It surprised me. To find myself in this space, this land between what my mind knew and my body trusted. It was as if, almost like Thomas in his own disbelief at his risen Lord, I needed to put my hand in the crimp of her curls before I could fully believe she was alive, that she did, indeed, stand before me. Bodies keep different calendars than our brains; sometimes it takes an anniversary to discover what your body has been remembering all along. It’s been nearly a year since the Guadalupe rose over 37 feet and took 119 lives from Kerr County, including Heaven’s 27, the twenty-seven girls who died while at Camp Mystic.

Nearly four weeks earlier, my hands shook and jaw tightened as I squeezed Annie’s strong body one last time before she climbed the steps, boarding the bus bound for her camp, for Hunt, for the Guadalupe. When I walked back into our home an hour later, I found a dozen sticky notes hidden throughout our home — in silverware drawers, behind the coffee machine, inside the pantry, and hanging from my bathroom mirror — all from my Annie. “I miss you!” … “MWAH!” … “I love you” … “I hope you have a great day!” … “Sup brah” … “Miss u” … “I heart you.”

I collected each one and stuck them all in a cluster above our kitchen sink and texted my friend, Sarah: “If she dies, I’m never taking these sticky notes down.” A year ago, twenty-seven girls didn’t come home from camp on that same river. Death simply feels like an actual possibility every day now. Even a few nights ago, as Annie and I laid side by side once again in our bedtime liturgy for the first time in weeks, I tickled her back, marveling at her breaths and braided pigtails. The solidity of her muscles beneath my fingers felt like a miracle to me.

How do we keep sending our children into a world whose fragility we can no longer ignore? How can we be kind to our collective grief as it swells this week in particular? Does Target know that the mere presence of red, white, and blue accessories in the dollar section now makes our bodies remember what we watched unfold the last time we wore beaded USA necklaces around our necks? The 4th of July sales have begun, and our hearts are gutted as we consider all the ways this year should have looked different, all the ways reality is not what was hoped for. The birthdays that arrived without a little girl to blow out her candles. The camp letters that will never again arrive in the mailbox. The friendships that would have deepened. The ordinary Tuesday afternoons no one thought to treasure because they assumed there would be thousands more. The prom pictures that will never be taken. The wedding dresses that will never be chosen. The graduation caps that won’t be thrown into the air. And, more ordinary and perhaps even more sacred, the toots at the dinner table, followed by giggles and ’scuse me’s, that won’t come again. The growing old that will never happen.

Grief does not only mourn the people we’ve lost. It mourns the unrealized future that was swept downriver.

We held visions of a future with and for these 119 people. Beautiful narratives. And God is with us as we mourn the loss of those stories. He receives every should have been and every we had hoped. Yet he gently beckons us to dwell with him here, in the life before us. For the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, the embodied us. Jesus entered into the mess, the grit, the dust, the river itself. He takes up residence with us here. In our present pilgrimage. In the life that is.

God lives in the reality of our flooded riverbeds. He dwells in the reality of an empty chair at the dinner table, in the twin bed that no longer holds the shape of a sleeping child, in the Christmas stocking that won’t be filled again. He takes up residence in the reality of the bodies that have yet to be recovered, in the Halloween candy that wasn’t sorted into neat piles after a night of trick-or-treating, in the story we thought would look entirely different. In a Fourth of July parade where celebration and sorrow now walk hand in hand, a day that no longer feels light but carries instead the weighty reminder that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. The terrible fragility of it all.

And it is in this fragility, in this reality, that we carry our griefs. Grief is love that prevails. It is good, and holy. And sometimes grief speaks the language of should-bes. They should be playing in the backyard with the water hose. They should be out on the soccer field. They should be nervous for their end-of-year dance recital. They should be here. This should look different.

And grief has a way of bridging the chasm between our hopes of an imagined future and the life we actually have. God does not ask us to leave those imagined places before he comes to us. He entered that land himself. Standing outside the house of his friend Lazarus, four days dead, Jesus even knew what he was about to do, to restore his friend to life. And yet, he didn’t rush past the grief. He sat in it. He visited that land between an imagined future and the life before him, and wept.

She should be here is not an unfaithful thought; no, it is love refusing to make peace with the enemy, with death. It echoes the very groans of creation itself in the hope for the world to be as it was intended. It is the cry borne out of a knowledge that somehow this is not the end of the story. And that changes the shape of our grief. Not its depth or its sting. But the space it occupies in our realities. In light of the ultimate defeat of death, we do not grieve as those who have no hope. We grieve as creatures who live in the middle of the story, choosing to trust the Creator, the one who has already written the full narrative. We trust his authorship even when, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, we do not recognize that he is already walking beside us. It is with an open-handed posture similar to the disciples’ from which our could have beens flow, one which acknowledges and mourns the distance between possibility and reality: “But we had hoped …” We had hoped the story would look so very different. And what does the risen Lord do in response to the disciples’ grief? He begins not by correcting them or shaming them. He joins them. In step. He walks beside them. He meets them in the old story they think they are living before revealing the story they are actually living. Only later, in the breaking of the bread, in the Eucharist, are their eyes opened to recognize the one who had been with them all along.

This week, as parents and family members recall the last earthly hugs exchanged, the last words spoken, the last texts received to and from and with those who died, we remember. We call each individual by name, remembering the families who were washed away. The parents. The siblings. The couples. The one-year-old. The 91-year-old. We honor the first responders, who moved into the water and into the darkness that life might be found. We name, too, those who survived and remember the terror of the night as they waited for dawn, the river residue having been rinsed from their bruised bodies and yet somehow still remains.

One of the most beautiful acts of remembrance I’ve seen in the past year lives inside Guad and Co., a lovely small shop in Hunt that was itself destroyed by last year’s floods, has spent the year rebuilding, and which now stands reopened both as a brick and mortar and online store. Along the wall behind the register hang 119 interconnected acrylic links, one for every life lost in Kerr County. Each bears the engraved initials of the person it honors and is rendered in a color thoughtfully chosen to reflect something of their story, together catching the light as it passes through. The links are accompanied by a Remembrance Wall, a curated resource which provides each person’s full obituary, and also offers a short description of them, what they leave behind, what they will be most remembered by. May we continue to say their names, to remember, and may we remember as Easter people, stubbornly insisting that death does not get to narrate the final chapter of the story. Because in doing so, our remembrance takes on the character of hope, as we believe in the resurrection of the body, not just in theory, but in the flesh. One day, remembrance will give way to reunion; the names spoken now through tears will answer back, and our bodies will again find one another in an embrace, in a final homecoming and endless collective dance before the throne of God.

Until that day, the land and seasons and creation remembers and points to this story, too. It’s peach season in the hill country. Roadside stands crest the hills, wooden crates filled to the brim with the ripened fruit. We stop and buy a $10 bag. Before we even merge back onto the highway, I dust one off and bite into it, the juice flowing down my arm. Excessive in flavor, a sweetness that surpasses my needs and my own expectations. The flesh of the fruit, easily bruised. And as we wind our way through Hunt and on through Kerr County, sharing with each other in the superabundance of the season’s produce and passing peaches and napkins back to one another, we catch glimpses of the Guadalupe as it runs alongside us. Along its banks, the cypress trees still wear the mark of how high the water rose.

The river remembers. The land remembers. And so do we. Perhaps that’s all I know a year later.

The cypress trees bear their scars. The peaches came anyway.

The post The Peach Stands appeared first on Mockingbird.

The post The Personality of Jesus: Meeting the Man the Church Forgets appeared first on Mockingbird.

A member of the search committee said, “I have a question … What’s your thing?” He elaborated, “Most ministers have a cause or an issue that is sort of their thing. I don’t think I know yet,” he said, “what that is for you.”

He wasn’t against ministers having a particular cause or issue — a thing — about which they were passionate and which they would urge on the congregation. He, an activist for liberal causes, was for it. He just hadn’t figured out what mine was. Was it racism? Gay/lesbian inclusion? Women’s rights? Immigrant justice? Poverty/economic justice? Health care? Interfaith dialogue?

I thought about it for a moment and then said, “My cause, my thing … is the church. I really believe in the church and think it matters, that it’s important.”

The man who asked the question looked a bit perplexed; disappointed really. His expression, maybe it was the eye roll, said, “The church, really?”

Still, I was kind of proud of my answer, if for no other reason than it was the truth. Also I had resisted the temptation to tell him what he wanted to hear. I could’ve trotted out some cause or issue. I was interested in and had some level of concern and involvement in most of those listed above. All are important. But they weren’t my “thing.” My cause was the church, the church and gospel.

To my mind, it is a problem when clergy or laity see the church as primarily instrumental, as their platform for another “more important” or “relevant” cause or agenda.

A Church Is Like a Tree

Dennis Sanders recently did an interview at his Church and Main podcast with Trygve Johnson. Johnson is a man after my own heart. In a difficult time for the church and for our culture, he spoke forthrightly, enthusiastically, of his love for the church. If you listen to the podcast — hope you do — I especially recommend minutes 14–20.

With Psalm 1 in mind (“They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither, in all that they do, they prosper”), Johnson compared a healthy church to a healthy tree.

“A tree provides stability, even as it changes with the seasons. It is a stabilizer to the soil. It offers a canopy of shade to those in need of respite. Its branches provide a place for children to climb and play. It acts as a filter to take in the poisonous gases and recycle them as fresh air. A tree roots a community. If you want to destroy a geography, get rid of the trees.”

What a great analogy or image. “When a church is healthy,” concludes Trygve, “it brings up the water table for everyone in the community.” But like trees, we have tended to assume a church will always be there. Like trees, we see them, but we don’t see them. We take them for granted, only to wake up one day and discover they are gone. We say, “Something is missing, something’s off here, what happened?”

I know, I know, many people would disagree with Johnson’s positive portrayal of the church, some virulently. Legions point to the church’s failures. Writing in public spaces, I hear plenty about this. Yep, we’ve failed so many times in so many ways. Believe me, I am well acquainted with the failures and foibles of the church.

And yet … I love the church. I have seen, experienced, and felt the church Johnson describes — the church that is a tree planted by streams of water, a tree that stabilizes the soil, that roots a community, that absorbs the poisonous gases of our culture recycling them as forgiveness and hope, that raises the water table for everyone in the community, whether they are part of that or any church.

Johnson’s non-hedged, full-throated — but also not naive or triumphalist — profession of love for the church is a rare word these days. It is also bold and powerful and needed.

We need the church to be — not triumphalist, not self-aggrandizing, but also not apologetic. We need the church and churches, and those who lead them, to be confident.

Not Only Church

But it’s not only the church in which we have lost confidence. The 2023 Wall Street Journal/ NORC poll explored American’s confidence and engagement in five key sectors and values, as well as how levels of confidence in each have changed in the last twenty years.

Those five were patriotism, religion, having children, community involvement, and money/ personal financial well-being. Participants were asked, “How important is each one in your life?” Confidence and engagement had declined precipitously in all but one. The sole sector in which American’s trust had grown? Money. I could get moralistic about trusting in money and wealth, but I won’t. I get it. It’s understandable. But also kind of sad. That’s all you got?

It is almost a cliché to say that we are living in a time when trust has everywhere eroded. David Brooks recently cited a study where people were asked, “Do you believe most people are selfish and out to get you?” 72% of millennials and Gen Z answered “Yes.” That too is sad.

In such a world, you don’t often hear people making bold affirmations like those Trygve Johnson offered. Irony is our go-to. When we say “I believe” we’re not saying, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” We’re saying, “I don’t know, maybe, it’s possible.” We play it safe. We hedge our bets. We draw back from engagement and commitment.

But I wonder — could this be a vicious cycle, one that feeds on itself, deepening distrust, cynicism and isolation? How odd, how refreshing it is to hear someone go all in. “I love the church.” “I love this school.” “I love this place, this community.” Such a love is not blind to foibles and failings. It sees them, but sees more.

I Believe in Believing

I remember a student in a confirmation class some years ago. He had been quiet for most of our sessions. I didn’t have a good read on what he might be thinking or if he was thinking anything other than “When will this be over?” Still, he showed up every week. At the conclusion, I asked them all to write their own Statement of Faith. I was moved — “shocked” might not be too strong a word — by his very first line. He wrote, “I believe in believing.”

Think about that. “I believe in believing.”

Being critical, looking for the flaws, saying what’s wrong. There’s a place for that. I do plenty of it. Too much. But at some point, what matters is what you affirm, what you stand up for, what you believe in, and what you love. “There is,” wrote Montesquieu, “a power in the universe forever on the side of those brave enough to trust it.”

“What’s your thing, your cause?” asked Bob. “My cause is the church; I believe in the church. I believe it matters.”

To all of you who are doing the hard, heroic work of keeping the tree of a particular church strong and healthy — to the faithful laity, to the church staff, to the clergy, the pastoral leaders — thank you. You are helping to stabilize the soil in an unstable time, to clean the cultural air of poisons, to raise the water table for everyone. What you do matters. It matters enormously. Thank you, bless you.

The post Does the Church Matter? appeared first on Mockingbird.

The spirit of most Eastern religions would probably say that the transition to what this short book is calling “the last third of life” involves a process of dis-attachment from emotionally important entities from your first two thirds of life. I agree with that. In a way, your body’s decline forces you to detach from certain things or interests. You can’t see very well; and if I misplace my reading glasses one more time, I think I am going to scream. Then there’s your hearing aids, which get left at the barber shop every time you have a haircut. Or you forget to take them out when you’re taking a shower, and they are destroyed forever. Moreover, the simple passage of time takes your children away from you, and your career, too—whatever that was. (My friend Arbus, who had a big job in journalism for many years, now refers to his“so-called career.”) And “Who,” to quote The Who (1978), “Are You?” That is still a good question.

On the other hand, some people in the last third of their lives don’t dis-attach at all. They are as bound up in older age with their children’s lives or their original career aspirations or just their search for outside validation as they were in their 30s and 40s. We have known some high-profile successful men who spent the last third of their lives literally waiting for their next honorary degree to be awarded them from a major university. And a few of them succeeded at that. I would call this attitude a form of anachronistic living. These hypnotized people are not in due season. Eventually, though, illness and death wrenches one’s fingers of close attachment away from every visible object. Sometimes, this does not happen until the moment of death. It is not a pleasant way to die…

The last third of life witnesses a felt decline in the quality and number of the things that mattered to you when you were in your second third. Ironically, the emotional and derivatively intellectual interests of your first third of life probably mean as much to you now as they did then, though in the softer light of age and recollection, and loss. But the things that stressed you—and caused divorce, disruption, and dismay—in your second third of life, those things are fading. “Pictures of Matchstick Men” (The Status Quo, 1968).

What things about your life do not fade? What features of the way it has gone are still sharp?

The pain of early loss does not fade.

The pain of early rejection does not fade.

The pain of early (and to the child, inexplicable) disruption does not fade.

Those things, those sufferings, stay with you. In fact, they are almost more powerful now than when they actually happened…

Do you remember seeing the classic Ingmar Bergman movie Wild Strawberries (1957)? The elderly professor, on an ‘accidental’ road trip down memory lane to get to the city where he is to receive an honorary degree, passes inwardly through every single disjunction of his long personal history. But when he gets truly to the end of the road—the viewer is to understand that he is dying at that exact moment—all he sees is the ravishing vision of a scene from his early childhood—of his parents, his siblings, and their contentment. That, at the age of 85, is all he sees at the point of death.

The purpose of this book is to try to describe the last third of most people’s human lives as accurately as possible, being especially true to the emotional vantage point of middle and old age. The inward and actually driving concerns of this later period, which have certainly caught up with the author, cannot be denied. They require a response. They cry out for an answer, as “deep calls to deep” (Psalm 42:7).

The outcome of many persons’ lives turns out to be not pleasant. I am often with middle-aged acquaintances who are looking after their parents in extreme old age. It is rarely a pretty picture. Severe physical symptoms, coupled with wrenching, awkwardly expressed emotional unhappiness, makes their parents’ departure memorable but only as an unsettling memory, and sometimes even a shocking memory. People will say afterwards, “I prefer to remember my mother before she got really sick. I try to forget that part.”

There are exceptions, however. I hope that you, dear Boomer, will be one of them. It is possible to get to the end of your life, its outcome and its great transition, in hope and peace.

That is why this book is entitled Peace in the Last Third of Life. I hope that reading it will help you find some.

The plan of the book moves from diagnosis of Boomer discontents to the hope of release from them in the interest of better life-endings with children, husbands and wives, and one’s own past. There is a chapter on the ‘mechanics’ of gratitude. Then the interest shifts to the question of life after death—its possibility and even its shape. The concluding chapter describes what peace looks like ‘in practice’, or rather, in actual experience, during the final fragile third of one’s life…

In July 1941 a group of Quaker, main-line Protestant, and incipient ‘New Age’ thinkers gathered at LaVerne College in southern California to discuss in religious terms the prospect and implications for Americans of a coming World War. The informal convenor of this “LaVerne Conference,” as it came to be known, was Gerald Heard. Heard, whose full name was Henry Fitzgerald Heard, was an Englishman of Low-Church Anglican patrimony who sought insight from a variety of spiritual traditions, and especially from Quakerism, first, and later, from Eastern thought.

Something that Gerald Heard said at LaVerne, as recorded by the novelist Christopher Isherwood, who was also present, made a big impression on me as I began, against my will, I have to say, to ponder what it meant to be entering the last third of my life. Heard said, “If you want to find God, go back to where you lost him.”

The speaker freely admitted that this wise counsel derived from the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart (1260-1328). But I heard it first from Heard, and Heard for me is an unimpeachable source.

“If you want to find God, go back to where you lost him.”

What does that mean? I think it means, first, that you probably lost the authentic voice of your true self almost the moment you started attaching significance to the ‘static’ of the life around you, i.e., the supposed goals of life you established for yourself and also for those you love. Those goals could be financial security, outward affirmation and credit for yourself and your performance, and control or power (authority) in relation to the outward circumstances, challenges, and obstacles of life as they come at you from almost anywhere at almost any time.

The Classical, i.e., Greco-Roman, way of putting this was that everyone who has the least ambition for themselves seems to want Power, Money, and Honor. I have already said that these perceived ‘goods,’ i.e., Power, Money, and Honor, are typical of the things for which most people strive, to one extent or another, during the second third of life. They absorb our conscious attention from our 20s, and sometimes earlier, through our 60s, and sometimes later.

Yet Power, Money, and Honor inevitably pale during the last third of life. They fade in conscious importance and feel increasingly anachronistic. They are superannuated by physical and mental circumstance.

You lose Power, by definition, as cancer or heart disease threatens you, as your bodily control over yourself loses ground, and as you become physically, like it or not, ‘a mere shadow of your former self.’ You can barely remember the name of one person over whom you used to have ‘power’, let alone the many who now have power over you!

You lose Money, or you are bound to eventually, because the markets fluctuate even in the best of all fortunate worlds. Holding on to money for the duration is very hard to do. COVID-19! Or is it true that ‘the rich get richer’ – that ‘deep pockets’ are shielded from loss and fluctuation? That is not my experience. Guess I have just known many individuals who once had money, or access to money; but who find themselves living now in a basement ‘guest-room’ dependent entirely on one of their adult children’s generosity. In my parish experience, at least, something like that has been the rule rather than the exception. Your money can disappear within one bad day.

And you lose Honor, because fewer and fewer people are still alive out there that have even heard of you. Remember the scene in Tender Mercies (1983) when the faded country music singer, played by Robert Duvall, is walking down the street, and a lady stops him and says, “Hey, Mister, weren’t you Mac Sledge?” He replies, “Yes, Ma’am, I was.”

In sum, you lose, lose, lose.

But you have got to find! You have got to find something. You require something onto which you can lay hold, something solid. If only because you are gradually skidding down an increasingly steep plane, which invariably and inevitably leads to the edge of an abyss into which death throws you no matter what you think you’ll find, if anything, on the other side of your radical, invisible fall. Will it be an instantaneous crushing on the rocks below? Will it be the strong hands of angels, holding you up? Will it be a trampoline, bouncing you stunningly up and back? Will it be the opening (and widening) scene of What Dreams May Come (1998), in which the just-expired Robin Williams walks through Grand-Canyon “gates of larger life” (Book of Common Prayer, 1979)?

If you die with nothing solid on which to hold, and if everything you used to have you no longer have, then you are, as St. Paul said, “of all men most to be pitied” (I Corinthians 15:19).

Gerald Heard said that if you want to find Solid Ground, go back to where you first got off the paved road. Like Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, you have kept deviating from the stated way that is right; and every time you have, you have had to re-trace your steps. To make serious progress in the inward life, and I believe you could also say in the spiritual life, you have to keep going back. In order to go forward you have to go backward.

This is not what everyone wishes to hear. Or at least, it is not what one usually hears…

Intimations of Mortality

What this chapter began by calling the “unease within the last third of life” is more than a sense of diminution, though it is that. It is more than a Sword of Damocles, consisting of a general anxiety before the pressing fact of death, though it is that, also.

The unease inherent in the last third of life is a prompt which hangs over your whole outlook and is expressed by the phrase “intimations of mortality” (play on William Wordsworth, 1804). And one’s clearest “intimations of mortality” consist not of a vague anxiety concerning a coming “end of the world as we know it” (R. E. M., 1987), but rather a dark field of unresolved, unfelt pain from the first third of one’s life. That dark field, which is the weight, burden, and stress of memory, is the center and circumference of this first diagnostic chapter, the aim of which, when you see it and feel it, is to heal you in relation to it and deliver you from it. Remember that Wordsworth’s complete title for his inspired poem is “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”

In 1983, right about the beginning of the second third of my life, I wrote my first book. It was called Who Will Deliver Us? I stand by that book today and its conclusions. But the book you are reading now, entitled Peace in the Last Third of Life, is its sequel.

Who will deliver us now?—from stubborn and inhering bad memories, inward unease and regret, unstanchable wounds, and holes—pot holes!—that were never repaired. Those inward scars and disabilities have been there a long time. It is time to get out from under them. Or die trying. They need to lose their defeating and vitiating influence over you. And whether you try to get out from under them or not, you will die in any event. Therefore, the matter is “Urgent, urgent, emergency” (Foreigner, 1981).

For more, pick up Peace in the Last Third of Life here.

The post Finding Peace In the Last Third of Life appeared first on Mockingbird.

As Clark becomes obsessed with this labyrinthine office space and attempts to learn more about it, his therapist, Mary Kline (played by Renate Reinsve), seeks to find out if her client is losing touch with reality after an abrupt session where he gives her “proof” of what he has discovered: a hand-drawn map of the parts of the space he has explored thus far. When she comes to the store to find out what Clark was talking about and finds the portal to the backrooms, their pasts and memories collide in violent and horrifically absurd ways.

A24, the studio that put the film out, is, for better or worse, known for championing horror fare that places grief and trauma at the forefront as the main movers of plot and character motivations. It is not uncommon for their slate of horror films to unearth the subtext and make its decayed corpse roam the land of blinking, neon text. For a society that is increasingly steeped in the language of therapeutic culture, A24 seems to target their horror for those who derive their diagnoses from TikTok or Instagram influencers. As someone who regularly sees a therapist and has a therapist as a wife, Backrooms’ play at therapeutic text is mostly muddled in popularized self-help advice and generic terminology that sounds like the real thing. The creature reveal as a manifestation of Clarke’s internal state is about as ham-fisted as it could be, even if the creature design itself is refreshingly delightful in a DIY sort of way.

However, during a Texas Chainsaw Massacre–tinged scene, we are given something that defies all of the therapeutic sound bites that came before it. Clark confronts Mary about whether or not he is to blame for his plight, and she answers him honestly: the reason for his divorce is his “whining” and that he never places the blame squarely on himself. It is in this moment when — as Flannery O’Connor might put it — Mary has a metaphorical gun put to her head that she delivers the truth sans therapeutic trappings.

While this is likely not what A24 or Kane Parsons intended for the takeaway, there does seem to be a reading of the film where the labyrinthine backrooms represent the endless corridors, dead ends, and fake doors of modern therapeutic culture. Freya India notes the extent to which therapeutic culture has become an end in itself, and her description finds interesting connections with the architectural imagery of Backrooms:

I find it strange that we think this is freeing, this brutal knowing. That this self-surveillance is the liberated way to live. That we are somehow less repressed, being boxed in by medical labels. There are young people spending the most carefree years of their lives mapping themselves out, categorising themselves for companies and advertisers. So much of their thinking is consumed by this. They don’t have memories anymore; only evidence, explanations, timelines of trauma. They don’t have relationships; only attachment figures, caregivers and co-regulators. And I think this is it, the cause of so much misery. We taught a generation that the meaning of life is not found outside in the world but inside their own heads (emphases my own).

Being stuck in your own head (what used to be called, with cruel fondness, navel-gazing) has the same captivity principles as the backrooms: the spaces and architecture are familiar to us but weirdly askew in ways that we do not begin to know how to process. The more we return to the internal workings of our mind and the longer periods of time we stay in there, the more apt we are to forget where the exit is or why we needed to leave anyway. The identities and categories we create for ourselves derive from our minds, and if we give ourselves over to them long enough, the rest of our being follows suit. When therapy becomes ideology — the lens through which we experience all things — we end up embracing the creatures of our worst natures stalking the halls of our backrooms, and they end up consuming us.

All this is not to say therapy is ineffectual or bad, but it too can succumb to the same failures as any ideology: it becomes a vicious cycle of confirmation bias where no external input is allowed to interrupt. So when Mary Kline bluntly diagnoses Clark’s failed marriage in the moment, she is interrupting Clark’s obsession with his own interiority. She ceases to be a therapist and becomes a prophet, freeing him from his own delusions. The problem: by that point, he is too far gone. He is too comfortable in the skewed architecture of his mind where he feels some semblance of control, when he feels none in the world outside of the backrooms.

Therapy can help, but the truth shall set you free.

The post The Fluorescent Lights of Our Endless Minds appeared first on Mockingbird.

P.S. Did you know that there is a Mockingbird Masterlist playlist on Spotify, featuring every track we’ve included in a monthly playlist since December 2007? That’s over 3,100 songs, AKA 205 hours of listening goodness. A veritable Mockingbird radio station!

The post July Playlist appeared first on Mockingbird.

I’d spent a week in 110-degree heat with a pry bar and a rock hammer. When it comes apart and there’s something inside, it’s a religious experience. I spent two decades studying evolution and most of it was theory. This was the imprint of the animal in my hand. Eighteen months ago I was a scientist; now I was the guy whose stuff you drew on.

Lynch then muses on status, which he calls a “zero-sum game” but something that we all chase, some of us in flashy ways, others in ways more externally subtle but just as intentional:

It’s easy to spot the asshole with the Ferrari or Rolex but harder to acknowledge the NPR tote bag, the pronouns in your email signature, the dog you rescued, or the copy of Anna Karenina on your coffee table … Me wearing a Dartmouth sweatshirt at the airport because it’s comfortable, while secretly hoping I get asked who went there. […]

But playing the status game isn’t even the worst part. It’s handing my worth over to people and circumstances I don’t control. […]

Comparing yourself to others doesn’t just surrender your happiness to strangers, it locks you into a contest you can never win and makes other people’s wins feel like your losses. Whatever you measure yourself by will be the thing that eventually breaks you. Chase money and you’ll never have enough; bank on being smart and you’ll spend your life afraid of when you’re not; trade on your looks and you will lose, because everyone gets old. […]

We all end up where my father did [dying]. You can wait for it all to be taken, or you can begin handing it over now. Let go or be dragged — or, as the Buddhists put it, die before you die. The self you’ve been defending — the identity, the position, the proof that you matter — was always going to be taken from you. It’s the joke that takes a lifetime to get: none of it was ever as serious as it felt.

How do I feel about my own status decline? It depends on the day, sometimes the hour. Sometimes it’s simmering resentment and another fight with a principal who’s trying to tell me how to run my class. Other times I reframe it as just another of life’s challenges. Bitter or better, my sponsor used to say. I’m learning the same lesson alcohol taught me: the thing you’re most afraid to lose is the thing keeping you in prison. And sometimes the loss does something I never expected: it loosens the knot between who I am and what I do, and frees me up to be the other things I might have forgotten — father, neighbor, son, brother, friend.

Perhaps it’s for the best we can’t meet the measures we set for ourselves — if we could, we would just keep doubling down on finding our identity in our performance, until our final breath. Thus the reality that the people who best satisfy the Law of Personal Appearance or of Career Success wind up being most wrapped up in those things up until, as Lynch suggests, it is taken at the moment of death.

In his Antinomian Disputations, Luther suggests that a function of the law is giving us a chance to face our moral shortcomings and the terrors of conscience before the moment of death, so that we have time to reckon with the crisis and find the gospel. In Lynch’s terms, the law forces us to “begin handing it over now.” Our setbacks and reversals in pursuing “success,” however defined, loosen that knot between who we are and what we do and, counterintuitively, free us up to be something beyond our striving and performance.

2. Speaking of grace in suffering, the New York Times interviewed poet Christian Wiman this past week. The interview is suffused with Wiman’s usual depth, attentiveness to reality, and startling insight. Worth a full post, but can’t help quoting some of the best bits here.

Wiman, who grew up fundamentalist Baptist, read Nietzsche in college, and quit going to church for 20 years, recounts how his love for his wife led him back:

I was moved to come back to religion because of love. I was 37, and I had not experienced that level of love before, of wanting such good for the other person that your own self isn’t as paramount as it was. We found ourselves saying little prayers at night before dinner even before we were married. They started as jokes, but then they became more serious. We got married very quickly, and then I got diagnosed with cancer very quickly. The doctors told me I had five years to live. So there was love, and then there was suffering, hard on the heels of the love. The love led me to turn to God; the suffering led me to find a form for it.

Wehner: A lot of people fall in love and don’t find faith. What was it about falling in love that led you to faith?

Wiman: I had been in love before. But I had never experienced a love that wanted to be other, that wanted to be more. And that was the experience I had. It didn’t stop at the other person. It went through Danielle Chapman, my wife, and needed to be more. And it just baffled me for the longest time. I had no idea what it meant. But I did know enough, or she knew enough, to know it meant prayer. That seemed to be the only gesture that we could make that was beyond us. We hardly even knew what we were praying to.

On poetry as an act of devotion:

I do believe that the “word,” lowercase, can express the “Word,” uppercase, that the two are bound together, that the lowercase word can be sacred because the uppercase Word exists. So I do take the act of poetic creation quite seriously. And I do think that when I’ve written the poems that are most mine, I’m getting a communication from God. Now, it may not do you any good, but it was genuine for me. I think it can be genuine for an awful lot of people with their own poems or reading poems. And it’s not necessarily a claim that one is a prophet or something. That is, I think that capacity exists in a lot of people.

And on the suffering of God:

I take the fact that God suffered — just as we suffer — in the form of Jesus to be not just a consolation but a great key to understanding what existence is. Pain is woven throughout creation. And it’s not just human creation; it’s woven throughout all of creation. So suffering seems to be a part of existence. And God entered that suffering. I take the God that Jesus cried out to on the cross — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” — to be exactly the same God that we cry out to. I don’t see them split. God is Jesus, and so Jesus is crying out to the same unknowingness, with the same unknowingness, the same passion, the same pain, that we do. And I do find that not just comforting, I find it true, that it accords with the truth. When I feel the world, when I feel my experience in the world, it feels true. […]

Wehner: Can you expand on what you were trying to say in the poem and why “Every Riven Thing” is meaningful to you? […]

Wiman: I think it goes back to the idea that we were discussing earlier about God being in the pain of creation, the pain of creation somehow being in God. That God is in these places where the break is, where the rift is, the riven thing. That’s what I was experiencing at the time. It looked like I was going to die, after this great rapture of love. And yet I was experiencing an awful lot of joy in the midst of that. The poem was autobiographical without saying a word about me.

Nothing to add — but if Wiman strikes the same chord in you that he does in me, check out our interviews with him on the site in 2013 and the Home issue of the magazine. A gift that keeps on giving.

3. In education, low-hanging fruit from the Atlantic: the exquisite AI learning-support tools developed over the last couple of years, it turns out, haven’t meaningfully improved education outcomes. Entrepreneurs like the founder of Khan Academy have revolutionized access to learning tools, but the bigger limiting factor, it turns out, was motivation.

But by this spring, Khan had admitted that the release of Khanmigo was “a non- event” for many kids. Although access exploded, from reaching 40,000 students in 2023 to nearly 1 million this year, actual uptake — whether students use it — has stagnated. […]

Khanmigo, like so many other ed-tech tools, has floundered because it hasn’t solved the challenge at the center of education: How do you motivate students to experience the discomfort of learning something new? An AI tutor may be able to deliver math problems that are perfectly calibrated to a student’s level. But it can’t make the student actually do the problems. […]

Ed-tech experiments have driven home what educators have long intuited: Learning is a largely social and relational enterprise, and bots have yet to replicate the value of a human touch. Teachers are still our best source of motivation for students, not only because strong ones know how to push kids to learn new things, but also because education works best when it happens in a group.

In the race to improve our capabilities ad infinitum, it’s tempting to simply ignore, or refuse to acknowledge, the constraints of our human nature. Unlike machines, we can’t just plug in and download information. Our intellectual activity, like all our other activities, takes place within an affective frame — unless our affections (or desires) are somehow engaged, we simply won’t do it. For better and for worse, our desires aren’t easily shaped by shallow motivational tools or impersonal apps but rather in the context of lived relationships with other human beings. Among other things, kids come alive in the classroom when they have a teacher who cares about them and cares about the subject — when they can be drawn into a world where they discover truth in community with others. Stripped of those affective and communal contexts, algorithmic educational “content delivery” will usually fail to connect.

4. In music, the Guardian interviews up-and-coming Irish rock band Bleech 9:3. The singer, Barry Quinlan, recounts his addiction. After two unsuccessful stints in rehab, Quinlan recalls:

On 22 February 2019, “I went into my last place – please God – and thought: how have I ended up in a place like this again? In that questioning, it all hit me. I was so far away from myself, from everything, and I knew that was all coming for me again, like the bullet had left the gun.”

He let his mind wander, “into the darkness of the room and beyond, into the ether, out into the night: there has to be something. ‘All right, God, you better be real because I’m f*d if you’re not.’ And in that moment, I felt something touch my heart and the obsession to use was taken away.” […]

[Later,] Barry had already passed 1,000 days sober, but it hadn’t been smooth. “When you get rid of the alcohol, you’ve still got the -ism, you know?” he says. “I was carrying this sickening feeling all the time.” Trying to understand it, he visited a Buddhist centre near Cork, which had a room with a statue of Buddha on one side and Christ on the other. His earlier spiritual awakening crystallised. “I sat in the middle, not looking at anyone. And then I heard Jesus speak, as clear as day: ‘Come and speak to me.’ I can’t ignore that; I’m not foolish enough to put that down to psychosis. So I did, and since then I’ve felt a presence in my life that I can’t ignore. For me, recovery is proof that there is a God, and addiction is proof that there is a devil. You see the destruction that happens in an addict’s life, to them, to their family: nothing but carnage and evil.”

The guitarist, Sam, was also in AA, and he wound up with Barry as his sponsor.

The AA sponsorship brought an incredible closeness: Barry and Sam started making music together … All they’d been through fed into the songwriting, and for all the noise in their self-titled EP, it’s suffused with clarity; Luke likens the sound they make to “lightning and thunder, a big explosion. There was communal feeling that there was something different about this group – we were smiling more when we left the room.”

5. In humor, the Onion reports, “Study: Crying Not Linked to What You Said But the Way You Said It;” Reductress chimes in with the hopeful “Woman Somehow Navigates Existential Crisis Without Researching Grad Schools,” and the New Yorker advises on “How to Be a Mysterious Woman Who Is Also in Bed by 9:30 P.M.” But the winner has to be the Onion’s “Study Contends Free Will Disproven By Fact That Humans Repeatedly Eat At Jimmy John’s”:

CHAMPAIGN, IL — Shedding new light on the concept of voluntary behavior, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign contend in a study published this week that the existence of free will can be disproven by the fact that people repeatedly eat at chain sandwich restaurant Jimmy John’s. “Our exhaustive survey of over 12,000 regular Jimmy John’s customers revealed patterns of behavior utterly inconsistent with the idea of human autonomy,” said lead researcher Gina Smith, emphasizing that no person with functioning taste buds would continually subject themselves to a dry, flavorless J.J.B.L.T. or a cold, inadequate Jimmy Cubano unless their behavior was predetermined by a chain of causal events behind their control.

6. An uncommon bounty of quality podcasts this week: First up, former Nebraska Senator and UF president Ben Sasse, after receiving a terminal diagnosis, started his Not Dead Yet podcast, which has been excellent. Guests this month included Adm. McRaven, John and Jack Harbaugh, and — this past Tuesday — our own David Zahl. It was the best 66 minutes I spent on the net this week. Second, DZ was on Theocast talking about the recently released Tenth Anniversary Edition of Law and Gospel (available in our store (on sale) and on Amazon). Finally, The Way UK podcast interviewed Belle Tindall-Riley, recently announced editor of The Mockingbird. It’s a great conversation.

Strays:

• A little lighter in a week when the internet has seemingly been taken over by Alan Greenspan takes and think pieces on reflecting pools, but at Plough, David Bentley Hart takes a startlingly deep dive into baseball’s philosophical and theological dimensions.
• At the New Yorker, Sarah Miller writes about her experience of drinking and getting sober, with plenty of AA wisdom.
• And the AV Club wrote a promising review of Toy Story 5.
• Oh, and tonight is the premiere of Larry David’s new HBO show, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness. Premise looks prett-eee good.

The post June 20-26 appeared first on Mockingbird.

And inevitably, the physical agony of injury is the essence of broken hope. Playing hurt lives a sort of faith amidst the defeat of expectation. Whether in sports, school, work, or parenting, what we have worked, trained, and devoted our lives to can simply fail us, because we fail to control everything we live through.

Falling short is a measure. Being held short by fate is without justice. Both reveal our frailty. Both point us toward the grace of God that we have no clue of — until it is all we have.

Bo Jackson lived his body. That exquisite connection was simply true. “Bo knows” his body:

Then the world betrayed the beauty of Bo Jackson’s overwhelming manifestation of his (and by projection our) body — his hip was broken, displaced, and finally replaced. Bo did not let a break end a life in the glory of his body: he replaced the wrecked hip and tried to go on. We watched as he walked with a hitch, was fully devoted and finally compromised by the impossibility of perfect performance, despite the incredible gifts God had given him.

Just like Bo Jackson, Roy Hobbs was “The Natural” athlete as described in Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel. Though fraught with allusions to Arthurian legend — the baseball bat as Excalibur, the athlete searching for the Holy Grail while living in a profane world — there was a real-life athlete as the genesis of Malamud’s fantasy. Malamud’s story was based on the Chicago Cubs first baseman Eddie Waitkus, who was shot by a woman obsessed with him. We all collide with life events, but a few of us live in full connection with ourselves in the world — and are derailed by it. There is the SAT-perfect-score-in-high-school student who believed in the justification of his GPA, until the first college grade is a D. Some devote themselves to The One to live the rest of their life with, and the relationship simply falls apart. And I wanted to play for the Giants — working out every spare moment one summer in downtown Buffalo — until actually playing revealed how thoroughly I sucked.

The Cub Eddie Waitkus returned from being shot and played for six more years of high-level but unexceptional play. In the novel, Roy Hobbs spent the years after being shot changing from a pitcher to a hitter and making one last leap into full devotion in sport, only to come up short, again. In the film adaptation, Hollywood’s Hobbs redeemed himself (with the help of an angel, played in the movie by Glenn Close). His towering home run, with the blood of the Holy Trinity on his decade-old gunshot wounds wicking through his jersey, made his stoic love of baseball, and his angel, have a fulfilled final scene.

Like Waitkus, Malamud’s Hobbs hit no home run upon return: he struck out.

Like Bo and Roy, we try to compensate. In 1972, I was in full compensation mode. My family was slow-motion wrecked by World War II, alcohol — all because my father lived a hope-ending family injury in 1911. When my father was just one, his mother died while aborting his sibling: she could not abide another child with my grandfather.

No matter the brilliance and devotion of my father (a Wall Street lawyer whose parents had not attended ninth grade in Britain) or the gifts of God that Bo and Roy had, playing through injury does not fulfill us: it simply copes with our broken reality.

My broken reality was my broken family, and football was my coping. My inability meant that playing was my only hope. And I played. But in a pass play as I slipped sideways to pass block to the right, and in the push-off of my left hip, I popped it. Out of its socket. My sight- and sound-ending pain replaced the mechanical execution of the offense. But I could not not play, so I got up and peg-legged to the huddle and finished to another loss. Not because of my injury, but because the team was awful.

Meaningless. Except 52 years later, I was alone in my office on a Saturday afternoon, took a quick turn, and that same hip left its home, bringing the searing white pain of 1972 alive again. As before, it abated. We never recover to purity from injury. We go on, maybe forget, maybe reset to other triumphs of the will we can believe that we obtain.

I think we live all the life we are given. And its broken parts — the injured hopes, the revealed inabilities — are either injustices to be cursed or simply what we have been given, like Bo and Roy. We want to have reason behind our outcomes, but there is no reason for any gift. If we cannot have reason, we are desperate to at least understand random reality. But how do you understand grace? Without the gifts of ability or its loss, we could actually believe we are in control. Until we are not. Like Bo and Roy.

The post Playing Hurt, Like Bo and Roy appeared first on Mockingbird.

NOPE, advance poster, 2022. © Universal Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection

Ian: I think what prompted me to pick NOPE was, well, pressure from Blake.

Blake: You know you loved it!

Ian: No, I did, it’s just that one scene — that one — rivals Quint’s demise in Jaws for me. So I also most definitely hate it.

Blake: YOU KNOW YOU LOVED IT.

Caleb: Hey, I’m just glad to see someone from TMZ eat it.

Ian: That scene is so funny to me because someone could say, “This is caricature,” but I would counter that lots and lots of people live as caricatures rather than real and aware moral subjects.

Blake: BURN.

Blaine: Yes! I think that is embedded in the film. It’s part of the reason Jupe created a shrine to the most traumatic and horrifying experience of his life that he exploits for financial gain.

Blake: What the — Is this just how you think? In mind-altering ways?

Ian: Blake, you know this! But to his point, what does Jupe sound like? “Dupe.” He tries to sell a story to others, but first he duped himself.

Blake: Well! To add to it, I would say that the whole film, I think, is engaging and commenting on spectacle in our world. We are all, to some extent, becoming less human and more spectacle, whether that is becoming consumed by ideology or by fame or fortune or power. The creature is a reflection of us. It does not consume when it is not viewed. We stop consuming when the cameras are off. The narrative itself shows our protagonists trying to get the “Oprah Shot,” who is the epitome of spectacle.

Ian: I noticed many more times this viewing how often the word “spectacle” is actually explicitly uttered.

Blake: To be seen by the world is a quality, I would say, in opposition to being seen by God.

Ian: In that vein, your Father sees in secret. That’s why we go away to our closet to pray, to not be seen by others.

Blake: ACTUALLY, my father is dead.

Ian: Yeah, well, you have to pray to be seen praying…

Blaine: One hundred percent, Ian. I think that’s why the eye/mouth of Jean Jacket [the creature] is a camera lens.

Ian: . Let that not be lost on anyone!

Blake: It’s genius, the creature design.

Ian: That is a frightening reveal — we retroactively realize that our initial glimpse inside of the monster was one in which it was looking at us the entire time.

I’ve alluded to this already … yeesh. It makes me deeply, deeply uncomfortable, but I think it’s an important scene that we see the audience at the Star Lasso Experience getting eaten by Jean Jacket. The thing is, what we see is the movie’s analogue of spectacle: what it does is it eats you alive and it spits you back. It grinds you into paste and spits you back. That’s the threat of Jean Jacket explicitly, on-camera, but it’s the threat of spectacle itself. Such that TMZ guy is pleading for his camera, befuddled why OJ isn’t filming what’s going on. It does not compute for him how OJ isn’t trying to capture the spectacle of this monster and its imminent devourment of him!

It isn’t first and foremost, it is the only thing on his mind as he is about to be consumed, and that is what I mean where someone might say, “That’s a caricature; this is just allegorizing what it is like to be beholden to the Spectacle.” The problem takes other forms in other epochs, but right now the problem is that we are beholden to the spectacle and incentivized to behold and participate in it, such that beholding and participating is the only thing on our minds, and we go willingly to be eaten alive.

Blake: Incentivized and yet never gratified.

Ian: Right! It’s so fitting. It seems to me that the ethos of our time is “I am to the extent that I am an exhibitionist of my life.” And there are monsters — there are literal monsters — that make their living off of that. That is how they exist, how they feed, how they persist.

It’s consuming and being consumed. NOPE, I think, portrays the emptiness of that relationship because you don’t arrive at something. We want to be seen, we yearn so desperately to be seen, and being sighted is enough, even though inevitably you are going to be sucked up and squished as the camera monster flexes and turns you into blood rain. Participating in the economy of Spectacle is a covenant with death.

Blake: In light of NOPE’s commentary on spectacle, everything creating spectacle, from one’s own past to being addicted to getting proof of Jean Jacket, I would like to make the argument that proof — within the rationalist, Enlightenment mode — is a version of spectacle because it demands sensory information that can be clearly relayed to another so as to put their doubt to rest. Essentially getting the Oprah Shot.

The desire to deliver proof about reality or ontology is such that it will inevitably devolve into spectacle because it is an item to be sensed (viewed, read, felt, etc.) and because of what we have said about spectacle thus far. Proof then makes the retriever and the receiver consume and be consumed by something that ultimately does not “objectively” confirm nor negate the reality of something.

Ian: That can be contrasted with “Come and see.” That’s what the very first disciples hear from Jesus in response to their question, and that’s what they begin to tell others as they are seeking to draw them to their master. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” “Come and see.”

What kind of proof are we talking about? I think that’s one of the biggest problems with scientism. I said earlier that I am to the extent that I exhibit. But scientism similarly believes a thing is only as real as its quantifiability, which is spectacle, because a thing is only worth acknowledging as much as it yields itself to my mastery, to my organizing concepts, which are treated not as attempts to grapple with what is but simply, nakedly, as what is.

Blake: “Come and see” intends not just “proof” that avails your doubt but the inherent giving over of yourself and the dangers inherent in that for you by going to see. That kind of proof is a fully embodied proof.

Ian: Precisely this, exactly this. There’s no detachment in “Come and see,” like there is in the presentation of the Oprah Shot as a demand to surrender.

Blake: Alright. I shall shut it so Caleb and Blaine can speak to this stuff.

Caleb: Oh gosh, I don’t even know where to begin … I wonder if spectacle might not necessarily be a bad thing though. Peele explicitly makes this movie as a celebration of spectacle, too. It’s Spielbergian in some sense. It causes us to feel awe and wonder. And it’s finally giving us the black cowboy hero we’ve overlooked for 150 years.

Ian: For sure.

Caleb: Like you say, Ian, “Come and see” is a command to enter into joy and reconciliation. The spectator is not necessarily always a bad entity. Jean Jacket may be a godlike figure that destroys through voyeurism, but that is not the God of the Bible. That God, in the Old Testament, is named by the outsider — abused Hagar and abandoned Ishmael — as El Roi, the God Who Sees (and saves) us in our distress. And Zacchaeus is a great sinner who desires to spectate the Lord from a tree but finds that the Lord already had his gracious eye fixed on Zacchaeus, whom he grants salvation that very day.

Ian: Great points, Caleb, but I think there’s a distinction between awe-inspiring sight and spectacle. There is substance in one and emptiness, consumption, and life’s opposite in the other.

I caught it much better this time around — probably because I had the volume up higher since my oldest kids were spending the night elsewhere — that Antlers says we don’t deserve the Oprah Shot and even dies to keep it out of human sight. The ending feels a little Pyrrhic to me, since capturing the impossible shot seems to rank about as high as defeating Jean Jacket.

Blake: However, Em does not care about the Oprah Shot in the end because OJ is alive. Which is the emotional payoff for me when it comes to denying the spectacle in favor of those we love.

Ian: Yeah, good point.

Blake:  Can we just take a minute to celebrate Michael Wincott? His rendition of “Purple People Eater” chills me to the bone.

Ian: Cheesiest moment of the film for me.

Blake: I love it.

Ian: I just don’t get why. It feels so nonsensical to me, a dramatic reading of “The Purple People Eater.”

Blake: Look, I like Michael Wincott and his raspy voice, and it’s just unadulterated joy tinged with fear among friends before they endeavor on the most dangerous task of their lives.

Ian: It’s the only point in the movie for me where it stops feeling like something with stakes and feels like people in a movie doing a self-conscious, self-referential thing. I thought for sure we were going to commiserate how forced that part was.

Blake: I mean, I get your critique. It just didn’t gall me the way it did for you.

Ian: I think that if, in a planning session to achieve the Oprah Shot, I began whisper-singing “The Purple People Eater” in a grave and gravelly manner that you would rightly say, “…What? Dude, what are you doing? Do you think you’re in a movie or something?”

Blaine: I feel like I remember seeing or reading someone in the film industry who essentially said there are a ton of DPs who dress/act/speak like that. Which is hilarious.

Ian: Boys, let’s get real. Does NOPE feel summer-y to y’all?

Caleb: Totally, it’s summery in that it’s about big, sunny action movies and is itself a big, sunny action movie.

Blake: Yes, in the same way most Westerns do. The heat and sun just exasperates the violence and the tensions.

Blaine: No. Because I don’t hate it. But! I can’t let this conversation close without simply stating: Akira slide = 10/10. It’s one of the few times I’ve audibly cheered in a movie theater!

Ian: TETSUOOOOO!

Blaine: KANEDAAAAAAA!

Caleb: On the Akira homage, what other explicit references or implicit influences did y’all see?

Blake: I mean, its central aesthetic and textual tie is to the cinematic tradition of the Western. Just with elements of horror worked in.

Caleb: I think I detected some John Williams in the score.

Ian: I don’t know that there’s a specific image that did it, but I felt echoes of Close Encounters at points.

Caleb: Yeah, Ian, I felt that, too!

Ian: Also implicit, the Star Lasso Experience brought to mind King Kong. Which also features commodified mastery making a show of having understood and bested a wild thing.

Blake: Which was likely intentional. The Shining with the blood flood, I would say.

Ian: Even the blockbuster valence of its echoes make it feel summery.

Caleb: Oh, definitely!

Ian: Good golly, and the Jean Jacket in the room is Jaws, come to think of it. Because this isn’t just a big thing that ate some people. You think you’re hunting it, but its hunting you. And it’s going to eat you.

Blake: I think you’re gonna need a bigger horse…

Thanks for joining us, folks! We hope you said “Nope” to the naysayers and enjoyed the film and our discussion. We’ll be back next week with Emma Tammi’s The Wind (2019) and all its High Plains frightful fun. Be there and be square! 

The post You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Horse: <i>NOPE</i> (2022) appeared first on Mockingbird.

Powell does an exercise with his seminary students: he asks them to read a text then close their Bibles, pair off, orally tell each other — as accurately as possible — what the text said, then look back at the text to see what they omitted (or altered!). For example, he asked students to read Luke 7:36–50 about the woman who barges in on the Pharisees’ dinner with Jesus, washes his feet with her hair, and, despite her reputation as a sinner, is praised by him. Jesus signs off with a benediction: “Your sins are forgiven … Your faith has saved you, go in peace” (7:48–50). In retelling the story, not one but two students amended the story with a new conclusion: Jesus telling her, “Go forth and sin no more.” Pretty revealing, that we can be so antsy about our expectations of moral living that we subconsciously amend the biblical text. Powell recalls that when he pointed out the absence of a “sin no more” in the text, both students were “flabbergasted. Both were certain that they had just read those words in the text just a moment earlier” (13).

While I do think those students’ emendation illustrates our universally human “fatal love affair with the law” (Capon), I wouldn’t want to imply they were somehow less capable of objectivity than the rest of us. One could say the comprehensive nature of our sinfulness extends to our handling of sacred things. The word speaks to us when we encounter it, but it struggles to be heard above the din of the presuppositions we bring to it, the questions we doggedly insist on asking scripture even as it’s pressuring us to reformulate them.

Rembrandt, The Prodigal Son Among the Pigs (c. 1645–1648)

On biblical interpretation, the book’s most interesting feature is its exploration of the Prodigal Son story in Luke 15:11–32. Twelve students read it, and all twelve spoke of the son squandering his money in a foreign land. Zero of the twelve mentioned the second detail in verse 14:

When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need.

Powell notes that he too thought it was an extraneous detail — but was interested that everyone omitted it. So he did a larger study with a hundred students: about one in six mentioned the famine. Powell notes the students were of diverse “gender, race, age, economic status, and religious affiliation. No single factor of social location seemed to have any statistically relevant impact on” whether the student mentioned the famine. But all of the one hundred were Americans.

On sabbatical in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2001, Powell surveyed 50 Petersburgians, and 42 (!) mentioned the famine. As Powell notes, the social factors at play are obvious: 60 years earlier, the Wehrmacht had besieged St. Petersburg for about 900 days, leading to acute famine, with more than half a million people dying of starvation and exposure. Interestingly, most Russians did not mention the son “squandering” his wealth. As Powell notes, either factor — the squandering or the famine — could by itself explain the son’s predicament. He asked the Russian respondents if the squandering wasn’t an important factor. Their response was revealing: “So what if he lost his inheritance? … That just means he would be poor like everyone else. Most people don’t have an inheritance to lose. But when the famine came, that was the problem” (18).

 We could summarize this divergence —

American version: (i) young man gets inheritance and leaves, (ii) he squanders inheritance, and (iii) he is left in acute need.

Petersburgian version: (i) young man gets inheritance and leaves, (ii) then famine comes, and (iii) he is left in acute need.

As Powell notes, in American preaching, he

ha[s] not heard many American sermons that portray the prodigal as a famine victim — more often, the story is regarded as a paradigm for repentance … Perhaps, then, the famine gets ignored because it was not the boy’s fault, and most sermons that I have heard on this text want to be clear that the boy’s downfall was his own doing. He wasn’t just a victim of bad luck — he went from riches to rags because of his own irresponsible behavior (18).

Powell kept quizzing the Russians: doesn’t the story imply the boy did something wrong? Yes, they said, but the boy’s mistake wasn’t how he spent his money. He was a fool to leave the caring community of the home. “In a phrase, his sin was wanting to be self-sufficient.” (18, emph. added). Then Powell told them about the American students’ responses. “How revealing,” the Russians thought,

that Americans think the great sin was wasting money. They think this because money is very important to them … This boy’s sin was that he wanted to make it in the world on his own. He trusted in the finances and in his own sense of rugged individualism, and he figured that would be enough to get by.

Maybe he would have been okay but for the famine — but famines come. That’s life, and that’s why you can’t make it alone.

But, you might say, our NRSV clearly says he spent the inheritance on “dissolute living,” and the older brother notes he spent it on prostitutes. Right? Powell notes that the word translated “dissolute” by the NRSV (and with similar connotations of immorality by most English translations) can also mean simply “expensive” or “luxurious” — which is how most Eastern translations have rendered it (21). And why we would assume the dour older brother is a reliable witness? Powell notes that while most Western commentaries take the brother’s remark at face value, “Eastern interpreters, virtually without exception, regard brother’s remark as a slanderous and probably baseless accusation” (22).

Summarizing the differences, Powell notes that Western readers typically

regard the tale as a quintessential tale of moral repentance, a story that depicts sin as personal responsibility, illustrates the consequences of such sin, and then locates the key to redemption in an individual decision to reverse one’s course … Eastern readers, by contrast … regard the story as a tale of divine rescue: it is a story that depicts independence as a foolish choice (given the vicissitudes of life), and it is a story that locates redemption in the safe haven that God provides via family and community.

In a word, Western readers tend to see it as a story of “reform,” Eastern ones as a story of “recovery.”[1]

For those of us who believe that American Christianity has been distorted by our culture’s obsession with the individual’s sovereign control over his or her life — and the corresponding weight on choice and discipline as the vehicles of self-making — these differences are revealing. Along with “a severe famine took place throughout the country,” how many other scriptural clauses — even in our best-known stories! — do we silently and unknowingly edit out, Thomas-Jefferson-style, because they complicate our preexisting assumptions? Specifically because they reveal us, at root, as dependent, frail, vulnerable creatures?

We take the boy’s newfound wealth as a sort of baseline, assume that’s the default state of affairs, when really it’s just a buffer — a buffer that the boy spends through and suddenly finds himself “poor like everyone else,” newly at the mercy of the structural factors, like weather, whose fluctuations have radically affected human well-being in nearly every time and place, though less so in our own. Maybe the structural factors in our lives — the things bigger than we are — loom larger than we realize. Certainly the explosion of psychotherapy and other medical interventions in our culture reveals that there are problems in our lives that personal responsibility, however well exercised, simply cannot solve. Maybe, as the Russians thought, our conviction we can “make it in the world on our own” is the boy’s (and our) sin, or at least a major part of it.

Maybe so — but the father in the story doesn’t interrogate the boy, doesn’t ask how he lost his buffer or try to pinpoint cause and effect. Over against the older brother — the beady-eyed diagnostician, the accuser — the father figure simply rejoices that what was dead is now alive, and what was lost is now found. Some of us come back to our Father with head held low, broken by a dozen self-inflicted wounds, while others rush in desperation, pursued by forces they cannot hope to meet and master. The Father takes all kinds, kills the fatted calf — dies himself to any possibility of interrogation, explanation, punishment, or any other of the rightful prerogatives of a wounded dad — and gives himself over to celebration.

[1] Interesting sidenote: on a later trip to Africa, curious to see if Tanzanian seminarians would incline towards the Russian or American interpretation, Powell asked them a quick litmus-test: why did the son starve? A large majority responded: because no one gave him anything to eat. It’s easy to lose one’s money when you don’t know the local customs — it happens often to immigrants — and the Bible asks us to care for the stranger in our midst. He may not have even known that famines happen in that area. The far country was a society without honor because it failed to care for strangers, just as the Pharisees failed to care for sinners, which is, after all, the parable’s immediate context (15:1–3). The kingdom of God, by contrast, welcomes and cares for everyone.

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