Religious Week In Review

Another Week Ends

Liking Kenny G, Work Burnout, Love and Opioids, Native American Art, and Existentialist Blonde Jokes

David Zahl / 12.10.21

1. Leading off this week, Maia Szalavitz wrote an op-ed for the Times stating that “Opioids Feel Like Love.” Don’t be put off by the grabby headline; the findings she reports may just spur some compassion for the increasing number of addicts in our midst (still reeling from those gambling numbers…). Clearly our need for love and connection is so strong that we’ll seek it out wherever we can — in this case, in the very worst of places. But if opioids and love do the same things to the brain, then finding love might be part of one’s journey out of dependency.

Opioids mimic the neurotransmitters that are responsible for making social connection comforting — tying parent to child, lover to beloved.

“When people experience an opioid high, they feel warmth, safety and love,” said Steven Chang, an associate professor of neuroscience at Yale. That’s because opioid systems have evolved in part to fuel the good feelings people get from spending time with friends and family, he explained.

The link between opioids and feelings of love and connection also offers clues as to who is most vulnerable. People who experienced childhood trauma and neglect are at high risk for opioid addiction. People with mental illness or developmental disorders, which often bring isolation, are also highly susceptible. Low or falling socioeconomic status raises the risk for opioid use in part because it can erode social ties.

To paraphrase the writer Johann Hari, the opposite of addiction isn’t abstinence. It’s love.

2. World Magazine posted the first part of a wide-ranging interview with Tim Keller, in which the iconic preacher reflects on what he thinks accounts for the “success” of his work in New York City. The whole thing is very much worth your time, and not just because of the contrast to Mars Hill it represents:

[Working at a small church in Virginia for nine years before moving to NYC] I … learned not to build a ministry on leadership charisma (which I didn’t have anyway!) or preaching skill (which wasn’t so much there early on) but on loving people pastorally and repenting when I was in the wrong. In a small town, people will follow you if they trust you — your character — personally, and that trust has to be built in personal relationships, not through showing off your credentials and your talents […]

What attracted these successful Manhattanites to the gospel?
They had lived their whole lives with parents, music teachers, coaches, professors, and bosses telling them to do better, be better, try harder. In their view, God was the ultimate taskmaster, with unfulfillable demands. To hear that He Himself had met those demands for righteousness through the life and death of Jesus, and now there was no condemnation left for anyone who trusted in that righteousness — that was an amazingly freeing message.

I came to see how the theology of grace freed them (and Christians too) from the modern-day idolatries that Manhattanites struggled with.

Were there challenges in attracting people of other socioeconomic and educational levels? Yes, quite a lot of challenges. In general, it is far harder to combine people from different socioeconomic and educational levels than it is to combine people of different races and nationalities.

You probably wouldn’t think that small town Pennsylvania church life would have been the thing that most prepared Keller to lead a thriving NYC church; then again, people said the same things about our favorite Nazarene.

3. Over in the Atlantic, Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel continue their laudable crusade to change how Americans think about their work lives. In this installment, they argue that the key to avoiding burnout has everything to do with caring less about work. And the key to caring less about work usually involves finding, or remembering, the activities we enjoy outside of our success or failure at them. In other words, the hobbies we ran to after school got out. Those of us looking for a road out of the cult of productivity, then, would do well to look to the inner child — or whatever parts of us exist(ed) beyond/before obligation and proving.

The treadmill rarely provides the kind of value and meaning that we hope it will. People are growing more certain in the notion that the status quo of American working life is untenable.

Think back on a time in your life before you regularly worked for pay. Recall, if you can, an expanse of unscheduled time that was, in whatever manner, yours. What did you actually like to do? Not what your parents said you should do, not what you felt as if you should do to fit in, not what you knew would look good on your application for college or a job.

The answer might be spectacularly simple: You liked riding your bike with no destination in mind, making wild experiments in the kitchen, playing around with eyeshadow, writing fan fiction, playing cards with your grandfather, lying on your bed and listening to music, trying on all your clothes and making ridiculous outfits, thrifting, playing Sims for hours, obsessively sorting baseball cards, playing pickup basketball, taking photos of your feet with black-and-white film, going on long drives, learning to sew, catching bugs, skiing, playing in a band, making forts, harmonizing with other people, putting on mini-plays — whatever it was, you did it because you wanted to. Not because it would look interesting if you posted it on social media, or because it somehow optimized your body, or because it would give you better things to talk about at drinks, but because you took pleasure in it.

A lot of us have only the faintest traces of those childhood and early-adulthood activities in our life — what we might dare call “hobbies.” They largely exist as conversational markers and rhetorical placeholders for who we once were.

A real hobby isn’t a way to adorn your personality, or perform to masquerade your class status. It’s just something you like to do, full stop.

We love to talk about kids’ personalities, how unique and weird and joyful they are. We don’t grow out of those characteristics so much as subsume them with duties. But they remain the building blocks of our humanness, the enduring difference between us and robots. We must preserve those inclinations toward delight and whimsy, toward the ineffable and the unimpressive, the feelings you can’t re-create with a machine or optimize for peak productivity. They are worth rediscovering not because they will allow us to rest and, as such, make us better workers — but because they anchor us to who, at heart, we’ve always been.

4. On a related note, the Big Think ran an excerpt of one of the books I’m most excited about this coming year, Jonathan Malesic’s The End of Burnout. The book is out the first week of January, and promises to be fantastic. For what it’s worth, the parking lot in Charlottersville that Jon mentions is a daily destination for yours truly, and the environment he describes there is dead-on:

I expected being a college professor would fulfill me not just as a worker but as a human being. I expected it to be my complete identity, my vocation. Few jobs could ever live up to those expectations, though I had certainly absorbed the notion that the right academic job could. Of course, it didn’t live up to them, and I labored for years before the disappointment and futility became so much to bear that I quit.

By contrast, I had no lofty ideal of work as a parking lot attendant. I thought of it as just an undemanding way to make rent money. I didn’t expect to “engage” with the job. There is no real possibility of experiencing “flow” if you’re a parking lot attendant. There is no progressive challenge to collecting money in a booth. No one gets better at it over time… The job did nothing to foster the absorption in a task that supposedly makes work productive and the worker fulfilled. It was perfect.

I am convinced that my lack of engagement with work was the paradoxical reason I was so happy during my year as a parking lot attendant. The job resisted any effort to make it morally or spiritually meaningful. It did not promise dignity, growth in character, or a sense of purpose. It never held out the possibility of the good life. Because I couldn’t find fulfillment through my job, I had to look for it elsewhere. And I found it: in writing, in friendships, in love.

So many workers are at risk for burnout because the degraded reality of our jobs since the 1970s coincides with a too-lofty ideal of work. The gap between our ideals and our experience at work is too great for us to bear… The Protestant ethic that we carried into the postindustrial era helped create the vast wealth of the countries that are today most concerned about burnout. But it also valorized a destructive ideal of working to the point of martyrdom.

5. Speaking of forthcoming books that get us excited, Christian Century ran an excerpt of Matthew Milliner’s soon-to-be-released The Everlasting People under the title “The creative resistance of Native American Christian art.” To say that the piece opened me up to an entirely fresh vista of grace (which he dubs “Indigenous Christianity”) would be an understatement. Cannot wait for my copy to arrive next week — I’m hoping it contains an image of this Cheyenne Christ, as I couldn’t find one anywhere online:

Now in his 90s, [founder of St. Augustine’s Center for American Indians, Peter] Powell remains an Episcopal priest and an honorary Cheyenne chief. He sees no conflict in these vocations. On my visit to meet him, he accommodated my request to see the Cheyenne Christ. He held it as if it were a child and laid it upon his living room altar, where he still performs daily mass. Powell almost seemed to refer to the sculpture as Christ, testifying to the effect of the countless prayers offered by all those from across the continent who gathered to worship before it for more than 50 years.

Christ’s elongated body conforms to the gentle bend of the cottonwood. His eyes are softly closed as he absorbs his afflictions with hard-won grace: the wounds inflicted on him by the feather-clad priests of Cahokia, who sacrificed human life on the nearby prairie; by General Winfield Scott, who supervised the Trail of Tears; by Chicago’s gun culture and the amnesiac arrogance of its towers; and by the forgetfulness of all who — still benefiting from the remarkably efficient American policy of conquest and removal — live obliviously on this land today.

Standing before the sculpture with Powell, I felt as if I stood in the center of the universe. He was less sanguine, having absorbed some of the sculpture’s radiant sadness. After all, in dynamics that parallel the western frontier, so much of Chicago’s Indigenous population has been gentrified away from Chicago’s north side neighborhoods. “The world as a whole,” Powell gently informed me as I departed, gesturing to the Cheyenne Christ, “is not ready to receive this power.”

6. In humor, The Onion cracked me up with ‘It Would Be So Easy,’ Think 79% Of People Holding Ladders For Loved Ones Putting Up Christmas Lights. The New Yorker hit close to home with “Ah, Another Beautiful Morning —Time to Ruin It by Immediately Opening My Phone” but the hardest laughs were probably the Existentialist Blonde Jokes they compiled:

What do you do when a blonde throws a grenade at you?

Lament the absurdity of a world where science is used for war.

—–

How do you confuse a blonde?

Give her a slip of paper that says, “If you are free, turn this over.”

On the other side it says, “I knew you would do that.”

7. “Is Kenny G’s music a … weapon of consent? Does it make people agree to comply, and if so, why?” This quandary, posed by critic Ben Ratliff, was just one of many moments that made me sit up straight during the incredibly entertaining new documentary Listening to Kenny G. So fascinating, humanizing, hilarious, and unexpected. It not only reveals Kenny to be a figure of near Weird Al-levels of belovedness (and perfectionism), it makes a music snob like myself question just about everything. Amanda Petrusich summed up some of those questions for The New Yorker in her piece “Does Kenny G Make good music?”

“Listening to Kenny G” shows Gorelick applying this idea — that he can satiate his perfectionism through obsessive study — to all facets of his existence, even the soft and instinctive ones, such as parenthood. “How am I going to become the best father the world has ever seen?” he wonders, after his sons are born … He also wants to be the best interviewee in the world. “If that means sitting here for twelve hours and not eating or drinking, I’ll do it,” he tells [director Penny] Lane. Rise and grind, baby!

Has this approach worked for Kenny G? Well, yes and no. In the film’s opening moments, as Gorelick warms up onstage, Lane asks him how he’s feeling. “Underappreciated, in general,” he says. [“But other than that, I’m fine.”]

Later, Petrusich cut me to the core when she observed, “We are all secretly eager to ascribe morality to our likes and dislikes — to enjoy Kenny G is to be a bad person, and to find him absurd is to reinforce your own superiority.” Course, that’s a complicated insight, this week of all weeks, having watched the documentary the day after a former colleague and I had commiserated about our aversion to the Mars Hill phenomenon in the mid-00s being aesthetic before it was anything else.

Strays:

RIP, Michael Nesmith
“I’m the TikTok Couch Guy” by Robert McCoy attempts to give a human face to the “large-scale sleuthing culture” that our true-crime-obsessed moment has foisted upon us:

Given the apparent tendency of the TikTok algorithm to present viral spectacles to a user base increasingly hungry for content to analyze forensically, there will inevitably be more Couch Guys or Praters in the future. When they appear on your For You page, I implore you to remember that they are people, not mysteries for you to solve. As users focused their collective magnifying glass on Lauren, my friends, and me—comparing their sleuthing to “watching a soap opera and knowing who the bad guy is”—it felt like the entertainment value of the meme began to overshadow our humanity. Stirred to make a TikTok of my own to quell the increasing hate, I posted a video reminding the sleuths that “not everything is true crime”—which commenters resoundingly deemed “gaslighting.” Lauren’s videos requesting that the armchair investigation stop were similarly dismissed as more evidence of my success as a manipulator, and my friends’ entreaties to respect our privacy, too, fell on deaf ears.

I wasn’t expecting David Brooks to quote Thornton Wilder’s “The Angel that Troubled the Waters” in his column “What Do You Say to the Sufferer?” but here we are:

We are right to treat those who have suffered with respect and credibility. “Without your wound where would your power be?” Thornton Wilder wrote. “It is your very remorse that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve.”

This doesn’t mean that those who have suffered should go out giving sermons and lectures. We all know the weakness of words in these circumstances. But having tasted desolation, those who have suffered do powerfully sit with others in their desolation.