Another Week Ends

1. For the first Valentine’s Day in a few years, I’m in love, and yet I spent Wednesday evening sitting stag in a church pew in a posture of penitence — the service a solemn reminder of my frailty. This is a far cry from the elegant prix fixe menus and signature cocktails some of my buds were imbibing. But it didn’t make me sad; it felt exactly right. Esau McCauley in the Atlantic gets at why:

At first glance, these two days could not be more different: One is a lighthearted celebration of love and affection, the other a somber reminder of human mortality. But love and death are not strangers; they chase each other like childhood friends playing tag in the schoolyard. The coincidence of these two holidays occurring on the same day feels providential, reminding us that death lingers at the edge of the sweetest romances, waiting for its moment to spoil the fun.

Sad breakups have had a way of reminding me that “I am dust,” but it’s a surprising and gracious experience to be reminded of my gritty humanity within the context of a loving relationship, with a person — with the Lord.

Nonetheless, this story will have an ending. Humanity’s great enemy cannot be put off forever. Death will intrude into our narrative, taking one from the other. When we are at our frailest and most in need of companionship, death will separate lifelong friends. Then the depth of love will be revealed in the abyss of grief. Valentine’s Day will be swallowed up by Ash Wednesday …

What do we do with this reality? We remember that love is a wonder; in its first flush, it is intoxicating, and feels like it encompasses the world. But that feeling has always been something of a lie.

McCaulley suggests that placing too high a value on romantic relationships can lead to emotional and spiritual bankruptcy. Esther Perel has been preaching this word from the pulpit of her podcast for years. Equal with romantic love, our vocations matter, our friendships matter, our obligations to neighbors matter. Our insatiable appetite for love and meaning cannot be fed by one person who is similarly starved for affection. This sounds unromantic, but it’s very good news.

Both Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day present visions of the meaning of life. But Ash Wednesday offers the more radical hope. As it looks toward Jesus’s death and resurrection, it dares to suggest that there is a divine love not limited by mortality, and that although we are sprinting to our graves, we might one day rise from them and face an affection that defies description … Ash Wednesday does not simply tell us that we might die. It suggests that through the power of God, death might not have the final word. It is bold enough to maintain that all our temporal affections are echoes and hints of a divine love that can bear the weight romantic love cannot.

2. Speaking of love, the Point’s advice column takes up a question about intellectual inequality in romantic relationships (gut punch), namely, why it matters so much to a girlfriend that she is seen to be as smart as her boyfriend. Citing Becca Rothfeld’s new book All Things Are Too Small, Proust, Norman Rush, and Jane Austen, Lillian Fishman’s advice might surprise you.

As a culture we generally imagine that romantic love alone promises a type of communion in which souls actually meet each other, unmediated by power, inferiority, ego, projection … We imagine that romantic love contains a unique, even a magical solace.

Fishman chafes at the idea of lovers being totally equal, of getting what you deserve, of the idea of ever being good enough for each other. 

Are any of us worthy judges of our own value and our own particular skills? I’ll take you at your word that, based on your own definition of intelligence, you have an accurate handle on how smart you are; but in general we are notoriously bad at judging ourselves … We don’t have access to essential truths about each other; and this question of equality is, as you point out, always a problem of belief. Isn’t the sensation of love inherently a sensation of overvaluing someone, of knowing that what you feel for them is immeasurable, wild and indefensible to others?

She seems to be describing love as the opposite of equality. Our worthiness to receive it is not based on intellect, power, decency, money, or any of our good deeds. She’s describing love as grace.

Love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the very proof of real love … How much finer it is to hear: I’m crazy about you even though you’re neither intelligent nor decent, even though you’re a liar, an egotist, a bastard.

We’re not used to hearing this because we’re comforted by the delusion that we’ve earned everything good in our lives. But Fishman is convinced that being loved amid apparent unworthiness is what makes love so potent, so rare. 

In love we decide again and again not to wield our portion of power. The idealized form of equal love, which wouldn’t require this refusal, would also lack love’s most profound and transcendent quality.

3. Once a notoriously outgoing, extroverted culture, “Americans Have Stopped Hanging Out” and their dynamism is in steep decline, says Derek Thompson. In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam charted this decline from the 1970s-90s, but antisocial stats have steeply risen since then. From 2003 to 2022, American men reduced their average hours of face-to-face socializing by about 30 percent. For unmarried Americans, the decline was even bigger — more than 35 percent. For teenagers, it was more than 45 percent. Boys and girls ages 15 to 19 reduced their weekly social hangouts by more than three hours a week. In short, there is no statistical record of any other period in U.S. history when people have spent more time on their own. Many people have traded pets for people, with many young women spending more time with their cats than their girlfriends (really! It’s been charted.) Add remote work, food delivery apps, streaming platforms, and virtual church services to this and the loungewear boom starts to make a lot of sense.

Maybe this isn’t all that worrisome though? Aloneness isn’t loneliness after all. And how possible is solitude in a world of constant pinging interruption?

For Americans in the 2020s, solitude, anxiety, and dissatisfaction seem to be rising in lockstep. Surveys show that Americans, and especially young Americans, have never been more anxious about their own lives or more depressed about the future of the country. Teenage depression and hopelessness are setting new annual records every year. The share of young people who say they have a close friend has plummeted.

So this prolonged aloneness does equal depression. The solution isn’t simple. Thompson doesn’t think that simply hanging out more will solve every problem. It’s a both a quantity and quality problem: facetime instead of FaceTime is the remedy, because after all, digital content is designed to leave us anxious, hungry, without, and wanting more.

We come into this world craving the presence of others. But a few modern trends — a sprawling built environment, the decline of church, social mobility that moves people away from friends and family — spread us out as adults in a way that invites disconnection … Screens have replaced a chunk of our physical-world experience with a digital simulacrum that has enough spectacle and catastrophe to capture hours of our greedy attention. These devices so absorb us that it’s very difficult to engage with them and be present with other people. The sum result of these trends is that we are both pushed and pulled toward a level of aloneness for which we are dysevolved and emotionally unprepared.

We live with this reality. I don’t need to remind you of what you see everyday from your screen, but I can remind you that, despite the hurts it has caused, the remedy for the loneliness pandemic could be found at a local church. At their best, churches are a community meant to lift us up in times of crisis. Several years ago, CT reported that a “number of large, well-designed research studies have found that religious service attendance is associated with greater longevity, less depression, less suicide, less smoking, less substance abuse, better cancer and cardiovascular- disease survival, less divorce, greater social support, greater meaning in life, greater life satisfaction, more volunteering, and greater civic engagement.”

If you’re tired of doom-scrolling alone, maybe going back to church is worth the risk? 

4. So yes, try church. Also: throw better parties, says Tara Isabella Burton at Plough.

Do you remember the first party you went to as the pandemic abated? And can you still feel that nerve wracking tinge of first-day-of-school jitters mixed with total and complete jazzy desperation because you were so pumped to get out of the house in a real outfit? We all need more of that feeling! And we need more of the sparkly connection only made possible in such settings. It’s not frivolous, rather it is festive, and festivity is an essential characteristic of a full and joyful life.

“Far from being frivolous (and, in many ways, because of its seeming frivolousness), the party – at least what I want to call a Good Party – offers us a vision of an affective polity, rather than an ideological or disengaged one. It is a practice for living.

A Good Party is a place where bonds of friendship, fostered in a spirit of both charity and joy, serve as the building blocks for communal life overall. The wedding feast, that abundant banquet of Christian life, is always prefigured in the convivial symposium of friendship. The kingdom of heaven, when it comes, will be a very Good Party.”

Good Parties are opportunities to cultivate Good Virtues. In his book In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity, Josef Pieper writes, “Because the festive occasion pure and simple, the divine guarantee of the world and of human salvation, exists and remains true continuously, we may say that in essence one single everlasting festival is being celebrated.”

Burton is extolling festivity for the same reasons. A Good Party: “fosters in its attendees the same qualities of charity, of kindness, of appreciation for one another, of openness and vulnerability and effervescence, that are themselves the party’s aims … no quality is required in us but our willingness to show up, our openness to being at a party in the first place, and to learning from those around us how to participate in joy.”

Speaking of parties, Mbird is hosting a fun one in NYC in April …

5. We all know these people: folks who find every reason to post photos from their latest trip weeks after they’ve returned home, or wedding photos long after they’ve come home from their honeymoon. In Shouts and Murmurs, Meg Richardson (not Ritchey) lists the reasons why.

This story of Simon Williams, who failed at giving up booze in January and is about to fail at giving up chocolate for Lent, hits a little too close to home.

A little miffed? So is Rachel Reyes, and it shows in her list of things that other people should give up for Lent. List favorites: Comic Sans, Bacon Bits, and dentists who want to chat while their hands are in your mouth.

Earlier we talked about how much time people spend with their pets these days, but what happens when your relationship with your emotional support animal becomes toxic?

6. Closing out this week with a dive into the that Superbowl ad that generated such controversy — for the second year in a row. It turns out that washing feet is still just as controversial as it was in Jesus’ day. Legalists of all stripes were up in arms at who the ad failed to condemn. Surely Jesus wouldn’t wash the feet of those Judases, would he? Heh. But as David French explains in the New York Times, all the hand-wringing and pitchforks is an object lesson in missing the point:

Far from making a stealth case for Christian nationalism, the ads are making a rather blatant case to Christians that perhaps Jesus would not play the culture-warrior role they imagine. This is especially true of the Super Bowl ad, which refers to a story known primarily to Christians. […]

It’s one thing to possess the courage to say what you believe, but it takes immeasurably more courage to truly love people you’re often told to hate — even and especially if they don’t love you back. There is nothing distinctive about boldly declaring your beliefs. Many people do that. But how many people love their enemies?

That’s what the Super Bowl ad is communicating. It’s not saying there’s no difference between the cop and the young Black man or between the oil rig worker and the climate activist — or that they shouldn’t speak about their differences. It’s saying something far more radical and valuable: I can love you and serve you even when I disagree with you.

In fact, while Jesus was obviously a preacher and a teacher, Scripture is clear that when people were suffering or in peril, time and again Jesus moved to relieve their suffering before he asked them to follow him. He immediately demonstrated love and compassion when people were under duress. Kindness was not conditioned on first accepting his teaching.

French goes on to relay prime grace-in-practice story by evangelical pastor Tony Campolo, who once found himself eating at a late night diner when a group of prostitutes came in:

One of the women, named Agnes, said her birthday was the next day and observed that she’d never had a birthday party in her life. Campolo overheard the conversation and asked a man behind the counter if the women came in every night. He said yes.

The next night, Campolo brought some simple decorations, hung them up and threw Agnes a surprise party in that diner. She cried tears of joy and ended up taking the cake home, untouched. It was the first birthday cake she had ever received. After she left, he prayed with the people who remained in the diner, and one of the employees asked him what kind of church he belonged to.

Campolo’s answer was perfect: He said he belonged to the kind of church that gives a party for a prostitute at 3:30 a.m. Not, obviously, because he approved of prostitution. But because he cared for Agnes. He threw that party for her before he knew how she’d respond, before he knew whether she’d leave the streets and before he’d had a chance to say anything at all to her about Jesus. The party itself spoke to her more loudly than any words could have.

Strays:

• Marilyn Robinson has written her own exegesis of the first book of the Bible, called Reading Genesis. It follows Calvin’s in treating scripture as art, because according to Robinson, “An aesthetic appreciation of the Bible doesn’t diminish its holiness. On the contrary, artistry is divine.”
• At Seen and Unseen, Barnabas Aspray preaches the same old song that Christianity is more than a moral program for self-improvement, or a set of spiritual practices; it is wholehearted belief in the power of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection as the advent of a new reality.
• In a world that loves pleasure, the cost of discipleship seems steep, that is, unless we were created to deny ourselves, as Alan Noble suggests over at Christianity Today. 
• The Gospel Coalition takes a look at the beginning of the Alpha Course and one of its unsung creators, Charles Marnham.
• A new PZ’s Podcast is out today, where he gives his thoughts on rock n’ roll.