction of which they are capable and who attempt to suppress it on their own. Yet their strivings to hide, suppress, and run from their destructive tendencies never works. What these characters fail to recognize is, in each of these stories, it will take someone outside of themselves to bring a resolution. They can’t do it alone.

For Peter, he attempts to suppress his dangerous powers with physical exertion, mental effort, and technological advancement. He struggles to let the memory-addled Mary Jane see his effort, he can barely ask his frenemy Frank Castle for assistance, and he refuses to level with Banner. He is afraid. Thematically, Banner has clarified for Parker what he believes to be his only option: destroy this hardship before it destroys you. Peter has forgotten what he once knew: he can’t make it on his own and desperately needs help. He needs a person unafraid of his power who can give him what he needs to face the monster within.

And it is here Peter’s foil enters the story: Jean Grey, the face of the faceless horror. Jean has similarly faced her own monster. Her power to control others is astonishing. But her response is not to suppress her power but to embrace it. Jean is out for revenge against those who have kidnapped her big sister. While an understandable character motive, it drives Jean to terrible things. She murders and destroys along the path to find her sister. In the climax of the film, Jean is prepared to destroy everyone around her when she takes control of Peter’s mind. There she meets a surprising friend, a tender memory of Peter’s deceased Aunt May, where she delivers a twist on the famous Spider-Man motto:

This is what I want you to know. You’re beautiful. And the people who love you, we love you not because you’re special. We love you because you’re you. I want you to remember that. That’s your deepest responsibility. Never forget that, no matter how powerful you become.

As Jean listens to May’s love for Peter — her understanding of his frightening powers and her commitment to walk alongside him no matter what happens — Jean’s hard heart begins to melt. What Jean needs most is for someone else to understand her powers, accept her, and offer her love in the depth of her sorrow and brokenness. She needs grace. As May gives Peter grace in his memory, Jean then receives this grace from Peter, and it transforms everything for her.

The story of Spider-Man resonates with millions. Shattering global records, it is evident folks long for a brand-new day of their own. It is evident we desire to be free from our personal propensity for self-destruction. While none of us are, likely, at risk of becoming a large green monster, we struggle with destructive tendencies that threaten to shatter us if we allow ourselves to give into them, like Jean, or allow them to isolate us, like Peter. Only when we recognize these inner monsters will our hearts be prepared to receive grace. Like Peter and Jean, we need a friend who truly understands our hazardous nature and fully loves us all the same. We need an Aunt May to offer us the hope of a brand-new life. The antidote to our sin and shame is not working harder to make ourselves palatable. The antidote is found in the application of grace to a weak and weary heart.

At the heart of the Christian story is a God who refused to leave us to our own futile devices. It may seem too good to be true, but stories like Brand New Day resonate in our hearts because they point us to the greater story in which we live. We are drawn to characters like Aunt May because we long for someone to rescue us from ourselves. The story of Jesus’ incarnation contends that God became a man who dwelt among the broken, received the weak, loved the outsider, and died to guarantee the salvation of his people. Jesus took on our failings, met us in our loneliness, and brought us hope for restoration. To him, we are beautiful — no superpowers necessary.

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Most children grow out of their dreams of being an astronaut. Funk never did. She spent the rest of her life doing a more elaborate version of the same thing: trying to get off the ground. Her death this month came just five years after she finally touched the sky.

It was a long and winding trajectory. In 1960, a physician named William Randolph Lovelace II — the same man who had screened NASA’s male astronauts — quietly put a group of women pilots through the identical testing regime. They were the Mercury 13. Funk, at twenty-one, was the youngest of the thirteen who passed. In the sensory-deprivation tank — floating in water warmed to her own body temperature — most of the men tapped out after about three hours. Funk stayed under for ten hours and thirty-five minutes. She napped. The researchers eventually decided she’d made her point and fished her out. On several tests she outscored John Glenn, soon to be the first American to orbit the Earth. The historian Margaret Weitekamp later summed it up in four words: “Right stuff, wrong sex.”

By every measure anyone could devise — every needle, every tank, every stopwatch — Funk was cleared to fly. Then the unsanctioned program was canceled, not with a hearing but a telegram. When Congress did eventually hold hearings, the men who had flown testified that the absence of women from spaceflight was, as Glenn put it, “a fact of our social order.” One that “may be undesirable,” he allowed, but a fact.

So she waited. “The old-boy network,” Funk said, “didn’t want us.” She applied to NASA four times, and four times was turned down — the last time for want of an engineering degree. “Well, I’ll get one,” she said. Airlines refused her too; one explained, apparently in earnest, that it had nowhere for a woman to use the bathroom. In 1995 she stood at the launchpad and watched Eileen Collins fly the thing she had trained for.

Funk was a woman of remarkable grit. Drinking a pint of radioactive water will do that for you. But there comes a time when gravity takes its toll on us all, and even she said, “I didn’t think that I would ever get to go up.” In her seventies she put $200,000 down for a seat with Virgin Galactic, and was still in line when Sir Richard Branson himself went up. Sixty years. Still circling.

By 2021, she’d stopped expecting it. Then Jeff Bezos called.

Blue Origin’s first crewed flight had a spare seat, and it had her name on it. There was no test to pass this time; the woman who had passed every test was simply invited.

From astronauts to agrarian realities, Jesus once told a story about a landowner who hired workers for his vineyard — some at dawn, others at the eleventh hour, an hour before quitting time. When the whistle blew, he paid them all the same. The ones who had sweated through the whole day were, understandably, furious. The owner’s reply is one of the strangest lines in the Gospels: “Are you envious because I am generous?”

Even further back, the prophet Isaiah promised that “those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles.” But what arrived, sixty years late, wasn’t the reward for waiting. It was a gift she’d merely stayed alive long enough to receive.

None of which means the striving was wasted. She flew for another sixty years, taught three thousand people to do the same, and would have laughed at anyone who called her a passive recipient of anything. Grit and grace aren’t enemies. It’s just that only one of them ever opened the door — and it wasn’t the one she’d spent her life pushing against.

Most of us are circling something. Not the celestial realms, perhaps, but a marriage repaired, a child returned, a vocation finally recognized, a prayer that’s there but never really articulated anymore. And most of us handle the wait the way Funk did: we retake the tests. We add the qualification, put the deposit down, stay close to the launchpad. Doesn’t the door open for whoever pushes hardest? The vineyard owner’s question is aimed at that instinct we have. But what if the call, when it comes, comes not because you finally proved enough, but because someone had a seat with your name on it all along?

At five she leapt off a barn roof and the haystack caught her. At eighty-two the sky finally did. She’d been cleared to fly since 1961. It turns out she was only ever waiting for clearance to land.

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You can close your eyes to reality, but not to memories
-Stanisław Jerzy Lec

When we first meet Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, he is strung out on lotus flowers, unable to resist the chemically induced amnesia. He wishes to not remember the war he won so decisively, the life he used to have but does not now deserve. And so he eats to forget. In the forgetting, the fabled events vanish from existence — or at least so far as Odysseus is concerned they do. His memories accuse him, so the only consolation he can find is in the oblivion of nothingness delivered one petal at a time.

Odysseus has found a way to silence the past, but few would confuse it with health.

Grief is a most unwelcome houseguest — showing up unannounced, inviting itself in, stretching out on your couch, eating your cheese curds — but it shows up just the same. It does not respect any restraining orders we put on it, either. Many people never recover from their parents’ divorce. Or the one that got away. Or a car accident. Or anything, really.

The Atlantic’s David Frum recently produced an interview with his wife Danielle Crittenden entitled “How to Survive Losing a Child,” which documents the couple’s grieving process after they suddenly lost their daughter when she was thirty-two. In the interview, Crittenden speaks to the misconception that grief is ever done and done with. “The goal of most grief books is for healing, to get you, as they say, ‘through it.’ And then, apparently, you’ll come to some eventuality of acceptance, or you’ll be fine,” she says. “And that just seemed to me palpably untrue and palpably unhelpful.” For her, grief was not a means to an end that resulted in personal growth. It was like being transported to an alternative universe. 

The loss of her daughter changed Danielle Crittenden forever. The way she lived, the way she thought, the way she woke up in the morning all shifted dramatically from that point on. “As people’s lives move on, they expect you to move on. But you don’t really move on. You just quietly nurse this horrible pain.” In other words, grief is not a season that comes and goes. It is, rather, awkwardly adjusting to a new life in exile where one must grow new roots.

The movie Sheep Detectives centers around a flock in rural England whose beloved shepherd is mysteriously murdered. Up until that point, the sheep are completely ill-equipped for suffering. Whenever something remotely uncomfortable happens, the sheep perform a mysterious ritual in which they collectively wipe the negative memory from their minds. They have trained themselves to forget the troublesome past in order to cope with the present.

The film’s director, Kyle Balda, spoke of how the flock’s desire to avoid living with painful memories struck a personal note with his own mother’s death. For the first year, he put her death out of mind, busying himself away from grief until he could not keep it at bay any longer. When he first read The Sheep Detectives script, Balda immediately identified with the instinct to circumvent the pain. He wanted the movie to help provide families a space to talk about death. “As much as it might hurt,” he said, “it’s a gift to be able to remember your mother’s face.”

No one ever really “gets over” anything. Outside of Odysseus’ lotus stupor or the sheep’s memory wipe, what we grieve can never be entirely forgotten. Nor should it be. Health is not a forgetting but a remembering differently.

A friend of mine who lost her husband several years ago told me that loss stays with a person, but its immovability is not always a bad thing. Not only did losing her husband fundamentally change her. The process of healing from her loss has changed her, too. And how exactly has my friend healed? By fixating on the memory of her husband. Rather than look away, she fixates on her wound. Does it still hurt? Yes. Only, over time, slightly less. Catharsis is not a pain killer as much as a wound healer.

God offers us consolation in not letting go. Jesus insisted that we never let go of what happened on that fateful Friday. Any holy communion service pays heed to his command to continue “a perpetual memory” of his death. There is no shelf life to this memorial. We are to obey his command to remember — not for a thousand years or even five thousand years – but until he comes again. Each Sunday, we relive his death. We refuse to get over it. Should we ever attempt to “move on” from the crucifixion, we would be moving away from the source of our salvation. Ironically, in order to experience true healing, we go deeper into the wounds of Christ. 

Garrison Keillor’s famous retelling of a Thanksgiving memory comes to mind in which a family member, Uncle John, is asked to bless the food:

Everybody in the family knew that Uncle John couldn’t pray without talking about the cross and crying. Sure enough, Uncle John prayed, talked about the cross, and cried. Meanwhile, the rest of us shifted nervously from one foot to the other and longed for the prayer to end. All of us knew that Jesus died on the cross for us, but Uncle John had never gotten over it.

Each Sunday, when we kneel before the altar, what was once hard to endure is now sweet to recall. The death of our Lord. Here, it is much better to be reminded than it would be to forget. As much as it might hurt, it’s a gift to remember our Savior’s face.

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For the last several months, it had been publicly available on his website and Facebook page for online chats or phone calls. It had learned to mimic his bent toward optimism, his obsession with the Green Bay Packers and his casual slang, but it did more than just regurgitate what he had already said. It mapped his thinking onto new conversations to provide advice around the clock for people he’d never met who had questions he’d never been asked.

“It’s a digital version of my mind,” he told his congregation. “If I’m asleep or traveling, you don’t have to wait. You can have 24-7 access to this other version of me.”

The around-the-clock service seems to be the bot’s most appreciated function. Lester’s congregants and even strangers across the country engage with his twin into the late hours of the night. People are going to this bot for answers to their most vulnerable questions and problems: “Why won’t He [God] answer my prayers?” or “Can I still be saved if …?” Lester takes the next morning to review his twin’s work:

“User asks about anxiety and why meds don’t eliminate it.”

“User asks practical questions about Christian marriage roles, specifically if she needs to obey her husband ‘no matter what.’”

Lester skimmed back over a few chats and saw that his twin was chatting in his cadence and citing some of his favorite passages in the Bible. “That’s exactly how I would have responded,” he said. He liked to test the technology himself every few weeks, either by text or voice call, and now he hit a button on his computer to speak to the twin. He waited for the call to connect and then heard a clone of his voice on the other line.

“I built this mind so you can get an answer straight from how I actually think,” the twin said. “Ask me anything.”

“Yeah, man,” Lester said. “What’s your favorite thing right now about artificial intelligence?”

“Yeah, man. That’s a good question,” the twin said. “These tools, they cut hours out of my week. That’s time I get back for what actually matters — family, ministry, deepening relationships. That’s the move.”

Lester hung up and drove to church as he kept turning over the chats in his head. He knew from his own depression that most mental health problems couldn’t be solved late at night in front of a screen. He trusted the technology to act responsibly and give good advice. But it had taken him a decade of work to feel good again in his own skin — in-person therapy, prayer, writing exercises, deep and sustained relationships — and no chatbot could compress that into a conversation.

He wondered about the anonymous users, seeking answers and then disappearing back into space. Often there was no way for him to follow up, and no time.

Is a technology that promises a wider, more efficient reach really worth it? Who knows how many actual people are using Lester’s app (the bots are smart too). And for the actual people on the app, it gave them answers by re-subjecting them to their cycles of loneliness and isolation. They got facts at the expense of a relationship. No computer can mimic the tender warmth of an embrace, the empathetic cries of compassion, nor the spoken words of grace.

It’s scary (and a bit sad) to think of these people screaming into the void, hoping for guidance, wishing for comfort from a pastor that isn’t truly present to tend to his flock. Going to Google and WebMD for answers was bad enough, now our pastors can outsource their care by using chatbots who pretend to be them. Christ, have mercy.

2. How well do people know themselves? This question has plagued psychologist David Dunning ever since he and Justin Kruger published a 1999 academic paper on what is now coined the “Dunning-Kruger” effect. The gist of the theory (which was not named by its authors, apparently) is that incapable people sometimes overestimate their abilities, while capable people may underestimate their abilities. Matthew Hutson, for Nautilus, interviewed Dunning to figure out “Why We Think We Know More Than We Do”:

One of the reasons why people are overconfident in general is that they tend to look for reasons supporting their ideas. In fact, one of the pieces of advice we always give is: If the decision is important, stop and ask why you might be wrong. In planning, one of the procedures that’s recommended for a group is to project yourself into the future and imagine your initiative failed spectacularly. What happened to make it fail? And say, “OK, what can we do to prevent those stories from happening?” That’s called a “pre-mortem.”

Doctors do this as a matter of course. They have a different name for it. They don’t diagnose you; they do a “differential diagnosis.” They may have an idea, but they have to think about what else it can be. OK, you might have Lyme disease, but what else are your symptoms consistent with? We’re going to test you to rule out everything that we can. That’s core to medicine, thinking of alternatives, thinking how you could be wrong.

Dunning and Kruger’s intention was never to make their theory into an adjective. They, er, underestimated human proclivities:

I wish people would stop yelling Dunning-Kruger at each other. We offered the paper as a reason to self-reflect. I remember when I started looking at Twitter back in the day and seeing people yelling, “You Dunning-Kruger idiot” at everybody else. I went, “Oh no.” My biggest regret is that it’s become an epithet to hurl at other people. It’s something to hurl at yourself every so often.

Yes, indeed.

3a. Up next is a term which may be new to you: hikikomori. The Japanese term translates into “pulling inward.” It’s a phenomenon from the 1990s that is still gaining traction amongst young adults today, in which an individual isolates themself from the outside world for a prolonged period of time. A 2022 UK study found that hikikomori appeared “most common in boys and men.” Eva Livingston interviewed a young Brit about why he withdrew from society:

In a series of replies, Lewis told me he is from a small town in north-west England and lives at home with his parents. He’s been a hikikomori for about a year, though it happened somewhat gradually; he’s always preferred his own company and spending long hours online in his room to socialising in person. At one point in 2025, he realised: “I don’t have to force myself to do things I don’t want to. I can just speak to my parents when I go to get my tea and I don’t need to do any more than that.” [..]

The real world is both tiring and tiresome for him, Lewis went on to explain: too many unwritten rules, too many norms that don’t quite make sense. In his bedroom they don’t exist; he speaks to the people he wants to speak to, when he wants to speak to them, in a format — primarily online gaming — where his words and intent won’t be misconstrued, and he doesn’t have to work so hard to understand other people’s.

On Reddit, you can find threads of users writing about their own shut-in experiences and inviting others to AMA (ask me anything). These online forums make it clear that the practice doesn’t involve a complete isolation from the world at large, just that of physical, human-to-human interactions. As Lewis would concur, internet chat rooms are far less messy.

There’s something to be said for the way that hikikomori is actually creating community, albeit online. It’s almost like our souls yearn for it!

3b. Another trend on social media is also, ironically, creating community. But this time it’s mainly women.

Sarah-Jane Hoadley is what they call a “Loneliness Influencer.” Loneliness Influencers create content of themselves doing their hobbies, errands, or any day-to-day activities completely solo. The videos basically romanticize being alone. When you are alone you can prioritize your own well-being — light that candle! Start that bubble bath! As Belle Tindall-Riley aptly points out, loneliness is like a product they are selling:

Loneliness is never the medicine. In fact, I fear it’s the poison. That’s why the rise of these influencers is so troubling, because they’re (literally) selling this poison, pretending (believing?) that it’s medicine. But loneliness is a problem, one that should not be repackaged as a cure.

We were made for connection – we are interdependent beings. Our brains register social injury in the exact same way they register physical injury. Company is as essential to our survival as food and water. Can the research make it any clearer? We need to move toward each other in order to survive. Literally. We were designed to understand our inner and outer worlds by way of the relationships we form and sustain – with all the friction, the vulnerability, and the burden that such a reality entails.

And you may think that this Loneliness Influencer trend is a storm in an online teacup, and maybe you’re right. But there are forces – cultural, societal, economic and spiritual – that do their darndest to keep us apart. And we shouldn’t take any of them too lightly.

4. Influencers aren’t only selling loneliness, they are also marketing an idyllic reality that isn’t possible for 99% of the population. And according to Alex Demas in The Dispatch, they may be responsible for Gen Z’s malaise:

Another metric Nietfeld cites, that around 57 percent of Gen Zers would be influencers if they could, is a telling one. What are influencers, after all, other than performers of success? Influencers design their lives around how they want to be perceived by others, building an authenticity only insofar as it photographs well and is capable of funding their continued stagecraft.

Influencers: the coolest, prettiest, fittest, and smartest peers across the country and world — peers who are often sponsored or paid for their one-dimensional pursuits and who almost certainly shouldn’t be considered peers at all. When your eyes are constantly pasted to a never-ending queue of people who structure their lives not to pursue actual satisfaction but instead to present an image of what they believe satisfaction looks like, you’re bound to end up with an unrealistic understanding of what you should expect from life. And that doesn’t end at wealth alone. Online, you’re faced with people who have dedicated their lives to perfecting one aspect of a good life: the perfect set of abs, an impressive half-marathon time, the most adventurous vacations, the most devout adherence to a religion or creed. Taken together, they offer an image of success that no one person could ever realistically achieve. And if that’s what success looks like, why strive for it at all?

For this, America’s youth deserve empathy, not derision. Undoubtedly, not every Gen Zer has been sucked into this unrealistic digital culture. But those who have are faced every day with the prospect that they will never be good enough and that their own success is out of their hands. The fact that this belief is false does not change the sincerity with which it is likely held by many young Americans.

But Demas still holds that we can’t indulge this burnout:

The risk for America’s youngsters is therefore not that they are faced with insurmountable obstacles. The risk is that they are so bought into that narrative that they give up on success without even trying. “I also wish they understood how the dream itself illuminated the path a few feet ahead of me, until I stood on solid ground,” Nietfeld writes, speaking of her own experience climbing the ladder to corporate success. She is correct: Dreams can be more than just comforting stories — they can serve as functional tools to light the way from where you are to where you want to be. Which is why the narrative of helplessness absorbed by many Gen Zers is so corrosive. The truth for Gen Zers is that the ground beneath them is firmer than they’ve been told. The path is still illuminated, but only if they keep walking.

Influencer culture won’t be going away anytime soon, if ever. There has to be a way for Gen Z to move forward. It doesn’t involve more time online, consuming content about other people’s lives.

5. For kicks and giggles, here’s the New Yorker with an HR-coded breakup text … um … document:

Following a comprehensive internal review (conducted mostly in my head, late at night, while you were asleep and breathing very loudly), I have decided to dissolve our relationship, effective immediately. This decision reflects a strategic realignment of my emotional resources and should not be interpreted as a comment on your over-all market value, which, my friends have warned me, remains strong going into Q3.

I want to start by acknowledging that, in the early days, our partnership exceeded expectations. We had momentum — and, yes, even synergy. We had a shared sense that we were “not like other couples,” which at the time felt innovative. Meetings were spontaneous. Communication was high bandwidth. For a while, this worked.

However, as our relationship scaled, cracks began to emerge in the infrastructure. Small issues (my hatred of your friends, your disdain for my mother) were initially flagged as low-priority bugs. I assumed they would be resolved in a future update. Instead, they were folded into the core system, where they now power most of my anxiety. […]

Furthermore, I want to be transparent about scope creep. Somewhere along the way, my role in the relationship expanded from Partner to Emotional Help Desk. I became the point person for your work stress, your existential dread, and your recurring theory that everyone secretly hates you. While I admire your trust in me, this role was never formally negotiated, and I lack the emotional maturity to perform it effectively.

See also, Points in Case‘s “How to Master the Art of Passive-Aggressive Cleaning.” And last, but certainly not least, McSweeney‘s “I’m Jimothy, the Short-Spined Raccoon Who Has Taken the Internet by Storm, and the Collective Weight of Your Adoration Is Breaking My Already-Compromised Back.”

6. To close, Rachel Mann, for the Christian Century, reflects on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous poem that asks “Who am I?” After 21 years of full-time ordained ministry, health complications have brought on early retirement for Mann. Retirement means the start of something new, but it also brings the death of what once was. And for Mann, it’s the loss of a role which gave her life purpose that brings about her wrestling with the question who am I?

But this loss of purpose, this “death of self” does not have the final word. Our identity crises don’t change the fact that we are God’s:

In the midst of that death, that depth charge in one’s complacency, one might just be changed. I know that along the line of my wounds, my grief, and my bewilderment at retirement, God waits. Christ invites me to place my hurting, doubting hands in his wounded side. He comes alongside me on the lonely road as I head away from the catastrophe of loss; he breaks bread and shows me a new world. Like Bonhoeffer, somehow I too say, “Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. / Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am Thine!” 

Strays:

• The Case Against Answering Every Email
• Olga Khazan on what the loss of conversation of doing to us.
• Another fascinating read on fiber-maxxing and the optimization of our guts: “We talk a lot about keeping our guts ‘clean,’ but our guts are the primary site of spoilage in our bodies — they have no business being clean.”

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