1. The crisis in Europe has taken center stage this week, and for understandable reasons. I wrote my own thoughts on the subject for Mbird earlier today and Nadia Bolz-Weber’s reflection on Jesus’ stilling of the storm is definitely worth a read:

Maybe when Jesus said to them where is your faith he said it not as an accusation but as an invitation – an invitation to reflect on where God is in the midst of storms. Maybe in this question Jesus invites us to reflect on what it means to be alive on the other side of a situation we thought would kill us: a divorce, an illness, the death of a parent or even a child, the loss of a job, depression, middle school.  It can feel like it’s going to kill us.  But if it doesn’t, then maybe we get to ask sacred questions like: in what did I have faith?  Where was God?  What did I fear?

Because faith and/or positive thinking are not some kind of magic formula for a storm-free life. But faith is a way to find some calm. […]

Because here’s what I believe: the Triune God, whose love is powerful enough to raise Christ from the dead, simply will not be separated from me or from you.  Not by a storm, not by a crisis, not by a pandemic, not by a war and not even by death.  What I mean is, the love of God in Christ may not separate us from the storm … but the storm cannot, shall not, will not separate us from God’s love.

Amen to that.

2. In much-needed humor this week… Reductress was quick to the draw with “Russia Starts War Despite Us All Having a Lot Going on Right Now.”

For the anxious person, Slackjaw has, “No Big Deal, But I Noticed I’m Listed 5th Out Of 7 On Your Group Email.”

And I’ll file this one under hilarious, but also sadly true: “Unfortunately We Can’t Hire You After Seeing That 2010 Photo of You Drinking a Beer When You Were Sixteen”

Finally, the Onion wins the low-anthropology humor award with, “Man Shell Of Imagined Self“:

Saying that when he looked in the mirror, he no longer saw the man he once deceived himself to be, local man Ron Stockton, 37, told reporters Monday that over the years he had become just a shell of his imagined self … “I don’t know what became of that [nonexistent hallucination of a] person I once was, that person who [I thoroughly deluded myself into believing] had so much promise. I honestly don’t understand what happened.”

3. Before reading the next article, by Kaitlyn Tiffany in the Atlantic, I was unaware of the term “love bombing.” Love bombing was originally used to describe the behavior of cults that shower a prospective convert with care before pulling the rug out from under them with obligations and judgment (aka Gospel, then Law). Since then, the newly-found psychological term (like gaslighting or narcissism before it) has taken on a life of its own to categorize dating relationships gone awry. One is bombed with gifts, praise, and extravagant gestures, only to be hurt by the potential suitor. But Tiffany remains skeptical over whether it’s appropriate to speak of love bombing at all:

With its spread, the term has also gotten more expansive and mundane. The love bomber can be charged with less diabolical intentions than control. Many of the TikTok videos tagged #lovebombing imply that the bomber in question merely intends to get away with some lies, or that he might be a bit of a phony (as was the case with West Elm Caleb). Sometimes the love bombers one hears about on TikTok seem to have done little other than give a person attention and then later withhold it, for whatever reason. It’s tempting to pose some snide rhetorical questions in response: Is this really love bombing, or did someone just express interest in you and then lose that interest? Have you been wronged, or are you just not enjoying a moment of your feelings being hurt by someone else’s free will? Have you heard of infatuation? Getting carried away?

The need to deploy pathological language when simply saying that someone is a jerk strikes me as a troubling trend. Why can’t a break-up be a misunderstanding, a tragedy, or ill-fated ships passing in the night? After recounting the story of a break-up broadcast on TikTok, Tiffany concludes with this zinger:

no one would dispute her claim that he’s a love bomber, because the substantiation comes solely from her own experience. It’s a perfect word: simple, shocking, and above all, flexible. It can apply to almost anyone.

In other words, the accusation of love bombing is a convenient way to prevent self-recrimination, deflect blame to an enemy, and bolster one’s righteousness. All of which seems to make perfect sense, given the high emotional stakes.

4. In the off-the-wall, but fantastic, category this week we have Adam Fales’s splendid analysis on the haunted house horror genre. Fales begins with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables and continues right up to more recent films. His contention mirrors that of Paul Zahl in his book Grace in Practice, where demonic possession in literature reflects the bound will and total depravity:

The word “haunted” provides a vocabulary for the forces outside individual control, as well as the way that we, as individuals, are constrained by them, even and especially when we cannot perceive or even comprehend what they are. As Sigmund Freud points out, “haunted” is already a limited translation of “unheimlich,” and the repeated description of houses in particular as haunted illustrates some of the way that this vocabulary guides both thought and actions. Being haunted is, in a sense, the experience of being constrained, whether by another’s will or by the blunt necessity of historical circumstance. So, if I tell you a house is haunted, you might expect to encounter ghosts, dead bodies, perhaps the devil himself, but what you’ll find is, unfortunately, much worse. […]

“The ego is not the master in its own house,” Freud wrote, and the haunted house makes this unmastery literal. Or rather, it reveals that there’s something off, uncanny, eerie, missing about self-possession and mastery as ways to organize the world, a house, a life. The haunted house tale, however, describes this constitutive fault line of liberal individualism as though it is merely a local, individual, or familial problem.

Fales concludes that, “Haunting occurs in the present, but it always refers back to that original moment, when things were made wrong. This moment, necessarily, is unreachable.” House hauntings in literature usually end when the person fleeing the house the safety, a fact that illustrates well how we cannot rid ourselves of sin so easily, if at all.

5. That said, moving to a new place might have some secondary benefits to your overall happiness. Boxing up everything you own and heading for a new town, you might just a bit smile more. It’s still you, of course, who takes all your baggage with you — there is no such thing as a purely fresh start. But in an interview we missed from last week, psychologist Laurie Santos (aka the happiness professor) argues that the influence of our social setting cannot be understated:

The dirty secret is that we can intervene and briefly change behavior but long-term change is really hard. What we know works is if you plop people down in a new culture, they change. You move to the Netherlands, you’ll be happier. … you can teach people to meditate or to do their gratitude journal, but unless they have robust structures around them societally that are helping people to do that, it’s not going to work.

This broader cultural apparatus of happiness extends to more commonplace settings, like social media:

the biggest hit of social media on their well-being is that they spend a lot of time on it thinking that they’re being social rather than talking to other people. I do that too. There’s times when my husband walks into the room and we could have a nice conversation about how our day is and I’m looking at some crap on Reddit. It’s like, I have a husband who’s here. I could talk to him! We’re not always making good use of the humans around us.

Or, for that matter, going to church a where you can actively participate:

There’s a lot of evidence that religious people, for example, are happier in a sense of life satisfaction and positive emotion in the moment. [Rather than merely holding religious views,] if you can get yourself … to meditate, to volunteer, to engage with social connection — you will be happier. It’s just much easier if you have a cultural apparatus around you.

I’ve moved at least 10 times in my adults life and every new house or city offered various costs and benefits that pushed and pulled the happiness needle. Some ineffable combination of weather, traffic, proximity to friends/family, church life, and if the new house had a back yard or a parking spot. So far as I’ve been able to tell, there is no perfect place to live, but some cultural apparatus are clearly better than others.

6. But what about other people? What if we were part of the positive cultural apparatus of someone else? Perhaps we can, with appropriate tact and persistence, make them better people. It would be nice if it were possible. But like the specters of haunted houses, change does not arrive by mere argument. As told recently by the School of Life’s, “On Nagging“:

Nagging is the dispiriting, unpleasant, counter-productive but wholly understandable and poignant version of a hugely noble ambition: the desire to change other people.

There is so much we might fairly want to change about them. We’re an entirely imperfect lot. And so we want them to be more self-aware, punctual, generous, reliable, introspective, resilient, communicative, profound … At home, we want them to focus more on the sink, the children, the bins, the money and the need to put the phone down and look up. At a macro dimension, we want them to think more about the suffering of encaged animals, the destruction of our habitat and the iniquities of capitalism. We are, most of us, very far from our ideal selves – and at the level of the species, come close to an evolutionary error. The desire to change people is no pathology; it’s a clear-sighted recognition of human wickedness.

Nagging is, in its essence, an attempt at teaching, at getting an idea for improvement from one mind into another. But it is also a version of teaching that has given up hope. It has descended into an attempt to insist rather than invite, to coerce rather than charm. One has grown too tired, and humiliated by constant rebuffs to have the energy to seduce. One is too panicked by the thought that the unteachable ‘student’ is ruining one’s life to find the inner resources to see it a little more from their point of view. It’s one’s own suffering that dominates all the available imaginative capacity. […]

Lamentably, also, it doesn’t work. By the time one has started humiliating the student, the lesson is over. Nagging breeds its evil twin, shirking. The other pretends to read the paper, goes upstairs and feels righteous. The shrillness of one’s tone gives them all the excuse they need to trust that we have nothing kind or true to tell them.

One changes others only when the desire that they evolve has not reached an insistent pitch, when we can still bear that they remain as they are. All of us improve only when we have not been badgered or made to feel guilty; only when we have a sense that we are loved and deeply understood for the many reasons why change is so hard for us. We know, of course, that the bins need our attention, that we should strive to get to bed earlier and that we have been a disappointment in the couple. But we can’t bear to hear these lessons in an unsympathetic tone; we want — tricky children that we are — to be indulged for our ambivalence about becoming better people.

Strays:

• “As an Episcopal priest, I’m used to polite worship. But we need to make room for unfiltered pain at church, too.“
• For Wendall Berry fans out there, the New Yorker conducted an extended interview with the beloved author.
• “We’re Killing Ourselves With Work“
• Surprise! Using our phones to keep us from being distracted (by our phones) doesn’t work.
• “Canadian Pentecost: Indigenous religion is fulfilled by Christianity. Just ask the Indigenous.“

 

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