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1. Reports that Adam Sandler officiated Taylor Swift’s wedding at Madison Square Garden.  
2. All things World Cup, primarily Erling Haaland, a Norwegian soccer player who millions of people (myself included) became momentarily obsessed with. 
3. The Other Bennet Sister, a charming Jane Austen–inspired miniseries.

The World Cup is over and Taylor Swift’s wedding has faded behind newer headlines, so the third item on my list has inspired the most thought.

The Other Bennet Sister (based on a book of the same name) follows the story of Mary Bennet after Pride and Prejudice. The show is a joy to watch: Mary is funny, charming, smart, and curious, and the characters who play an important role in her own character arc manage to have depth and likability while still being flawed and fumbling, as real people are. But alongside Mary’s journey of self-discovery, the miniseries offers a disappointing (and misguided) thesis: “Our happiness is in our own hands.”

Mary is offered this admonition amid a conversation with the depressed and despondent vicar, Mr. Collins, who shares with her that he has taken up a study of Aristotle’s philosophy of happiness: what it is and how one might find it. It was a very interesting moment in the show … and one that made me want to pull out my red card.

The scene:

Mr. Collins: What I have discovered seems to suggest that it is only through self-knowledge that genuine happiness is experienced. I think it is only when we have examined and understood our strengths and weaknesses and been honest about what we truly desire from life, only then do we have any chance at all of attaining happiness.

Mary: So what Aristotle is saying is: our happiness is in our own hands?

Mr. Collins: Yes. I think so, yes.

While I am not a philosopher or an academic, it seems as though Mr. Collins and Mary have made a shortsighted conclusion (or at least one that Jane Austen might’ve dismissed as such) to Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s seminal scholarship on what it means to live well. While Aristotle does extol the necessity of self-knowledge in the pursuit of happiness, he also says that man cannot be the source of his own happiness. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle takes a whole chapter to discuss the importance of human relationships for man to not just survive but thrive:

It is also disputed whether the happy man will need friends or not. It is said that those who are supremely happy and self-sufficient have no need of friends; for they have the things that are good, and therefore being self-sufficient they need nothing further, while a friend, being another self, furnishes what a man cannot provide by his own effort. (NE. Book IX.9)

In his book Happiness and Contemplation, which is itself a commentary on Nicomachean Ethics, German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper says, “Happiness is essentially a gift; we are not the forgers of our own felicity” (p. 25). Sounds quite different from what Mary Bennet or Mr. Collins are scripted to believe, doesn’t it? But grace doesn’t make universally compelling television, I suppose.

After Mr. Collins and Mary’s discussion about happiness, the story continues to depict Mary admirably forging a path towards her own felicity. In many ways, Mary is to be admired in her resolve; she must and does learn to reject passivity and resist harmful and false narratives that cloud her judgment about both herself and others. She also resists the temptation to rely on the pursuit of knowledge as her sole source of identity and happiness. However, Mary is only able to do any of this because other people (people who truly love her as she is) intervene emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and physically.

While it is tempting to credit Mary’s happiness with her resilience or resolve, she cannot and does not actually accomplish any of this alone. Rather, it is because of the kind, compassionate, protective, encouraging, and healthy relationship Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner forge with Mary and she with them. The Gardiners’ hospitality makes it possible for Mary to proceed into this fuller life; they literally welcome her into their home, their humor, and their love, sharing generously and without expectation. It is by their hands that Mary, who is very wounded by years of her mother telling her she is a disappointment to her, begins to have clarity and charity for herself and others. Through these means, the Gardiners (and **cough cough** others) encourage Mary toward not only a better self-concept but also a happier and healthier existence.

While Mary Bennet has a key role in embracing and accepting the encouragement and affection of those around her, it is much too simple to say that her happiness comes by her own hands. It is by freely given love that Mary grows up and glows up. While Mary certainly has an existential glow-up by the end of the series, it should be accredited not to her newfound self-knowledge or self-acceptance but to grace. It is by grace that Mary Bennet was worthy of love even before she loved herself, and it is by grace that she is able to receive and give love in the end.

While I have my qualms with the miniseries, one thing The Other Bennet Sister does very well is depict one of the great gifts of human relationship: The Gaze. The Gaze is a powerful thing, containing both great and grave capability and potential. Endless movie plots, song lyrics, and classic poetry center on The Gaze, and even the Bible depicts its power; the gaze of Lot’s wife turned her into salt, and Jesus warns us that a lustful gaze is the equivalent of adultery. A loving gaze, however, has a sort of holy tenderness to it. It is more than a look — it is a kind of knowing. The Gaze contains something a mirror can never show us. 

It is very moving to witness Mary Bennet being caught in another person’s loving gaze, even more so because of how we’ve watched her be looked upon with disgust by others, including her own mother. I won’t spoil some of the key plot points of the show, but we are shown, not told, how others feel about Mary. And it is a lovely thing to watch. 

Another person’s ability to gaze upon us with love and then remind us that we are, in fact, lovely — the image and glory of God who are “fearfully and wonderfully made” — is a means of grace. While watching these moments play out in poetry or film or even our lives is undeniably beautiful, what is even greater is to consider that as believers, this is how God gazes upon us! Whose gaze is more steady, more loving, more knowledgeable, more understanding, more kind, more truthful, more gracious, than that of God’s?

Consider the story of Jesus’s baptism: 

As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased” (Mt. 3:16–17).

Every baptism is gazed upon by God with great power and great gentleness and great love. This is not a Jane Austen romance or a Taylor Swift song or a philosophical proposition: this is a historical reality, and this is our reality too. What is even more amazing to consider is that God’s gaze is also generative. As it turns out, “We love because he first loved us” is what makes any and all human flourishing possible. What we need to flourish is to believe that God really does love us. How do we do this? Well, we can begin by listening to a voice from heaven saying words that have always been true: you are a beloved child of God.

The good news is that flourishing is not in our own hands; it’s in God’s. And the good news is that all glow-ups begin with grace. 

The post Mary Bennet and the Glow-Up of Grace appeared first on Mockingbird.

In the opening banquet scene, we’re dropped, in ancient style, in medias res as the bard begins. Why do the suitors, abusing the law of hospitality — or “law of Zeus” — even want a song? Maybe to remember the pain and the heroism, or maybe for yet one more distraction on their long bacchanal. The bard takes us to the Trojan beach, where Odysseus won his great glory. And we get the first narrative break of the film’s many, this demanded by Penelope. She will not remember, in every detail, tonight. She’s been remembering Odysseus faithfully for twenty years, and memory sharpens desire, which sharpens sorrow, and tonight she just doesn’t want to hear his song.

Nolan’s mastery of complex narrative serves the frame-within-frame source material well, giving him the freedom to sequence the story more thematically than chronologically — though in his own way. He works in scenes of Odysseus, hunting with his beloved Argos, stringing his bow and shooting through the axe heads, lamenting with his beloved Penelope the necessity of going to war. In their short time on screen together, the husband and wife (played brilliantly by Anne Hathaway) spark with affection. If ever there was a vision of home, this is it.

But if Penelope’s pre-war Odysseus seems careful, mirthful at times, a bit boastful, the Odysseus who sails away from Troy, in Nolan’s film, isn’t. He’s quieter, less a spinner of tales. Compared to the epic poem’s Odysseus, he doesn’t use clever verbal trickery to escape the Cyclops, nor does he shout his name as he leaves, instead shooting an arrow in a futile act of vengeance that only makes things worse. His choice of route — not to follow Agamemnon — is delivered petulantly, a petty act of symbolic defiance after he’s already finished out Agamemnon’s great war. His later defiance of the islanders’ warning not to sail west comes off as restless, flippant, almost like he’s asking for trouble. And this Odysseus, rather than moving and delighting the assembled banquet hall in Phaeacia (as in the poem) instead struggles to un-forget on a paradisaical, desolate beach. Nolan gradually gives us the sense that Odysseus, though he doesn’t want to admit it, does not actually want to go home.

Here Nolan’s adroit plot work allows him to set up a mystery: how will he get home if doesn’t want to, and why doesn’t he want to go? In his halting, piecemeal delivery to Calypso, the reason unfolds.

The costs of Odysseus’s adventures are counted, first in his men’s bodies. Each episode — rendered in a brilliant mixture of grounded and fantastical, claustrophobic and sweeping — represents a moral judgment. Odysseus flouts the laws of hospitality in Polyphemus’s cave by coming without a guest-gift and eating cheese before it’s offered, sacrilegiously invoking “Zeus’s law” itself when one of his conscientious men catches him out. After Odysseus and his men blind the Cyclops, who writhes piteously about and calls his father’s name — sea god, whoops — they learn he can talk. When one of his men asks if they couldn’t have tried talking, Odysseus deadpans along the lines of, “I think we’re past that.” (As I don’t have the script, quotes are necessarily paraphrased.) In a petty act of vengeance for the men who died following his orders, Odysseus shoots the Cyclops after they’ve escaped, which enrages the Cyclops, leading to yet more bodies. The cycle of violence spins on, and the offense of their blinding Polyphemus follows them in the unrelenting sea.

After encountering and being largely massacred by Laestrygonians, they end up with Circe, who feeds Odysseus’s men. The parallel with Penelope is uncomfortable: the men say they won’t hurt her, but she’s not exactly free, either. As Penelope said earlier, to paraphrase, “You men do what you choose. I do what I can.” Circe feeds the Argives a hideously addictive stew, and as they compulsively eat, she muscles her hands on their heads, molding them into swine. After Odysseus convinces her to heal them, she chants (again paraphrasing), “Go back to your disguises.” To her, all men are pigs, driven by animal appetite to eat and pillage and rape. In this particular context, the men are likely innocent of that particular intent, but the nature of man is fickle, changeable in the space of a spell. And after ten years of war, or three years of waiting, that brutish nature rises ever closer to the surface.

At the same time, the Greeks are put to impossible choices — immortally symbolized by Scylla and Charybdis — throughout much of Nolan’s adaptation. It’s an abomination to leave your men’s bodies unburied, but it would be worse to stay and die. Nolan’s Odysseus wants no part of Agamemnon’s war, but he can’t refuse and can’t run away drawing Agamemnon’s rage upon the Ithacans. If Homer’s Odysseus deceives readily, almost gratuitously, Nolan’s deceives reluctantly: he can’t tell the soldier left behind his plans, has to trick his crew into sailing past Scylla. By the time Tiresias warns him that if he tries for a bloodless passage past Charybdis, all his men will die, he’s learned to reckon the cost, and to accept it. The only way he can do this is by promising his unburied men that he will sail to the West to honor his fallen soldiers in a religious ritual. Amidst the impossible tradeoffs of life in a fallen world — and the world of Nolan’s Odyssey, like that of Homer, is very much fallen — there’s simply no way to come out clean. The pressure is too much, and ritual provides the only release valve. Why else do those milling about at Athena’s temple in Pylos seem so human, so pitiable? In a hard world, the vertical is the only place to turn.

The Greek sense of fate in a hard world bleeds more and more into karma, the old law of action and consequence. The film itself poses the question, Were these hardships chance or consequence? and it resolves on consequence. In the storm (caused by eating the sun god’s cows when they are starving), one of his men screams, “Pray to Poseidon! Pray for forgiveness!” It comes as a jolt, for while the film had generously embraced the mythic elements of Homer, its religious presence was toned down, more at the edges. But in the storm, it moves to center stage. Forgiveness for what? Eating a cow? Blinding a man-eating giant? For everything? The man doesn’t say, but his cry hangs there, casting a shadow over the rest of the film, the last words of Odysseus’s perished crew.

After the shipwreck, Odysseus washes up with Calypso, and we learn how she took him in. She tells him she healed his body but she couldn’t heal his mind, and he realized he didn’t want to go home. Still, his heart was always set on Ithaca, and she tells him she had always believed what was in his heart would make its way back into his mind. In the film, she acts less as enchantress — though a suggestion of that near the beginning acts as a deft red herring — and more as a nurse and Socratic midwife, coaxing Odysseus to remember. He does; his wife and son come to mind. Love causes sorrow; we sorrow when what we love is lost or threatened or separated from us — so love is always ultimately stronger, and in Odysseus it wins out. He wants to go home.

But home is increasingly under threat. The thin wicker screen dividing Penelope from the three-year feast of remorseless men feels so fragile, especially with Telemachus away. Their desire to win her in marriage, and the fact that, in lieu of any man ceding to his rivals, her own choice might play some role, is the tenuous thread on which her safety — and the lives of those loyal to Odysseus — hangs. And then Antinous catches her unraveling the shroud, pushing her towards a decision.

For a film about a man coming home to his loyal wife, Nolan’s Odysseus spends little time in flashbacks of his beloved’s smile. Instead he focuses on the Athena statuette, an icon not only of Penelope but also an entire civilized world that seems lost. His love for them might drive his remembrance and thus the narration, but the events themselves are more the grim consequences of Odysseus’s actions. It’s the fallout of his glory that drives him without rest through the lawless world. As much as we long for his and Penelope’s reunion, the stakes get higher: can satisfaction be made for his crime? Can anything be done to stem the “blood-dimmed tide” (Yeats) of civilizational decline?

On Calypso’s island, she tells Odysseus that he’s been trying to control everything around him — the Trojan War, the route home, finding food on the isle of the Cyclops, etc. — and made a mess of it. Like the soldier jumping overboard to hear the sirens, Odysseus pursued everything he wanted and hated himself for wanting, leaving a trail of broken promises and broken bodies in his wake. (Not that the other men are better; some, like Agamemnon, have done far worse.) The solution? To relinquish control, to give in to the gods rather than fighting them, and to throw himself on Athena’s promise of Zeus’s favor (Greek charis). So he relinquishes his fallible will for the second time, abandoned to the sea and to the gods, and washes up on the pebbled strand of Ithaca. Why would Zeus want to preserve him when it’s Zeus’s law he broke? Favor, or grace, is a mystery, but in the end it is all he has.

Warned by the dead Agamemnon, Odysseus comes home dressed as a beggar to “assess” the situation. The trope of the king-in-disguise works so well because he can earn by merit what is his by right, which creates a certain moral satisfaction — our hero is still the best man. But here there’s another edge to it: Odysseus has lost his men, his ships, and the spoils of Troy — lost everything but grace. And the beggar’s habit suits his first posture towards Penelope, as a supplicant and penitent.

That fragile wicker screen walling off Penelope, symbol of the delicate customs of civilization that alone keep a friendless queen safe from a mob of men, or a beggar safe from the kicks of scoffers, remains impassable by Odysseus, man of scandal. Tradition, manners, the things we say and leave unsaid — all embodied in a spindly wicker screen. Confession can’t be heard directly but is mediated by the inadequacy of words, the impossibility of making our hearts transparent to others or even ourselves. And perhaps we need some reserve of anonymity to make confession at all. So he works through his story, mediated by the screen, mediated by his disguise, his use of third-person voice, as Penelope (in priestly regalia) listens. Only with her can he actually get the words out, tell the full story.

So Nolan takes us again to Troy, after Odysseus’s brilliant ruse has succeeded in opening the gates. The horse, in Nolan’s film, was a sacred gift, abused by the Greeks to enter the city by deception, to kill and to pillage. (This reading has been around at least since Virgil, but it’s a departure from Homer, where the horse is viewed more as a triumph of tactics.) We hear the Greeks committed atrocities; and the treatment of Athena (with one shot recalling Cassandra) makes the sacrilegious nature of the sack pointed. And in a trademark Nolan twist, we learn that Odysseus’s ruse and the Greeks’ sack so trampled upon the laws of hospitality that the entire ancient world is now being torn apart by right of the strong and the will to power. The ancient civilization of the Bronze Age is collapsing, all due to the sin of Odysseus. The feared Sea People — marauders who terrorize the coasts of the Mediterranean world, and whose depredations are one reason Ithaca needs a king — are in fact the Greek veterans, or those following their example. It’s an almost Adamic sin, one man’s wrong plunging the world into chaos. The threats to Ithaca and the glory of its absent king come from the same act.

We finally learn why Odysseus didn’t want to go back to his beloved Ithaca: he didn’t want to see how the savage new world he unleashed has affected it. In shirking home, he refuses to reckon with the consequences of his crime, keeping the Ithaca of his mind undefiled by his act, even as the Ithaca of reality comes under mounting threat. As in some other Nolan movies, the structure makes perfect sense but only at the end. As it turns out, confessing one’s wrongs and eating lotuses were the only two options, and to flee from one is to seek the other. He doesn’t quite get Penelope’s absolution until later, but we do see Athena alongside him, silent tears running down her cheeks. The Greek gods are many things, but in this moment we see film’s truest image of the divine, weeping alongside mortals for all the griefs we inflict and all the griefs we endure.

One great unanswered question of Homer’s poem is how the cycle of violence stops. In the poem, after the suitors are killed, their fathers come to avenge them, till Athena steps in and, deus ex machina, tells them to stop — the end. But what about their sons’ blood? Who will avenge it, and if the avengers are avenged, will it go on forever? Aeschylus, among others, tried to answer that question in the Oresteiad, and Nolan’s avenging dead owe something of their moral logic to the Furies of Greek literature myth. But where Aeschylus interposes a court of justice (plus a bit of deus ex machina) to stop the cycle, for Nolan the only answer is expiation.

Odysseus, after acknowledging the guilt he bears, becomes able to take the evils of others onto himself. In the act of remembrance, perfected in confession, he moves from lotus-eater to sin-eater.  Telemachus could not kill the suitors (even if he were able to) without violating the Law of Zeus, so Odysseus becomes the lawbreaker for him. He kills them all, zealously keeping Telemachus out of it, ready to die before letting his son incur the taint of blood-feud. As the big wooden doors to the hall close, Odysseus’s killing the suitors becomes more than just a revenge tale, a way to contain the bloodguilt in himself and prevent it from becoming a generational curse.

If I had one slight criticism of the film, it might be that for Telemachus to be king (Odysseus takes back the role in the poem), he should be worthy of kingship through feats of arms, and Nolan doesn’t give you much of that — quite the opposite, in the swineherd fight (h/t DTHM). But in the terms of the film, what makes Telemachus worthy of the throne isn’t so much his martial skill as his freedom from bloodguilt. He alone can preserve Ithaca against the collapse around it because, cleansed by his father’s sacrifice, his kingship can be untainted by the mounting cycles of vengeance in their unravelling world.

Like certain goats of the ancient Jewish world, Odysseus bears his guilt into exile so that what remains can be clean — or at least, clean of the curse of vengeance — symbolized by the heavy golden circlet on Telemachus’s head. In Nolan’s version, Penelope comes away too, and they’re clearly happy together, but the sense of an ending and a departure predominates. They have a purpose, to go West to honor the unburied men.

What starts in romance must, as the forces of a world too big and too compromised by violence threaten to swamp everything, set its face toward ritual, the acts of remembering, sorrowing, and making whatever feeble gestures of respect one can. The filmmaker’s art is anemnestic, an un-forgetting of our own primal guilt, of our own nature that we share with angels and with pigs. It brings us before the unburied bones of our own history and that of our species, freeing us to rejoice with those who rejoice and coaxing us to mourn with those who mourn. As nice as a happy-ever-after ending in Ithaca would’ve been, with the moral freight Nolan’s Odysseus carries, the move from romance to ritual is the only real way to honor the gods and to the dead. Ritual reaches blindly toward some act, however imperfect, commensurate to the agony and ecstasy of our own lives and the glories and tragedies of those who’ve gone before. Storytelling does too, and Nolan’s latest grasps something worth holding onto.

A few adaptation notes for strays:

• I spent the first half of the film trying to shake off a mild annoyance that the story wasn’t being told to a Phaeacian banquet hall, but by the end Nolan’s choice made sense. Nolan’s story, limited to sub-three hours on the screen, is already large in scope and benefits from cutting Phaeacia; the emotional catharsis of Odysseus’s storytelling pays off in the Penelope scene, and the concern with “vertical” guilt beyond Poseidon’s grudge means the more intimate setting with Penelope and Athena works well.
• Nolan’s take on The Odyssey is a pretty serious one, omitting some of the fun and/or comedic elements of the poem. But the events and characters are fairly disparate (geographically and relationally; many of the people and places have little relation to one another), making a tight adaptation extremely difficult. Unity of tone seems almost necessary, and if one tone has to predominate, serious/pathos-y seems the one to hit.
• The “Law of Zeus” — that one must show hospitality to strangers — functions as a nice plumb line for the moral aspects of Nolan’s universe, but I did wince a little when one scene tries to broaden that to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The “burning tower” shot in Troy immediately evoked Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” a reminder that the Zeus of Greek myth isn’t the “golden rule” type, and also all of this is kind of his fault.
• In an interview (above), Nolan references three films that influenced his take on The Odyssey: Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, Kurosawa’s Ran, and Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. All visual masterpieces, but also films that deeply resonate with the thematic elements discussed above.

The post From Romance to Ritual appeared first on Mockingbird.

backed that doctor up against the hospital wall, and as I watched from my bed, she grabbed his white coat collar in her hands and made it really clear that her student wouldn’t be abused under her watch. The doctor was speechless … then he left the room. After that moment, the hospital staff suddenly remembered how to behave. I became a patient rather than a suspect. And then Sister Maura did something even more important: she stayed by my bedside while I drifted in and out of consciousness. She saved my life.

It’s depressingly rare to hear these stories of the church as a refuge, coming in when the powers of the world accuse and condemn; when church figures act as a counterweight to the judgment of the world, rather than an intensification of it. Maura in that moment embodied Jesus’ relational intervention to offer grace where the world offers judgment, as well as the Holy Spirit’s work as advocate, with a life-saving outcome.

2. Yesterday at Noema, Jacob Dreyer posted a thoughtful (and to me slightly scandalizing) reflection on the transhumanist movement. It’s easy to write off that stuff as fringe, but in Silicon Valley and international circles, it continues to gain ground.

Technology promises to give us ever more mastery over the material world, to solve every problem that exists, except the moral, relational, spiritual, behavioral, and emotional ones. At the same time, birthrates are in “unprecedented decline,” and far from reversing that trend, belief in a coming material utopia may accelerate it:

At the same moment when technologically driven increases to human lifespans seem to be on the horizon, our species has taken on a kind of suicide mentality: Far fewer people are having children. Research suggests this may be linked to the rise of computation and technology. A recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that early smartphone access in the U.S. contributed to lower birthrates. … In China and India, where AI has arrived more rapidly, the birthrates have declined more rapidly, too.

This seems driven by at least three factors: for some, the changing economy makes having kids less feasible; for others, it’s general uncertainty about the future. But for many in the technology world, the future is about optimizing the human collective, whether in a growth direction … or not:

From the labs in Wuxi to the experimental startups in Pudong’s Zhangjiang Science City, there is a sense that biopower is state power. But China’s biotech boom is not driven by Silicon Valley’s libertarian fantasies or metaphysical anxieties. It comes from a socialist-industrial legacy that sees the population as part of a mathematical equation it needs to maximize … As the population rapidly ages — more than a quarter is expected to be over the age of 60 by 2040 — China is approaching the human body as it once approached steel, cement and architectural blueprints: as an ingredient in the next stage of development. […]

In China, I’ve heard casual comments to the effect that it would be fine for the country to revert to a few hundred million or so people — down from the country’s more than 1.4 billion today — if they were the “right” people. A nation of intelligent, rich Chinese with no acne, no mental illnesses, no peasants or poor. In China, transhumanism is a post-socialist industrial theology: the dream of a perfected collective body.

Our historically unparalleled methods of measuring and controlling every aspect of life allows for more and more “optimization,” and AI is a major driver of this. In 30 seconds, you can get ChatGPT to suggest the perfect diet for your body and goals, the perfect laundry routine for your priorities — in short, you can optimize every aspect of your life. For whatever reason, we find that appealing and empowering at the individual level but off-putting and dystopian, to say the least, at the collective level.

Our surprise by or aversion to the technologists’ vision raises the question: “optimization” by what criteria? The American answer mostly seems to be whatever criteria you, the individual, define. And for most of us, if we’re honest, number of kids is one factor to balance against others — time for career, time for hobbies, savings, quality of life — in calibrating our vision of an “optimized” life as the sum of different tradeoffs, each carefully analyzed and chosen. That we’re not good at predicting what will make us happy doesn’t seem to slow us down. In some ways, the techno-futurists’ utopian dreams are outlandish or morally repugnant. But in other ways, they reveal similar assumptions embedded in our culture and ourselves.

Some of that optimization mania is borne of necessity: when one must work, grocery shop, keep up a house, figure out what’s for dinner, do laundry, clean, care for children (or ferry them around), pay bills, do yard work, and manage all the other demands of modern life, every minute saved feels is a genuine gift. On the other hand, at least some of the high bars we’re trying to clear are bars we put there ourselves: not only necessity but also self-justification drive us to exhaustion. Technology functions both as help (allowing us to jump higher) but also accelerant (raising the bar). Inasmuch as technology continues to empower us, we will probably reach for ever more ambitious levels of comfort, capability, and achievement. But to what end?

3. If all that optimization talk makes you want to run for the hills, then lace up your running shoes, strap on your biometric watch, and sign in to Strava. Over at Compact Magazine, Felice Basbøll has been training for her first half-marathon and takes a dive into running culture:

Suddenly, even recreational exercisers are acting like athletes. […]

Even professional athletes didn’t use to be this neurotic. Suzanne Lenglen had cognac in the middle of her 1919 Wimbledon final to soothe her nerves. My old figure skating coach used to reminisce about the wild parties that were thrown on the Friday night before a competition. … Now, professional athletes get their bloodwork done, test their VO2 max on fancy machines, and tailor their schedules to eliminate all inefficiencies. The amateurs go as far as they can with wearables and AI-driven personal training plans.

Gen Z might be getting into running, but we are still bored, lonely, and anxious. Perhaps it is no accident that we neurotics are drawn to running, a uniquely trackable sport, where every minor improvement incrementally increases your predicted race times on Strava. Every element of your diet, sleep schedule, and social life can be adapted to it. “Healthy is beautiful” is repeated ad nauseam and we become walking public health campaigns. We are slowly outsourcing intuition to optimizable metrics. Every unforeseen life event or ingested substance can throw off the regimen; complete lack of resilience to any outside stimulus is reframed as health. “Holistic” just means adapting everything to fit your workout routine.

Decades ago, feminists imagined a utopia where women have no scruples about our looks. But the aesthetic approach at least had a vision of a life to look good for. Instead of exercising in order to be able to eat, drink, and enjoy life, “health” has become the whole lifestyle.

That last line hits it: is health an ultimate end in itself, or is the point of good health being able to enjoy something better — friends, family, nature, making a positive impact on the world, prayer, etc.?

A friend who studied in a far-away country recalled English being viewed as the great enabler. If you wanted to be a great doctor, study English; a great teacher, study English. It opened opportunities to the world. But he recalled that some students who entered with a very definite idea of what they wanted to do got sidetracked — they became so invested in the means to the end (fluency in English) that they lost interest in the end itself. They became professional translators.

Something like that seems to have pervaded modern society. We don’t have a coherent vision of the good life, so we invest in different enablers of the good life — health, money, education — obsessively. We tend to forget (or simply never decide) what we’re optimizing for.

4. We’ve talked before about play as the space of human living beyond the realms of necessity and of self-justification. And the World Cup this year has been a true gift: wildly popular, shattering previous attendance records. There’s something captivating about it, like worldwide festal days, and the spirit of celebration is infectious.

Three good articles on the Cup this week: a general writeup from Jonathan Wilson at the Paris Review, our own Will Fagan’s piece on the freedom of playing with nothing to lose, and Jay Kaspian Kang’s at the New Yorker on V.A.R. On the last,

The supposed precision of V.A.R., which purportedly can tell when a Croatian player’s hair has touched a ball (but apparently not when a ball hits a camera wire suspended in the air) or when half a kneecap pokes itself offside, makes everything worse, because these tiny infractions feel like violations of the spirit of the world’s beautiful game. […]

The complaint against V.A.R., then, operates on two levels. There is rage at the machines for turning what should be a spiritual game into the strictest and most tedious rule-following exercise possible. And then there is a separate anger, because this mechanistic objectivity is not applied evenly.

As an avid watcher of American football, my quadrennial love affair with soccer is driven mainly by the freer, more fluid nature of it. The clock keeps going, players keep playing, and referees are constantly making semi-subjective decisions about such things as how much stoppage time to add or exactly when to blow the whistle to end the game. Fans and even the players gripe loudly at almost every decision, then move on — life, after all, is messy and imperfect, and it all (mostly) comes out in the wash. Sometimes it feels like in American football, we get just as much griping and subjectivity at critical moments; they just come at the end of cumbersome review processes designed to prevent them.

Kang asks why tennis’ automated line calls are widely accepted, but soccer’s V.A.R. seems despised. His answer? Soccer by its nature is chock-full of judgment calls:

Did the hand that was placed on the chest of the defender actually cause them to fall back or was that just more theatrics? Was the defender whose elbow blocked the shot in the box making a natural motion or was he sticking his arm out to purposefully make his body bigger? How do you automate such determinations without coming up with an entire new rule book that would dictate, for example, the length of a “build up” to a goal? Do you put little gauges in the shirts and socks of players to tell how hard they actually got hit?

One answer, it seems, is just to enjoy the play, accept that close calls are hard to get exactly right, and keep playing. Fans’ appetite for the game itself, rather than the cumbersome processes that try and fail to eliminate imperfections of human referees, is a true encouragement, as is the play itself.

5. Also against the grain of optimization: a farmer who wastes seed on rocky and thorny soil. Nadia Bolz-Weber continues what’s been a run of good sermons, applying the Parable of the Sower to different phases of our lives: there are phases where we’re saturated by the cares of the world or blocked up by the rocks of past hurts. But God just keeps on scattering the Word, keeps on giving grace to us, even when we’re not (consciously) receiving it. I won’t spoil more, but it’s well worth a read.

6. In humor, the Onion goes dark with “Newborn Baby Can Already Tell Parents’ Genetics Not Going To Do Him Any Favors” and channels a Lutheran view of the effects of exhortation with “Insisting Coworker Get to the Point Somehow Slows Him Down.” These people are incorrigible! My favorite, though, was Babylon Bee’s “Man Informs Wife He Can’t Mow the Lawn Today as He Is Busy Playing Lawn Mowing Simulator”:

Despite his wife’s pleas that the grass was now taller than their toddler, who had been missing for hours in the backyard, Callahan explained that he was completely slammed with virtual lawns to mow in MowSim Elite.

“Business is really taking off. I’m getting mower upgrades left and right. There’s simply no way I can stop right now,” said Callahan. “The diagonal lines I’m getting on the lawns in the simulator, they’re ridiculous, babe. I’m an artist, and grass is my medium. Well, virtual grass. I can maybe work our lawn in tomorrow, but it’s going to be tight.”

7. At Christianity Today, our friend Ross Byrd considers the mounting tiredness in many of the evangelical nondenominational churches started from the late ’90s on, many of which experienced massive growth but now face incipient fatigue:

Churches that adopted the forms of the internet were duly rewarded with rapidly growing congregations, buildings, and bank accounts. Now, it seems, they may have received their reward in full. […]

Our megachurch parking lots are still mostly full on Sunday mornings. But the lots remain full of cars in much the same way that our Instagram feeds remain full of content: The people are still coming, but they aren’t exactly thrilled to be there. Exhaustion has set in.

A certain subtle odor, resembling the beginning of mainline decline, can now be sensed in the nondenominational evangelical corner of the world. The growing cracks in the empire appear to be coinciding with a new and widespread interest in more traditional forms of Christianity. I can’t even count the number of conversations I’ve had recently with young evangelicals pondering conversion to Catholicism or the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Ross helpfully diagnoses churches’ focus on programming, marketing, and seeking ever new forms of engagement as a species of worldliness; these churches adapted, in some ways, to a marketing, consumer-first model. And the fatigue he describes matches not only that of many exvangelicals but increasingly that of everyone in today’s over-inundated world. His prescription?

“His yoke is easy, and his burden is light,” we declare, just after drumming up a new wave of volunteers for various ministry teams. Maybe we have forgotten our call to give rest to the weary.

Our churches should be beautiful, restful places of prayer and silence, feasting and fasting, joy and grief. The infrastructure for this may certainly require careful planning and execution, but it does not require programs and advertisements, busy pastors and busier volunteers — expending themselves toward the end of an ever-increasing number of consumer offerings for parishioners who are already too busy to keep coming. The church should not compete with or imitate the rhythms of the secular world but should rather become a kind of holy refuge. […]

We need our ministers to move at the pace of prayer and devotion, so that we can move at the pace of God. When they don’t, the congregation doesn’t either, and we all pay the price. … Our priests and ministers must be given permission to be unbusy, holy people who are daily present in the sanctuary to pray with those who need prayer, to mourn with those who mourn, and to walk alongside the body of believers. … If they do — and if we do — the harried world around us will flee to us rather than the other way around.

Strays:

• For the medieval nerds among us, LARB reviews a book on the seven deadly sins — unpromisingly titled Self-Help from the Middle Ages — which doubles as an interesting window into our culture’s recent dalliance with all things medieval. Is it the texture? The considerable “friction”? In some circles, I suspect, it’s because the medieval depressingly represents a hitherto unexplored vector of self-help: maybe this paradigm, unlike all the others, will work. The author and reviewer are well qualified, but I could imagine th’angelic doctor groaning from the fourth sphere at the reviewer’s suggestion that “when the system worked as it was meant to work, year after year, penitents learned to recognise their worst tendencies and replace them – or at least offset them – with their opposing virtues.” To quote the Coens, “Would that it were so simple.”
• At the Dispatch, Alan Jacobs muses on the interest — especially among men — in the Second World War and its place in history.
• Tom Holland (of Dominion fame) interviewed Tom Holland (of Gregory Cromwell / Spider-Man / Telemachus fame) about The Odyssey. It’s a good chat (below). For those heading to the theater this weekend who want an Odyssey refresher, I was recently introduced to Natalie Haynes, h/t JL, whose rundown of Homer’s Odyssey is both informative and highly entertaining.

The post July 11-17 appeared first on Mockingbird.

So come on over, have a seat in this imprint in the corn … Huh. That’s a funny shape! Well, I’m sure it’s nothing. But, uh … just in case …  would you mind putting this tinfoil hat on? Perfect! Now just grab a glass of water (or twenty) and join us as we press play!

Ian: Caleb, what led you to pick Signs?

Caleb: It’s an all-American summer setting. An erstwhile pastor’s home in a small town with swing sets, baseball bats, and cornfields? It’s the platonic ideal of summer.

But besides the summer connotations, Signs has one of the most unnerving scores I’ve ever heard. James Newton Howard really outdid himself. And it’s still one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen!

Blake: It made me realize one of my fears, which is looking out a window or door and seeing something or someone there which isn’t supposed to be there.

Caleb: A terrific decision from Shyamalan to give us only glimpses of the threat through silhouettes, reflections, and blurred videotape.

I also caught a detail in this I never noticed before. Toward the end, when Merrill is listening to the radio in the basement, he mentions a theory that they were not there to invade earth but rather to pillage humans from it. To me, that solves a lot of the plot holes around why they would invade a planet covered in “toxic” water.

Ian: For me, once I discovered the death drive, my objections about invading a watery world dried up.

Caleb: Tell me more about that.

Ian: The death drive is Freud’s rediscovery of Paul’s grenade in Romans 7 that we are internally divided and alienated from our own selves and thus undermine our own self-interest, sabotaging our efforts to accomplish what we tell others and ourselves we are interested in.

Since this is a fallen cosmos, I take it as a given that any putative aliens would share in such a split subjectivity as we do, differences notwithstanding, and so would do things that, to outside eyes, are not only stupid but manifestly stupid. Basically, crackhead lack of self-awareness is the norm for speaking beings.

Caleb: I like that insight. And at the end of the day, even if we cannot fully psychoanalyze something so foreign, the idea of a malevolent other still works theologically.

Here is an anti-god. It’s a “bad miracle” to tap into our other alien movie this summer: NOPE. It doesn’t come to commune but to destroy. It spews poison gas but is vulnerable to cleansing and life-giving water. I guess I’m saying that baptism kills it.

Ian: This guy gets it.

Caleb: But then, we have that in common with the aliens.

Ian: That’s right! … If they’re aliens. I’m not sure it’s crucial thematically, but I do wonder if the “aliens” are in fact fallen powers and principalities. *cough* Just like in the real world.

Caleb: I am also obsessed with how “Father” Graham (“Don’t call me that!”) has to listen to so many confessions in this. It starts with the pharmacy clerk, Tracey Abernathy, and her guilty conscience over mundane cussing (which invokes laughter in us) and leads to Dr. Reddy’s heartsick and hell-dreading apology for accidentally killing Graham’s wife by falling asleep at the wheel one night (which invokes tears).

And, although Graham resists listening to all of it, it’s all a part of his healing journey. He gets more and more emotional as he listens to the soul-baring of the people around him, which, in turn, allows him to weep and pray later.

Ian: Absolutely! I think it shows how we don’t get better by avoiding confession, ours or others. We are healed in our sharing one another’s hurt.

Caleb: Morgan and Graham actually both have a moment when they tearfully turn to their Father, who they perceive as not listening to them, and tell them they hate him. But in this, they’re both praying — Morgan at the dinner table, and Graham when Morgan has an asthma attack in the basement without his inhaler. It’s reminiscent of Job or Psalm 88, where God is accused by his people; almost slandered even, but he listens because they are praying to him.

Ian: Yes — Graham is praying at last! To actually address the One you feel and fear is hurting you is to close some of the distance. And on the other side of it, you see that that One was drawing near and drawing forth words out of your depths. That is the turning point of this film.

Ian: Morgan’s address to Graham prompts Graham’s embittered “I will not waste another second praying,” but, it seems to me, also unlocks him to utter his address to God a little later.

Caleb: Thematically speaking, this reminds me of a very different movie, Tokyo Godfathers (2003) which is an animated film about three homeless people in Tokyo finding a baby on Christmas and their journey to reunite her with her parents. Both are stories about the wild, merciful providence of God in unfathomable situations.

Blaine: Caleb! Tokyo Godfathers is a Christmas tradition in my house!

Blake: A couple of things really stood out this time than they had in other viewings. First, we view the yard from an old piece of glass that is warped and distorts the perspective. After the invasion, the window is broken, but the view is piercingly clear. The distortion is shattered, and we are able to see clearly through the lens of suffering, difficulty, and conflict.

Ian: Yo…

Blake: Second, there’s a scene about midway in the movie, a tracking shot from above as the family goes into town to “keep their mind on everyday things,” and if you notice, the tracking shows the shapes present in a bird’s eye view of the town they live near. Each of these shapes, like the crop circles, are signs of the past, the history of development, the history of settlement of people, the history of a community, and similarly a map or navigation layout. That side-by-side is very compelling to me.

Ian: We’ve talked a bit about some specific fears Signs touches on. What is the most frightening thing about this movie for y’all?

Blake: Very few things about this movie DON’T raise up goose pimples. Cornfields, electronic transmissions from elsewhere, things outside doors and windows, and on and on.

Ian: All the Blake Collier classics, right? What about you, Caleb and Blaine? The scariest thing for me is how the footage on the news reminds me of watching shows like Sightings and Encounters when I was much younger and being terrified of alien abduction recreations.

Caleb: I have a distinct memory of watching this movie with my mom in the theater, and she was so terrified she grasped my hand a couple times. My mom being just as scared as me was terrifying! The idea that parents or authority figures are also vulnerable and don’t have all the answers, which is a lot of what Signs is about, shook me to the core.

Blaine: What scares me the most is when it seems like the weight of the happenings (hehe!) are going to cause the family to come apart at the seams. The dinner scene, in particular, is always hard for me to watch. Gibson’s performance captures a pent up sense of guilt, rage, fear, and pain so well. But I also really don’t like it when that tall fella is on the roof.

Ian: Man, I feel that. The creatures pull the veil back, and the rift that opens when we do not love God is exposed.

Blake: I’m curious, what do you guys see here? Luck or a miracle? I take this from the movie in part because I really like that scene between the brothers, but also because if it is a miracle (which I think we would all agree it is), it is a crazy miracle that takes the family through hell and back (if you read the aliens as demons), or at least through a prism of suffering and grief (if they are simply just invading aliens). The grief-strewn miracle is something that has always captured my imagination. It’s something that Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor were notorious for putting in their stories, and it shows up here as well.

Ian: This is my favorite thing about Signs: nothing was an accident. “Luck” is the way we distance ourselves from the signs of God’s superintendence of all things. It takes faith of a different sort to insist these things were not meaningfully connected by another agent outside the visible scope of what is taking place. Everything is potentially a sign when a wild but good God is at work.

Blake: This film really is a Calvinist wet dream.

Blaine: There’s a title for the piece…

Ian: You know, Blake, I think that joke clarifies for me that Signs is a type of unwelcome good news. Because I think it’s very unpopular right now to say that good can come from suffering. Which is distinct from saying suffering is good. But to a certain way of seeing the world and the self, that sounds like the same thing.

I think that there is so much cultural incentive for victimhood and creating victimhood out of nothing. And, smaller than that, just pretending that the bad things we’ve experienced are the truest and most interesting things about us makes this theme in Signs a powder keg for our warped views of ourselves and our world.

But that is the testimony of this film! Shyamalan is so strange, because when he doesn’t overthink what he’s doing, he delivers profoundly. The transformation of the signs of the title seeming to be the signs of imminent alien invasion but recognized retroactively as the signs of God’s superintendence is skillful, and he’s most skilled when he isn’t preoccupied with how to be a good writer and director.

Blake: Yep!

Ian: So what I love in this movie is that we vicariously experience the sheer exhilaration of finally recognizing how all the parts relate to one another, culminating in that immortal line, “Swing away.” Man. It’s incredible! Even Merrill’s failure is a thread in this fabric, and it is redeemed to rip evil a new one. This is where abstract questions of theodicy give way to “Lord, what would you have me do now?” The luxury of abstraction collapses in the face of the recognition that I am not forsaken or left only to my own resources. And it’s beautiful!

Blake: Theodicy … is that the new Nolan film?

Ian: *rolls eyes* Any parting thoughts on Signs, boys?

Caleb: Don’t you mean any … SIGNoffs?

Ian: Hey! I make the puns here!

Blake: This movie pretty much details all the signs of the times.

Caleb: I think I’d tell readers to … SEE … and maybe even to … SWING AWAY.

Ian: You son of a gun, Caleb. That’s good! I guess I would urge you, dear reader, to remember that this movie is your life projected onto a screen, so you can take courage, here and now, where you are.

Thank you so very, very much, friends, for joining us in this Spooky Summer series! We are grateful for your companionship, and we hope you had even a fraction of the fun that we did. We also hope your perspective on things has graciously enlarged and that the gospel’s applicability has shone all the more brilliantly through the chilling explorations these movies have provoked. 

Fear not, friends! It can’t stay hot forever. Enjoy it while it’s here, but we can already hear autumn breezes whispering around the corner, so until the next series: graves and pieces, fiends!

The post The Unwelcome Good News of <em>Signs</em> appeared first on Mockingbird.

The sans-technology vibe didn’t end with the booking process. At this lake, there’s no cell service, you have to pay for Wi-Fi per day or week on each device you want to use it with, and connectivity drops off if you try to use it too far from the main office.

Crazy, right? But also … amazing?

Though the tech-free aspect was accidental to the location we wanted to visit and not an intentional choice on our part, we decided to try and get by without the internet for most of the week we were there. In the first few days when it felt the most strange having a largely useless smartphone, I found myself surprised at what I missed most. It wasn’t the social media, texts and emails, or streaming choices. It was Google search.

It started immediately after arriving at the lake. What elevation are we at? Is there a trail to walk around the lake? What’s that peak we can see right now? Is it possible we just saw an otter or beaver in that stream? What are the Yelp reviews for the café at the resort down the road? Do they have pizza? And on and on.

It felt weird not being able to look up all our questions and immediately have answers. The first day, stressed about all that not-knowing, I had the psychotic idea to start a note to write down every single unanswered question we had. Then once we drove to an area with cell service, I could look them up one by one and know the answers, and then my life would be complete!

You see the problem, yes?

I reflected a bit about why it was hard for me to go without my beloved internet knowledge base. I’m in my early forties, so it’s not like I don’t remember a time before smartphones and the internet, a time where we’d wonder about something and just shrug off the mystery. But once you have that ability to know, it’s hard to go back.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using the internet to answer all manner of questions as we go through life. And with all of the Big Things of life that are truly out of our control, who could begrudge us that little peace of mind that comes with a quick definitive answer?

But I sense that habituating myself to instant answers has some downsides. For one, it feeds that part of my ego that foolishly prides itself on being a Decently Intelligent Person. (As Augustine would remind me, what do I have that hasn’t been given me?) I like knowing things, often just for the sake of knowing things, and I want to be seen as an interesting and knowledgeable person. But there are not enough internet searches in a lifetime that can actually accomplish this for me. I can never know everything. And in reality, the things I’m generally seeking to know fall within a very narrow slice of human experience. Furthermore, what percent of the information that’s supposedly feeding my knowledge actually sticks? (I’ve asked the interwebs what temperature to bake a potato or what the population of my city is about fifty times, and I still don’t remember the answers.)

The constant stream of information also feeds an illusion of control and weakens our tolerance for mystery and humility in the face of things we don’t know. Asking the internet a question and getting an immediate answer is so satisfying because for that moment in time, there is certainty. Our feet stay firmly on the ground, we don’t have to be left wondering, and the world seems well within the bounds of something we understand and see clearly. Again, is it wrong to google things, especially something straightforward like the number of tablespoons in a cup? Of course not. But over time, I wonder if it’s building an unhelpful mental framework: There are always answers. They are simple, and all I have to do is type in a few words! Perhaps this is part of the reason why even the smallest amount of friction in our lives seems so difficult now. We’ve become accustomed to simple, immediate answers in so many questions of daily life. And when hard, messy, inexplicable things come, as they inevitably do, it feels like a bug and not a feature of life.

In those moments, the temptation of quick, pat answers and the counterfeit peace of more information is especially alluring. Who among us hasn’t googled information pertaining to big questions about our health, our marriages, our kids, the sovereignty of God, even as some part of us knows that whatever we read is simply words on a screen that can’t bring any real peace or help or change in circumstances? Knowledge is power but only to a certain extent. Knowing the nature of my child’s illness doesn’t alleviate their suffering. Knowing the ways my husband and I are contributing to our conflict still leaves the hard work of forgiveness and reconciliation and the need for grace. Reading a theological explanation of the sovereignty of God doesn’t take away the pain of my circumstances or my unease at the amount of suffering in the world.

Yet time and time again, we find ourselves googling things, not in an earnest attempt for necessary information but in an attempt to force a feeling of perceived control or to get the quick hit of validation for our opinions. It often feels easier and more tangible than entrusting ourselves to a God who is beyond comprehension—a God who, while we can google a list of his attributes or read hundreds of scholars’ takes on the incarnation, is wholly beyond even collective humanity’s efforts to completely understand his wisdom and his ways after millennia of study and contemplation. And there’s the paradox. That inexplicable God full of mystery, whose foolishness is wiser than our best human efforts, has drawn near to us and is the only harbor of true peace, wisdom, and safe surrender.

***

Let’s be honest, I’m not going to stop googling stuff about mundane and big questions any time soon, even as I sense that habit might be malforming me in some ways. But it was a gift to be forced for a week to consider the hold that practice has on me. To be more present in God’s gifts of beautiful mountain lakes and vistas without needing to know extraneous details. To be reminded that being able or unable to google something produces neither a real deficit nor surplus in my knowledge and control, and it changes nothing about my fundamental state: I am a frail human who knows and controls far less than she thinks she does, and I exist via the grace of a wise and loving Father who proved his love by joining us in our suffering, the only real source of rest and peace.

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A fascinating development emerged during the course of the tournament. While the final four teams could have been easily predicted ahead of time, there have been a surprising number of upsets throughout the tournament. But why? Why have teams like Germany, the Netherlands, and Brazil fallen to upstarts? One explanation seems to be these historical giants played “afraid to lose.” Their upstart opponents, by contrast, played with both feet fully on the gas, dictating their style of play early in the game as opposed to being reactive. They played to win the game.

As explained in this viral X thread, these footballing giants play a “European” brand of football that “optimizes … what is measurable,” tracking pass completion percentage, possession, and positional discipline. European football prioritizes safe, higher percentage plays over riskier 1-v-1 artistry. It’s a system of short passes that slowly accumulates small advantages until they can be decisively exploited. The majority of both Argentina and Brazil’s rosters play club soccer in elite European leagues. This leads them to play a European style, a point made by Alan Shearer last week on The Rest is Football, claiming they’ve lost the South American quality that makes them successful.

Soccer optimization exists within a greater sporting-optimization movement, paralleling a similar development in the NBA, to detrimental effect. In short, optimization suggests that one can develop a perfect theory of how to win based upon the story that statistics tell us. In other words, if a team and its players hit certain metrics during the game — pass completion percentage, expected goals, usage rate — they will be likely to win the game. For the first teams to discover these insights, this may work … until everyone else does it, as Freddie deBoer suggests. (Do college football fans remember how successful Chip Kelly was in the late 2000s and early 2010s? Everyone else ultimately caught on.)

To be sure, no one can argue that advanced statistical models aren’t helpful. They aid in team strategy and individual player improvements and are helpful to tell a different story than what the eye can see. Yet it has the propensity to make clones, whereby every team plays the same, looks the same, and embodies the same character, potentially stripping a team’s identity — the engine that makes it go. When used as the end-all-be-all, it can create environments where players believe they are playing for statistical optimization, not against another team.

Teams that exceeded what was expected of them at this World Cup — Norway, Cape Verde, Paraguay, among others — however, view a game as not only the sum of countless measurable data points that can be combed over exhaustively to try to find an edge, but simply as a game that is “us vs them.” While their backroom staffs doubtlessly use statistical metrics, they also prize winning the game and beating their opponents more than winning the advanced statistical models. This gives individual players confidence to try the harder pass, break on a ball even if it takes them out of position, and win a “duel,” because beating an opponent one-on-one is just what the game is about.

I have been on teams where individual performances were graded after each game with a percentage given to you at the end of watching the game film. While this is effective at drawing attention to mistakes, it also can make a person hyperfixated on being mistake-free, rather than simply playing the game in order to win it. The reality is that elite athletes are better when they are not thinking, lost in the flow of the game and in a complete state of self-forgetfulness.

If there is a gospel tie-in — and there is — it is that too often we can view our lives this way, particularly in a world of life optimization. We can be terrified to make mistakes in our desire to be more sanctified, in our quest for the best version of ourselves, or to take the exact right steps for our future (“Should we invest in this house in this market? Should we?!”). This modality of living puts too much attention on ourselves, characters who were never meant to be the star of the show. Yet if we live in freedom, having been given life to the full (I think this is why Jesus came!) we are free to live in a state of self-forgetfulness, to be free of keeping track of how right or how wrong we are “getting it,” as if someone is going to give us a “life-optimization score” at the end of the calendar year. The gospel exists entirely for our benefit.

I’m hesitant to make this all sound like “the little engine that could” in a different kind of rah-rah speech. And yet I wonder what it might be like to live our lives like these upstart nations against historical giants — nations with countless World Cups to their names. What would it be like to not be afraid of getting it wrong but be told by a coach, “Just go out there and play. You’ve already won”? That almost sounds like a story I’ve heard before. It also makes me feel like I have a better chance at playing freely, and probably a better chance at winning, unburdened from keeping tabs on my performance in real time. It would sound like good news to me.

The post Playing to Not Lose appeared first on Mockingbird.

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But how did he get to this point where he did something so endangering to his marriage? My sense is that all people who do holy work — not just pastors, or even church employees, but people who work for non-profits and all sorts of caring professions — go through three stages of work.

Stage One: I Work for Jesus

Graduating seminary I had two goals: serve Jesus as a pastor and procure health insurance for my five-months pregnant wife. Prayers were answered through Zion’s Lutheran, a congregation both ready to hire me and embrace the challenge of helping their pastor and wife bring a child into the world. The solution to our need for a “nest” was to open the “Bird’s Attic.” Literally, the Bird family opened up their attic to us while we waited to move into the home we had managed to find. Every morning for breakfast I would eat Cheerios while listening to the morning report, aka three decades of community gossip, about each and every person in the congregation. At night, because Mr. Bird was a Yankee fan (but otherwise a marvelous guy!) I recapped the day’s adventures, and my wife shared pregnancy progress during mid-inning commercial breaks. Eventually we would then retire to our perch up above, fall asleep, and then rise again to my bowl of Cheerios and the morning report.

I hope as you read this you remember a time in your life when you truly gave your all to a cause. You let go of the guardrails. You overlooked boundaries. You just poured yourself into a calling. You felt purpose, community, and joy in your work. You gladly put in extra time fixing a website, repainting an office, or mentoring a colleague.

To be clear, this isn’t just about pastors but also any position where one feels a sense of working on team “Jesus.” This can be a youth director planning their first mission trip, a non-profit fundraiser pulling off their first donor event, or even a new school teacher decorating their class for students. We wear the company swag because we are not just drinking the Kool-Aid, we are also making it!!

This is a glorious season of life. But as Game of Thrones warns us, “Winter Is Coming.”

Stage Two: I Work for Pharaoh

The initial surge of excitement of any position eventually wears off. At some point, even in doing good and holy work, bitterness can set in. The ministry organization stops feeling like an arena to live out faith and serve a higher purpose. It becomes the employer; we become an employee, hungry for rights and painfully aware of boundaries.

It can begin to feel like one is working for Pharoah. To be clear, I do not mean to suggest one is a slave or to minimize slavery. What I want to communicate with the metaphor of Pharoah is the demand Pharoah makes of the people: make more bricks from less hay. People assume that what you did one time for one person can be done all the time for everyone when they want it. And they dare to complain when the bricks aren’t made soon enough and to their specifications. One looks around and realizes that one is working just as hard with just as much skill as folks in other sectors of the economy, but they seem to have more resources for their work, and they are compensated better for their task. (And they don’t have to work at night, they can worship without getting peppered with questions, and they can go to their kids’ weekend soccer tournaments!!) It isn’t just that the grass is greener, it is that we feel like all we have over here is hay … and the constant pressure to make bricks.

Not liking one’s job is hardly unique to the non-profit or church world. What becomes difficult though is that one has to reconcile the noble aims of the organization with the internal feelings of frustration. No one likes asking yourself questions like: “What is wrong with me that I do not want to go to work today and help poor children learn to read?” It also proves extremely difficult when one’s social world is enmeshed in the organization, because the thought of leaving the organization entails potential loss of friendships. If the organization happens to be a church, then there’s a double whammy in that one can have extreme trouble finding sabbath and renewal.

At this point, typical responses reflect biblical responses to Pharaoh:

• Resist discreetly (Hebrew midwives): This can range from explicitly stealing to simply doing as little as possible.
• Internalize the demands (slaves who protest Moses): This is where people assume that this role requires extreme sacrifice, even believing that our inability to sustain the pace grows out of our lack of faith.
• Fight and Flight (Moses): This is where people run away, perhaps even after a very frustrating outburst.

The latter is where my friend found himself when he called me. Having put a congregation on his back during COVID, he simply ran out of steam a few years later. Frustrations with the national denomination left him feeling incredibly isolated both within the congregation and the broader church. He began to cause tumult in the congregation and looked for a way to leave, finally securing another call in another denomination. He wanted out so badly he figured his wife would ultimately assent, which she (for good reasons) did not. When he called for his confession I had a couple of reactions. As a friend, I told him he was an idiot. As a confessor, I gave him holy absolution. As a fellow minister of the gospel, I empathized.

I knew the deep fatigue and bitterness my friend experienced. It turns out that giving my all to my first congregation, especially in a small town where the pastor functions as therapist, social worker and exorcist, led to burnout. At this point, one wonders what options we have beyond antagonism, silent misery, and constant job shuffling?

Stage Three: I Am Healed (But Not by Self-Care)

God can renew our passion for ministry, turning our bitterness again into a renewed sense of purpose and even joy. Years after Moses kills a man and flees, God encounters him in the burning bush. God calls Moses back into ministry, giving him holy work to do.

It is worth pointing out here that Moses has done nothing to deserve this theophany. Moses has not set about a new routine of yoga, journaling, or hobbies. Moses has not avoided doomscrolling, late-night carbs, or alcohol. Moses simply receives a profound gift: the awesome presence of God that fills us with wonder. The kind of encounter that makes us take off our shoes and reminds us that something far greater than ourselves exists in life.

The road away from burnout and bitterness is not paved with self-care. This movement is a sheer gift, when God breaks through the hardness of our hearts and stokes the fire of our internal burning bush. We again care and want to work.

One might find it strange to read an article about ministry burnout dismissing self-care. But I believe the whole self-care industry is premised on a self-defeating lie: that we are in control of our spiritual health. Behind every self-care speech lurks judgement: If you are bitter, it is because you’ve not done X, Y, or Z to take care of yourself. If you are burned out, you should have, could have, would have done X, Y, or Z; and you better get started right away to heal yourself. It also ignores the fact that following Jesus done well — well, in the words of Bonhoeffer, “Bids a man come and die.”

The burned out of scripture (e.g., Elijah, Naomi, and Jonah) follow the pattern of Moses again and again. They do their duty before God and others, but when life’s successes and failures come, they fall off the wagon in despair and bitterness. They follow no good self-care practices, yet ultimately God renews their call.

I admit that many things conceivably encompassed by self-care form the basis of biblical ethics: honoring the sabbath, trusting other members of the body, avoiding idolatry, and honoring non-work vocations. We just have to read a wee bit further in the story of Moses to see many of these enshrined in the ten commandments. Yet, neither Moses nor Jesus ever says anything remotely like “Focus on preserving and sustaining yourself.”

The reality is that we cannot preserve or sustain our love for ministry. The call and the passion for ministry come from God. It can happen strangely over a vacation, a conversation, or an experience that forces us out of our rut. A discussion about a new project launching can rekindle the fire, as can a side hustle that simply returns out joy to living. Again, all sorts of things can reignite our passion: a contract has been renegotiated, a new staff member joins the team, a new job offer opens up. Furthermore, God has always been in the resurrection business, and he delights in finding ways to stir up new creative energy in our soul.

The post The Three Stages of Pastoral Burnout appeared first on Mockingbird.

The perfect watermelon is a precious summer treasure. It hits a hot, parched mouth in a way that few other fruits do — crisp, cool, refreshing, and sweet.

A few summers ago, we had several dud watermelons, so I researched how to choose the perfect watermelon. The secret to picking a sweet watermelon boils down to three things: the shape, a yellow patch, and scratches. The rounder the watermelon the sweeter it is. A yellow patch means it sat on the ground and ripened in the sun for longer. Scratches are evidence of active pollination by bees which makes it sweeter. With this helpful information, my family has mostly avoided disappointing watermelons ever since.

I bought a watermelon last week and promptly hid it on the bottom shelf of the fridge. My kids are at the age now that they can polish off a whole watermelon in one day without breaking a sweat — that’s a little summer pun for you.

As soon as it was in the fridge, I forgot about it.

When I pulled it out a week later, I was sure it would be past its prime. But I was pleasantly surprised to find it was perfectly Pollyanna-esque.

We enjoyed several pieces, and then I stored it in the fridge for friends coming over the next day. Twelve hours later, I pulled it out and was dismayed to find it was already turning. A little softer and grainier, souring rather than sweetening.

Watermelons have an expiration date. They can be a Pollyanna dream one day, and within twelve hours they are mushy and pungent. You can miss the moment and it’s gone.

Last fall I ran into an old friend and said, “You should come over for dinner.” I was sincere at the time but have yet to follow up on it. I have since thought about it several times but mostly when the kids were sick, or we were too busy to add one more thing to the schedule.

At the time, I felt this happenstance meeting was a “God-thing” — a seemingly random meeting that was intentionally initiated by God. I have come to believe that these sorts of encounters are more on purpose than not.

When I was living with chronic illness and without energy to reach out to people, I would just happen to run into the right person at the hardest moments. God always sent someone to encourage me on the days when I received bad news or was on my way in for a dreaded procedure or just when the pain and fatigue was more than I could bear. Over time, I came to believe that the chance meetings were divine help. It has just happened too many times for me to deny it.

And yet, I still have not yet made good on the supper invitation to my friend. It is now July, no supper has been organized, and I am remiss.

But this is why I am thankful God is not like a watermelon.

There is no past its prime, expired, or point of no return with God’s leading in our lives. His offers, his per chance meetings of old friends, his invitations to respond do not go bad if you leave them too long.

As a young child, I always thought that there was one perfect moment for everything to happen, and if you missed it, God would never offer it again.

But God is not a watermelon.

Let me be clear: I am not saying that we should ignore God until it is most convenient for us. God doesn’t want to fit into your schedule but for your life to be interrupted with his goodness and mercy, to be received with joy and gratitude.

It’s easy to find yourself fearing that the divine train car has already left the station. It’s easy to despair and believe that your regrets and failures are the final word for eternity. But the witness of scripture is to a God that is “slow to anger and abounding in love.” The Bible is the story of a God who offers humanity an open-ended invitation to follow him.

The story of the Bible is of a patient God who never reneges on his promises. He is perfectly just but chooses mercy and extends it with gracious abundance. Over several hundred years, he sent prophet after prophet to the Israelites. Finally, he sent them into exile, but even their exile was not as long as the time they had spent disobeying him. In the end, he sent himself because God is gracious and kind.

God is not a watermelon. To him, there’s always more time. To him, it’s never too late. His plans are good, and he is patient. His invitation never sours or turns unlike Pollyanna’s watermelon, which will eventually rot. “Heaven and earth may pass away” Jesus said, “but my word will endure” (Mk 13:31). His is a kingdom that does not rust or decay. Even if it’s been forgotten in the bottom of the refrigerator.

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