1. January is the cruelest month. Or rather the most disliked, according to a YouGov survey from last year. Maybe it’s the long, cold nights, the post-holiday depression, the endlessly dismal weather forecast. Whatever the cause of our collective distaste of it, the bleak midwinter is also an apt metaphor for mental health. As expressed in an excellent article in The School of Life, there are times when we become “immovably numb and sterile,” when we “can no longer be productive; we lose direction and inspiration.” It can be tempting to think that because this is how things currently are (and maybe even how they have been) that this is also how they always will be. However:
Certainly things are lifeless, cold and in suspension. But this is not the end of the story; the earth is like this not as a destination but as a phase. The deadness is a prelude to new life; the fallow period is a guarantor of fecund days to come. All living organisms need to recharge themselves, old leaves have to give way, tired limbs must rest. The dance and ferment could not go on. It may look as if nothing at all is happening, as though this is a trance without purpose. Yet, deep underground, at this very moment, nutrients are being gathered, the groundwork for future ebullience and dynamism is being laid down, another summer is very slowly collecting its strength.
I award five points for the use of “fecund.” Ten points for the observation that some of the most important things going on are not necessarily visible to the human eye. What might that mean, when applied to religious life?
2. This idea of “mental midwinters” calls attention to our limits — we cannot constantly be fecund, for example. Human beings need rest, periods of time when we produce nothing, when our existence is not tied to usefulness. This was stirringly addressed in the New York Times this week by the rabbi Elliot Kukla, who writes about his chronic fatigue — learning to accept it, and even going so far as to say that it’s teaching his child to enjoy sleeping. One of the most beneficial things our kids can learn, Kukla argues, is how to rest — how to “be lazy.”
He sees me napping every day, and he wants in. We build elaborate nests and gaze out the window together, luxuriously leaning on huge mounds of pillows. Most 3-year-olds I know fight bedtime, but we snuggle under the blankets on cold winter evenings, sighing in synchronized delight. […]
Laziness is more than the absence or avoidance of work; it’s also the enjoyment of lazing in the sun, or in another’s arms. I learned through my work in hospice that moments spent enjoying the company of an old friend, savoring the smell of coffee or catching a warm breeze can make even the end of life more pleasurable. As the future becomes more tenuous, I want to teach my child to enjoy the planet right now. I want to teach him how to laze in the grass and watch the clouds without any artificially imposed sense of urgency.
3. Kukla also notes that, etymologically, “lazy” is partially derived from “weak or feeble,” two adjectives that are at least as derogatory as “lazy.” Today, it’s preferable to be confident, strong-willed, assured—even in our vulnerability. We’re told to “own” our weaknesses. To this end, I appreciated this interview with two sociologists, who question our over-confidence about confidence.
“To be self-confident is the imperative of our time. As gender, racial, and class inequalities deepen, women are increasingly called on to believe in themselves,” reads the first line of [their new book Confidence Culture]. It criticizes the individualistic, neoliberal missives from corporations to “just be more confident” — in our bodies, in our relationships, in motherhood, in the workplace, and within humanitarian efforts to support global development — and argues that, most of the time, they end up reinforcing the very beliefs they aim to deconstruct.
Interviewees Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill go to great lengths to disclaim that they aren’t “critiquing confidence itself but the culture around” confidence — a subtle distinction that, to my ear, sounds perfectly theological. “The commandment is holy, righteous, and good,” but that same commandment also rebukes us for failing to live up to it. Who isn’t tired of pretending to be confident (even about weakness)? Take body image, for example:
As much as “body positivity” is a common and very popular and marketable phrase, you show that at no point in history have people been this focused on their bodies. How does that dichotomy work?
Rosalind Gill: It delegitimizes the feelings that anyone could have about their own body insecurities because we’re supposed to be comfortable in our skin. Yet that isn’t the world that we live in. We’re in a world of absolute forensic surveillance where everybody feels under intense scrutiny. I’ve just been doing some interviews with young people around how judged they feel all the time around their appearance
4. So far 2022 has been a Year of Screaming Parents. Due to school closures, childcare expenses, and general exhaustion, “parenting has passed the point of absurdity,” says this article in the Atlantic; meanwhile NPR reports that parents have hit rock bottom. But for my money the best article about all this appeared in McSweeney’s: “A Boat Surrounded By Sharks Is a Childcare Option I’m Seriously Considering,” by Michelle Kobler.
Hi, it’s me, the mom of an under-five-year-old overtired, under-stimulated, homeschooled, unvaccinated monster child currently using his chubby little fingers to pick off small pieces of colored tape I put on the floor because some Montessori Mom Instagram account said this would distract him long enough for me to take a conference call from the hallway closet about that super important work thing I haven’t been able to get to in three years, while my husband asks what we’re “doing” this weekend.
FYI The Onion also released this study recently: More Parents Opting for One Big Baby Over Multi-Child Household. Something to consider.
5. In her newsletter Culture Study, Anne Helen Petersen (a speaker at our upcoming NYC conference!) also considered the swell of parental exhaustion. About the proliferation of articles on the topic, she says: “You know who’s reading them? Other parents who feel the same way.” In other words, parents may scream at the top of their lungs, but no one but similar parents can hear them. Because:
we have effectively siloed ourselves (even the parents amongst us!) in a way that makes the rockets of exasperation bounce off the walls, going nowhere. They make a huge racket that only those also in the silo can hear. […]
Petersen argues in favor of greater commitment to integrated community, where people are not mere replicas of one another but instead encounter folks in different life-stages — different ages, races, economic brackets. Ideally this engenders greater empathy across dividing lines but also leads to ampler sharing of experience and resources.
Sociologists and political scientists (most famously, Robert Putnam) have demonstrated that the collectivism that structured mid-century life in the United States was borne, at least in part, from forced co-mingling — through the war effort, both at home and abroad, but also in religious organizations and hundreds of other societies, organizations, and groups. Some of those groups were still incredibly segregated, and in his most recent book, The Upswing, Putnam makes a convincing case that those divisions were the cracks in the foundation of that collectivist period.
6. For now, I’m not at all convinced anyone needs to watch HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones, a pungent spoof on megachurch hypocrisy, but given that the Mockingbird site has become a sort of virtual safe house for folks burned by megachurch mismanagement and hypocrisy, I almost feel it would be odd to completely ignore the timely series, now in its second season. Therefore I recommend: this review, by Doreen St. Félix, who argues the show is more theologically minded than its gaudy previews suggest.
“Gemstones” isn’t primarily interested in satirizing modern Christianity; rather, McBride, not so much a moralist as a closet sentimentalist, treats his subject with some affection. Many have found this approach frustrating. The series premièred in 2019, during the Trump Presidency, and there were critics who wished that the characters were more straightforwardly sinister. Why wouldn’t McBride come out and condemn these predatory capitalists, who have converted faith into so much personal wealth? Why didn’t Eli move like a dastardly Robert Mitchum-esque huckster? The plot endeavors to be more epic than topical. The stories unfold not unlike New Testament parables. Greed has corrupted the Gemstones utterly, and McBride wants to nudge his wayward creations back to the path.
And in music, Amanda Petrusich reviews John Mellencamp’s new album:
These days, Mellencamp doesn’t care about appearing likable, grateful, or good-natured. “I come across alone and silent / I come across dirty and mean,” he admits on “I Am a Man That Worries.” He delivers each line with the steadfast confidence of a guy who has witnessed a lot of ugliness and won’t pretend otherwise. As he told Rees, “I’ve been right to the top and there ain’t nothing up there worth having.” This sort of honesty —unconcerned with commercial striving; a pure repudiation of the filtered and staged—is rare. It buoys these songs and gives them heart.
(Taking notes for our upcoming Success & Failure issue. Ach, and also: Cheer Season 2 displays that “just a small amount of celebrity can turn heroes into villains, friends into enemies, and make winning feel a lot like losing.”)
7. “I Can’t Get No” was the title of a wonderful recent essay on [dis]satisfaction by Nadia Bolz-Weber. She begins with the text of John 14, where Philip promises that if Jesus could just “show us the Father,” “we will be satisfied.” Bolz-Weber (like probably you, and certainly me) relates to Philip’s impulse here — to believe that our satisfaction relies on conditional circumstances. Bolz-Weber probes: “if I cannot find satisfaction in anything I already have then why in the world do I think I could find satisfaction in anything I don’t already have?” She concludes, brilliantly, with words we all need to hear:
You may never marry, you may never have a child, and for sure people will never magically act the way you think they should.
But God is not to be found in eventualities.
God is to be found in actual reality.
THIS is the day that the Lord hath made.
THIS is the body that the Lord hath made.
THESE are the people that the Lord hath made.
Let us rejoice and be as glad as is realistically possible in all of it.
P. S. Lots going on in the Mocking-verse:
- Tune into the Mockingbird conference in Tulsa today! Events begin this evening (Friday) and go through tomorrow afternoon. Live-streaming will be available through the Mbird YouTube channel.
- And next week, the hosts of the Same Old Song podcast will host a virtual event all about “Crafting the Gospel-Focused Sermon for Lent.” Join Aaron Zimmerman, Jacob Smith, and David Zahl on January 27th @ 7pm EST via Zoom. This will be a great time to learn some good stuff and also see some handsome human faces.
