Another Week Ends

Before we dive in, note that early bird pricing for our upcoming conference in NYC (4/23–25) expires tomorrow, January 31, after which all the usual tiers open. Click here for more details or to pre-register. I’m not blowing smoke when I tell you that somehow this event is getting more awesome with each passing day, ptL.

1. To wit, one of our NYC speakers, Jennifer Breheny Wallace, is having quite the week. Wallace just hit the promotional circuit for her forthcoming book Mattering — a free copy of which all conference attendees will receive — and clearly the work has hit a nerve, as I certainly hoped/suspected it would. Wallace sat down with none other than Oprah (and Ina Garten!) to speak about some of the book’s themes and then appeared on Good Morning America this morning. It should be immediately apparent why we invited her to join us in April:

If you make it to the seven-minute mark, you’ll get to hear Wallace riff on the (countercultural) magic of play, which is an admittedly inconvenient truth this week. Like many folks in the Mid-Atlantic, the recent snowstorm has kept my kids’ school closed all week. It’s getting pretty ripe at home, my friends. Cue Vox’s “What Kids Lose Without Snow Days” from a couple years ago that warned against schools going virtual when the heavens open. I applauded the argument at the time, but let’s just say it hits different today, setting up an unwitting law/gospel litmus test. Does the assertion that “snow days need to be sledding days” comfort or convict? Yours truly pleads the fifth.

Also on the NYC Conference tip, Plough published a glowing review of James Kimmel Jr.’s The Science of Revenge. I’m so pleased we’ll be hearing from him on Friday morning of the conference (4/24).

2. Next, David Marchese interviewed film director Chloé Zhao (Hamnet) for the NY Times, and their conversation delved deep deep deep. It turns out Zhao, in addition to her many cinematic projects, is training to be a death doula, partly as a response to a recent midlife crisis. That admission ignites their conversation, leading to some grace-adjacent observations about failure, rejection, and death. The anecdote about her receiving Terrence Malick’s “blessing” out of the blue was beautiful, too:

What is this fear of failing? What is this fear when my film gets rejected by the critics? What is this feeling if the box office is terrible? What if I lose? When the winner is announced at an awards show, I look at the faces of the people who didn’t win and I try to feel, what are they feeling? At best it’s like, That person must have had an easier childhood. At worst it’s like, I don’t belong; they reject me; I might as well die.

Because what if work is your sense of belonging? What if you feel like you don’t belong anywhere but with your family, and then what if your family is gone? It makes me realize that any kind of belonging has the risk of being cast out. People might roll their eyes when I say this, but the kind of home that cannot be taken away is the one within, and the one you connect with the divine, with this great mystery and the earth. That cannot go away.

Ideally, your sense of self-worth is not defined by how many awards you win or how much money your film makes. Imagine if you could go to those award things and actually enjoy — like a surfer — every part of a wave? Can you have pleasure in losing and being criticized and failing? I’ve been investigating that because I know now, at 43 years old, that 50 percent of the time is going to be great and the other 50 percent is going to be [expletive]. I want to find pleasure and joy and awe in the [expletive], too. I’m working on that.

3. The buzz around Hamnet prompted this next piece, believe it or not. While I have yet to screen the film (blame the snow!) I have no doubt that the rapturous notices Jessie Buckley’s performance has received are well deserved. Fargo and Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things were my first exposure to her monumental talent, but I also dug the record she made with Bernard Butler.

Anyways, a number of viewers have noted the almost shocking malleability of Buckley’s face — as well as the complete command she has over it — which has to do, at least in part, with her resisting fillers and other cosmetic procedures. In Allure, Valerie Monroe used the occasion to ask the question “Is the Backlash to Facial Conformity Finally Upon Us?” I learned quite a bit from the piece, which also underlines the #lowanthropology insight that our weaknesses/flaws/imperfections are far more reliable conduits of connection, sympathy, and love than their shinier counterparts:

What’s a face for? Starting with the completely obvious, a face is what enables your friend to pick you out of a crowd (recognition). If you’re a toddler lost in a department store, it allows you to realize with desperate surprise that the adult hand you just grabbed does not belong to the face you trust (bonding resulting from facial attunement). In which case, your face will communicate unequivocally to that strange adult that you are not comfortable with their unfamiliar companionship (communication of emotions). All of which suggests that the human face has evolved to be read. Our physiognomy, including individual asymmetries, our expressions (macro and micro), the qualities of our complexion, all encode valuable information about age, our mental and physical health, our lived experience and personality. What happens when these cues are greatly diminished or erased either by plastic surgery or other aesthetic interventions?

The face is so important to our social fabric that there’s an area of the brain — called the fusiform face area — devoted exclusively to decoding it. Damage the cerebral geography here, and you can’t even read the map, losing altogether the ability to recognize faces (prosopagnosia). But here’s what might be the most revealing detail about how your brain reads a face. It’s not by examining it at rest. The brain interprets patterns of movement: tension at the corners of the mouth, a slight widening of the eyes, a lift of the eyebrow…

But aesthetic treatments that sharpen the contours of the face—snatching the jaw, inflating the lips—to give them more contrast in photos, can reduce and distort expression. Aesthetic interventions that reduce wrinkles and facial asymmetries like crows’-feet diminish the cues that can signal warmth, wisdom, and happiness, the very things we rely on a face to communicate.

A face identifies us as a person alive and with presence; a face is irreducibly unique, and yet through it we can trace the bones and beauty of our ancestors. As we age, a face can serve as a lovely, richly imbued representation of past harmonies and discordance — essentially, in the end, a coda to a well-lived life.

4. In humor, the Onion reports “Looks Like Ex Gained Some Weight Ever Since They Started Dating Someone Better” while Reductress weighed in with the pointed “Nation Willing to Bet Nothing Bad Could Come From Making Everything About Gambling.” But tops of the week would have to be Alyssa Brandt’s hilarious and disarmingly wise contribution to Shouts and Murmurs, “Diagnosis: Wellness Guru.”

Left untreated, Wellness Guru will grow rapidly. Early symptoms include bypassing ultra-processed foods, like those yummy-looking pumpkin-spice doughnut holes which someone left on the counter at work … Late-stage symptoms include making your own laundry detergent, fear of nonorganic fruits, or swapping coffee for fungi powder and pulverized twigs. Do you consider yourself to be living a clean and intentional life? This could be a sign of early-onset supplement psychosis. If so, I recommend immediate hospitalization so that we can get you on an I.V. drip of orange soda and start you on a diet of soft slices of white bread.

Studies show that Wellness Guru is notoriously hard to extract once it has taken root. Mindfulness is not a cure. This practice just makes matters worse. Focussing on your Wellness Guru only gives it more power.

Believe it or not, there are some highly effective home remedies. Try eating a handful of Takis over the sink when you get home. Maybe two handfuls … Some patients have successfully shrunk their Wellness Gurus by responding to e-mail messages from their mothers asking for “help with something on the computer.” Renewing your driver’s license at the D.M.V. is also known to help diminish a deeply embedded Wellness Guru.

5. We’re a couple weeks away from one of the most overlooked holidays of the year. Indeed, Ash Wednesday comes and goes with little fanfare. There are no family gatherings, no animated specials or grocery store promotions, no complex stories or theologies to understand. Just a simple service with a simple message. But as Jacob Lupfer writes in Commonweal, it’s that very simplicity that makes the day so powerful. “Ash Wednesday Asks Nothing” and in the process gives exactly what we need.

For most of my life I tried to understand myself through two great systems — religion and psychology — each promising transformation, neither able to deliver it. Christianity gave me a grammar of sin, grace, and redemption. Psychology renamed the same terrain with trauma, repression, and repair. I moved between them the way a person switches languages, hoping that fluency in either might finally render my life legible. But both required an optimism I could never inhabit.

Whatever their differences, they converged on a story in which I should, by now, have become someone else. I hadn’t.

This is what made Ash Wednesday intelligible to me. It did not offer a new explanation or a better technique. It asked nothing of me at all … It offered no promise that anything would get better. It required no narrative of growth or progress … The rite did not collapse under the weight of my life. It grounded it. It met me exactly where faith and therapy faltered — not at the point of improvement, but at the point of truth.

[Ash Wednesday] speaks beneath doctrine and diagnosis … It speaks from a place far older than Freud, and even older than theology. It does not interpret our condition. It reveals it.

It is the one moment in the year that does not ask me to assemble myself first. I cannot shake the sense that something foundational in me is perpetually out of tune, the part that neither faith nor therapy has ever coaxed into harmony […]

After so many failed attempts at coherence — so many half-believed catechisms — that acknowledgement feels, at last, like mercy. “Remember that you are dust” does not condemn. It clears the ground. And in that moment, for reasons I may never fully understand, I find I can hear God.

6. The final word this week comes from Esau McCaulley’s “It’s So Hard Not to Be Consumed by Rage” in which the former NYC conference speaker expounds powerfully on the dangers and temptations of anger before exegeting the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. In the pages of the New York Times no less! It’s too good to risk overcondensing. Suffice to say, Esau’s jumping-off point is the same upsetting one as Cali Yee’s earlier this week, which he courageously connects to his troubled relationship with his own father, a drug addict and convict who abandoned his family and son when Esau was young:

Before he died when I was in my mid-30s, I realized that my sense of my own righteousness had callused into something cruel. I didn’t want him to change, because his poor behavior formed a central part of my identity. He left his family; I built one. He was addicted to drugs; I barely drank alcohol. As long as I compared myself with him in this way, I needed his brokenness to provide direction. I was not running toward the good; I was fleeing him […]

I remember the day that my father apologized to me. We hadn’t spoken in years but were now reunited at my sister’s wedding. During a lull in the rehearsal, I asked him the questions that had been with me my whole life: “Why did you leave, and why did you stay away?” He replied, “Son, I don’t rightly know. After I left, I saw that you all were doing better without me, so I stayed away. I’m sorry.”

What shocked me most was how difficult it was to accept this new version of him even as he tried to make amends. Who was I if I wasn’t a person with a wicked father? I was confronted with a miracle that I was not sure I wanted. Forgiving my father forced me to create a positive, and not merely a reactive, vision of my life. It also taught the valuable lesson that not all lost causes are irredeemably lost.

My father died a few years after that apology, and my family asked me, a member of the clergy, to perform the ceremony. I … preached about the Pharisee and the tax collector, who feature in a parable in the Gospel of Luke … The story turns expectation on its head because it is the loathed tax collector who, troubled by the things he has done, receives mercy from God.

I told the congregation that I had been like the Pharisee, so caught up in self-justification that I failed to view my father with compassion. I did not see him as someone lost or trapped by his own wrongs; I saw him as someone whom I couldn’t wait for God to judge. He had been on a spiritual and moral journey that I could not see […]

I am a pastor and a public theologian. By vocation, I have a duty to hope. To hope, as a Christian, is never to concede that wickedness must be the end of any person’s — or any nation’s — story. To hope does not imply accepting a false peace that laments divisions without naming the evils done. Instead, hope demands a certain doggedness, a refusal to let go. The same patience that God showed me must, in principle, be available to others.

Strays:

• Over at Vox, Sigal Samual interviewed Anthropic’s Amanda Askell about their uber-chatbot Claude, specifically about the 80-page “soul document” Askell and her team (which includes two Catholic priests!) put together to govern the bot’s character. While my inclinations about this topic have been profoundly shaped by a lifetime of (amazing) science fiction, it’s nonetheless fascinating stuff, and I’m doing my best to withhold judgement.
• RIP Catherine O’Hara, who gave us so much. I hadn’t seen her eulogy for John Candy (embedded above) until introduced to it by I Like Me a couple weeks ago, but gosh, what a moving and grace-saturated tribute.
• Very nice to see DFW’s masterpiece receive some rehabilitation after a decade or so of mean-spirited meme-ification via Hermione Hoby’s “The Infinite Pleasures of Infinite Jest” in the New Yorker.
• Also from the New Yorker, Alex Nazaryan wrote about The Dry January Hangover:
  

  As one might expect, the most compelling arguments against Dry January have nothing to do with politics. Much of the backlash centers on the performative quality of the undertaking — the fact that it has become something to post about on social media — and on the idea that so many people who brag about giving up alcohol continue to partake in other drugs.

• A couple recs for the culture vultures out there: That Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching documentary is even better than Sam’s talk from Cville indicated. Also, the Annie & the Caldwells record Can’t Lose My (Soul) is top-notch gospel-soul.
• Lastly, I can’t imagine a better way to sign off than with “10 Liberating Truths from the 39 Articles” by Joseph Whitenton.