1. Big news this week from the sporting world: former NFL quarterback Andrew Luck gave his first real interview since leaving the Indianapolis Colts in 2019. We profiled a bit of Luck’s story back then. Despite being one of the best players in the league, the quarterback had suffered a number of injuries during his career. After a preseason injury to his ankle, Luck announced his retirement two weeks before the start of the season, leaving fans, coaches, and teammates in a lurch. In this new interview, we get more of a glimpse into the man’s inner world as he wrestled with his decision. As banged up as his body was, it turns out his mental health was even worse, and only after undergoing a season of intense rehab and psychiatric therapy in Holland was he able to articulate his struggle.

Luck now refers to those six weeks simply as “Holland,” an experience as much as a place, a transformation so profound that, looking back, might have marked the beginning of the end of his NFL career. He returned to the Colts facility in late 2017 with a promise to himself that he would put his body and mind and wife-to-be first. But at the time, Luck also had a goal of returning to play. When he entered the Colts building, familiar urges started to kick in. The team and the press wanted to know his time frame for throwing. Luck told them that he would throw when he was ready. But Ballard says that Luck “cared so much about others, and not letting the team down” that he was in a dull panic.

“I need to throw,” Luck told Kramer.

“If you’re not ready, you’re not ready.”

“I need to throw.”

“Why?”

“I need to.”

“You matter,” Kramer said. “And when you can’t throw, you still matter.”

Luck’s whole story is a parable of the curse of the law, the command to win and succeed at all costs. If I were to summarize the article, Luck ran headlong into Low Anthropology, specifically, the limitation of his body. Worlds of expectation rested on his shoulders, but the shoulder holding up that weight couldn’t throw a football. He began to realize he could never succeed as everyone wanted. Nothing could work: taking time off to rehab, playing through the pain, lashing out at his partner, or hiding his fear and anger behind a wall of stoicism. Love, identity, pressure, pain — it’s little wonder the man gave up hundreds of millions of dollars to walk away.

2. When the Hedgehog Review shared Alexander Stern’s reflection on “The Impotence of Being Clever,” the character that leapt to mind was Alan Alda’s surgeon Hawkeye Pierce from the classic TV show M*A*S*H. Never was there a more witty, righteous, and powerless character, stuck working on an assembly line of death in a war he had no control over. Stern’s observation bears true to that character’s story and our own time: when cleverness manifests itself in wit, it’s no longer insightful. Instead, cleverness becomes a coping mechanism, a way of navigating powerlessness by distance and detachment. Stern suggests this manifests itself in three ways: the detached flâneur (an idle observer), the righteous detective, and the corrosive comic.

The flâneur, the detective, and the comedian are precursors of the practitioners of the online cleverness that has become such a nuisance today. The Internet is a spaceless airport. Like passengers in an airport, its users are fundamentally idlers. They occupy themselves with browsing — both the objects available for consumption and their fellow consumers. They are placed in a similar but even more extreme position of impotent omnipotence. The world is at their feet, but they cannot really act in it except to pose and acquire. At the same time, the Internet enables control of people’s movements and desires in a way the airport could only dream of. All this naturally prompts a desire to wrest back some semblance of control. […]

Another way to redeem passive lurking is by making a clever joke that shows that you are above the whole thing. Twitter’s quote tweet function, especially, enables users literally as well as metaphorically to appear above the conversation and to cleverly one-up their opponents from this privileged position. The game, in effect, is this: Who can appear the most above it all? But the circumstances of posting — alone at the controls with no one around but everyone watching — all but guarantee that posts are alloyed with insecurity, however clever they might be. Like the too-clever detective whose need to exhibit command tends to result in more chaos, the clever poster’s attempt to stand above the medium’s stupidity merely reveals dependence on its meager pleasures. Cleverness devolves from the output of analytical acuity into a transparent show put on to allay the anxieties of passive consumption. […]

Kierkegaard associated cleverness with what he considered inferior forms of life — the aesthetic and the ethical — in contrast to the genuinely religious life, which was for him not a matter of dogmatic belief but an embrace of the absurd and the suffering that characterizes human life. Both the aesthete and the moralist use forms of cleverness to evade such suffering.

3. The New Yorker profiled Greg Williams this week, a ninety-year-old Vermont Christmas Tree farmer. Along the way, a few fun insights into the history of Christmas for those of us who celebrate “the Tannenbaum religion.” I’ll save you a google search — shnockagastical is not real world, but maybe it should be?

The tradition was for centuries avoided or disdained by Catholics. In Germany, the Protestant religion was sometimes dismissed as “the Tannenbaum religion.” (The Vatican didn’t put up a Christmas tree until 1982.) Americans today buy some twenty-five million Christmas trees a year, but Puritan settlers once viewed the trees with suspicion. In 1659, the government of Massachusetts Bay passed a law that “whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labour, feasting, or any other way … shall pay for every such offence five shillings, as a fine to the county.” Christmas was not a school holiday until around 1870. But some people were still having fun. In 1823, the York, Pennsylvania, Society of Bachelors advertised that its tree would be “superb, superfine, superfrostical, shnockagastical, double refined, mill’twill’d made of Dog’s Wool, Swingling Tow, and Posnum fur; which cannot fail to gratify taste.”

4. In humor this week, Reductress goes for the jugular with “Email Signoffs to Make You Sound Less Like a Pushover and More Like the God of the Old Testament,” as does the Onion with “New Square Feature Allows Customers To Tip With Bible Quote.”  Kids of the 80’s will be glad to hear that cinema icon “The Toxic Avenger Seeks Therapy to Become Emotionally Intelligent Avenger.”

Finally, the Beaverton takes a jab at Malcomb Gladwell with “This Person Has Practiced for More Than 10,000 Hours and Still Sucks“:

Tim’s claims to be great despite his natural mediocrity have had critics re-examine people they thought were great after so much time, including The Beatles, Michael Jordan, and Kendall Jenner.

“Tim has really upended the way we look at success and talent,” said Dr. Harry Brenshaw, head of sociology at Harvard. “Are the Beatles actually good? Is Michael Jordan a good basketball player? Does Kendall Jenner not deserve the hundreds of millions of dollars she is worth? I don’t know if we’ll ever wrap our heads around all of it.”

5. Tim Keller writes in the New York Times this week on gun violence and America’s trouble extending forgiveness. Much of it will ring true to Mockingbird readers, but I especially appreciated the famed pastor’s insistence that forgiveness itself is transformative. When the world (and, as Keller adds, the church) bails on forgiveness, it bails on the very key to achieving our personal and societal end goals.

If forgiveness in small things and large were deeply embedded in our culture, it would transform us politically, ending the demagogy that never admits wrongdoing and that mocks and belittles one’s opponents. It would transform us socially, ending racial stereotyping, discrimination and unwillingness to listen to one another. It would make every movement for justice less likely to burn out, overreach or alienate. It would remake us personally, enabling us to confront frustrations and hurts and work through them rather than turn to drugs or guns or other destructive ways of dealing with our pain.

Few have the ability to honestly confront their own failings, flaws, self-centeredness — in short, their sin — unless they are assured that grace is ready to meet them. C.S. Lewis put it well: “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”

6. We’ll give the final word today to 18th century theologian Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt. (Deep cut Simeon Zahl fans will know he’s written a book on Blumhardt’s theology). Plough published Blumhardt’s thoughts on The Song of Mary (Lk 1:46-55) on their site this week, and it’s a great example of the pastor’s unique mix of low anthropology and expectation of God’s direct action.

It is a remarkable thing that we can rejoice like this in the Lord, in the One who made heaven and earth. How does this come about? The lowlier I become and the more the Lord is seen in me, the greater is the joy of my soul.

It is not like this with the mundane relationships of the world; there it is just the opposite. When two people are together and one sinks lower and lower while the other rises higher and higher, the one who sinks lower is annoyed at the other one, even though he might be helped by him. He thinks, “Oh, if I could only make as much progress as he does. It hurts me to see him climb higher while I sink lower.” That is how it is on earth.

Our relationship with the Savior, with God, however, is just the reverse of this. The more we are made low and the Savior elevated, the more we fade into the background and the Savior comes into the foreground, the happier we are. The proof of an inward relationship with God is that in our innermost heart we want God to be great. It is as if my innermost being were God and God were my innermost. That is how it is with the Savior. Man should be so intertwined with the Living God that the decay of the outward man – that is, of our own nature in this world — should be a matter of pure joy and delight, for in this God will be exalted through the Savior Jesus Christ. For this we can surrender everything.

This is what we praise and rejoice in this season. May God grant that in our dust – for we will not forget that we are dust — we may have and hold on to this trust; and that even while we sigh because of our nature, our poverty, and lowliness, we can always extol the deeds of God. We gladly remain lowly. We assuredly do not want to be exalted. Quite the contrary, the Savior should chastise us much more to keep us from becoming hypocritical Christians. We are glad to humble ourselves. Let him take everything from us. The only thing we want to hold on to is that he increases, that he acts, that he means something to people and that they each receive through their Savior the same courage, the same strength, as we have been given.

Strays:

• Did the development of a concordance for the Bible contribute to the development of dispensationalism? And what might that mean for those of us reading the Bible through smartphone apps?
• Think Christian has a fantastic writeup on how Pinocchio is, ultimately, a story of grace, no matter which version you watch.
• AI is getting smart enough to turn out college level essays “better than most MBAs can write.” How will higher education, or more broadly, any educational institution, cope?
• I learned this week that “Carol of the Bells” was originally a Ukrainian folk song. Plenty of great Christmas carols, it seems, come from times of war and hardship. Video above.
• Big Sale happening this week over at the Mockingbird Store — a better gift than an ugly Christmas sweater!

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