1. There have been many articles written over the years on the use of psychological pathologies in everyday conversation, whether it be the way people are deemed to be narcissistic, or suffer from PTSD, abuse, anxiety, depression, or trauma. For our largely secular world where the religious means of self-understanding are largely deemed inauthentic, psychological “concept creep” was perhaps inevitable. While the popularizing of pathologies have increased awareness and, perhaps, compassion for those who suffer from them, not all the gains are positive. It also runs the risk of pathologizing what is otherwise a normal human experience, hindering self-understanding more than illuminating it.

Writing for the Atlantic, Elissa Strauss wishes another now ubiquitous term would be stricken from our vocabulary: codependency, an idea whose origins begin, not with psychology, but from the trash heap of 1980s self-help books.

Some people may find it to be a useful tool for explaining bad relationship habits, but the term’s popularity also gestures at something worrisome: an avoidance of vulnerability and the natural asymmetries in relationships. To be a person is to be dependent on other people, perhaps in incredibly inconvenient ways. “Codependent” is a fairly accurate description of the human condition.

We are, however, in the age of boundaries. “There is something in the zeitgeist about people really wanting to individuate from relationships,” Darby Saxbe, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, told me, referring to the rise of family estrangement, for example. Sometimes, such as in unhealthy or even abusive relationships, emotional distance is wise. But a constant preoccupation with distance is not. “We have adopted this view that relationships are too messy, challenging, demanding, or threatening, and it is cleaner and easier to go through the world solo,” Saxbe said. “But that doesn’t track with what we know about human flourishing.”

The flip side of codependency, enabling, has found a home within recovery circles, but this too has dubious significance:

In addiction-support circles, “enablers” — the loved ones of people with addictions—were seen to also be at fault. As long as they kept caring for their loved one, that person would never hit rock bottom and find the inspiration to quit. Meanwhile, the enabler would be so obsessed with changing someone else’s life that they risked jeopardizing their own financial and emotional security. Better for everyone, apparently, if the enabler distanced themselves from the addict and broke the chain of unhealthy mutual dependency. Recent research questions this thinking, showing that those with substance-abuse disorders tend to benefit from strong social relationships, whereas loneliness increases the odds that they become addicted in the first place.

Why has codependency become such a buzzword for unhealth? In addition to valorizing the self-made man who does not need to depend upon anyone else (to say nothing of God!), Strauss suggests that women have found the concept a useful arrow in their quiver:

The term codependency offered a tool for these women to determine which of their relationships they had overinvested in, to their detriment. It gave them a reason to reject an assumption that they should be caregivers, perhaps at the expense of caring for themselves. […] Codependency remains a shorthand for women’s fears of being too emotionally dependent on others, and of losing their independence and individuality as a result.

The pseudo-medical term, in other words, is employed by those who lack the agency to speak frankly of what they want. Strauss has some understandable sympathy here, but believes such scapegoating to be inadequate in the long run. Instead of pure independence and a clearly defined sense of self, everyone (women and men) should strive to be more inter-dependent:

Mutual reliance is an accurate definition of a healthy relationship. The more we see depending on others and being depended on by others as an affliction, the less prepared we are for not just parenting and caregiving, but also any long-term friendship or romantic partnership. When someone is depressed or sick, they need exactly the kind of disproportionate care that codependency language warns us to stay away from. […]

Oftentimes, we establish ourselves through a bond. In my 20s, I tried many solo paths to self-discovery: meditation retreats, hikes, backpacking around the world. None of these challenges taught me as much about myself as raising children, being married, or supporting my loved ones through hard times have. Only then was the gap between the person I thought I was and the person I am — or could become — fully revealed. Paying close attention to others’ needs made me a more accurate observer of my own. Whoever I was before a meaningful relationship was challenged and transformed through one-on-one connection. And if I hadn’t been, what would’ve been the point? We don’t just self-actualize; we co-actualize. 

2. Taking my two dogs to the dog park, they immediately scamper off with the all the other canines in what can only be described as an elaborate game of tag. But are they really playing? Anthropomorphizing such behavior has long been a temptation for animal lovers of all stripes. Even still, it seems as though the multi-colored blurs running around the fenced enclosure are, in fact, having fun. As told by Sallie Tisdale, scientists has long explored animal behavior in search of its evolutionary utility, but perhaps the real reason is more obvious:

Animal play has come into focus as a subject of study only in the past century, and the field is still developing even basic principles. What is play? How do we define it in species as different from us and from each other as octopuses and crows? The most careful observer may find it hard to avoid biases about what play looks like and means. In humans, many forms of play imitate serious behavior: hunting, courtship, exploration, building, fighting. We recognize play in other species if it looks like our own games, yet what looks like play from one perspective may be something else altogether. We may miss play entirely if it doesn’t have a human equivalent — or if it appears in an animal we don’t believe to be like us at all. […]

Although humans tend to combine novelty, excitement, and sensation into something called “fun,” many ethologists have found the idea of “nonfunctional” behavior a serious challenge to their perspective on other species. Play promotes physical strength and group bonding, teaches social skills, and relieves stress: Therefore, in their view, play is an adaptation. They are prone to consider play as a neurological drive, an instinct, or a social response. […]

When you pause to think about it, the array of behavior that confounds ready categorizing as adaptive is delightfully broad. Before orcas began ramming yachts, they had what appeared to be a fashion trend of wearing dead fish on their heads. Songbirds sometimes sing when they are alone, repeating a phrase or trill several times; they seem to be singing simply for the sake of it. I had a golden retriever who would drop his beloved tennis ball in the eddy of a fast river and nudge the ball to the very edge of the current, waiting until the last possible chance to snatch it out. A grainy video online of a crow in Russia shows the bird carrying a jar lid to the peak of a roof, climbing in, and snowboarding down. The crow does this several times. … Perhaps if you can fly, sliding is peculiarly exciting.

The theorists can be a bit dispiriting. Sometimes I wanted to whack one on the side of the head and say, “Hey, catch this ball.” The quest for objectivity will sooner or later collide with the fact that in the kingdom of play, humans have plenty in common with other animals. We naturally romp with dogs. And dogs goof around with horses. Rats enjoy being tickled. The so-called play expression is common — a “relaxed open-mouth display.” Is it possible to see this as a smile? That puppy in the snow: If you can’t appreciate the fun of having your movements inhibited and your vision compromised by a weird substance, then I don’t want to go to a foam fight or costume party with you.

Jesus once lauded the “birds of the air” for how they do not work for their food, taking their carefree attitude a model for a (codependent!) faith that relies upon God for everything. The same could be said of crows who go snowboarding or songbirds who perform for an audience of one. Perhaps the opposite of worry isn’t peace and security, but playfulness — to measure life not in terms of utility, but joy.

3. On the subject of science … what should we make of levitating monks and nuns? In a deep dive into the delightful world of the paranormal in premodern Catholicism, Erin Maglaque reviews a recent book by Carlos Eire that examines the many canonized saints who defied the laws of physics, either by involuntarily floating in the air or bilocating (traveling to another part of the world instantly). For Eire, the sheer strangeness of these events serves as test cases to at least question many of the modern historian’s dogmas: perhaps miracles can, in fact happen. Take, for example, the case of Joseph of Cupertino:

Crowds of people came to see the spectacle. Pilgrims would poke at him, catatonic in his flying state, prick him with needles, try to burn him with flames, but his soul was already up, his body insensate. So many came to see him that the friars had to remove tiles from the roof so the masses could watch him fly during the liturgy. He levitated constantly, understandably annoying his fellow friars — what with the shrieking, the soaring, the streaming crowds. He eventually annoyed the Inquisition, too, and was charged with feigned sanctity. He levitated on the way to his trial. The examiners gave him a stern warning, and the Inquisition would monitor him for the rest of his life, hiding him away in ever more isolated friaries so as not to attract crowds to witness the spectacle. It wasn’t that he was faking it, necessarily, but that his flying was so frequent, so disruptive, so attention-grabbing that it was better to let him fly alone than to deal head-on with the problem of his extreme sanctity.

(Youth Minister’s Voice: “You know who else was locked away because he did too many miracles? …”) For Eire, the flights of Joseph are a fly (heh) in the historical ointment: “Why, has he been relegated to the history of the ridiculous rather than to the history of the impossible, or to the science of antigravitational forces?” Back to Maglaque’s review:

Eire understands modern secularism as its own kind of methodology, with its own interpretive shortcomings. Atheism, as much as faith, shapes the questions we ask of our sources and limits the possibilities of interpretation … Religious belief shouldn’t be explained away as a symptom of something else, as a functionalist response to political violence, say, or economic scarcity. Faith — and especially lived faith, not abstract theology — can make history, too.  […]

I agree, too, that recent histories of religion that understand early modern beliefs and practices as a set of discourses, ideologies, and representations can be unsatisfying. This approach risks reducing belief to something discursive, to a text the historian can untangle and cleanly interpret without ever having to truly confront what was real and radical about belief. The distancing effect of this kind of cultural history is frustrating, with its unexamined conviction that we, with our lack of belief, can make belief make sense. But to do so is to misunderstand what it means to believe.

Reading this unresolved, open-ended back and forth between modern and pre-modern worldviews, I was struck by a fairly obvious point that both Eire and Maglaque seem to miss. That, for all the self-assured confidence of modernity’s difference from the gullible and unthinking ancients, the two are more a difference of degree than kind. Alongside these fantastic stories of flight, these supposedly primitive Christians sought a type of scientific proof or disproof of the miraculous. Bodies were exhumed and examined, trials were held. How could someone travel to the New World and preach to a people who didn’t know your language? These pre-moderns both accepted that miracles can and do happen and did not uncritically believe what they were told.

I haven’t a clue if monks and nuns actually flew, but if scientific rationalism is so convincingly and obviously right, they why must it need such a strawman?

4. On the funny side of the internet this week, Points in Case’s “After Credits Scenes From the Bible” had a couple of good ones. McSweeney’s “TikTok Is a Threat to Our Extremely Normal Media Ecosystem” was pretty apt. For those in the online dating world, there’s the Onion’s “Millennial Women Forgoing Dating Apps In Favor Of Standing On Misty Jetty, Calling Out To Sea.” And their “Parents Really Hitting It Off With Daughter’s Emotionally Abusive Boyfriend” was sneakily funny/smart:

Laughing and smiling the whole night as they bonded over Emily Barkan’s flaws, local couple Jay and Brenda Barkan were reportedly really hitting it off with their daughter’s emotionally abusive boyfriend this week. “Andrew is such a gentleman — I was about to suggest Emily stick to salad tonight, but then he just went ahead and ordered it for her!” said Brenda Barkan, who gushed over both the subtle and not-so subtle jabs that Andrew Ehret had taken at her daughter, noting that he already fit in perfectly with the whole family. “I was a little hesitant at first, because they arrived at the restaurant a few minutes late, but then Andrew rolled his eyes at Emily and blamed it on her ‘nonexistent time management skills.’ That got us on the topic of how pathetic it is that she’s even thinking about studying for the LSAT, and before you knew it, we realized this guy was the perfect man to control our daughter.” At press time, the Barkans added that they could tell their daughter really liked Andrew too, as he had done a great job convincing her that no one else would ever love her.

5. Next up, theologian Miroslav Volf sat down with Seen and Unseen to talk theology and politics. There’s a lot to like in the interview — if you can overlook the occasional ‘Ivy League’ lapses — but Volf made two points that I thought were especially salient. Toward the beginning of their discussion, Volf was asked about the role forgiveness plays in American culture:

I see the culture becoming increasingly unforgiving. There are, of course, ritualistic gestures of forgiveness in different domains of life, but they’re really public image management tools rather than steps toward reconciliation.

… For the most part, we operate with the narrative account of the self: ‘I am what I have done, what has been done to me, what I have made out of what I’ve done and what others have done to me.’ But if you have this notion of the self, how do you do what the miracle of forgiveness requires? How do you unglue the past deed from the self that has committed that deed, when that deed is—by definition— defining of the person?  Forgiveness requires a vision of the self that isn’t defined by its acts.  For Christians, God’s unconditional love defines the self. That emphasizes the importance of the Christian message and deep theological reflection on it to make such an account of the self plausible. 

And when asked about the left-right culture wars, Volf had this to say:

You know the old adage – “I don’t care what’s left and what’s right; I care for what’s right and what’s wrong.” This right / wrong contrast, this dualistic moralism of religious traditions, can obviously be lived in different ways. But if we understand it in the properly Christian way, with humility, the contrast between right and wrong seems to me important because it provides us an independent place on which to stand and from which to open up a space for movement in this rather sterile conflict, or at least not to let ourselves be drawn into it.

To nurture such Christian independence, we need to return to the big question that Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked toward the end of his imprisonment: “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?” That seems to me to be a central question, and it helps avoid the temptation of the church — as you see happening in the United States on both sides, left and right — to a certain kind of identification with the politics of a cause. 

6. To close out this week let’s turn to Katelyn Beaty’s latest entry on her SubStack, “The Myth of the Extra-Special Church,” which examines the fairly high-profile scandal of a church she used to attend. There’s a lot there, but what most interested me is her diagnosis. Churches that fail to protect and nurture its members simultaneously believe themselves to be the leading edge of God’s mission. Like any high anthropology, the more inflated the view that this church is extra-special, the less likely it is to see its own failures. She ends with a moving plea for ordinary churches:

God doesn’t promise us, or our institutions, an upward trajectory, a path that’s always up and to the right. Churches that appear to be on the path of success can fall off seemingly overnight. Leaders that seem specially ordained can become their own worst enemy. Church members that seem animated by Christ’s love can become haughty and cruel when their church — which they’ve invested too much of their identity in — is criticized or tested. The common denominator in all of this is humans. May we never underestimate our ability to deceive ourselves and believe our own hype.

The older (and possibly more jaded) I get, the more suspicious I am of a church with an amazing and incredible success story that asks me to join in its mission of saving the neighborhood or transforming other people’s lives or whatever. Because too often, we start to think that God needs us to be amazing so that God can be God.

And, the more interested I am in belonging to an ordinary church. A church whose leaders aren’t charismatic or impressive but faithful and shepherd-like, intimately familiar with the needs of their people. A church where worship is enriching and Spirit-filled and sometimes can stand to be quiet or even boring. A church where the preaching is centered on God’s story of redemption, not the preacher’s stories of amazing spiritual breakthrough. And most centrally, a church that is eager and proactively equipped to stand with the vulnerable and wounded when the worst is done to them. I’d trade all the extra-special churches in the world for one who, by God’s grace, can stand to be a mere church.

Strays:

• Don’t Tell America the Babysitter’s Dead
• The Unkillable Appeal of Multilevel Marketing
• Theologian Peter Leithart reviews Tara Isabella Burton’s latest novel, Here in Avalon.
• From 1517, A Robe That Won’t Weigh You Down.
• My Anxiety

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