Jeanne Murray Walker fell in love with words at a young age, and it changed the course of her life. Although raised in what she describes as a “fortress” of fundamentalism, it was, she writes, “through sustained attention to the imaginative language of metaphor and symbol, allusion and ambiguity… [that I eventually] came to inhabit a wider and more vibrant sense of the world — and of God as its creator and redeemer.”

In the 60 years since Walker won Atlantic Monthly competitions for both fiction and poetry as a college student at Wheaton, she has continued to explore the power of words in a remarkably wide variety of forms and genres. Best known for her faith-infused poetry — of which she’s published nine volumes, including Pilgrim, You Find the Path by Walking (2019) and her retrospective collection Helping the Morning (2014) — Walker’s gemlike words offer fresh angles on faith. Take this excerpt, from her 1989 poem “Birth,” which puts us in the mind of a mother welcoming her newborn:

… In one minute,

a new order, a new earth, transforming
old orthodoxies, transfiguring the room.
In the end, we are faithful

to what cannot be avoided.
Light breaks from your new knees
and shoulders. Light peals
like an unbearable, high bell.

“We are faithful / to what cannot be avoided.” Such sentiments suffuse Walker’s other works: award-winning plays, short stories, essays, and two memoirs, her latest being Leaping from the Burning Train: A Poet’s Journey of Faith (2023). Along the way, Walker has been a dedicated and beloved college educator, notably at the University of Delaware, where she taught for 40 years and where, as well as at her alma mater Wheaton, her papers and letters are archived.

Through it all, Walker’s ongoing explorations of the written word, which she considers quasi-sacramental, have kept her ever grounded on a kind of shared religious pilgrimage, one in which she and her readers, “venture together toward hope, toward the reversal of death: resurrection.”

— Ben Self, interviewer

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Mockingbird: Jeanne, thank you so much for chatting with me. As I was preparing for this conversation, I had so much fun reading your poetry. I found it both accessible and profound. You don’t have to be a poet or an academic to enjoy it, and I just love it.

Jeanne Murray Walker: Well, I’m very glad to hear that because, after all, the point of writing is to be read.

M: Much of your recent memoir, Leaping from the Burning Train, deals with your upbringing among Christian fundamentalists and its reverberations through the rest of your life. In the prologue, you write that “over the decades I became increasingly aware — with a shock of recognition — that certain strains of American Protestantism bore similarities to other fundamentalist movements around the world.” How would you define a fundamentalist?

JMW: What a good question. I think of fundamentalism as quite literal, and some parts are wonderful. I mean, I memorized chapters of the King James Bible when I was a child, and that aspect of fundamentalism has served me well. When I went to graduate school, I knew the Bible backwards and forwards. I knew the 66 names of the books of the Bible in order and could recite them.

I remember a quiz game that we played as teenagers. Everybody had a Bible, and the guy in charge would be calling off verses — you know, Hezekiah 4:10 — and the person who could find it first would stand up and read it. There were teams, so you either won or lost. I don’t think there were any prizes, but we were just really, really interested. I think that’s part of the reason I ended up going to graduate school for English literature and reading old texts. It was a very text-oriented form of Christianity.

M: Right, at least oriented toward Biblical texts. Not necessarily other texts.

JMW: Yeah, but once you start reading the King James Bible, you have a key to unlock a lot of other texts. I did my PhD in the English Renaissance, so all the language I was reading by John Donne and George Herbert and various other writers was written in the same King James English. For me it was a wonderful way of translating over to texts that were also often religious, but were not biblical.

M: We live in a time when, as one of your reviewers put it, “dark, Dickensian memoirs about growing up in fundamentalism abound.” Yet, even as you address problematic aspects of your upbringing, you have quite a few positive things to say about it. So what were some of the most positive aspects of growing up in that community?

Hope Olson, Dandelion Wine, 2021. Acrylic on panel, 24 x 24 in.

JMW: Well, I think we took care of each other. We all saw each other once a week on Sundays, but there was also a core community within the bigger community that met for prayer meetings on Wednesdays and lots of other occasions. So we saw each other several times a week. And it was one of those situations where all the adults parented all the children. If you were doing something that your parents wouldn’t like, the other parents would come along and say, “Hey, maybe you don’t want to do that.”

One thing that has also often been overlooked is the singing, just the joy of singing together. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a choral group, but because they sang every week, they were pretty good, and they sang all the different parts. And when you’re doing that with something as simple as hymns — like “This Is My Father’s World” — it’s really thrilling.

Then there’s the food. We went to a Baptist church, and they had potluck dinners at the drop of the hat. Each family had the dish that they usually brought. And so you really looked forward to Mrs. Dubicki’s baked beans or whatever it was. And if you eat together, that’s a form of communion.
So there were a lot of aspects of that fundamentalist culture that drew us together and kept us together. I used to have sleepovers with the kids from my Christian school — you would go over to their house and they would have prayer before dinner, just like you did at home. It was a real community.

M: A lot of people don’t have that kind of community nowadays, even people who go to church.

JMW: I think that’s right. I belong to an Episcopal church at the moment, and we do different things than I did as a child. Every so often, we partner with a local organization to take in people off the street and feed them for a week, letting them sleep in the church at night, while they do job training during the day and the kids get established back in school. That kind of thing also draws the church members together. Community still has to do with things like eating and sleeping, and so, you know, it reaches into the common areas of our lives. It’s not just something we do on Sundays.

M: I’m interested in what causes people to be drawn to fundamentalism. In the memoir, you write,

My fundamentalist parents were always driven by anxiety about change. … [My mother] was a teenager during the Depression when her parents lost a good bit of their farmland. In 1933, she taught twenty-two kids in a one-room schoolhouse in rural Minnesota for $60 a month. My father, during the war, dropped out of college. After they married, they wanted something they could count on at any cost, something that would not change. No wonder they joined the fundamentalist movement.

Elsewhere you add that things like gambling or card playing became symbols “of the kind of financial and moral risk my fundamentalist parents abhorred.” I thought that was a really compassionate insight. Does this imply that fundamentalism has a greater allure in times of unrest?

JMW: That makes sense to me. What I was trying to do in that passage was explain why my parents, and especially my mother, needed to hang on. My father died when I was 13, so I didn’t really get to know him as an adult. In some ways, my mother did have a flexible personality. She could get along with pretty much anybody and had millions of friends. She had a wonderfully capable personality in terms of being outgoing in the world. Many people just adored her. But she also hung on tightly to her worldview.

Then again, she did not really understand metaphor. She was very literal and practical. She lived pretty much there, present in the moment. She wasn’t a philosopher. She was a nurse, the kind of person who, if she happened to be out and someone needed help, would jump into action. I remember, we were in a department store once — back when there were department stores — and somebody was having a seizure. Suddenly she became a big authority and took on the responsibility to help this man. She cleared the area. She always carried tongue depressors with her in her purse, so she stuck a tongue depressor between the guy’s teeth so he couldn’t bite his tongue and took care of him until a doctor came. So she was flexible in some ways, and excellent in a crisis, you know? As a teenager, that was enough to make me honor her. I understood that I had a very fortunate family.

M: I love how you describe your parents as aspiring to be “immutable as rocks.” On the one hand, they did evolve. But when it came to the “fundamentals” of their beliefs, they were just not going to change their minds.

JMW: That’s absolutely right. And my mother had a little trouble with that as the years went on, because later in life — about 10 years after my father died — she ended up marrying somebody who was not famously religious. It came about because all her friends wanted to match her up. She lived another 20 years with Jim. He was an oil man in Dallas, and he’d been out there with all these rough, spirited, Southern guys. He smoked cigars. Well, my mother had thrown all of her own cigarettes and cards and things like that into the furnace when she became a fundamentalist! She tolerated some of that from Jim because she loved him, but it wasn’t easy.

M: I loved the chapter about how your parents founded Lincoln Christian School. It was a tiny private school in Nebraska, but you make it sound heroic. That’s where you first learned to “subvert authority” — not, presumably, the lesson that was intended.

JMW: No. Haha.

M: You write, “I more-or-less invented my own education.” Tell me about that.

Spot illustration by Ruthy Kim

JMW: My father started the school from scratch in a church basement. He didn’t know anything about education. They didn’t have supplies or real curricula. They tried to hire teachers who could sign a statement of faith and also take on four grades at once. They mostly taught reading and math. But we had a lot of freedom. We could pursue basically whatever aroused our interest. I remember I got in my head once that we should study Indian tribes, and the teacher said, “Okay. Take your book and do some research.” I ended up making a plaster of paris igloo for one of the tribes. That’s how it went. If you got interested in something, the teacher would say, “Go do it.”

M: I’m sure that approach served you well later. Although I imagine you struggled when you had to enter public schools in the 8th grade.

JMW: Yeah. As I look back, those 8th graders in Lincoln, Nebraska, were pretty tame. But I had been made very aware by the fundamentalists that it was “us” and “them.” You needed to be on your guard to make sure they didn’t wreck your faith. But I didn’t have any trouble making friends. I had a very close relationship, which I still have, with somebody in my grade who’s now on the West Coast. I see her every couple of years.

M: Was she a fundamentalist?

JMW: No, she was a Lutheran. We actually tried to get her saved! There used to be these revivals in big stadiums, like football stadiums full of fundamentalists and other people they had dragged along. She would go to those meetings with me, but I don’t think it changed much.

M: You eventually started to break out of the chrysalis of Christian fundamentalism that had been spun for you. You write: At age 16, “I saw for the first time that I was living inside a fortress. … I had to choose whether to stay in the fortress or to leave. About three years later, I left.” And yet, there’s nothing inevitable about leaving fundamentalist Christianity. Many people stay. So what made you leave?

JMW: I think it’s important to say I never lost my faith. You know, I’m a pretty devout Episcopalian now. And it doesn’t have to be Episcopalian — it’s just very important to me to worship; I feel like I’m a creature, I was created, and there’s a purpose for my life. And that supersedes any denomination. You find people who have that in common with you, and then you worship with them.

M: Right, but what drove you away from fundamentalism?

JMW: Probably the literalism of it. You know, my work is to write. And I primarily have written poetry, which is about metaphor. So I think the literalism of the fundamentalists is at heart why I couldn’t stay.

I can still worship with those people. When I used to go back to Dallas to visit my mother when she was still alive, I would certainly go to church with her. I bear no acrimony towards them. It’s just easier for me to understand and worship in an Episcopal setting, or even a Catholic setting, really.

M: In the book, you write about having this terrible feeling as a teenager that you were losing your faith because suddenly a particular image you had of the Second Coming didn’t make sense to you anymore. At the time, you couldn’t see that doubting that image didn’t mean you were losing your faith. Later you discovered the famous example in psychology of the “rabbit/duck sketch … If you look at it one way, it’s a rabbit. If you blink and look at it another way, it’s a duck.” And that illustration helped you realize that there are different ways to read the same scripture, sometimes at the same time, on a kind of spectrum between the literal and the more allegorical.

That discussion really resonated with me, but it was also challenging. To me it seems like certain passages of scripture — the creation story, the flood narrative, the Book of the Revelation — are pretty clearly meant to be read allegorically. They’re not supposed to be factually accurate depictions of events. But many parts of scripture are meant to be read primarily as factually accurate depictions of events, like the Gospels. So there’s a tension there, right? Do you feel the need to classify certain things as a duck and others as a rabbit?

JMW: No, I don’t think so. Reading scripture is so interesting. Episcopalians always have prescribed texts for every Sunday — an Old Testament passage, the New Testament epistle, and the Gospel passage, right? There’s a three-year rotation in the readings, and by doing that, you find that the texts come alive in different ways at different times. So the process of reading the scripture is in some ways like the process of reading any great work. It means different things at different times. I think Shakespeare is like that. The plays can mean different things at different times. That’s the mystery of language, don’t you think?

M: Yeah, but there’s definitely a portion of the people in mainline denominations — say, the Episcopal Church — who don’t feel the need to stake any real truth claims. Like, with the resurrection, they might say it’s just a metaphor for spring and rebirth, and it doesn’t matter whether it actually happened. And to me, it does matter.

JMW: Oh, it does matter to me, too. Absolutely. I think for me the resurrection is the linchpin.

M: You mentioned Shakespeare. I know you taught Shakespeare at the university level for many years. Do you have a favorite play? I’m just curious.

JMW: I am very partial to his later plays. He wrote the comedies first and they’re a lot of fun. Then the tragedies, they’re a little hard to deal with. But the late romances are just great, and they don’t very often get performed unless you go to a Shakespeare festival, or somewhere where they try to do all the plays.

M: You mean like Measure for Measure or The Winter’s Tale?

JMW: Exactly. Particularly The Winter’s Tale. That may be my favorite Shakespeare play because the woman who dies comes back to life. And it cannot be done just by reading. You have to do that play on the stage. It’s like a miracle every time I see it.

M: One of the things I like most about your memoir is that it’s both a story of deconstruction and reconstruction in your faith. As you write, the book is

about returning home — or, to put it a different way, about the journey I had to travel in order to preserve the heart of the faith we all clung to so fiercely in my childhood. … I can truly say [to quote T. S. Eliot] that in writing this book the end of my “exploring” has been to arrive where I started “and know the place for the first time.”

What do you think led you back to that point?

JMW: I never gave up gathering with people who worship, and I think that has been a really fundamental part of my journey. You know, it’s pretty easy to just give up church — on Sunday morning, you sleep in, mob around in your pajamas, you have a late breakfast, you just relax. Not me. I really need to have church. I’m lucky enough to have a priest now who is young but very smart, and when he speaks on Sunday morning, I listen, because it’s thought provoking and important to me. Church has always been for me like a guide rope.

It has to be the right place, but you just go, and you say, “I don’t know who you are, God, but I worship you.” I think it’s really important to not believe you’re your own creator. There is this mystery about the world and about life and about yourself that you’re constantly trying to understand and it leaves a big space for God. I never abandoned that. There’s a great deal of mystery involved in life and death and friendship and language and everything else. And I’m not in charge of it!

M: In a recent interview with Slant, you said, “Poetry chose me.” You make poetry sound like a religious vocation. Has God been searching you out through the medium of poetry? Do you attribute your lifelong love affair with language to the workings of the Holy Spirit?

JMW: Yes, I do. I also think the Holy Spirit is tricky and uses all kinds of different methods on different people, depending on what they’re going to respond to. I knew early on I loved the written word — I was probably five years old or something like that, and I learned how to read in about 10 minutes. I was sitting with a book by myself, and I took the book to my mother, and I said, “Look, I can read!” And she was doing something in the kitchen, stirring something or whatever. She didn’t even look down at me, like, it’s not important. And I’m going, Wait a minute! The whole world has changed! So the Holy Spirit figures out what each person needs.

M: As I’ve mentioned, I love your poetry. Sometimes there are points in your poems where the phrases seem almost perfect. They’re like little gems. This is going to sound silly, but it feels like the words were almost ordained, right? Do you mind if I read just a few of my favorite lines from your poems?

JMW: Oh, do.

M: From “Leaves Leaving”: “They outdo each other / drawing secret metals / from the earth / to turn magenta, crimson, / orchid, sun-bather cinnamon. / They wrap the brown grass like a present.”

From “Poem for the Missing Beauty Operator”: “In a village where the streets were so tiny / and shagged off to the wilderness on every side, / we girls and women bent our heads to suffer / for refinement, bobby pins stuck in / like little crucifixes right over perfect wheels of hair.”

From “After Terrorism”: “Maybe the John Deere of history / has to drag catastrophe into our library with an 18-gauge chain / before we finally stand up and say, Well, what have we got here?”

I could go on… I wonder, do you ever feel like the words choose you? Is writing poetry all labor and effort and persistence, or are there times when the words just drop out of the sky into your lap?

JMW: Yeah, if you work hard enough. By working I mean reading a lot of good stuff, thinking a lot about the language, and doing some kinds of exercises, the kind I used to teach my students to do. Like exercises that have to do with sound, so you can make sounds in a line that sound like music. Or that teach you to think about stops — places where language stops and there is silence.

M: The last chapter in your memoir is perhaps its most beautiful, but it’s also heavy, because it’s about your mother’s Alzheimer’s. I know you wrote an earlier memoir entirely about that subject about a decade ago. But your last paragraph has just stayed with me. You write:

My mother never lost her faith, and I suspect she did not find her slide into Alzheimer’s as distressing as I did. Faith is the conviction that this world is not tragic but comic. Maybe it gives a person the ability to see whatever joy and beauty and wit flickers in the disorienting darkness. Or maybe it is the result of noticing those flickers. I don’t know. And how can we know for sure that the flickers are clues to how the story will end? We can’t know for sure. Nevertheless, most mornings I wake up believing that we are perennials not annuals — a feeling that itself is a gift. Surely what dies will spring back to life. I suspect it was my mother who taught me that faith.

I love that.

JMW: Thank you.

M: I have to ask, from all the experience you had dealing with that really challenging disease as a daughter and caregiver, what is some advice you might give to someone trying to care for a loved one who has dementia?

JMW: That’s a hard question. I think it depends on who it is and what their relationship to you is. It’s probably easier to deal with a parent who has Alzheimer’s than it would be to deal with a husband or a wife. Because as a spouse, you have to live with it every day, whereas in my case I didn’t live with it every day, although we called my mother every day to make sure she heard our voices. My husband was fantastic about that. He loved her too, so I wasn’t the only one.

As far as what helps, I would say I learned to just answer my mother straightforwardly based on whatever weird things she said — to talk back, in other words, and not to try to correct her. I think that’s the most important thing about caring for someone with that disease. For a while, as loved ones, I think we don’t fully grasp that this condition is not going to change. But once you understand that, then I think, wherever they are or whatever they’re doing, you have to participate in it.

M: Which is a kind of grace.

JMW: Yeah, but it’s not so easy, because you’re stuck standing in the rain somewhere, and she’s off in Africa.

M: One of your best-known poems is “Staying Power,” which has been published in numerous anthologies. At the end of the poem you write,

Say God’s not fire, say anything, say God’s
a phone, maybe. You know you didn’t order a phone,
but there it is. It rings. You don’t know who it could be.

You don’t want to talk, so you pull out
the plug. It rings. You smash it with a hammer
till it bleeds springs and coils and clobbery
metal bits. It rings again. You pick it up

and a voice you love whispers hello.

As you age, how has God continued to whisper to you through that “telephone” that won’t stop ringing?

JMW: Well, when I was little I heard about this still, small voice. I thought there was really a voice. But in my experience, it’s more like a presence that appears over and above and around whatever situation you’re in and it aims you towards the truth. But it’s hard to talk about. I’m not really sure I have language for it, except in that poem, for example.

It’s funny, everywhere I go I see that poem. The irony of it is, I wrote that poem in about 20 minutes. For 40 years, I’ve had a writing workshop with another poet. Usually they take place on Friday, and she contributes a poem, and I contribute one, and we comment on one another’s work. So I wrote that poem after I got home from school one day, just before I went to see my friend Deb for our workshop. Now, I was probably working on that poem at some deeper level for months, but I wrote it very quickly. It just came to me.

The post On Growing Up Fundamentalist and Loving God Anyway appeared first on Mockingbird.

I heard someone exclaim this as I walked out the doors of Saint George’s to begin my journey home. It did feel like a hug from God, those three days we came together for the 2026 Mockingbird NYC Conference. Wow to the deadness, indeed!

Ben Maddison wrote a wonderful post about the letdown we feel upon leaving the Mockingbird Conference, knowing that it will be another year before we come together again. Over the years, I have tried to wrap words around this strange feeling of returning to our lives. I have also sought to tie some theological concepts to what we feel.

Displacement is the Root Cause

The best word I can find to describe this feeling every year is … grieving, a sadness that it will be too long before we are once again in a place where we feel so at home. Gil Kracke gave perhaps the best theological concept for understanding this feeling at the 2010 mini conference in Pensacola, Florida. Gil spoke there of displacement, a term which describes the perennial state of a Christian. When we receive God’s grace, we become displaced persons, because we no longer belong in this world in which we live; while at the same time, we are not yet in the world in which we belong. For where we now belong is with Christ.

Last week, I attended a function at Virginia Theological Seminary where Daniel Gutiérrez, a visiting speaker, gave a beautiful illustration of such displacement. He asked if there were any marine biologists in the audience? There were not. He then asked if any of us knew how whales die? We did not. When whales die they drown, because as mammals they must go up for air. At the point of death, they can no longer reach the surface to breathe. While other sea creatures, save dolphins and a few others, have adapted to breathe underwater, the whale has not. The whale, it turns out, lives in one world but actually belongs in another. This is displacement. Similarly, you and I live our lives in this world, but we belong in another.

Love is the Displaced Language

Yet you and I not only live our lives in a world where we do not belong, we also speak to this world a language that it does not understand. For ours is the language of love, one that speaks deeply to human suffering. Indeed, we speak of a love that was born out of the ultimate suffering, a divine love through Christ and the Cross, one that is offered to all who will believe and receive such love. But the only language this world wants to hear is the language of self-love and the love of self-aggrandizement, which will not look beyond itself.

Our language of love is a language not of this world. Nevertheless, we continue to speak it. Like the whale, we call to a world that will not listen, save for other whales we encounter.

Glimpses of the Other World

We do occasionally experience glimpses of what it will be like someday when we are where we belong. These are times when we can speak and hear freely this language that is not at all unfamiliar to us. It is a language that we understand and yearn for somewhere in a deep common substratum. This language of love is the “lost lane-end into heaven” for those who will hear it. It is a language that is for us like fresh air that we have longed to breathe. It is language that can feel to us as if we are receiving a warm hug from our loving God.

One place we experience this language is the Mockingbird NYC Conference, where for three days we no longer feel displaced. The world is outside, but inside is grace and fellowship and relief. Here we can breathe. Here we can feel God’s love. Because here God’s love is the only language of the day, so that here God’s love can embrace us as God’s grace sets us free.

The post When God Hugs Us appeared first on Mockingbird.

Our sessions sometimes go off track, just like this one had, but this time the conversation became unexpectedly intimate. In this unguarded moment, my counselor spoke relationship-changing words. “If we weren’t in a counseling relationship,” he shared, “I would love to go to your church.” Silence. Eye contact. “I would love to go to your church,” he said. It was a Freudian slip of my counselor’s own making, an unguarded admission that, outside of his office couch, we could be good friends. It was like that memeified scene from the Will Ferrell comedy Step Brothers: “Did we just become best friends?” Is our therapeutic relationship getting in the way of us being buddies? But after this wide-eyed moment of connection, where our mutual passion to connect our faith and psychology sparked, we both blushed and demurred to another topic. There were now only 35 minutes left in our session, and we hadn’t really touched on the reason for my visit.

Therapists are one part of a larger “emotional” economy, where we trade money for things like self-knowledge, emotional uplift, wisdom, or expertise. Other professions in this emotional economy: personal trainers, financial advisors, life coaches, massage therapists, beauticians, barbers, pet sitters, and the hospitality industry of hotels and restaurants. It’s not enough to provide a stylish haircut, excellent financial advice, a tasty meal, or a good workout. Each of these industries becomes profitable when they add a relational component to their service that transcends the practical need they supply. I’m much more likely to stick with my counselor if, beyond offering me treatment, he treats me as a friend. If my fitness trainer leads me like a drill sergeant, I may quit and not come back. The occasional Christmas card from my financial advisor is a marketing ploy, but at least he remembers me outside of our annual check-ins. It’s not enough to walk out of the salon with a stylish haircut: most people want to have a pleasant conversation with the stylist as a part of the pampering process.

I once dined at a fancy New York City restaurant, the kind with multiple Michelin stars. It was so good that I decided to return again four years later when I was back in the city (for a Mockingbird conference, nonetheless!). When I walked in the door, the hostess, who I had never met before, greeted me. “Welcome back Mr. Jarrell, it’s been a while. We’re glad you could join us again this evening. How have you been?” Certainly, there is a database with my information in it feeding the hostess her lines. It’s the kind of restaurant that might even have hidden cameras doing AI facial recognition, or a photo of me in their reservation system that they stealthily captured during my last visit. Intellectually, I knew her greeting was disingenuous, an excellently executed marketing ploy. That didn’t stop the warm feeling of pride and importance that rose up through the base of my spine and into my lungs and chest at her welcome. “They remembered me!” I thought as my shoulders subconsciously squared and my chin rose up. “I’m important!” Food aside, I may go back again one day and drop a West Virginia rent check on a four-course dinner just to get another hit of New York–sized validation.

Herein lies the problem: so many aspects of this emotional economy are built upon a mix of money and friendship, when, practically speaking, money and friendship are oil and water. The most important relationships in our life are those which are unconditional and voluntary. We find happiness and fulfillment in part because people choose to be with us, and we reciprocate that choice. A hermeneutic of suspicion might try to reduce these relationships to a transaction, but lived reality tells us friendship and kinship are more than the mutual exchange of endorphin- and dopamine-inducing interactions. Mutually reciprocated love and care is best described by poetry and art, not biology or psychology, to say nothing of how they inspire voluntary self-sacrifice for the other’s benefit.

My experience at the restaurant was the opposite of my friend’s experience at the gym. Some years ago, in my late twenties, I joined a heavy-metal, Viking-themed gym that specialized in personal training and weight lifting. The owners and trainers worked hard to create an encouraging atmosphere. If someone on the other side of the room was working on a heavy lift, those close by would shout encouragement, clapping and cheering them on. The rest of the gym, hearing the commotion from across the room, was spurred on to join in with the cheers, despite not knowing the circumstances. Within moments, the whole room was cheering as the lifter struggled to get their full extension. It was a fantastic environment. I would likely still attend that gym if I hadn’t moved away for work. 

One day, at the store, I ran into a gym friend I hadn’t seen in a while. I mentioned it to her, and she sighed with exasperation. “I quit the gym” she said. “I invited our workout leader to my birthday party last month, and she didn’t come. She was a fake friend to me.” 

You can forgive this friend of mine for mistaking the atmosphere of the gym for something deeper than it actually was. Who doesn’t want to try something hard and have a whole room cheering for them? Who wouldn’t be disappointed to find out that this atmosphere was limited to the four walls of the gym and a monthly payment? Wouldn’t we all like to have a room full of cheerleaders when we engage with life’s everyday heavy lifting? As positive as the gym environment was, it was not fueled by kinship and mutual affection. The money made it conditional.

The Bible is pretty clear that there are things that can’t be bought. Its prohibitions against prostitution, for example, are nuanced enough to highlight how the social dynamics of human sexuality don’t mix with money. The highs of physical intimacy can be experienced properly only in the monogamous unconditional vows of marriage, with all its “better or worse, richer or poorer, sickness and health” glory. Jesus has nothing good to say about those who give generously to the Jerusalem temple’s operating fund but have otherwise immoral lives, as if their relationship with God was as simple as a financial transaction. Simon the Mage, of course, is buried in condemnation by Peter when he tries to buy the blessings and charisms of the Holy Spirit.

This particular mix of money and relationship and heartbreak defines the apostate disciple. In Matthew’s gospel, Judas repents of his betrayal and tries to atone by returning his famed 30 pieces of silver reward to the temple leadership. “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood,” he declares. The leaders, of course, couldn’t care less. “What is that to us? See to it yourself.” Judas wants there to be some connection or understanding from his conspirators, some level of acknowledgment that he has erred. Perhaps he can restore something by returning the blood money. Maybe, because he’s asking for absolution from a priestly caste, he thinks there is possibly some atonement available from God himself. Sadly, he discovers that their relationship is merely transactional. They are not going to offer him a bounty for his betrayal while also giving him relief from the burden of his guilt. The charge cannot be reversed.

Life’s closest relationships — family, friends, and even God himself — can only be unconditional. The moment that money enters the equation, the potential for real intimacy dries up and withers. My therapist won’t ever be a congregant. Nor will I go out for cocktails with my financial advisor. My personal trainer is swell, and we show up at the same parties from time to time, but I won’t be calling him up to see if he wants to go to the movies next weekend. And that’s OK. Gratefully, I have family and friends in my life that I can count on outside of services that I pay for. But for those who don’t have some element of unconditional love in their life, the emotional economy provides a close, but ultimately unfulfilling, proxy.

The post Is Money Involved? It Doesn’t Count. appeared first on Mockingbird.

Our desires are so often as much about how the world has already affected us, than how we want to affect the world. The strange things that pull us — that remind us of childhood, or home, or a teenage cast party, or a first love — [are] as much evidence of our vulnerability as our sovereignty. If “what I want” is part of “who I am,” it is in part because I have less control than I think over either.

My desires, at least, are always attractions to unanswered questions. They’re longings to plumb mysteries I can’t fathom. I want to heave my whole body against locked doors.

Reframing desire/object in the language of curiosity/mystery, Burton notes:

The language of mystery makes more sense to me. It makes sense to me as an artist: working on pieces where all my uncertainties can be held in tension, offered up without resolution. And it makes sense to me as a person discerning everything in my life, all at once. To stand in a mystery — to expect not full knowledge but to hope for understanding — is, at least, to be open to incompleteness […]

I respon[d], selfishly, to particularity (a resemblance, a memory, an evocation) in a poem, or a painting; the particularity helps me pay attention; I pay attention and I see something else beautiful in it, foreign to my first understanding, which remakes me, a little bit next time I find that particularly calling me, in another painting, or another person. I can’t ever get out of myself. Most doors I’ll never open. Even the ones I try I’ll only splinter, get a shoulder through at best, and hope that what comes through, in the end, is light.

Burton’s insights work toward a distinction between desire to acquire something which augments the self, versus desire as being led into a world where the self feels small before a larger mystery which it dimly apprehends, or in which it incompletely partakes.

The piece also sheds light on different ways of approaching individual desire: the ascetic way, seeking agape by denying one’s particular, self-interested loves, or the way of Dante (among others), where particular loves can lead one toward agape.[1] Burton embraces the latter, which seems a helpful paradigm for us contemporary Protestants, who are talking much more about desire and aesthetics than we were in the ’90s but almost always in the context of “formation.” Burton’s question — how do you engage transcendent beauty and mystery with the self God has given you? — is a good one.

For more on relating to real but ungraspable mysteries, check out Belle Tindall Riley’s excellent talk from last week’s NYC conference, “An Age of Unknowing: A Generation’s Yearning for Mystery.”

2. The Atlantic published a bevy of relevant pieces this week, beginning with Megan Garber’s article on performance anxiety. Garber notes that the rise of social media and the possibility of public representation of everything you do have “eroded the old distinctions between the performing of life and the living of it.” She writes that “mass self-consciousness is ascendant. Performance anxiety is becoming a way of life.”

Garber has several interesting observations, including the gradual use of language from fiction (etymologically, something “made” or “produced”) to describe everyday life. We think about our lives in term of character arcs, “main character energy,” etc. In a world where we feel we are constantly performing for an audience, there’s a corresponding impulse toward privacy. Garber notes that after the pandemic, “many people kept wearing masks. They did so not as a defense against other people’s germs but as a defense against other people’s eyes. A common explanation was I’m sick of being perceived.” But in a vicious cycle, our retreat into ourselves removes human foibles even more from public life:

The less you’re around other people, the less patient you might be of the foibles that can compromise a performance, whether your own or someone else’s. The desire for a stage environment that is under total control — in which every line sparkles, in which no awkward pauses occur, in which misspeaking and misunderstandings are violations — may be a rational response to the pressure to be forever “on.” The main character, after all, has one job: to put on a good show. But when the show never ends, the need to stage-manage doesn’t either. And that can be exhausting.

Sure can. The piece doesn’t provide an easy solution. But the predicament is another sign that our culture is increasingly in need of (and primed for?) a message that meets our foibles with forgiveness, that we share fallen nature and share healing grace; that even though I’ve flubbed most of my lines and bungled my character arc, my belovedness and hope are firmly rooted in a God who loved me and gave himself for me.

3. At the Wall Street Journal, Carolyn Gorman makes the case that it’s okay to be unhappy, arguing that “happiness” is not the normal human condition, nor is “unhappiness,” in itself, a disease to be treated:

In the years since Sigmund Freud discovered the couch, Americans got the strange idea that happiness is the natural human condition. Unhappiness, they decided, is a psychological problem…

In recent decades, there’s been an obsession with improving “mental health.” But the concept of “mental health” has so many vague definitions that anyone the least bit unhappy is presumably “mentally unwell.” Therapy culture has taught us to attend closely to our emotions because anything negative supposedly might be the early sign of something serious and merit professional intervention…

For most of Western history, constant happiness hasn’t been a goal in and of itself. The good life meant striving for more, which naturally involves effort and discomfort. Freud saw psychoanalysis as a tool for returning miserable patients to “ordinary unhappiness.” Seeing unhappiness as a normal part of life might be what’s needed to feel better.

While there are undeniably mental health problems that can be diagnosed and improved with treatment, for “ordinary unhappiness,” Gorman’s insights seem constructive. One Christian writer noted that in some of his congregations, people felt an overwhelming pressure to be happy and like they were messing up their lives if they weren’t.

When someone is unhappy in an ordinary sort of way, making them think there’s something wrong with them doesn’t help. And I can’t help but wonder whether the law of “thou shalt be happy” doesn’t motivate us, like a whip to a beast of burden, to pursue various avenues that numb our unhappiness — doomscrolling, etc. And when we apply that law to our children, well, it’s safe to say it often produces the opposite.

4. In the case of happiness, there are particular structural reasons why mandating it seems to produce the exact opposite. In this week’s post at Experimental Theology, Richard Beck lists several of those mechanisms. Of note here is the “hedonic treadmill” effect, that a new gadget or new accomplishment generates a short-lived feeling of satisfaction, after which we return to a baseline. Hence the treadmill analogy — we keep running forward even as we don’t move in space.

Another mechanism is poor “affective forecasting” — we’re reasonably proficient at judging what course of action will make us healthier or more professionally successful in the future, but we’re pretty bad at judging what will make us happy:

We stand at the fork in the road of a life decision. We look down one path and make a prediction about how happy we will be if we travel that road. We make an “affective forecast.” Then we look down the alternative path and make a happiness prediction for that choice. We compare those forecasts and pick the one we think, at the moment of choice, will make us happier.

Sadly, as I said, we are terrible at this task. Due to “miswanting,” desiring the wrong things, we are poor at predicting joy. We travel down roads that do not lead to happiness.

The misalignment of our desires and what will make us happy seems as good an entry into a secular doctrine of sin as any. But there’s also the problem of the will: even when we can affectively forecast what will make us happier, we are often constrained by the will. As a self-hating Missourian once said, “Between the motion / And the Act / Falls the shadow.”

Beck also notes the old Aristotelian point that happiness is a byproduct of certain goods, which means it doesn’t do well to pursue it directly, and that pursuing happiness promotes patterns of narcissistic thought, which in the long run undermine happiness pretty significantly. Given all that, it seems the “thou shalt be happy” mandate not only fails to confer the power to fulfill it but actually provokes the opposite in some pretty specific ways.

Which all appears to validate Gorman’s intuition. Liberating us from the pressure to be happy may be a countercultural, urgent, and liberating way for grace to make contact.

5. One way our desire for personal happiness — or the closely related ideal of self-actualization — plays out is in efficiency, control, and streamlining. In the process, the earthy, bright, messy things of the world, in which our ancestors were enmeshed, are placed at arm’s length; daily experience loses texture. At the New Yorker, Hanif Abdurraqib provides a wistful, non-quite-fatalistic reflection on “Our Longing for Inconvenience” in the modern world:

I learned early lessons in patience and precision using a hand-me-down dual tape deck that I kept in my childhood bedroom. I would wait, sometimes for hours, to hear a song on the radio that I wanted to record onto cassette. I’d be careful to wait until the end of the d.j. intro before hitting Record, so as not to get it onto tape, and I’d cut out early if the d.j. intruded at the song’s end. I learned that if I wanted to avoid picking up the harsh click sound of the tape stopping, I could hold down the Pause button and then press Stop. In both the Walkman and the bedroom tape deck, the cassette’s inner spool of tape would sometimes get caught up in the gears of the machine; the remedy was to gently remove the cassette and wind the tape back into the casing with a pencil, lest you destroy your coveted archive of songs—some of which, for all you knew, might not come on the radio again.

Abdurraqib, it seems, learned lessons about carefulness, attentiveness, work and reward, etc. And I remember learning those lessons as I painstakingly assembled my iTunes collection in 2005, lovingly editing songs’ metadata like a geologist poring over her favorite rocks. How many of the lessons formerly taught by necessity must we now learn by social engineering, repetitive self-discipline, or not at all? How many gifts we used to receive, unwillingly and unknowingly and appurtenant to some inconvenient necessity, must we now struggle to achieve? Abdurraqib concludes with her struggle to take on as much inconvenience as she can handle:

I’ve resolved to never have my own groceries delivered, even though when I go to the grocery store no one seems especially interested in making eye contact, let alone in speaking. And I don’t blame them, because some days I’m not sure that I am either. What makes the madness increasingly incurable is that I want parts of the past that are increasingly incompatible with this iteration of our world. I walk through the grocery store, half smiling, with my hood up. My friend finds a VHS player but can’t connect it to any television in his house.

Still, I understand her desire, because so many of my own desires are detached from the reality of the times we live in. I am still inventing inconvenience in order to bolster my desire to feel alive.

6. In the social-manifestations-of-Romans-7 category, the Atlantic explores the tension between Americans’ undaunted reverence for monogamy and the increasing inability to live up to it. Polled on a range of moral issues like euthanasia, gambling, and the death penalty, the one moral behavior Americans almost universally condemned was infidelity.

The article notes the powerful emotional effects of infidelity vis-à-vis other forms of harmful behavior. One woman, whose husband incurred significant debt without her knowledge until collectors came and stripped her house, remarked that “it’s so much better … than if he cheated on me.” The preference recalls a line from a certain ancient Hebrew love poem, “If one offered for love / all the wealth of one’s house / it would be utterly scorned” (Song of Songs 8:7).

It’s understandable that we tend to view our partner’s exclusive commitment within marriage as a proxy of our own belovedness. At the same time, it would appear that the weight of our seeking fulfillment through such relationships leads to fewer and fewer actual marriages:

Fewer have actually been getting hitched, but that might be a testament to how seriously the institution is taken; people tend now to think of matrimony as something for which they need to prepare — save up money, get their career in order, find their soulmate […]

What a tortured relationship Americans have with monogamy. They can’t live with it; they can’t live without it. Pundits who panic about monogamy’s demise aren’t necessarily wrong. Only a minority of Americans live up to the nuclear-family model: two married parents with kids, all under one roof, their relationship not open or adulterous. Maybe people are so protective of monogamy because they can sense that it really is vulnerable. The problem is that they end up putting immense pressure on the custom to provide them with purpose and complete fulfillment. It’s perhaps no wonder that so many people cheat; they may want more from their relationship than it can ever really give them. The glass gripped too tightly will shatter.

The irony, then, is that our very idealization of marriage creates expectations that scare us off it (Bowie: “ter-ri-fies me”) or makes us seek too much from it, sowing the seeds of later dissatisfaction, restlessness, even infidelity. In light of that, The Atlantic piece ends with modest advocacy for looking to sources of meaning other than monogamous marriage.

Most of the pastors I know who do marriage counseling would agree — we need a source of fulfillment beyond our spouse. But other sources of fulfillment — work, polygamy, etc. — tend to take us away from the family. Christianity’s the only one I know that affirms the family and marriage while not making them absolute. I wouldn’t quote Matthew 22:30 in a rehearsal-dinner toast, but it’s a good example of how the hope of the world to come acts as a brake on our tendency to overburden the good things in life.

Sociologically, conservatives tend to assume the decline in Christianity has harmed monogamous, long-term commitments by making people value them less. The Atlantic piece suggests otherwise; that the decline in Christianity may have harmed monogamous commitments by making us value them above all else. As the theologian Charles Marsh once said of the ’60s counterculture, in the absence of a religiously transcendent frame of reference, “Eros, overburdened, collapses in on itself.” Seems an apt description for today, too.

While we’re on the subject, I hear Christine Emba’s talk on “Modern Love” at our NYC conference last week was not to be missed. Can’t wait to listen.

7. In humor, the Onion’s “Man Finally Good Enough at New Hobby to Realize How Bad He Is At It” struck a chord — “At last I’ve gotten to the point where I’m able to just pick up a guitar and immediately grasp how little talent I have for it. I’ve come a long way, and I can now see that I have absolutely no business trying to play music.” Makes me wonder if my old dormmate from YoungLife camp ever mastered the opening of “Stairway to Heaven.”

McSweeney’s takes on ’90s nostalgia with its “Fine. This Is What I Was Really Like in the ‘90s”:

Nothing about love was complicated back then. Relationships lingered without the ability to instantly reach someone via text, and most breakups were done on a folded piece of loose-leaf paper…

If I said I’d meet someone at a bar at 10 p.m., I just stood there alone sipping my amaretto sour. If they didn’t show up, I didn’t get a text saying: Running late. I just went home and assumed they had moved or died…

There was no doomscrolling, only staining my fingertips with the same copy of Rolling Stone for months.

So, no, honey, I wasn’t “vibing” in the ’90s. I was perpetually slurping a forty-ounce Slushie, waiting for a payphone, and shaking cigarette ash off my oversized flannel shirt. Just like you, I was figuring it out, only with better music and thankfully scant photographic evidence.

Plus the Babylon Bee weighs in with a classic “Dad Splits Commute Time Between Worshipping the Lord Jesus Christ and Cursing Out Bad Drivers”:

Witnesses said Jeff West, a project manager at a local company and also an elder at his church, was on his way to work Wednesday morning and going through his normal routine of alternating between singing along with worship music and loudly shouting imprecatory exclamations at nearby drivers as he drove through traffic…

At publishing time, West had reportedly made up for his outbursts of profanity by uttering a quick prayer for the drivers who offended him on his way to work.

Strays:

• The Atlantic this week also ran a raw and honest memoir of maternal grief (excerpted from Danielle Crittendon’s forthcoming Dispatches from Grief, to be released May 5), a sympathetic profile of John Mark Comer, and a glowing review of James K. A. Smith’s new book, Make Your Home In This Luminous Dark.
• The NYT’s interview of Bob Odenkirk, sketch comedian turned Saul Goodman of Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul fame — and now action movies — is worth a read.
• Also notable is Paul Bradbury’s reflection at Seen and Unseen on anonymity, where he suggests that “value capture” — the idea that evaluation based on others’ criteria makes us internalize those criteria as our own — accounts for the value of anonymity. As Bradbury notes, it perhaps sheds a bit of light on the “messianic secret” motif, too.
• For writers, perfectionists, and/or Connecticuters, the New York Review of Books wrote up an exhibit on errata at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library. In addition to an anecdote about a 1631 KJV print run that omitted the “not” in the Seventh Commandment — nightmare fuel for copyeditors and pious Englishmen alike — there’s something both terrifying and comforting about a museum of mistakes.
• And finally, thanks be to God, not one but two of our favorite musicians — Paul Zach and John Van Deusen (who met rave reviews at our 2025 Charlottesville and 2026 New York Conferences, respectively) — released new music today. Listen, mark, inwardly digest, etc.

[1] But then for every Dante there’s a Proust, who managed to turn his particular infatuation into a sort of transcendence, albeit a solipsistic and infinitely more fraught one. It also bears mention that even though we rarely choose the way of ascesis — I want my Staedtler mechanical pencils! — life often forces us into it. To take an example from Burton [spoiler alert for Sense and Sensibility], Marianne wasn’t able to choose the good, stolid Colonel Brandon until the dashing Willoughby abandoned her. And all for the best, in the end. (FWIW, Elinor’s restraint about the matter reflects a sober evaluation of her influence over her sister’s misplaced affections and, one could argue, presents a salutary example for elder siblings and pastoral ministers today.)

The post April 25 – May 1 appeared first on Mockingbird.

Artificial intelligence is not only accelerating access to information; it is quietly and persistently teaching us to expect that everything should happen quickly. When answers appear in a moment, we suspect that patience is increasingly passé. When knowledge is organized and delivered on demand, delay seems like failure rather than a natural part of life. In this way, AI does more than speed up our tools — it magnifies our impatience.

As more of life becomes immediate — answers, entertainment, communication — we are being trained to expect resolution without delay. Waiting, once a normal part of life, feels like an inconvenience we can eliminate with enough engineering.

To be clear, artificial intelligence did not create our impatience; it simply reveals how deeply it has already shaped us.

This shift has been subtle. No one sets out to reject patience. The change happens gradually as our tools reshape our instincts. Centuries ago, Blaise Pascal observed that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Our technologies have only intensified that tendency. When information arrives instantly, we subtly assume that clarity should always arrive quickly. When solutions to everyday problems appear on demand, we presume that deeper problems will resolve just as easily.

Over time, these expectations seep into areas of life where they do not belong. We tend to carry technological assumptions into relationships, spiritual growth, and even prayer. When God does not deliver like Amazon Prime, we assume something has malfunctioned. Either the method has failed, or the system itself must be broken.

But the more profound realities of human life have never operated according to that logic. Healing is rarely immediate. Trust is built slowly. Wisdom emerges through years of experience. And the transformation of the human heart — what scripture calls sanctification — almost always unfolds gradually, often through long stretches that appear outwardly unchanged.

Technology accelerates many good things. But it cannot accelerate the formation of character. Character grows according to a different clock — one measured not in seconds but in seasons.

Decades ago, the French cultural critic Jacques Ellul observed that technological societies gradually reorganize human expectations around efficiency and speed. When rapid results become the dominant measure of progress, habits that require patience now feel irrational. Waiting itself can seem unnecessary. In such an environment, the slow processes that shape human character — learning, healing, reconciliation, and spiritual growth — are easily misunderstood because they refuse to operate on technological timelines.

Media critic Neil Postman extended this concern by warning that modern societies risk becoming cultures that “amuse themselves to death,” gorging on entertainment rather than pursuing education or wisdom. When information is constantly packaged for immediate consumption, the patient habits required for understanding gradually erode. What requires time, effort, and sustained attention increasingly feels burdensome, while immediacy becomes the assumed and preferred standard.

Earlier observers of mass persuasion sensed a similar dynamic. Social observers such as Gustave Le Bon, Walter Lippmann, and Edward Bernays warned that large systems of communication and persuasion could subtly mold how entire populations perceive reality. Their concern was not merely political. They recognized that the tools that distribute information inevitably influence how people think, expect, and respond.

Over time, those forces frame not only our schedules but our imaginations. When so many practical problems can be solved quickly, we then expect that deeply personal problems should respond just as readily. Yet the most important dimensions of human life rarely move at that pace. Character forms slowly. Wisdom grows gradually. Relationships mature over years. And the work God does in the human soul often unfolds in ways that resist acceleration.

It is precisely here that the modern imagination clashes with the rhythm of Christianity. Scripture consistently portrays waiting not as a malfunction of God’s purposes but as one of his primary instruments for shaping faith. Abraham waited 25 years for the fulfillment of God’s promise of an heir. Moses waited 40 years in the wilderness before God called him to lead. David waited years between his anointing as king and his enthronement.

Job waited. Joseph waited. Even Jesus waited.

In each case, the promise preceded the fulfillment, and the space between promise and fulfillment became the place in which faith was revealed and obedience proved genuine. God’s people were required to trust not only what he had said but also the timing he chose.

Waiting, in other words, was never accidental. It was instructional.

Waiting is not only where we are shaped — it is where we begin to see something about God himself. Scripture reveals a God who is never hurried, never late, and never indifferent, but who works with a patience that far exceeds our own. What feels like delay to us is often the outworking of his long, careful purposes.

The Psalms capture this dynamic repeatedly. Again and again the people of God cry out with the same question: How long, O Lord? That question is not a failure of faith. It is the language of faith living inside the tension between promise and fulfillment.

God is not simply asking us to wait — he is revealing himself as One who works patiently, faithfully, and over time.

The scriptures never pretend that waiting is easy. Waiting exposes our limits. It reveals how little control we actually have over our lives. It confronts our desire to manage outcomes and timelines. Yet precisely in those moments, God often accomplishes his best work in us.

In waiting we learn to distinguish between trust in God’s promises and trust in our own preferred schedules. The first produces humility and endurance. The second produces frustration and anxiety. Waiting on God is a confession that our shortcuts are no match for his sovereignty (Ps 103:19). Waiting, therefore, becomes a kind of spiritual classroom where God patiently teaches his people to rely not merely on his power, but also on his wisdom. And that is good news, because it means the burden of the process does not rest on us alone but on a God who is patient with his people.

In that sense, waiting is not simply something believers endure. It is something through which they grow and mature.

My own family has lived in waiting for decades. My wife has battled retinitis pigmentosa for more than 40 years and is now in the final stages of losing her eyesight. No technological advance has shortened our waiting for a cure. We have prayed for healing through the years and continue to do so. Yet in that long, unresolved prayer, we have discovered something scripture has always taught: Waiting is not empty time. It is the place where dependence deepens and faith is quietly formed.

Living inside a culture of accelerating solutions makes this kind of waiting feel especially disorienting. New technologies promise faster answers to nearly every problem, and it becomes easy to assume that every difficulty must eventually yield to the same momentum of progress. Yet some realities resist that logic. Illness, loss, and the frailty of the human body remind us that not every question yields to innovation. In such moments, we are brought face-to-face with a truth modern culture often forgets: Some of the most enduring work God does in our lives unfolds not through immediate solutions but through sustained trust in the midst of unanswered questions.

Thus waiting is not an anomaly in the Christian life — an inconvenience to be eradicated. Rather, faith is strengthened there. Trust is clarified there. Hope is anchored there. God often leads his people into seasons where obedience is required before they understand the end. The Bible and long experience teach us that waiting is not wasted time; it is necessary time. Not destructive time, but formative time.

So in a culture that increasingly desires to delete delay from everyday life, waiting may feel abnormal — even suspicious. Yet scripture proves the opposite. Waiting is not a sign that God has forgotten his people. Rather, it is evidence that he has not finished shaping them.

A question typed into an AI interface may be answered in seconds. But the deepest questions of the human heart rarely yield to that kind of speed. They unfold slowly, often through times of uncertainty, where answers remain hidden and faith must learn to trust what it cannot yet see.

God never rushes the work he does in his people. He is still forming souls the old way. And that work almost always requires waiting.

Perry C. Brown is a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary and has taught the Bible for over 45 years. This article was inspired by his latest book, Waiting… Navigating the Most Difficult Part of the Christian Life.

The post Waiting in an Age of Instant Answers appeared first on Mockingbird.

First off, a big thank you to all the dedicated volunteers who made the weekend so wonder-ful, most especially to Chris and Emily White, Calvary-St. George’s and all the amazing staff and volunteers, the speakers, and everyone in between. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

As always, all the talks below are free to stream and download, but we would greatly appreciate if you could chip in a donation to help defray the costs from the weekend. Conferences aren’t cheap to put together, and we definitely don’t make money off of them.

To donate, click here.

ALSO! The Fall Minnesota Conference, “Grace for the Ages,” is this October 2–3, 2026.

AND FYI registration for 20th Annual NYC Conference (April 15–17, 2027) is now open at a special early-bird registration discount. You really, really, won’t want to miss it.

Pre-conference events will be available soon. If you’re not already subscribed to Talkingbird, talks are also available via streaming on Apple and Spotify.

Plenary Talks:

“The Wonder of Grace (When Grief Is Everywhere)” — David Zahl

“An Age of Unknowing: A Generation’s Yearning for Mystery” — Belle Tindall Riley

“The Science of Revenge and Forgiveness” — James Kimmel, Jr.

“Modern Love (Or Lack Thereof?)” — Christine Emba

“Getting Through What You’re Going Through” — Tanner Olson

“Blaise Pascal: Addressing the Cultured Despisers of Religion” — Graham Tomlin

“A Conversation on Mattering” — Jennifer Breheny Wallace talks with David Zahl

“A Word for the Weary: The Consolation of Homiletics” — Tim Blackmon

Breakout Sessions:

“The Personality of Jesus: Meeting the Man the Church Forgets” — Todd Brewer

“Carpe Parvum: Embracing Little Ambitions in Light of the Resurrection” — Ryan Tinetti

“Grotesque Grace in the Works of Guillermo Del Toro, Flannery O’Connor, and David Foster Wallace” — Kylee Pastore Asirvatham

“Life Is Abundant: 15 Lessons from 15 Years of Church Planting” — Kevin Makins

“The Real King of Color (A God Beyond the Pantone)” — Emily Newton

“I’m Not Dead Yet, But I Could Use a Hug: Naming the Deadness and Waking Up to God With Us” — Marc Choi

“A Positive Charge: On Recovering Boyhood in the Lives of Lonely Men” — Ethan Richardson

“More Than a ‘Like’: When Grace Calls Us Beloved” — Timothy Jones

Short Talks:

Sara Kay Mooney poetry: Opening Night, Friday Morning, Saturday Morning.

Ben Dehart devotionals: Opening Night, Friday Morning, Saturday Morning.

Drinks with Paul Zahl:

The post 2026 Mbird NYC Conference Recordings appeared first on Mockingbird.

Driving to my local airport to park my car and pick up a rental, to then drive to a city without an airport, to then drive from that city to one with an airport (where the rental is dropped off), to then fly back to my parked car. A pretty tight itinerary for an action-packed 26 hours of high performance. Forty hours door to door.

Kicking off this marathon of insanity, I offered a critique of two design sections at a university, saw two graduate students there, and then gave a PowerPoint talk in front of the student body. I may have been fatigued, but the students never looked at their phones in that hour.

The next stop was just as busy. First, there was a Zoom with a bishop, followed by two meetings with parents, students, and teachers using a second PowerPoint presentation. Next were meetings with engineers, followed by a quick measurement of a building for a design project in that second city — all while writing and responding to about 80 emails and texts throughout the two days.

In 26 hours.

All that was left was a quick flight. Genius.

The first flight out left on time then arrived half an hour early. My 32-minute connection time suddenly became an hour. Genius AND lucky!

But then we inexplicably sat in our plane 50 feet outside the entry gate and waited an hour. I missed the connecting flight to my home, the last flight out that night. And since the delay was not the airline’s fault, no free hotel was offered. Not that there were any close enough for the quick turnaround.

But I can catch the next flight out. Twelve hours and an overnight at the Detroit Airport later.

This whole debacle could have been avoided. It could have been just an eight-hour drive back home — I could have spent the night in my bed. Instead, it takes 20 hours to fly home.

Outsmarting yourself assumes you have control, even though you never do. I was not a victim; I did this to myself, and it only happened because God gave me the chutzpah and cleverness to be too smart for my own good.

God gave me the ability to hear students’ designs and suggest ways of seeing those designs that only someone who has done this work for 45 years can. I could then talk to the entire school about the inexplicable beauty of Emily Dickinson’s words and sacred space, because God let me see them and gave me my life’s mission as an architect. Designing, building, mentoring, teaching, inspiring (hopefully). For 26 hours, I enjoyed the fruits of decades of my life’s work.

And, after these joyous efforts of small triumphs, our plane sat for an hour outside our gate, for no known reason. In Detroit.

Because I do not control this.

I had a dozen hours through the night to see the full truth of my inability amidst infinite grace. Walking around the airport in the small hours of the morning is less enjoyable than you might imagine. The appeal of visiting the post-apocalyptic emptiness fades after a few minutes. Once you’ve seen one abandoned food court, you’ve seen them all. Little known fact: Airports are not meant for sleeping. In fact, they are actively designed to be uncomfortable for those who stay longer than a couple of hours. The chairs cannot be made into a bed. The lights are always on, with intermittent noises that disturb the hibernating fools who find themselves stranded.

I wish I could convince myself there was some purpose in all of this: If I could, then I could know the mind of God. I can only apprehend the miracle of life. I cannot reason out the transaction and justice that are simply the life I have been given.

In a world where positions and rationalizations try to define what is correct, the injustice of spending the night in the Detroit Airport could be a grave rallying cry of betrayal against how great Satans — airplanes, airports, our performance culture — has abused me. But that is silly.

When we all die, at one hundred with a loving family or at two in innocent loss, we cannot find the reason or the hideous injustice in any of it. It is simply given to us.

The gift of life is the reason for gratitude: Nothing is earned. We, I, just have to hear God in the beauties (and idiocies) we live every day.

Especially at 3 a.m. in the Detroit Airport.

The post The Illusion of Control appeared first on Mockingbird.

Actually, 50 years ago it was Byne Memorial Baptist Church.^[1] And 50 years ago it was located in downtown Albany — in buildings, now mostly demolished, I still remember well — and not in a gargantuan brick structure north of town.

As so often, church began with an invitation — an acquaintance invited Mom to Byne — specifically to the all-important Sunday school class. Pretty soon Byne was a fixture.

I was baptized there in the baptismal pool behind and above the choir. I must have been six years old. Stepping out onto the pedestal for little kids, the pastor — following the Southern Baptist understanding of millennia’s worth of traditions — immersed me “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Time has blurred these memories. I do recall the sense of seriousness, of commitment.

Some of my psyche’s deepest tracks were laid down at Byne. Hymns. Bible stories. The need to be “saved” (or else). The sense of mission. The importance of a godly life. Being “called” to do amazing things for God and his world. The centrality of sin and the Fall and how all our righteousness is “as filthy rags.” And, what I didn’t see as paradoxical until later, the simultaneous stress on free will, of decision.^[2]

Most of these I have, over the decades, drastically rethought and reworked. Much ended up in a baggage compartment I keep locked tight. Yet there was much good, as well:

Every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old. (Matt. 13:52)

I did my first school years in a public school. Starting in fourth grade, we joined the growing Christian school movement. By the time I was in sixth grade, Byne had its own school. I did sixth and seventh grades there.^[3]

***

Sometime that last year, our time at Byne would end.^[4] That sad happening, so common among churches, befell Byne: a church split.

Schism — rupture in a communion — has featured among Christians since the beginning.^[5] The Reformation, with its emphasis on an individual’s understanding of scripture, accelerated it. Christ’s hope, that Christians might be “one” like he and the Father, is as yet unfulfilled.^[6]

Just as any particular divorce is a composite of the typical reasons and the specific causes for the break, so too a church split. I recall a “moral failure” on one leader’s part. Having myself failed enough  — morally and otherwise — I do not judge. And I am saddened that, even at this distance, shame seems to seep in.^[7]

In retrospect, this was the precipitating cause of the split rather than the deeper explanation. The Charismatic movement was billowing through the South. A fresh voice of the Spirit was overturning the traditions of men. New ways of “singing and making melody” — praise and worship music versus dusty hymns — were bursting out. My parents and their friends hungered for these things. I recall, too, the belief that our “side” was more serious, more committed, possessed of deeper spiritual knowledge.

I am hazy on the chronology of all this but not on how I felt — anxiety and a sense of loss, mingled with curiosity and anticipation.

And so it was that Lifegate Church was formed. Lifegate was my church in youth and young adulthood. Except during college, this close-knit community — really, an extended family — was my spiritual home until I left Albany for grad school.

Many lovely things happened at Lifegate. We followed Christ in what was, for our culture, a radical way. A number of families homeschooled, unusual back then. We were, I suppose, “Bapticostals.” We held traditional views about scripture, salvation, baptism, and ethics. Yet, intense praise and worship, prayers for healing, speaking in tongues, the weekly hope for a fresh word from God — these marked us in varying intensities.

We also held home groups. We hosted “Matthew parties.” We had a lovely youth group. We had itinerant ministers giving us the Good Word. We were politically engaged. [I recall Pat Robertson on a bus at the Albany Mall (ca. 1988). I recall David Barton at Sunday lunch (ca. not sure).] We were ardent pro-lifers. Yet we also wanted to heal Albany’s racial divide — quite remarkable in hindsight.

But Lifegate struggled from the get-go. We had rejected a denominational hierarchy yet soon hungered for an organizational “covering.” We had spurned investment in mere bricks and mortar yet discovered that renting was hard. We had transcended “programs” yet learned that young parents needed those. We had surpassed “committees” yet still had to make decisions. And we had our own conflicts.

Lifegate just never found its footing. People would come; they would leave; they might come back. Stasis was actually a fairly healthy community. Yet, it never achieved escape velocity, never actually left the ground.

More than anything, Lifegate lacked consistent leadership. My first real pastor — a young man from Texas whom I consider a mentor — was at Lifegate. Yet, he was there just a few years. We also had flash-in-the-pan types come through (from Texas, also). Arrogant and immature, they left division in their dust.

A core group of men (of course!) — like a presbytery — gave ongoing leadership. I love them. Yet, to speak in their idiom: They didn’t get it done.

***

When you leave a place, you retain a picture of the people and relationships as you knew them. Yet, those go on, they evolve. My parents — founding members — actually left Lifegate for another small charismatic church. And so, people that in my mind’s eye should be together, are not.

I left Albany when I was nearly 30. Lifegate would endure another 20 years or so. Whether it flourished in those decades is not for me to say. I tried to keep up. Yet politics, a pandemic, my father’s passing, and sheer distance means those connections are largely defunct.

The church closed in 2023.

I’m grateful for my decade and a half or so at Lifegate. “Fundamentalist” might be a fair descriptor, true. Yet, genuine, lived-out love also characterized it. “Christian nationalist” might also be fair. But that too came from conviction that a godly nation alone can prosper. These hold, I suspect, for most Christians hoovered up under the sociopolitical tag White Evangelical.

Lifegate exposed me to different points of view, different ways of being a Christian. Granted, some of these were strange, some downright wrong. Yet, there was a flexibility, an embryonic tolerance. That led, at seminary, to an ecumenicalism and then, years later, to a generous pluralism. I doubt Byne could have given me that head start.

Anthropologists have a notion apropos a church break-up. It’s called schismogenesis. Each side defines itself as much in opposition to the other as it does in terms of what it’s actually for. It sets up a self-reinforcing, perpetual motion machine of divisiveness (see also: our national politics). If Byne was stuck in the past, Lifegate was the future. A photographic negative of the stale deadness that came before.

I don’t know if the stayers at Byne actually thought much about us leavers. We certainly thought about them. A particular position (scriptural, theological, or ethical) was often couched in terms of Exodus. We’d left the old behind and were on to the Promised Land.

Lifegate never reached that locale. Maybe the joy was always destined to be in the journey. Perhaps the peregrinations were the point.

I wonder about counterfactuals, ways things might have been: Byne, I understand, never fully recovered from the break. Its ultimate potential was thus attenuated. So, would the “net result” of Christian impact in Albany have been greater without that split? Probably so. Yet, what about the manifold — and for a place like Albany, truly fresh — insights, experiences, ways of being, and expressions of Christianity that came through Lifegate? They marked me for sure.

Online, I find no trace of that 40-year-old schism. No doubt, the Southern policy to hush up unpleasant things underwrites this. And, no doubt, the event and its aftermath feature larger in my memory than in historical fact. But it happened. Wheat and weeds were sown. I want to identify, to classify, to sort. Yet, at this distance, only God can do that.

^[1] In 1910 a mother and daughter made a significant contribution (greater than half a million dollars in today’s money) toward a church building and dedicated it to their late husband and father — a Mr. G. M. Byne.

^[2] I would understand later that the first stress owed much to Saint Augustine, the latter much to Jacobus Arminius.

^[3] So that would have been through the 1984 / 1985 school year; I would have turned thirteen that January.

^[4] Not only did we leave Byne for church, but we also left the school. We joined the very, very new — and to my paternal grandmother, horrifying — homeschooling movement. So I switched church and school about the same time. A big year for me.

^[5] Witness the conflict between Paul and Peter in Galatians, as well as that between Paul and Barnabas in Acts.

^[6] “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me…” John 17:20, 21 (NIV)

^[7] I recall “our side” forgiving the leader and seeking reconciliation, while the “other side” did not. That is good. People mess up — leaders mess up. We should forgive, make amends, reconcile.

The post Notes On a Church Split appeared first on Mockingbird.

But recently, Ferriss wrote an interesting article in which he shares some second thoughts about the self-help genre. It is titled “The Self-Help Trap: What 20 Years of ‘Optimizing’ Has Taught Me.”

Ferriss is not the first to rethink youthful devotions, certainties, and enthusiasms, so let’s be gracious as we hear what he has to say:

The older I get, the more I think that self-help can be a trap. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. I say this after 20 years of writing self-help and a lifetime of consuming it. Spend enough time in the world of “improvement,” and you’ll notice something strange: The people most obsessed with self-help are often the least helped by it. Behind the smiles and motivational quotes, behind closed doors and after a drink or two, the truth is that they’re not able to outsmart their worries.

On one hand, perhaps this unhappiness is precisely what lands one in self-development in the first place, right? I long assumed this about myself, and it’s partially true. On the other hand, what if self-help itself is actually creating or amplifying unhappiness?

It comes as a surprise to many to learn that the oft-quoted aphorism “God helps those who help themselves” is actually not in the Bible. There we find something different. God helps the broken, the desperate, those who are at the end of their rope, those at the end of their efforts to save themselves.

Which is not to say that every form of putting forth effort or making wiser choices — a.k.a. self-help — is foolish. Of course not. At the moment, I am dealing with a bit of sciatica in my left leg, a result of walking a lot on a recent hiking trip. I’ve taken to the self-help of twice-a-day stretches that loosen the grip of my hamstring muscle on my sciatic nerve. Beyond that, I’m a pretty devoted gym rat. There’s a place for self-help, in moderation. But as a cultural obsession? As the route to the good life or path to salvation? Maybe not.

Most of us who try really, really hard to get it totally right do at some point bump up against what St. Paul ran into (i.e., our good intentions and attempts at self-help aren’t enough). Our motives are mixed, our follow-through flawed. We undermine ourselves.

As Paul put it, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7:15). This was, for Paul, the plight of life lived under the law, under the attempt to achieve perfection or salvation by one’s own efforts, a.k.a. self-help. God knows it’s enticing. How could a title like The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman not grab you and entice you to grab it off the shelf at the bookstore, as apparently hundreds of thousands have. But as Paul discovered that the law’s promises can never deliver, self-help guru Tim Ferriss has now discovered the same about his own variety of law, the religion of self-help.

Writes Paul, “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand … wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death! Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ!” (Rom. 7:21, 24) At some point, we discover we aren’t totally in charge. We are all, in fact, in bondage of one sort or another. We need rescue. We need a Savior.

Ferriss doesn’t go quite so far as Paul, either in his despair or his remedy. He does turn, however, to the famous work of Abraham Maslow and his Hierarchy of Human Needs. You remember Maslow’s Pyramid? The pinnacle of Maslow’s pyramid is self-actualization, self-help’s mountaintop. How often has self-actualization been trumpeted as the be-all and end-all for the enlightened classes and that for which we all ought to aim?

But as Ferriss points out in his article, Maslow’s work and his pyramid do not actually end with self-actualization. There was something more for Maslow, something that somehow ended up on the cutting-room floor: self-transcendence. Ferriss writes:

A critical footnote got lost in the shuffle. In his later writings, especially notes compiled in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971), Maslow added a sixth level above self-actualization: Self-transcendence.

Self-transcendence means going beyond the self — seeking connection with something greater, such as service to others, nature, art, or the divine […]

Once again, the fundamental assumption behind self-help is often this: Something is not OK. Something is wrong. Something is not enough. Something needs fixing. If I can’t find it, I’ll create it. We’ve established this. But there is a follow-on assumption that matters a lot. If I fix the things that aren’t OK, all will be well. If I improve myself enough, if I only work hard enough, I can finally eliminate my suffering.

“I hate to inform you,” concludes a repentant Ferriss, “but this doesn’t work. I’m also thrilled to inform you that this doesn’t work.”

There is crossover here with what some call therapeutic culture. I’m not saying therapy has no place or can’t be helpful. It can. But as therapeutic language has become the go-to moral language of a culture that has given up on others, it risks making my feelings, my happiness, and whether or not something “works for me” my primary, even sole basis of judgment. But as with self-help, in Ferriss’s assessment, the risk here is becoming terminally self-preoccupied. Which calls to mind Luther’s definition of sin, “the self curved in upon itself.”

Christianity’s goal, on the other hand, is what one might call self-forgetfulness. So touched, awed, and carried by God’s grace in Jesus Christ that we lose ourselves, forget ourselves, in the glory and beauty of God, in the mercy of God’s Son, in the surprise of the Spirit’s movements. “Self-transcendence.” “Lost,” as Charles Wesley writes in a hymn, “in wonder, love and praise.” That is to say, worship of the true God, who — surprise! — turns out not to be you or me.

I remember once spotting a teenager with a T-shirt that had the word “LOSER” emblazoned across his chest. “Golly,” I thought, “that’s sad.” As he passed me, I turned around to look again at him and caught the back of his shirt which said, “He who loses himself for my sake will find himself. — Jesus.”

The post A Self-Help Guru Has Second Thoughts appeared first on Mockingbird.

But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

A week later, his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” (Jn 20:24–28)

“Going home is hard,” she said to me.

It’s a feeling I’m familiar with after the Mockingbird Conference. Nine times out of ten, it’s raining on the last day of the conference, as if nature herself has packed her bags, checked out of the hotel, and prepared herself to do that long trip home.

Away from a place that feels undeniably Here and Now, toward every place that is begrudgingly Not Here and Not Yet.

“It’s good for us to be here.” But we can’t stay.

Going home is hard.

I’ve always been struck by the fact that in John’s Gospel, the post-resurrection Jesus retains the evidence — the scars — of the crucifixion.

It’s a detail that often doesn’t fit well with how Christians talk about the resurrection. New life. New bodies. Everything made right.

But Jesus has his scars?

I’m working through Revelation with my church Bible study group, so I’m currently immersed in thought experiments and questions about what the resurrection at the Last Day will be like. What will it be like? What will it feel like? What will we look like?

My old ladies have decided that the best resurrection would be if all of us get to decide which eternal, corporeal body we’ll have forever. Only our best — only our most favorite version of ourselves — would make the Resurrection feel like resurrection, they decided. And I get it.

If my knees don’t bend, and my hair is still thinning …

If my skin is crepey and my eyesight poor …

If everything that bothers me now isn’t made right at the Last Day, is it really a resurrection worth having?

“Maybe Jesus decided to keep the scars,” one woman said to me. “But maybe we won’t have to.”

One of the ever-present realities at Mockingbird is that it attracts people who are wounded — whose wounds are new and scars are not fully healed.

To that end, Mockingbird feels like an emergency department on a busy Friday night. Masses of wounded people, gathered together, looking for relief, looking for hope, looking for anything.

The balm they crave — the balm we crave — is grace. Applied to the wounds to stop the bleeding. Applied to the scars so they can start to heal. Applied to the dead and nearly dead so we can live.

“A lot can change in three years,” Tanner Olson said. And he’s right. But every year, new wounds and new unhealed scars come searching for a balm.

Scars tell a story. Never a good story, in the sense of happy, easy, fun, enjoyable. But they tell a story.

My scars, like many at Mockingbird, are well documented in talks, articles, and tear-filled recollections in between sessions with people I only see once a year, once every few years.

“How’s your oldest?” They ask in kindness, in interest, in a search for connection and hope.

“Amazing,” I’d like to say. “Becoming an incredible young woman,” I imagine. “The time goes so fast,” we’d smile knowingly.

But where that question would’ve poked the not-yet-healed wound six months, twelve months, a year and a half ago, this time it’s different.

“Let me show you a picture of our youngest since we can’t post him online yet.”

Dead bodies meeting Resurrected Bodies proclaiming a sure and certain hope.

Broken relationships met with new marriages. Lost church communities greeted with open arms in unexpected places. Difficulties with teenage children welcomed with joys over thriving young adults. Crushing experiences of death — literal, horrific, ugly tragedy — embraced by laughter, memory, and the dawning of another day that felt like it would never come.

Wounds that felt impossible to heal replaced by scars that tell an even more impossible story. Not a story that is easy or guaranteed. But each scar the story of a tiny miracle, a personal resurrection.

Once a year, for three days, we get the clearest answer to what life will look like after the Last Day. A church full of Resurrected Bodies. Bodies that bear the scars — or are bearing the scars. That will one day heal. Bodies that tell the same story.

“My Lord and my God.”

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