You find the thing you want, you click on it; a day or two later, the thing you wanted arrives. It’s true you don’t have any discomfiting encounters with misanthropes or wackos, but you also don’t come home with any stories. […]

The trip to the model shop, including the weird quirks of the owner, used to be as much a part of making a model as sanding or painting it. But for a lot of increasingly timid, introverted consumers, not having to interact with any human beings when they need something is the whole point of the internet. Which is why Jeff Bezos got to rent Venice for his wedding, and one reason people now seem so grotesquely maladjusted to interacting with each other, or living in a society. […]

Look: I am as ambivalent as you about Other People. Other People are problematic, impossible. I don’t want to get too sentimentally nostalgic about the lost joys of real-life encounters with crazy, abrasive human beings. I did not enjoy being treated like a contemptible dilettante or a simpleton when all I wanted was to buy some glue. […]

But we need the brush and abrasion of Other People, including — maybe even especially — annoying and difficult ones. Because look at the world we’ve constructed to avoid it. If it’s a choice between awkward conversations with eccentrics and cranks or this infinite blank impenetrable wall of corporate contempt we all now face daily — the constant, soul-eroding hassle of creating an account with a unique username and novel password including capital and lowercase letters plus at least one numeral and symbol for every single transaction or errand, scanning a QR code, downloading the app […] accidentally clicking on a popup and scrambling to close the blaring garish page it opens, being asked to take a moment to fill out a brief survey to rate your experience! and Let Them Know How They’re Doing, briefly explain your reason for cancelling, and having to delete one last “We’re Sorry to See You Go!” email — I know which world I choose.

Shopping used to be one of the few things that forced us to engage with others, in ways that abrade us but also give to us. Give what? It’s intangible, but maybe just a sense for a reality beyond ourselves. I’m reminded of a quote from Thomas de Zengotita’s brilliantly prophetic Mediated, that “the opposite of real isn’t phony or illusional or fictional — it’s optional.” I think part of what he’s getting at is that anything optional is, once chosen, something that you constructed, something you are responsible for, whose existence depends on your own. What feels real is the thing that exists outside of you — that bracing feeling you get on a mountain or at McSorley’s that the world exists utterly apart from you and will go on existing apart from anything you do. It’s those sorts of encounters, given rather than constructed, arising naturally from a human soul rather than private equity market modeling and focus groups, that seem to get lost in today’s world. Maybe our 2027 NYC Conference will finally be my year for a platza.

2. On Tuesday, journalist Calum Marsh published a history of CrossFit, which seems like a gold mine for tracing the seculosity of fitness in our culture, at least if this week’s profile in UnHerd is anything to go by. Apparently CrossFit pioneered the model, common today, of pricey subscriptions to a high-intensity exercise program that function not just for health but as an arena in which one can pursue personal excellence. At the time, the metrics were revolutionary, and the idea that an adult would pay to be yelled at seemed fantastical. The eccentric visionary who started it described the “spectacular” discovery underlying his idea: “Men will die for points.”

This mindset of competitive, measured eliteness, intentionally fostered, fell into exactly the sorts of oddities one associates with cults and excessive machismo. At the 2024 Summer Games, an athlete many had expected to win died. The review notes that the

suggestion that the event should be canceled to respect Dukic’s memory, some CrossFitters questioned what the “big deal” was; “people die every day”. Here was the central contradiction: a movement devoted to perfecting the body had become disturbingly casual about its destruction.

To their way of thinking, the body was merely a vector for the ego’s pursuit of excellence, to such an extent they could voice near indifference about its consumption. The review continues to discuss CrossFit’s seeming successor, Hyrox:

Hyrox elevates suffering and abasement as noble and purifying rites. […] Extreme fitness offers benediction in the secular age. Shared ordeals bind. Injury, collapse and even death are offerings. The official purpose of fitness culture is about health and well-being; when gymgoing becomes a jihad it shifts to something else — sacralized suffering, control of the self and, at the very top, others. Like most religions, extreme fitness touts its doctrine as unfalsifiable: a rockin’ bod is proof of concept, while physical or psychological damage is proof you didn’t believe hard enough. For some searchers in the post-modern world, salvation is always just one more rep away. Glassman’s vision may by now seem an ancient cult thoroughly displaced by more glamorous upstarts, but all of today’s die-hard gym bros have CrossFit to thank for the spread of extreme faith in fitness.

3. For the second consecutive week, the New York Times delivers on grace. This week, Methodist pastor Lydia Sohn reflects on the loss of religious language, especially a five-letter word that starts with g:

What has replaced religious language for moral guidance? Professors Grenoble and Whaley observed that smaller languages tend to become displaced by those with greater political, economic and social power. The language of law and public justice — accountability, rights, reparation — has become the dominant framework through which many of us structure our relationships.

There seems something endemic to Christianity that, unlike most other ideologies, bends against asserting or defending a dominant position, even if only occasionally and inconsistently. It’s nothing new: Since the days of John the Baptist, the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force (Mt 11:12). In our society, the power seems to lie largely in an economic sphere supercharged by the Industrial Revolution, technological innovation, and free markets. These patterns show up in our language, first in the public sphere, then increasingly in the private one (or whatever is left of it):

The language of investment and return, cost and benefit, what one gives and what one is owed threatens to overtake private domains like our marriages, friendships and the schoolyard. It is little wonder, then, that “grace” has fallen out of our everyday vocabulary.

Grace, by definition, interrupts the logic of exchange. It is a gift freely given rather than earned or traded. While there is nothing inherently wrong with the language of the law and the marketplace, it is insufficient to the task of capturing how we seek to treat and be treated by others. […]

This is the reversal I’m interested in: not the language of law traveling inward until our marriages and friendships resemble courtrooms, but the cultivation of a spiritual vocabulary within our intimate moral lives and faith communities rippling out into the public sphere.

Her phrasing is helpful. We aspire to experience love and be loved, to relate to others, in a way that the dominant language today simply can’t begin to account for. In particular, we long for love independent of our performance, value-add, or expected return, but those paradigms of conditional value have become deeply seated in how we think of ourselves and the world.

That said, to view the problem as the intrusion of “the world” into our otherwise pristine selves would be to miss the enemy within. If I treat my relationships like a courtroom, it’s probably because the litigation provides a framework for me to express my inherent desire to justify myself, divert blame from me to thee, and so on. So it’s not so much that the disruptive language of grace comes from cultivation of the private sphere (see too Mt. 15:11), but rather an in-breaking from outside the world and, critically, from outside ourselves.

I do think Christianity provides resources for alternative linguistic frameworks. Paul did a lot of that, constantly contrasting the language of the culture of his day — honor, competition, the valorization of pride and ambition, rigid hierarchies — with that of Christianity, often inverting or parodying it (e.g., Rom 12:10, 2 Cor 11). One of my favorite Mbird talks, from the NYC 2024 Conference, did just that for the present day: grace is inefficient; love is slow; and you don’t need to accomplish anything with whatever time you have. It gestures toward a whole ‘nother outlook on life, and one that is immensely liberating.

4. Speaking of fightings without and fears within, over at the Hedgehog Review, Anna Ballan brilliantly probes the limits and weaknesses of modern pop psychology culture by contrasting it with the estranged dead father of psychotherapy himself, Herr Doktor Freud:

The psychological culture popularized on screens often assumes several things: that you actually want to get better; that insight leads frictionlessly to change; that naming an issue defuses it; that the self is a project to be perfected. Freud assumes that a part of you — perhaps the most salient part — does not want to get better; that apparent insight can deepen the problem and naming an issue can intensify its grip; that the self is a kind of battlefield. If the therapy of today’s screen culture holds a mirror up to a curated self-image, actual therapy, Freud would insist, is more like a light held up over a swamp.

She sees Freud eclipsed in the ’90s by more chemical/pharmaceutical models, as partly the result of a preference for seemingly quicker, more immediate, or more predictable fixes. There’s also the dynamic of popular reception appropriating Freud’s language for get-well-quick schemes underwritten by high anthropology, a dynamic depressingly familiar to those interested in psychology (or theology). Articulating one’s inner landscape may illuminate, but it can also darken:

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the assumption that self-articulation liberates is only half true. The more articulate we are, the more elaborate and agile our evasions may become. Pathological symptoms are not random errors, after all: they are solutions the psyche has devised, protective compromises that maintain a precarious psychic equilibrium — a panic symptom that holds in abeyance a deeper grief, a chronic independence that protects against the anxiety of dependency, a rigid scruple that helps fend off an inconvenient desire. To unravel these is to tamper with a system that may, however painfully, be functioning. And naming a feeling — far from resolving it — can make it more dangerous, like a virus mutating under pressure. Freud noticed that his patients did something interesting. They claimed that they wanted to change, but they evolved intricate psychological ecosystems to ensure precisely that they didn’t, and they enlisted Freud as an accomplice in their stasis. 

Again, hard not to notice the resonances with other forms of modern self-help. Is veganglopescatarianism the route to true healing, or something that reinforces a more fundamental underlying issue? What about your nephew’s rediscovery of biblical masculinity? Easy to point fingers, but I suspect we all have coping or deflecting mechanisms that are potentially embarrassing, and most of us probably subscribe to an implicit grammar of self-improvement that hinders at least as much as it helps. It’s fitting that the author lands in a place of compassion:

Freud dismissed the idea that making the unconscious conscious could be accomplished by simply reciting traumatic childhood episodes or diagnostic labels at a patient: “Such measures,” he wrote in a 1910 essay, “have as much influence on the symptoms of nervous illness as a distribution of menu-cards in a time of famine has upon hunger.” […]

Grasping at the diagnostic category du jour may be misguided, but the desperation driving it is authentic. You can no more reproach someone for it than you can blame a starving person for eyeing a menu; they are both looking for sustenance, however illusory it may prove.

In other words, we’re all needing human beings, and the techniques we overestimate are also signs of places where we need help and might, somehow, find it. And rejecting the modern pop psychology idea of cheap, self-induced abreaction does not automatically entail resignation or despair:

Freud’s famous episode in Beyond the Pleasure Principle lays this bare: the child’s “fort…da!” game — throwing a toy away (“gone!”) and retrieving it (“there!”) — stages his mother’s absence and return in ritual form. Imagination does not restore what is missing, in the Freudian picture, but it is capable of formalizing missing-ness — of creatively accommodating a painful absence and making it generative.

So naming places of pain doesn’t automatically heal them, but it can help find ways to live in an “uneasy détente” with the wound (to quote Tim Kreider’s  description of the contentious relationship between two owners of a business on 10th St.). And those places can be, and often are, the “cracks … where the light gets in,” to quote Cohen, or the “holes in the roof,” in Paul Zahl’s image from a talk earlier this year. That seems a more realistic and genuinely hopeful vision of psychotherapy and business disputes than one typically finds.

5. In humor, with election season coming up (I can’t think what I did in college that’s put me on the text list for “Georgia Catholics”), “Kids Table Having Far More Calm and Mature Discussion than Adults Table” may be prophetic for the holidays. The Onion’s “Years Of Learning To Love Self Undone By Single Glimpse Of Body In Self-Checkout Camera” hits too, the fragility of the ego being a recent theme of ours from the (IMO odorless) Sam Bush. And for Halloween, an imagined dialogue with a ghost of a creepy hotel seems preferable to that long-delayed rewatch of The Shining.

6. Apparently the American Academy of Pediatrics’ sugar guidelines are fairly generous these days, per the Atlantic. There’s a nice grace angle for parents of young’uns on Saturday. Apparently, too, a 1985 controlled trial found that sugar doesn’t cause bad behavior, a realization that careful readers of Matthew 15:11 may have stumbled upon already. But why, then, do sugared-up kids act out? Are our eyes deceiving us? Two factors play a role: first, that “sugary foods tend to be served during celebrations that are otherwise chaotic and overstimulating.” No easy physiological mechanism to take the fall.

But there’s another factor too:

Parents may also expect kids to become hyper when they have sweets: In one study, mothers who were told that their kids had consumed a large dose of sugar rated their children as significantly more hyperactive than mothers who were told that their kids had received an artificially sweetened placebo — even though all of the kids had actually ingested the placebo. (This expectancy effect was stronger, the study authors said, for “cognitively rigid mothers.”) When kids eat sugar, parents may be more likely to interpret their behavior as wild, and attribute it to the sugar. So the myth lives on.

I also think parents persist in believing that sugar makes kids rambunctious for the same reason they believe in so many other dubious child-rearing fallacies. Parents long for an explanation for their kids’ inexplicable behavior and for a sense of control over it. If sugar really explained why kids became manic and naughty, parents could create peace by banning Skittles and soda. But sugar isn’t to blame, which leaves us to accept our kids for the frenzied, irrational beings that they are.

The author’s expectations mechanism — that they affect how one expects or interprets behavior — makes sense, but we might go father: expecting a kid to be hyperactive or otherwise ill-behaved might actually make them that way. But then hyperactivity, impulsiveness, and — heaven help us — cognitive rigidity are, to an extent, built-in realities. Here’s to a sugary Reformation Day.

Strays:

• Start getting excited! The Friendship Issue of the magazine is headed to the printers and pre-orders will be opening up very soon.
• Re: Reformation Day (tomorrow), here’s Amy Mantravadi’s latest, “The Alternative Enchantment of the Reformation.”
• A new study out of South Korea shows paper straws may be worse for the environment than plastic ones, according to the Korea Herald. All our righteousness are as plastic straws.
• Aeon ran a lengthy but thoughtful piece on grief and what is lost when we minimize or deny it:

Grief named and disclosed is grief that can be met, grief that can be placed between you and another person, where the two of you can look at it and hold it together. That shared vulnerability lets one person recognise another in their common humanity. Grief, as Weller reminds us, was never meant to be carried alone; it was meant to be held and processed by a whole village. Strip it of its name and you strip people of the possibility of being seen in their loss, of discovering that the wound they thought was theirs alone is in fact shared by those around them.

The post October 24-30 appeared first on Mockingbird.

Ian: I picked this because it takes me back so vividly to October 2018 and seeing it with my wife, Kristin, and her sister, Anna. Weird as it may sound, this flick lights my heart up like a dozen M-80s in a jack-o’-lantern. I was excited for Michael Myers to return to the big screen and for a new generation to reckon with the horror of The Shape.

Caleb: This was the first movie my wife, Aleece, and I ever saw together. Our second date! It’ll always be important to me for that reason alone, but it’s also important to me because it’s a good Halloween sequel!

Blake: This movie will forever hold a dear place in my marriage as the first film I took my wife to that caused her to cry and to lose sleep. The first Halloween she watched, she didn’t even bat an eye. This one was just too much for her.

Caleb: Wild that we all associate this, for good or for ill, with our wives!

Blake: Except Blaine, who just saw it for the first time, right?

Blaine: Yeah. I’ve only ever seen the OG and this one.

Blake: That is WILD.

Caleb: Do you think this one stands out more than others, Ian?

Ian: In some significant ways, yes. Halloween (2018) resets the board by proceeding as if there had never been a sequel to the 1978 Halloween. Even titling this film Halloween shows how it positions itself as spiritual successor to the original, and it kind of implicitly announces that nothing with that word and a number after it matters.

Caleb: I will admit, I am a sucker for all the various timelines and reboots. But I think this is far and away the best one.

Ian: Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy certain sequels before this, but it’s largely in the same way I enjoy the Friday the 13th sequels: schlocky fun.

Blake: I don’t hate any of the sequels. But this and its subsequent two films were the first time I felt giddy about being in Haddonfield again.

Ian: Halloween (2018) definitely seeks to accomplish something amid its slasher spectacle. I think it wants to go back to basics in showcasing Michael as the evacuated site and vessel of evil: The Shape.

Caleb: It’s fascinating how they have to cast the horror of Michael killing five people in 1978 against the larger horror of the subsequent 40 years in American society. Michael isn’t the most prolific serial killer. There have been worse threats than him, but still: he is an avatar of the shapeless Shape of evil.

So I think Laurie gets it right later when she talks about how hard and dark the world is. All of us have to be prepared for it. The question is How can we be?

Ian: You’re actually approaching something I’m sensing this time around. Although this film officially disavows forty years of sequels, it nevertheless assumes their lore, after a fashion, precisely because the Michael of Halloween (1978) murdered five people, but there’s a mythos to Michael here as though he had carried out everything in those sequels.

Caleb: It definitely reckons with its own lore. Laurie’s granddaughter’s friends hear rumors that Laurie was Michael’s sister, which alludes to Halloween 2 (1981). But the truth is much scarier: he’s not related to Laurie at all. His stalking and tormenting her is utterly inscrutable; random. And I think a thesis of this movie is that the world is the same: full of random horror that we can’t ever truly parse out in this life. Michael just happens to be one personification of that.

Ian: One of the most satisfying things to me was how the inmates at the asylum chitter and cry out when the mask is presented to Michael, like they sense a power drawing near. That shapeless evil seeks a vessel but also a shape. Michael is at the ready but seeks union with the mask. It’s an anti-wholeness: a complete evacuation and readiness for radical evil. It makes me think that evil, which preexists mankind, seeks man’s shape because man bears the image of God.

Blake: I definitely think you have something here, and I think there is text in this and the other two movies that speaks to his desire to “exist” or be incarnated into a form that he knows he can never be.

Ian: He? Or it? The mask confers shape upon this evil and operates almost like a magic wand. At the very least, it’s a totem. And I love the idea of its bearing a power no one would have thought to confer upon it or would ever recognize without Michael’s adopting it.

I love that this film portrays the paranormal, superhuman quality of The Shape in a more subdued fashion than previous sequels that simply told the audience, for instance, “Michael is the result of a cult ceremony!” It shows us actions and consequences that eerily exceed what is normally possible in those actions, such as depicting the union of man and mask at the gas station as an unleashing of chthonic power. And that’s more in keeping with Halloween (1978). This series is strongest when it doesn’t attempt to explain the evil of Michael Myers and simply depicts it.

Blaine: I thought the podcaster/journalist duo served as an indictment of attempts to rationalize or reason with this kind of evil.

Ian: I completely agree, and I think that that posture is summed up in the male podcaster telling Laurie, “I don’t believe in the Boogeyman.”

Blake: Agreed, as well as a knock on the true crime podcasting mass industry.

Ian: Yeah, it really does a disservice to people by portraying evil as explicable, as something that can be diagnosed and understood fairly simply and then packaged as a product. Even if it wasn’t the writers’ intention, I think this film shows that failing to reckon with the gravity of evil fails ourselves and our fellows.

I think that’s a theme it attempts to explore because Karen, Laurie’s daughter, accuses Laurie of projecting paranoia and neurosis onto her. She blasts Laurie’s outlook with the most roseate cope imaginable: “The world is not a dark and evil place! It is full of love and understanding, and I’m not letting your psychotic rants confuse me or convince me otherwise!”

Blake: I think that if what happened to Laurie happened to me, I probably would have done almost exactly the same thing she did in its wake. I’d isolate and prepare, because really, unless you are very well adjusted and know in a profound way that fear is just as much an eater of the soul as denial, I’m not sure that there’s a way around that in a broken world. So while I agree that Laurie is a little off, I see how that is a real response we can expect from people. I have a lot of compassion for her.

I have less for Karen, aside from the fact that she was a kid and didn’t understand the horrors her mother witnessed. She’s in denial for most of her life and most of this film’s runtime. I think she’s trying to act like this isn’t real and that all the things her mother taught her are insane. But when we see her snap into the training Laurie gave her as a kid, it shows how it’s all still there, ready to do what’s needed, and it’s awesome.

Ian: I’m rewatching this now and I have four kids. What you said, Blake, helps me articulate something I sensed on this rewatch: “Train up a child in the way they should go.” Laurie tried her best to do so and inevitably, as all parents do, failed in some regards. But in light of what you just said, I am compelled by how, when the time comes, Karen’s denials dissolve in the face of what’s happening, and her preparation kicks right back into gear, and she knows exactly what to do. And that’s the point. That’s what you are to do as a parent: to equip and prepare your child for a world that is dialectically both things. There is love and light, but it also is brimming with darkness and hate.

Blake: That moment where Karen clicks into her training is easily the best singular moment in the movie. I honestly think this movie is about her, even though she doesn’t get the most screen time. Like a lot of horror now, this does traffic in trauma and generational hurt, but it does so within the confines of an evil that operates outside of human categories. The horror is not a strained allegory for grief or trauma but simply the context in which the characters live and have to navigate to confront this unknowable evil. In this way, I think it’s much smarter and refuses to therapeutically or materialistically explain away the horror by way of allegory.

Ian: Well, we know Blake’s favorite moment in this film! What about you, boys?

Caleb: I love that long tracking shot of Michael going in and out of houses, wreaking havoc. They use those same kinds of shots several times in Halloween 2, and here, it’s even more effective. He blends into the happy chaos of trick-or-treaters yet quickly and ruthlessly destroys people’s lives before they even know what’s happening. It’s bone-chilling.

Ian: For sure!

Blaine: My favorite moment is when Michael pushes Laurie off the balcony, looks away for a second, and when he looks back to the ground, Laurie is gone. This is accompanied by an ominous note in the musical score. I think it’s a perfect reversal of roles, and it signals the moment when Michael has gone from hunter to hunted.

Blake: That reversal was more ominous earlier when her granddaughter stares out the classroom window and sees Laurie standing across the street like Michael in the first one. Makes us see them on a very similar path, like he is drawing her to him to transform her. Then it fails in the scene you noted. It’s almost as if — and I know this is social heresy right now — Laurie’s trauma was drawing her closer to Michael instead of being released from him through divesting herself of her victimhood.

Ian: I could not agree more! Undergoing and recovering from harm is not equivalent to curving in on yourself via adopting the identity “victim.” And that’s really the heart of why I say Laurie’s needle points more closely toward the truth but is still several degrees out of alignment.

Suffice it to say, this feels like a genuine Halloween movie and a movie for Halloween — perfect for cozying up with your wife!

We hope you enjoyed hanging out with us ghoul-igans! We wish y’all a fun and a safe Halloween. Be sure to join us next week when we watch Dario Argento’s Inferno. Be there and be square!

The post The Shapelessness of Evil appeared first on Mockingbird.

The world is a scary place. At any moment, our identities could be hacked. Our phones could ring with dreadful news. Our brains could suffer an aneurysm. Swimming in a bottomless sea of insecurity, we are meagerly equipped with our basic survival instincts: fight, flight, freeze, and appease. These impulses may help keep us safe from spiders and clowns (answer for both: flight!), but what do we make of the dangers that are harder to pin down? What if the dangers are not only without but within?

Leave it to this year’s hit TV series to explore these questions. If you’re looking for a spooky show to get into this weekend, it’s Widow’s Bay. The Emmy-sweeping, genre-bending, horror-comedic series is a triumph for a number of reasons. For starters, it muddles the black-and-white worlds Hollywood has created (e.g., horror movies without humor, comedies without any depth), reminding us that life can be both scary and funny. The show has all the irresistible horror tropes (the harbinger who warns everyone of impending doom, the suspenseful music, the jump scares) but, along with its crowd-pleasing antics, it dives deeper than surface-level fears. Its anthropology is refreshingly low. This is not a match between good people and evil monsters.

Yes, sometimes the enemy is a chainsaw-wielding fiend. Much scarier, however, is when the enemy is yourself.

Take Tom Loftis, for instance, the ambitious new mayor who wants to transform the cursed island town of Widow’s Bay into the next Martha’s Vineyard. He is, from every angle, a secular man. For Tom, God is no more real than ghosts. The only higher power that exists is the one you achieve by climbing the ladder. He resents how the locals tolerate the town’s haunted reputation. For too long, people have been resigned to the rumors that the hotel is haunted, the church is cursed, and the bay isn’t safe for a swim. For Tom, the only thing to fear is fear itself. Like any mayor with a messiah complex, he sets out to do something about it.

As Loftis sees things, the real problem with the place is not that it is demonically possessed. The real problem is bad branding. In his eyes, Widow’s Bay is simply misunderstood. When visiting Widow’s Bay to write a piece for the New York Times travel section, a reporter asks Loftis about a framed article in the historical society titled “Cannibalism in God’s House.” Loftis tries to water it down. “These stories get so exaggerated over time,” he says. “Was there a deadly storm in 1786? Yes. Did a group of people get trapped inside a church? Apparently so. Did they immediately turn to cannibalism? No, that took four days!” See? That’s not so bad, right?

Loftis’ PR campaign is like slapping new siding on a haunted mansion. He is convinced that the plight of Widow’s Bay can be solved by installing a proper cappuccino machine in the local coffee shop. Cappuccino machines are great at making a proper latte but pretty useless when up against the occult. Before long, Loftis’ denial of the curse over the island town is just as dangerous as the curse itself. The first step to keeping the forces at bay is to admit they exist.

There is a scene in which Loftis speaks to another character about the Trolley Problem, an ethical thought experiment in which there is a runaway trolley barreling down the tracks toward a crowd of people. In this hypothetical setup, there is a lever that would switch the trolley to a different track with only one person on it. Pull the lever and you kill the one person. Do nothing and a crowd of people dies. The inevitable question: Would you accept responsibility to kill one person in order to save that many more people?

For Loftis, the Trolley Problem is a no-brainer. Do something! Pull the lever! Save the people! But the other character begs to differ. To Loftis’ horror, she says she wouldn’t pull the lever. “The runaway trolley is life,” she says. “The lever is me. You can’t control the bad things that happen in life, Tom.” When Loftis protests, arguing that Widow’s Bay is a house of horrors, she responds, “Life is a house of horrors! In all its ugly, beautiful, terrible glory. You just have to accept it.” Of all the responses to fear, acceptance is an option that Tom Loftis has never considered. Surprisingly, once all the other options have failed, it is the only thing to do.

The entire scene revolves around a quote by Tennessee Williams that has been squeezed onto a framed needlepoint screen:

The world is violent and mercurial — it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.

The real horror in this terrifying world — the one that we are most afraid to admit — is that we have absolutely no control. We may do everything we can do to distract us from that reality, but no amount of fighting, fleeing, freezing, or appeasing will keep life from having its way with us. The runaway trolley comes for us all.

As it barrels down the tracks toward us, however, something happens. The lever gets pulled. The trolley switches tracks. The world is spared at the expense of a single individual. One life sacrificed for many.

There is much to be afraid of these days: an uncertain future, social instability, all kinds of epidemics running rampant (not to mention spiders). And yet, our fears are no match for one thing. The only thing that can banish our fears altogether: the love of God.

The post Fear Itself appeared first on Mockingbird.

When Ozzy cried, “All aboard!” you stood with hundreds or thousands of tangential warriors singing along with the fatalistic chorus, air guitaring with the riffs, nodding with the rhythm, but you weren’t there for music. You were there to shout, thump your chest, flex, thrust hands with fingers contorted into symbols of specific allegiance, or claim you’re #1, convinced that the song, the battle cry, and the power behind it all were on your side. The words didn’t matter. Your heroes were fighting for you, to give you hope. You’d fight for them if you could, if you had to, against whoever stands in your way, to win at all costs.

But what if that’s not what Ozzy wanted? How do we know what he wanted?

He screams, “You’ve got to listen to my words!”

Below is a paraphrase of the “Crazy Train” lyrics:

“It’s crazy, but it’s always been like this — we’re all living as enemies. But maybe it’s not too late to learn how to love and forget how to hate. We’ve all got mental wounds that aren’t healing. I’m losing it. I’ve listened to everyone — fools, preachers, anarchists. Nothing helps. There’s always a system run by someone who’s a product of the system and has been conditioned to run the system, which is sold to us by rich people who get richer by keeping the system alive. And we buy it, screaming in pain from our open mental wounds. It’s messed up. I’m messed up. We’re all messed up. We inherit each other’s trouble. We’re heirs of unresolved conflict. I keep saying it, but no one listens. You’ve got to listen to my words. I can’t figure out how to feel. The mental wounds don’t heal. I don’t know who to blame, but I know it’s not fair.”

I wrote the above paraphrase to read to my senior literature class last Monday morning. Nearly half of the students in the class are varsity football starters chasing championships and full-rides. I prefaced the reading with a white lie, “I got this message from someone you all know over the weekend. I won’t tell you who it is, but I want you to help me think through how to respond.” The starting quarterback, worried, tried to interrupt me. I didn’t look up, held my hand out to pause questions, and continued reading. When I finished, there was a chorus of concern from several voices: That’s a cry for help! Is it from a boy or a girl? You said we know them? Who is it? Did they email you? What did you say? They need help. Who are you going to talk to? Still in character, I said, “I can’t tell you a name, but I’ll play this song.” A few seconds into “Crazy Train,” the students realized what was going on, looked relieved, but then became uncomfortable when I turned down the volume and read out the actual lyrics. In confused silence, their faces said, We weren’t listening.

I felt bad. I smiled and apologized for manipulating their emotions, and the air lightened. Someone started singing the chorus, and we moved on. But I’m not sure we should have. “Crazy Train” is the most popular song from the most recognizable sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll villain to ever bite the head off a bat, but it’s also a cry for help from a struggling human admitting personal weakness and claiming no superiority. While suggesting that love is better than hate, he’s doing more than just asking us to love. He’s asking us to LEARN HOW TO.

French philosopher and mystic, Simone Weil, who died during World War II in solidarity with residents of German-occupied France, didn’t write how-to books, but she couldn’t stop talking about attention. Her bumper sticker quote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” is clipped from a thank you letter she wrote to a paralyzed poet who had expressed precise appreciation of her work. She further expounded on the value of attention, nearly sacramentalizing it, in a contemplative essay on education:

The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing: it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.

I can’t say if my students had more than warmth of heart, impulsiveness, or pity. They had something. They recognized a sincere cry for help as something that required sincere attention, but when they realized the source of the cry, the requirement changed.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about Simone Weil, sufferers, and attention in the pursuit of sincere miracles that are enough.

The post A Crazy Train Crying in the Wilderness appeared first on Mockingbird.

In the beginning, there was only “Burnt Norton,” written in 1936 and intended to be a one-off. It was generally well received by critics, and the whole business could have been over then. But three years passed, and Eliot found himself with that most common of authorly ailments: not knowing what to write or fearing that he no longer knew how to write properly. Specifically, he had gone for some time without constructing new poems.

The world had changed since “Burnt Norton” was published. A growing menace once possible to ignore had exploded into a firestorm of destructive force sweeping through the nations of Europe, consuming all in its path. The bonds that had knit together what remained of Western Christian civilization were snapping with wild abandon, supplanted by ideologies of extermination. Faced with such a crisis, Eliot searched for the one fixed point amid the whirling chaos.

He settled on the village of East Coker in Somerset, England. His ancestor Andrew Eliot had left there in 1669, abandoning the historic family home and immigrating to New England. Nearly three centuries later, Thomas Stearns Eliot had become the first member of the family to move back to the motherland, and the family connection held spiritual significance for him. In 1937, he visited St. Michael and All Angels’ Church in East Coker, where his ashes would one day be placed.

I know something of Eliot’s experience. I too am the descendant of Englishmen and women whose bones lie buried in every corner of that land, some in tombs I have visited. I too was the first person in my family to return and live in England, if only for a year. It did feel in a sense like returning to my beginning, which is probably why I connect so strongly with the Four Quartets. The secret Eliot discovered at East Coker is one that has transformed my own life as well: we do not possess the power to redeem ourselves or the world and are utterly dependent on the gift of grace.

Of all the Four Quartets, this is the most law and gospel poem.

The Four Quartets are commonly associated with the four traditional elements of the physical world: air, earth, water, and fire. But as I have noted, Eliot did not begin with a grand plan, so the elemental symbolism becomes stronger in the later poems. Yes, we see the movement of air in “Burnt Norton” disturbing a bowl of rose leaves and carrying the laughter of children, but you would not conclude “This is an air poem” unless you had the other three Quartets to guide you. Likewise, the earth theme is not obvious after the first section of “East Coker,” but once we get to “The Dry Salvages,” we will be drowned in water imagery, and “Little Gidding” will pelt us with fire from beginning to end.

Thus, Eliot begins “East Coker” rooted in the earth, in time and place and home. But immediately, the earth is overturned by the machinations of human societies succeeding and supplanting one another, building up to heaven and returning to dust.

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.

If you have visited the ancient monument of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, you know it sits at a motorway intersection. As you stand in awe of the ancient engineering, your ears are filled not only with the bleating of sheep but also with the rumble of cars whizzing by. The British government thought it had a solution to the traffic congestion: simply build a tunnel underneath Salisbury Plain. But ardent campaigners objected that this would mean disturbing and destroying the remains of ancient civilizations just for a bypass.

This is the sort of scenario Eliot presents at the beginning of “East Coker.” There is something very Ecclesiastes about it: the futility of human effort and the vanity of earthly pursuits doomed to be buried beneath the earth. Empires fall, ideologies go out of fashion, and our own bodies rot and decay. As a lover of history myself, it is easy for me to look at previous ages and think, “Things were so good back then! They did such amazing things!” when in truth they also started wars and persecuted each other and ignored the God of heaven. The real lesson of history may be that everything dies in the end. Thus, Eliot requests,

Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

In the context of the entire Four Quartets, Eliot clearly does not think all human endeavor is worthless. Rather, he realizes that human endeavor is limited and tainted. The answer then is not to cease our efforts but to adjust our mindset. We must begin with an appreciation of our flaws and failings. Humans, Eliot declares, are beings of folly and fear, choosing radical independence rather than the riches of love. We seek our purpose in the wrong things, thinking too much of ourselves and too little of things eternal.

We must therefore start with humility, which in Christian terms is to say we must start by admitting that we are creatures and not the Creator. Not only that, but we are born and live our lives in sin. We are incapable of saving ourselves or making ourselves righteous. We must acknowledge this at the beginning, or our lives will be wasted in futile efforts. Though Eliot himself was a man of great endeavors and explorations, he knew there was nothing truly new under the sun that he could call his own: only that which was from the beginning, perhaps changed into another pattern, but only ever subcreated.

And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate — but there is no competition —
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

This may seem like a recipe for despair, but in fact, it is the only path to hope. For if we hope to conquer by strength and submission, or to recover what has already been lost, we are doomed to failure. That is why we must begin with humility, admitting our strength is never enough, and we cannot save that which we love, or win that which we hope to gain.

Eliot sums things up in one of his famous lines: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” By this, he means that we are not in control. We cannot say what will survive the ravages of time. But do not miss the implication of his words: for us there is only the trying, but perhaps there is more for another. That is the part that “is not our business.”

***

In the fourth section of the poem, Eliot grows explicit. Up to this point, “East Coker” has proclaimed the futility of human effort and only hinted at the possibility of deliverance. Now, Eliot makes clear what is necessary to restore us to wholeness.

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

Yes, it is the curse of sin that brings us low. Hence, the need for humility. Our restoration must come by way of its opposite. The “dying nurse” is Jesus Christ, who does not merely stick a bandage on and send us home with false hope but subjects us to surgery, cutting out the cancer of sin. He knows what we refuse to acknowledge: that we are dying and can only be saved by resurrection. So counterintuitively, he seeks to hasten our death. He brings in the reminder of the curse, his holy law. As Martin Luther taught, God’s law puts us to death in the spiritual sense. It declares us guilty without hope of salvation, for no sinner can fulfill its demands. Only at that point can the remedy be applied. I think this is what Eliot means when he says the following a bit earlier in the poem:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought

We live now between the two Advents of Jesus Christ. Faith, hope, and love have been awoken in us by the power of the Spirit, but they have not reached their fulfillment. In these bodies of death, we groan. The triumph of good is hidden from our eyes. The older I get, the more I realize that faith, hope, and love are the pain of separation from that to which we long to be joined. The German romantics called it sehnsucht, holy longing. C. S. Lewis called it joy.

Our purpose is found in union with God and the ultimate experience of the beatific vision. Now, in our earthly existence, the very yearning we feel is our connection with the divine. We are betting everything on God’s word of promise. We abandon hope of perfection in this life for hope of a perfection to come. The virtues of faith, hope, and love look a lot like grief, but at the present hour, grief is wisdom, for we know one day our grief will be turned to joy. Eliot continues in the same vein, borrowing from the mystic theologian St. John of the Cross.

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.

It would be easy to see this dispossession as just another form of the law that kills. For many of the medieval mystics, it was. Everything depends on what you connect it to — what you say next. Martin Luther made little of himself when he was a friar, and he made little of himself after he left that life. But there was a difference between one littleness and the other. In the cloister, he despaired that he could not fulfill God’s law and concluded he was bound for hell. After his evangelical discovery, he still despaired of his own efforts, but he finally had hope of heaven, for he knew it was not his own efforts that counted. His spirit had been killed by the law and brought back to life by the gospel.

***

In “East Coker,” Eliot looks back on his life, the mistakes of his early years and the regrets of middle age. He hears again the sound of the children he will never have, which stand in for everything he has failed to do and achieve. He concludes that he must trade the ecstasy of this earth for the ecstasy of heaven. “The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy / Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony / Of death and birth.” He must turn his love to the source from which love comes. He must give all he is to Jesus Christ, in whom alone he has hope. Like the mystics of old, he must endure purgation. He must die and be reborn. But this suffering, this grief, will give way to the light of life. For salvation is offered to humanity through union with the one who died and rose again.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood —
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

Yes, the only remedy for our sinful souls is the flesh and blood of Christ given for us. Upon Good Friday, he poured himself out at Calvary so all that is sick and dead in us might be restored to health and life. Now we who die declare ourselves sound and substantial, not by our work but by his.

The way of the gospel is torture. It puts our pride to death. It strips us of that which lays us low. But it is an ecstasy beyond anything of this world, a never-ending fount of life abundant. This is the fullness of love, which is not ended in time but transcends it. Love is our end, for God is love, and in communion with him our purpose is fulfilled.

Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion

What is there left that has not been discovered? That which is from the beginning, the thing worth pursuing to the ends of the earth and beyond: Christ himself, love itself, life itself. For us, there is only the trying. For him, there is the doing. That is law and gospel theology. So, let us explore all there is to explore, not out of fear that our lives lack meaning, but in the knowledge that we are loved eternally. Our exploring has meaning because of him, and the greatest exploration will be to spend eternity growing in knowledge of him, in closer communion with him, into the fullness of ecstasy.

“In my beginning is my end,” Eliot writes, for we came from God, and we will return to him.

The post East Coker and the Cure for Human Inability appeared first on Mockingbird.

First, the longevity. It’s worth celebrating, even if it’s both a blessing and a curse.

The time has allowed us to develop some pretty priceless chemistry. When I’m picking articles for us to talk about, I know that even if the material falls flat, I can rely on our dynamic to take up the slack. I trust my co-hosts, and it’s been very gratifying to watch us gel in a non-contrived way over the years. We’ve been through a lot together, and it shows, I think.

Being around so long (in internet years) means we’ve had the benefit of watching things come and go. Sarah mentioned this recently in relation to the moralization of food in our society. It was super acute about eight years ago, then it retreated a bit with the body-positivity moment, now it’s back again under the guise of #maxxing. But that’s just one example. I could mention radical atheism, or gospel-centered this and that, or mindfulness. We’ve seen cultural fixations take hold and then recede, specific anxieties bubble up and dissipate. The longer view allows for a measure of perspective that I believe lends the show added depth.

Longevity can also be a curse. The ebb and flow can foster a degree of detachment that masquerades as superiority. For example, it’s hard to take the latest rebranding of medieval monasticism (or justification by works) seriously when you’ve seen it happen four times under four different (best-selling) names already. Discipline becomes application becomes virtue becomes formation and so on. It’s a challenge to keep listening and paying attention, but a challenge that I’m proud of us for at least trying to live up to. Because beneath every one of the trends we’ve observed are real people with real hopes and dreams and disappointments.

The second longevity-related challenge is the same one that afflicts anyone in a public role, especially those in ministry or thought life. It’s the danger of impersonating yourself. Whenever I detect in my voice any sense of “the grace guy needs to say a grace thing now” — it makes my skin crawl. Autopilot is the enemy, along with its cousin repetition. I remember a trusted listener once warning me that we were becoming a podcast about social media. Another said we were talking too much about parenting. These grooves are understandable, but to keep things fresh, especially over the long haul, you have to always be finding fresh vistas, not just in the culture but in yourself. It’s not easy.

This leads me to the next observation: over ten years, it’s become notably more difficult to find suitable material for The Mockingcast. One of the things that I hold sacred about our show is its role as a refuge from culture wars. I want listeners to be confident that when they press play, we’re not going to trigger them about the same headlines that trigger them the rest of the day. We haven’t done this perfectly, I realize, but it remains a guiding principle. When the occasional how-dare-you emails come in, folks are usually surprised to hear that they come just as frequently from both sides of the aisle. If they didn’t, I’d try to course correct.

Finding stuff that threads the needle of interesting and substantial but not pre-narrativized has gotten more challenging over our tenure. It’s like the ledge we walk has gotten narrower. Not nonexistent, mind you, just narrower. I’m so proud we’ve reached this milestone without, at least in my view, falling into an ideological ditch or becoming (too) predictable.

I’d like to think that The Mockingcast, and Mockingbird more generally, constitutes a rejoinder to those who claim it’s impossible to maintain any semblance of intellectual and spiritual substance that doesn’t automatically code left or right. I’ve never been more flattered, in fact, than when someone called us the last nonpartisan ministry in America. Not because I think it’s true, necessarily, but because of how much I think such a thing is needed. I consider the continued breadth of our listenership a bit of a miracle.

I know others might view that as evidence of a lack of courage or conviction or something, but those objections no longer trouble me. I know just how much courage — and hope! — it’s taken not to foreclose our discussions.

The key, in my mind, is that we’ve always privileged the Existential over the Ethical. Again, this is one of the top reasons we’ve lost listeners over the years, but it’s one of the things I feel most strongly and settled about at this point. It’s also one of the reasons we talk about death so much, and why you can go back and listen to the vast majority of our episodes and glean something of value. Or so people tell me.

I also appreciate that we laugh a lot on The Mockingcast. And we laugh a lot not only because my co-hosts are genuinely funny, but because we have fun making the show. A lot of religious podcasts, well, they don’t sound like they’re having any fun. They certainly don’t laugh about dark stuff like we do.

That hilarity isn’t incidental. I believe it flows directly from our shared confidence in God and a corresponding lack of confidence in human beings, ourselves most of all. Human beings are ridiculous, and Christians are no exceptions.

What else do I appreciate about The Mockingcast? I should probably mention just how rare it is these days for men and women to talk together about anything in public, let alone about God. As far as I can tell, the sexes exist in almost entirely separate media ecosystems these days, and I believe The Mockingcast is richer for our bridging of that increasingly wide divide. Of course, it only works because we like each other as people rather than as stand-ins for our genders.

This is getting long, so I’ll just say one last thing. I’m proud of us for sticking with the song of grace. There is every incentive in the world for moving on to a sexier topic or timelier angle. A friend of the show recently remarked that he’d visited two churches in the last six weeks, hoping to hear some good news. One congregation was more liberal, one was more conservative, both had at the center of their worship some version of Should. Some form of telling people what to do or think rather than announcing the love and forgiveness that God pours out on suffering, sinful people.

The listener emails almost all foregrounded that aspect of our work: not so much our talk about the “absence of grace” as the endless stories about its presence and power. These are certainly the stories that have meant the most to me, and the fact that I’ve gotten to highlight them with two of my best friends — who’ve been tireless beacons of grace in my own life — well, I don’t take it for granted.

Which is to say that 300 episodes in, God has shown up in my own life via The Mockingcast, and I am thankful.

It doesn’t hurt that we have the best theme song in creation.

The post A Few Thoughts on 300 Episodes of Grace (and Its Absence) appeared first on Mockingbird.

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One of the go-to jokes of a group of guys I hang out with. I laugh because, well, I just like to please people. But every time the boys say it, I think to myself, “If you only knew what being a pastor feels like sometimes.”

An impromptu funeral at the clinic for veterinarians whose colleague committed suicide, scrolling to find an angry email about last week’s sermon or the changing of the carpet color in the narthex, begging financial generosity from people who pay your salary, lunch with a lonely man going through a brutal divorce, restocking the youth fridge with 7,000 Cheerwines, hearing that they’re gossiping about you again, failing yet again to prepare a sermon that marries TikTok and TED Talk, off to the shelter to serve dinner, did I even eat lunch? Did I mention that this was last Tuesday?

Ministry is often pure gift. The highs are as high as they get. Pastors bear witness to the most intimate, most raw, most human, most beautiful and terrifying moments of people’s lives. We play at the level of the soul. We get paid to read and write and pray. We have a front-row seat to miracles: the bound freed, the sinner forgiven, the debts paid, the dead resurrected. It’s not lost on me that having a job rife with meaning is a privilege and honor. This is what God has chosen to make of my life, and I am truly grateful.

And yet, there’s no way to get away from the fact that ministry is a burden too. Its shape is a cross. Its form is death and resurrection. People bring all their junk to church — and they should. Sunday mornings are not an assembly of the righteous, they are a sanctuary for sinners — hypocrites anonymous, I like to call it.

One of the chief problems that has arisen in my ministry is that I find it so hard to be ministered to. Ministers minister, preachers preach, consolers console, but if you’re not careful, a pastor will find herself without a pastor, a preacher will find himself without a preacher. Everyone needs both.

Not long ago I burnt out. Years after, I realize the burnout was not the product of overwork. The fire in my soul was extinguished because for years I had offered relief to others without finding ways to receive it myself. What becomes of a healer who forsakes his own wounds?

Pay attention when your soul stops singing. And I did. I prayed for God to bring relief, somehow, someway. And then, to quote Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption, “a beautiful little bird flew into my drab little cage.” That beautiful bird was Mockingbird Ministries. And now for six years I have done what Michael Gershon calls “staking one’s life on the rumors of grace.” As the 300th of the Mockingcast draws near, I thought it fitting to say what Mbird has been for me:

1. My theological home: Pastors in the mainline will tell you that our denominations are fracturing. It’s tempting to give in to extremes and to weaponize politics toward ecclesial ends. This has made me feel like I don’t belong anywhere politically, theologically, or pastorally. I know many fellow pastor Mbirders agree because we’ve talked about it. Pastors in the mainline who long for a ministry rooted only in the gospel are like an island of misfit toys. Mbird has become for us a gracious home and a place to be reminded again and again of the gospel of grace.
2. My Preacher: I listen to the Mockingcast on Monday mornings. You pastors out there know Monday’s malaise. Dizzied and frenzied from all of Sunday’s work and pressured by a million regrets about the sermon or the attendance, I find sweet relief in the words of RJ, Sarah, and Dave. “That’s right,” I think. “This is what ministry about.” God may not speak to us all through an audible voice in our heads, but God does speak through the words of a sermon. On Mondays, the Mockingcast is the sermon I need to hear. And just like my own parishioners, after I hear the good news, I find myself ready for another week.
3. My Storyteller: We are narrative beings. Ask Jesus. He was a preacher of parables. The stories of Mbird break open the frozen seas within me. No tears in the preacher, no tears in the hearer. So, when I find myself moved, I know the Spirit is inviting me to share the story again.
4. My friends: Just to be clear, I don’t think an online podcast and website are “my friend.” But what Mbird has done is introduce me to a host of other pastors and people who, like me, feel adrift in their denominations. I’ve found fellow Mbirders in my own PC USA, but through the Iowa’s Preacher’s Project, I now have friends who are Lutheran (all types), Baptist, Charismatic Anglican, Methodist, and Episcopalian. Ministry is a lonely gig. Knowing you’re not alone in fighting the long defeat can mean the difference between burnout and beloved.
5. My pop culture blockbuster: As a music lover, cinephile, and just general peruser of grace in real life, I find Mbird’s tone so down-to-earth. They say it every other week — grace for actual people. There is no limit to where Jesus knows us and is known by us. Mbird has helped me realize that ministering to the world requires genuinely loving it as God does. The lingua franca of our people is reality tv, is sports, is music, is movies and popcorn. As such, Mbird has gifted me a freeing permission to expect that God meets everyday people in their everyday loves, hobbies, and desires.

The rumor of grace is spreading, thank God. It spreads like seeds, spreads in quiet and forsaken things, spreads in great laughter and deep sorrow. It spreads because despite everything dark in our world, the light shall overcome it. Grace is an earworm that once you hear it sing you just cannot help but let is soar in your soul. Mbird does best what pastors do best — it points to the unlimited yet hidden beauty of God’s grace for sinners. And for that witness I am ever grateful.

The post Rumors of Grace appeared first on Mockingbird.

I’ve been aware of Coakley’s work and reputation for some time but never taken the plunge, which, after reading their conversation, feels like a bit of a shame-on-me situation. One of my favorite bits comes at the very beginning, when Coakley talks about her teenage years. Apparently the confirmation classes at her little Church of England parish lacked the rigor she was hoping for. Thus, she did what all kids that age do these days:

My eldest brother and I organized our own theological discussion group in that same parish. We brought a lot of our atheistical and skeptical school friends into it. And this very holy rector was very clever at this point, because he just sat watching the arguments go backward and forward, rather like the umpire at Wimbledon. He never intervened, never put us right, never told us what the right answer was. When my brother and I recently thought about who had attended those discussions, the vast majority of our friends who attended at that age, 14 to 16, subsequently became Christians. So that tells you something about opening the Pandora’s box theologically and how important it is for the clergy not to stifle that.

A lovely little testament to the power of grace in practice, I’d say, and one which jibes with my own decades working with young people. Allow students to ask their questions, raise their objections and air their doubts without threat of defensiveness — let that stuff hang in the air — and the craziest things can happen, especially over the long haul. Squash their arguments with doctrine, even right doctrine, and you risk alienating them forever. Such is the emotional wallop of correction, however well intentioned.

Coakley goes on to provide some rather damning commentary on the gap in theology between the academy and the pew, the professor and the layperson. One of the core hopes of her own work, she claims, is the closing of that gap chasm, to which I can only add a hearty amen. I’ve tried to do something similar in my own books, albeit on a much smaller scale. (Whether utilizing a French phrase for that project — théologie totale — screams accessibility is a separate question.)

In Coakley’s view, uncoupling the study of theology from the practice of prayer is dangerous. This leads her into one of the most beautiful articulations of prayer I’ve read anywhere, let alone the New York Times:

How do I pray? Well, you hand yourself over to the source of your being, and then you ask some things. But the handing over is primary, and learning how to do that. It changes your perspective on God — because when you practice this, even for a very short time each day, simple opening up space in which God is God. You don’t control it. That’s what’s so frightening.

This is not a new skill, like learning how to make a very good omelet or to ride a bicycle. This is a nonskill. It’s an unskilling, an unmastery. It completely changes your view of God, because up to that point you’ve probably subliminally been thinking about God as a very large entity, the largest and the best in a universe of entities whom somehow you’ve got to get on your side or cajole or get to answer your request.

I know that’s a very naïve sounding description, but as a priest I can tell you that’s the God I hear about all the time. All the great theologians of the tradition have slain that God, and they’ve had to slay that God — think of Luther — with great terror. It’s really just opening up to the possibility of grace. Contemplation isn’t special. It’s just very difficult for people who are relatively educated and privileged. For people who are already absolutely broken, as Jesus said, they know about it.

The interview ends with some hopeful words about death and heaven, as well as a bold distillation of the true purpose of the church — a purpose which tends to meet, she’s found, with resistance in mainline denominations where “certain political topics become all important, and theology is seen as an unnecessary obfuscation and a sideline.”

What the Church is at base is a church of reconciliation and forgiveness, and that’s our gift to the world. We live in a very unforgiving world. But then our churches are not forgiving places either. It seems to me that reconciliation and forgiveness is our task.

2. Next up, in the Atlantic, Faith Hill reviews a new book by psychologist Marisa G. Franco entitled Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment. I prefer Hill’s blunt heading, “Stop Trying to Be Your Best Self.” It starts with a refreshing blast of low anthropology, usually in short supply in the pop “positive psychology” genre, and the acknowledgement that self-esteem cannot be approached head-on:

Nominally, Worth is about how to become more self-assured. But as soon as Franco presents that possibility, she upends it by suggesting that it may be impossible. Maybe most people are just a bunch of insecurities in a trench coat, one stiff wind away from toppling over. Perhaps, she suggests, they should accept their weak or tender spots, all of their little ways of being defensive or touchy—and settle, if anything, for “secure-ish.” […]

Before she started this book, she looked around and saw a “group of people that was just trying so hard to heal,” she told me. They could resolve conflict with “I” statements, speaking about their own feelings rather than jumping to blame others. They could set boundaries. They were hoping to become the perfect partner, or break cycles of generational trauma. And yet, she said, “it just didn’t seem like it was working.” She recognized herself in their show of composure.

It gets even more interesting when Franco stumbles onto/into several of our pet theological themes, not only the impotence of the law (the Clear and Reasonable Should) to create change in a person but also its tendency toward counterproductivity:

A conventional idea of self-worth might involve embracing what Franco called “glittery” attributes: reminding yourself of your strengths, accepting compliments, spending time with people who see your best sides. But she calls on evidence that shows that, much of the time, positive feedback can backfire. Psychology studies have shown that participants with low self-esteem felt worse after receiving compliments or after repeating aloud “I’m a lovable person.” When people received praise for giving a speech, researchers observed actual spikes in their blood pressure.

I’ll refrain from commenting on the generational aspect here, but let’s just say those of us who grew up being told nonstop we were special didn’t end up feeling that way all the time. Hill worries that the abiding emphasis on self, positive or negative, might be part of the problem:

Perhaps devoting so much attention to your own wounds sounds a little navel-gazey; I myself wondered, at times, whether Franco might be preaching self-reflection to a whole lot of people who already monitor their own happiness and growth so much that it makes them miserable. But she argues that the point is ultimately to avoid that kind of endlessly self-involved intellectualizing by having an actual emotional experience. […]

The goal, instead, is “integration”: welcoming the hurt and ugly parts of yourself into your self-image along with the shiny parts, and feeling that you deserve kindness anyhow. That message might be especially crucial for the self-help heads — the ones trying so hard to fix themselves that they’re re-creating all the shame that may have made them feel unworthy in the first place.

If Franco’s words ring any bells for longtime Mockingbird readers, it’s because she’s essentially paraphrasing what my father calls “the assimilation of negativity.” He wrote about the phenomenon years ago in his book Who Will Deliver Us? as something the gospel of grace often makes possible:

The “assimilation of negativity” refers to a person’s willing, painful embrace of the sorrows of life, of himself and his flaws, in coexistence, almost union, with his confidence, aspirations, and joys. It is the opposite of splitting — the phenomenon of distancing our conscious self from unacceptable feelings and experiences to such an extent that a fissure opens between the conscious self and the unconscious self.

With reality knocking at the door, the age-old message persists — “Accentuate the Positive!!”, if you don’t, there is no way to survive. The message of the Gospel — of God unjustly crediting us as good — allows us to unsplit (break down the wall, let the shark back in the water) and deal with the real troubles that we have long cordoned off and do so without being crushed and devoured.

 

3. I’m proud of myself for making it this far into the column before bringing up certain documentaries. But three items in, I can wait no longer to talk about the trio that’ve grabbed my attention.

First up, of course, there’s You Can See Everything, in which Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim follow Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the weeks before she went to prison in 2023. This is one where you really do need to go in cold, so if you plan to see the film, I’d suggest moving on to the next item below. (Not that I plan to give actual spoilers.) I’ll add my voice to those calling it a masterpiece, not just thought-provoking and novel but also breathtakingly beautiful. The cinematographer deserves an Academy Award.

Is there a Mockingbird dimension to this film? Well, I suppose anything that complicates the black-and-white narratives we have about cultural heroes and villains contains a dash of biblical insight, especially if there’s some compassion at play, which I believe there is in this case. You could also read the film as “a haunting exploration of the limits of other people’s knowability” as Naomi Fry does in the New Yorker (i.e., an extended meditation on “epistemological modesty” in the age of the meme), or as a study in the malformations of true codependency. You could just as easily interpret it as a meditation on story itself, or on personal catastrophe, or self-deception, or as an indictment of what I’ve increasingly come to think of as the Anti-Wisdom of contemporary startup culture.

That’s what’s so fun about this movie, it’s doing that much. Here’s Fry:

Holmes’s soul remains a cipher. Who is this woman, with her wide, unblinking, cornflower-blue eyes, with her frequent tears and earnest proclamations, who keeps insisting on her utter sincerity — going so far as to say that she can’t remember telling a single lie? “She’s really weird. She’s just not normal,” Evans tells Fielder, while attesting to Holmes’s honesty, but the idea of full transparency — the notion that one can and will see everything about another person if there is willingness on both sides to do so — is both troubled and troubling in the film. The more access Holmes allows, the less Fielder is, seemingly, able to know her. […]

I thought of Theranos’s promise to provide people with crucial medical knowledge through a tiny blood sample. This promise, as we now know, was fraudulent. No puzzles were solved; blood, it turned out, would not tell, and the mysteries of the self remained locked within it. Fielder, too, resists being known: after spending weeks trying to get into his subjects’ heads, he dismisses the possibility that they’d be able to get into his. “I know what you’re feeling,” Evans tells him, at one point in the film. Fielder’s response is immediate, and notably heated: “No, you don’t.”

How does that Prayer Book collect go? Something about a God “to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hidden.” Maybe amidst all our unknowability, the promise of a God who truly knows everything — yet whose disposition somehow remains merciful — still has the power to go viral. Or maybe it’s enough to say: In a world full of Billys, I’m thankful there’s at least one Nathan.

4. The second documentary that rocked my world this week was Norm, Judd Apatow’s feature on the life and comedy of Norm Macdonald. I am what the kids call a “Norm stan,” which means you can count me among the hordes of middle-aged guys who, when they need a laugh, jump down the Norm rabbit hole on YouTube.

Yet as hilarious and original as the guy was, there was a lot more going on than just genius-level absurdism: the love of Russian literature, for starters, to say nothing of the love of his amazing mother and bajillion friends. The sincerity he reserved almost exclusively for matters of faith too. How about his near-pathological refusal to leverage his cancer diagnosis for attention? And while it won him zero fans at the time, watching him advocate for forgiveness re: cancelled colleagues, I couldn’t help but think of that amazing Chris Rock interview Bryan highlighted last week. (Would that Norm had lived long enough to contemplate forgiveness being extended in a certain running back’s direction!) I’ve watched his final Letterman performance upwards of thirty times, and his closing “I love you” never fails to pierce my heart. I’m glad to have been alive to watch him do his thing.

As far as other sources of humor, “Druid Loving this Cloak Weather” from the Onion made me laugh, as did “Unsubscribing, Huh?” by Dave Fromm on Medium, and “Meta Glasses capture footage of man being avoided for wearing Meta Glasses” on the Chaser.

But nothing had me in stitches more than the return of Ali G this week. I realize he, like Norm, may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but any excuse I can find to embed the bit below is welcome:

5. The third gobsmacking documentary I watched this past week was Don’t Look Back in Anger, which covers last summer’s immensely popular reunion of the British band Oasis. Of the three films mentioned here, I would not in a million years have expected this one to contain the most gospel resonance, but here we are, and I’m wrong again, thank God.

I first suspected things might take an interesting turn when, early on, Noel Gallagher confesses a lifelong aversion to forgiveness. It just isn’t in him, he says. We then watch for the next hour plus as he and brother Liam not only reunite but reconcile — to the point where Noel admits to looking at his younger brother with real forgiveness. To drive this aspect home, the final words of the documentary come out of the mouth of a Catholic priest(!), who lauds their reunion from the pulpit, interpreting the stratospherically enthusiastic reception to their tour as evidence of a deeper public appetite not for infectious Britpop anthems or even ’90s nostalgia so much as reconciliation itself. It’s a stretch, perhaps, but one I’m willing to, uh, acquiesce to. What’s the word Liam loves so much again? Oh yeah: Biblical.

Any punters looking for an Alternate Best-Of Oasis Playlist need look no further.

Also on the music front, “Inside The Inexplicable Intimacy Of Phoebe Bridgers’ Phoneless Tour” in Coveteur functions as a poignant follow-up to Caroline Devitt’s “Sad Girl Pentecost” from a few months ago on this site. Very cool.

I’ve finally been reading Ian Leslie’s John & Paul book as preparation for the Friendship Issue of The Mockingbird magazine (out early next month!), and it’s as good as people say. I couldn’t help but notice one interesting factoid. Not only did John Lennon and Paul McCartney both lose their mothers at an early age, they were both the products of interconfessional homes. That is, John’s father was Irish-Catholic and mother English Protestant, while for Paul it was the inverse, albeit both of Irish descent à la the Gallaghers. Coinkydink? Who knows. But I do know that the third rock star with a similar pedigree is none other than David Hewson, aka Bono from U2, whose mother was Irish-Protestant and father Irish-Catholic.

6. Cue the Times feature this week, “50 Years In, What’s the Point of U2?” in which David Marchese interviewed Bono and The Edge. They have a new album coming out in a few weeks, and while I wasn’t blown away by the first two singles, the third (“The Greatest Show on Earth”) finds them back in their gospel sweet spot, singing (I think) about the church. A couple soundbites:

Marchese: When you say there are ideas that you want to be in the mainstream, what are they?

Bono: The metaphysical thing, the gospel side of U2 — that was only allowed in rock ’n’ roll if you were Black. You can’t be white people talking about God, because generally white people who talk about God make our audience very nervous, you know? But not in the Black church in America. Coming to the United States, we’d just seen those televangelists, and we were like, Wow, these people are in deep trouble. Then you walk into a Black church and you hear the abandonment of the singing and that feeling — it’s fervor, but not freaky fervor. So being able to sing songs of faith and devotion and songs of doubt, to put the gospel with the blues, which is rock ’n’ roll. There’s nowhere you can’t go, including the pop charts. My constant argument is don’t cede the charts to just those pop mechanics. Hip-hop did it and got revolutionary ideas on the radio. But a lot of indie stuff just gave up. They weren’t even bothering. […]

The Edge: People have said that we’re the band that people who don’t know that they believe in God like. It’s in the work in such a natural way. There’s no polemic there. It’s just our search, our inquiry. And it involves so much doubt. It has to, I think. Because if it’s not dogma, then it’s constantly in flux. I would say I’m agnostic about half of the week, and then the rest of the week I’ve got an incredibly strong faith. But it’s always changing, ready to be upgraded. […]

Marchese: I was listening just this morning to “Glorify,” and there’s a line that goes, “You spit in my eye, you’re a barefaced lie, and there’s nothing you can do to keep me from loving you.” It’s the idea of having love for your enemies. Do you have love for the people doing the things that you’re calling unconscionable?

Bono: Yeah, I love these people because I believe God loves them and Christianity calls us not only to love our neighbor but to love our enemies.

7. Elsewhere the duo talk about their resolve to counter dark times with a record of party music, not as an act of self-absorption so much as a witness to a deeper and more hopeful reality. An act of resistance, if you will. It’s not so dissimilar to what I tried to say in that essay on Play for CT (oh, CT!) back in January. Yet I suspect Bono and The Edge would sign on to this next piece by poet Kathleen Kilcup published in Commonweal, “Beauty on the Edge,” (no relation) in which the recent memoirist ponders whether poetry has a moral obligation to sufferers. Een-ter-esting:

I believe that art and beauty are never more fully themselves than when they encounter human suffering. Similarly, the message of salvation is no doubt good news to the happy and contented, but for people in extremity without hope, it is life itself — living water for those dying of thirst. […]

Of course, not all art need address suffering directly. Human anguish is not the only subject suitable for artistic interpretation. W. H. Auden, for one, puts awe, not suffering, at the center of the poetic impulse. […]

I don’t think we can say art birthed from suffering is intrinsically superior to the poem written on a lazy Sunday afternoon. But I do think that the greatest works of art are so faithful to the real, so completely absorbed in rendering out of air, breath, and imagination what is true, both in human experience and beyond it, that joy and sorrow become entangled with one another. Praise and suffering become inseparable. Such beauty can and does address suffering, even if suffering is not its explicit subject. Consider the marigolds. Somehow their earnest bobbing heads and innocent color spoke directly to the hearts of soldiers on the fringe of a senseless war.

For Christians, there is no beauty as complete, as strange, or as troublesome as that of the cross. There, life and death, hope and devastation, shame and joy are inextricably mixed. […] Such paradoxes present difficulties for the theologian and philosopher, who remove themselves from life in order to grasp it from the outside, but for the artist who is “rooted in imaginative awe,” those mysteries can live, breathe, and spread their wings.

8. Rounding the final bend here. I’m pleased to report that former Mbird conference speaker Elizabeth Oldfield continues to tear the internet up with her pen. A couple Fridays ago, we mentioned her timely dinner party article, and today our Long Read of the Week has to be her “Living in Community Is Where Self-Illusions Go to Die” on Aeon.

Living with others has shown me things in myself that I would prefer to ignore. How much of me is still a child, wanting my way, quick to cry ‘it’s not fair’. […]

This project finds faint echoes in the self-improvement, self-development, self-optimisation we are all constantly hectored into – therapy (or psychedelics, or stoicism) for the mind and Hyrox (or reformer Pilates, or yoga) for the body (with those who are not working on themselves in some way being the exception). Interestingly, the unconventional way our household lives is rarely recommended to those seeking self-knowledge or self-development. The standard advice is an inward turn in order to facilitate a private excavation of an authentic self, along with strong personal boundaries that draw distinct lines between that self and others. Porousness tends to be framed as deleterious to Project Self. Most monastic orders encourage periods of solitude and silence, to be sure, but much of daily life is spent in an exposing proximity to others, the very idea of which would bring most of us out in hives.

This difficult proximity, where we witness and are witnessed without our protective, polished personas is an immensely powerful change agent. You can see it in action in group therapy, the recovery movement and some short-term intensive self-development programmes, but this powerful ‘technology of the self’, to use Michel Foucault’s phrase, is vanishingly rare. This kind of witnessing is effective because change requires us to be honest about who we currently are. Living in community is where illusions about the self go to die! […]

My experience is that our community (and other lasting ones) hold together by turning attention beyond ourselves.

She then turns to the Jesus-shaped “beyond” holding her particular experiment together. The language she uses is so exquisite that you’re really best served reading it over there, in context.

9. We’ll close with a stirring sermon from another former Mbird conference speaker Nadia Bolz-Weber, posted to The Corners under the perfect title “We are exactly that stupid.” Her text was the passage in Exodus about the golden calf, and boy oh boy does she get there in end:

Maybe the Israelites took a God too big to manage and melted it down into a God they could hold. But maybe we just come at it from the other direction. We make ourselves bigger until God fits comfortably in our pocket. Different method, but maybe the same calf. Because a God I only really need on occasion is a God I can domesticate like cattle and carry around like a little worry stone for when I get anxious. […]

And when we are anxious, friends, do we not also do whatever we can to make it stop? We follow leaders who are confident but not trustworthy. We hoard wealth. We lean into temporary oblivion through scrolling, drinking, online betting, binge eating, which works for a minute, and then the dopamine wears off and we have to start it all over again.

And does my own heart not cling to false promises more than to God’s word? Do I not come up with a backup plan when it feels like God is taking too long? Do I not rely on my own strength more than God’s? As if I have to meet some sort of self-sufficiency deductible before my spiritual benefits kick in.

I don’t say all this to be a bummer. I say it because we are the likes of whom God saves, just like they were the likes of whom God delivers. If we don’t think those people are we people, then I’m not sure what exactly we are doing here. The fact is, God has only ever had the likes of them and the likes of us to work with; we who forget that when anxiety circles in on us, and God feels silent, or absent, or angry, that we cannot actually run away from God because: there is nowhere else to go. […]

Yes, we have a God who cannot be held in our hands. But we also have a God who will not let us go from his own. Amen.

Strays:

• Mockingcast Episode 300 is in the bag and should be out early next week. Thank you to everyone who sent in such wonderful and encouraging notes.
• Other must-listens are Zadie Smith on Wild Card, Andy Squyres’ conversation with John Mark McMillan, and the recent episode of The Permanent Questions, in which David Brooks talks to Jeffrey Goldberg (fast forward to the 17-minute mark for a primer on #Seculosity). Paul McCartney on Good Hang with Amy Poehler was pretty special too. Oh, and if you haven’t gotten around to the “Tamara” installment of Heavyweight, do yourself a favor.
• Go Brewers!

The post October 17-23 appeared first on Mockingbird.

Ian: Caleb, what led you to pick In the Mouth of Madness?

Caleb: I actually watched it earlier this year on my quest to see every John Carpenter film. This was the final movie of his I hadn’t seen. And it was the perfect one to end on. An autumnal, meta movie about authorship and terror. Just right up my alley. And what better way to go insane than in an impossibly dark cathedral in an autumnal New England town? Who wouldn’t want to watch a movie about that? And who wouldn’t want it to happen to them too?

Ian: Well, when you put it that way …

Blake: I was really struck this time by Trent and Cane’s dialogue when Cane states, “I am God now …” and Trent responds something to the effect of “I didn’t know God was a hack horror writer.” It’s a great comeback but also chilling in that humans, no matter their brilliance and no matter how well-adjusted they present as being, are hacks when it comes to authoring their own stories, let alone the stories of others. Only God can weave the narrative in such a way that the goodness, justice, and mercy of the ending is earned.

Caleb: And that sanity is maintained!

Blake: Exactly!

Caleb: If fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, then trying to usurp him is entering the Mouth of Madness.

Ian: It is, but it’s a sanity that might look insane to the surrounding world. And that’s the question with Trent, isn’t it? He sounds insane, but he sees through the bogus story Cane is weaving.

Blake: In this way, I think the film makes for a thrilling blueprint of the failures of humans trying to weave together the grand narrative of existence, and how fiction can portray our own failures to usurp God’s position and role.

Caleb: This reminded me of Tim Keller recounting how Dorothy Sayers wrote herself into her own detective novels to be a help and savior of a sort to her own protagonist, Peter Wimsey. In the Mouth of Madness tells the opposite story: Sutter Cane writes himself into his stories to destroy his characters.

Blake: So in this way, Cane is a type of Satan … which means Dante’s footprint is all over this film as well.

Blaine: *In Gordon Ramsey voice* Bloody hell. Here we go again …

Ian: You know, I’m something of a Dante adaptation myself!

We are all creatures spoken into existence, in a story in which, like Sayers, the Teller, the Creator, becomes a character. And there are so many stories vying for authoritative interpretation of the world and of what we are.

Caleb: There’s something interesting too in how many times it’s mentioned that the film rights to Cane’s book have been optioned. I think Carpenter was playing with how many people are only familiar with these stories via the film medium, which I imagine is even more true now, 30 years later.

And the movie ends, not with Trent rereading Cane’s book to find out how it all ends but rather alone in a theater, eating popcorn and laughing hysterically (almost weeping) as he watches his own life play out, rather absurdly, on the silver screen.

Blake: In some ways it is the mixed moral affection of giving oneself over to something that isn’t a wholly moral good. I think again of the ending of THE VVITCH where our protagonist is levitating in the air, and her face is both ecstatic and terrified with tears rolling down.

Ian: It seems like the insane ecstasy of embracing oblivion. Here it’s the film adaptation, but this could just as easily be a Reel or a TikTok: all of which are in the mouth of madness. And all feature subjects playing at being the main character of a story they’re manufacturing, one that reduces and demeans and distorts those characters. I gotta say, it’s been a long time since I last watched this, and listen: I enjoyed it. But it was a little all over the place.

Blake: It’s a mess but a lovely mess. It has issues, to be sure. Every time I watch it, its flaws are apparent, but I come away from it enjoying myself more than I have any reason to.

Ian: Does this feel for anyone else like the beginning of the end for Carpenter as a director making expansive, imaginative things, trying to do something more interesting than just entertainment?

Blake: Oh, for sure the beginning of the end. The seams are beginning to show here. This is the last film of his that I would say is “good”; everything after, he feels like he is getting tired and resenting the work of directing. There is a reason why The Ward is an absolute turd. (It’s the last one he did.)

Ian: I think you hit the nail on the head: yes, it’s like he resents the work of directing. Working with all these teams of people to try to bring something about when he is something of an auteur. And I wonder if bigger-budget productions means he can’t just keep working with the same pool of people that he knows and that know him, that he has a bit of psychic connection to, that understand what he’s trying to do, that are on the same sympathetic wavelength, and that can all contribute to this vision.

And that can’t but be dismantled when your production crew becomes as large as it is for a work like this or Escape from L.A. or Vampires or Ghosts of Mars, and I wonder if that feeds into it, this resentment. And I further wonder if that’s why he’s found his muse again just focusing on music. I like a lot of his albums of his own compositions where he collaborates with his son, but also his scores for the new Halloween trilogy are outstanding, I think.

Blaine: I was going to say that I feel like you can almost sense an anger or frustration behind this film. In some ways, the movie is an extended reflection by Carpenter on his work and the place of horror as a genre within society.

Those early scenes with Heston’s publisher character seem indicative of a soul weary of having to bend to the whims and financial preoccupations of studios.

Caleb: I agree with Blaine that this feels like Carpenter reckoning with his career in this sober kind of way. I think that’s what makes it feel so vital. You can tell this movie meant something to him.

But I do disagree with Blake in that I think his last great movie is not this but Vampires.

Ian: That was me! Don’t get me wrong, I have such a soft spot in my heart for Vampires, but it doesn’t have the attempt at high concept his earlier work does, so it’s only fun. (And the movie that made me think, “Yeah, it would be pretty rad to be part of a vampire hunting crew.”)

Caleb: Well, to your point, that’s why a movie like this, what someone could consider just a B-movie, “cosmic horror crap,” actually feels like an important attempt to investigate larger-than-life questions about stories, meaning, and life itself.

I think we all have that appreciation for this genre in common — it feels big and important, even when its budget isn’t.

Blake: I also miss Sam Neill, and this film is just one more example of what a talent we have lost. He pulls off the hard-boiled private investigator and transitions to bats%@* crazy with such ease.

Ian: Sam Neill is only ever giving 130%. It doesn’t matter what the rest of the production is doing or how well they’re doing it, he gives his all and more. And I love how you only have to say the words “cosmic horror” and he says, “I’m in.”

Blaine: I agree! It felt very nice to revisit a Neill movie this season. I also think Carpenter inherently “gets” what makes a Lovecraft story Lovecraftian. He understands the mood, tone, and sense of dread conjured up in these types of stories, while still leaving his own unique imprint on the film.

Ian: Probably the most Lovecraftian element is Cane’s opening of the world to the Old Ones. It’s not liberation from religion but opening the city to new gods.

Blake: Our own madness so often is our constant drive at attempting to name the unnameable and understand the unknowable.

Ian: Yes, and I see here how Carpenter’s also of two minds. He wants to show us the skeptic that refuses to believe the phenomena all around him. There’s a great moment where Cane tells him, “You’re always looking for the con, aren’t you?” and it reminded me of C. S. Lewis’ statement about those who are always trying to see through things, in the sense of piercing through the deception and the smoke and the mirrors and the machinery that keeps this lie afloat. He says if you’re always trying to see through then you’ll never actually see anything, and it’s so applicable to Trent, who’s so accustomed to and skilled at finding deceptions and connivances. But that skill that is so lauded by modernity doesn’t help him to actually grapple with reality. He has to see it and acknowledge it.

And yet Carpenter’s also a bit of a cynic. He wants it both ways, it seems to me, because he wants to say, “Yeah, but this is all fiction. And all such talk is fiction.” It’s just telling how the contradictions in his heart make this film. He wants to unmask lies, but he also wants to unmask unmasking and show “this is real.” And I think that he’s not sure where he fits into the typology of this film. He is both Trent and Cane, and I think that feeds the film’s power and its confusion both.

Thanks for joining us again, boils and ghouls! We hope you had fun plunging into the mouth of madness with us and that you will all find your moorings in the true story God is telling. Join us next week when we watch and discuss Halloween (2018), and until then, stay spooky!

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