Another Week Ends

1. Spiritual writing is basically impossible to do well. I’m not talking about religious writing or theological writing. People write beautifully all the time about the Sacraments and the Church, about ministry and congregational life, about the Bible, about the Trinity, Justification, you name it. I like to think we publish some solid examples. But trying to put words around an encounter with the living God in a way that’s intelligible and/or interesting to those on the outside of the experience is a nearly hopeless task.

Which is probably why this first piece left me in tatters on the ground. It’s super long, and there’s no name attached to it (the author is Some Guy) other than the name of the newsletter by which it arrived, Extelligence. The title of the essay is “Anti Majestic Cosmic Horseshit,” which should give you a sense of both the scope and tone of what’s on offer, i.e., potentially not for everyone. If you make it all the way through, however, it will be the best thing you read this month, possibly this year. It’s a bunch of things: a ghost story, a conversion story, a sociology of sawmill culture, an excavation of heartbreak, but mostly it’s an account of a trip to the afterlife. Any further introduction would spoil it, and I won’t attempt to excerpt any of the passages about the Supernatural, as the context for those is essential. But here’s a small portion from the final third, in which Some Guy reckons with life after his big ‘experience on the canal’:

One day my therapist gave me a flier for group sessions run at a local Baptist church for people who had been sexually abused as children. Once per week and it was free.

I have never been so terrified to go to a place in my entire life. I’d have rather walked into a mafia den or one of those prisons in the wilderness where they keep members of MS-13. There were all kinds of reasons I listed out for why I shouldn’t have to go. Looking around, I also realized that my best judgement didn’t seem like it had landed me in the best of circumstances. So I went even though I didn’t want to go.

The first two things I noticed upon entering the room was that the facilitator, a man named Dave, was about a hundred years old and anytime someone spoke he had to turn toward them and hold his hand around his ear to help him catch the sound and also that every single person had moved their chair so that they could be facing the entrance. I can’t talk about the actual sessions much since I took an oath of ultimate double top secret secrecy. I will say that there were times I didn’t want to leave my truck to go inside, but that every time I left a session I felt like the weight on my shoulders was a little bit less. There’s a peace in knowing you are not alone even if you don’t think there is.

When I asked Dave why he did what he did and for no money — because I could see how much it hurt him to be there — he said he did it for Jesus. That still makes me choke up, just writing it. He said it with his whole body, his manner, and all the history of his life behind it. He was the first real Christian I had ever allowed myself to know […]

All of this is to say, it was the first time after my experience by the canal that I felt something like the love I had felt in that other place. It came from Dave.

2. The top three things I’m excited for this month are, in no particular order, the Liam Gallagher & John Squire album, Hulu’s long-awaited adaptation of James Clavell’s Shogun, and Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation. From what I’ve read, the book will expand on the decline in free play in recent decades, and the deleterious effect it has had on the mental health of our youth. This certainly tracks with my own observations as both a parent and an erstwhile child — and to be honest, I don’t know many parents who don’t lament the decline as well. We remember our own childhoods, after all, and our fondest memories were almost never adult-directed. The problem is, we’re all chained to a lifestyle that makes it nigh on impossible to foster more free play for our kids. That’s how it feels at least. And so we watch Stranger Things and Craig of the Creek and pine for better days.

Enter “Why Children Need Risk, Fear, and Excitement in Play” by Mariana Brussoni, which Haidt put out on his After Babel newsletter this past week. Brussoni, a professor at the University of British Columbia, identifies the double-bind at work while making a case for what she calls ‘risky play’. The whole thing sounds a lot like grace in practice — which is always risky — i.e., control and surveillance tend to backfire when it comes to raising well-adjusted children. Freedom and imagination on the other hand… But don’t take my word for it:

Parents today receive constant messaging that in order to be “good parents”, they must always keep their children safe. And it is widely believed that the world is no longer a safe place for children to play in. Yet statistics show that it has never been a safer time to be a child. Injury-related deaths are at an all-time low in most Western nations. In the US, deaths from unintentional injuries fell by 73% for boys and 85% for girls between 1973 and 2010. This misperception of risk creates the parental paradox.

What kids are dying from today are mainly car crashes and suicides, not playing outside unsupervised with friends. Parents are worrying about the wrong causes of injuries and harm. In fact, the very strategies that parents use to try to keep their children safe – driving them around, maximizing supervision, and minimizing freedom – are unintentionally increasing the likelihood of injuries and even death.

We’ve prioritized safety over freedom, achievement over play, and screen time over outdoor time. The results are predictable: compromised mental and physical health, cognitive development, and emotional competence.

The solutions are both simple and hard. We know what children need to thrive. The three key ingredients necessary for thriving play environments are Time, Space, and Freedom.

3. Enough of the convicting stuff, time for some hope, eh? The venerable Marilynne Robinson penned an essay for Commonweal on “Forgiveness in Genesis,” and while I admit to sometimes having trouble following the Pulitzer Prize winner’s non-fiction, this one gripped me from start to finish. Those who enjoyed Will McDavid’s indispensable Eden and Afterward will find much to appreciate in her literary approach to material that can suffer from over-familiarity:

The whole great literature of Scripture, unfolding over centuries, will proceed on the terms established in [Genesis]. So Genesis is carried forward, in the law, in the psalms, in the prophets, itself a spectacular burst of light without antecedent but with a universe of consequences. …  This realism by itself is a sort of miracle. These men and women saw the face of God, they heard His voice, and yet life for them came down to births and deaths, love, transgression, obedience, shame, and sorrow, everything done or borne in the course of the characterization of God, for Whom every one of us is a child of Adam, made in His image. God’s bond with Jacob, truly a man of sorrows, is a radical theological statement […]

While he lived, at the pinnacle of authority, Joseph saw his dreams play out more beautifully than anyone could have imagined, not as foreseeing mere superiority or dominance but instead as giving him an occasion to comfort, sustain, and forgive. This is the climax the narrative has been building toward since Cain and Abel. I know of no other literature except certain late plays of Shakespeare that elevates grace as this book does. Joseph’s brothers have brooded for years on the grievous harm they have done him and their father … And when Jacob dies, they fear that Joseph will take his revenge on them … So they send him a message saying that their dying father instructed him to pardon them. “And now, we pray thee, forgive the trespass of the servants of the God of thy father.” It is surprising to find them identifying themselves in these terms, since to this point their piety has been expressed only as dread of divine retribution.

And yet, no matter how sincere they are in speaking in this way, what they say is perfectly true. Just these men will lead the Hebrews into Egypt and bondage. Their families will multiply until they become a people. The life of the nation Israel will instruct and bless multitudes. The names of Joseph’s brothers will be remembered on earth for as long as the God of Genesis is remembered. Jacob struggled to find words of blessing for most of them, yet, like everyone whose story is told here — like everyone, presumably — they are indispensable. Joseph’s act of forgiveness in effect opens the way for them to assume their essential, though unexplained and unrecorded role in sacred history. In every instance where it arises, forgiveness is rewarded by consequences that could not have been foreseen or imagined.

4. Before we leave the Old Testament, Christianity Today published a stirring excerpt from Mike Cosper’s new book, Land of My Sojourn, in which the popular podcaster charts his journey into disillusionment — and back — with the help of the prophet Elijah. Brave, bold stuff, and makes me all the more excited to hear Mike speak at our NYC Conference in April:

I was raised not to complain, to see it as unvirtuous. I was also taught much about the holiness of God and what we were and weren’t allowed to say or do before him. But there’s a funny tension between my modern ideas and the attitudes of many of the fathers and mothers of our faith in the Hebrew Bible. They have an audacity, a willingness to argue, complain, or speak out of naked self-interest. Maybe that’s one aspect of what it means to have a childlike faith: having the audacity to speak your mind in a relationship where the asymmetry of authority and control couldn’t be starker […]

Elijah came to Sinai despairing that his life and his dreams had come to an end. He left aware that the best parts of that dream — the hope of a renewed and restored Israel—were in God’s hands and always had been. Seven thousand people Elijah had no idea existed remained faithful. The deeper awareness was that he needn’t cling to the outcomes of whatever followed. The old cliché “God is in control” turns out to be true, but it may be something we only truly learn and that only liberates us after things fall apart.

5. In Humor, while not the all-time funniest week, there were still a few goodies. “‘Well Now It Sounds Mean,’ Says Woman Whose Friend Just Repeated Her Statement Back to Her” from Reductress got me laughing. Then Hard Times weighed in with “Priest Suffers Crisis of Faith After Hearing Christian Ska Band” (Bandname? Skadom and Gomhornda! Ha). And McSweeney’s “My Comments Are in the Google Doc Linked in the Dropbox I Sent in the Slack” was clever.

6. Next, the Atlantic turned up an incredible letter from playwright Arthur Miller, sent to a college journalism student during the initial run of Death of a Salesman in 1949. Miller must’ve been in a generous mood that day, as he took the opportunity to explain his entire understanding of tragedy. It’s a dense but really quite spectacular unpacking of #lowanthropology:

We reward our dealers, our accumulators, our speculators; we penalize with anonymity and low pay our teachers, our scientists, our workers who make and do and build and create. And so the urge that is in all of us to give and to make is turned in upon itself, and we accept the upside-down idea that to take and to accumulate is the great good. And whether we succeed in that or not, we are sooner or later left with the awareness of our emptiness, our inner poverty, and our isolation from mankind. When a man reaches that knowledge and has the sensitivity to feel the loss of his true self deeply, he is a tragic figure; but not unless he tries to find himself despite the world can he raise up in us the actual feeling that something fine and great and precious has been discovered too late. The history of man is his blundering attempt to form a society in which it pays to be good. The tragic figure now, and always, is the man who insists, past even death, that the stultifying combinations of evil give way before the outpouring of humanity and love that is bursting from his heart. This is why tragedy endures, and this is why it has really never changed excepting in its superficial aspects of rank etc.

What a cover!

7. Last week in his Red Hand Files, Nick Cave answered a letter from a New Jersey sewer worker, who was writing in not to ask a question but to thank Nick for acknowledging “those of us that work in jobs that are so necessary that nobody really ever thinks about it.” The contact provoked a particularly poetic paragraph from Cave:

Brian, if by chance you dealt with any of my bodily waste whilst I was visiting New York in the nineties, as it travelled along with the 8.3 billion gallons of daily waste water, running through the 7,500 miles of sewerage pipes, then I want to acknowledge your efforts and say, with the utmost respect, thank you and God bless you! For if God exists, then He exists in the sewers as in the stars, and in the end, in our own hellish ways, we are each at His service, engaged in the grim business of preventing the world from drowning in its own excreta.

8. Finally, Nadia Bolz-Weber shared a humdinger of a Lenten sermon last week, “Notes on a Late Bloomer,” via her substack. She took as her text Jesus’s injunction in Matthew 16, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” Self-denial may not be the friendliest subject, but good God by the end of this one, I was ready to quit a lot more than sugar (though that, too):

My solution to the problem of having squandered years of my life to addiction was to then just become addicted to proving myself, and then that solution turned into its own problem and well, that’s usually how the cycle goes […]

When Jesus says deny yourself and follow me … Maybe he’s inviting us to deny the part of us that wants to see itself as separate from God and others. Deny the self that always creates a list of demands. Deny the self that is so turned in on itself that it cannot see much of anything beyond itself. Deny the self that says really horrible things to you about you. Deny the self that pretends you never need help. There are parts of me that really should be de-platformed.

Every time our me-based solutions to our me-based problems fail us, just know this: it is in the tombs of our self-manufactured darknesses that God always shines brightest.

As if that’s not enough, Nadia concludes with the sort of (brilliant) illustration that could only come from a woman who just binged the new season of F1. Amen to this:

Since he says we should follow him, does it not mean that he’s right in the front, that he’s always going before us, that he’s always in pole position, and we get to spiritually just draft off him. That’s the rest and the help we need. It’s found in the spiritual slip stream of following Jesus — the one who says come to me all who are heavy laden and I will give you rest.

Strays:

• Why Do We Valorize Busyness? by Dixie Lane mines some familiar territory in a fresh way.
• For your listening pleasure, PZ dropped a two-parter this week! Episodes 379 & 380 of PZ’s Podcast, “It Only Takes a Minute, Girl” (Part 1, Part 2).
• In television, the first two episodes of Shogun are phenomenal! Faithful yet fresh, with incredible production values, smart writing, and a terrific cast. Also surprisingly unflinching on the (strong) religious elements. Oh and those not watching The New Look are missing some Les Mis-level grace, not to mention a masterclass in acting from Juliette Binoche and Ben Mendelsohn. I think the latter may have overtaken Sam Rockwell to become my favorite actor.
• Mcasters can click here to read Jessica Bennett’s piece on Mean Girls in the NY Times. Or here to read Gilad Edelman’s piece on The Best Small-Talk Topic in the Atlantic, both of which we talked about in our recent episode.
• The Mystery Issue of the magazine is finally getting out the door! Thank you for your patience with us, but it’ll be well worth the wait. (And if you haven’t yet subscribed, pick up your copy here)
• Last but not least: Chicagoland! I’m preaching this Sunday (3/3) at First Presbyterian in Lake Forest and talking about “The Low Anthropology of Lent” afterward with my friend Jon Wasson. The service is at 9:30am, and our convo begins at 10:45am. Very grateful for this invitation — never made it to the area during the book tour — and am excited to check out what I’m sure is a wonderful spot. Would love to see you.