1. Has it really been ten years since Christian Wiman blew all our minds with My Bright Abyss?? Apparently so! Not that the beloved poet has been idle — there have been multiple volumes of poetry and a collection of essays about art — but it’s certainly nice to have Wiman’s voice front and center again as he promotes his new book of prose, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries against Despair. I’m referring primarily to the NPR segment, as well as Casey Cep’s New Yorker profile we highlighted last week. The piece that’s moved me most, however, was the interview with Josh Jeter in Christianity Today.
Wiman reports having spent the vast majority of the last two years in bed (and almost dying) from the same blood cancer that’s been afflicting him for nearly twenty years now. He goes on:
Extreme illness is hell, but it does strip away the inessentials and make certain intimacies and insights possible, both with people and with God. I spent five weeks in Boston, and while there, two old friends came (at different times) to be with me. One is a Jewish Buddhist poet with whom I have had an ongoing conversation about God for 35 years. The other is a Lebanese/Irish novelist who has a finely developed sense of and respect for the mystery of existence but an antipathy for organized religion.
What surprised me — and has stayed with me — during our time together was how close Christ seemed to be to us, how I could feel him in the care and love they showed for me. I’m not saying either is an “anonymous Christian,” to use Karl Rahner’s unfortunate term. That would be condescending and disrespectful to both. What I am saying, though, is that Christ precedes and exceeds Christianity, and that belief in him is not a precondition for his love.
Jeter closes the interview by asking Wiman what the cross of Jesus means to him:
This embarrasses me — but why? — but I teared up (in the parking lot of my gym) when I first read this question. Simone Weil once said that Christianity would be sufficient if it ended with the Cross — that God would so love humans that he would become one, that he would die for and with us, the sacralizing of matter by the Incarnation — that this was miracle enough.
I can’t agree. Resurrection is the final fruition of that miracle. But I know what she meant. This life is hard. I am a Christian because I believe it looks unflinchingly at — and redeems — that fact.
If that’s not an opening for some Shane MacGowan, may he rest in peace, I don’t know what is:
2. Consider this the next volley in my campaign to get everyone reading Andrew Root before he speaks in NYC for us in April. Comment magazine recently ran a portion of Root and collaborator Blair Bertrand’s new book When the Church Stops Working under the title “Today’s Temptation for the Church.” The full text is behind a paywall, but lord knows that’s a publication worth supporting. Here are a few paragraphs to whet your appetite — very much in line with not only a theology of confession-and-absolution but with Wiman’s words above about the necessity of looking unflinchingly at the actual state of things. If that’s not enough to get you interested, be aware that the set-up for the essay is a deft exegesis of the last six minutes of Aziz Ansari’s most recent stand-up special:
Many of us worry deeply that our congregation, or even your denomination, is going to die. We’re always thinking about dying, but we don’t like to admit it because we hate the thought of dying. Dying is dangerous. It’s bad. It goes against what we think God wants. Doesn’t God want us to have life and life abundant?
Still, when busyness takes over our lives and we feel like we can never stop, it’s common to wonder if the only thing that will stop the treadmill is dying. Burned-out leaders, especially pastors, have wished they could die. Not necessarily suicide, although that is a tragic possibility, but something that simply stops the acceleration. Often they sense that if they ever stop, they’ll let down their congregants and they’ll disappoint God. They’ll betray the faith they have given their life to.
Only dying can stop acceleration. There is no other way. Only in dying can the church find its way beyond the crisis of decline, which is a fake crisis, and into the crisis of God’s action in the world.
Humility is not something on our to-do list, as if it were a difficult workout at the spiritual gym. Rather, it is a surrender, stopping and confessing that having more cannot save us or our church. In humility, you confess you need something outside your own energy, outside your own creativity, to save you. You die to yourself by confessing you’re in need of a saving you can’t accomplish from your own striving for more. This kind of dying creates new possibilities because it leads to confession.
Those looking for a worthy addendum on the topic — one that outlines the supreme (crazy-making!) resistance this sort of surrender/confession encounters on a denominational level — check out Benjamin Crosby’s piece on Plough, “Zero Episcopalians.”
3. In his newsletter this week Atlantic staffer Derek Thompson explored “How Anxiety Became Content,” After providing an overview of the new “genre” on social media — the TikTok hashtag #Trauma has more than 6 billion views, in excess of 5,500 podcasts have the word trauma in their title — Thompson suggests that our consumption of such material may be backfiring:
Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist at the University of Southern California, told me she has come to think that, for many young people, claiming an anxiety crisis or post-traumatic stress disorder has become like a status symbol. “I worry that for some people, it’s become an identity marker that makes people feel special and unique,” Saxbe said. “That’s a big problem because this modern idea that anxiety is an identity gives people a fixed mindset, telling them this is who they are and will be in the future.” On the contrary, she said, therapy works best when patients come into sessions believing that they can get better. That means believing that anxiety is treatable, modifiable, and malleable — all the things a fixed identity is not.
There is also an enormous difference between critiquing therapy itself and critiquing the poppy online version. “I teach clinical psychology, I am a therapist, and I’m very pro-therapy,” Saxbe said. But we may have overcorrected from an era when mental health was shameful to talk about to an era when some vulnerable people surround themselves with conversations and media about anxiety and depression, which makes them more vigilant about symptoms and problems, which makes them more likely to problematize normal daily stress, which makes them move toward a deficit model of psychopathology where they think there is always something wrong with them that needs their attention, which causes them to pull back from social engagement, which causes even more distress and anxiety.
4. Next up, in the New York Times Christopher Beha interrogates “The Mystical Catholic Tradition of Jon Fosse.” Fosse, as you may remember, is the Norwegian novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year for his seven volume Septology. Yours truly has yet to take the plunge, but was heartened to hear that these are not marathon volumes. They’re also supposed to be much more readable than the structure might indicate (each volume a single sentence that covers a single day, adding up to a single week). Yet as compelling as Beha makes the books sound, it is his own reflections that distinguish the essay. An ideal precursor to the upcoming Mystery Issue of our print magazine, too:
The books take place during Advent — which is to say, right at this time of year — and they are saturated by the feeling of waiting that this season brings. Not waiting for a family holiday or the turning of the calendar but waiting for that time when a God who is at once inside of us and impossibly far away will finally be seen face-to-face.
I sometimes think that the modern world’s true cultural divide is not between believers and unbelievers but between those who think life is a puzzle that is capable of being solved and those who believe it’s a mystery that ought to be approached by way of silence and humility. I am a problem solver by disposition, but in my heart I am strongly on the side of the mysterians.
The most sincere believers I’ve known have also been the most humble, the most perplexed. It may be that those who feel most powerfully the presence of God in their lives likewise feel most powerfully the impossibility of adequately capturing that presence in words. And it may be that those for whom God is not a symbol or a cudgel but a lived reality find this reality most mysterious.
5. In humor, “Joseph and Mary Ask Jesus to Come Home for Hanukkah” elicited a few chuckles, especially the passive aggressive parable Mary shares with her son. On Instagram, Tom Fell’s hilarious tips on improving one’s mental health had me clicking ‘share’ almost immediately. Reductress got me smirking with its doubleness-drenched “Why I Stopped Making New Year’s Resolutions and Started Making New Year’s Problems.”
But what’s brought me the most glee (by far!) this week is the combat-juggling-level discovery that Extreme Ironing is a real sport. Not a joke! We human beings are sometimes pretty darn lovable, eh?
6. Everyone knows there’s nothing less funny than having to explain what makes something funny. That’s the rule of thumb at least, and I can’t say I disagree. Writing about humor is usually pretty dull. Which is why I was so surprised at how engaging Adam Gopnik’s essay “What Do We Want from Comedy?” was, in which the New Yorker mainstay mines a few recent theories on the subject. He also takes care to trace the medium’s ascendancy to near religious heights in recent years. Shades of #seculosity and #lowanthropology abound:
Surely any relaxation that we feel, any release, [from comedy] has more to do with that sudden acceptance of our shared helplessness in the face of the comedian’s gift for naming our best-kept secrets. Comedy is more likely to involve shared shock than communal bonding; impiety is its theme far more often than is any collective “moment of healing.” In truth, the happiness we experience is the happiness of escape, however momentary, from the enforced good feelings that phrases like “a moment of healing” suggest. Piety is poison to comedy […]
If the uses of comedy are endless, what seems to make us laugh loudest now are reminders of uncomfortable but permanent human truths. We laugh when John Mulaney tells us that, in the midst of his drug intervention, he stopped to count, self-approvingly, the celebrities who had come out to help intervene. We laugh harder when he realizes that, however well meaning they were, he will now have to pick up the tabs for his dinners with them forever. Even our greatest moments of crisis are never untouched by personal calculation.
We turn toward one another at the show in delighted shock because we recognize that our deepest selves contain as much guilty knowledge as good feeling. The cognitive twist we call comedy makes the guilty knowledge become good feeling.
Hmmm … sounds not unlike the dynamic that Root and Betrand were talking about earlier. This is comedian not only as preacher but high priest and mediator, transmuting confession into absolution. Or at least, something approximating sorrow (or even horror?) into something approximating joy. A bit like this:
7. On a less seculigious(!) note, over at Seen and Unseen, psychologist Roger Bretherton dialed into a seasonal frequency that’s eerily similar to one Sarah hit in her exquisite post from yesterday. In a post exploring “The Shadow Under the Christmas Tree” he writes:
Christmas is a time for ghosts … It might be the empty chair at the table. It may be the memory of happier times. It could be a year of losses and regrets. But there is a darkness to Christmas that the fairy lights and tinsel can’t quite conceal. There’s a shadow under the Christmas tree that we’d rather not acknowledge.
Thankfully, also like Sarah, Bretherton approaches the darkness with a measure of humor, outlining the three key steps that “are guaranteed to turn the usual family drama into a crisis.” An inverted guide to holiday harmony, you might say:
First, take it personally. Instead of thinking your family (like most families) can be a bit weird and anyone would struggle to get on with them at times, convince yourself that their eccentricities say something really hideous about you. Spending time with these people makes you a worthless, useless, failure — or whatever other creative insights your inner critic has gift-wrapped for you this season.
Second, make sure you ignore anything good. Even the most dysfunctional families lapse into moments of hilarity, peace, or occasionally even love. We can be quite good at ignoring these bits though. Third, imagine it’s going to last forever. It’s true all good things come to an end. But to be honest, all bad things come to an end too. Our least favourite Christmas gatherings may feel interminable, but they only get worse if we keep telling ourselves, we’re stuck in the land that time forgot.
The family that is currently doing our head in, is the family without whom we would not have a head in the first place. So, when we sing sweet carols to the baby Jesus, we’re actually celebrating the moment God got a family.
8. Last but not least — pun only kinda intended — Elizabeth Bruenig surveyed the findings of the new book Final Words: 578 Men and Women Executed on Texas Death Row. Very powerful stuff:
Religious conviction likewise makes a frequent appearance in the final remarks of Texas’s execution subjects — not only in personal expressions of faith, but in exhortations to find God. “I plead with all the teenagers to stop the violence and to accept Jesus Christ and find victory,” Danny Ray Harris said in July 1993. “Today I have victory in Christ and I thank Jesus for taking my spirit into his precious hands. Thank you, Jesus.” In December of 1995, Hai Hai Vuong voiced similar thoughts: “I thank God that he died for my sins on the cross, and I thank him for saving my soul … I hope whoever hears my voice tonight will turn to the Lord.” Harris was convicted of the 1978 murder of Timothy Michael Merka, whom he beat to death with a tire iron in rural Brazos County; Vuong was found guilty of the shooting deaths of Tien Van Nguyen and Hien Quang Tran in 1986. It’s natural — and common — to question the sincerity of expressions of faith among condemned people, but it’s worth noting that there was no way these particular statements of religious belief could have helped the men and women who made them. If it were all pretense, it was extended long past the point of utility.
The same can be said of the numerous expressions of love and hopes of forgiveness in Final Words. “I love you, everyone, I go out with great love and respect,” Miguel A. Richardson said at his June 2001 execution for the 1979 slaying of the Holiday Inn security guard John G. Ebbert. “Stop killing start loving. Stop the violence.” Many prisoners addressed their victims’ families directly. Michael Adam Sigala, convicted of the 2000 murders of a young couple in Plano, asked “forgiveness of the family. I have no reason for why I did it, I don’t understand why I did it. I hope you can live the rest of your lives without hate.” Forgiveness is ordinarily imagined in therapeutic terms, something one asks for to free them from the bonds of old guilt, pave the way for reconciliation. But forgiveness requested on the brink of death is perhaps purer. It’s a prayer for which there is no future, a hope without a chance. But it must be precious, because scores of people executed in Texas spent their last breaths begging for it.
Strays:
- A great seasonal refresher: “Understanding the political world into which Jesus was born” by Philip Jenkins.
- Marriage Will Kill You (and That’s Good) by Alex Sosler takes Harrison Scott Key’s How to Stay Married as a jumping off point for a profoundly gracious meditation on matrimony.
- On the Mockingcast (out tomorrow, most likely), we also discuss Rachel Cohen’s essay for Vox, “How Millennials Learned to Dread Motherhood.” We also talk about the Words of the Year (Merriam-Webster gave top nod to “authentic” and Oxford went with “rizz”).
- The Brothers Zahl reconvened for one-off Christmas episode! Should be out early next week — be sure you’re subscribed.
- Bookmark this last one for next year’s Mbird XMas Playlist, ht JAM:
