The accusations might be different today, and the stones take different forms, but the social processes are the same. Religious communities still reduce people to certain categories and use their exclusion as a way to reinforce the authority and righteousness of the leaders.

The woman caught in adultery is dragged into the temple by religious leaders while Jesus is teaching. She’s brought into the middle of the crowd, and we learn that she was caught in the act (Jn 8:2–6). The Pharisees believe that what they are doing by bringing her before the community is a righteous thing.

What possesses a group/mob of religious enforcers to do such a thing? The writer tells us they are trying to trap Jesus through publicly shaming her. However, the story exposes what is inside the people who accuse her.

How does this happen? It is through the language and roles prescribed by a group. Joe K. Adams writes, “It is largely by means of language and definition of role that groups cast a veil of illusions over the individual.” He goes on to say, “Roles not only prescribe the ‘moves’ which an individual is entitled to make in relationships with others; they penetrate the interior of the individual and prescribe his perceptions, thoughts, and feelings.”[1]

The role tells the religious leaders what they are entitled to do to her. They are the moral guardians and paragons of the community. The law supplies their scripting. The person is gone, and in her place is a category: sinner, adulterer. Only the ideologist-inquisitor can determine whether someone has deviated from the norm. The religious leaders have this authority. They determine who has deviated from the norms that they enforce and use measures such as stoning to enforce conformity. By labeling the woman, they move her entirely outside of the group and beyond what they consider decent. Doing this to a person plays an important role in the life of a community: it reinforces the norms for everyone else, solidifies the authority of the religious leaders, and allows them to present themselves as not like her and therefore righteous.

Culture, language, and roles make patterns of uniform thought and conduct. Once a role is established, perception and behavior are shaped by it. Collective language can bind and blind. The category describes what the woman has done, but the role determines what kind of person she is and what the group believes it has a responsibility to do to her.

Sociologist Tamotsu Shibutani describes how a group’s belief system and codes become the way people present themselves toward the world. He writes, “In this way, people in each cultural group are continuously supporting one another’s perspectives, each by responding to the others in expected ways.” Those in the group may not be aware that there are alternatives.[2]

The religious leaders reinforce one another’s perspective. A person’s moral indignation confirms the indignation of others. The leaders are authorized to provide an interpretation, and everyone responds in the expected way. It is not required for them to pause and reflect if they are seeing the woman clearly. Their response to her makes the interpretation feel clear.

In this community there is a “hierarchy of credibility” with the religious leaders at the top. Both they and the community believe that their spiritual authority has been sanctioned and blessed by God. Individuals who are in positions of social responsibility have greater influence and power to define what is true.[3] The hierarchy is really dangerous and messy when God is brought into the picture.

The religious leaders have social authority, the law, and they are the one group sanctioned to interpret it. Their interpretation of the woman trumps anything she might say about herself. They define who she is. In their religious minds, they know better than she does about how she should be living her life.

Erich Fromm gives an account of irrational, inflated authority and writes, “There is nothing more effective in breaking any person than to give him the conviction of wickedness.” Guilt is tied up with submission to authority that claims the right to accuse and diagnose.[4] The authority and the righteousness of the leaders are confirmed through the act of publicly shaming and exposing her.

Harold Garfinkel’s account of degradation ceremonies explains what the leaders are doing to her. They are publicly recasting her as a lower kind of person, in contrast to them. He writes:

Moral indignation serves to effect the ritual destruction of the person denounced. Unlike shame, which does not bind persons together, moral indignation may reinforce group solidarity. In the market and in politics, a degradation ceremony must be counted as a secular form of communion.[5]

The religious leaders experience a powerful sense of spiritual solidarity through ritually degrading the woman. Their moral indignation binds them together in a self-righteous community and reinforces their ideology. They establish their solidarity and righteousness by locating the evil in her. Misery loves company.

The denouncer speaks for the group’s values, and the accused is cast in the role of a sinner and an outsider. Garfinkel explains why the denouncer’s authority is accepted: “What the denouncer says must be regarded by the witnesses as true on the grounds of a socially employed metaphysics whereby witnesses assume that witnesses and denouncer are alike in essence.”[6]

The accusers, in their possessed solidarity, recognize themselves in each other and behave accordingly. They share a moral and metaphysical framework and assume that they are alike. Meanwhile, the woman is accused and turned into something not human. The accusers are nothing like her, while the woman disappears behind the category.

What business is it of the religious leaders or the community who she is sleeping with? They believe their religion, role, scripting, and law make it their business. The law gives them a role to play, and the role convinces them that they are entitled to take action. This isn’t naming a behavior they think is wrong. They drag a person into public, place her in the middle of a crowd, and use her body and what she is accused of as a way to tempt Jesus because of their conflict with him.

This points to the pathology of the religious leaders and their own need for the defense mechanism of accusation. What this does for them is assuage their guilty consciences by locating their evil in the other. Carl Jung writes, “It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else.”[7]

They are looking at her, but what is going on inside of them? What is it about the group that makes them want to do this? This collective madness to stone a person. Where is the real sickness? Where is the real evil?

Esther Harding describes the violence that can possess ordinarily sober, law-abiding people intoxicated by a group’s emotion. In her discussion of lynching, she writes, “The victim of the lynching may have only the slenderest connection with the crime that is being avenged so violently and so lawlessly; yet he immediately becomes almost a demon or a devil to those caught up by the mob spirit.”[8]

The human is no longer being seen. The group of professional accusers can only see the role it has assigned to the person and feels justified in punishing her. She has become almost demonic in their eyes, while they experience themselves as pure defenders of righteousness.

Adams says, “The location of pathology in the dominant institutions of the culture is hardly in accordance with the tradition of any culture.”[9] The religious leaders have located the pathology outside of themselves and in the woman. But it’s theirs! Their roles, law, moral standing, and agreement with one another protect them from examination. Instead of asking what is wrong with her, what is wrong with the group that needs to do this to her? If the response from the accused is just more confirmation for the accusation, the person is then always under examination, and the group never is.

When they bring her to Jesus, they do so in order to trap him so that they might have something to accuse him of. They are trying to treat him the same way they treat the woman: by turning him into an accused non-human. Depending on how he responds, they can degrade him and move him outside the community, just as they have done with her. Jesus presents a serious threat to the religious establishment, and publicly degrading and discrediting him would reinforce their authority and superiority. They use her in a sick way, as an instrument for doing it.

What Jesus does is beautiful. He acts as though he doesn’t hear them (Jn 8:6). He gives them the grey rock technique and does not justify, argue, defend, or explain. Jesus refuses the role that they assign him. He does not approve of their degradation ceremony. He tells the one without sin to throw the first stone, and they leave, beginning with the oldest (Jn 8:7–9).

Jesus knows their type, and he can see the pathology happening and turns the mirror back on them. Jesus offers the religious leaders and those in attendance an opportunity for self-knowledge. The people who brought the woman to be examined are now being challenged to examine themselves, and the results are not good. The evil that they have foisted on her is really theirs. By the end of chapter 8, the same crowd insinuated that Jesus was born of fornication. He is called a Samaritan, accused of having a devil, and almost stoned. It’s a similar process.

This is a story about Jesus not condemning sinners. About a God who doesn’t throw rocks. Doesn’t pick up rocks. Especially at law-breaking, sinful, ungodly kinds of people. The one who could throw a stone doesn’t.

Jesus tells her, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more” (Jn 8:10–11). He does not keep her under his supervision. We don’t get an update on how she did afterward. There is no follow-up appointment with Jesus, no public accountability, and no permanent diagnosis. If she doesn’t live up to the standards of the local religion, she knows that she has encountered one person who will not condemn her.

Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect? (Rom 8:33)

[1] Joe K. Adams, “Psychosis: ‘Experimental’ and Real,” Psychedelic Review 1, no. 2 (1963): 121–144.

[2] Tamotsu Shibutani, “Reference Groups as Perspectives,” American Journal of Sociology 60, no. 6 (May 1955): 562–569.

[3] Erich Goode, “A Sociological Perspective on Drugs and Drug Use,” in Drugs in American Society (Alfred A. Knopf, 1972).

[4] Erich Fromm, “Individual and Social Origins of Neurosis,” American Sociological Review 9, no. 4 (August 1944): 380–384.

[5] Harold Garfinkel, “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies,” American Journal of Sociology 61, no. 5 (March 1956): 420–424.

[6] Ibid.

[7] C. G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self (Routledge, 2002).

[8] M. Esther Harding, Psychic Energy: Its Source and Its Transformation,  2nd ed. (Princeton University Press, 1973).

[9] Joe K. Adams, “Psychosis: ‘Experimental’ and Real,” Psychedelic Review 1, no. 2 (1963): 121–144.

The post Accusers Caught in the Act appeared first on Mockingbird.

And that’s it. The clip ends.

I think about that little interaction a lot. Most predictably, when people make movie/TV adaptations of novels that I love. And, come to think of it, even novels that I really don’t.

I wish I weren’t one of these people, I really do. But I just can’t help it. Some things you’re supposed to touch, and some things you’re never supposed to touch. Right? There are, of course, a plethora of notable exceptions to the rule (hello to Saint Emma Thompson’s 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility and a special salute to Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy), but on the whole, I’m coming at each new visual adaptation with a level of cynicism (let’s call it nervousness, shall we?) that I have no right to hold.

So, as you can imagine, I was slightly less than excited when I first heard about Zoe Kazan’s go at adapting John Steinbeck’s East of Eden for Netflix. Some things you’re supposed to touch … and surely Steinbeck isn’t one of them.

Oh, and then I heard that Kazan and Co. had tweaked things a little. They had humanized the novel’s notorious monster — Cathy Ames. And I thought that was a total, albeit predictable, tragedy.

Until I watched it.

Salon’s Melanie McFarland asks her readers if it’s about darn time Cathy Ames was reconsidered, wondering whether her own literary professors were simply “too tired to parse such nuance.”

When Steinbeck first introduced Cathy Ames to the public in 1952, and when Elia Kazan (Zoe’s grandfather) brought his version to the screen three years later, we were only allowed the slightest glimpse into her soul. Elia Kazan’s movie, written by Paul Osborn, barely covers the last third of Steinbeck’s 600-page epic. It also omits Lee and focuses primarily on James Dean’s Cal Trask, one of Cathy’s sons, leaving most of her story to secondhand whispers. When a lawman confirms to Cal the rumor that Cathy, known by then as the nearby town’s madam, Kate, shot his father, Cal muses, “He must have done something to hurt her.”

“No, sir,” the man counters. “He gave her everything that any woman could ask for.”

But how would he know? Zoe Kazan’s Cathy, which closely hews to Steinbeck’s original vision, defies easy assumptions about a woman’s wants and needs. Nothing about her, or the way Pugh plays her, is simple.

I, perhaps similarly to McFarland, watched this latest reconsidering of Steinbeck’s material and found myself wondering why I’d never been frustrated with how hollow, how stubbornly 2D Cathy Ames appears to be. She’s a monster, I always thought. And that’s the beginning and end of that.

Such interpretations of Cathy are comforting in their distance, aren’t they? We can revel in the luxury of making an anomaly of her — “I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents,” Steinbeck writes, and we sit cozily in the belief that we are not one of them.

How soothing. And yet, how theologically hollow.

This is something McFarland picks up on:

But if the best fiction can also be instructive, maybe the last moral of (Zoe) Kazan’s “East of Eden” can help us hold multiple truths at once. Cathy’s reasons for doing terrible things may be understandable, even relatable, while the transgression remains unforgivable. A person may even warn us by crying for help or, as Cathy does, advising those on the verge of falling into her trap to turn back … But for a few twists of fate, she could be any of us.

She’s drawing specifically on how our circumstances, “twists of fate,” can make beasts out of any one of us. And she’s right, of course. But I think what we also need to reach for here is a basic acknowledgment of the reality of sin, no? Our brokenness and our breaking-things-ness. The hurt we feel, the hurt we inflict. That crack, the fracture — our relentless propensity to miss the mark. We can’t keep that at a cozy distance; we can’t identify dollops of it in Cathy Ames without wincing at the same dark substance within our very selves.

So, maybe Steinbeck can be touched, after all. Just leave George Harrison’s Telecaster alone — I beg of you.

2. Right, let’s stay on the theme of reading for one more, shall we? The Sunday Times columnist, James Marriott, keeps scaring me with all his talk of a “post-literate society.” Is he being a little too prophet-of-doom, here? Man, I hope so. How am I supposed to make friends if I can’t quote Jane Austen to people, siphoning her wit and pretending it’s my own?

The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Akst reviewed James’ book on this very topic. A book which, ironically, I have not yet read. Thinking about it, James Marriott better hope that his thesis is blown out of all proportion — if only for his own book sales.

Akst wrote this,

“The decline of student reading is only the most visible symptom of a wider crisis,” James Marriott warns in “The New Dark Ages,” a disturbing book about the death of the print culture that once shaped our lives, culture and democracy. “In America,” he writes, “reading for pleasure declined by 40% in the first two decades of the 21st century. And in the U.K., more than a third of adults say they have given up the habit.” Publishers have evidently responded by dumbing down their offerings. Mr. Marriott cites an analysis from the Economist of New York Times bestselling books over the course of nearly a century that found that “sentences in popular books have contracted by almost a third since the 1930s.”

As a short sentence lover, I’d like to suggest that short sentences alone are not cause for alarm. But still. Dammit.

I guess I have two questions, both of which are answered by James Marriott via Daniel Akst — first up, what’s to blame?

Nothing, in Mr. Marriott’s view, has done more than the smartphone to bring on the culture of illiteracy that we seem to be entering. He notes that people on average now check their smartphones 144 times a day. A columnist for the London Times and an inveterate reader, Mr. Marriott recounts his own early experience with the technology. “It was often a matter of minutes after sitting down with a book,” he writes, “that I would spring up again, assailed by thoughts that were at once impossibly petty and yet possessed of an inexplicable urgency,” to check his phone.

Figured. My second question: What’s at stake here?

For Mr. Marriott, reading isn’t only a matter of personal cultivation. On the contrary, he makes a strong case that reading is a necessary ingredient for the exercise of reason, providing a mechanism for arguments to be considered and assessed, for truths to be asserted and defended. Reading, as generations of the downtrodden have discovered, can be liberating, which is why a number of slave states before the Civil War made it illegal to teach the skill to black people. […]

Mr. Marriott believes that the decline of reading and writing (and the growth of hyperkinetic distractions such as TikTok), abets the rise of an ignorant, irrational and distracted electorate. “Mass literacy is a recent phenomenon,” he writes. “So is mass democracy. We simply don’t know whether one can survive without the other.”

Noted.

If James Marriot’s thesis holds water, there’s reason to lament. These stories that we’ve apparently stopped reading, they’re hooks upon which we can hang our own experiences — but you don’t need me to tell you that. If my observations, my thoughts, my ponderings were the only ones residing in my mind, with no dialogue partners invited in, the world would shrink before my eyes.

Anyway, I guess we’ll all have to buy and read James Marriott’s book, won’t we? And in so doing, smugly prove him wrong.

Gosh, his marketing team have really got me where they want me, haven’t they?

Courtesy of my all-time favorite Instagram page, Letters of Note

3. OK, you’ve earned a palate cleanser … So, behold, a list of “Deleted Scenes from ‘The Sound of Music‘” as gifted to the world by Sarah Dabby. My personal favorites are

“Liesl sings, ‘I am sixteen going on seventeen.’ Maria replies, ‘I am twenty-two going on twenty-three.’ Liesl has several follow-up questions.”

Mmm. How do you solve a problem like Maria and Georg’s slightly awkward age gap? Well, darling, you just don’t mention it. And then there’s

“The nuns host Maria’s bachelorette party.”

I’ll have you know that nuns are having a real cultural moment right now — we’re only just stumbling out of what people are calling a “Nun Girl Summer.” Both Lily Allen’s West End Girl and Rosalía’s Lux — arguably two of the most successful albums of the last year — heavily relied upon nun imagery in their artwork.

I have many, many, many thoughts about this. But for now, let’s just say that a nun-thrown bachelorette party might not be as much of a laughingstock as one might initially assume.

And last, but not least, there’s

“Brigitta asks what, exactly, the Nazis have against the Jews. The Captain says they can discuss it after the song.”

Last Christmas, I convinced my husband to watch The Sound of Music with me by describing it as a WWII movie. He no longer allows me to pick the films we watch.

Elsewhere in humor, there’s

• “Local Woman Deeply Ashamed Of The Feral Creature Caramel Slice Turns Her Into” from The Betoota Advocate (well, ‘tis the season)
• And then there’s the Onion’s “Smiling, Unblinking Tom Cruise Just Wants To Know Why Nation Didn’t See ‘Digger'”

Tom, I can answer this one for you — there is, and always has been, something incredibly off-putting about a prosthetic cat.

4. Next up, we have John Blase writing for Inkwell. I’m not sure I’ve been this delighted by a collaboration since boygenius formed. Blase’s piece, “Putting the Quiet Life on Trial,” takes us by the hand and leads us onto the rocky terrain of “wanting.”

Yet I too am a born wanter. My hunch is we all are to varying degrees. I mean, if you have a pulse, you’re in. I don’t feel I’ve missed so much, but I don’t want to miss anything if I can help it. I’d like to go out with as few as possible, to live Bukowskian: “So well that Death will tremble to take us.”

But behold now the valorization of “Ordinary” Christianity — the stay-in-place, semper fidelis Jack or Jasmine living out a regular old non-glamorous life for God. To me, it feels wrapped up in our vibe shift, our current yearning for grandmacore, reaching back for a simpler, gentler, saner time. You know, Friday nights at Blockbuster and J. Crew magazines. Rumor has it even the young men are going back to church.

OK, being British (Welsh, for those who care for the particular), I have no idea what Blockbuster or J. Crew are, but I think I get his point. We’re numbing (or, maybe, chastising?) ourselves out of wanting anything that bursts the banks of the “ordinary.” Yet, we humans are creatures who yearn, who crave, who long for, who want. And history/society/my own aliveness tells me we have no real framework for how to hold “want” healthily — we either deny our “wanting” at all costs (a picture John Blase paints in this piece), or we let it rule us (a picture we, very sadly, don’t really need painting for us).

And while John gets it, he laments it. Particularly the way this leaks into our experience of our faith,

In our legitimate strivings for a representational faith — one populated by our regular old non-celebrity selves, one that looks like most of us — there exists also the concern that the overcorrection might blur or even erase the aspirational: a faith with room enough to dare to dream what we might be, to make mistakes, to shoot for the moon, risk it all, to live Buechnerian: “Where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” To get carried away, for Christ’s sake.

What’s that Mary Oliver line, again? “Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.” Blase pulls the unimaginable into his readings of the Gospel narratives, referring to Jesus as

this pied piper looking over his shoulder singing Come sail away with me. According to the oldest manuscripts, people dropped their nets or whatever they were doing and took off after this thirty-something Galilean. They and their wanting got carried away: Jesus, joy of man’s desiring.

What was it that hooked them? I’m just a drugstore theologian, but I maintain part of it was his style — this attractional, polar-opposite-of-boring force that drew men, women, children, centurions, tax-collectors, dogs even, to his side. And while okay, Jesus was loving and joyful and peaceful and kind and gentle and all that, I gotta believe it was his absolute childlikeness that knocked their socks off.

Actress Daisy Edgar-Jones, who is currently promoting her new movie, a brand-spanking-new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility (don’t even get me started), recently caught my attention when she suggested that “whenever one is in the throes of a yearn, I feel like you are probably most aligned with yourself, you’re most aware of being alive …” I think I pretty much entirely disagree with her. When I was “yearning” for my now husband, I convinced myself I was a Pixies fan. That could not have been less aligned with myself. But, alas, then I read of Jesus being the “joy of man’s desiring,” and I want nothing more than for all to be carried away by their wanting of him. Me included.

5. Shall we have one more from the land of Substack before we move on? It’s Elizabeth Oldfield’s “How to have 1,500 people for dinner” — the origin tale of her (rather infamous, actually) Monday Night Dinners.

Elizabeth is ever-convinced that community is the logic of the universe — and who are we humans to pretend otherwise? She suggests that acts that seem “soft” (you know, neighboring, sharing, caring, and hospitality) are actually charged with political, sociological, and spiritual significance. A dinner party can, indeed, be a radical act. So, from her decade-ish worth of experience, she has curated a list of nine hard-won pearls of wisdom for anyone who wants to host their own extraordinarily ordinary dinner party.

I’ll just pull out one or two, shall I?

Regularity is the point: hospitality is one of those lovely aspirations which, honestly, sounds like something I don’t really fancy when presented with the opportunity. … This bizarre culture of possessive individualism will always give us reasons not to be together, so sometimes it takes a strong container to push back.

Can I be honest with you? I’ve fallen at the first hurdle here. There is not much in the world that I relish more than a cancelled plan — possessive individualism, as Elizabeth puts it, has got its claws deeply within me. The older I get, the more I have to take a stand against the allure of aloneness. Have you seen that “Loneliness Influencers” are a thing now? They are influencers (obviously) who post overly romanticized videos of their seemingly solitary days with a caption along the lines of “A day in the life of a woman with no children, no partner and no friends.” While it feels like a storm in a Tik-Tok-shaped teacup, it also feels insidiously like a poison being packaged up as a remedy. At least to me, an ever-introverting zellenial.

And then there’s this piece of advice, which I find much easier to get on board with:

Keep Tidying to a Minimum: my husband always says hospitality is not the same as entertaining. Yes, I will get the kids to plump the pillows on the sofa and run a hoover around if the carpet is filthy, but generally, people take us as they find us …

I’m too Type B to really care too much about plumped cushions or matching glassware, and I’d rather dive in front of someone attempting to open up my chaotic fridge than actually set aside time to organize it. But still, even I need reminding that there’s a biblical call to hospitality and not to entertaining — people-pleasing, dear friends, is not a fruit of the Spirit.

I’ll leave this one there — if you’re hankering for the other seven pieces of advice, you know where to find them.

6. And finally, before we say our farewells to each other and this week, let’s take a moment to celebrate Canadian poet, classicist, and essayist Anne Carson, winning the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. Beloved as she is for her ceaseless innovation and ability to blend genres, the Swedish Academy praised Carson for her “bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”

Carson’s response to winning such an accolade? “Yikes.”

There’s something deeply satisfying about all the poetry draining out of her in the moment.

The New York Times’ very own Nobel Man, Alex Marshall, prepared articles for forty-six possible winners. Thankfully, Carson was one of them. He writes,

Among Carson’s key works cited by the Nobel committee are “Eros the Bittersweet,” her debut book-length essay from 1986 about the god of love, and “The Glass Essay,” a long poem from 1995 about unrequited love.

Ah — here we are again, pondering our own yearning ways. A few lines that I have long loved from “The Glass Essay” are

Also my main fear, which I mean to confront.
Whenever I visit my mother
I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë,
my lonely life around me like a moor,
my ungainly body stumping over the mud flats with a look of transformation
that dies when I come in the kitchen door.
What meat is it, Emily, we need?

Gosh, if women had a pound (whoops, sorry, a dollar) for every time they feared they were turning into Emily Brontë … well, they’d have enough money to create an annual literature prize.

My mother speaks suddenly.
That psychotherapy’s not doing you much good is it?
You aren’t getting over him.
My mother has a way of summing things up.
She never liked Law much
but she liked the idea of me having a man and getting on with life.
Well he’s a taker and you’re a giver I hope it works out,
was all she said after she met him.
Give and take were just words to me
at the time. I had not been in love before.
It was like a wheel rolling downhill.
But early this morning while mother slept
and I was downstairs reading the part in Wuthering Heights
where Heathcliff clings at the lattice in the storm sobbing
Come in! Come in! to the ghost of his heart’s darling,
I fell on my knees on the rug and sobbed too.
She knows how to hang puppies,
that Emily.

Well, would you look at that … loneliness, wanting and yearning, classic literature (that, apparently, we’d rather not read but watch in seven parts on Netflix) — set aside the Sound of Music cameo for a moment, and it appears we’ve wrapped up our week’s key themes with the words of its newly appointed Nobel Prize winner. Huzzah!

Strays:

• I do hope this isn’t just some clichéd Britishness leaking out of me, but I can’t quench my curiosity when it comes to the religious and spiritual language being heaped upon the Oasis reunion.
• Kate Bowler is hallowing the absurd.
• Is Elon Musk the Cecil Rhodes of our time?
• To reward yourself after reading about Elon Musk.

The post October 3-9 appeared first on Mockingbird.

Caleb: What did we think, boys?

Blake: This is my third time watching it, and I still adore it.

Ian: I need a Virgil to guide me, because I’m not sure where the Dante allusions are that Blake keeps mentioning besides the, you know, framed picture of “Dante’s Inferno.”

Blake: It’s the slow descent as the narrative goes until we reach the frozen center with the women locked in cages. Hugh Grant’s character, Reed, is clearly a trickster/tempter/Satan archetype. The framed picture is just the moment where the writers were like, “Okay dummy, get it?”

Ian: Abandon all cope ye who enter here. Call me a Philistine, but Satan is frozen in the lowest circle, so I didn’t get it.

Caleb: Yeah, I don’t buy the Dante stuff. At best, it’s a passing allusion. I like it overall, but I can’t get this one Letterboxd review out of my head: “Jigsaw if he were an insufferable Reddit atheist.”

Blake: I’d say that the iteration monologue is smarter than most Reddit atheists could come up with.

Caleb: But Sister Barnes gets him on the ropes pretty quick. Reed ignores so many details in constructing his narrative that all religions become the same.

Ian: I enjoyed it a good deal, but I thought its quality was in the heroines being up for an intellectual fight rather than in Reed’s sophomoric screeds.

Blake: They may be sophomoric for people who are used to incredibly online atheists, but I haven’t interacted with many at all. So these versions of arguments have never been heard by me. Then you add Grant’s delivery, and I was like butter in his hands. It was like a good session of proper debate. Add in the music and the ratcheting tension, and I was in for the whole runtime.

Ian: I like how this film shows the self-involved wickedness of unbelief. It’s not neutral, objective, or detached. It’s involved in the very things it cites as reasons for its unbelief.

Caleb: I have little patience for people who argue God is cruel because of their perception of his silence and absence, but then they turn around and are actively manipulative and malevolent.

Blake: I think this is where I found myself really taken with the film: I hear the insufferable arguments from Grant, and I automatically am predisposed to think this is the character I’m supposed to root for over and against the bigoted Christian/religious person. And then I realize, third time in, even, that no, this is the evil one. The religious ones are the smart/cunning protagonists. Grant could deliver the worst monologue, and I’d listen contentedly

Ian: His charm is absolute!

Caleb: I’m curious what you all make of Topher Grace’s bishop character.

Ian: Shoot, I was happy to see Topher Grace working!

Blake: He’s kind of a throwaway for one (really good) gag.

Ian: I think I was supposed to laugh, but it felt misplaced.

Blake: His makeup was subpar at best. I didn’t believe his existence in the film as a Mormon bishop.

Ian: I think the script’s intelligence is largely in how Mr. Reddit’s crap is rebuffed. But the returning-to-Reed’s-house-to drop-off-a-pamphlet gag felt like a step down to me.

Blake: I giggled every time. Call me a simpleton.

Caleb: Also, Sophie Thatcher has been on a generational run since 2023. The Boogeyman, this, Companion, MaXXXine, and Her Private Hell? What a spate!

Blake: I do enjoy her, even though I’ve only seen this and Companion. But her cover of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” is actually surprisingly effective.

Caleb: Wait, that was her??

Blake: Yep!

Ian:  In the film proper, when I saw Reed’s miniature prison, I got pretty scared worrying there was Hereditary residue splattering onto this. But it turned out to be kind of unimportant?

Blake: Yep. I think it was a way to visualize the *ahem* DANTE-esque maze of the house.

Ian: Sorry. I dante see any parallel there …

Much of this film felt like the basement sequence of Zodiac but, humorously, when they were yet upstairs, before any of them moved to the basement. It made me think that was part of why Blake is so smitten with it.

Blake: There is definitely some truth to that. I’m also a sucker for single-setting films. I think there’s a reading where Reed isn’t actually so much an atheist as he is someone who is willing to sell his soul to find the “one true religion” as he calls it. Had more than a touch of Cthulhian mythos, man using rationality to overreach into realms not meant for him.

Caleb: I also wondered if he was perhaps affected by some kind of mental illness, as he seems partially taken with conspiratorial ideas about living in a simulation.

Blake: The other sister calls him out on his nonsense. He was reaching for something when the “prophet” decided to go off-script. I don’t think he actually believed it; he was trying to cover up something he didn’t have “control” over. Simulation theory is just solipsist philosophical thought with a digital veneer.

Ian: Yeah, I agree: I think he only argues like Dollar Store atheists, but he is after the pot at the end of the rainbow.

Caleb: Which is consistent with his own self-deification.

Ian: Boom. He’s the one person that can see the stupid elephant in the tired analogy. I suppose I was waiting for him to be a devil, but it’s consistent tonally and logically for him to be the man who wants to believe but “sees through” everything. Reed shows how man is haunted by God but often will not have him as he is.

Blake: I think this is giving him too much credit, even, haha.

Ian: On a different note, the exterior shots of the storm are pretty much my Platonic ideal of autumnal weather. And back to a prior note, I’m interested to see if Blaine sensed some strong stench of Dante in it.

Blaine: I feel like the Inferno stuff is mostly fun window dressing because yeah, I’m not convinced any exploration of that is there in a substantive way. But I do like the idea that Mr. Reed designed his own topsy-turvy version of Dante’s Hell in his house.

Blake: That’s cuz y’all are seeing with your head and not yo heart.

Ian: Easily the most TikTok thing Blake has ever said.

Blaine: Y’all mentioned the Reddit bro ethos of Reed. One thing we might typically expect to accompany that in this kind of movie is a naive and shallow depiction of faith.

We get hints of this early on. Barnes has clearly gone through some stuff and has a storied past, while Paxton projects a more enthusiastic faith. Mr. Reed picks up on this and seems to target much of his diatribe towards Barnes.

So, later, when Mr. Reed asks them to choose between the door of belief and disbelief, we might expect Barnes to more readily opt for the latter. The exact opposite of this happens.

Blake: It says a lot that the assumption for those who are believers or want to believe are credulous in the worst ways, while those who disbelieve or do not want to believe are considered rational and neutral.

Blaine: The film seems to be making a point about how faith grows stronger during hardships, trials, etc. The testing of Barnes’ faith has produced perseverance, even if that virtue, on the face of it, looks most susceptible to breakage.

And then the butterfly that suddenly appears. Early on, Paxton says something to the effect that she would come back as a butterfly. I think — correct me if I’m wrong — that she says she’d land right on the finger to let them know it was her.

Well, the butterfly at the end doesn’t do that. It lands on Paxton’s hand, but not right on her finger. I think that’s a nice touch.

Blake: Then there is a glitch and it disappears. So maybe the simulation theory was right after all. I liked that touch, too, but also didn’t know what to make of the meaning of its disappearance.

Ian: Yes, the music swells as she regards the butterfly, and then suddenly it cuts to silence as it disappears. The glitch is interesting because it suggests more than wishful thinking hallucination.

Blaine: I think one of the last things Paxton says in the film is that she prays to feel connected to other people more than out of a real sense of conviction?

Ian: Yeah, that was disappointing. She says the findings of a prayer experiment were “conclusive” and says it doesn’t matter because prayer is about caring for others.

Blake: Yeah, but also that is coming from someone who is still largely surface in their faith. This appears to be the first major suffering she has gone through. So while I didn’t care for that line, it didn’t ring false for her character in my mind.

Ian: I also like that, to Blaine’s point, she’s bolstered by her sister who was killed rather than caving after that happens. Anyway, the thing I probably enjoyed most about this film is that religious believers weren’t depicted as unthinking idiots blown away by the skepticism of those who do not believe.

Blake, how would you recommend this to readers who aren’t normally horror buffs?

Blake: It’s mostly tension by way of dialogue. By the end, we get some gore, but it’s largely muted. Really, it’s a master class in how dialogue can be used effectively to create tension. Also, Hugh Grant! Also, if you’re a fan of Dante.

Ian: Ha! “Needless to say, if you loved The Inferno, you’ll love the single nonspoken reference to it in this film, which otherwise bears no allusions, echoes, or references to it.”

Thanks for joining us to watch Heretic! Spookiness abounds, and you better believe there’s more in gore next week when we watch Brotherhood of the Wolf. Until then, stay spooky!

The post Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door appeared first on Mockingbird.

Wait. I smell? I’m a smelly person? I walked into my friend’s office across the hall and asked him point-blank. He was caught off guard — and confessed immediately. Apparently, throughout our co-working relationship, I often had a faint hint of body odor. And that was the precise moment my ego was set on fire. I thought I had come to terms with many of my shortcomings — not good at math, slightly socially awkward, etc. — but this was beyond the pale. All this time, I had been the most loathsome of the grade-school stereotypes: The Smelly Kid. The horror.

We spend much of our lives in blissful ignorance. Better to be happy than to face the truth. Better to have high self-esteem than feel convicted. When we ask for advice, we are usually touting for flattery. When we ask a friend to edit our manuscript, we are secretly hoping for ceaseless praise. We like truth when it suits us. Any inconvenience, however, is where we draw the line. Take the classic headline from the Onion, “Picture Most Closely Resembling Actual Self Immediately Deleted.” Why would we face the world as it is when we can see the world as we think it should be?

Deleting unwanted photos or clearing our browser history is not enough to conceal the truth. It is bound to get out somehow. Like helium in a balloon. Like body odor. As the German poet Christian Hebbel once said, “That people, who flee from truth, should have invented the mirror is the greatest of historical miracles.” And the mirror always has its way with us. We cannot airbrush our way out of our true reflections as we casually catch a glimpse of ourselves in a parked car’s window. Oh no. Is that really us? That’s what we look like? Surely, that’s the curvature of the window, right?

The law holds a mirror up to our nature. Its accurate portrait is as necessary as it is unflattering. Without a true reflection of ourselves, we would all be walking around, hair disheveled, flies down, poppy seeds between our teeth, convinced that we are all Adonis reincarnated. The law reveals the unwavering truth about us to which we were somehow oblivious. It tells us, point-blank, that we smell like a polecat. As Augustine once put it, “The usefulness of the law lies in convicting man of his infirmity and moving him to call upon the remedy of grace which is in Christ.” In other words, the law kills our trust in our own goodness and drives us to seek help outside of us. 

As broken people, we have a tricky relationship with the law. We simultaneously need and hate it. We are easily convinced that the solution to our problems is as easy as 1-2-3. We are sure that our loved ones would benefit if we called them out. So we hold each other accountable. We “speak the truth in love.” But then, once the truth is spoken, we tend not to speak to each other for a long time. In that sense, the law does not play well with others. Whenever law and love are presented as a package deal, the law is usually the only one which survives. 

Ultimately, the law does little good for a person on its own. A mirror does not help clean you up, just as a diagnosis does not cure you. Telling a person that he stinks may be the truth he needs to hear, but it won’t make him smell any better. While the work of the law brings a person to seek help, the work of the gospel is the sweet-smelling, odor-defeating, pit-stain-averting antiperspirant. To stretch the metaphor to its fullest extent: my sin is my body odor; the law is my colleague’s candor; and the gospel? Old Spice Pure Sport (with aluminum).

Jesus was not afraid to speak the truth to people. Calling the Pharisees whitewashed tombs and King Herod a sly fox, he pulled no punches. And yet, rather than simply preach the law, he fulfilled it. He had so much more to give, after all. While the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Those words, grace and truth, are a winning combination. In Jesus, we can face the truth and yet not be condemned. 

In an interview, NBA superstar Kevin Durant said this about Jesus: “He used to go to the worst places, and go find the people who hated him, absolutely hated him. Who denied him, never even thought about saying his name. He went to go holla at them and give them the truth. And once they heard the truth their souls changed, and they couldn’t deny it.” Kevin Durant understands that those who are most afraid of the truth are chased down by Truth itself. The truth — the whole truth, that is — is not just the truth about us but the truth about God. The cross is the very intersection of the law that condemns and the gospel that sets free. 

So the two — law and gospel — always work hand in hand in God’s story of redemption. Both are true, and both are required to speak the whole truth. Perhaps John Foxe put it best when describing the nature of God’s two words:

There is nothing more comfortable for troubled consciences than to be instructed in the difference between the law and the gospel. The law shows us our sin; the gospel shows us the remedy for it. The law shows our condemnation; the gospel shows our redemption. The law is a word of ire; the gospel is a word of peace. The law is a word of despair; the gospel is a word of comfort. The law is a word of unrest; the gospel is a word of peace. The law says pay your debt; the gospel says Christ has paid it. The law says you are a sinner, despair you shall be damned. The gospel says your sins are forgive, be comforted you shall be saved. The law says where is your righteousness? The gospel says Christ is your righteousness.

It took me a while to get around to it, but I eventually went to the store to get some deodorant with aluminum. I’m pleased to say that I’m already seeing positive effects around the office. Every morning, I put on the Lord Jesus Christ in the form of Old Spice. The old world falls away. I smell like a new creation.

The post Do I Have Something in My Teeth? appeared first on Mockingbird.

Another phenomenal conference is in the books, and this one brimmed with laughs, profundity, life-changing fried rice w/bacon, and the best (and only) church puppet show we’ve ever seen. Can confirm: the Midwest is as nice as everyone says it is — and not just because it isn’t winter yet!

A big THANK YOU to St. Michael’s Lutheran, Ryan Alvey, Joey Goodall, Juliette Alvey, and all the volunteers, speakers, musicians, and tech crew. And a special thanks to Mark Koschmann and our friends at Concordia University, St. Paul, for their invaluable help.

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.

[And FYI! — registration for the 20th Annual NYC Conference (April 15–17, 2027) is open at an early-bird registration discount. You really, really, won’t want to miss it.]

Andrew Root — “Young People and a Church of Consolation: Evangelism in an Age of Despair”

Gretchen Ronnevik — “Sandwiched Between Crises: The Fusion of Grace and Truth in Midlife”

Paul Zahl — “Grace for Children, Grace for their Parents, and Grace for Retired Old Men!”

Andrew Root & Tony Robinson in Conversation

Grace Leuenberger — “Qualifying the Unqualified: Grace in Young Adulthood”

Tony Robinson — “Grace for the Sometimes/Frequently/How About ‘Always?’ Challenging Relationships Between Adult Children and Parents?”

Joey Goodall — “Kids Don’t Follow”

Melina Smith — “Faith Begins With Play: Enchanting the Next Generation”

Mark Koschmann — “Most Simple, Most Ordinary, Most Terrible: Grace for Ivan Ilyich and the Rest of Us”

Manuela Thames — “Multiple Exposures: Finding Grace Amidst the Noise of a Layered Life”

The post Mbird Minnesota Conference Audio appeared first on Mockingbird.

And if we’re doing that wrong, well, it’s pretty safe to say we’re doing most everything about Jesus wrong. It’s a pretty remarkable thing, but if you inventoried your red-lettered Bible, you’d find that Jesus prefers to teach with parables (and that goes for John too, btw — but that’s a subject for another day). In those off-chance times we actually do see Jesus say something in non-parabolic form, they happen because Jesus’ disciples have relentlessly pressed him to please stop talking in parables and just get on with it already! And what happens is really quite funny, because when he does finally speak plainly — explaining, in the most literal fashion, that the Messiah must die and then be raised on the third day from the dead — the disciples are only the more confused! “What the heck are you talking about?” is the approximate Greek. Jesus’ reply is a simple, “Good grief.” (Lk 18:31ff; note: none of the earliest manuscripts record Jesus actually muttering “Good grief,” but the sentiment is clearly implied.)

What might be funnier is that at one point, the Gospels record a moment where the disciples try to feign “getting it.” It occurs not long after the parable we’ll look at today, in Matthew 13:51, where Jesus asks them whether they “understand all these things.” Capon compares it to a scene right out of high school, where the disciples — too embarrassed to say otherwise — mumble that “yes, they do,” only to, moments later, come back to him asking if he would “explain it just one more time.” Not for themselves, of course, but for the slower-witted guys in the back of the room. Yeah, those guys.

But in truth, we’re all those guys. Despite two thousand years plus worth of books and sermons on the parables, they’re no less mystifying to us than they were to them. And that, ironically again, is precisely where Jesus wants us. Jesus doesn’t do parables to help us understand. Jesus tells parables — by his own account and Isaiah the prophet’s — in order to un-hear us, un-see us, un-understand us, so that we might simply believe, and thereby receive, the kingdom of God. “The disciples’ relationship to the mystery of the kingdom,” and ours, says Capon, “is based not on their knowledge or performance and certainly not on their guesswork about God’s plans; it is to be rooted only in his promise. They are to believe only in the King. Everything else is out of their hands, beyond their ken, and both literally and parabolically, over their heads.”[1]

Last time out, I looked at “The Parable of the Publican and the Pharisee” in what Capon called “Jesus at his parabolic best.” This week I thought we’d rewind the tape a little and take a look at “Jesus at his parabolic first” in what is called “the parable of the Sower,” what Capon calls “the great watershed of the parables, out of which flow the whole body of Jesus’ parabolic teaching (Mt 13:1–9; Mk 4:1–9; Lk 8:4–8).”[2]

The parable is a familiar one, I trust. It goes basically like this: a man went out to sow seeds and proceeded to cast them about literally everywhere, in indiscriminate, seemingly careless and haphazard fashion, as if the sower of the parable turned out to be none other than everyone’s favorite British farmer, Jeremy Clarkson, on his Lamborghini tractor, zigzagging across England’s fields, byways, and pubs, scattering seed in a stunning display of unstrategic zeal! Some seed falls on the roads, some in his or his neighbors’ fields, others on village sidewalks, some in the thorns. And yet some manages to actually find, and root itself, in good soil. And that pretty much is the parable. All the seed does something but in varying degrees and for various durations.

The parable itself comes entirely out of left field (all puns intended), without even the hint of a preface. Each of the synoptic authors, Capon points out, “just begins with it, unadorned by any commentary … [Jesus] does not say what he is talking about; he simply launches into a seemingly straightforward story about a farmer whose scattered seed falls into four different situations.” And though, “obviously he is talking about something other than agriculture, as to what the other subject is … he gives not a single clue!”[3] Add to that what will become Jesus’ signature closing, quoting Isaiah: “He who has ears, let him hear.” Mic drop; Jesus out, much to the dismay of the disciples — and by extension, us — who pull him aside to ask him what on earth he was just doing back there?!

Jesus has an answer, an equally cryptic and not the least bit demystifying one. First, he says that “to the disciples has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom.” He then quotes Isaiah yet again, this time as a sort of explanation for why he has chosen parables as his didactic form of choice: “that they may look yet not see, listen, and yet not understand, lest they should turn again and be forgiven.” If ever there was a counterintuitive pedagogy, this is it. Isn’t the whole point of Jesus’ ministry repentance and forgiveness?! And as for the disciples being in on the secret, well, so much for that! The only thing Jesus seems to have succeeded in doing is in baffling them supremely. An unpacking, he decides, is in order.

Perhaps you think that unnecessary. “Haven’t we heard this parable since we were kids?” you say. I’d wager you have. And if I had to wager how you’ve heard it, I’d guess in one of three ways, just as I had: as diagnostic (an explanation as to why some people get saved and others don’t; answer: they weren’t good soil); as cautionary (you’d best be sure to end up as good soil); or as motivation (better get out there and spread that seed on the good soil). But each of these begin with a fundamentally erroneous assumption, Capon points out: “Whom do we usually identify as the Sower?” he asks. “We think it’s Jesus, don’t we? And we have in our minds an image of him — and then of ourselves as the church — going around sprinkling something called the word of God on places that haven’t yet received it. But … that makes no sense at all,” he goes on to explain, for “the primary meaning of the phrase the Word of God in the New Testament is … the one who was in the beginning with God and who is, in fact, God himself … the Word [then] has to mean the eternal Son … and do you see what that says? It says first of all that the Sower is God the Father, not Jesus.”[4]

And so right out of the gate, it turns out, we’ve already gone off course. Contrary to what we’ve been taught and naturally thought, the parable turns out, much to our disappointment, to not really be about us at all! “It means,” Capon says, “that on the plain terms of the parable, Jesus has already, and literally, been sown everywhere in the world — and without a single bit of earthly cooperation or even consent.” From us, or from anyone else for that matter. So much for all the aforementioned likely sermons we’ve heard. In tragic irony, we find our preachers — who unfailingly read parables the same way we do, as being first and foremost about us and what we must do — caught with their proverbial pants down. Just as the sermon is getting its real start, we have already “ended up just as [Jesus] said we would as a result of his explanation of the Sower … We see and hear and still don’t catch on.”[5]

Instead of the parable being about what we must do for the kingdom, “In short we find Jesus asserting that in himself — in his death, resurrection and ascension — whatever is necessary for the fullness of the kingdom has been accomplished, purely and simply by what he has done.” Capon continues,

From the parable of the Sower to the end of the New Testament, we are watching the opening of a bud into full flower … the Word is sown in the field of the world, he dies, rises, and vanishes (in ascension). His entire work proceeds as does the work of a seed: it takes place in a mystery in secret — in a way that as Luther said, can neither be known or felt, but only believed and trusted … the story as told rests squarely on the sole agency of both the seed and the Word … the seed [as seed] is fully in action in and of itself at every step of the story. Everything necessary for its perfect work is in the works from the start.[6]

This is what Capon is getting at by calling this parable “the great watershed” out of which all Jesus’ parables flow. The entire catalogue of them asserts repeatedly, to borrow from Capon’s summation of another parable, “the passion of the Finder to find.” Or as Lutheran pastor-theologian Jim Nestingen put it in preaching another parable, God’s relentless insistence that “he will have his vineyard!”

What we’re bothered by, Capon suspects, is the seed’s apparent abysmal performance. We could agree, with Meat Loaf, that “two out of three ain’t bad,” but here Jesus seems to be flirting dangerously close to the Mendoza Line, a whopping one for four! But Capon challenges our assessment standards:

Consider the seed that falls into the other three situations. In all of them — whether the rocky ground, in the thorny underbrush, or in the well-prepared soil — the seed actually does its proper, reproductive work: it springs up. True there are differences in the outcome … but what needs to be emphasized here is that the differences can never be interpreted as meaning that the operative power of the seed … is in any way dependent on circumstantial cooperation. Perversely though, we seem to enjoy that interpretation … Sure, we have said, “the Lamb of God has taken away all the sins of the world.” But then we have proceeded to give the impression that unless people did something special to activate it, his forgiveness would remain only virtually, not actually theirs … That unless they confessed to a priest, or had the sacrifice of the mass applied specifically to their case, or accepted Jesus in the correct denominational terms — or hit the sawdust trail, did penance, cried their eyes out, or straightened up and flew right — the seed, who is the Word present everywhere in all his forgiving power, might just as well not really have been sown.[7]

Capon concedes here, as he often does in this book on the parables, that we may feel he’s “just pulled a fast shuffle on us.” Perhaps so, but only for the purpose of diverting our seeing eyes and hearing ears from the story they so naturally long to see and hear; the one where the good guys are vindicated and the enemies of God get it in the neck. Instead, the overwhelming insistence of the parables from start to finish is the success of God’s kingdom, despite the resistance it faces — not even despite the fact, come to think of it, but somehow in mysterious concert with the resistance, like a divine jiu-jitsu move. Says Capon, “The idea that the Good News of the kingdom is proclaimed in a hostile environment is written all over the New Testament.” Indeed, Capon continues, “Antagonism is every bit as much the soil of the Word as is acceptance.”[8] Yet, “the first thing to be insisted on is that all the antagonism in the world has already been aced out. Not overcome by force as we would have done — not bludgeoned into submission or out of existence — but precisely aced out: finessed, tricked into doing God’s thing when all the while it thought it was doing its own thing.”[9]

As a case in point, Capon takes that which appears to pose the greatest threat to the seed — the birds which carry it away — and insists “but this is no place to get upset … Like the birds that nibble on the seeds and then pass them out of their bodies unimpaired, the devil has no power against the word. Nobody” he assures us, “not the Devil, not the world, not the flesh, not even ourselves can take us away from the love that will not let us go.”[10]

But the question keeps nagging at you, I suspect, as it does me; “Yes, but what about the good soil, how does the seed find it?” More to the point, “How can I be sure that the seed finds me; how does one become good soil?” Jesus has an answer for that too, as I’m sure by now you’ve come to expect he would — he makes it himself.

At this point I introduce another parable, and even as I do so I fear you may accuse me that, like Capon, I too am pulling a fast shuffle. But as he is good to point out, Jesus’ parables are part of a corpus, a body, a catalogue, and as the rest of the Bibles does, they take liberty to preach unto and interpret one another. Even as we here, in this Capon Corner of ours, pull the parables out one by one and turn them over, we do so not in isolation from one another but instead in light and lieu of the others. And so we turn then to another parable, what we have come to call “The Barren Fig Tree” (Lk 13:6–9). I promise to be quick here and cede the floor again to Capon; “Consider the story. A certain man has a fig tree planted in his vineyard and he comes to it looking for figs and finds none. So he says to his vinedresser, ‘three years I’ve been trying to get figs from this tree and it hasn’t produced even one. Cut it down. Why should it use up ground?!’ But the vinedresser says to him, ‘Let it be Lord (aphes, the Greek for “forgive it’), for one more year, till I dig around it and put on manure.’”[11] Watch how Capon finishes it:

The world lives, as the fig tree lives, under the rubric of forgiveness. It thinks, of course, otherwise … that salvation is a pat on the back from a God who thinks we are good eggs … but by the foolishness of God that is not how it works. By the folly of the cross, Jesus becomes sin for us, and he goes outside the camp for us, and he is relegated to the dump (Gehenna, often translated “Hell”) for us, and becomes the garbage, compost, offal and manure for us … and he sends our roots resurrection.[12]

Now if you’re thinking along the lines of all those sermons we’ve likely heard, you’re thinking, “Yeah, Jesus does send resurrection roots … for all the people who have the good sense or the good heart or the good whatever it is to accept him.” And to that I would say, I think you’re missing the point. The point of the parable is that none of us are any of that. There are no “good eggs,” as Capon points out. The fact is that there is no good soil — until Jesus makes it so. By him, and the mystery of the cross, the cursed ground, thorned and rife with stubborn resistance, is made into good soil. And so the parable turns out, Capon shows us, not to be at all about any of the things we with our blind eyes and deaf ears made it out to be. Instead, the savior of the whole world turns out to be just that; the one who comes to save the whole world.

You feel I’ve pulled a fast shuffle of my own? Perhaps so. But only at the encouragement of Jesus to do so, and to hold him to his word. Here is how Capon sums up the Sower; “The final concern … of the Word himself, is nothing less than the reconciled you and me that he longs to offer his heavenly Father. He did not become flesh to display his own virtuosity; he did so to bring us home to his Father’s house and sit us down as his bride at the supper of the Lamb. He wills us whole and happy, you see; and the parable of the Sower says he will unfailingly have us so.”[13] Amen, and so let it be.

Josh Schatzle is the Co-host of the podcast Lectionary After-Party (In Case You Missed It).

[1] Kingdom, Grace, Judgment, 41.

[2] ibid, 57.

[3] ibid, 57–58.

[4] ibid, 60–61.

[5] ibid, 61.

[6] ibid, 63, 68.

[7] ibid, 69–70.

[8] ibid, 70.

[9] ibid, 70.

[10] ibid, 71.

[11] ibid, 248–249.

[12] ibid, 250–251.

[13] ibid, 74.

The post There Is No Good Soil appeared first on Mockingbird.

To apply to join the next cohort as a preaching fellow, click here.

When my husband, Andrew, and I moved with our son Zeke in 2018 to Japan to serve as missionaries, I did not want to be pastor again.

I had felt this way for more than a decade, after a very unhappy first call that lasted less than two years. We’d applied for Andrew’s job, anyway, for him to be a church history professor at Japan Lutheran College and Seminary. My job as pastor to the English Ministry of Tokyo Lutheran Church got tacked on last minute, a kind of bureaucratic bait and switch, because what ordained missionary accompanying her spouse was really gonna refuse to serve a poor little congregation that otherwise had no shot at hearing the gospel preached in English?

Even so, with that being my official call, I knew what my first job on arrival in Japan was: learn the language. I am heir of the Reformation, after all. “Vernacular” was one of my first long weird words because it mattered so much: everybody should and must have the Word of God in their own language.

Besides, the majority of the members of Tokyo Lutheran Church were Japanese-speaking Japanese people; my senior pastor was Japanese; and, for that matter, my convenience store- and post office-clerks, the smartly suited railway staff and the salarymen falling asleep on the train, and nearly every other human being I might meet and want to talk to, not least of all about Jesus, were all Japanese.

Obvious first task: learn Japanese.

Now let me warn you right now that this is not going to be an assimilation and contextualization success story. This story does not culminate with me learning Japanese. This particular story sputters to a stop when I realize that arigatou gozaimasu — “thank you” — covers 90% of the situations I find myself in, and therefore, two and a half years and fifty textbook lessons into it, trembling on the cusp of comprehension at long last, I give up.

Or rather, I acknowledge the indisputable fact that I have already given up.

Indulge me for a moment in blatant self-justification.

Let’s set aside the fact that the grammar of Japanese is so different from English that the active/passive distinction crucial to English verbs is baffling to them; and, in turn, the Japanese ability to speak without nouns, vaguely attributing action but not to any particular agent, is baffling to me.

Let’s set aside the fact that the syntax of Japanese is so different that an ordinary sentence will often unfold in the exact opposite word order from English.

Let’s set aside the fact that, beyond grammar and syntax, the culture of Japan is so different from ours that, even though Google Translate could give you a perfectly accurate rendering of what you want to say in Japanese, no Japanese person would ever, ever say that.

Let’s zero in, instead, on the written language. Written Japanese is a blend of three completely different writing systems — and that’s if you don’t count their use of the Roman alphabet as a fourth.

First there’s kanji, which are the pictographic characters borrowed from Chinese. They are so numerous and complex that even native Japanese schoolchildren are only expected to master 2,000 of them by the time they finish high school. Each kanji is itself a combination of component parts, which may not have any necessary relationship to the word’s meaning, so you can’t guess what each one means; you have to learn it by brute force. On top of that, each kanji has at least two ways of being pronounced, its Chinese original and its Japanese counterpart, so you have to be taught which way to say it in any given context.

The second writing system is hiragana: a curvy syllabary (not an alphabet) for rendering native Japanese words phonetically. The aforementioned kanji are so unpredictable that a tiny version of hiragana, called furigana, is often perched on top of the kanji so Japanese readers know how to pronounce them correctly. Books for small children are usually printed in hiragana only. You might wonder why Japan doesn’t just switch over to hiragana entirely. The reason is that the one and only easy thing about Japanese is its pronunciation, because it has an extremely limited set of sounds; but that also means it has an extremely large number of homophones. They still need the kanji to interpret the meaning of identically sounding words.

The third writing system is katakana, a whole separate syllabary. Unlike the curvy strokes of hiragana, katakana is spiky, like cuneiform: both look like they were designed for reeds dragged across wet clay. Katakana is used for species names, for the equivalent of italics, and above all for foreign loan words, like my personal favorite, doraibusuru — “drive-through.”

That might not seem like much, until you circle back to the need for a vernacular Bible. From place names like Sinai and Golgotha, to personal names like Moses and Jesus, to words so loved in their original form that they are untranslatable, like amen and alleluia, on every single page of every single Japanese Bible marches a whole host of katakana, that is, visually obvious foreign words.

Sheerly on account of the writing system, every page of a Japanese Bible shrieks at the reader: “This is a foreign religion, brought here by foreigners, meant for foreigners. It is not ours. It is not for us.” In a place that is insular in geography and culture alike, the vernacular is doomed from the start.

And that is one of many reasons why Japan remains the all-time greatest puzzler for Christian missions: no place has seen more personnel, money, time, or creativity devoted to it with visible less result.

Given this immense complexity of the Japanese language, what struck me most while settling into my new life in Tokyo was not the never-ending phalanx of high-rises, not the tacky flashing neon, not the sprawl that stretches from mountains to coastline. It was that Tokyo talks. Constantly!

Every surface is trying to talk to you. There is hardly an uninscribed spot anywhere in that city of 38 million. Warning signs, government notices, recorded messages speaking from shop shelves, advertisements that are not simple bright images as we prefer but dense paragraphs bristling with text: words, words, everywhere.

Which puts the foreigner — in my case, a triple foreigner; foreign in ethnicity, foreign in citizenship, foreign in religion — in a strange position. The city is screaming for my attention, desperate to break through my barriers, for its message to reach me.

But I have no faculty of reception.

I receive none of it.

The problem is mine, obviously. My job is clear: learn the language. Learn the damn language! Actually, that’s the conclusion the early Jesuit missionary St. Francis Xavier came to: the Japanese language, he said, is a product of the devil invented expressly to frustrate the transmission of the gospel. When I first got to Japan, loyal Lutheran that I am, I figured this was culturally insensitive Catholic colonialism as its worst. A couple years into I thought, Man, those Jesuits sure got some spiritual insight.

But Francis did learn the language — and I did not — and that’s the point: I knew what I needed to do, and I did not do it. In some powerful way that I still can’t quite explain or understand, I could not do it.

There were mitigating factors, of course: loneliness and isolation, a bigger cultural gap than I expected, covid, closed borders, and the sheer difficulty of Japanese: so many valid excuses. Except that my husband, despite being a fellow Lutheran and definitely not a Jesuit, learned the damn language anyway: living proof in my own home that it was possible.

But I could. Not. Do it. This did not fit my self-image.

I am competent. I work hard. I am especially competent and hardworking in my God-given field of theology and ministry and languages. And yet, after I had been sent by God to Japan as a missionary, all of these long and gratefully cultivated gifts ran aground, crashed, collapsed, and drowned in the tsunami of my utter inability to talk myself into doing my daily homework.

That’s right. I didn’t even get the glory of a spectacular crash! All that happened was that I could not bring myself to open my textbook and copy out the next sentence. Not one day, not the next, not the one after, until finally a month into it, I owned up to my language coach and then to my husband, who was rapidly acquiring the lingo and even teaching master’s level seminars in it, for heaven’s sake.

I was done. The whole world of Japan was closed off to me because I could not bring myself even to want to hear it, much less speak it. When Paul wrote that he had become all things to all people, I doubt he meant it the way I experienced it: I was as closed off to Japan as Japan was closed off to Christ.

I know you’re still waiting for the twist, some linguistic miracle akin to the day of Pentecost in Acts 2. Alas, I have scoured the scriptures, and that appears to have been a one-off for a very special occasion; like the resurrection itself, Pentecost is not a miracle to be repeated until the end times.

What happened instead is that the Lord took due notice of his lowly servant, slow of speech — at least where Japanese was concerned — and said, “Who gives speech to mortals, you or I?”

And then he opened my eyes, rather than my lips. And I saw the many bilingual members of my congregation eager to serve, who had succeeded willingly where I had failed even to will willingly. I saw the Japanese who made a point of worshiping in English. I saw fellow foreigners who’d actually acquired fluency.

The Lord God said: this is what my dumbstruck missionary needs; interpret for her! And interpret they did. With good courage and happy hearts. They undertook a major bilingual evangelistic project while I stood by and watched.

After that, reflecting on how few English-speaking preachers were around, I thought to ask: Do any of you want to try preaching, too, for when I go on vacation or furlough or something? Many volunteered. Some found once was enough. But others found a vocation in lay preaching and continued to grow in that calling and so supply the congregation’s need.

By then the Lord was really on a roll working around all my blockages and failures. Here’s another admission: I have no idea how to evangelize. I didn’t back home, so how much less in a country, culture, and language that I couldn’t bring myself even to want proficiency in. But that’s OK, because Jesus once again ignored my incapacity, or possibly (I was beginning to suspect) incapacitated me in order to get around me, and starting flinging people through our church doors.

An Estonian woman who was born right before the fall of communism (and so wasn’t brought to baptism in infancy by her parents), who moved to England for university, married a Japanese guy, and moved again to Tokyo before tumbling unexpectedly into faith and showing up two weeks before Easter pleading for baptism. Except for the Ethiopian eunuch, that was the world’s fastest catechumenate! And after her baptism, she never stopped beaming. Eventually I baptized her little boy, too, because he wouldn’t stop bugging his startled parents for the right to belong to Jesus, too.

Then there was the Canadian who’d moved to Japan to play drums for a death metal band, until one day the darkness couldn’t conceal itself anymore. Once he saw the truth of it, he rushed straight into the arms of Jesus his Lord, bringing his little children for baptism and telling everyone who’d listen about the One who has power over the darkness.

And then the Chinese. Streams of Chinese, already believers in China, tactically waiting to get out, showing up at Tokyo Lutheran either their first or second Sunday in Japan, announcing that they required baptism, and could I please tell them what to do?

Whether Estonian or Canadian or Chinese or even, on the rare and precious occasion, a Japanese in Japan, nearly all of them said the same: “I was walking along, minding my own business when God said to me, Read the Bible and go to church. So here I am. What now?” And before long, I was saying to whoever would listen that Jesus has finally realized that missions in Japan don’t work, so he’s started doing it himself.

And that is the point at which I became useful. I had been sent to them, but they also had been sent to me. By the time I realized how precious and miraculous the meeting between us was, I’d learned beyond all doubt that what they needed was the word of the Lord, plain and simple.

Then my lips were opened and I spoke, not in Japanese to be sure, but in that odd, truncated, simplified English you learn to use with non-native speakers. There was no guff or distraction or commentary or advice, and heaven help me, never an anecdote as long as this one!

There was just: Jesus Christ, son of Israel, was killed on the cross, but God his Father raised him on the third day.

And: You have been baptized into this Christ, and received his Holy Spirit, so you no longer live in the kingdom of darkness but in the kingdom of light.

And: All of your sins have been forgiven.

And: This is the body and blood of Christ, given and shed for you.

They heard, and they believed. And so did I. One time, I was talking a Chinese convert through the Creed and heard myself describing the ascension, and I started to wonder what kind of friggin’ lunatic I must be to buy into something like that. I ran out of words, embarrassed.

He said into my silence, “It’s wonderful.”

It is.

That gigantic chattering city goes on chattering, sometimes an analogy of God’s relentless communicativeness at our closed-off-ness and sometimes the foremost obstacle to God’s communicativeness. There are still plugged ears and silenced tongues, as many among Christians and pastors as unbelievers and outsiders. There are still lost opportunities and sorrowful failures.

I can’t explain why Japan doesn’t hear. I can’t explain why I couldn’t speak. What I do know is that God sears unclean lips and makes them fit to speak his words on his behalf. My lips; your lips; for his purposes, not ours; with and around and in spite of and sometimes even because of our failures.

You might have become acquainted with Romans 10 as the charter of your calling as pastor and preacher. It probably meant a lot to you, gave you the confidence and boldness you needed to go through with it. But also, what pressure. How will they hear without someone to proclaim to them? Namely, you?

But let me proclaim some good news to you proclaimers: Romans 10 is not about you and your ability to live up to your calling. Romans 10 is the assurance that the Lord Jesus will have preachers, and he will make them happen, whatever it takes.

If that means speaking out of Balaam’s ass, or out of the sky, or at Shibuya Crossing, or in a prison cell, he will have preachers.

By all means, give him the best you’ve got. But also give him your failures, your embarrassments, your character flaws, your vain pride, and your pitiful excuses. He will use them, too, to get his preaching done. He will raise up others to preach whatever you have failed to say.

Preaching will happen. With you. Because of you. Even in spite of you.

What a relief. Amen.

The post A Missionary Who Can’t Speak the Language appeared first on Mockingbird.

Adulthood is supposed to mean meeting the vegetable on its own terms — and, preferably, enjoying it. You’re not merely supposed to eat the broccoli. You’re supposed to have matured into the kind of person who wants the broccoli.

I know this because I can make feeding myself unnecessarily complicated if I let myself. I am a food editor; I know how to make vegetables taste good. I also know how quickly “eat some vegetables” can become “eat vegetables correctly.” 

What is this best way to eat a vegetable? Straight from your home garden, preferably raw, maybe with spritz of lemon juice and “enough dirt still clinging to them to imply virtue.” Just as God intended. Back to Stevens:

What you eat is, once again, evidence of what kind of person you are.

Which is perhaps why I was so susceptible to a piece of nutritional wisdom I first encountered in the lauded medical halls of Pinterest. It appeared on a peach-colored background in undulating cream script: Eat what you want, add what you need. […]

A couple years before Pinterest delivered this revelation to me, chef Roy Choi gave me another version of the same permission — only a little less polite. “Disrespect the s**t out of vegetables,” he told me in an interview.

His point was that we have made vegetables too precious. We talk about “letting the ingredient shine,” as though the carrot is competing for a prestigious academic scholarship. Choi’s advice was to go the other direction: blister them, puree them, drown them in vinegar or chili, add something sweet, blend them into sauces, make them taste like the foods you already crave. 

Stop treating vegetables like museum objects and start treating them like ingredients.

What I remember most, though, is that beneath all the swagger, Choi’s argument was really about self-compassion. Later in that same conversation, he described the larger project — his cookbook, “The Choi of Cooking” — as learning to have “the courage to be kind to yourself.”

I was drawn to this article for a few reasons. I am an adult who prefers to eats vegetables when they are in a salad or covered in salt and butter. This, I think, just makes me a human. But the article also illustrates how many of the rules for being an adult confuse pragmatics for sanctity (see also: rules for being a Christian). In that way, Stevens’ and Choi’s “disrespect the s**t out of your vegetables” feels less like another rule and more like the freedom of playfulness that transforms the mundane into the magic of fun.

2. After reading the above and trying out your first course of garlic and bacon green beans, you might be tempted to think the secret to lifelong happiness is to imbue each day with an overflowing sense of whimsy. And you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. But in attempting to make every aspect of life feel magical,  Mitch Therieau wonders whether a dash of whimsy has become less whimsical:

If whimsy is really the answer to our ills, it’s understandable that people would want more and more of it. […]

Whimsymaxxers talk about bringing out the magic in the everyday, but increasingly that magic is seen as something to be measured and harnessed. It is no surprise, then, that whimsy slots so comfortably into the jargon of our wellness-saturated culture. One social media guru breaks whimsy down into a series of salutary “microhabits”; another speaks of whimsy as a means of maximizing the return on investment of one’s “inner child.” Whimsymaxxing is presented as part of a “low-cortisol morning” routine. A medical spa shows off a bedazzled box of Botox vials.

Whimsy here starts to look less like magic and more like the mining device, turning in circles, working on the self, dredging some things up from its depths and shuttling others down from the surface. Buy yourself a little treat. Invest in your inner child. Let your impulses drive. “Fun is a medicinal bath,” as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno put it more than 80 years ago. “The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it.”

To try to optimize whimsy is to subject it to an “if … then” conditionality of law. The whimsymaxxer instrumentalizes whimsy, disfiguring playfulness into its opposite. The law of fun, it turns out, is no fun at all.

3. For the clergy out there, this next article is a parable on the plight of being a pastor’s kid. For everyone else, it’s another example of how to zap the fun out of something that should be enjoyable. While a coach can be a surrogate father figure, being both simultaneously, as Nick Paumgarten discovered, is a kind of toxic alchemy. Like the mixing of law and gospel, being parent and coach spoils both in the process: it turns out that being the coach’s kid is a recipe for hating the sport.

But it wouldn’t be long before I would forget and be tricked into expecting too much. Something came awake in me, an incubus of ambition — a desire for excellence, obviously of a shine that would reflect back on me. The vanity of parenthood took hold.

I hadn’t set out to coach my sons. The earliest impulse was to be on the ice with them. If I was going to go to the rink, I might as well get to skate. I wanted to play with them, not teach them to play, much less to play for me. Still, it was pride, of a kind, that drew me to the bench. … But eventually a dad’s tutelage sets in motion the familiar cycle of expectation and disappointment.

What unfolds is as predictable as it is sad. As the dual roles of father and coach become intertwined, Paumgarten ceases to be either. One vignette he recounts is particularly instructive. When James, his eight-year-old son, is shoved from behind into the boards, he retaliates by hitting the other player in the face with his stick. Paumgarten tries to play it cool, as any coach would, but inside he’s being split in two:

From a certain remove, the mayhem amused me, but I worried, with a dad’s fierce, selfish concern, about James’s well-being — his head, ribs, neck, shoulders — and muttered justifications to myself for the retaliatory stick to the ear. “Kid had it coming,” my inner hockey man said. Yet I also worried about that Rye boy and felt the rustlings of embarrassment, guilt, or even outrage. The refs kicked James out of the game and gave Rye a five-minute power play. They scored twice. It cost us the game. […]

On entering the locker room, I immediately checked in on James to ask about his head and spine and give his shoulder a surreptitious squeeze — what he really needed was a hug — on the car ride home I began to criticize him for losing his cool, for attempting to hurt another player, and also for putting his team down a player and depriving it of his services. “You can’t keep doing this,” I said. “We need you out there.”

I knew it was bad to talk to James about the game, or really to say anything at all besides “Let’s get some pancakes,” but, because I was wound up myself, or because I felt that I needed to impart some kind of lesson, as a father and as a coach, or because there was some childish part of me that needed to spill my own disquiet onto someone else, I persisted. Sometimes I savored the sweetness of driving to and from the rink with one or the other son in back; other times, I felt like little more than a chauffeur. Today, I was a cop, with a perp in back, behind a scrim of parental expectation as impenetrable as bulletproof glass.

Eventually, Paumgarten’s son James would quit hockey and “the yoke of expectation” that it likely brought. He soon picked up basketball:

Basketball! Sacrilege. Out on the hardwood, as an energy guy off the bench, he bounced around with the avidity and glee of a parolee. I took it as a delicious rebuke. Another dad exclaimed, “James is the happiest basketball player on the planet!”

4. I promised myself I wasn’t going to write about AI (yaaawn), so here are some quick hitters of the best of what I found this week. Becca Rothfeld notes the current anti-AI populism is being driven by a new humanism. I think this observation is largely correct, but Ashley Frawley’s “We Must Become Gods” strikes me as more prescient. The New York Times notes the homogenizing tendency of AI, which Noema argues will make human knowledge work more essential (here’s hoping!)

5. I obviously can’t endorse what I haven’t seen yet, but my gosh the reviews of Nathan Fielder’s You Can See Everything are superlative. See this, from the Guardian, which gives it five stars:

Those who were there can confirm: the hype is deserved. You Can See Everything is, somehow, more shocking, twistier, thornier and revealing than billed – a stupefying and gloriously destabilizing hall of psychological mirrors, a thrilling once-in-a-lifetime collision of director and subject.

6. For laughs, Little Old Lady Comedy has the perfect satire of people who study abroad in their “I Can’t Really Explain It, But Things Just Seem Different Since I’ve Been to Mars.” Elsewhere there’s Beaverton’s “Child’s Imaginary Restaurant Acquired, Shuttered by Private Equity,” and my personal favorite that is also 100% true comes from the Onion, “Algorithm Distorting How Important Man Thinks ‘Gummo’ Is To Rest Of World”:

Blaming their friend’s personalized internet feed for his warped perception of the film’s impact, sources confirmed Wednesday that the algorithm presented to local man Todd Bennett had been distorting how important he thinks Gummo is to the rest of the world. “No matter which social media site he’s on, he’s being pushed Gummo content left and right, all the time,” said roommate Jordan Mintz, explaining that between the long Reddit threads arguing about the symbolism of Tummler killing stray cats and the TikTok tutorials for Bunny Boy cosplay, Bennett appeared to “live in his own little bubble” where the experimental indie film from 1997 was widely considered one of the cultural touchstones of the last century. “He’s stuck in this echo chamber of Gummo GIFs, Gummo fan fiction, and speculation about whether Harmony Korine will ever make a Gummo sequel. No matter what we try to tell him, he’s convinced that people come home from work and casually put on this chaotic series of conceptual vignettes to unwind. He just keeps being pulled deeper and deeper into a false reality where everybody understands the reference of a boy eating spaghetti in a dirty bathtub filled with murky water, when that’s definitely not the case for the majority of the population. It’s sad, really.” Mintz added that he worried Bennett’s algorithm made no mention of what’s actually important to people, like the 1992 live-action/animated fantasy Cool World.

And for the Presbyterians out there, this new monograph from Penguin Books will change your life.

7. The above cartoon is actually the perfect segue … Next up, we turn to a familiar voice sounding in an unexpectedly devotional key. Writing from the Lamp magazine in their special examination of the seven deadly sins, Freddie deBoer offers his thoughts on the sin of pride. I’d quote more if I weren’t constrained by length/copyright, but here is a small sampling that should convince you to read the whole thing.

What separates pride-as-vice from pride-as-virtue is not entirely obvious, and the people who are most guilty of the former tend to be exactly the ones who are most certain they’re practicing the latter. This is pride’s most insidious trick: unlike envy, which makes its victim feel bad, or sloth, which inspires some degree of self-hatred, pride often feels like clarity. Pride presents itself as a correct and lucid appraisal of your own worth; it feels like knowing who you are. It feels like standing up for yourself. It takes extraordinary self-awareness to recognize it for what it actually is. And if I wanted to make it harder for people to recognize and embody that self-awareness, I would come up with something like modern self-help culture.

What pride actually is, in its full theological and psychological sense, is a systematic distortion of reality, a chronic overestimation of one’s own value and what one deserves thanks to that value. The proud don’t just feel good about themselves; they feel good in a way that cannot be revised by evidence, in a way that is essentially insulated from the kinds of information that the world is constantly, if imperfectly, offering. The proud sometimes know they’re talented. They know they deserve what they have and probably more besides. But when the evidence suggests otherwise, they discount that evidence. They blame external factors; they blame the people delivering the news; they shoot the messenger. They do everything except the one thing pride cannot permit: they do not revise their self-assessments downward. Pride may be a condition of self-love, but before that it’s a condition of self-fixity, a snapshot the proud have decided to treat as an unchangeable document. […]

Can you resist pride? With more difficulty than your therapist is likely to tell you, sure, because pride has this weird recursive quality: any self-inquiry into your own pride runs through the very cognitive system that pride corrupts. Forgive me for engaging in crude folk postmodernism, but there is no Archimedean point outside your own perspective from which to objectively assess your perspective. The proud are exactly as unable to recognize their pride as they are unable to see anything else about themselves clearly; that inability — that helplessness — is just … what pride is. The standard advice is to seek feedback from trusted others, to cultivate intellectual humility, to practice saying “I was wrong” about small things so you can do it about big ones. All good counsel, and all, predictably, resisted most fiercely by the people who need it most. Pride makes feedback feel like an attack, humility feel like self-erasure, and the straightforward acknowledgment of error feel like a confession of total inadequacy.

DeBoer concludes by pivoting to pride’s cure, which resides not in rebalancing the scales of self-worth but by having an altogether non-contingent identity.

What helps, I think, is not trying to eliminate pride but trying to make it less central to your self-conception. … The cure is not to think worse of yourself, or to go in the other direction and wallow in self-criticism, which is frequently just pride’s photographic negative. The treatment is to make your sense of yourself more dynamic, more process-oriented, less contingent on any particular fixed assessment of your worth.

Strays:

• Calling all Gerhard Forde fans! Lutheran Quarterly has just released a previously unpublished paper by him entitled “The Concept of Justification”!
• “One Reason People Are Spending So Much Time Alone”
• “Why Are So Many Adults Cutting Off Their Parents?”

The post September 26-October 2 appeared first on Mockingbird.

Where in all the varied movements of creation is there any work of God which is not wonderful? … Indeed, how many common things are trodden underfoot which, if examined carefully, awaken our astonishment.  –Augustine (Letters 137.10)

My daughter Bekah has a quirky and remarkable gift. Ever since she was a child, she’s had a knack for looking at a stand of clover and immediately — instantly — finding a four-leafed cluster. Over the years she’s plucked her finds and tucked them in her journal. She’s well into adulthood now, and on a recent spring day, strolling with her and her then-fiancé on a mountain road, we passed a clump in full display. This time she outdid herself: within seconds she had found two four-lobed clovers.

“How do you do that?” I asked. She smiled and shrugged. Once back at the cabin we looked up the probabilities on Google: Only one out of every 5,000 stems (or 10,000 according to another source) have the foursome.

Bekah gave me one of the two she had found and I taped the gift to a page in my own journal. Looking at the clover just now, I’m baffled again. Perhaps a brain scientist or ophthalmologist could theorize about pattern recognition. About how some people have sharpened perceptual abilities. How some of us don’t.

The Mystery of What We Notice

The biblical tradition cares deeply about sight — about not missing the glory in front of us. Jesus himself bemoaned the refusal of religious leaders around him to recognize the work of God unfolding before their eyes, their stubbornness an obstacle to their awed recognition of the Son of God. No wonder Jesus’ most common healing miracle was the restoration of sight.

I realize in my daughter’s ability how there’s a mystery to what we perceive — and what we miss, something indefinable in what we zero in on or overlook. Who knows why some see a sharp outline when looking at wayside wonders, and others’ eyes have a gauzy, dimming film?

And I find myself asking more questions: Can I cultivate a keener eye? Not just for odd clover leaves but in larger matters? Can I better orient my life with more reverent attentiveness? I’ve been considering what it means to look, not distractedly but worshipfully. Not hastily but with greater attention. And with a greater sense of anticipation.

Why We Miss What’s Right in Front of Us

Sometimes I don’t see because I let distractions cover over my line of sight. Often, I simply forget to look. I don’t pay attention. And the phrase is intriguing: we have to pay something (like a moment or two) to have our looking rewarded. Much of that reality has to do with my scattered affections, my stutter-step threading or stumbling through everyday miracles. Maybe too often I don’t bother to move the surrounding virtual clutter to better see the created thing itself, in its mystery and reality and glory. Maybe my failure truly to see traces to how much I’ve gotten used to a mere scan. A rushed glance. Reverence does not thrive in the soil of hurriedness. We end up with, as someone put it, attention deficit disorder of the soul.

Flannery O’Connor was addressing a group of writers, but she could have been talking to any Christian, when she said, “There’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer … can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once.” For, she said, “the longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it.”

I was told as a child that staring is poor manners. But gazing has its rewards. Might not a grain of humility, if it leads us to reverence as we traverse a wider world, open up our souls to insight and new delights we will miss if eyes stay glued only to our blue-glowing screens? We instead practice turning our eyes to our world (including other people) with a lingering, leisurely look.

A Presence-Saturated Universe

The handiwork of God has a translucent richness, and sometimes all that is just a look away. The heavens declare the glory of God, as we hear in Psalm 19, as does a carpet of woodland undergrowth. Sometimes reverent looking has its beginnings in simple wonder.

And when I lose track or get sucked back into bland, dulled seeing, sometimes lifting up my eyes to contemplate what stands outside my office window can reorient me. Even a bug-splatted windshield will do. Likewise, an unhurried look at a loved one bathed in candlelight. Glimpses stolen from a hectic day pull me toward the seen, put me back in touch, place me in the right posture — looking up or out. A charged glance may come in more simple settings than I think.

So most mornings I manage to sit still for a time. I try to remember that, as Dallas Willard wrote, we live in a “God-bathed and God-permeated world.” I may have to allow a little time to lapse, or a little more light to slant. When I can, I try to find some time or another to walk outside, sky suspended over me, whether at dawn or beneath a starry spectacle or under a noonday dark-clouded weightiness.

Eyes Opened by an Ache and a Grief

Sometimes what shakes us from our doldrums into reverent attentiveness has to do with hard, even harsh things. As a young adult I experienced the trauma of rejection by my parents. When I had left my California home as a young man for seminary on the opposite coast of the country, I met the person I wanted to marry. My parents thought I was too young and promised to boycott the ceremony. I proceeded, over my parents’ protests, with the wedding. It opened a rift in my relationship with my parents that took years to mend. I braved angry letters, threats to disown me. An aching for their affection and blessing went unfulfilled — for a time. Thousands of miles between us, my parents’ ailing health, and my tight finances all conspired against a reunion.

I saw again how suffering can narrow our field of vision, make us shrink back, can keep us from seeing blessings at hand. But it may also open us up, sharpen our raw seeing. What if the dreaded, ugly turn of events can jolt us alert, deepen our ability to see into the heart of things?

That is what I found when a trip Jill and I planned for Thanksgiving week — to California — finally brought a real change. We were to attend a church conference not far from my family’s Santa Monica home. It was the perfect occasion to gather — this time with Jill and our little children. And I felt a new appreciation for what I’d been denied. As I recount in my book Awake My Soul, from the moment we walked up the steps of their sea-green stucco house perched on a rise above the sidewalk, I was all eyes. I took in the familiar worn places in the gold shag carpet (installed in the seventies), the tropical flowers in the backyard, the view of the Pacific waters from what had been my second-story bedroom. I don’t think I casually noticed anything that trip.

Most of all, I took in my parents’ faces. During a spare moment of our stay I jotted in my journal, “I feel great love for my parents when I look into their eyes. And I feel it from them.”

We may let experiences roll over us until something, like a separation or illness, yanks us from distracted, half-tied noticing. Until suffering jogs or jostles us to a deeper look or heightened attentiveness.

Seeing the God Who Sees Us

Still sitting in a bit of wonder over my daughter’s uncanny ability to scan a bed of clover and see what just about anyone else would miss, I’m thinking of yet another kind of seeing, a larger perceiving that I’m also finding mysterious — and beckoning. I mean not just becoming aware of evidences of God but glimpsing God — the sight upon which no one can gaze and live, who yet condescends to become incarnated in humanity, taking up residence in creaturely life. Surely that means God shows up on the premises of my life, too. Psalm 19, with its assurance about the heavens declaring the glory of God, makes a turn to go deeper. We exult in not just a general (possibly impersonal) revelation of divine glory, but something even more relationally rich. God’s guidance, his attention to our lived lives, continues to work, “reviving the soul, … rejoicing the heart” (see vv. 7–8).

So it seems possible, as some of the church’s saints and mystics claimed, like fourteenth-century Julian of Norwich, that we meet a presence that doesn’t just see us from afar but who holds us in the palm of his hand. In one of her renowned visions, “all that is made” is like “the size of a hazelnut,” yet tended, loved (Revelations of Divine Love, 5). The child of God sees One who is both infinite and yet also willing to be intimate. Our souls stand at attention at such a gift. And so in the ancients I catch sight of a sharpened perception.

Julian surely had plenty of ugliness around her — a plague that exceeded our COVID pandemic for its sheer, crushing devastation. A petty war raged. Famine hung over everyday life. But she knew that horrific illness and unjust suppression of peasants did not blot out spiritual reality. When she spoke of hope, it was more than her eyeing traces of glory in creation, but something more personal, more relational, more close by. She knew she was being watched over by Love. Her visions made that clear — and not just of the hazelnut but in the crucified, willing Jesus. “And in this I saw cause for celebration and cause for lamentation,” she confesses: “cause for celebration, because our Lord, our maker, is so near us and in us, and we in him; … cause for lamentation, because our spiritual eye is so blind and we are so weighed down by the burden of our mortal flesh and the darkness of sin that we cannot see clearly the fair, blessed face of our Lord God.” (Revelations of Divine Love, 72). But it’s that Face that we want, isn’t it? The face of no less than God made real, brought down to flesh, subjected and submitting to the worst of human suffering.

In the Mix of Tedium and Transcendence

A while ago, with all this rolling around, I headed from my parked car to my office at the time with a prayer under my breath. I said something along the lines of “God, help me see today — see you.”

That day unfolded with a mix of tedium and significant conversations. I was already a bit down from a drizzly sky. And nothing instantaneous happened. But that day, and the next, I found myself noticing things that had a feel of hopefulness. That reminded me of the Ultimate presence. Was it grace, God’s pure willingness to answer my asking? More divine light got through to my heart’s field of vision. It was more than my simply squinting and looking harder.

With this kind of God drawing close, I tell myself to look around amid the odd and common and hard. Even better, I recall the extravagance of the God who has surprised me again and again, helping me to see what once I could not. Helping to make visible what I could easily miss.

With that kind of generosity at the heart of God’s doings, I’m hopeful that I can expect to see more — even more.

An alternate version of this article previously appeared in Fathom Magazine.

The post A Shimmering Universe, Barely Seen appeared first on Mockingbird.

I am not a disciple of Berry’s in any conventional sense, nor am I his friend save in the way one becomes when they read and profit from someone over years. I was wonderfully dashed to pieces and put back together by Berry’s writing: the novels and the essays, of course, but especially, surprisingly, the poems.

What I have to show for learning from him may not seem like much, but on the scale of my life, in my affections and in my habits, it is substantial enough. I think I have appropriated my inevitable death in such a way that I live a little more simply and more for the sake of others while I am yet alive.

I have taken steps to rely less upon digital tools, and I have enjoyed the clarity and the fruitfulness that has resulted from more analog methods. I think I not only know but also feel a little bit more the satisfaction of working outside on something I helped to grow. I scarcely exaggerate when I call it a miracle that I have helped to plant a pumpkin patch and to keep chickens in the backyard. I, who have been so afraid to get my hands dirty in the past, always trying to quarantine impurities and be at the ready for obsessive-compulsive habits and for screens.

It was Berry who drove home to me how handwriting was a point at which thought and the body converged for the good. This is a window into the entire complex of things Berry cared about and that I have come to see are deeply important. His essay “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine” delivers the epochal summary statement that “the danger most immediately to be feared in technological progress is the degradation and obsolescence of the body.”

You may recognize the truth of that testimony, but do you see how it bears fruit in writing by hand? I didn’t at first, but I was profoundly changed by his assertion that “my handwritten pages have a homemade, handmade look to them that both pleases me in itself and suggests the possibility of ready correction. It looks hospitable to improvement.”

Writing out reflections and drafts by hand has profited me enormously. But his remarks about composition bleed over into life more broadly considered. Berry has never lacked for angry responses when he published something, because people, as a whole, do not like the challenge of a life that is better lived.

You need only read the letters attacking and insulting him following the publication of his brief essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” Some of these were included in the version of the essay published as part of What Are People For? There is a fear in them that spills over into bitterness and rancor. And why? Because Berry sets out a series of principles consistent with a truth that people do not want to hear, and because it means what they are doing is not good.

Part of Berry’s usefulness to me is precisely this, that he constantly held up a mirror to me and showed how far from my professed ideals I fell. No, it doesn’t feel particularly good. But that’s not the point of everything, is it?

I think I have matured enough to recognize that that feeling is due more to my inadequacy than to how impossible those ideals are. Berry’s witness agitated all who read him at every point along the sweep of our accommodation to a pernicious fantasy. We dislike Berry because we have told ourselves that how we are is fine, even though we ourselves know it is not.

The human condition being what it is, it should not surprise us that our complaints about our situation are often accompanied by hostility, rather than hospitality to improvement. We constantly live as contradictions. How many of us spurn other possibilities and simply settle for a different law? There is always a master to whom we turn to derive a sense of accomplishment and equilibrium. Why do we not listen more to the dissatisfactions of our heart and take the hopeful risk of a new affection?

When we encounter an ideal, we are confronted not only over the shape of our lives up to that moment but also the inclination of our hearts as well. An ideal unmistakably asserts there is a better way to be than how we are conducting ourselves now.

Recognizing its demand, we may feel shame for falling short of its vision and decide it is not only impossible but insulting that it should address us. We then settle once again for the pit we have longed to escape. Or we may say in our hearts, “If that’s what I must be, then I will be.” But even then, there are two pathways out of this. Some will try to take on precisely what Berry or Bach or Ignatius did and find they cannot. The question is, will they be shattered by the truth that they can only do what they can in their setting, or will they make idols of such figures and refuse to compromise with the limits reality has imposed upon them here and now?

All of us must answer this because none of us is ever absolved from having to live. Why do we feel as though our fatigue is stronger than the grace of God? Or that we should never be challenged out of spiritual lethargy?

The gospel is only ever for the thick-skulled and hard-hearted, for the apathetic and inadequate. So it is for you and for me. And it frees us to tell the truth. The primary reason I am afraid of admonitions to do differently is that I am a coward. I lack, both in ability and in merit. Some part of me knows the truth of this.

But too often, I think, we stop there. The justification of the ungodly is so astonishing because the ability and the merit of another are reckoned as my own. But it’s not a fiction that leaves me the same as when I encountered it. One is declared righteous, and then Jesus’ own agency is shared with them by the Spirit, unlocking doors over time as they are tried in the Spirit with the daring of Jesus.

We complain of having too little or no agency, and there is truth to this. But what is not true is the idea that we only ever have the same amount of agency we began with, precisely because a new horizon of thought, feeling, and action becomes possible through partaking of Christ. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” Paul adoringly proclaims (Gal 2:20). Paul lives and acts, and yet it is not only Paul to whom these things are attributed but also the Christ who loved Paul and gave himself over to death for him. The righteousness of God is the power that reaches out to us and in us to aspire to something better, something fulfilling.

***

I remember telling some friends seven years ago that one of my fantasies was to lay down on a forest trail in a light rain and not worry about my clothes getting wet or dirty. That was an almost eschatological vision for someone like me who had allowed OCD to ravage his life. And now, this year, I derived tremendous satisfaction from tilling the soil in preparation for planting our pumpkins.

You and I are not good gauges of what we are capable of, either for good or for evil. You and I tend to equate the feeling of a thing’s difficulty with its impossibility. We bemoan not so much that the next good we are called to do is beyond us but that it isn’t as easy as the grime to which we are accustomed.

Justification, really, is the gift that allows the pitifully little I am capable of right now to count as more than it appears to be in and of itself, to bear fruit the normal metrics say should not be possible, to unlock greater capability and greater agency in me.

If justification frees us to love, this really amounts to a freedom to live with the truth that I am not the center of the universe, and that what I think I can handle and what I will find myself handling do not coincide. Love means that others deserve as much consideration as my preferences and my needs, and that many of my “needs” may not be as necessary as I tell myself they are.

None of us does this constantly with full fervor at all times. Nevertheless, if one does not want to be better, if one does not wish to do or be more than their givens, then one does not have love.

Berry would have balked at comparisons between him and Jesus, but I will draw one anyway. People have strong reactions to Wendell and to Jesus because both announce cataclysmic things that are true. People resent the clarity of their stances because they are comfortable with the way things are, regardless of how crummy and horrifying and dehumanizing they are. We feel impure as we consider their positions — as we should — but treat this feeling as evidence we should not budge. Both of them present us with the way things are and with an alternative.

But it is Jesus who asks us: What must you do next if you are already forgiven for not having done it? 

Jesus allows you to feel that tension. He confronts you with a different way and comforts those who wish to walk this way rather than the other. He embodies faithfulness and shows the humanity and loveliness of this alternative. And he is overjoyed when you give your five loaves instead of holding onto them because you don’t have more to offer right now.

In this light, let us remodulate Saint Paul’s critical question for us in an era of machine-enabled lassitude. Should we vegetate and scroll and consume slop that grace may abound? God forbid! Christ has not rescued us from the hope of something better but from the awful hole we have dug for ourselves. So long as the answer to that question surprises you, I fear you are finding solace not in the gospel but in settling. God wants better for you. And so did Wendell Berry.

Perhaps you will not grow pumpkins or chase chickens around your yard to gather them into the run. All well and good. But I thank God that I can now get my hands dirty for even five minutes because Wendell assured me I would not only be okay but happy. And doggone it, I am much happier than I was when the circle of my life fit comfortably around what I felt capable of. We must never content ourselves with how things are, for God is a God of the impossible.

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