1. Parenting was a hot topic this week, but not in the way parents have come to fear — like the TikTok Mom-fluencers from Utah, the gentle-parenting connoisseurs, or the Substack advice columns that promise to help you and your family build Core Memories or experience Breakthrough Moments. As with all well-intentioned advice, some words are bound to hit us right in the jugular. Maybe what first knocks us off our pedestals and forces us to set aside our pride will be the thing to set us free. Kathryn Jezer-Morton, writing for the Cut, suspects that our obsession with control is the very thing that keeps us from having a meaningful life:
In babyhood, parental control begins with the obsessive maintenance of a nontoxic environment, whatever that means to you, and it can mean anything. Food and sleep regiments have always been necessary for parents trying to work and run a household, but today’s options for controlling and optimizing your baby’s sleep have far surpassed any real utility. In toddlerhood, parents must exert control over shitty food, toys with a pre-trash-can life span of less than an afternoon, and vapid and addictive technology. […]
It continues into later childhood, as kids’ social worlds become further sites of optimization: safety, correct friends and activities, correct schools. When we think about raising children today, it’s often less a matter of participating in a shared family culture as 20 years of managing outcomes. There is no doubt that it’s shaping many of our personalities. […]
What I really hate about the control I feel inside myself and the control I see radiating out of others is that it’s making us behave more stupidly than we actually are. It’s robbing us of the ability to think imaginatively and with sensitivity about what life is really like. Anxious parents really think that by consuming and communicating with enough intentionality, they can control their children’s future, an unharmed childhood giving way to an actualized, thriving adulthood.
But any adult who pauses to think about it knows that we always come to regret something about our past, no matter how nice our childhoods were.
Even a child with an almost perfect childhood or textbook-level parents will experience bumps in the road. Perceived notions of perfection have a way of creating resentment in imperfect people (read: everyone). But if we can’t fully bubble wrap, package, and send our kids away from the less-travelled paths of this world what is a parent to do? Esau McCaulley, in the New York Times, has a word of encouragement:
Parents can only make deposits of joy. We cannot control when our children will make the withdrawals. […]
Parenting is always an exercise in hope, a gift given to a future we cannot see to the end. At some point, if God is merciful, our children will continue forward without us, left with the memory of love shared and received.
We are entrusted with the awesome responsibility of introducing our children to the world and the world to our children. We cannot and should not shield them from all difficulty. But it’s also necessary, periodically, to be a bit irresponsible, to spend a little too much on a soccer game so they remember that alongside the darkness, sometimes there is light.
Elsewhere in the Atlantic, Arthur Brooks also has a word of wisdom:
For happiness, the parenting technique that truly matters is warmth and affection. As my wife used to say when we were at wit’s end with our son, “I guess we should just love him.” This might sound like a hippie recipe for disaster, but it isn’t. Your kids don’t need a drill sergeant, Santa Claus, or a helicopter mom; they need someone who loves them unconditionally, and shows it even when the brats deserve it the least. Especially when they’re at their most brattish. Remember: That is what they will remember and give to your grandchildren (who will never be brats) when they themselves become parents.
Children will probably remember that one time you embarrassed them in front of their middle school friends. But they’ll also remember the moments in which you embraced them despite the horrendous words they just threw at you minutes prior. The secret to child-rearing may just be the thing that parents need too: mercy upon mercy and love that isn’t hindered by even our worst selves.
2. Next is a harrowing testimonial from a now grown client of the late child psychoanalyst Edna O’Shaughnessy. For three years (and four days every week) Michael Bacon saw the widely acclaimed and trusted Kleinian psychiatrist when he was just eleven-years-old. One evaluation of Michael’s occasional (and normal) shyness or reservedness about starting at a new school turned into multiple years of intervention — much at the expense of Michael himself. Therapy with O’Shaughnessy was never a time for the young boy to reflect on and feel his own emotions, rather the sessions proved to be an occasion for O’Shaughnessy to fit Michael into her own theoretical frameworks. Instead of listening to Michael, the psychoanalyst continued to project her own beliefs and theories onto his psyche — all the while puffing up her own self-importance. Michael Bacon’s testimony of malpractice is not to discredit or hinder the work of therapy, but to bring to light the consequences of our hubris:
O’Shaughnessy’s essays illustrate human susceptibility to indoctrination and the potential for dogma to override common-sense ideas about what is reasonable in relationships with other people – including, of course, children. They also illustrate the dangerous tendency of inward-looking and self-regulating communities to error and harm. […]
Yet the problem goes beyond any one set of tenets. Successful psychotherapy requires, above all else, that the therapist attune herself to the other person in the room. Any set of presuppositions is a potential obstacle to that task. If O’Shaughnessy wasted part of my childhood for three frustrating years, it wasn’t because she meant to do so, but because she could perceive me only as a device to play out already fixed ideas. In some dim way, I grasped this point from the outset, fought back, and so was spared more permanent harm.
The need to let go of presumptions or expectations is not specific to client-therapist relationships. We may think we know our friends better than they know themselves, but it is this exact pride that gets in the way of us loving them well. Our best friend is not a patient at the hospital to whom we prescribe SSRIs. We aren’t in control of the prescriptions given to us, nor in charge of the prescriptions given to others (unless you are a full fledged doctor), but praise God that the only prescription that matters at the end of the day is his: that we are forgiven and cherished children.
3. Calling upon Love Doctors or relationship experts may seem passé to younger generations, but our desire to excel in the world of dating and romantic relationships is still well preserved. The “10 Ways to Get Him to Notice You” lists and “Is He Interested in You?” quizzes are not a thing of the past. But instead of being published by Cosmopolitan, Gen-Z dating advice is confidently doled out in one-minute TikTok videos. Two minutes of scrolling on the internet is enough to overwhelm singles with a plethora of opinions, testimonies, and do’s & don’ts of courtship. Even those people close to you will have a different take on the correct way to find love (although everyone says “It will happen when you least expect it.” Note: sarcasm).
The quagmire of opposing beliefs concerning the right way to date is enough to make anyone doubt their ability to find love. But amidst the cacophony is one thunderous shout of agreement: searching for love is all about you. For the Point, Lillian Fishman questions whether this (very) American dogma is the best path to love:
If there is a single conviction governing American romance right now, I am certain it’s that loving someone means making them feel consistently good, making sure they never doubt your commitment, learning how to speak the language of love on their terms … The only love that is culturally condoned right now is this self-interested love. And the reason is, of course, that everyone is petrified in exactly the way you’re petrified: we don’t know what we want, and, in the absence of many of the practical desires that structured partnership for the better part of history, the best approximation we can make about what we should want or what it would be good to want is someone who treats us well and devotes themselves to making us feel good all the time. We are being taught — I should say, especially, that young American women are being taught — to look for people who can be instrumental to us. We are not encouraged to “apprehend another human being as a separate reality, akin to one’s own.” Is this apprehension even possible? Are we being discouraged from it because it’s impossible, or because, when we achieve it, it’s not nearly as comfortable as being self-interested?
This concept of self-interested love and its prevalence in American society is not at all surprising, nor is it completely unwarranted. Our work-obsessed culture craves to maximize ourselves, maximize our time, and even maximize our relationships. With all the war that is happening in the world, the unrest within our country, or the day-to-day human difficulties that we face, it’s understandable that we crave romantic relationships that make us feel good, cared for, and safe. But if we look only to other people for the love that we so desperately need, we will ultimately come up short. Humans make terrible instruments; they are bound to break, corrode, and get old. Enter Taylor Swift:
4. On the topic of self-interested relationships, Sarah Hinlicky Wilson’s most recent update from her newsletter Theology & a Recipe highlighted a Tokyo man’s experience as a Rental Person Who Does Nothing. For those in Japanese society willing to pay for his services, Shoji Morimoto’s job as a Rental Person is to respond to peoples requests for company or a non-judgmental listener — all the while remaining a stranger. Sarah notes in her newsletter that Westerners may be tempted to see Rental Person as a warm sentiment, a “ministry of presence,” or “freely given grace.” The demand for Morimoto’s services may, at first, seem like a buyer’s bid for connection, but Morimoto himself illustrates the dark side of Rental Person Who Does Nothing:
“As I don’t have friends, this was an experience I wouldn’t otherwise have had.” As the memoir progresses, he reveals his uniformly negative experience of human sociality in the form of crushing obligation. “Every named relationship entails particular things that you have to do, certain expectations that you have to meet.”
That’s exactly why he enjoyed his Rental Person gigs — one time only, no previous relationship, no future relationship — and generally praises the kind of connections that social media enables. “This type of relationship — neither friend nor acquaintance — can be very agreeable. It allows people to feel less isolated, while letting them avoid the obligations of more fixed relationships.”
Sarah goes even further into the shadows:
What’s so disturbing about Rental Person’s solution — and the thousands and thousands of fellow Tokyoites who said they were deeply moved by his service — is that it accelerates everyone involved toward more falsity, more performativity, more disconnectedness. It’s loneliness coping with itself by making solipsism the highest good. The end game here is total disconnection, with lingering inconvenient longings for other people sopped up by a pretend friend or hired relative. […]
Online options accelerate the problem. But the temptation has always been there, to take the fake and performative over the real and resistant. Resistant in the sense that reality has its own stubbornness, embodied in physical things that don’t bend to your will like in a video game, and in human beings who have their own minds and feelings and histories and opinions. Dealing with reality has always been hard, but for most of humanity’s existence we haven’t had any choice but to learn to deal with it — to acquire the skills that reality demands. Ironically enough, that very process has allowed us to create a mass architecture of fakeness as a buffer against resistant reality. The result is that we are actively losing the skills of reality and retreat further into fakeness. It’s a self-reinforcing pattern.
How much of our lives is real anymore? Do we still have the ability to tell the difference?
It’s safer and more convenient to avoid the obligations that come with deeper relationships. It’s easier to keep everyone on the surface so they won’t discover the wretched and messy depths of our beings. Although you can hire Rental Person Who Does Nothing to attend a loved one’s funeral or come to your hospital bedside (and people certainly have), there are limits to what a Rental Person can actually do for you. You can pay someone to keep you company or be a good listener (heck, isn’t that what we pay therapists to do?) and you can pay someone to not feel so lonely, but love …. well, love is priceless.
5. For kicks and giggles look no further than McSweeney’s “What I Thought My Life Would Be Like After Decanting All My Spices Into Mason Jars.”
My decision to spend sixteen dollars on these Mason jars would inevitably coincide with a sudden, inexplicable change in my personality, from someone who eats luncheon meat straight from the packet to someone who regularly uses fenugreek. […]
I would automatically become the best, most well-adjusted and anxiety-free version of myself. An aura of uncluttered calm would radiate from me, bathing my interlocutors in a golden, turmeric-scented glow.
Reductress hilariously highlights the flip side of success with “Sad! This Woman Achieved Everything She Aspired to and Now She Has to Do It Forever.”
And last but not least, the SNL sequel you never asked for about one man’s obsession with the Papyrus font and his struggle to let go of the past:
6. To close, Dominick Santore writes in 1517 how the gospel gives us “license to grace.” I’ll let the words speak for themselves:
All that was his is now ours. All that was ours is now his. Grace upon grace upon grace.
Amen! Hallelujah!
Unfortunately, it never seems to be in our ability to stop right there and soak in the full meaning of those words. If we’ve been in church or among Christians long enough, we know what comes next:
“Just remember, grace is not a license to sin.”
This is the clarion call of any number of pastors, elders, para-ministry leaders, and lay people. Many well-meaning individuals are eager to see you grow in your faith, even if they don’t realize they’re twisting a tourniquet around the good news, cutting off the circulation to the freedom found in the Gospel.
Applying the pressure of law to ensure you do not to take grace for granted squeezes the life and power out of the gospel. Grace is meant to be free, all the way free. It’s not just a leaky faucet but a broken main gushing up from the ground.
Grace means that as mistakes and sins occur, forgiveness will be applied. Not because we can live life without consequences but because there are consequences in life. We don’t become Christians and stop sinning; we become Christians who keep receiving forgiveness.
No one ever needed a license to sin. I’ve been doing that since before I was old enough to have a license to drive. Instead, the law implied in phrases like, “Grace is not a license to sin,” gives people a license to hide. It gives them a license to keep that sin in their back pocket because if anyone found out, they would be condemned, shamed, and given a roadmap for how to climb their way out of guilt. […]
The Gospel is good news, not good law. It is a license to apply grace to messy lives, lives that haven’t got it all together yet. It’s a license to recognize that no matter where we are on the road, it still applies to us because we still struggle and sin. It’s a license to be imperfect fathers, mothers, spouses, co-workers, and neighbors. It’s a license to be tired and weak and fed up and overwhelmed. It’s a license for us to grab hold of this truth:
But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong (2 Cor. 12:9-10).
Strays:
- The Hedgehog Review goes through the uses of nostalgia.
- How to be (un)successful according to Seen & Unseen.
- Aeon‘s “What is ‘lived experience’?”
- Philip Cary for Modern Reformation on the Biblical connection of thinking and feeling.
- Happy Taylor Swift New Album Release Day to all who celebrate!
COMMENTS
One response to “April 12-19”
Leave a Reply
I think item #2 ties directly into #3 and #4. The increasingly therapeutic framework through which so much of society now views itself is a big part of why solipsism and narcissism are now preventing so many people from finding relationships, human connections, and love. Perhaps “the work of therapy” deserves to be “hindered” or “discredited,” if Abigail Shrier’s argument is to be believed (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/716567/bad-therapy-by-abigail-shrier). I look forward to reading her take, as recent interviews she’s given about the book’s release have been highly cogent criticisms of therapy culture.