All hail the noble rat?

Never once in my life have I seen a rat and paused to consider its superior ethical system. Not when I’ve seen them at the subway station. Not when I’ve seen pet rats behind glass in a store. And certainly not when I’ve seen one scurry across the kitchen counter. There are some people who find rats to be very sweet, gentle animals; that rats are actually quite cute and get a bad rap because we’ve wrongly blamed them for the black death that wiped out a third of Europe during the Middle Ages. But there is a reason why he’s Mickey Mouse and not Mickey Rat. I think it has to do with their size and their terrifying tail.

The rat study — and especially the media coverage surrounding it — reveals how lost we can be when it comes to thinking about the shape of our lives. Are we really looking to rats to shape our ethics?

If the old narratives of meaning and direction have come to be viewed as outdated, oppressive, or misguided, in our DIY world we are left to grasp for whatever might give our lives a measure of meaning, whether it be an Instagram influencer, a paperback of inspirational quotes, or a noble rat who frees his friend from a cage. But rats can’t tell you how to live your life any more than an ant colony can set public policy. In two years, that wellness influencer will just be a salesman for vitamin supplements. In five years, no one will remember the title of that book that seemed so life-changing at the time.

Life, we are often told, is what we make of it. The freedom of open road with no map to tell you where to go. Should one pursue success? Or making your mark on this world? What about having the best things? Or family, friends … All of these and many more options are on the table. For some, the open road is adventure, a grand journey with a pretty view. That’s what the car commercials all say nowadays. But that is a fairytale told by those making a virtue out of necessity, a tacit admission that there is no real meaning to be had other than the passing enjoyment of moments strung together like pearls on the string of memory.

Either way, we are incessantly told that we must make something of ourselves, that our lives must matter, that we must be whoever we want to be, that we must make our own way amid infinite possibilities. This freedom, however, comes with a cost. The writer Freddie DeBoer recently put it this way:

Be anything, says the motivational Instagram account! Define success for yourself, says the best-selling self-help book! Chart your own path, says your mother in a text message! That all might sound liberating, but it’s actually exhausting; when nothing is prescribed, everything is a choice, and every choice is a referendum on your worth.

On a journey of infinite possibility and infinite judgment, it is easy to feel lost, to believe there is no good option. No matter how you define what matters to you or what’s worth living for, the alternatives not pursued or the unchosen failures along the way readily metastasize into regret. Perhaps you should have been a lawyer; at least then you’d have wealth to salve the misery. Perhaps you should have not gone to law school and married that guy; though you’d be poor, at least you’d be happy.

It would be tempting to observe the postmodern malaise and posit Christianity as the best roadmap to navigate the ethical void. Indeed, many Christians take this route. Jesus’ teachings are certainly countercultural and far more incisive than whatever can be inferred from a noble rat. But the roadmap of legalism — no matter the form — is always a dead end.

However important ethics may be, when applied to the question of meaning and significance, its medicine becomes a poison. Knowing the good you should do is not the same as knowing why you are to do the good — to say nothing about the inconvenient trouble of mustering the desire for the good. You can follow the roadmap of the law to a T and find yourself burnt out and disillusioned. You can be a good parent, student, or employee while simultaneously hating it all and wondering whether it’s worth the effort.

Add despite what many Christians might think or preach, Christianity is ill-suited to answer every ethical question we might ask of it. The moral roadmap it offers is painfully imprecise and practically useless. To the legalists, real Christian freedom can look like the dizzying freedom of post modernity. It might tell you to head north, but it doesn’t stipulate turn-by-turn navigation.

Christianity doesn’t offer a roadmap but a person. When Jesus tells his disciples in the Gospel of John that he’s about to exit stage left, they are understandably troubled. Don’t worry, he assures them, he’s going to prepare a place for them with room for everyone. When you get there, everything will be great. The disciples immediately recognize a problem. The destination is determined, but they don’t know the way.

Jesus’ response is characteristically profound: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The what, why, and how of living. The roadmap, the reason you travel, and the one who animates your steps to take you far beyond the edges of the maps we cling to. Jesus understands that in the midst of lostness and despair and anxiety, what we really need is something — someone — that immovably stands alongside us in the ebbs and flows of circumstance. That the cure for lostness is not a roadmap, but belonging.

You cannot feel lost if you are held.

Jesus doesn’t give you a roadmap. He gives you his very life. He offers not judgment but mercy. If life is a journey, we do not travel alone. Though we meander on the way, the destination is guaranteed.

The post Better Than a Roadmap appeared first on Mockingbird.

In this interview and others, Sasse has stated unequivocally that his doctors say he’s not going to beat this cancer. But he’s taking on an aggressive treatment plan to gain more time with his family, most notably his fourteen-year-old son. As his Interesting Times interview began, Sasse sat so comfortably resigned to death that he could announce he “has received a calling to die,” while Douthat made a joke about Clavicular canceling so that Sasse could be the guest. If you’ve never heard that name, don’t stop reading: all will (unfortunately) be explained. Clavicular is the internet nickname of twenty-year-old influencer and streamer, Braden Eric Peters, leader of the “looksmaxxing” movement. While looksmaxxing is Gen Z’s online term for self-optimizing one’s attractiveness through both lifestyle and physical changes, there are all sorts of “maxxing” options these days: healthmaxxing, personalitymaxxing, financemaxxing, etc. Basically, throw any self-improvement plan on steroids (sometimes literally), mix it together with social media, and you have a maxxing moment waiting to happen.

Douthat’s offhanded quip about Clavicular offered a stark contrast to the man who sat across from him, ready to meet his death. It’s a comparison I haven’t been able to get out of my mind since listening. Here was Sasse, unabashedly facing a camera while his face was covered in blood he couldn’t stop from flowing. Clavicular, on the other hand, provides a different view of the world. He is a young man willing to do anything and everything — including breaking the bones in his symmetrically perfect face — to “ascend” (internet lingo for gaining a new level of success or status).

A comparison between Ben Sasse and Clavicular doesn’t take rocket science to understand, and yet it’s one worth exploring. I’m not so interested in a comparison in terms of “whose morality is better?” (that should be somewhat obvious), but instead one that reveals the difference between a theology of glory, of which we are all guilty, and a theology of the cross, which is only possible through the work God does on us.

A month or so ago, I randomly listened to an entire podcast episode with Clavicular. I don’t know, I guess I was curious about “what the kids are up to these days.” Like Ben Sasse, Clavicular was a completely confident podcast guest. Yet this time, the confidence was purely in himself. He talked at length about the right amounts of testosterone and anabolic steroids to inject, about microdosing Ozempic and crystal meth, and about the most attractive facial structure for both women and men. I’m not an expert on the manosphere (nor do I really want to be), but from the viewpoint of at least this particular interview, I can confidently say that Clavicular believes life is rigged against ordinary people who follow the rules. Modern society is so broken and so depraved, your only option (if you want to find health, wealth, and happiness) is to join in. Sure, you might personally believe in something greater than yourself or not like the way people are acting around you, but to actually hold to any conviction is a social death sentence.

Within this worldview, goodness is equated with status climbing: the more you climb, the better you are. It’s a theology of glory cranked up to the nth degree. Clavicular and others like him don’t care about pretense. They don’t care about hiding behind even a veil of altruism. For the looksmaxxer, what you see is what you get, and so you might as well make it look as good as you can.

This past fall, I was in my brother-in-law’s wedding, and I felt this insane pressure (completely self-imposed), to achieve and then maintain a certain beauty standard for the day: I cut my hair, I tinted my eyebrows (which makes you look sort of insane for well over two days), I dyed my hair (which takes hours and hours of time!), and I got my nails done. I also watched hours of YouTube tutorials on makeup, and received not one but two! spray tans, the list continues.

All of these appointments were wearing me out, not only due to the commitment they required, but because every time I checked one thing off the list, I noticed something else that needed fixing. In the middle of all of this, I realized something: beauty, when treated as something you must achieve and maintain, especially in order to bring you any sort of lasting fulfillment, starts to feel pretty ugly.

That is how worldly status works. Whether it’s status based on your physical attractiveness or some other form of self-glory, God’s own glory is elsewhere. This is how Martin Luther can say in his 1518 Heidelberg Disputation:

Even though the works of man always seem to be beautiful and good, they are nevertheless demonstrably deadly sins. The works of God, thus always seem ugly and wicked, nevertheless they are truly eternal gain.^[1]

Luther did not necessarily mean these two theses in terms of physical attractiveness, and yet in the case of Ben Sasse and Clavicular, they are. There’s a bit (ok a lot) of Clavicular in all of us. We all want to ascend to whatever form of glory we set our eyes on. Yet the truth is our reliance on ourselves ensures that the closer we get to our goal, the further away we’ll find ourselves from God.

And yet God, who is truly beautiful and good, continues to work under the guise of that which is ugly to draw us out of ourselves and toward him. As Paul says, “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18).

And so God comes down to us in the repulsion of the cross. He comes to us in the embarrassment of a Savior who died in the most humiliating way possible. Down, down, down into the grave he went for the sake of our maxxing-intent hearts and souls. Down into sin and death itself, God went for the sake of Braden Eric Peters, Ben Sasse, and for you, too. And through his resurrection, we can say with Luther, “He is not justified who does many works, but he who, without work, believes much in Christ.”^[2] And therefore we can await the resurrection of our bodies, the restoration of our physicality, where neither tumor-killing poison nor bone-smashing hammers are needed.

One of the most notable moments of the Interesting Times interview is when Douthat asks Sasse if he’s ever mad at God. He responds quickly with, “No.” Then proceeds with the following:

I wouldn’t want a sovereign God to defer to all of my prayers with a yes. I’m not omniscient. I don’t know what the weaving together of the tapestry of full redemption should look like, but I know going through the period of suffering that I’m going through is a benefit because it is a winnowing …

I now, in the midst of this disease, know much more the truth of my finitude than I ever let myself believe in the past. The hubristic nonsense — I believe in God, and I’m grateful and blessed, but I can build a storehouse that can be pretty deistically persuasive.

My storehouse can have enough resources that I can operate without a need, but that’s not true. I can’t keep the planets in orbit. I can’t even grow skin on my face.

I was listening to this final part of the interview while weeding my yard (which I guess you could say is an attempt at beautification in an entirely different sort of category). My husband and I are in the midst of trying to get our house ready to sell while simultaneously keeping three small children alive and preparing to meet our fourth, who is due in June. So let’s be honest, there was plenty for me to be doing this past Saturday afternoon other than weeding, and yet it seemed like the essential thing to do. And as I bent over, back aching, picking at tiny tufts of weeds after tiny tufts of weeds, Sasse’s words brought me to tears. What a blessing it is to have full storehouses right now. Unless, of course, I think I’m the one maintaining them. While I currently can grow skin on my face, the truth is that I can’t get close to keeping my yard free from weeds or pretend that doing so will make much difference in who buys my house and when. Just like Sasse and perhaps like you, it’s often easy to hide how truly in need we are, until all of a sudden, it’s not.

We each have our hundred-plus plates to keep spinning, our burdens and worries, our goals and our dreams. We each have our own storehouses built by our own labors and efforts and talents and achievements — storehouses we would do almost anything to protect and keep safe. But when these are our anchor, we are left to continually fluctuate from pride to despair, from idolization to nihilism: one minute, everything rests on our ability to rid the yard of dandelions, the next all we can think is, as Sasse himself said, “We’ll all be pushing up daisies someday.” And if that’s all you have, I can see how life can feel like it’s rigged against you. It can feel like your only hope is found within your ability to climb the ladder of success, to achieve more than your neighbor, and to confirm that something about yourself is attractive based on your own merits.

Ben Sasse shows us a theology of the cross, but only because he can first confess he’s a theologian of glory. Faced with his impending death, he’s had to face the deepest needs of his soul, and thanks be to God, he’s willing to share that those needs are the same for all of us.

“My soul thinks Ben should be God, and I want that to die. Cancer sucks. But I’m pretty grateful that cancer is a stake against my delusional self-idolatry,” he said at the end of his interview.

Our lack of ability isn’t God’s final word. The exposure of our idolatries isn’t where God wants to leave us. Instead, he has promised that in Christ, we are intentionally brought to the end of ourselves so that he can make us alive once again. We are made alive through his promises, made new by the work of the cross, and someday very soon, we will be raised in glory with all his saints. I can’t wait to see Ben Sasse there, and I hope and pray Clavicular joins the party, too.

^[1] Theses 3 and 4 in “Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation 28 Theses and Proofs” (1518) translated by Caleb Keith in Theology of the Cross, edited by Caleb Keith and Kelsi Klembara (1517 Publishing, 2018).

^[2] Thesis 25 in “Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation 28 Theses and Proofs” (1518) translated by Caleb Keith in Theology of the Cross, edited by Caleb Keith and Kelsi Klembara (1517 Publishing, 2018).

The post Looksmaxxing, Ben Sasse, and the Theology of the Cross appeared first on Mockingbird.

Art historian and curator Aaron Rosen is a visionary thinker who works at the intersection of art, faith, and culture. With a doctoral degree from the University of Cambridge and academic appointments at institutions such as Wesley Theological Seminary and King’s College London, Rosen’s vocation spans teaching, curating, and public scholarship. He is the author of books including Imagining Jewish Art (2009), Art and Religion in the 21st Century (2015), Brushes with Faith (2019), and most recently Spiritual Traces (2025). He also runs The Parsonage, a gallery in coastal Maine that stages exhibitions focused on spirituality, ecology, and creativity.

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In this wide-ranging conversation, we reflect on how beauty reveals itself in unlikely places: in the cracks of our cultural narratives, in sacred and secular spaces, and in moments that refuse easy categorization. Rosen shares how beauty is not simply an aesthetic add-on but a transformative conduit of grace that opens new possibilities for connection and meaning. And he asks us to attend to questions like, What would Jesus see? What might we be missing in our hurried culture? And how does beauty ask us to pause, listen, and respond?

— Meaghan Mitts, interviewer

You’ve written several books at the intersection of art, religion, and visual culture. How do you define “beauty,” especially in religious or spiritual contexts? And why do you think beauty (rightly or wrongly) is such a taboo word in the contemporary art world?

I am probably not the person to define beauty. Reading your questions, I realize that I’m probably part of the problem. I’ve avoided questions of beauty like the plague in both my writing and curation. It isn’t that I’ve not examined or exhibited works that are beautiful, but I’ve avoided framing them in this way. I think I’ve done so largely for the benefit of the artists themselves. I think beauty has come to be seen as unserious, insufficiently toothy and dangerous, in contemporary art circles. My own painterly hero, Philip Guston, once asked devilishly, “Doesn’t anyone want to paint badly?” His question is a crucial one for modern and contemporary artists, who have felt the impossibility of reviving the beautiful clarity of the artistic past. But maybe — after so many artists picked up Guston’s gauntlet too badly, without a deep sense of the past — it’s time to redirect Guston’s question: Why doesn’t anyone want to paint beautifully?

Some people are skeptical that beauty has any real moral or spiritual weight — they think it’s just aesthetics. How would you respond to someone who thinks beauty is superficial or even distracting?

There is no reason that something cannot positively shimmer or effervesce with meaning. And it’s easy to turn even the contemplation of the abyss into something trite, predictable, or maudlin. So, I think the perspective of the viewer is what renders something facile or distracting, not necessarily the object itself. Also, what if being superficial — literally on the surface — isn’t as bad as we presume? Perhaps even if beauty somehow only dwells on the surface, it nonetheless has something important to tell us through that quality. Maybe we do not have to accept prima facie the binary opposition between surface and meaning, and thus we don’t need to defend beauty in the way we think we do.

Anne Mourier, Blanketed, 2022. Courtesy of The Parsonage Gallery.

There is a tension between the ideal of beauty and the messiness or brokenness of real life. How do you think art or religious expression can deal with ugliness, suffering, or injustice while still aiming at beauty?

I don’t necessarily see an opposition here. Suffering can be exquisite. This is one of the great insights of Christianity, revealed again and again through its visual heritage. Christianity understood progressively through the centuries not to hide the symbol of torment — the crucifixion — but to instead transform it. This comes out so powerfully even in one of the most overtly grotesque Crucifixion scenes: Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. Even as Grünewald maps the myriad, seeping wounds that perforate Jesus’ flesh, there are moments of beauty, especially in the delicate rivulets of crimson that run down his side. One might even say that the paint itself, the very substance of the work, is itself beautiful as paint. It holds the tension unresolved within itself, signifying abject trauma without sacrificing its own material beauty. And of course, I’m looking at the work from my perspective as a practicing Jew. For Christian viewers, this crimson paint bears a more sanguine message — the beautiful promise of salvation — embodied by the lamb at the foot of the cross, who collects the running blood into a eucharistic chalice.

Your book What Would Jesus See? suggests a shift in perspective — what we are missing by not seeing more carefully. What do you think contemporary society is failing to see in terms of beauty? Does beauty matter?

For Jesus, I argue, seeing was a form of doing. At the center of his ministry was a call to look at others, especially the most disadvantaged, with new eyes. I wouldn’t say Jesus was interested so much in calling our attention to beauty in the world as in showing us that the act of empathetic looking — “good looking,” if you will — could be beautiful.

Jesus does give one image which palpably evokes the perils of mere aesthetics. “For you are like whitewashed tombs,” he tells the Pharisees, “which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth” (Mt 23:27). What is most ugly to Jesus is the mere simulation of spiritual beauty. While it’s commonplace to lament the ethical decay of one’s era, we do seem to be in a period that is remarkably fixated on the performance of virtue, whitewashing more than just tombs. So we need to practice not just looking for beauty — which can easily become ethically self-defeating — but with beauty.

You’ve written about what you call the “hospitality of images.” What does “hospitality” mean in this context, especially when images themselves can be contested or ambiguous? How does beauty help or hinder dialogue across faiths?

I started using this language as a way of shifting conversations about dialogue among the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We so often talk about them as “people of the book,” and I wanted to think about these faiths as people of the image, with profound commonalities — and opportunities for dialogue — rooted in visuality. To illustrate this idea, I took the biblical Abraham’s famed hospitality — his tent open to all sides — and applied it to art.

To me, art is an ideal prompt for dialogue, precisely because of those “contested or ambiguous” aspects that you mention. And, unlike reading scripture together, which can be so overdetermined by dogma and tradition, I think people can oftentimes bring more openness to the interpretation of images. They can, in a real sense, offer us and encourage hospitality.

If beauty has a spiritual function, why should we cultivate beauty in our daily lives and in our public spaces?

I wouldn’t say unilaterally that beauty has a spiritual function; that kind of ontological claim worries me. I’m inclined to the more modest belief that it can have a spiritual function. But I can say that I do personally find that during such unrelenting pain in the world at present I am even more grateful for small, beautiful things and like to share them with my young son Arthur. When it comes to public spaces, I’m more hesitant to talk about beauty. These days beauty shows up in some rather unsavory contexts. Recently, after gutting public funding for the arts and humanities, the federal government announced it would be pouring resources into the creation of a National Garden of American Heroes. It’s hard to think of something less beautiful than vainglory in a moment like this, but it will surely glint and glimmer …

In Art and Religion in the 21st Century you explore how religious themes are revealed in contemporary art. Can you share some examples of important religious themes being communicated in works of art that might not be read as superficially beautiful?

I have a chapter in that book about the sublime in contemporary art. Historically, philosophers and theologians have usually played the beautiful against the sublime, its more serious cousin. And yet this distinction seldom holds up when one looks at actual works of art. So many of the works I discuss as sublime for the ways in which they generate terror, wonder, or a sense of the uncanny also have elements that are beguiling and inviting. Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project — which I recall seeing in person in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall — is a good example, in which strange and captivating sensations can also suggest beauty. Or I think of my friend Michael Takeo Magruder’s New Jerusalem virtual reality work, in which he invites viewers to put on a headset which takes them into a gilded space defined by the staggering dimensions of the heavenly city, as enumerated in the Book of Revelation. The experience is overwhelming, almost literally stunning, in a way that leaves it hard to unpick what is sublime versus beautiful. Either way, bringing the text’s theological vision to aesthetic realization is anything but superficial.

Are there underexplored mediums, artists, or contexts that you believe are especially promising for revealing new dimensions of beauty in the coming years?

Waste. Nothingness. Silence. It’s time to make less of everything and find beauty in what already exists. Two very different artists, who happen to be friends, remind me of this often in their work: Ian Trask and Anne Mourier. Ian intercepts objects from the commercial waste stream, while Anne finds beauty in simple things, traditional crafts, and pared down rituals.

The post Seeing as a Form of Doing appeared first on Mockingbird.

“The newspaper is the second hand in the clock of history; and it is not only made of baser metal than those which point to the minute and the hour, but it seldom goes right.” – Arthur Schopenhauer

There’s a story that when Napoleon’s army was abroad at war, his mail would come only sparingly. By the time he was presented with a decision to make, most matters had often already settled themselves out in real time. Ironically, not knowing the latest updates proved to be useful to him. His ignorance allowed him to see the larger picture at hand and not get dragged into minor details. Doing nothing, it turns out, was often the best thing Napoleon ever did.

Unlike the heir of the Republic, I check the news a lot. I’m devoted to the latest updates of Who Did What, Who Said What, Who Won What, and Who Wore What. My excuse is that I’m being a responsible citizen; that it’s important to be informed; that I’ll have more balanced views (about who wore what). Staying abreast of current events, however, doesn’t seem to help my actual life. Rarely have I checked the news and thought to myself, “I’m glad I did that. I feel better now.”

There seems to be something deeper going on than wanting to be informed.

Another 19th-century Frenchie, poet Paul Valéry, once wrote, “If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. ‘Nothing in the paper today,’ we sigh.” The news, as we know it, can so easily turn the world — people’s actual lives — into a spectator sport. Paul Valéry has helped me realize that, for me, the news was no longer a way of staying informed but my drug of choice. The fact that his observation was made two hundred years ago only goes to show that our tendency to feed on current events runs far deeper than our current political climate. We have always been desperate to live outside of the ordinary. And what good does it do?

While staying updated on one’s ever-changing news feed seems like the responsible thing to do, my experience and world history both prove the opposite. Living from headline to headline often leaves me in a lingering state of panic, constantly refreshing my news feed. While knowledge can equip me to solve problems, it can only go so far, especially when the problems are too big for me to face. Ironically, I’m sometimes prone to be even more misguided in my personal life than before.

This happened on a grander scale in wartime England leading up to the German blitzkrieg [warning: animal lovers may want to skip this part]. In early September 1939, the citizens of London were so afraid that they were going to run out of supplies and not have enough food for their pets that they euthanized 26% percent of the city’s pet population. In a wave of panic, 400,000 dogs and cats were exterminated over a period of about four days in what would be later called “The Great Cat and Dog Massacre” (covered extensively in a book by Hilda Kean). None of this was done out of real necessity. The British government didn’t issue any instructions to kill any animals. It was a spontaneous act by a people who were terrified by the thought of war. Of course, almost immediately, people realized that they had made a terrible mistake.

This is often what happens when we are living fearfully in the moment, when we feel like the responsible thing to do is to take matters into our own hands, when there is a problem that we cannot control, and we think the answer is to control it.

So what can be done?

A friend of mine says his doctor prescribes a “news fast” for people who struggle with worry and anxiety. According to my friend, this doctor is someone who cares deeply about people and the world. The doctor isn’t prescribing denial as much as he is relieving his patients of the duty to carry the world’s burdens. His prescription is a bit like a sabbath, the law instituted by God that was designed to help us rest. Often times, when you stop moving you realize that the world, in fact, keeps turning. And then you realize that you are not turning the world. And then you realize that you are not God. And then you realize that’s a good thing.

In these moments, it helps me to consider the Apostle Paul’s words: “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Cor 4:18).

While the news that the world provides often leaves us in a state of panic and confusion, the Bible offers a type of news that we call good, news that can’t be manipulated or twisted, news that is objectively true. It is both current and eternal. It addresses the plight of the world; it diagnoses the problem, but it also brings a solution. As we receive it, we find that it’s not just headlines or abstract information but the ultimate Human Interest story. It is news that has to do with a loving God, a sovereign God who loves the world and keeps it spinning, a God whose primary interest is you.

The post Caught in the Current of Current Events appeared first on Mockingbird.

Laurie Santos, PhD, a psychology professor at Yale and the host of The Happiness Lab podcast, warns that there’s a danger in obsessively tracking your happiness. “Research by UC Berkeley’s Iris Mauss and her colleagues shows that the more you value happiness, the less happy you are,” says Dr. Santos. “So there’s a psychological paradox when it comes to the pursuit of happiness — the more you seek it out, the worse you feel. I do worry that happiness trackers like these can exacerbate this tendency.”

Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, who has written several books on happiness, adds that monitoring your mood nonstop will ultimately worsen it. “Constantly asking yourself, ‘Am I happy yet?’ is not good,” she says. “If you monitor your happiness too much, you’re focusing on the end goal, but research suggests that it’s better to focus on the journey. It sounds hokey, but there’s truth to it.”

Wearables also present the question of what you’re supposed to do with all the emotional data at your fingertips. Pulling up an app and seeing a chart of your tanking mental health doesn’t solve the problem for you; it just shows that you’re not doing great.

Lots to unpack here. For starters, it’s worth questioning whether the happiness that a digital mood ring reports is the real thing. One may be content while playing a video game or listening to music or sitting in the park on a sunny day, all with same the telltale biological markers, but those are just passing dopamine hits of fickle creatures. No, true happiness has far more to do with what you cannot choose or manufacture. Happiness is a gift received with gratitude from that which you cannot control.

2. Happiness, it turns out, looks like Ben Sasse. Grab some Kleenex for this next one … The former U.S. senator and college president is now a hospice patient literally wearing death on his face. This week he sat down with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat to discuss politics, the state of the humanities, and his own faith on Day 99 of a 3–4 month prognosis.

Douthat: God hasn’t answered those prayers yet. Are you angry at God ever?

Sasse: No.

Douthat: Not at all?

Sasse: No. I wouldn’t want a sovereign God to defer to all of my prayers with a yes. I’m not omniscient. I don’t know what the weaving together of the tapestry of full redemption should look like, but I know going through the period of suffering that I’m going through is a benefit because it is a winnowing.

I’m filled with dross. This suffering is not salvific, but it’s sanctifying, and I’m grateful for it.

Tim Keller, who I know you knew, who’s in my denomination — a Presbyterian pastor in New York who also died of pancreatic cancer — said: I hate pancreatic cancer. I would never wish it on anyone, but I would never want to go back to a time in my life where I didn’t know the prayer of pancreatic cancer.

Meaning I now, in the midst of this disease, know much more the truth of my finitude than I ever let myself believe in the past. The hubristic nonsense — I believe in God, and I’m grateful and blessed, but I can build a storehouse that can be pretty deistically persuasive.

My storehouse can have enough resources that I can operate without a need, but that’s not true. I can’t keep the planets in orbit. I can’t even grow skin on my face.

Douthat: For the listener or viewer who — whether for Ehrman’s reasons or others — doesn’t believe in God and finds your cosmic optimism admirable but maybe thinks that you’re deluding yourself on the brink of actual finitude, what would you say to that person?

Sasse: Let’s read the Book of Romans together. In Romans 1, where Paul’s essentially laying out a catechetical argument for the structure of Christianity against a Jewish messianic hopeful backdrop, he says there are lots of intellectual arguments you can make against God, but you have to start with a fundamental question about what do you do with this moral issue of our own conscience?

And does the individual in your hypothetical really start with the claim that things are right in your soul? Because I can’t relate to that. Things are not right in my soul.

My soul thinks Ben should be God, and I want that to die. Cancer sucks. But I’m pretty grateful that cancer is a stake against my delusional self-idolatry.

Douthat: Do you think you’re ready to die? Do you feel ready?

Sasse: I don’t feel ready. But to whom would I go? I have confidence that when Jesus says to the disciples he didn’t want to be identified as the Messiah yet, keep these crowds away, don’t tell about the water-into-wine miracle at the feast — how amazing is it that Jesus’ first miracle is a big-ass party? Let’s drink more together.

But he says: You can’t keep the children from me. And we’re told that we get to approach the Almighty, we get to approach the divine and call him Daddy, Abba, Father? That’s pretty glorious. And I know that that’s what I need.

It’s difficult to watch the video of the interview and not be moved. Sasse’s witness here is unfathomable. To be on the brink of death and yet to decide to spend your last days on earth dying in public while praising God with the “old, old story.” Sasse has also launched a podcast entitled Not Dead Yet, which has instantly jumped to the top of my queue. Perhaps he’ll spend an episode on Romans before the season ends.

3. If you’ve ever found yourself feeling resentful at being told — for the fifth time in two weeks — to go to the trendy new bakery down the street, there’s a term for that: “psychological reactance.” It turns out the more one is told they should do something, the more they recoil at the idea. For Anna Holmes, her own psychological reactance rears its head in a resistance to the perpetual hype machine of online promotion. No, she will not be watching The Pitt, no matter how many awards it wins. Or better, especially if it wins awards.

Does this make me a jerk? I don’t like to think so. Contrarian doesn’t quite describe me; my rejection of The Pitt isn’t an attempt to appear provocative or argumentative. And nonconformist doesn’t work; it suggests a person allergic to the zeitgeist, which I’m not. (After all, I covet Clare V. bags. I own a pair of Stan Smith Adidas.) I’m also not a dissenter. Dissent suggests a protest against something that a person has previous experience with, or doesn’t believe in; but my pop-culture resistance is different from having seen something and deemed it wanting or boring. I’m not necessarily worried about encountering pop culture that turns out to be bad. I just don’t care to act on it if it’s supposed to be good.

I’m not alone in this. (As a matter of fact, the impetus for this inquiry was an unscheduled conversation between me and one of my Atlantic editors, with whom I bonded over a reluctance to watch The Pitt.) Roland Imhoff, a social psychologist at the Psychological Institute of Gutenberg University, in Germany, told me that he relates as well, and suggested that what I’m expressing is less a need for uniqueness than a form of “psychological reactance” — a defensive response that occurs when someone thinks their freedom of choice is being constrained.

In the end, Holmes thinks such self-preservation is a noble reason to not watch The Pitt, but I’m not so sure. Not because I’ve seen the show and wish to add my recommendation to the tsunami of fans, but because psychological resistance is the root of so many of our problems. It’s less of an issue when it comes to the trivial aspects of life, like where to eat lunch or what music we listen to, but our rebellion against the law is as old as time.

4. On the other side of rebellion, there are two options available. You can double down and claim you reside on the higher ground — and maybe you’d be right. Oftentimes, though, our rebellion creates irreparable harm to ourselves and others. The only other alternative is repentance and forgiveness, a script that, as Max Heine reports in the Dispatch, is rarely seen today.

[Those on the right] are quick to whitewash any misstep. Even when evidence of wrongdoing emerges, apologies never follow. Blame gets shifted to Joe Biden or Democrats or alleged radical nutcases. […] On the left, the blame game has evolved with more finesse … Each victim had its perpetrator. The perps needed to repent and, ideally, make atonement, even if it failed to yield forgiveness.

For its part, the church has likewise shifted away from language of sin/repentance/grace toward a different kind of gospel:

In the following centuries [after Nietzsche], in spite of its excesses and mistakes, the church enjoyed some degree of respect as a moral arbiter. It defined sin. It offered atonement. Then the Age of Reason, with its secularism, scientific empiricism, and challenges to authority, began chipping away at its throne. That trend’s acceleration in our lifetimes created a growing tolerance for sin. The denial of traditional absolutes — moral relativism — overlaps with what theologian Carl Trueman and others have called expressive individualism, a celebration of self-exploration and redefinition. When self trumps communal mores, there’s little consensus about shame, sin, or repentance.

So it’s no surprise to see people avoid the institution behind the Thou-Shalt-Nots. Even before the church decline got so severe, critics had noted the use of shinier bait by desperate leaders aspiring to be fishers of men: In addition to the therapeutic, non-confrontational messaging … there’s no shortage of large churches offering recreational buildings, retreats, classes, stylish worship bands, and the like.

Placing the decline of moral language alongside similar shifts in the church isn’t necessarily new. But it does clarify how and why the peripheral aspects of Christianity have risen to the fore — at the expense of the “old, old story.” In this way, as much as left and right Christianities might disagree on doctrine, they both reflect the same shift. Both spend a great deal of time talking about community, self-actualization, and service. Though the kinds of each may be vastly different, they’re still two sides of the exact same coin.

5. For laughs this week, Reductress ran the one-liner, “Friend Getting a Little Too Good at Not Being a People Pleaser,” and the New Yorker had a lot to say about influencer culture in their “How to Be Deep in a Marketable Way“:

Post vague quotes about self-realization that are universal but ultimately mean nothing. For instance, “Follow your own light,” with a picture of you holding an unlit match. Mention cutting toxic people out of your life (but don’t reveal that the people in question are your friends who, at lunch, discouraged you from posting that).

Carry around thick, intimidating novels. Quote Victor Hugo and insist that the Disney version of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” really “got the ending wrong.” Everyone will be impressed that you read nearly a thousand pages about French Gothic architecture. An airline will fly you out to Paris to lead an “H.B. of N.D. Tour.” Quasi-modo; fully sponsored.

And in an apparent follow-up to a recent article about starting a band (discussed in this week’s Mockingcast episode), SNL had this:

6. I want to close with an accessible deep dive into an unfashionable but nevertheless vital idea: divine impassibility. Simply stated, God is unchanging, always and forever the same. I say “unfashionable” because it bumps up against more personal, intimate portrayals of God. God is with us, yes, but not changed in the process. God might know and experience our pain, but not in the same way we know and experience pain. To some, that sounds like Bad News, putting God one step removed from daily life. But the opposite, Richard Beck contends, is the case. A God who can change cannot be trusted:

Most of us, though, experience our love relationship with God as a parental relation, paternal and maternal. Here the experience is less a torrid love affair than one of constant nurture and care. The pathos of God’s emotions shifts toward the delight and dismay a parent feels toward a child. Here our conversation becomes less entangled in God’s “feelings,” because in this parental framework the definition of love shifts away from emotions toward commitment. What defines parental love as parental love is not the storm of its passions but the unconditionality of its acceptance and care. Which is precisely what is highlighted by the good news of God’s impassibility, the constancy of God’s love. […]

In short, the pathos of love is less about turbulent emotional swings between two unsteady lovers than about the fierceness of a relational commitment, like a parent’s love for a child or the love found in a lifelong marital union. God’s feelings and emotions are always expressions of that fierce relational commitment, the constancy of God’s love and care. Because of our unsteadiness and inconstancy, there is a drama and pathos to God’s relational commitment, and we describe that drama and pathos using the language of emotions as analogies of relation. But that relation is loving precisely because it doesn’t wobble or change.

This has been a key point I’ve been trying to make. Love shouldn’t be “emotional.” Because emotions are, by definition, variable and volatile. We know this. When we describe someone as “very emotional,” we are not describing a steady, constant person. A “very emotional” person is an unpredictable person. In a similar way, we don’t want an “emotional” God. It is not good news if God is a hot, unpredictable mess. True love, we know, loves despite emotion. So this whole debate about whether God has “feelings” or “emotions” is really a waste of time, because what is good news in this debate isn’t the emotionality of God but God’s constant posture of commitment and love. And it’s this constant posture that makes the doctrine of God’s impassibility such good news.

Indeed, it’s the kind of God who Ben Sasse can look to when everything falls apart — to know that there is a fixed point amid the ebbs and flows of time that holds it all together. If divine impassibility appears to make God less relatable, or less human, it does so precisely in the way that matters most. Though we are unreliably fickle, God is not.

Strays: 

• For the theology geeks out there (Part One), Mbird contributor Jeb Ralston’s Ph.D. thesis on Reformation readings of Romans 5 is available for free. Bravo, Dr. Ralston!
• For the theology geeks out there (Part Two), check out the recent Lenten lectures by John Barclay, the world’s leading expert on the apostle Paul’s understanding of grace.
• “Words: What Are They Good For?” asks Tara Isabella Burton.
• Alan Jacobs’ ruminations on Easter “visitors”:

To those of you who are Christmas and Easter Christians: Come without guilt, without shame, and without hesitation. We are all people who have gone astray; we are all in need of God’s mercy. Christmas and Easter tell us that we’ve got it. In Christ God has dealt definitively with our offenses, and if that’s not something to celebrate, I don’t know what is. So here’s something each of us can say to our neighbors in the church: Greetings, fellow miserable offender!

The post April 4-10 appeared first on Mockingbird.

Aisles of VHS tapes, the vinyl of the film world. And of course, that new release section, and inevitably, those movies that took ten minutes to rewind. And so I’ve gotten in the habit of putting together a list of movies for when I’m sick, often the movies I know my wife wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. For me, that means horror films.

A couple of weeks ago when the stomach virus haunted our household, I popped in the third and fourth installments of the post-apocalyptic series that began with 28 Days Later. In 28 Years Later, we meet a twelve-year-old boy and his father. It’s been 28 years since a deadly virus infected the bones and flesh of humanity. The boy and his father live in a commune located on an island off the coast of Scotland that is connected to the mainland by a narrow path of rocks.

The end of the world has driven humanity back into the ancient rituals of emerging adolescence, and so the boy and his father walk toward the mainland for the boy’s first experience off-island. The world is far more inhumane and dark than the boy imagined in his nightmares. As he and his father fend off a legion of zombies, the boy notices a tower of billowing smoke on the horizon. “What is the smoke for, Dad?”

“That’s the smoke from a raving lunatic, Dr. Kelson. You must never go there.”

Upon returning, just barely, to the island, the boy witnesses his mother’s rapidly declining health. He takes drastic measures, escapes with her to the mainland, and accompanies her to meet this madman of a doctor. When they arrive, they see an arresting sight. As far as the eye can see, there are towers of bones glued together, and at the center, a temple reaching up to the heavens made of human skulls. And there is Dr. Kelson, far more humane and gentle than the myths suggest. “What are the bones for?” asks the young boy.

The doctor responds in Latin, “Memento mori.” Remember death.

For 28 years, Dr. Kelson has been collecting the dead, erecting an ossuary of their bones. Even at the end of the world, even when humanity has reached its conclusion, Dr. Kelson dares to remember what has been lost. And with a glimmer of hope in his eyes, he dares to believe that death is not all there is.

As a theologian and preacher, I couldn’t help but gasp as I saw in terrifying and beautiful cinematic form the story of Ezekiel and a valley of very dry, very many bones. The prophet who resides in the homelessness of exile is violently ripped away by the Spirit’s hand and brought to a valley of bones where the Lord “walks him amidst all of them.” Zeek knows not what this valley is, nor does he yet know to whom these bones belong. These bones are scattered — in other words, one cannot know which bone belongs to which. It is an image of a devastated and disconnected society — a culture that has come to the end of itself. Memento mori.

And then comes the question upon which the whole Old Testament story, the whole story of humanity, hangs, “Son of Man, can these bones live?” Can all that is lost be found? Is death victorious? Does God keep promises? Do we have a future?

For the first time the Lord speaks, “Son of man [God’s name for Zeek], Speak to the bones, and I will put my breath in them, I will connect their sinews and put skin on their bones, and they shall live.”

The dry bones have ears to hear, and the Spirit’s voice through Ezekiel pierces through their death. Even so, Zeek’s first prophecy is only partially effective, for “the spirit is still not in them.” For his second speech, Zeek speaks directly to the Spirit breath of God. From the four corners of the earth gushes the violent pentecostal wind of God, vivifying the zombies that now stand in the valley of the shadow of death. It is only at this moment that God finally reveals to Zeek to whom these bones belong, “These are the whole house of Israel.”

Zeek sees before him the faces of his friends and family. All he has lost stands before him, bone of his bones, flesh of his flesh. In the moment Zeek finally realizes to whom these bones belong, that this valley is the tomb of his people, he is also given the reason they are there at all. Dem bones speak, “We are dried out completely, our hope is lost, we are cut off completely.”

Withering, hopeless, alone. The anti-trinity of modern times. Many feel as though human society has reached the end of itself. For all our striving and progress, we are utterly disjointed and disconnected. Sinew from sinew, bone from bone, we have lost touch with what makes us human. If the bones in our lives and in the world cried out, what would they say?

As W. H. Auden put it, “We would rather be ruined than changed, we would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and see our illusions die … we who are bound to die need a miracle. Nothing that is possible can save us.”

Can these bones live? God’s answer is not a fact but a person. God incarnates (enfleshes) into our valley of dry bones. The Son of Man, Jesus Christ, puts on sinew and skin, and with the spirit pulsing through him, he stands for us at the end of the world. Jesus dies not on a mountain but in a valley, a valley called “Golgotha,” the place of the skull and bones. Somehow Jesus is at once the hand that dragged Zeek to the valley and is also the prophet himself, speaking life into withering bones. Three times Zeek spoke into his people’s derelict end, three days Jesus’ bones lay fallow in the tomb. By some miracle, God doesn’t allow our ruinous ways to end us. Our ruin, his. Our death, his. Our bones, his.

As the wild prophet Dr. Kelson reminds the young boy while he places his mother’s skull upon the top of the ossuary, “Memento mori, remember death, but also, Memento amoris, remember love.”

Can these bones live? Impossibly, yes. God’s Spirit lives at our end. These bones shall live. They must. They can. They will. Remember death, but more than that, remember love.

The post God Lives at Our End appeared first on Mockingbird.

My friend and I were walking to class, our lunch conversation spilling over into the seminary courtyard. We were talking about art and faith and churches and why was it that art seemed so bad in sanctuaries and didn’t congregations have taste anymore? We were full from burgers, and full of opinions, unsoftened by experience. We were sounding off on imagined groups who, if they just lifted themselves to Our Knowledge of Theology and Art, would transcend all sorts of barriers. A professor walking in front of us stopped abruptly, whipped around and, holding his satchel to his waist, leaned into our faces and said, “Don’t ever talk like this again — you have the privilege of space and time to study these things. Most people can’t afford that!” We walked to class in stunned silence. I sat near the back row, mulling over that moment, feeling distracted and starting to wonder what else my opinions had blinded me to.

That courtyard moment has stayed with me over this past decade. It came to mind recently as I stepped into the bright afternoon light outside a Saint Paul movie theater. I had just seen Art for Everybody, a documentary about Thomas Kinkade, and new details of the artist’s life confronted me and my own critical opinions of his work. I’ve known of the “Painter of Light” since I was a teenager, carefully averting my eyes in the Christian bookstore to keep from seeing the fluorescent cottage scenes, scoffing at the mall-goers ducking into his darkly lit galleries. He held a symbolic role in my teenage years, a creative leader whose paintings evoked a blend of art and faith that frustrated me. I shadowboxed him often. When he died from an overdose in 2012, estranged from his family and living in a mansion with a girlfriend, I remember reading the news reports and feeling vindicated. “See? This is where Christian kitsch can lead! It hollows you out, falsifies what’s real. He was an artist living a lie!”

But then there was this documentary and the news that came with it. Thomas had a vault — a padlocked room hidden deep in his mansion containing hundreds of surreal paintings. Art that didn’t match his light-soaked brand. The paintings are dark, literally — lots of drab grays and deep blues — and dark in subject matter too. In one landscape, he paints an abandoned overgrown factory as a heavy black storm approaches. In a self-portrait, Thomas paints himself standing alone in a room, uplit like in a horror movie, and staring blankly back at the canvas with red paint dripping down his shirt.

Thomas Kinkade, Untitled (Self-portrait with a Paint Stained Shirt), c. 1980. Oil on canvas.

An easy interpretation of all of this could focus on the artist himself, seeing the vault as yet one more example of the corrosive nature of kitsch or ’90s evangelical culture wars — see how even the artist is damaged? Another might focus on his fans, arguing that the artist pulled the wool over their eyes, inflicting shallow nostalgia on people who shared in the delusion. To be sure, the images we make form the structure of our imaginations, giving us a vision of the world we want to live in and the choices we might make to arrive there. The Painter of Light’s sentimental world has no suffering or pain or injustice or darkness. While that imaginary world is alluring, it’s also constricting and incomplete. There was no room for the artist’s whole self, and it clearly wrecked his life. It might not wreck his viewers in such a dramatic way, but there’s something soul-numbing to landscapes like this. We’re lulled into hazy light at the expense of the real world.

But still, over the years, it’s been too easy to just blame the artist, blame the paintings, blame the ’90s Christian subculture. Blame, blame, blame. Blaming (and dismissing) the artist was easy; Director Miranda Yousef’s empathetic touch invites a kinder and wiser approach. Now I felt confronted by the film to do some self-examination, in the same way that professor confronted us in the courtyard. The more I learned, the more I felt kinship with the artist and the social pressures he faced to be a “Good Christian Leader.” My harsh opinions about kitsch softened into more complicated questions: Why does an artist hide vital parts of himself for the sake of success? What happens when we curate branded versions of ourselves? Why do we continue to see this cycle of Christian leaders wrecking their lives? How can we imagine new social landscapes?

Thomas wasn’t lying, per se. He was holding back; editing out the parts of himself that were “off-brand.” As an artist trained to make movie backdrops, Thomas found subject matter and a style that easily fit into the background of living room walls across the country, next to cabin decor and scripture inscribed on driftwood. There’s a rustic American sensibility here, and his paintings reach audiences that might not ever set foot in the rarefied air of an art gallery. But once he found success, the nostalgic cottages started to take over, crowding out more difficult and personal subject matter from his own life — like growing up with his single mother in a trailer park. How many artists or leaders also feel this way? You figure out what works, so you keep doing it. Project the good, hide the bad. But when success comes, the pressure to conform only grows stronger. Deviating, or showing vulnerability, becomes a greater and greater risk. The distance between selves grows, and it’s even harder to catch when we aren’t fully aware we’re doing it.

Thomas Kinkade, Untitled (City with Red Sky), 1979. Oil on board.

Growing up, I was a model leader. I led congregational singing during chapel at my high school and college. I started a praise band. I said yes ma’am and no ma’am, I wore khaki pants and tucked in my button-down shirts. If you leaf through my high school yearbook, you’ll see me on the “Senior Superlatives” page holding a mop and bucket. It says Most Service-Oriented. I was the “Good Christian Man.” Somewhere along the way, though, I would drift into perfectionistic feedback loops. People expected me to be good, I was good at being good, so I kept trying really hard to be good. Really, really hard. To the point that making mistakes felt like anathema. I didn’t understand what was going on — why did trying so hard to be good and virtuous and selfless feel so bad? An early depression settled into my bones.

The Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck describes the self as spokes on a spinning wheel — each spoke another strategy we use (consciously or unconsciously) to find safety and validation and keep ourselves from dealing with a core belief. I don’t know yours, but finish the sentence “I’m unlovable unless I …” and you might get close. For me? As I grew early into a young Christian leader, I made my own vault, where I kept my aggression and anguish and desire. Thomas’s strategy brought him extraordinary success. A small Nashville youth group and a national network of galleries are different in scale, but similar in their social shape. Eventually, trying really hard to be good becomes too difficult, and if we’re lucky, we get time and space to open the door and figure out how to bring our worlds back together. Thomas wasn’t so lucky.

The Painter of Light built a national brand, hired more workers, and made lots of people lots of money. There were book deals and decor deals and housing developments and TV programs … it was all so lucrative. How could you stop? At the height of his career, the scale was too big for a single artist to make paintings on an easel, so he and his team started manufacturing them. Thomas would make a new painting, and then his team used state-of-the-art technology to print limited edition “canvas transfers” where hired artisans hand-painted only a few highlights. He signed the copies using ink mingled with his own blood, a gesture toward authentic “fine art.” Buyers didn’t seem to mind, and all of it added to a cult of celebrity around the artist, even though the objects for sale were increasingly distant from his own hands. In interviews Thomas compared himself to Andy Warhol, the pop artist who famously brought rapid production into the artworld through screen prints. Yet you get the sense he was trying to justify himself — and that the distance between the artist and artwork and brand started to stretch to a breaking point. Around the same time, his drinking and gambling became more and more of a problem, threatening to tear the business down. When his growing media business expanded galleries too quickly, they coerced franchisees into buying too many canvas transfers, leading to waves of lawsuits and ruined lives.

Thomas Kinkade, Untitled (Self-portrait in Shower), c. 1978. Oil on canvas.

As one staff member tells it in Billion Dollar Painter, after his business started falling apart, Thomas would often spend time in front of one of his favorite paintings, Maxfield Parrish’s “Pied Piper,” a mural behind a hotel bar in San Francisco. The image shows a musician dancing and playing panpipes, beckoning a community down from a castle and toward a verdant field. He must have seen himself in the Pied Piper, a Christian artist solely responsible for bringing his community to a better world. It seems noble. But to see yourself in such mythic and isolated proportions damages everything — the person, the art, the community.

When I was in seminary, I was in a student group focused on building community around the arts. When I had a chance to lead the group, a friend at the time took me out to coffee and asked if I’d be interested in co-leading. I turned him down. I don’t remember the reasons I shared, but I can tell you the reason that mattered to me then, even if I couldn’t consciously name it. I wanted to be the mythic leader, guiding the group through my own ability. It was the same vision of success I’d imagined for myself in high-school: service-oriented, self-sacrificing, and independent. It seemed good, until it wasn’t.

Once, the student group put on a week-long arts festival, and I took it very seriously. I met with donors, found partnerships with local arts organizations, and worked with the group to plan events. But somewhere along the way, self-celebration took over. I remember a video crew interviewing me outside, the camera spotlight on me while inside the students kept planning logistics alone. Finally it all fell apart: the pressure of graduate work, planning a festival, and the pressure I put on myself to be a good Christian leader all became too much. I had a mental breakdown. I quit my job, shaved my head, stopped eating and barely slept, and started driving around Los Angeles telling people about a “New Renaissance in American Culture” until, thankfully, I crashed on my couch and slept almost a whole weekend straight.

Somewhere along the way, I had lost touch with myself, with others, and with life itself. It was confusing and painful. Life-altering, to say the least. I survived it thanks to the community around me, which meant I’ve now had the gift of time to reckon with this, and to try to understand what led to so much pain. Sometimes I tell people, “I’ve had the gift of failing early,” and I mean it. As family and friends and a therapist helped bring my feet back onto the ground, I started walking in a different direction. I started to reckon with my own mental health. And I realized that if I didn’t untangle my self-conception, the social pressures I felt, and my own delusions about leadership, the result could be lethal.

I wish Thomas had found that kind of time and space to open the doors and windows and let some air into his creative life. In the documentary, it’s heartbreaking to watch his life implode. His business is falling apart, his family is estranged, and there he is wearing skull rings and dying his hair and riding motorcycles and trying to stay a few drinks ahead of the pain.

Thomas Kinkade rarely painted interior scenes. Instead we’re outside cottage after cottage, looking in at a golden haze of light. Almost all the doors are shut. The homes all blur together, evoking domestic scenes at a distance. Garden paintings swarm with pastel flowers. And while there’s often a path leading to the horizon, there’s rarely a single person in sight. At the time, all this seemed like expressions of faith and “family values.” But knowing more of Thomas’ own struggles and about the vault he kept, I have to wonder what was actually going on in these paintings: How lonely must he have felt?

“To be living is to be handed a precious white canvas upon which each of us can create a painting of great depth and meaning,” Kinkade writes in his book Simpler Times. “A painting that can be full of joy and peace. The beautiful painting of our lives. And if your perspective is true, the whole canvas will be beautiful.” His art brought him great fame and wealth and influence — things he kept pursuing until they hollowed him out, wrecking lives along the way. And while we may not be painting imaginary landscapes, we still live in that same world with the same incentives, one that celebrates self-editing and constant curation, scaling personal brands at all costs — pressures that are even more constant today. But it’s not the whole picture, not then or now.

Now that I’m nearing middle age, I look around at my friends and family, and I do see joy and peace — and a lot more, too: lush apartment gardens and homes caught in wildfires, affairs and second weddings, dissertations defended and unemployment, bright new infants and stillbirths, thick photo albums and letters from jail, picnic reunions and lost friendships, ordinations and porch talks on the death of God, published stories and stories yet to be written, days of grief and days of wonder. One whole canvas, light and dark, larger than any gilded frame can hold.

The post Lessons From the Hidden Vault of Thomas Kinkade appeared first on Mockingbird.

Lo and behold, the remarkable piece by Terry Godier titled “The Last Quiet Thing.” That “last quiet thing” would be Godier’s Casio wristwatch. He begins his essay with a picture of said humble wristwatch and these words:

This watch cost twelve dollars. It weighs twenty-one grams. It has an alarm that sounds like a microwave in another room. It has told time the same way since 1989. It doesn’t know my heart rate. It has no opinions about whether I’ve stood up enough today. It will never need a firmware update. When the battery dies in seven years, I’ll press in a new one with a paperclip. That will be the entirety of my obligation to it.

His simple wristwatch (like my simple 2010 Honda Fit) predates the present age in which such devices are, depending upon your point of view, much more capable and helpful, or much more demanding and exhausting.

“Sometime in the last twenty years,” continues Godier, “our possessions came alive. Not all at once. Not dramatically. One by one, the objects in our lives opened their eyes, found our faces, and began to need us.”

Your thermostat has opinions now. Your television requires a login. Your car updates itself overnight, and sometimes when you start it in the morning, the interface has rearranged itself, as if someone broke in and reorganized your dashboard while you slept. Your earbuds won’t play music until they’ve updated their firmware. Your refrigerator wants to be on your Wi-Fi.

None of this is broken. This is the product functioning as designed.

For most of human history, you bought a thing, and it was yours, and it was finished. Nothing you own is finished. Everything exists in a state of permanent incompletion, permanently needing. Your phone needs updates, needs charging, needs storage cleared, needs passwords rotated.

Your apps need permissions reviewed, terms accepted, preferences re-configured after every update.

Your subscriptions need evaluating, need renewing, need canceling, need justifying to yourself every month when the charge appears. The purchase isn’t the end of anything. It’s the first day of a relationship you didn’t agree to, with no clean way out.

You can see, I imagine, where this is going. You may love all this stuff (or not). It does make some things possible from which I, for one, derive benefit and enjoyment. And yet … it is relentless, “a to-do list that writes itself.” We have no real alternative, save becoming an off-the-grid hermit. It is also a form of bondage. If you read all of Godier’s piece, he comes to the point where you expect him to tell you some way to manage, to simplify your life and make it all better. He doesn’t do that. Instead, he says that if you are frazzled, confused, overwhelmed, and exhausted by it all, know at least this, “It’s not your fault.”

On reading this, my mind went to the New Testament’s letter to the Hebrews. Well, some of us are weird that way.

One of the principal themes of the letter to the Hebrews is that Christ’s work of salvation on our behalf is not something that ever needs, nor requires, a redo, refreshment, or updates. This, for the author of Hebrews, is in contrast to priestly rites of the old order, which demand constant effort, attention and performance.

Every priest stands day after day at his service, offering again and again the same sacrifices that can never take away sin. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God … For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. (Heb 10:11–12).

Get it? The work of forgiveness and freedom has been done once and for all. Those last three words hold a double meaning. Christ’s work has been done — period, full stop. It need not be repeated. It is finished. Complete. “He sat down.” And second, it is for all people that this grace is accomplished and offered in Christ’s death and resurrection.

The work of tech now is never done, never finished, never complete, always requiring — demanding — more of us, from us. It’s never enough! Which takes us again to a basic contrast between law and grace.

In that sense, tech functions in a way similar to what theologians and scripture term “Law.” The Law (Ten Commandments and all the rest) are good stuff. However, they can never accomplish what they command. Law can’t save us. Only grace does that. Only the finished work of Christ can offer us true rest. Law isn’t just found in religion. There are lots of secular forms of law, as in “You must have the perfect family,” “You must have the perfect body,” “You (or your kids) must get into the right college.” The grammar of law is “if/then.” If you do this, you will get that. But it’s all on you. The grammar of the gospel is different. It is the language of promise, as in, “I am with you always.” “I love you.” “I died for you.”

Grace and promise lead to “rest in the Lord.” I used to know an older, African-American man who was often to be found on a bench in a nearby park. I’d say, “Hey, what’s up?” He’d answer, “Just resting in the Lord, in what Jesus done for me.”

Our technology has become Law-like. It requires of us always more, constant attention, and “updating.” I put quotes around “update,” because I think it is a term deliberately chosen to suggest improving, getting better, climbing higher. We are keeping up to date! God help us if we don’t keep up!

This is the false promise of the Law (do this, do enough of this and you’ll be saved/loved/okay/at peace). Now the law comes at us again in the disguise of modern technology. Get this device, this app, this hack and climb the ladder to perfection, peace, abundant life. It’s a false promise because we never arrive, only needing to go faster, harder. We become like the old order priests of Hebrews performing the same sacrificial rites day after day, even though it never really works, never frees people from the grip of sin and death.

Perhaps the most needed thing for us striving, updating, never-enough, 21st-century humans is the rest that comes from knowing that Christ has done for us, once and for all, that we cannot do for ourselves. I go to church not to check off my week’s to-do list of the things I must do to get on God’s (or other people’s) good side. I go to church to hear the good news of God’s work which has been done on my/our behalf, once and for all.

We need, imho, just this: rest, resting in the Lord, resting in the work Christ has done on our behalf. “Just resting in the Lord, resting in what Jesus done for me.”

The way tech has and is developing, probably with good intentions (and profit motive), Christ’s promised rest is needed more than ever. Godier’s Casio watch is not the last quiet thing. There is another quiet thing: our souls and hearts quieted by the promise of the gospel and by dwelling, being still, in the presence of the God who is God.

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If you’re unfamiliar with the multiverse concept or parallel universes, it means you have not yet entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe! In truth, a tiny bit of digging shows that this popular treatment is only one thread of a deeper philosophical argument about matter, time, and existence. It goes all the way back to Greek antiquity but really finds its voice in the 20th century. There are several versions of multiverse theories and at least a few reasons it is valued for its explanatory power. There are also many voices in opposition based on scientific and philosophical grounds. I’d be out of my depth entering that debate, but I was struck by George Ellis’s wisdom:

As skeptical as I am, I think the contemplation of the multiverse is an excellent opportunity to reflect on the nature of science and on the ultimate nature of existence: why we are here … In looking at this concept, we need an open mind, though not too open. It is a delicate path to tread. Parallel universes may or may not exist; the case is unproved. We are going to have to live with that uncertainty. Nothing is wrong with scientifically based philosophical speculation, which is what multiverse proposals are. But we should name it for what it is. (emphasis mine)

The term “philosophical speculation” probably rubs proponents the wrong way, but I find it very helpful in understanding why this mostly esoteric debate has entered popular discourse. If people think about meaning and purpose on a regular basis, the multiverse offers a compelling way to approach the issues. The multiverse overflows with possibility, with our own choices the hinge points that spawn new, unseen worlds.

I believe this accounts for the explosion of interest in Marvel and Spider-Man multiverses, as it invites us to see the power of our choices played out in different timelines or existence. We tend to believe by default that our choices are determining factors in life, but this trope lets you follow the thread in all kinds of creative and parallel ways. This happened in film in the ’90s with Sliding Doors. I remember many friends in high school being enamored with it. To get on the train or to miss it creates two timelines and a very different story arc of love.

The multiverse invites me to reflect on my life choices, a counterfactual timeline created by a small change. If I had married this person, or if I moved there instead of stayed, if I had gone to a different college, bought a different car, or woke up earlier yesterday, my life would be different. What if, what if, what if … But far from feeling empowered or given meaning, these trains of thought fill me with confusion and anxiety. The vast multiverse feels empty. If our world is just one of infinite worlds, the chain of events that made it does not feel sacred but arbitrary.

But perhaps I’m just being too neurotic and focused on me. Let’s do a thought experiment and give Jesus the Spider-Verse treatment. I don’t plan to go full Scorsese and ruminate on Jesus choosing a normal life due to temptation. Let’s do something simpler, like his entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. And in this case, the crowds that welcome him will be our “sliding doors.” What if the crowds that came out that day had been hostile to Jesus? In the multiverse framework, this could have led Jesus to a parallel world of being driven out of Jerusalem right away and not being arrested, tried, and crucified. Would that mean a different salvation outcome, or does he still find his way to the cross? Is there an alternate universe where Jesus is not the savior? Or what if no one had come out at all? If no one is there to oppose or praise, is this akin to a tree falling in the forest? Does Jesus have to create a conflict? And again the question, are there universes out there where Jesus is not Savior and Lord?

I feel absurd proposing all these threads, but I believe this is the philosophical speculation that arises with certain forms of the multiverse. At first it sounds like an expansion of stories, options, and outcomes, but at least to me, it feels a bit paltry and surface level. What I mean is that the possibility that Jesus could be anything begins to make him nothing. So too for myself, if I can seek meaning for my life in infinite outcomes, how different is this from a vague nihilism? If you stare at the multiverse long enough, if begins to look like a fathomless void.

Ok, ok, let’s come back down to earth a bit and do something empirical. Let’s take Jesus in the Gospels and briefly observe what he says about himself and what he does. First there are his explicit statements about going to the cross. These are found in Matthew (16, 17, 20, 26), Mark (8, 9, 10), and Luke (9, 18) and occur at least three times in each. There are those conversations in John about being lifted up like the serpent on the pole in Numbers 21:8 and the seed that falls to the ground and dies (John 12:23–24). He seems to know exactly what his future holds.

We can also observe some of the things Jesus does. In Luke 4 he is tempted by Satan, essentially offered an alternate route to being Lord, and he refuses (Lk 4:1–13). Later in the chapter he is literally threatened with death by a crowd, the thing we would expect him to have come for, but he walks through (Lk 4:28–30). It becomes very clear that Jesus has a particular mission and specific path. The meaning of his life seems obvious to him. He has been called upon to enter the world, die for our sins, and be raised to justify us (1 Cor 15:1–4).

In other words, Jesus has no interest in the multiverse. His purpose is singular, clear, and full. And that calling is good news for us, not only as recipients of his grace but as individuals receiving calls that are also singular, clear, and full. You can find this throughout Paul’s writing, but particularly in Ephesians where we hear a full-throated call from God in Jesus. In Ephesians 1:3–14, Paul emphasizes this singular call for the Ephesians, that it is clearly given in Jesus and that it leads to a full and free life. The phrases that rise in my mind are “He chose us in him before the creation of the world” and “You also were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation.” You and I are meant to hear these words for ourselves.

In the multiverse or even “what if” approach to life, we find uncertainty, regret, and most ironically, navel-gazing. In the universe of Jesus we find assurance, wholeness, and momentum to reach out. All the alternate possibilities promise fullness, while the singular track of God actually gives it. You have a particular mission and a specific path.

I recently saw the strangest of examples of this via a high school in Sisters, Oregon. The small town has a particular woodworking program for building guitars. The students have one task. They learn to design and build their own acoustic guitar. As the instructor states early on, the goal is not about the guitar per se but that they will learn to fail and try again. Students readily identify the constraints of their task. They have limited time, must take risks, and special attention to detail is crucial. As I watched the video, I was struck by the well-placed pride of the students. Is their guitar the best? That’s not even a question that is raised. They made it. It reflects their home, relationships, and themselves. Not once did I hear about a “what if” regarding their creations. You could see the joy and purpose for each of these students.

The students weren’t the only ones who found joy and purpose in this class. The teacher, Jason Chinchen, communicates his own sense of calling. As he describes not only the shaping of the guitars but also the deeper shaping of young people, he begins to tear up. He says, “I love what I do, a lot. I feel really lucky.” He too seems to have no interest in the multiverse or “what if” kinds of questions. His purpose and yours is singular, clear, and full. The multiverse pushes you to ask of your life “What if …,” but life’s meaning is to be found in what we have already been given.

The post The Emptiness of the Multiverse appeared first on Mockingbird.

We spend a lot of time watching our children play: with friends, on sports teams, in theater productions, etc. But when it comes to playing with our children, many of us feel intimidated by the idea. We may feel like we don’t have time or don’t even know how to begin.

But sometimes, God breaks through our barriers of taking ourselves so seriously and shines a glimmer of hope.

This past week was spring break for my kids. When a friend was coming over to hang out with my twelve-year-old, my eight-year-old was feeling sad that she didn’t have a friend coming over too. After a few attempts to schedule something, I finally said, “Well, I’ll play with you …” She looked at me incredulously and said, “No offense, Mom, but I don’t want to play with you. I want to play with a friend!” I understood her desire to play with someone her own age.

The next day she got her wish. All three of my kids had friends over. Our house was bustling, and everyone was having fun. When all the guests left, I started to make a late lunch. My eight-year-old had started playing “picnic” with her friend before she had to leave, so there were blankets in the middle of the living room. She asked if we could eat lunch on the picnic blankets, and I agreed.

I brought our sandwiches over while the kids took care of the snacks (their specialty), which included cheese puffs (I know, so nutritious!) and Pringles. We ate our picnic lunch, and when we were done, one of the girls started throwing the Pringles lid like a frisbee to the other. Then they started to include me in the game of catch. We counted how many times we could throw it without it hitting the floor. Then we came up with the idea that whatever way we catch it we have to throw it. So if I happened to catch it between my pinky finger and my knee, I had to throw it in that same pose. It got pretty ridiculous.

Soon we got tired of that, and we all just sat on the floor laughing and talking together. My daughter had her feet up on my lap and we were just sitting there relaxing. It was one of those rare moments where we weren’t accomplishing anything, we weren’t feeling pressured by time, and we were unbelievably … content.

These moments are few and far between, it seems, but it made me realize that play really does break down walls and lead to connection. Play is kind of like rest in that it requires trust … trust that the world won’t fall apart if I’m not accomplishing something… and trust that I am safe to be silly. Play comes out of trust, but it also creates and deepens trust between one another and opens up conversation.

As parents, we want to have that kind of connection with our kids, and we also want them to have that kind of connection with God. We want to share our faith and bring them up in a trusting environment, but it’s not always easy to know where to start. The new book from StoryMakers called Play Together! A Family Devotional acknowledges this challenge for parents:

Real talk: When it comes to sharing our faith with our kids or teens, our desire to pass it along is high. But let’s be honest … we may feel the weight is too much to bear, which often blocks us from getting started. It can sometimes feel tricky or awkward to know where to begin.

Whether we play together spontaneously, like our Pringles frisbee game, or you plan a time to play — this could be a game or outing or doing something creative or using these family devotions — play is always unexpected. I used to think if we planned something, it took away the fun and spontaneity. But the truth is, we are all unique people with unique things happening in our lives, and we can never predict what will happen. Like grace, play always comes as a surprise.

Playing opens up connections, and praying reminds us who we are connected to first and foremost. By participating in these two things as a family, we open up those connections with one another and with our creator.

The devotional, PLAY! StoryMakers for Grown-Ups, puts it this way:

Some days life can feel beyond our reach… especially when we are trying to stay connected with our kids. We can feel lost in the cosmos … floating through time and space. This is when it helps to play and pray … Playing can open our eyes and ground us in reality. Praying can tether us back to where we belong.

The family devotions have activities to do as a family, questions to think about, fun facts, Bible verses, and they all end with a written prayer as well as space to add your own family prayers. There are also Family Spark Cards: Play Edition, which gives families an abbreviated version of these same elements. We opened these up after dinner the other night, and although my fifteen-year-old son groaned at first, by the end we were all throwing paper airplanes around the house, on which we wrote our worries and let them fly away to God.

I have to admit that most of the time starting to play with my family feels like a chore. Everyone wants to get back to their own thing, and honestly, life is so heavy that we usually don’t feel like being lighthearted and silly. We want solutions, not recreation. But once we begin to play and pray, walls come down, true connection begins, and grace for our children and grace for ourselves starts pouring in from the most Creative One, who starts it all and redeems it all.

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