December 6-12 - Mockingbird

1. While we all (impatiently) wait for season 3 of Severance, a new show has arrived on Apple TV that’s off to a promising start. Created by Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul’s Vince Gilligan, Pluribus is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi series that follows Carol’s journey to save the world from happiness.

The premise is ingenious: After a mass-infection of an alien virus, the entirety of humanity is now serenely content, living in a “harmonious hive mind … They are hardline pacifists, utterly convinced they are liberating humans from conflict, negative emotions, and ultimately, from themselves.”

Carol, however, is immune to this virus. In fact, as Joshua Bloor masterfully highlights, it’s her grief and depression that may be humanity’s saving grace:

Many of us are taught from childhood to avoid sadness — “Cheer up, you’re fine.” In a world of inspirational quotes and booming wellness industries, sadness feels wrong. Yet valuing only positive feelings sets an impossible standard. People end up feeling like they must avoid sadness at all costs. It’s no wonder many of us feel ashamed or anxious when we have a bad day. Like the Pluribus hive mind, cheerfulness is mandatory, and anything less is seen as “broken.”

Ironically, studies show that the societal pressure to feel happy (and never sad) is linked to poorer mental health. Neuroscientists have found that when children grow up in families where emotions aren’t named, noticed, or welcomed, it actually shapes how their brains develop. The regions responsible for managing feelings and handling stress don’t grow as strongly as they should. […]

By eradicating personal pain, the hive mind also erases depth of feeling. Humanity gains perpetual comfort, but at the expense of authentic connection. Carol’s misery keeps her tethered to reality — she is the only one who can remind the Joined of what love and meaning truly feel like, because she alone remembers what it’s like to suffer. In ending world suffering, they’ve also ended love, since real love includes the possibility of loss and suffering.

As Dostoevsky suggested, suffering is not just pain, it is wounded love. Hell, as Father Zosima claims in Brothers Karamazov, “is the suffering of being unable to love.” This is true on a divine level. Because if God cannot suffer, then God cannot love, either.

With Pluribus, Carol’s desolation becomes a form of resistance — an insistence that authentic human experience demands the full spectrum of emotion. She’s not fighting for the right to be happy; she’s fighting for the right to be real.

Making happiness the ultimate goal of life leaves little room for actual human interaction. Relationships, as many of us know, can be highly inconvenient — they can interrupt our carefully crafted schedules, our endless list of tasks, and even our moments of peace. But as David Zahl aptly said in the newest episode of The Mockingcast,

Interruption is often the place of grace in our lives … What a shame it would be to miss the interruptions because that seems to be how God creeps in.

2. Speaking of relationships, there’s no greater test of their strength than the holidays. Fraught with family members who hold wildly different political views, loved ones who insist on asking you about your love life, or strangers who were invited last minute by your mom, the holidays are Hospitality 101.

We want the Perfect Hallmark Christmas^TM with mistletoe and yule log and joyful celebration around splendid food and nostalgic classics. But as Clare Coffey reminds us in Christianity Today — “People Always Ruin Christmas”:

The Perfect Christmas turns the mundane to-do list into scaffolding for the emotional consummation of a hundred cross-hatched desires. If we work hard enough, happiness will come easily. […]

Christmas is the time of year when families come together, which means that Christmas is our chance to make up for all those days of the year spent in separate rooms, all that time spent ignoring each other on our phones. Christmas, one perfect day, is our chance to erase the quarrels and sloth and apathy, the squalid minutiae. On our Perfect Christmas, we will get to experience what being a family is all about.

Until, of course, people ruin it, as they always do, with their squabbles, failures, needs, competing points of view, and a hundred other potential points of departure from the vision board. The Perfect Christmas — an ideal that can be constructed and pursued without its maker ever becoming aware of it — usually suffers death by a thousand cuts from the sharp edge of reality.

Perhaps the reality of an Imperfect Christmas and its cast of kooky characters can open us up to the surprising grace of hospitality:

Hospitality is mysterious: a transcendent correction to the problem of exclusion that retains and even emphasizes the pain that it turns into joy. Family life is mysterious: a burning core of the solidarity and communion for which humans were made that always reveals a shortfall in the moment of its happiest achievement. Hospitality and family are among the sweetest things we experience in this life precisely because the desires involved will never be perfectly satisfied in this world. The joy and the pain both point us to something beyond them.

So, bring out the prime rib and puff pastry or slice-and-bake cookies. Do things differently for a day. Extend the invitation. Make the invitees feel special, and ask nothing in return. People shouldn’t be alone at Christmas. The imperfect Christmas will mean unfinished to-do lists, hurt feelings, disappointments, awkward silences, boring conversations, the pepperoni on the cheese board disappearing too fast. It will mean songs and colored lights and homecomings and Waterford crystal, and it will make you so very happy but never happy enough. Celebrate it anyway. The celebration will never make us happy enough, but the reason we celebrate will.

3. For decades, the inmates in San Quentin had been playing baseball against one another within the walls of the prison. But in 2023, San Quentin’s Field of Dreams welcomed teams from the outside. A 40-game schedule consisted of college, high school, and men’s league opponents from across the country and even Canada. Eli Tan, from the NY Times, is our eyes and ears inside San Quentin and its surprising revelations:

Chance Andes, San Quentin’s warden, believes that baseball can be just as rehabilitative as state-mandated therapy sessions or vocational training, which is why the prison has invested so much time and resources into the team.

“The skills you learn on a baseball field, the camaraderie, the joy, you can take that out into the real world,” the warden said.

For almost all the players on the team, it was also in the weeks or months after their final youth baseball seasons that their lives went downhill.

“When we’re out here, it’s more than just the feeling of playing baseball,” said Angelo Mechi, an assistant coach. “It’s the feeling of being free again.”

Carrington Russelle, one of the team’s captains, is currently serving a life sentence but has applied for a resentencing. Tan’s interactions with the captain were particularly moving:

In the character statement Russelle wrote in his application to be resentenced, [Tan] talked about how he used baseball as his ministry, and his role as a captain to build the team’s players into men.

On the floor of his cell, Russelle painted the Roman Road, a series of scriptures from the Book of Romans that outlines God’s plan for redemption: sin, consequence, salvation and acceptance.

But he realized redemption for his mistakes was more complicated than the wins and losses on a baseball field. After decades spent in prison for crimes that could never be undone, to victims that would never be the same, what did it mean to be redeemed?

“We caused tremendous harm, and we were rightly sentenced for our actions,” Russelle said. “Now we’re here, wanting to account for what we did.”

4. Moving on to a topic that’s (alas) more Lent-ish than Advent-ish: death! More specifically, obituaries and what they “reveal about how Americans define a ‘life well lived.'”

Authors for the Conversation analyzed 38 million obituaries published from 1998 to 2024. The purpose of their research was to identify widespread American values and traditions and whether those beliefs shifted throughout “generations, regions and major historical events.” Using text-analysis tools to find common words, what they discovered is fascinating:

Across nearly 30 years of obituaries, words related to the value “tradition” appeared most often – many tributes described religious participation and enduring customs. Words related to the value “benevolence” – caring for the welfare of others – were also consistently prominent. In fact, tradition and benevolence formed the dominant value profile across the dataset: They appeared in more than 70% of the obituaries. By contrast, words related to values like “achievement” and “power” appeared far less often.

Isn’t that something? You (and others) probably won’t remember or care about your achievements but how you loved and were loved. It recalls what Paul Zahl remarked a few years ago that “There are certain things that are eternal, but when you look back, you realize that 85% of what you thought was worth giving your all to was a charade, a mist. It really is the case.”

The researchers then noted how COVID-19 marked the shift away from benevolence-related language toward tradition-related language (like “service” and “faith”) in the pandemic’s later stages. They concluded,

These changes show that collective disruptions impact the moral vocabulary families use when commemorating loved ones. They shift what it means to have lived a good life.

I wonder what (if any) shifts will occur 20–40 years from now. I’m certain that some obituaries will, unfortunately, be written by ChatGPT.

5. Now for some humor … This past Wednesday, the Australian Government implemented its social media ban for children under the age of 16. There is a lot of discourse surrounding it (and I’m certain we’ll learn of its effects soon enough), but in the meantime here’s the Chaser‘s “PM says social media ban is the only way to stop the ‘6-7’ meme”:

The Australian Government has taken the unprecedented step of banning anyone under 16 from social media, in a last ditch attempt to eradicate the ‘6-7’ brain-rot epidemic plaguing the world.

It is understood the government is still weighing up more measures, such as banning under 16s from speaking in general if things don’t improve. […]

“At first I was really upset about the ban” said Ben, 14, “but now I’ve realised that without all the hours I’ve spent doomscrolling I’ll have much more time to pursue other hobbies.”

“Like petty theft, vandalism, underage drinking, selling illegal vapes and intimidating elderly neighbours. I can’t wait!”

For more kicks and giggles there’s the New Yorker‘s “This Bowl Has One Hundred Grams of Protein”: “You need all this protein in order to work out. Even if you’re not working out today. Or yesterday. Or tomorrow.”

And finally, from McSweeney’s “Why We’re Paywalling Our Family Christmas Card”:

Everybody on our list will receive the Morton Christmas Card featuring a candid photo of us down by the lake, wearing matching outfits. And while we love everyone who receives our card, those who subscribe and support our family’s essential end-of-year work will get even more of our love.

6. Second to last is Rachel Mann’s most recent for the Christian Century on hope and failure. She begins by defining what cultural theorist Lauren Berlant names “cruel optimism” — “in which ‘something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.'”

Mann points out a prime example of cruel optimism: the American dream — the good life narrative that falsely promises that everyone can achieve success if they just! try! hard! enough! Another example? The prosperity gospel (that some modes of Christianity proclaim) that suggests blessings will come to those who pray hard enough and do enough good works.

But the true story of the Christian faith, Mann poignantly writes, is not one of cruel optimism but hope:

To grow into Christ’s likeness is to step toward failure and the stripping away of power. Christianity reveals that along the way of death is the way of life. It is not sentimental. That is the promissory nature of hope: it is the promise of not pleasure or the good life but a progressive exposure to God’s reality. And it is love — not defined as a romantic or sentimental or instrumental category but demonstrated in God’s solidarity with the castoff and invitation to us to stand with them, too.

What I think it comes down to is finding joy in not having to achieve or be anything more than the catastrophe and mess and less-than-virtuous person one actually is. The only level of wisdom required is to know that one is unwise and foolish and cannot achieve the completeness of the complete person — the good person or the holy person. For there is only one who is good and one who is holy. There is only one human being, Jesus Christ, and it is okay to be an approximation of him.

Hope works only if it is located in the right place. Its promises are only as good as the one who makes them. When we attempt to live on promises made by a human or an institution, we risk being let down. I know only too well as a Christian that sometimes it can feel as if God lets us down, too. But God is good, and God’s promises are, ultimately, reliable. They present something trustworthy in the midst of precarious hope and too much cruel optimism.

7. And finally, I couldn’t leave you without acknowledging Portugal’s DJ Priest — the Rev. Guilherme Peixoto. Padre Guilherme’s opening act for his rave last month was a video message from none other than Pope Leo XIV (shoutout to my dear friend Ben Self for reminding me this existed!).