1. Ira Glass, host of This American Life, once famously quipped that Sinatra’s song “My Way” was “a crap song.” Referring to the crooner’s famous line, “regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention,” the frustrated radio host concluded “most of us are unlikely to relate.” Glass is not wrong — according to Daniel Pink writing in the Wall Street Journal, regret is the second most common emotion felt among human beings. And despite Sinatra’s dismissal of the emotion, Pink argues that regret isn’t just common, it’s actually beneficial:

For all its intuitive appeal, the “No Regrets” approach is an unsustainable blueprint for living. At a time like ours—when teenagers are battling unprecedented mental-health challenges, adults are gripped by doubt over their financial future, and the cloud of an enduring pandemic casts uncertainty over all of our decisions — it is especially counterproductive. […]

Regret is not dangerous or abnormal. It is healthy and universal, an integral part of being human. Equally important, regret is valuable. It clarifies. It instructs. Done right, it needn’t drag us down; it can lift us up.

Granted, regret feels awful. It is the stomach-churning sensation that the present would be better and the future brighter if only you hadn’t chosen so poorly, decided so wrongly or acted so stupidly in the past. Regret hurts; it makes sense that we’d try to shut it out.

But if regret is hard to take, it’s even harder to avoid.

The whole essay catalogs Pink’s exploration into the social science behind regret. Everyone experiences regret. When embraced, regret can make life better as we learn from our mistakes. When regret is ignored or unacknowledged, it’s a recipe for mental illness. There are even some “best practices” for managing regret that psychologists have identified, including confession and inventory:

In a pair of experiments published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2006, Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside, and two colleagues found that writing about negative experiences or talking into a tape recorder about them for 15 minutes a day substantially increased people’s overall satisfaction and improved their well-being — in ways that merely thinking about those experiences did not.

The reason: Using language, whether written or spoken, forces us to organize and integrate our thoughts. Describing regrets to others converts those abstract, stomach-churning feelings into concrete, less fearsome words. Instead of those unpleasant emotions fluttering around uncontrollably, language helps us to capture them in our net, pin them down and begin analyzing them.

So tell someone else about one of your regrets or just write about it privately. Perhaps even compile what Stanford University’s Tina Seelig calls a “failure resume” — a thorough inventory of your professional flops, flubs and foul-ups — that can help you avoid those blunders again. “The act of documenting your errors allows you to move on much more quickly, as opposed to dwelling on them, and results in a lower likelihood that you will repeat the same mistake,” Dr. Seelig says.

Two quick thoughts: first, these suggestions are all good and true and healthy. Yea and amen for emotional honesty and confession and healing. And yet, I am torn by St. Paul’s word in 2 Cor 7:10, that there is no regret on the other side of godly grief. I’m just not sure we can find a full solution to regret that isn’t ultimately spiritual at its core. Second, for all the preachers reading along, I will point again to Pink’s observation that love and regret are the two most common human emotions. Addressing loves and regrets by preaching a cruciform sermon will hit the lived experience of every person in the room, even if their hearts haven’t yet been broken open to a regretless salvation.

2. Colbert is at it again. Singer/actress/model//podcaster Dua Lipa asked the question, but the Holy Spirit was the real guest last night on The Late Show.

3. At Heterodox Academy, Ilana Horowitz summarizes research from her upcoming book God, Grades, and Graduation. It’s no surprise that Christian adolescents with religious buy-in tend to do well in school, but her research also found that this same group of “religiously restrained” students tended to select less prestigious college and universities than their grades and extracurriculars might predict: 

Since religiously restrained students have better academic performance in high school, we would expect them to make more ambitious choices about higher education. This is generally the case, except in one social class group: adolescents from the professional class. When it comes to the transition to college, students from the professional class who live their life for God make less ambitious choices about where to attend college than we would expect given their stellar report cards. God-centered students undermatch in the college selection process because educational decisions are social decisions that highlight the effect of the home environment on norms and values surrounding education. God-centered students make choices that reflect their familial and social ties rather than choices that optimize their social class standing. Millions of young men and women do not live to impress college admissions counselors. For them, it is God who matters.

To me, this rings as good news, that so many Christian students aren’t playing the higher-ed status game. Put all the talk about “lifelong earnings potential” aside: when your religion eschews status, self-identifies as foolish, and invites people to not be “of the world,” it sounds like, for this demographic at least, “the kids are alright.”

4. On the topic of kids and those who want to foster a “religiously restrained” household, Christianity Today ran a five-star review this week of The Jesus I Wish I Knew in High School, the grace-centered book put together by our friends at Rooted and featuring a number of Mockingbird contributors. As Mike McGarry writes, you don’t have to be a high schooler to enjoy the book:

Speaking of generations, the honesty and vulnerability of these chapters make The Jesus I Wish I Knew in High School something more than a gospel-saturated resource for teenagers. In addition, the book offers a surprisingly insightful window into the authors’ own generation (most are in their thirties or forties). Amid our current generational divides between boomers, Gen X, and millennials, I’m convinced that non-youth leaders would benefit from reading about the teenage experiences of these godly men and women. Reading their honest accounts of racism, abuse, insecurity, fear, and anxiety carries significant potential to foster meaningful conversations with more than just the generation to whom this book is written.

5. In humor this week, I got big laughs from this recently posted bit from the UK game show Taskmaster. Can these comedians fit a camel through a small gap? It’s from season 4 of the show, but the theology here writes itself. Spoiler alert: no successful attempts to get it through a needle’s eye.

See also: “Tom Brady Spends First Day Of Retirement Studying Tape Of People To Learn How They Work,” and “4 Conflict Resolution Tactics That Aren’t as Effective as Saying ‘Actually, Never Mind!’“ The preaching tips bit from The New Yorker was largely a whiff, but their “What if Brands Were True to Their Names?“ exercise was quite funny:

Zoom: rental-car agency

Target: axe-throwing bar

Lands’ End: cruise line

Sonic: music-streaming service

Zillow: online-bedding retailer

American Eagle: wildlife conservancy

Hot Topic: celebrity-news-and-gossip Web site

6. In music, two essays worth your consideration. First, this retrospective on the music of Led Zeppelin helps outline my own adulthood ambivalence to their music, music which I loved as a teen. Music critic James Wood writes how Zeppelin’s music was an expellable heresy in his restrictive evangelical upbringing, and how there is something remarkably dark and satanic about the band’s musical excellence and infamous hedonism.

Still, listen again to the opening of “Black Dog,” or to Plant’s forlorn wail at the start of “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” or Page’s fingers in full flow in “No Quarter,” or the violent precision of Bonham’s beat in “When the Levee Breaks.” It’s like listening to atheism: the charge is still there, ready to be picked up, ready to release lives. The anti-religious religious power of rock was exactly what my mother feared. I don’t think it was the obvious mimicry of religious worship—the sweaty congregants, the stairways to Heaven, and all the rest of it — that worried her. I think she feared rock’s inversion of religious power: the insidious power to enter one’s soul. There were many postwar households where a confession of interest in rock and roll was received rather as a young Victorian’s crisis of faith had been in the nineteenth century. Spitz tells us that listening to pop music in the Plant home was “akin to a declaration of war,” producing an “irreparable” rift between Plant and his parents. In my own adolescence, I can’t clearly separate atheism’s power from rock and roll’s. My mother was right to be fearful. There was something a little “satanic” about Led Zeppelin. You can feel it, perhaps, in the music’s deep uncanniness; in Plant’s unsexed keening; in the band’s weird addiction to downward or upward chromatic progressions — the sound of horror-film scores — in songs like “Dazed and Confused,” “Kashmir,” “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” and even “Stairway to Heaven.” It’s in the terrifying, spectral, semi-tonal shriek of “Immigrant Song,” the creepy scratching chords that open “Dancing Days,” the dirgelike liturgies of “Friends” and “Black Dog.”

That’s the good satanism. What about the actual diabolical activity — the violence, the rape, the pillage, the sheer wastage of lives? Jimmy Page was a devoted follower of the satanic “magick” of Aleister Crowley, whose Sadean permissions can be reduced to one decree: “There is no law beyond do what thou wilt.” If the predetermined task of rock gods and goddesses is to sacrifice themselves on the Dionysian altar of excess so that gentle teen-agers the world over don’t have to do it themselves — which seems to be the basic rock-and-roll contract — then the lives of these deities are never exactly wasted, especially when they are foreshortened. Their atrocious human deeds are, to paraphrase a famous fictional atheist, the manure for our future harmony. In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, they died young (or otherwise ruined their health), so that we could persist in the fantasy that there’s nothing worse than growing old.

The fictional atheist he references is Ivan Karamazov, famously “returning his ticket” in the Rebellion chapter of Dostoyevesky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan’s full comment about manure and future harmony showcases his disdain for attempts to justify suffering by the future good it produces. “Surely” he tells his devout Christian brother Alyosha,  “I haven’t suffered simply that I, my crimes and my sufferings, may manure the soil of the future harmony for somebody else.”  I’m not sure that overdosing to death as a scapegoat for the sins of teenage angst constitutes real meaning, and I think that’s what Woods is getting at, especially since the band’s debauchery in the 60’s and 70’s is mere parody today. I’m no Satanist, but the search for meaning in Zeppelin’s self-destructive musical excellence is a fascinating topic, even for the Alyoshas among us. 

Also in music, Ian Leslie’s essay “The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson’s Get Back” is the best read so far on the Disney documentary. Sure, the show is long (and pretty boring), but so is the process of making anything great.

A good song or album — or novel or painting — seems authoritative and inevitable, as if it just had to be that way, but it rarely feels like that to the people making it. Art involves a kind of conjuring trick in which the artist conceals her false starts, her procrastination, her self-doubts, her confusion, behind the finished article. The Beatles did so well at effacing their efforts that we are suspicious they actually had to make any, which is why the words “magic” and “genius” get used so much around them. A work of genius inspires awe in a lesser artist, but it’s not necessarily inspiring. In Get Back, we are allowed into The Beatles’ process. We see the mess; we live the boredom. We watch them struggle, and somehow it doesn’t diminish the magic at all. In a sense, Paul has finally got his wish: Let It Be is not just an album anymore. Joined up with Get Back, it is an exploration of the artistic journey – that long and winding road. It is about how hard it is to create something from nothing, and why we do it, despite everything.

7. The last word this week goes to Giles Fraser, whose reflection on death at Unherd is part reflection on the lesser celebrated holiday of Candlemas and part dunk on British atheism. I, too, hope that everyone at my funeral comes doing their best Sophia Loren impression.

We die when the experts “cannot do any more”. It’s not much of an ending. This is not a criticism of the people we have tasked with keeping us alive. But more a question about what it is to live without a narrative sense of our own ending. For without some hermeneutic rhythm of beginning and end, our lives — like Arnold Toynbee’s view of history — are “just one damn fact after another”. There is no conclusion, no purpose, no narrative arc; just a succession of inconsequential events with our death having no more or less meaning than any other event. The contrast with the religious worldview couldn’t be stronger…

At the bedside, priests often talk about death to those who are saying their goodbyes. And equally often, they are obstructed from doing so by family members who maintain it isn’t going to happen. Even at funerals, we are sometimes instructed to wear brightly coloured clothes, and to celebrate a life rather than mourn a death.

Atheists will say that we all need to face the fact that, ultimately, we are nothing more or less than food for worms and daffodils. That eternal life is a fantasy designed to give the clergy some sort of control over people’s lives. Auguste Comte said that the afterlife produced “slaves of God”. But atheism has arguably made us less able to talk about death, not knowing how it fits into the story of our lives. Instead of bravely facing death, too often the secular world ducks it.

When I die, don’t you dare come in a bright jumper. I want a church full of Sophia Loren look-a-likes under their black veils bawling their eyes out. These days, it is often secular death that refuses to think of death as real.

Strays:

• Diabolical Paper Towel Dispensers, via the New Yorker
• New Testament Scholar Luke Timothy Johnson on his experience as a Benedictine scholar. “In 1971, I was accepted into Yale for doctoral work — a monk and intellectual with some scholarly leanings and some scholarly ability. When I finished at Yale I had the focus and the desire to produce that mark the mature scholar. I was also a husband with a child and six stepchildren.”
• To pair with Todd Brewer’s excellent reflection for Mbird on “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” here’s a deeper dive into the earworm’s popularity by Spencer Kornhaber in the Atlantic, who agrees that the family’s dysfunction is part of the song’s relatability and popularity.
• I very much appreciated the sympathetic portrayal of holocaust survivor and fictional memoirist Misha Defonseca by Luke Kjolhaug over at 1517.
• Finally, check out the fancy new Mbird store!

COMMENTS

---