I confess, I often find it hard to tell the difference between the two.

That struggle to distinguish the shallow from the deep is one of the primary themes in my new book, And the Sea Was No More: Reading the Bible in the Deep.

The book is rooted in the depiction of God’s creation of the world in Genesis chapter one. When God begins the work of creation, we’re told “the earth was a formless void, and darkness covered the face of the deep” (1:2). God goes on from there to speak light and life into existence, calling everything that is made “good.”

But what about the darkness and the deep? Neither are called good, but they’re also not destroyed. God allows them to persist in the world.

The darkness is restrained by the Light (1:4) — a Light it will never be able to overcome (Jn 1:5) — and the watery Deep is restrained by a Dome that holds it back so that life can flourish under its protective shield (Gen 1:6–7). But both the darkness and the deep are allowed to linger in our world. God restrains them, but also, for some reason, sustains them.

And as the story goes on, we see that sometimes God allows the chaos water to rush in on us.

This theme of threatening water will be used repeatedly in the Bible to describe the experience of being catastrophically overwhelmed. It functions as a flexible image for the things in life that sink us, whether it’s an illness, or a natural disaster, or depression, or a marauding army, or death itself. From Noah to the Exodus, from the Psalms to Jonah, to the life of Jesus and on through to the book of Revelation, the chaos water will make its presence known. And then, at the very end of the Bible, John will share a glimpse of a new creation where “the sea was no more,” and as a result, “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things [that is, the world surrounded by the chaos waters of the deep] have passed away” (Rev 21:1–2, 4).

***

Truth be told, the revelation of the scriptural Deep saved my faith.

About twenty years ago, life pressures built up around me to such an extent that I began experiencing overwhelming panic attacks in response to horrific intrusive thoughts. I kept the panic at bay as long as I could, but eventually, I lost my mind.

At the time, the only mental health tool I had in my spiritual toolbox was the practice of contemplative, centering prayer. But when I lost my capacity for mental focus, I lost my capacity to pray, to hear God in scripture, to worship with an open heart, and to share myself openly with others. And when all that happened, I began to lose my capacity to trust in God’s providential goodness. Everywhere I looked, all I could see was a dangerous world where chaos appeared free to rush and run with no one able to restrain it.

I’d learned from great teachers of the Christian life that God sometimes allows us to experience periods of dryness and doubt in order to strengthen our faith, so that’s how I interpreted my experience early on: it was a spiritual battle, and I needed to be courageous and bear up under the weight of it all until the period of training was over.

But my condition only grew worse.

Then, one day, after years of mental, physical, and spiritual suffering, I realized that there might be a difference between the darkness and the Deep.

Here’s how I describe it in the book:

The darkness is characterized by a painful sense of God’s absence and a corresponding lack of the spiritual consolations we’d grown used to — the pleasure of singing, the yearning to pray, the experience of God speaking to us through Scripture. This darkness results in a loss of hope, but with it, the possibility of growth in faith: We learn to love and follow God for who God is, not for what God gives us. Because of this, the darkness of God may be conceived of as a purifying and potentially generative place. We discover that we can learn to walk in the dark, and the blindness we experience sometimes results in a new kind of sight.

The Deep is different. Where the dark is experienced as privation, the Deep is an experience of intolerable excess. Rather than leave us in an empty, desolate place, it’s a tsunami that floods us into a panicked maelstrom. The darkness is a dry desert; the Deep is a raging sea. The darkness is characterized by silence; the Deep, by screaming. They are best friends and often walk hand in hand: There they are, right in the first sentence of the Bible: Darkness covered the face of the Deep (Gen. 1:2). But where the darkness is a potentially teachable place, your only hope in the Deep is that you make it through to the other side. God sometimes partners with the darkness, but God works to restrain the Deep. God allowed it to do its very worst to the world once, long ago in the days of Noah, and vowed to never let that happen again.

The persistence of the watery Deep has become a scriptural way for me to speak about the experience of being catastrophically overwhelmed, whether by meaninglessness, or intrusive thoughts, or pain, or grief. Scripture helped me to realize there’s no failure or faithlessness in speaking truthfully about such things. Being overwhelmed, even fatally so, is simply a built-in part of being a breakable creature in the world that God has made. No further explanation is necessary. In fact, no explanation could be given that we’d be able to receive.

There’s so much more to say, of course, but here’s what I want you to hear today: don’t feel compelled to think of your mental struggles as spiritually meaningful or beneficial. Don’t automatically assume they’re something God has given you to endure in order to make you stronger or more faithful.

When you’re drowning, the only thing to do is to scream out for help. And sadly, there are ways of being Christian in this world that will keep you from doing that very thing.

Excerpted from And the Sea Was No More: Reading the Bible in the Deep by Dave Nienhuis ©2026 (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.). Reprinted with permission from the publisher.

The post The Darkness and the Deep appeared first on Mockingbird.

Sing Sing tells the true story of a small group of inmates at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, who participate in a program called Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), an organization to “model a justice system grounded in human dignity rather than punishment.” Through the arts, those incarcerated enter into a community where flourishing is possible. In a summer abuzz in the grandeur of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey or the latest Spider-Man installment, it’s this quiet film from last year that’s captured my imagination.

In the film, the RTA group at Sing Sing decides to pivot from their bent for Shakespeare to a far-fetched comedy the group writes together, journeying through the struggle and joys of performing a comedy in a seemingly hopeless place. The challenges of incarcerated employment, high rates of recidivism, and general acclimation to life after prison are real factors for the incarcerated. That coupled with other dramatized portrayals of brutality and disadvantages for those behind bars were factors contributing to my prison assumptions before watching the film. But where Sing Sing feels different is that at its heart are, well, heartbeats; heartbeats of men who have found a way to express themselves in their circumstances through art.

The group practices in a room that’s one crucifix away from a sanctuary. Bright light floods through large windows, clothing the group in the vaulted ceiling room. The men are silly as they play warm-up games before rehearsing lines. There are scenes of them in folding chair circles reminiscent of AA. In this sacred circle, they share their troubles and what an anchor the program has been for them in their rehabilitation. In Sing Sing, the RTA members see each other as brothers, not fellow inmates. The film makes an explicit point to show how they refer to each other as “beloved.” During a particularly tense conversation, group newcomer Divine Eye uses a slur to describe another member. Divine G responds: “We don’t use that word in here. We use ‘beloved.’” Another RTA member, Sean “Dino” Johnson, says to Divine Eye, “We’re here to become human again. To put on nice clothes and dance around. And to enjoy the things that are not in our reality.”

In his book Hunting Magic Eels, Richard Beck describes how stories orient us to a hope outside of ourselves and how he’s seen it play out with his own involvement in a prison ministry. Pulling from Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories” he describes the centrality of enchantment: “Fairy stories help us assume a particular posture toward the world and our lives … This is what the men in my Bible study so desperately need, an outward turn toward grace, help, hope, and a conviction of worthiness that comes to them from beyond the ruin of their lives and the confines of their prison cell.” Channeling Tolkien, stories have the power to recover a clear view of our reality and “see things as we are (or were) meant to see them.” Therein lies the power of recovery and healing; that we would be able to encounter stories that are, in some very real ways, transforming us for our good. There are no dragons or sorcerers or rings to rule them all in Sing Sing. The film’s enchantment is witnessing the inmates testify to the power of stories by acting them out upon a stage.

To be sure, reimagining is no Band-Aid to a broken world. It does not dismiss the pain, nor did it remove the sentences for those confined in Sing Sing. Rather, reimagining frees us to see our groaning world as a world that’s loved so much for it to be rescued and transformed. Since the program began at Sing Sing 30 years ago, RTA is now active at thirteen other penitentiaries. Fewer than 3% of RTA participants return to prison where recidivism rates nationally stand around 60%. These are hopeful numbers worthy of celebrating. And if the goal of Sing Sing was to artistically portray that a creative program led to successful prison reform, then it should be considered a huge success. It wouldn’t be hard to find some thematic elements of RTA’s success, retrofit this as “redemptive creativity,” and apply it to other industries for personal and communal flourishing; the books would fly off the shelf!

But the efficacy of the program paled in comparison to when I found out that almost all the actors in Sing Sing played themselves in the film. Men who were once bound, now free, acting out their rescue story. Not only did Sing Sing testify that hope could be found in a hopeless place, the very men who found this hope bore witness to its power on the screen.

It makes me consider the way Jesus’ ministry was constantly reminding and refocusing his followers to see things as they were “meant to be seen,” and how many head-scratching looks he received when he talked about his upside-down kingdom, as if there was a different world he saw filled with impossibilities and strangeness and hope he was bringing forth to us. How do we make sense of a God whose ways do not compute? Or how do our modern sensibilities consider the parables of foolish fathers, farmers that sow seeds in parking lots equivalents, or how the inmates of Sing Sing have the audacity to find hope upon a stage? Tolkien implores us that “we need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity — from possessiveness.” Too often, I’m like Nathanael when Philip implores him to come follow Jesus of Nazareth in John 1:46. Consigned to his opinions of the place and its people, Nathanael scoffs, “What good can come from Nazareth?” I need the brother and sister who, like Phillip, respond  “Come and see.”

When I think about the gospel and how it might speak to my own reimagining, I look to the saints who display a grace that speaks to the realities of everyday life and carries me forward. I have the Mad Farmer, the Junior College Basketball Coach, the Saint of Second Chances, and now the saints of Sing Sing. It is these and other flashes of grace that give me a different story and speak to a bigger story to order my days.

As snippets from real RTA performances rolled along with the final credits, I thought of the line in Isaiah about how in the new heavens and the new earth, swords and spears will be fashioned into farm equipment. My mind wandered to the prisons that will lay dormant on that glorious day. Except, that is, when we might gather in sanctuary rooms deep within their walls, light the stage, and testify with stories and songs of rescue from the old world now past. It’s that future hope that grounds me in reality, Jesus of Nazareth constantly adjusting my eyes to how his world’s meant to be seen.

The post How the World Is Meant to Be Seen appeared first on Mockingbird.

Remember when “grit” was a household idea back in 2016? Everyone wanted a gritty personality, to raise gritty kids, and to hire gritty employees, because success was linked to drive and willpower. Grit made the pre-pandemic world go round. Since then, a mix of new social science research failed to replicate grit studies, and a mix of pandemic and smartphone fatigue and GLP-1 drug access changed the social tune. Grit is out, and the author who coined the term, Angela Duckworth, has backpedaled on many of her original claims.

In her latest book, Situated, Duckworth suggests that the new frontier for self-help is not willpower and drive but control of our environment around us. Our wills, writes Duckworth, are the products of our situations, and so by changing our situation, we can realign our wills. Meghan O’Gieblyn has doubts. Reviewing the book for the New Yorker, O’Gieblyn asks whether we’re actually rejecting willpower if we apply it to our situation and not our own decision-making:

For all its attempts to disavow the cult of effort, “Situated” will likely rankle the same critics who accused “Grit” of advocating a crude bootstrap logic. “Very often, the greatest obstacle to getting situated has nothing to do with money or privilege or power,” Duckworth writes. “Rather, it’s assuming it can’t be done.” A major impediment to goal fulfillment, she contends, is “status quo bias,” our preference for things to stay the same. She cites David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, “This Is Water,” which opens with a parable in which a young fish is asked “How’s the water?” and replies, “What the hell is water?” The story, she argues, illustrates how difficult it is to practice “situational awareness,” the art of seeing how our environment, and other people, inflect our behavior.

Duckworth peppers her book with aphorisms about the importance of collaboration and community: “the real hero’s journey is from ‘I’ to ‘we.’ ” Or: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” She also suggests that personal growth requires constantly uprooting oneself and challenges the common wisdom that you cannot run away from your problems. Duckworth considers this objection, but her response is tautological: “Wherever you go, there you are — so choose where you go wisely.”

This tautology arguably lies at the very heart of Duckworth’s book. If motivation is conditioned by environment, then all you have to do is change your situation to get what you want out of life. But the decision to change one’s environment is presumably itself subject to some previous desire. “A man can do what he will, but not will what he will,” Arthur Schopenhauer wrote. We can pursue our desires, in other words, but our desires themselves are shaped by our environment and our personal history — a problem that extends backward ad infinitum. Duckworth sees this recursiveness as a virtuous circle that can be harnessed to one’s advantage: change your situation, and you change your thoughts and desires—which changes your actions, leading to better situations, better thoughts and desires, and so on. This framework, which she calls a “flywheel,” is presented with utter authority and an accompanying diagram, and no acknowledgment that it can also work in reverse.

A grit mindset says that our motivations are good, and therefore they should be pursued to all ends at full strength. A Situated mindset says that our motivations are influenced by our environments, and so we need to shift our environments to align them with our desired goals. But if our willpower isn’t strong enough to change our behaviors, do we think it is strong enough to change our environments and situations? And what if our desires are the actual problem? O’Gieblyn continues:

It’s hard to spend much time with “Situated” without sensing a sleight of hand. Although the book insists on the futility of will power, it offers a vision of human agency that is virtually omnipotent, capable of defying all obstacles — class, geography, milieu — and drafting peers into the supporting cast of one’s own heroic narrative. Duckworth calls it “situational agency.” In a 2024 interview, riffing on the famous line from William Henley’s poem “Invictus”(“I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul”), she offered a slight amendment to the poem’s message: “The seas that you decide to sail are part of your agency, too.” […]

Duckworth would likely argue that situational awareness requires thinking, too: assessing one’s environment, taking stock of the external factors that prevent you from fulfilling your desires. What it does not ask you to do, however, is to question whether your desires are fair or just — or are even your own. […]

Self-interrogation, of course, is often unpleasant and is not a prescription that is likely to sell many books. But the alternative — the freedom to perpetually abandon difficult circumstances — is, in the long run, the more wearying path. One could argue, in fact, that the current popularity of self-binding is a response to the anxiety and exhaustion many of us feel amid the relentless invitations to reimagine our lives. We have more opportunities than ever to eject ourselves from trying situations. Peers can be unfriended; politicians can be unfollowed. Marriages are easily dissolved, and jobs are no longer meant to last your entire life. The ropes that tie us to the mast are made of straw. Although Duckworth presents situational agency as a revolutionary form of self-mastery, it may be another instance of status-quo bias, cleverly disguised. It is simply the water in which we swim.

The fundamental problem, as outlined by Christian theology and not the Wharton School’s Behavior Change for Good Initiative, is that human desire is not neutral. It is bent toward selfishness, and that bent often leads to self-sabotage. The only two ways that these desires change are through the pain of bottoming out or the affections of a holy love. This is why, despite its popularity among the chattering class between 2016 and 2020, you won’t find much in the way of “grit” in our archives here on the site.

2. Earlier this week, I had a chance to share about my own struggle to rage against The Machine despite my inability to free myself from it (to put it in Duckworth’s terms, I lack the grit to alter my technological situatedness!). Stephanie H. Murray shares that same struggle in the New York Times this week, writing, “My Dumbphone Made My Life Better. It Made Everyone Else’s Worse.”

Even in real-life social situations, the fact that I don’t have a smartphone means I am often little better than dead weight. Who’s going to take the card payments at the school fund-raiser? Who’s going to double-check the restaurant’s hours? Who’s going to message the Airbnb owner to let her know we’re on our way from the airport? The answer is always: not Steph. To forgo smartphones in a world optimized for them is to become someone in constant need of accommodation, but for totally self-imposed reasons. Like adopting a highly restrictive diet without any of the health issues that might justify the need to organize every dinner out around it.

At Ms. Marquette’s children’s preschool, parents are expected to scan a QR code when they drop off and pick up their kids. Without a smartphone, she had to interrupt a teacher to manually check her children in and out. “It really wasn’t fair to them, frankly,” she said.

Notably, it was not hardhearted employers or faceless corporate overlords whom Mr. Dobrenko and Ms. Marquette worried they were letting down. It was the people looking after their children, fellow parents, neighbors and friends. More than anyone, it was their families.

This is perhaps why, though family considerations were often the impetus for putting the smartphone down, they were also the reason for picking it back up. Forgoing a smartphone may allow you to feel more present with your loved ones in any given moment, but it also hamstrings your ability to actually be there for them during times of need.

Living in small-town Pennsylvania, I am happy to share that my life isn’t nearly as tech saturated as what Murray describes (yet!). We have no Ubers, no DoorDashes, and some people still lack broadband internet. The tension she describes is nonetheless present: How do we guard our own sanity and mental health when society has organized itself around technologies that challenge our sanity and mental health? How do we create firm boundaries around technology when they hinder our most important life relationships? (Again, I have thoughts to this end!)

3. Checking in on last week’s 9/11 anniversary reflections, Arthur Brooks at The Free Press asks a good question: Why is it that New York seemed to come together after the 9/11 attacks, but subsequent tragedies, like Hurricane Katrina or the pandemic, inspired all sorts of division and vitriol? The answer, suggests Brooks, is the role of blame, offering a reflection on relationship and survival that comes right out of Genesis 3.

What explains the difference between 9/11 and every crisis that came later? Why does one kind of tragedy bring the world together in kindness and mutual trust, and another tear us apart? With few truly national catastrophes to study, a proper statistical comparison that controls for these events’ many differences is not possible. But a parallel line of research suggests a compelling theory.

I am referring to work done at a familial level. Obviously, collective crises are very different from individual ones. But the research is still informative, particularly when it comes to data about the worst family catastrophe imaginable: the death of a child.

Many family counselors believe that bereavement over a child tends to disrupt a marriage — and indeed, one statistical analysis from 2008 shows that such a loss increases the likelihood of divorce by about a third. But there’s nothing predetermined about that outcome. As one meta-analysis of studies published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies in 2016 shows, the loss of a child can also bring a couple together in their grief.

What decides which it will be? Blame. In the face of tragedy, blame can function as a short-term protective mechanism for parents to make sense of their terrible loss. But when that blame is directed at one’s spouse, the consequences are dire: It stimulates resentment and bitterness, ruins communication, and causes the marriage to be far less likely to survive. But when no blame is cast, shared pain can become relationship glue. In that 2016 study, parents who avoided blame by communicating well and trying to understand and accept each other’s grieving, tended to protect — and even strengthen — their marriage. And what predicts blame in the face of tragedy? Dysfunctionality in the marriage before the event: poor communication, resentment over other complaints, and low unity. In other words: a bad marital culture.

It follows logically that a public tragedy for which no fellow citizen is to blame would tend to unite a nation. The 9/11 attacks brought America together because it was an experience of shared national pain.

When blame becomes a tool for the expiation of our own negativity, not only is justice passed over, but our most important relationships suffer. It’s a tale as old as Adam and Eve. To quote the immortal lyrics of The Hold Steady: “The dude blamed the chick. I heard the chick blamed the snake. I heard they were naked when they got busted. I heard things ain’t been the same since.”

4. A few years ago, my short video feeds dipped into Judge Judy clips. When Ryan Zickgraf at UnHerd offers a eulogy for Judge Judy’s famous TV courtroom drama, dubbing her “America’s last great moralist,” he’s not being ironic. There is something remarkable about the fact that her 25-year-long show kept the attention of tens of millions of viewers, and her departure from daytime TV into retirement signals a shift in America’s moral vanguard.

To be clear, Judge Judy was never prestige TV, and her judgments weren’t sermons delivered from upon high. It was lowbrow reality fare: the litigants agreed to binding arbitration and received appearance fees, while the production paid the monetary awards. But the artifice of the production didn’t make the underlying disputes less recognizable, which is precisely what made her effective as a public moralist. She met Americans in the muck, amid the petty resentments and creative accounting of everyday life, where lofty principles hit headlong into concrete questions about whether someone owed their cousin $500. Viewers could tune in for the humiliation and accidentally absorb a lesson about keeping your word, which is probably more moral instruction than most of us get from prestige television.

Judy’s creed essentially fitted on an index card: pay your debts, show up when you said you’d show up, and don’t co-sign a car loan for a boyfriend you’ve known for five weeks. And above all, an excuse for your wrongdoing doesn’t make you right. She didn’t quote scripture or ask about defendants’ relationship with their father or whether they voted for Donald Trump or Joe Biden. She asked for their receipt, and in the 90 seconds it took them to explain why they didn’t have it, she had already decided they were guilty, told them so, banged her gavel, and moved on.

These principles sound banal until one considers how much of Judy’s career coincided with the erosion of authority among the institutions that once delivered such judgments. We remain deep in our “Do what thou wilt” era, in which self-expression is sacred and any restraint on it requires an explanation, preferably accompanied by an apology. Everyone is encouraged to live “their truth” while abandoning universal truth.

We certainly haven’t abandoned moralizing, but these judgments usually concern the wickedness of people we already dislike. The harder task is persuading people to accept a standard that might find them wanting, which was the premise of Judy’s courtroom: people could arrive convinced of their righteousness and leave having been told, in front of millions of people, that they were wrong.

Wait a sec … I knew that the “litigants” in the show came for binding arbitration, and I knew the show compensated them for their TV appearance. I didn’t know, however, that the show promised to pay the compensatory damages that Judge Judy awarded. I think that I, too, would show up before a judge to answer for my misdeeds if I knew someone else was going to pay for my consequences for me. Pardon the youth minister theology juke, but I know of only one other Judge who bears the cost of the judgments he renders.

5. In laughs this week: “One Hour at Friend’s Vacation Home Undoes Lifetime of Class Consciousness,” and “‘I Would Never Survive in the Suburbs,’ Says Woman Also Not Surviving in the City” hit home from Reductress. Also fun: “‘It’s Such A Red Flag If You Don’t Like Cats’ Says Owner Of Evil Cat That Won’t Let Anyone But Her Touch Him,” and “Local woman betrays family history by eating at different chain restaurant.”

But top form this week goes to McSweeney’s laugh-out-loud exploration of the new tech startup Rumpelstiltskin:

For some, having a baby can be prohibitively expensive, but the cost of living shouldn’t mean that starting a family is just a fairy tale. That’s where Rumpelstiltskin comes in.

Rumpelstiltskin isn’t your typical fertility startup. Rumpelstiltskin is here for your child.

Our founders took years of experience in casino design and timeshare sales and swaddled them together into a first-of-its-kind solution that asks: Do poor people deserve to have kids?

The business is revolutionary, but the concept isn’t. It’s a simple exchange introduced by German academics that dates back to the early nineteenth century. We’ll cover the complete cost of IVF to help you build your family — yes, really — and then, on your child’s first birthday, we might take your baby.

6. The last word this week goes to J. D. Peabody at Christianity Today and his reflection on meaningful work. What do we do with the fact that Jesus spent some 20 years of his life working in a trade before his rabbinical ministry kicked off? There is no evidence of his labor, no furniture that he made and rested upon nor table that he made and ate at that preserves his first decades of work. Does that mean those years of toil pre-baptism were insignificant because they didn’t build anything that lasted? Peabody’s insight, that Jesus himself knows the experience of unappreciated work, is good for anyone dealing with the overlap of existential meaning and vocation.

The answer may lie in the question, for nearly all of us will, at some point — or many points — ask the same thing. Research has shown that more than we want other benefits, even promotions and raises, we want our work to be meaningful. Like the author of Ecclesiastes, we have a visceral need to matter. And most of the time, we aren’t sure that what we’re doing with all those hours has any lasting value.

Even when the significance is more readily apparent, it’s rarely permanent. People in all kinds of professions pour their hearts into worthwhile endeavors, only to watch them be systematically dismantled upon their retirement. Employees who were once thought invaluable leave and are replaced or made obsolete. Long-term import becomes impossible to measure. “Soon you will have forgotten the world,” observed Marcus Aurelius, “and soon the world will have forgotten you.”

The world has most certainly forgotten the countless hours Jesus invested in his builder days. No matter how skillfully he worked or how great his creativity, the fruit of his labor is all lost to history.

This truth is perhaps the most poignant and personal to me now: The church that my wife and I planted and pastored for more than two decades is gone. It no longer exists as a community. We loved and were loved by that congregation to the end, and we can hardly wrap our minds around its absence.

Was our work there a failure because it didn’t outlast us? Did it have any enduring significance? And how am I now employed in such a different field, where eternal significance feels even harder to see?

I can’t answer those questions fully. But I come back to Jesus and the world’s ignorance of what he did for so many years. I think about how he took all his humanity back to heaven with him. He still remembers that season of his life, when he poured his best energies into projects no one now recalls. Christ is still actively experiencing the world’s perception that how he spent most of his life was irrelevant.

Strays:

• “The standard for live singing isn’t human anymore.” Despite wanting to talk about things other than technology, this reflection about live Auto-Tune and perfectionist expectations is eye-opening and ear-opening.
• For the Annie Dillard fans out there, Image Journal’s “Annie Spans the Gap” from a few years ago is worth a read.
• And this reflection on literary criticism from the Hedgehog Review is great. I appreciated its frankness about how literary theory led to a generation of “disappointed, maladaptive skeptics” and “admirably uncommitted ironists,” and how theory can sate the desire to leave the body and reality all together.

The post September 12-18 appeared first on Mockingbird.

It was just two years ago, around this time, that old family and ministry friends of ours stopped through to visit us in our cozy little North Carolina mountain town, a little worn from the weathering a congregation can too often dish out. The conversation turned to a sermon series he’d just wrapped up — and for which he’d caught some flack — whereupon I, of course, couldn’t help but mention Capon and his interpretation of the parable he’d just preached. “Who is this Capon guy?” he asked. “I’ve never heard of him.” “Yeah,” I replied, “few have; or if they have, they keep it to themselves.” Having piqued his curiosity with that, he promptly asked for a title. I obligingly gave him Kingdom, Grace, Judgment — Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus, from which I plan to devote the first several of this series.

If there’s one thing religion cannot abide, it’s “paradox.” We like clean lines and measurable outcomes. Metrics are the thing these days. Who’s in, who’s out. That’s what we want to know, and our denominational overseers above all. As for “grace”? It depends on whom it goes to. And as for “judgment”? Well, that too. Pastors feel it all most acutely; my friend promptly ordered himself a copy. A couple of years later (as in, just a few weeks ago), when they returned on a through visit, I couldn’t help but smile as he recounted to me in our kitchen — a little covertly, as if the Big Brother of his denominational ear had somehow bugged our home — that he “enjoyed Capon’s illustrations” and even “used a few of them in his sermons,” but he “was afraid he sounded like he might be a Universalist” and so “never credited his name,” as if he were Voldemort himself! But in one instance, at a pastors’ conference, he said he’d gotten into a conversation with a fellow pastor with whom he sensed “common peril” and to whom he recounted his pleasure at reading Capon. Sure enough, that guy took his pleasure at his word and ordered a copy for himself! And not long after, upon meeting my friend at the next denominational gathering, he said upon greeting him, “Hey, aren’t you that Capon guy?!” “Nooo!” my friend said. “You can’t say that here!”

This is not an uncommon occurrence, as I’ve come to find. While attending a beloved annual conference of ours a couple of years back — which shall remain unnamed — among whom there are a host of closet Capon fans, the director mentioned that they were taking ideas for conference themes for subsequent years. In the dinner line I suggested to him the writings of Capon. To which he replied, “I’m trying to keep my job.” I laughed aloud. I get it. Quoting Capon from the pulpit in my most recent ministry stint led to it being my last ministry stint in my then denomination. Some of my parishioners gushed at hearing him; others, eh not so much. I’ll share the excerpt here with you someday. But for today, I want to take a look at what Capon calls “Jesus at his parabolic best.”

But before we do, and in the event that you’re joining this column late, just a quick word on parables, particularly as Jesus utilizes them …

Speaking in comparisons and teaching by means of stories are … two of the oldest instructional techniques in the world. And in the hands of almost all instructors except Jesus, a relatively straightforward business …With Jesus however … in resorting to parabolic discourse … [his] point was that any understanding of the kingdom his hearers could come up with would be a misunderstanding […]

From Jesus’ point of view, the sooner their misguided minds had the props knocked out from under them, the better. After all their yammer about how God should or shouldn’t run his own operation, getting them just to stand there with their eyes popped and their mouths shut would be a giant step forward. (Parables, p. 5, 7)

So, on to Jesus’ parable of “the Publican and the Pharisee,” as it’s commonly known — the scriptures having no subheadings and titles in their original form, after all. Luke 18:9–14. I trust you can find it in your Bible or on your device, a familiar tale to you, I’ll wager. Two men go up to temple to pray, one a publican, a tax-collector, and the other a Pharisee. Familiar enough? But right out the gates Capon warns us against our usual prejudices of familiarity; this tax collector is not your local neighborhood H&R Block employee or even some dreaded stiff-collared suit from the IRS; it’s far worse than that.

 [This] tax-farmer … is the worst kind of crook: a legal one, a big operator, mafia-style enforcer working for the Roman government on a nifty franchise that lets him collect — from his fellow Jews, mind you, from the people whom the Romans might have trouble finding, but whose whereabouts he knows and whose language he speaks — all the money that he can bleed out of them, provided only he pays the authorities an agreed upon flat fee. He has been living for years on the cream he has skimmed off their milk money … a fat cat who drives a stretch limo, drinks nothing but Chivas Regal [I had to GPT that one myself, it’s expensive Scotch whiskey], and never shows up at a party without at least two $500-a-night call girls in tow. (p. 338)

That’s more like it. Having effectively benched the image likely pushed on you by decades of all-too-obliging preachers who happily pass this tax collector off as a poor and humble victim of an oppressive system but who really means well in his heart (which is, after all, what really counts) and who manages by sermon’s end, in all his humility, to show up this Pharisee in all his pomposity, Capon promptly ushers the villainous teacher of the law onto the stage. “Forget,” Capon urges,

the prejudice that Jesus’ frequently stinging remarks about Pharisees have formed in your mind. Give this particular Pharisee all the credit you can. He is, after all, a good man. To begin with, he is not a crook … not a womanizer. He takes nothing he hasn’t honestly earned, gives everyone he knows fair and full measure, he is faithful to his wife, patient with his children, steadfast for his friends … and he is not only good; he is religious. And not hypocritically religious, either. His outward uprightness is matched by an inward discipline. He fasts twice a week and puts his money where his mouth is: ten percent off the top for God. If you know where to find a dozen or two such upstanding citizens, I know several parishes that will accept delivery of them, no questions asked … best of all, this Pharisee thanks God for his happy state […]

Jesus shows [him] in the very act of giving God the glory! … Maybe the reason he went up to the temple to pray was that, earlier in the week he slipped a little and thought of his righteousness as his own doing … and thought “that’s terrible … I must set my values straight by thanking God.” But what does Jesus tell you about this good man — about this entirely acceptable candidate for the vestry (or elder board, for the Baptists and Presbyterians among us) of your parish? He tells you that not only is he in bad shape, but that he is in worse shape than a tax-farmer who is as rotten as they come and who just waltzes into the temple and does nothing more than say as much. In short, Jesus tells you an unacceptable parable. (p. 338–9)

The only reason we think the parable acceptable is because Jesus tells us to! “For,” Capon goes on,

you would — I know I would — gladly accept the Pharisee’s pledge card and welcome him to our midst. But would you accept me for long if I had my hand in the church till to the tune of a Cadillac and a couple of flashy whores? Would you (would the diocesan authorities) think it was quite enough for me to come into church on a Sunday, stare at the tips of my shoes, and say, “God be merciful to me a sinner?” Would the bishop write me a letter commending my imitation of the parable and praising me for preaching not only in word but in deed? Jesus, to be sure, says that God would; I myself have some doubts about you and the bishop. (p. 339)

That’s because, as Capon reminds throughout the book, we are inveterate law lovers and moralists whose hope is naturally located not in a God who forgives sin and raises the dead in their sins and trespasses, but instead in a God of the books who is faithful above all things to squaring the accounts. And if we do somehow manage to set that God-of-the-accounts aside, it’s typically only for a moment, only for as long as it takes to wedge our foot in the door of salvation. For no sooner do we cross the threshold do we find ourselves right back in the posture of the law, pledging to God our solemn vows to do better. “To help you be as clear as possible about your feelings,” Capon asks us that we

imagine taking our publican back to the temple one week later. And have him go back there with nothing in his life reformed; walk him in this week as he walked in last — after seven full days of skimming, wenching, and high-priced Scotch. Put him through the same routine: eyes down, breast smitten, God be merciful and all that. Now then. I trust you see that on the basis of the parable as told, God will not mend his divine ways any more than the publican did his wicked ones. He will do this week exactly what he did last: God, in short, will send him down to his house justified. The question in this … exercise is, do you like that? And the answer, of course, is that you do not. You gag on the unfairness of it. The rat is getting off free. (p. 343)

And then comes the stinger of it: “Why are you so bent on destroying the story by sending the publican back for his second visit with the Pharisee’s speech in his pocket?” I don’t know, and what’s more is, I don’t know how Capon knows!

The first thing to get off the table is the notion that this parable is simply a lesson in the virtue of humility. It is not. It is an instruction in the futility of religion … the folly of the proposition that there is anything at all you can do to put [or keep] yourself right with God … it is a warning to drop all religious stances — and all moral and ethical ones too … an exhortation to move on to faith in a God who raises the dead. (p.338)

The problem with us, of course, is that we’re all too alive; the old Adam and Eve in us, that is. That spirit which prefers a god of bookkeeping and law to the God who actually is; a God who is, was, and will always be Spirit and Life itself and who will quarter no law keeping if we will have anything to do with him. The New Testament Greeks had a name for that law-insistent spirit, the sarx; translated most unfortunately as “the flesh” in most of our English translations. And that sarx spirit does not die easy; it doesn’t really die at all, not at least until we do fully and finally. That sarx is, to be sure, drowned in our baptisms with Jesus in his death and resurrection, but that Old Adam is, as Luther said, “a damned strong swimmer,” ever lobbying us to put him back in the lineup.

Being of this spirit, we are very much like a man who walks into a casino, slaps a Confederate $50 on the table, and asks the dealer to cash him in only to find God the dealer refuses to push us any chips. Our money isn’t any good here, it turns out; the house offers no exchange rate on our antiquated currency. None of the things we bank on so instinctively in our sarx-ridden state will let us play at the table of God; not to begin with, at no point along the way, and certainly not at the finish. It is grace and grace only, “from faith, to faith.” The only way the righteoussed can live is by faith, says St. Paul. There’s no living by works, because works have no life to give.

And I know the havoc being wreaked on you by your troubled mind, because the same havoc is being wreaked on me by mine. The mere contemplation of the consequences of such reckless grace — can you fathom the chaos, man?! Paul gives voice to the internal dissonance of it all, “Shall we sin more then, that grace might abound!” The question did not escape Jesus. His answer; it’s wheat and tares growing up together. Or if you prefer Dr. Venkman’s “cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria, of biblical proportions.” And not just “out there” but right in here, the sinner and the saint inhabiting our very own bodies, until death do us part.

And yet, he has not given us any other way. Sunday after Sunday he bids we come with the only speech in our pocket we can honestly utter — and not as some kind of exchange or transaction, mind you, but as the only means by which he can pry our dead hands open wide enough to lay in them the forgiveness that Jesus is always, by the Spirit, trying to thrust into them, which is “ours, simply — and only — for the believing, no money down and no questions asked.” It is the publican’s speech, “God have mercy on me, a sinner.”

The post “Mass Hysteria — Cats and Dogs, Living Together!” appeared first on Mockingbird.

This is a bad habit of mine: the watching of strangers in their vehicles. A couple in a beat up Jeep full of stuff talk loudly and at the same time, arms flailing in unison as if they are miming each other. I can’t help myself. This is my version of reality TV. Fishbowls of private life sloshing down the public road, unaware or uncaring of my presence. It’s a bit sick, my furtive watching, and occasionally it will bite my butt, like with the turtle-picker, but life is short and full of sorrow. I allow myself the pleasure.

Connecting bumper stickers to their owners is particularly intriguing to me. What kind of person puts the Apple sticker they got from a computer purchase on their car and why? Is that a mermaid pole-dancing a giant fishhook on the back of your Nissan Rogue, sir? I recently saw a white cargo trailer being hauled by a Betty Crocker doppelgänger in orange-tinted sunglasses with a faded decal on the back that read: “Eat Healthy. Exercise Daily. Die Anyway.”

Ma’am, may I please buy you beer?

On the same trailer was another sticker, which I assume to be one of the most popular pieces of bumper art ever: GOD BLESS JOHNNY CASH in white text over a field of black befitting the man. And I got to thinking … Why Johnny Cash? Why God Bless Willie Nelson? What is it about these men that our response to their music would be to anoint them with our prayers? The story I tell myself, much like those I write about my fellow commuters, could be wildly mistaken but it goes like this. I think that by the time these stickers are being printed, a large swath of the population has fallen in love with these men. They are stars. At the same time, we know that our love for them hangs in the balance because their lifestyle and work put them in harm’s way. Like a tracker out in front of the regiment, great artists go off into the wilderness of the soul while we wait pensive for their return and guidance. I think we as a collective can intuit that it must be pretty hard to be Johnny Cash. “God bless that man. He needs all the prayers he can get.” God only knows what goes on behind the eyes of a man who writes the lyric:

“The beast in me is caged by frail and fragile bars,
Restless by day and by night rants and rages at the stars”

Like June Carter Cash, we are powerless to fight the darkness within the man we love, so we do the only thing we can. We pray. Now I know I’m writing about Johnny Cash at some length here, but truth is, he isn’t one of my heroes. His flavor of darkness is not my own; however, he got me thinking about who I would put on that sticker. Who is a hero of mine who lives hard? Maybe not in the style of Willie or Cash, but who is someone who I follow, who ventures into the void to bring back news of road ahead?

Annie Dillard is one of those people for me.

Annie Dillard is the author of a bunch of books, 4 of which sit on my shelf: Holy the Firm, The Maytrees, The Writing Life and most famously, the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winner for non-fiction, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Written when Dillard was 29, the book chronicles her experience exploring a creek behind her home in all seasons and bearing witness to the enormity of life transpiring there. Her descriptions of the place are so evocative that upon first reading I thought: I must see this Tinker Creek with my own eyes! Surely, it is stunningly beautiful. And while Tinker Creek in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley is undoubtedly pretty, it is not dissimilar to any number of wet places in my own backyard. It is Dillard’s accounting of the place that stuns. Read her report of a winter’s walk to the creek:

Today is one of those excellent January partly-cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you’re alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet.

279 pages of this. Writing that is demanding, musical, rewarding, and human. But Dillard’s reckoning does not stop at observation. She then sifts her self through the screen of the creek, apprenticing to its craft and acolyting its message. She notices a butterfly flitting along with tattered wings and writes:

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for …

It is a rare and beautiful thing to read a author who so completely disappears within her own writing. Yet Dillard is not done yet. Courageously, she details a personal encounter with the paranormal. Coming upon “the tree with the lights in it” as she puts it, she is set ablaze with what can only be described as divine revelation.

One day I was walking along Tinker creek and thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.

It is an untidy moment and she lets herself be swept away. In the pages that follow, I fear the author may be coming unglued. Her complete lack of self-consciousness unnerves my ego deeply and I am left with far more questions than answers. Without meaning to, I find myself in prayer for Annie Dillard. This is truly hazardous terrain she walks: to be out in the open, so vulnerable, so attentive to the place that the ground itself can burn beneath her, or the cold creek carry her away. She needs all the help she can get. And yet this perilous setting is precisely where Annie Dillard returns to again and again, falling through the trapdoors of attention and vulnerability into depths of meaning.

God Bless Annie Dillard.

She goes first. She pays the price of her way of being: weeping when called to, despising the despicable, watching death’s parade, suffering loss, bearing its weight, affected by life. She pushes the boundaries of attention and vulnerability to show that their extremes are not fatal. Though it be far easier to stay behind walls, keep up appearances, or medicate away the unnamed pains, she invites the reader to seek their own “tree with the lights in it”, to open oneself to the possibility of being swept away.

This article was originally published at luketurpin.com.

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We are no longer “middle”-aged. We have arrived at aged. Once blissfully ignorant of our bodies, they are now terrifying. We have seen many friends and peers die, 7,000 of us a day, so the end of life is often just a calculation. Looking at the obituary pages, comping lifestyles and Karma, most of us come to realize the futility of raging against the impending dark. Death may have lost some of its sting, but our lives now are a mirror — where once we thought the culture judged, we are judging ourselves.

The “Me Generation” was not born to its entitlement, American culture was its incubator. After the hopeless death of World War II, we were living miracles. We could do no wrong and defined a world gone wrong that we could remake. Many of us were nurtured in the mid-century sanatorium of WWII PTSD compensation — the Great American Suburb. As such, we were the center of an invented culture: malls, drive-through fast food, megachurches, and the promise of wide-open spaces.

“Work hard, play hard” was once a mantra — it’s now a memory for many of us. We boomers are in a crisis of confusion We do not know what to do. Retire? To do what? Work on? To what end? A divide is merging. There are now two distinct groups of baby boomers: those who “retire” and those who press on in the dance with the rest of the culture. It is an irreversible fork in the road. Do we continue to be validated in the world, or do we stop that basis of living and live “It’s all about me”?

But now the bodies that once expressed our control and authority now laugh at us. So we now segue every conversation into our health or that of others (doctor’s appointments, new aches, new diagnosis, and new meds). As the architect Le Corbusier described the houses he designed, our bodies have become “machines for living in.” Our day-to-day has become consumed with the task of ensuring the machines keep running one more day.

To what end?

Many have clocked out of the workaday world and put their minds in an RV to Nowhere. Nowhere is found in the Elderly Special Olympics of “retirement”: on Viking cruise ships, university alumni travel seminars, in “communities,” pretending to be athletic with pickleball and personal “trainers,” or endless visiting of grandchildren, playing golf/fishing/hiking.

But like the unrelenting reality of the obituary page, for some there is an inevitable depression when they find themselves in retirement, aka “God’s waiting room.” Some of those who have switched their lives into that alternate universe often decry it has an inconvenient truth: it’s not that great.

Just like God was not found in the next promotion or the child getting into Harvard or the “good divorce,” God is not found in the achievement of an idyllic retirement either. Because we do not define our lives, no matter how we strive to. Because God made us, is in us, no matter where we are or what we do.

So we are confused. I know a banker who gave up a huge income to save a beloved private school as its treasurer and went on to launch it into the next generation with a drive and belief that was far more important to him than salary. Another “finance guy” leapt into “retirement” in full comfort, control, and health. It was not enough. In endless training and focus he became a volunteer EMT and went on 2 a.m. calls. Both are not “home” yet.

It turns out that for many of us, retirement is not a reward. Our confusion in old(er) age is no different now than it was in our “peak earning years.” Because achievement, good works, or the dedication to control are not salvation. It seems that living for oneself on your own terms is not the life you love.

For me it is impossible to avoid the reality of being given everything. Life itself is now seen to be what it always was: a miracle. We earned none of our validations. Since “retirement” is not a reward but just the next part of that miracle, what do we do with it?  “Having the most toys” may have been a rationale, but it is not enough.

We can check every virtue signal, write an incredible holiday card of children’s weddings, reunions, trips, grandchildren births, but we come to realize that is not why we are alive. All this happens because of the grace of God — not ourselves. Our only quid to that pro quo is devotion to him — that is all we have to give. As the apostle Paul wrote in one of his letters: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters” (Col. 3:23).

It does not matter if we are retired, volunteering 50 hours a week, running a company at 90, or simply checking out groceries at the Stop & Shop — if we think it is all about us, we are lost. If we try to invent our worth, we have lost it.

The post Not Dead Yet: the Conundrum of Retirement appeared first on Mockingbird.

Look at it this way. That is how many come to the Christian faith: the slow ingress of grace which, in our fallen state, we so often try to sweep away. Then, in the mix, a gathering awareness of dust and decay, which no broom of our own can ever quite clear. And finally, in the seeming cadence of a day, the surprising clarity that it — faith in the Lord — is part of us.

As affection for country music deepened, I tended toward a branch of country that feels most familiar: outlaw country. Like our “outlaw” God, it refuses to play by our expectations. It carries an edge both devastating and freeing, with a pick sometimes pining, sometimes playful. The living God, too, is one whom we cannot keep put in schemes, and who, by his divine freedom, is faithful to his promises in the scandal of Christ crucified (1 Cor. 1:23).

In the genre of outlaw country — Waylon and Willie and the boys — the dust settles and scatters. The characters are flawed but loved, traversing long roads that reverberate with promises. Like reverb from a Fender, those promises may echo on our fallen ears like half-remembered scripture. They may recall to us the imago Dei, though now beneath a diamond-crease hat in the heat, both sinner and saint. And the more I listened, the more I realized these songs are doing something theological.

The other day, one of my playlists looped back to a song that always hits me like a psalm disguised as a highwayman tune: Guy Clark’s “L.A. Freeway.” It’s one of those rare pieces of music that reflects and refracts into multiple songs at once: it’s wounded and liberated, weary but suddenly unburdened by a burst of grace. Written more than 50 years ago, when Clark left California for Tennessee, it has become, for lovers of outlaw country, something of an oldie but goodie. And perhaps there is another reason to listen: in his introduction to another oldie — Athanasius’ On the Incarnation — C. S. Lewis argued for the value of returning to old books rather than being captive to the newest thing. Clark might not be Athanasius, but old songs, too, are full of wisdom and surprises when we hear them again. Clark, perhaps with less eloquence but more earthiness, extends the case, too, in the song itself with the line: “Play it for me one more time now.”

So … I cued it up one more time — and on that morning’s drive, both fretful and familiar, it had a way of lifting the weight of the world for a moment.

And much like the psalms, it also lets you breathe again. Not because anything has really changed but because you remember you’re not alone in it. When Clark sings “If I can just get off of this L.A. Freeway,” he is not naming something simply geographical. What he’s doing is touching a universal longing to leave behind — or change — what is broken and to step into something promised but not yet fully visible. “If I can just get off of this L.A. freeway / Without gettin’ killed or caught” pipes through the speakers, followed later by: “Love’s a gift that’s surely handmade / We got somethin’ to believe in.”

And as I listened, I realized I wasn’t merely hearing a country song. It’s a song poised at a cusp: “In my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered me” (Ps. 120:1). That verse opens the Songs of Ascents — a pilgrim sequence whose movement of departure, danger, trust, and arrival resonates with the ambling roads of country music itself.

Now, if — as Waylon Jennings asks in “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” — you ain’t sure Hank done it this way, the Christian tradition has a longstanding conviction that scripture interprets life, and life pushes us back into scripture. Augustine of Hippo models this beautifully in the Confessions, treating his own memories and yearnings as a lens for reading scripture and then allowing it to illuminate those experiences in return. Augustine, then, done it that way — bringing from the storehouse of his life treasures both new and old (Mt. 13:52).

Now, without flattening scripture or elevating human experience into revelation, let’s place Guy Clark’s song alongside the Psalter. Something happens. Something clarifying. Not perfect alignment but resonance. The psalms retain interpretive priority, yet through the tumbled texture of Guy Clark’s song, we may further grasp what the psalmist means by “going out,” “crying out,” or “dwelling secure.”

Let’s try this through three psalms: first, by continuing along the road of the Songs of Ascents with Psalm 121, then by bending back to two earlier psalms. Together, these three psalms may help us interpret Guy Clark’s song. And the song of a rambler — as we move, too, in a retrograde Texas shuffle in the Psalter — may likewise help us hear the psalms more fully.

And what’s more outlaw than shuffling backward while still journeying forward?

Psalm 121

Psalm 121 is a pilgrim psalm of departure, one with misted eyes lifted toward a journey bounded by hope and surrounded by concern. It is a song for the traveler embarked on unpredictable terrain. The psalmist looks at the hills, less in wondering awe than in sober recognition: this will not be easy. This may undo me were it not for faith — even faith but a seed.

Guy Clark captures the same truth in his opening line: “Pack up all your dishes, make note of all good wishes.” This is not a jaunty springtime road trip with a picnic basket. This is a reckoning with the cost of leaving a place — or changing a way — that can no longer sustain life.

If we let Psalm 121 interpret the song, we may see that the psalm names what Clark leaves underspoken: a yearning to share the road and, in sharing it, not to be alone. “I can hear that old bass singing / Sweet and low, like a gift you’re bringing,” Clark sings. Another voice on the road is received as a gift. But Psalm 121 presses the longing deeper: the traveler is not merely accompanied; he is kept. “The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore” (Ps. 121:8).

What we may hear is this: travel may be treacherous, and obedience to the Lord may be laden with danger in a fallen world. But we are kept. We are kept in and through Christ — the one who doesn’t bypass the judgment named at the outset of the Songs of Ascents but who bears it and gives us feet that will not be moved, even while moving.

Psalm 107

Led by our quick step, let’s move back to an earlier point in the Psalter. Psalm 107 is about people who have been through something. Something awful. They have known hunger, exile, wandering, loss. It is a psalm of those who have hit bottom and found the bottom was not the end. It is an exhale after an overwhelming stretch, one renewed by hope as the psalm repeats four times over eight breaths:

“Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress” (Ps. 107:6, 13, 19, 28).

They have found deliverance. Clark’s lyric echoes the same cry: “If I can just get off of this L.A. Freeway without getting killed or caught …” This is not desperado swagger. Whether east or west, north or south, this is goose-pimpled desperation itself. It is someone admitting that deliverance must come from outside. And Psalm 107 names that truth with theological clarity: we cry out, God delivers.

Deliverance is not earned. It is received. And Christ himself is the steadfast love of God made flesh. God’s steadfast love endures forever, and in Christ he shatters the doors of bronze and cuts through the iron bars that held us fast (Ps. 107:16), so that the way forward becomes a way of hope. And, letting the earlier Psalm 121 catch the thread forward, Christ is the shade from the hard, parching sun as we continue (Ps. 121:5).

In the next psalm we learn more about the gift.

Psalm 16

Another step back, Psalm 16 is a psalm of trust. The psalm sets us in a steady place between lament and praise, in the space where longing and contentment coexist. Still carrying forward the troubled thread of Psalm 107, we find a rootedness in thanksgiving to the Lord (Ps. 107:1). Yet a life rooted in trust can sometimes feel like the wagon-wheel effect: the seeming backward crawl of wheels on a highway that nevertheless are moving forward.

Psalm 16’s central line of trust is this: “The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance” (Ps. 16:6). And Guy Clark gives us this line: “Give me a land that I ain’t bought.”

Resonance. Both the psalmist and Clark proclaim a profoundly Christian truth: home is a gift. Inheritance is grace, and belonging is bestowed. Together they teach us that our identity is rooted not in acquisition but in gift. For now, in the already-and-not-yet kingdom, we live grateful even while still on the road between the leaving and the arriving, on which we are asked to “set up road markers for yourself; make yourself guideposts; consider well the highway, the road by which you went” (Jer. 31:21).

Unpurchased Land

Taken together, these psalms form a journey: departure, deliverance, gift. Guy Clark’s “L.A. Freeway” becomes an unexpected guidepost along that journey, naming the challenges of life in a fallen world, the difficulty of patience, and the vulnerability of hope. The land we “ain’t bought” is given in Christ, who goes ahead of us and keeps our going out and our coming in (Ps 121:8). Simply, he is the joyful treasure hidden in the field of that land (Mt. 13:44). Guy Clark — an outlaw truth teller — sensed, perhaps without naming it explicitly, that life is sometimes lived on the thin line between sorrow and joy, burden and freedom.

The psalmists said that truth long before him. They still sing it over us now: we have a beautiful inheritance. And y’all — the Lord is good.

The post The Road that Brings Us ’Round appeared first on Mockingbird.

A sample of Kingsnorth’s arguments for the unfamiliar: he argues that the Pyramids of Giza are grotesque. They represent the economic slavery of the masses in the service of an ideology and should be regarded as the tragedy of “the machine” that destroys human lives, instead of a monument to human achievement. Stop praising these gargantuan structures, argues Kingsnorth, and stop dreaming of modern-day versions of pyramids from Silicon Valley. Guard instead the four p’s of being human: people, place, prayer, and past, while avoiding the four s’s of The Machine: self, secularism, screens, and sex. 

At the end of the book, he addresses how to push back against the machine. I’ll let you read it for yourself, but the spectrum was something between ditching the smartphone on one hand and homesteading while forming a guerilla reactionary force to blow up data centers on the other. (He doesn’t call for violence explicitly, but he probably wouldn’t say no …).  My own meager attempts to keep the machine out of my life have been, as the kids say, mid, especially compared to how much I think Kingsnorth gets right. The kids have limited screen time, and we’re paying extra to send them to private school where they limit tech use. We live in a small walkable rural town, we have dinner with our geographical neighbors, and we take them to church. Alas, the smartphone remains, the Netflix subscription continues, my wife’s job is integrating ChatGPT into her workflow, and the short videos continue to be swiped. Most people recognize that same feeling of slavery that modern tech instills in us. 

It’s not difficult to imagine that if Kingsnorth were to review my life, he would probably say I’m not doing enough. Work harder. Do more. Ditch streaming, toss your phone, get off social media, stop shopping at Walmart. Job forcing you to use AI? Find another job. Start a garden at the very least, or run for office and fight the machine through political action. Can’t bomb a data center? Go cut down some Flock cameras. If we agree that The Machine is killing us, spirit and body, why not fight it as if our lives depended on it?

Maybe he would say this, but also, maybe not. Maybe he would see my meager acquiescence to his thinking as a practical, if minimal, part of the resistance. Or maybe this inner guilt is just my own inner monologue, a reflection of my own scrupulosity and not the feelings of the author. After all, if there is a value that is good and right and true, shouldn’t it be followed with total devotion? If Kingsnorth is right that the machine is coming for me and my family, isn’t that a DEFCON 1 Klaxon alarm worth responding to?

If you’re not familiar with Kingsnorth, you are certainly familiar with similar calls to radical and reactionary living against the antihuman apocalypse of our time. The late Wendell Berry represented this vision for many people, as Ethan Richardson discussed last week on the site. As Berry’s legions of fans posted tributes to their social pages (looking at you, Substack!), others were quick to point out the irony of a digital tribute to the contrarian agrarian. There is an undeniable tension between the pastoral lifestyle Berry embodied and the pulls of modern life on his readers. Many live in that tension of agreeing with Berry about the nature of the good life while feeling stuck and unable to apply it.

We might agree with the scientific predictions of future climate change but can’t afford solar panels or an electric vehicle. We might agree with Dave Ramsey’s debt reduction principles, but also, we don’t have enough stocked away to pay cash for an urgent home repair. The best we can muster is to buy a metal straw, start a porch garden, and make a budget — hardly the kind of radical intensity required to stave off a financial or environmental apocalypse. A convinced mind is one thing, but to replicate the success of the radical reactionary in life is something else altogether.

But is it beyond our ability to replicate? This is the nagging voice that pulls at the thread of my conscience. Surely, I could hustle and think my way into a more integrated and authentic way of living. I just need to try harder. Ditch the smartphone, start a garden, cancel the credit cards … My opposition to the logical conclusions of these apocalyptic and reactionary ideals is just fear or weakness or laziness. If a cause is of primary importance, any reason not to go in whole hog has to be a defect of character.

For many, Christianity represents that same ideological vision, a “no excuses” call to radical living. The monastics embrace it, of course, with vows of celibacy and poverty. So do the missionaries, or at least that’s the romantic take, leaving family and culture behind to live in the third world with only Jesus as a companion. Their examples are inspirational but not normative. Despite vague exhortations to “do more,” most Christians in history have lived out their faith in the context of family and vocation, in service to a ruling body, and in the geographic context they were born. Be good kids, raise good kids, do good work, honor the king, pay taxes, help the needy, and contribute to the community good. Is that enough given modern Christianity’s veneration of saints, Bible smugglers, martyrs, intellectual powerhouses, and servants of the poor? Are these everyday Christians just not radical enough in light of Jesus’ admonition to “take up your cross and follow me?”

When the first Christians were working to identify themselves in the context of their Jewish heritage, the question arose as to whether newly baptized Christians from outside Jewish ancestry should be required to be circumcised. Christianity, of course, is of primary apocalyptic importance. If the salvation of one’s soul was on the line, then of course circumcision would be worth undergoing. That’s a half joke, of course. If the modification of one’s adult and developed genitalia is required to join a religion, it may be a radical and rigorous religion, but we can doubt that it would be very popular. 

After much discussion of the matter, the apostle Peter offers his take on the situation: “Why are you putting God to the test by placing a yoke on the neck of the disciples that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus.” Plenty of circumcised people, reflects Peter, have lost the plot when it came to Jewish spirituality in the past. They jumped through the hoops of living a religious life, but that didn’t mean they had any sort of lively and active faith in God himself. Not only would this circumcision place upon the new Christian a burden beyond what even God himself intends, but it would be counterintuitive in inspiring the saving faith God wants. Now that Jesus has died and risen, there’s a freedom from the Law’s rigid prescriptions. A life lived in faith is enough. 

This moment offers two criticisms of the apocalyptic scrupulosity that Kingsnorth and others represent.

First, Peter says that the “radical” answer here was not the right one. Other ideologies offer the choice between radical living or apocalyptic doom, but the Christian exhortation “take up your cross” is not viewed in opposition to “make it your ambition to lead a quiet life.” Jesus’ teaching here is that “everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required,” but what about those who have been given little? A person can only be responsible for what is under their oversight and control. If we take the Serenity Prayer at face value, we have a decent heuristic that helps us divide what is our responsibility from what is beyond our control.

In this instance, the call to cut down my town’s Flock cameras is in direct opposition to the call to care for my family. Honestly, I’m sympathetic to the idea, but I can’t afford bail and the legal penalties, and my wife and kids need me at home and not in jail. The call to ditch the smartphone conflicts with the call to be connected to my church. Texting parishioners to see if they got their power back on after a storm, sending a silly meme to a discouraged friend, sending out the church news via email … as much as I hate it, the call to love my neighbor means keeping one foot in The Machine. The truest apocalyptic ideology, Christianity, has in place a system of values that conflicts with lesser apocalyptic ideologies. The call to take up one’s cross may actually mean suffering within The Machine instead of struggling to be free from it. 

Second, not only is the idea of radical devotion reimagined in light of Jesus’ death and resurrection, but the level of choice and independence assumed by radicals may be a mirage. Human beings are limited, and many of those limits are expressions of our dependence on the divine. Peter’s decision recognizes that people suffer under burdens they themselves may not be able to carry. The slaves building the Egyptian pyramids didn’t exactly have a choice in the matter as to whether they could escape the machine. It’s worth asking how we are hemmed in by a similar lack of agency.

The New Testament has a descriptor for these misanthropic realities that are beyond our individual ability to control. It calls them “powers and principalities,” and its recommendation is not to put on the armor of worldly power and resistance but to put on a spiritual armor of faith, truth, resolution, readiness, and prayer. It doubles down on the spiritual solution to these worldly matters instead of practical solutions, which is radical in its own way but not reactionary in the slightest. These thoughts come from St. Paul, who writes about principalities and armor while he himself is a prisoner of the Roman Empire’s political machine. His deepest desire is not for revolution but for rescue, achieved by God and encouraged by the steadfast prayers of his companions. Christianity offers its own way of raging against the machine, it’s just not nearly as romantic or dramatic as the calls for apocalyptic radicalism today.

A Christian, then, takes comfort that God’s love and good providence is not only for those who can escape The Machine but also for those who are trapped in it too. He happens to know a thing or two about what it looks like to rescue slaves from the shadows of The Machine’s pyramids, bringing plagues and parting Red Seas along the way. He also knows what it’s like to comfort and sustain and support his people when the chains haven’t yet been unlocked. It wasn’t Israel’s radical commitment to an ideal that saved them, nor was it Paul’s writing or public speaking, but the grace of an outside force that brought about their help.

Am I doing enough? I don’t know. The world around me is out of my control, and it drives me nuts. I do know I would like to do more to stem the tide of The Machine in my life but find myself limited in frustrating and embarrassing ways. As much as we hold our own lack of movement against ourselves, there’s something freeing about the fact that God isn’t the one holding it against me. As long as the heavens are in the business of helping slaves, then my own fears about The Machine can be replaced by serenity, Flock cameras and ChatGPT be damned. 

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This sensitivity for life comes out in Agatha Christie’s personal story from her childhood found in the introduction of her book of short stories called Midsummer Mysteries.

Her father and older sister allowed her to join them on a horseback riding adventure. Her mother thought she was still too young for this sort of thing, but her father assured her she’d be fine. The ride was going along fine, and they had a very kind guide who was paying special attention to the young Agatha. He would pick flowers and bring them to her and stick them in her hatband. The day was going wonderfully.

Soon the guide returned to her with another gift for her hat: a live butterfly. He took a pin and fixed the butterfly to her hat, admiring his lovely gift to her. She could feel the butterfly flapping its wings against her hat, struggling against the pin. She couldn’t say anything because she did not want to offend the guide. So she began to cry. Her father and sister were confused by her tears and asked her if she was hurt. No, that wasn’t it. Her sister asked if she was frightened by riding the horse. That wasn’t it either. Or maybe she was tired? No. She kept insisting that none of those things were causing her to cry. Her father and sister resigned themselves to thinking that perhaps she was too young after all for such an outing.

When she got home, her mother asked what was the matter. Agatha still couldn’t say, she just stood there with tears rolling down her cheeks. Finally her mother asked, “Who put that butterfly in her hat?” The sister explained that it was the guide. In Agatha’s words, this is what happened next:

“I see,” said Mother. Then she said to me, “You didn’t like it, did you? It was alive and you thought it was being hurt?”

Oh, the glorious relief, the wonderful relief when somebody knows what’s in your mind and tells it to you so that you are at last released from that long bondage of silence. I flung myself at her in a kind of frenzy, thrust my arms round her neck and said, “Yes, yes, yes. It’s been flapping. It’s been flapping. But he was so kind and he meant to be kind. I couldn’t say.”

She understood it all and patted me gently. Suddenly the whole thing seemed to recede in the distance.

Agatha’s mother did not fix the situation. She did not bring the butterfly back to life. But she saw the butterfly, and she saw the hurt. Agatha was not alone anymore in her suffering because someone saw and understood what she could not say.

Suffering has an isolating quality about it. Your suffering is your own, and somehow no matter how many people have gone through similar pain, you feel alone. No one has been you in your time and place, in your particular family, in this month and year, and in your body. No one can ever know exactly how you feel.

This causes us to try to deal with the pain in our own minds. We do this in various ways: deny that it exists, attempt to hide or run from it, fight against it, or give up. Or maybe at times, like little Agatha, all we can do is cry. In all of these methods, pain always seems to have the upper hand.

This pain could be the large losses we grieve in life, but it can also be the little butterfly flapping against your hat that others might not see as a big deal — those nagging things that feel too unimportant to say out loud but that weigh us down. They are those things that we compare to others’ hurts and minimize because, well, at least I’m not dealing with that. When we write them off as “not that big of a deal,” we deprive them of the opportunity to be seen and to lose their power over us.

Pain finally loses the upper hand when it is brought to light, when the mystery is revealed, and someone looks at you and says what has been stuck unsaid in your mind. The truth is released and brings wonderful relief.

God sees your hurt. He sees the butterflies that we cannot name ourselves, sometimes because we do not see them or sometimes because we don’t feel like we can say anything. In Christ, who is the mystery of God revealed to the world, we find relief from the bondage of silence, of being misunderstood, and the aloneness of suffering. Jesus shines his light on what we try to hide away, and when he sees (and I mean truly sees) the truth, the pain begins to “recede in the distance.”

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In the days and years after the towers fell, we all swore to “never forget.” It’s now been 25 years of not forgetting, and the architecture of our remembrances has, like the event itself, become as commonplace as wallpaper. As chronicled in the New York Times this week, in many instances the fading memorials have become literal wallpaper.

While there’s a melancholy in seeing dulled paint that was once so evocative, I would suggest that these fading murals of remembrance might now serve as testimonies of hope. We haven’t forgotten after 25 years, but we have also not been overcome by the trauma. The murals have faded because we don’t so acutely need the comfort they used to offer. I’m reminded of what Sam Bush wrote a few weeks back on grief and memory: “No one ever really ‘gets over’ anything … what we grieve can never be entirely forgotten. Nor should it be. Health is not a forgetting but a remembering differently.”

2. Turning to something else entirely, over at the New Yorker Jay Caspian Kang is launching the first in a series of articles on the decline of shame in social discourse, “The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart.” He begins by detailing the not-so-distant history of tanking in professional basketball, when the 1984 Houston Rockets shamelessly lost on purpose to land the highest draft pick. Since then, what was regulated by taboo had to be constrained by ever-increasing rules. While many might consider a cultural shift toward shamelessness to be more apparent than real, the product of technological shifts that warp our perception, Kang believes there is more to the story:

Sometimes, though, these genealogies of behavior can seem beside the point, serving only to dull one’s analysis of the situation. Twenty-four-hour news cycles, social media, and smartphones may have altered our sensitivity to shame, but they don’t explain everything. Social media has certainly helped spread what Foxworth called optimization culture, but the hiring of M.B.A.s and quants into management positions across markets didn’t happen because Elon Musk changed the Twitter algorithm. The kind of thinking that they embody has always been part of American capitalism — still, it’s everywhere now, and it’s worse.

In tech, finance, and, to a lesser degree, politics, those preaching a piecemeal gospel rooted in maximum optimization believe that they have obviated society’s need for shame. There is a conflict between those who still believe in social barriers and those who believe that all actions should be based on a proper calculation of the return on investment. That conflict constitutes both the present and the future of America’s culture war. The optimizers have all the money; the empaths only really have one another — and the assurance, however fleeting, that there are more of us than there are of them.

Efficient and sometimes monstrous thinking existed in the past, of course, but it generally made some effort to hide. Today, everything from our kids’ sports leagues to our parents’ nursing homes are profit-optimized right in front of our faces. Shame can no longer curtail a private-equity firm from buying up children’s sports facilities and shaving away every soft edge that made them feel like community property. Like the N.B.A., our world at large will need intervention and direct regulation to counter the gospel of flagrant optimization.

To me, part of what Kang is describing is an effect of secularization in a different a register, how we moved from categorial imperatives to more utilitarian calculations (see Lewis Black below: “Since there is no God, maxxing … now applies to everything”).

But I also want to suggest that the push toward optimization away from more ethical ways of thinking is precisely the kind of spiraling that happens when law is increasingly introduced as a means of improving human behavior. What was once governed by a shared sense of mutual trust and responsibility (the love of the game) is now regulated by a lengthy rule book that itself “increases the transgression” (Rom 5:20) and incites an arms race of ever-optimizing thinking.

3. I’d say these next two articles on mental health work really well in tandem with one another. In Aeon this week, historian Katherine Harvey takes a deep dive into “Medieval Mental Health” and some of the many homespun remedies they proposed. How-to books about how to stay healthy were incredibly popular. It’s a fascinating study of a much overlooked era.

Fear and anger were usually acute emotions, quick to come and go, but medical experts also warned about the dangers of chronic emotional distress. One of my favourite medieval images compares the mind to a bent bow which, although strong, cannot survive continual strain, so that ongoing ‘disputes in the household’ could ‘shorten a person’s years’. Just as we worry about stress, medieval people recognised that too much responsibility could make a person ill, with high-status men thought to be at particular risk. In an English conduct book written around the turn of the 13th century, Daniel of Beccles claimed that a master ‘lives like a toiling ant’; his ‘pressing worries gnaw at his gut and burden his shoulders’, and his mind is ‘always focused on calamities’. The anonymous biographer of the French knight Jean II Le Meingre (c1366–1421), better-known as Boucicaut, described his packed daily schedule, but suggested that ‘those who love him indeed, those who would wish him long life and the good health which makes public duties manageable … ought rather to advise him to be a little less conscientious and to take at least some time for repose and recreation.’ If he did not do so, he would surely become ill. […]

More broadly, medieval people shared our interest in the ability of mind-altering substances to prevent and treat mental health problems. Saffron was widely believed to provoke joy – although one Welsh recipe collection (c1400) warned against eating too much ‘in case you die of happiness’ – and both oregano and fennel were credited with similar powers. Alternatively, a melancholiac might be advised to eat ostrich liver – a suggestion I find particularly unappealing, though I could be persuaded to test the supposed benefits of precious stones. According to Abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), ‘If you are oppressed with sadness, [you should] look at an onyx intently, then place it in your mouth. The oppression of your mind will cease.’ She also advised that holding and looking at beryl, or placing a sapphire in one’s mouth, could calm anger.

But these remedies worked best when combined with lifestyle changes, so that patients were also told to do things that would cheer them up – much as modern doctors use social prescriptions to encourage activities that improve wellbeing. When Taddeo Alderotti treated Obizzo II d’Este, lord of Ferrara (c1247–93), who had suffered from melancholy and insomnia for more than two years, his prescription included ‘taking walks … seeing things that are beautiful and delightful to him … hearing songs and instruments that he likes … being told about and promised great yields from profitable markets’. In fact, joy was widely considered to be not just a useful cure but also an important part of a healthy lifestyle for, as one mid-15th-century German verse regimen reminded readers: ‘A sorrowful heart often brings people to the end/but the joyful mind always makes the life’s age blossom.’ While virtually every other strong emotion dried up the body, joy was good because it moistened it; other benefits included purer blood, sharper wits, higher energy levels and a healthy complexion. It could even make a person more attractive.

Who’d have thought that medieval Europe was so … modern? Not only in the holistic/woo treatment options but also their wide range of physical maladies. That said, I’m not about to consume ostrich liver any time soon.

4. I imagine that cherry-picking from the ancient wisdom of medieval Christianity won’t necessarily appeal to many. Cherry-picking from the ancient wisdom of medieval Buddhism, by comparison, is far more en vogue. I’m talking of course about meditation and its modern cousin, mindfulness. But as told by Olga Khazan in the Atlantic, there is a dark side to mindfulness often ignored by its Western practitioners. If that sounds surprising or far-fetched to you, it’s probably because the adverse effects of meditation have only recently been studied (which, it should be said, is wildly irresponsible).

Britton [a psychology researcher] began to perceive that the research on mindfulness contained a giant lacuna: its potential risks. Meditation researchers, she felt, tended not to find adverse effects among their study participants because they didn’t ask their participants about them. What’s more, many meditation studies are funded by pro-meditation organizations, and some study participants might feel pressured to say that their mental health improved after meditating. There’s no such thing as a placebo for meditation, which complicates studying its effects. When Britton looked for past studies on the risks of meditation, she found mostly isolated case reports and small studies — one of which found that two of 27 long-term meditators had had “profound adverse effects,” including confusion, depression, and severe shaking.

Britton still believed in many of the potential benefits of meditation, but she began to rethink her role as a booster for it. “It just seemed like the world does not need another meditation researcher who’s going to promote meditation,” Britton told me. “We’re like Starbucks — there’s one on every corner.” Assessing the extent and severity of possible negative effects of meditation, she decided, would be her version of a problem to solve — her niche. In 2007, she began interviewing meditators for what would become the first comprehensive study of meditation’s adverse effects. […]

Some of the side effects these researchers are finding may be attributable to the fact that, in the years since Eastern traditions of meditation were introduced to the West in the 19th century, this once primarily religious ritual has expanded far beyond its original intent; its more sweeping remit may have consequences that the practice’s original Buddhist context might have prevented. But as Salguero and others pointed out, early Buddhist texts cautioned that “meditation sickness” plagued even the devout contemplatives of earlier eras: In one eighth-century Chinese writing, the Buddha warns of 50 “demonic states” in which meditators could become trapped, including hallucinations, sorrow, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and possession by ghosts. […]

“I was trying to tell people ‘Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so,’” channeling Hamlet and Stoic philosophy. For a while, this idea seemed radical, and constructively life-changing: The secret to a good life is to just be okay with whatever! But then her own meditation practice started to make her think “like, Okay, but wait; I don’t feel like I exist now.” That didn’t seem like a good thing, no matter how you thought about it.

Now, I should say that the prevalence of negative outcomes Britton finds is more around 10% (and disputed by others), but the whole article is kind of wild and reads as a cautionary tale of syncretism.

5. What starts with a laugh but ends in tears? Aaron Belz’s poem “Things Artificial Intelligence Can’t Do,” and it couldn’t have come at a better time:

Things Artificial Intelligence Can’t Do

Stare for 25 minutes at a blank screen.
Write half a poem and give up.
End up walking down to the bus stop bench,
sit strangely erect, look dead
into the winter sun. Hate itself.
Resent the apparent happiness of others.
Miss its daughter. Go back in time.
Wish it had been a better dad.
Leave church after 15 minutes even though
it needed nothing more than the company
of the faithful. Even though it needed
the Word of assurance, the taste of God’s
blood in its mouth. Drive home cold,
order a pizza. Feed itself. Numb itself.
Shut itself down and dream of love
lost, of a girl refusing to speak,
of all that beauty slipping into ether,
nor can it remember kissing her blue
forehead in a Los Angeles funeral home.

We’re only a few years into the debate about the utility of AI writing, but that poem is the best thing I’ve read on the subject.

6. In actual humor this week, the Babylon Bee adds a theological twist to the LLM doomsday conundrum, “‘Oh, Your Intelligent Creations Are Trying to Kill You. That’s Interesting,’ Says Jesus.” There’s some low anthropology humor this week from the Onion and their “Everything Finally Clicks for Man After Getting Diagnosed as Stupid.”

Oh, and Lewis Black has some curmudgeonly hilarious (and decidedly not PG-13) opinions on the maxxing trends:

7. Almost the entirety of Lewis Black’s humor is of the old-man-yells-at-clouds variety. It has been for decades now, but the fact that Black is now actually old — and repeatedly tells you this — makes the whole rant almost charming. Unlike most today, he’s not hiding anything, trying to act younger than he is, or sporting a ridiculous comb-over. Cue “Old Age Is Not a Problem to Solve” by Jen Pollock Michel, who finds something disturbing in our cultural obsession with perpetual youth.

If glory is goodness on display, as Thomas Aquinas defined it, vainglory is preoccupied with the aesthetics, not the substance, of goodness. And it can take different forms: one derived from pride and an overeagerness to have our goodness displayed, or one cowering in fear, seeking less to reveal our goodness than to conceal its deficits.

It’s that latter form — fearful vainglory — that plays into our resistance to aging. Though youthful beauty has all the worth of Monopoly money, we are nonetheless afraid to be poor. “The industry thrives on self-loathing, bad body image, and feelings of painful inadequacy,” writes DeYoung. “Vainglory is, in cases of fear, not a show-off vice for excellence, but a cover-up maneuver for its acutely felt absence.”

Vainglory is sin, and through Christ, we are saved and healed. This means not only that we are forgiven personally but also that we’re delivered communally, DeYoung argues. Together, she writes, it’s imperative we learn to celebrate our belovedness in God through grace alone and by faith alone, dispensing with the need to prove our worth. […]

Here, Wilkin’s book sings. As the author dreams of a “wish list” for her own future, she does not pine for a more youthful face, a stronger body, and a guarantee against future decrepitude. She yearns to age according to a better story. “I wish to age gracefully, not as the world does but as someone who understands grace as unmerited favor,” Wilkin writes. “I wish to use the unmerited favor of good health and long years in service to others. I wish to treat my body as worthy of honor, but not as ultimate.” By God’s grace, her inner old lady will bloom, and it will be no cause for regret or apology or fear.

As the body of Christ, instead of offering honor for the shadow of the real — fleeting physical beauty, personal charm, social status, celebrity, and fame — we can praise the substance of goodness that can enlarge and expand with age. Even amid intense social pressure to stay young, this perspective is possible because we live a better story. We can honor the aged and commend those who give them care. We can find beautiful a godly woman like Elliot, who looked her age of 60. We can stop idolizing all things young.

The future will come, and time will shake us like a storm. Though we will bend in those great winds of infirmity, strengthened in the great forest called the church, we will not break.

Strays: 

• “Have We Destroyed Childhood?”
• “Reading for Sins”
• “On Possibility and Necessity”
• “Can Andre Agassi Enjoy Pickleball More Than He Hated Tennis?”

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