Another Week Ends

1. This year, I attended my church’s noontime Ash Wednesday service. Wedging my solemnity between back-to-back meetings and hurried phone calls left me frayed — a pressing reminder of the season I’m in: a time when no one and nothing is getting the best of me. Walking to the altar, I was worried that the elegant church ladies wearing black could tell how worn out I was feeling.

For Plough, Tish Harrison Warren reminds us that spiritual exhaustion is very often where Lent begins.

We know the difference between the kind of gratifying tiredness that comes after a good day’s work and the burden of weariness, when the hardness of life settles on us thick and leaden. The book of Ecclesiastes names the latter the “weariness of the flesh” (Ecclesiastes 12:12). It comes with desolation, anxiety, and the deep sigh of despair.

For the first time in a while, the notion that I am dust was an easy concept to absorb. I could blow away at any minute. As the service went on, kneeling, standing, kneeling again, I was consoled by the remembrance that our faith is a refuge in exactly these times. Too tired to reach out to God, he reaches down to us.

Jesus calls the weary to himself. He does not call the self-sufficient, nor those with the proper religious credentials or perfect, Instagram-able lives. He calls those exhausted from toil, from just getting through the day. He calls those burdened with heavy loads, those weighed down by sin and sorrow. It is these, not the confident and successful, to whom Jesus says, “Come to me.”

The good news of Jesus is not that we get a merit badge for being put together and hope that God ignores our failures. We serve God not only with our strengths, but in our weaknesses.

The ones Jesus calls are the weary ones, the ones who snap at those they love after a long day, the ones who battle addiction, the ones who aren’t who they wish they were, the ones who know they are not strong, the ones who wrestle and repent, who fail and fail again. This is the church, these ones through whom Jesus is strong.

2. The notion that faith can be a source of consolation and the church body an emblem of reconciliation has shaped the contours of writer Christopher Beha’s belief — and unbelief — as he outlines in his new book Why I Am Not an Atheist: Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. In it, the former Harper’s Magazine editor wrestles with questions like What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope? 

He recently published two articles — at the New Yorker and the Lamp — to tease the book. “Pinned by an Angel” recalls a terrifying nighttime experience that he had as adolescent.

When I was fifteen years old, an angel of God came to me at night, pinned me to my bed, and demanded that I put my trust in the Lord. This was no dream. I was awake, and a terrifying presence was communicating to me. I tried to escape, but my body wouldn’t move. Through great effort, I finally yelled out, and my scream chased the presence away. My heart pounded as I caught my breath. Coming back to myself, I heard my twin brother, Jim, snoring peacefully in the bunk above.

By morning, the sense of horror had passed, but I was still sure that something significant had happened. I never mentioned it — not even to Jim, whom I told everything — and I thought less and less about it over time, until it seemed possible that I’d imagined the whole thing. Then it happened again.

The visitations continued for years, varying in power and vividness, though each was terrifying and unmistakably real.

Beha goes on to share about his upbringing on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, describing his “Catholic world” as an altar boy, rosary recitations, and Jesuit high school. But as a freshman at Princeton, following his brother Jim’s harrowing and scary brush with death, Beha began to doubt the faith of his youth.

The recognition of our finitude and mortality pushes some people toward belief, but it had the opposite effect on me. On campus that spring, I started skipping Mass … The questions I’d been struggling with made the choice feel more significant. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t believe in God but that I didn’t believe that the God of all this suffering was worthy of my weekly devotion.

Eventually I gave up even the intention to attend church on my own, but I continued going with my family at home. I would still have described myself as Catholic if anyone had asked. Plenty of people I knew described themselves as such, even participated more or less fully in the faith (especially when family was involved), while admitting when pressed that they didn’t really buy into all of it. I thought of myself as belonging to this ambivalent camp.

His ambivalence turned into active disbelief after reading Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, wherein Russell insists that we must respond to fear not by dogmatically accepting the creeds handed down to us by tradition and authority but by looking at the world with a “fearless outlook and a free intelligence.”

Within a few years, his miraculous nighttime encounter with the angel was understood to be a physiological phenomenon, not a supernatural encounter. Religious devotion was subsumed by artistic ambition and creative discipline. Beha wanted to be a great writer, and he hoped that he “would make lasting art from the discomfort of living in a godless universe.” Then he was diagnosed with stage three lymphatic cancer. As he tells it, this didn’t bring him to his knees; it emboldened him. He went from being merely a disbeliever to an evangelical atheist. The New Atheists were all the rage, so he was in good intellectual company. But just as he had doubts about religion, eventually he began to doubt the fervency of his atheism.

First I rejected traditional belief, then I rejected the more strident forms of unbelief, and finally I arrived at a moderate compromise position. The common name for this position is agnosticism. Depending on how you understand that term, it describes either a very old or a fairly recent response to the problem of belief. If you take agnosticism to be simply the view that human beings can never really answer the question of God’s existence, then it is likely as old as belief itself. That position has historically been called skepticism. To this day, I consider myself a skeptic, and in this sense I can claim to have accepted agnosticism.

But for me, at least, these questions — How am I to live? What do I owe to other people (or even to myself)? What is the meaning of life? — felt real enough, and they continued to call out for answers. A life in which one has learned by way of therapeutic philosophy to stop asking these questions seemed little better than a life in which one has silenced the questions by way of drugs or alcohol or shopping or endless social media scrolling. I didn’t want such a life. So the journey went on.

That journey is now nearly three decades old. It has led me to an outright rejection of atheism. And it eventually led me back to the Catholic Church, albeit in a very different relationship from the one I had as an adolescent altar boy.

The takeaway, I think, from the piece and from the book, is that skepticism and doubt don’t have to exist in opposition to belief. And even more than belief, hope! Certainty is not what God needs from us. God doesn’t need anything from us precisely because of the miracle of God’s certainty about us.

3. For Christianity Today, Michael Horton exhorts Christians to not confuse discipleship with the gospel. The piece centers around a gentle rebuke of the discipleship industrial complex that animates so much of Christian publishing and church life. Lately, and perhaps not so lately, the church’s emphasis on personal moralism and performative holiness is mirroring the culture’s emphasis on optimization and self-help.

A disciple is first and foremost a recipient of good news. Following the example of Jesus is an important part of discipleship in the Gospels, but it is not the gospel.

Yet many today are equating discipleship with the gospel. John Mark Comer focuses his recent book, Practicing the Way, on discipleship. Comer reports that many people told him they had never heard about discipleship before in their evangelical churches.

This is surprising to me. I grew up in an evangelical world in which Dallas Willard — the preeminent name on spiritual formation — made a significant impact. Everyone was talking about discipleship. A translation of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ (circa 1418–1427) was a well-marked-up volume in my mother’s library. In His Steps, an 1896 classic by Charles Sheldon, was on the shelf too. In that book, Sheldon, a Congregationalist pioneer of the social gospel movement, asked the question “What would Jesus do?”

For 19th-century evangelist Charles G. Finney and other revivalists, in fact, following Christ’s example edged out Christ’s saving work in their preaching. Evangelicalism is an activistic version of Christianity, which has its pros and cons, as Jesus’ words to Martha and Mary suggest.

Horton goes on to critique Comer’s emphasis on doing as Jesus would do.

There is nothing really about grace in Comer’s Practicing the Way … Like many who emphasize Christ’s example over his achievement, Comer seems to think that God’s work is something he accomplishes merely through us rather than for us.

The “What would Jesus do?” (or WWJD) gospel is not a gospel at all. It is the law — the good law. We have it not only prescribed in the Ten Commandments but also fulfilled in Christ. The Good News is not “Give your life to Jesus” or “Surrender all” — actions we take — but the truth that the incarnate Son gave his life and surrendered all for you. Apart from this Good News, the example of Jesus leads us either to despair or to self-righteousness.

It’s not a question of whether we hold in principle to such doctrines but rather whether they function as key drivers of gospel discipleship or are transformed into the gospel itself.

I need the body of Christ because I’m not a good disciple on my own. There are no rules or core practices that will save me from this. Only the story I’m baptized into can do that.

Discipleship is the fruit of salvation, not its cause. A Christianity where believers measure faithfulness by habits, outcomes, or visible transformation could not be the Christianity that has persisted in the face of heinous failures of human will. It is the person of Christ, not the people we are, building the everlasting Kingdom of God.

(This is textbook Mockingbird talk. But don’t take my word for it. Read the whole article.)

4. Also for Christianity Today, Russell Moore has a word of encouragement for anyone who fears their work may be replaced by artificial intelligence.

The modern doctrine of calling has run parallel to the myth of the American dream: Find your passion, build a career, become indispensable, retire with dignity. For many young people (and mid-life crisis folks), this intense discernment has produced low-grade panic: What if I choose wrong? What if I plateau? What if I’m replaceable? AI answers that last question with a scary yes. To put it bluntly, machines may take the careers we were using to justify ourselves.

We have thought of vocation as a definite thing. That mindset may even be behind a lot of the angst we have about discerning God’s will for a career. We think once it’s decided, then the map is set, and now we just set out on it. Of course, that was never really true. Vocations never go the way we plan. That’s true whether a person stays in the same role for a lifetime or moves from job to job to job.

Moore suggests this upheaval could recover a more durable understanding of calling — not as a specific job, but as a posture of availability to God, a place best suited to receive God’s grace. Instead of usefulness, maybe a more ordinary faithfulness will rule the day. A lifetime of work may turn out to be preparation for a single unseen act of care — a hospital room, a difficult child, an aging parent, a lonely neighbor. Of his own work as a writer and preacher, he says:

Maybe the whole point of my calling wasn’t the writing or the teaching but the preparation for some month in the distant future when my roommate in the nursing home tells me he was hurt by some religion and is scared to die. Maybe my whole calling — all these years of grappling with what to say in sermons or wrestling every week with whether some atrocity in the news cycle was worth writing about here — maybe that was all just a lifetime of preparation for me to be able to know what I need to say to him: “Jesus loves you. This I know, for the Bible tells me so.” Who’s to say? If that is the case, could I live with that? Would it all be worth it? Yes. The same is true for you, whatever you do.

Christianity has always been addressed to people whose stability was fragile, who were beholden to fleeting principalities and powers, whose home was not this world but the next, who were forced to beg for mercy. This is reassuring in a fast-paced world where our identities feel so slippery. If the allusion of permanence goes, grace has room to speak. Moore says, after all, “Jesus’ calling to vocation was never about a blueprint. It was always about a way. It was never about your calling. It is about who is calling you.”

5. In humor this week:

If you’re scared the robots are going to replace you, be assured that the white Waymo cruising next to you on the freeway is definitely a better person than you.

You don’t want to make assumptions, but it did come to a complete stop at the stop sign. Not a California stop — a stop during which time actually passes. You feel this, and experience a slight internal recalibration, like when someone else puts their shopping cart back and you realize you’d been hoping that no one would notice that you hadn’t.

This Waymo seems comfortable with ambiguity. You are not. When a pedestrian approaches the crosswalk, the Waymo slows — even though the pedestrian hasn’t fully committed.

And a Basingstoke woman has treated herself to a new vintage chair that no one will ever be allowed to sit on.

Simon told us, “Sharon’s been very clear that the chair is not to be sat on. It belongs under the window in the bedroom, at a slightly jaunty angle, but should never be a place that you sit — no matter how comfortable it looks.”

6. To close things out, It’s on You, a new book by economists George Loewenstein and Nick Chater challenges the optimistic claims behind behavioral “nudge” policies of the early 2000s. A “nudge” was touted as a way of subtly steering people toward better choices without coercion. Examples of inadequate nudges abound.

Let’s say you’d like to encourage everyone to recycle as diligently as my friend does. Instead of instituting an onerous, possibly unpopular mandate, you could nudge. You could, as officials did in the United Kingdom, put up posters of watching eyes to promote good behavior. Or you could copy the authorities in Copenhagen and paint the sidewalk with footprints leading to trash bins. The problem that emerged with this approach … is that, in retrospect, a focus on personal responsibility in this situation was “misplaced.”

The review in the Atlantic cites other examples of nudges: auto-enrolling people in retirement plans, paying people for weight loss, guilt-laden advertisements about energy conservation that breed resentment.

All of these failed examples at improvement sound like case studies in Low Anthropology. We know that human perfectibility — especially through better information and incentives — will eventually collide with the brute fact of our limitations. So then, the failure of nudges is not bad news to overcome but an opportunity for grace.

Strays:

• If it’s popular it’s not Christian, says Richard Beck.
• Personal identity depends on memory, shared stories, and the physical traces of the past. When those disappear, we can lose the self who existed in relation to them. In her essay “Losing: A Personal History,” Rachel Teubner explores what it means to lose the narrative continuity of one’s own life.
• Olga Khazan reminds us that, when it comes to dating, we do not choose what moves us. Our “types” are a pretty flimsy idea of what we actually want.