Another Week Ends

1. It’s a Barbie universe this week, and we just live in it. In conjunction with the much-hyped movie’s release The NY Times Magazine profiled director/co-screenwriter Greta Gerwig, and to say that the article ends in a different place from where it begins would be an understatement. It blew me away — in a time consumed by cultural pessimism, Gerwig has somehow been given the courage and vision to bear the light, smack dab in the center of the Zeitgeist. By ‘light’ I mean the love and grace of God. Seriously. God is not merely a part of her filmic universe but its principal hope. Feels genuinely subversive.

Put another way, I suspect that what began with Lady Bird and blossomed in Little Women is about to hit peak velocity with Barbie. Get a load of this:

“I really thought of [the plot of Barbie] like a spiritual journey,” Gerwig says. The Barbies live in a world that has “the comfort of fundamentalism”; there is no death, aging or shame, and “you never have to wonder what you’re meant to do.” Then cellulite slithers into paradise. The idea that “you’re not going to follow a path that’s been laid out for you,” Gerwig says, “comes with a fair amount of terror.”

Helping Barbie navigate her topsy-turvy new existence are other women. Some are already embedded in her history but one is a stranger, a woman she notices while she sits on a bench, gathering herself. It’s a type of woman she has never seen before, because there are no old women in Barbieland. This woman is played by the 91-year-old, Oscar-winning costume designer Ann Roth, a friend of Gerwig’s. (“Do you have many friends who are, like, 90? I do, weirdly. I have three real friends, not pretend friends, who are now 91, 90 and 91.”) When Barbie looks at her, she finds her beautiful and tells her so. The woman already knows. Suddenly Barbie, the fraught aspirational figure, has beheld someone she might aspire to be, and it is a radiantly content nonagenarian, reading a newspaper on a Los Angeles bench, who knows what she’s worth.

“The idea of a loving God who’s a mother, a grandmother — who looks at you and says, ‘Honey, you’re doing OK’ — is something I feel like I need and I wanted to give to other people,” Gerwig says. When it was suggested that this scene, which Gerwig calls a “transaction of grace,” might be cut for time, she remembers thinking: “If I cut that scene, I don’t know why I’m making this movie. If I don’t have that scene, I don’t know what it is or what I’ve done.”…

Wowza, right? And that’s not all. The piece, written by journalist Willa Paskin, closes on the following note:

It’s a testament to Gerwig’s singular earnestness — a level of sincerity unavailable to many of us — that using Barbie to affirm the worth of ordinary women feels, to her, quasi religious. She told me that when she was growing up, her Christian family’s closest friends were observant Jews; they vacationed together and constantly tore around each other’s homes. She would also eat with them on Friday nights for Shabbat dinner, where blessings were sung in Hebrew, including over the children at the table. May God bless you and protect you. May God show you favor and be gracious to you. May God show you kindness and grant you peace. Every Friday the family’s father would rest his hand on Gerwig’s head, just as he did on his own children’s, and bless her too.

“I remember feeling the sense of, ‘Whatever your wins and losses were for the week, whatever you did or you didn’t do, when you come to this table, your value has nothing to do with that,’” Gerwig told me. “ ‘You are a child of God. I put my hand over you, and I bless you as a child of God at this table. And that’s your value.’ I remember feeling so safe in that and feeling so, like, enough.” She imagines people going to the temple of the movies to see “Barbie” on a hot summer day, sitting in the air-conditioned dark, feeling transported, laughing, maybe crying, and then coming out into the bright heat. “I want people to feel like I did at Shabbat dinner,” she said. “I want them to get blessed.”

I for one plan to get blessed on opening night. Oh, and how exciting is it that Netflix has given Greta the keys to Narnia?? Praise God.

2. Early in the article, Gerwig cops to playing with dolls until she was 14 or so, long after her peers had given it up. This not only marked her as a future director but one with a healthy appreciation of play, i.e. the perfect candidate for the job. Sadly, any Gerwigs-in-training have to swim upstream nowadays. According to a recent article by Anna North in Vox, American children’s unstructured playtime fell by a whopping 25% between 1981 and 1997 — and has continued to drop ever since. We’ve written about this decline a number of times before and the deleterious effect it seems to be having on the mental health of younger generations (we’re far from the only ones). I’m taking it as an invitation to let my kids roam as free as humanly possible these next six weeks. Here’s North:

In a commentary earlier this year in the Journal of Pediatrics, [Boston College professor Peter] Gray and his co-authors argue that the decline in play and independence could be one reason children and teens have reported skyrocketing levels of anxiety, depression, and sadness in recent years.

The presence of grown-ups seems to diminish the psychological benefits of kids’ activities, experts say. “The more that play for kids is organized and directed by adults, the less opportunities that kids have to develop some really important skills that we know are preventive for anxiety — and, because anxiety is so closely linked to depression, to depression as well,” Lyons said.

“I work with parents that have baby monitors in their kids’ bedrooms, and their kids are 12 years old,” Lyons said. “We’ve got this idea right now that the closer we keep our kids, the more information we have, the more we direct, the more that we control, the better off our kids will be. And the research is showing the opposite.”

Part of what makes play so precious, of course, is how intertwined with freedom it is. Play demands nothing; it produces nothing; it is action divorced from utility, anything we engage in for its own sake, simply because we enjoy doing so. No wonder it’s good for our souls — and no wonder some call the Holy Spirit the spirit of play.

3. Next up, over at the New York Times, David French asked “Who Truly Threatens the Church?” and his answer reads like it was ripped from the pages of #LowAnthropology — at least, that’s what the many of you who forwarded me the op-ed have suggested. French is concerned, as ever, with the perils of religious nationalism, which he believes contradicts Christian teaching on human nature on a fundamental level. Can’t say I disagree. It’s also nice to read the actual details of the Chesterton quote he mentions at the outset:

The doctrine of original sin rejects the idea that we are intrinsically good and are corrupted only by the outside world. Instead, we enter life with our own profound and inherent flaws. We are all, in a word, fallen. To quote Jesus in the book of Mark, “There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.” All manner of sin and evil comes “from within, out of the heart of man.”

Under this understanding of Scripture, we are all our own greatest enemy — Christians as fully as those who do not share our beliefs. We do not, either as individuals or as a religious movement, possess an inherent virtue that should entitle any of us to rule. We shun the will to power because we rightly fear our own sin.

This proper skepticism about human virtue pervades the Constitution. At every turn, the power of government is hemmed in. Each branch checks the other. The people check the government, and the government checks the people. The Bill of Rights attempts to safeguard our most fundamental human rights from government overreach or the tyranny of the mob. No faction can be trusted with unchecked authority.

This is not moral relativism. We still possess core convictions. But existential humility acknowledges the limits of our own wisdom and virtue. Existential humility renders liberty a necessity, not merely to safeguard our own beliefs but also to safeguard our access to other ideas and arguments that might help expose our own mistakes and shortcomings.

4. While we’re on the #LowAnthropology trip (out in paperback on 7/25!), this video from Ethan Hawke is making the rounds, and I love it so much. Our collective fallibility is not merely reason for distributing authority as widely as possible. It is the pathway to the sympathy, connection, and beauty that sustains us:

5. Speaking of the benefits of (healthy) self-skepticism, Alan Noble penned a moving account of “Living with Religious Scrupulosity or Moral OCD” on Plough:

Nobody warned me about moral scrupulosity, the type of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) I suffer from. Nobody warned me how anxiety and fear can take the thing you care about most — your faith — and turn it against you.

OCD is what psychologists call an “ego-dystonic” condition: your fears come from the things you value the most, your greatest hopes, your most cherished aspirations — the kind of person you most deeply desire to be. I deeply desire to be a trustworthy, safe, responsible, morally upright person. So my OCD takes the form of fear that I’m exactly the opposite. Fear that I’ve behaved irresponsibly. Fears that I’ve harmed people in the past. And no matter how little evidence I have for these fears, no matter how many times or in how much detail wise friends reassure me that I haven’t harmed anyone, my OCD never lets me accept that reassurance. There’s always something my friends must have missed, that I must have overlooked. There’s always “one more thing.”

Instead of guidance and comfort, your conscience — or what seems to be your conscience — gives you just one message, again and again: be afraid […]

When your mind turns against you, you need other minds to ground you. In OCD — and in many other mental health conditions — recovery requires you to take a leap of faith, believing against your own deeply felt beliefs, accepting that you can’t always trust your mind, but that you can trust in God’s love for you. And in that love, he has given you voices of compassion and wisdom. Some days those voices will be all you have: a single faint, flickering light in the darkness. But that’s OK. It’s enough. It has to be.

6. In humor, the Onion gave us “Loving Mother Only Wants Daughter To Be Different In Every Possible Way” and “Overwhelming Need To Find A Bathroom Mistaken For Confidence.” Reductress reports, “Woman Still Not Seeing Results of Doing Yoga Once Every Three Years.” And McSweeneys produced an amused nod with “A Camping Trip with Young Kids, as Imagined by Me Before Having Kids.”

7. Over at the Project for Lived Theology, Charles Marsh praised late preacher and Civil Rights activist Will Campbell, who died in 2013. He includes a couple of details about the man’s ministry that struck me not only as inspirational but Darryl Davis-like in their radicality, grace-wise. Just astounding:

After 1965, Campbell scandalized many in the [Civil Rights] movement when he announced that the same concern that they had shown to the disenfranchised minority should be shown to poor whites – and to segregationists and racists. Many of these men and women, who were unsettled by the prospects of legal equality for blacks, had been abused as children and were tormented by fears and uncontrollable rage, often by untreated mental illness. Campbell made himself available as pastor and confessor to racists and to members of the Ku Klux Klan, seeking to share gospel-grace with outcasts and sinners.

“Most of us suspect that if Christ came back today he would once again be born among the lowly,” he explained. “But wouldn’t it shake us up if he came today and was born into a Klan family!” The redneck racist needed to be loved and cared for. Such was the radical love of Christ, the spirit of agape.

In August of 1998, Campbell traveled to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for the trial of Sam Bowers. Bowers was the former Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, who reigned over the most violent white terrorist organization in the South.  In 1998, more than thirty years after his first arrest, Bowers was convicted for the 1966 murder of Vernon Dahmer, an NAACP leader, land owner, and churchman in Forrest County, Mississippi. Campbell had been introduced to Bowers in the time of his impending arrest, when Bowers was still living in the nearby town of Laurel, running a pinball machine company and writing tracts on politics and religion. On the first day of the trial, Campbell arrived early in the Hattiesburg courthouse and approached Bowers, who was sitting at the defendant’s table, and shook his hand. Campbell then walked across the room, greeted the Dahmer family, and took a seat with them, where he remained for the rest of the day.

During a recess in the trial, a newspaper reporter asked Campbell how it was possible for him to walk between the grieving family and the Klan terrorist, who surely deserved punishment, not compassion. Campbell’s actions seemed offensive to the reporter. Did he really think Bowers deserved his kindness? Why had he acknowledged Sam Bowers with a handshake?

“It’s because I’m a goddamned Christian,” he told a gaggle of reporters. He would be sitting with the Dahmer family, but as a minister of the gospel, he would not forsake Sam Bowers, even though the former Imperial Wizard was wholly undeserving of such love.

8. Finally, in a short essay for Commonweal, hospital chaplain Sheila Cavanaugh relates “What Death Has Taught Me“:

I continue to be surrounded by death as a chaplain working at a large urban hospital that serves patients from all over the world. The hospital staff bears witness to the full arc of human suffering. Every day, doctors, nurses, coordinators, therapists, and chaplains don their compassion-coated armor to tend to the wounds of body and soul. Amidst patients who are recovering from strokes, burns, heart attacks, sepsis, tumors, and every imaginable permutation of disease, I am frequently paged to attend to a patient approaching the final threshold of life: a fifty-seven-year-old cardiac surgeon dying of metastatic colon cancer, a twenty-three-year-old college student struck by a truck, a forty-six-year-old father felled by a broken neck. Our patients’ pain is many-layered and their loneliness acute. Yet within the mystery of all this suffering, I experience glimpses of the Resurrection: people from all walks of life coming together to help those in need. So many of us — strangers helping strangers — come to see the world anew. Tending to trauma has created a resilient village where the deeply afflicted and we who accompany them transform heart-rending sadness into courage, hope, and joy. By coming together in a spirit of compassion and love, each of us — worker and patient alike — enables hope to take root. Whether it is hope for recovery or hope for peace in eternal life, it is hope that propels, consoles, and uplifts.

As I witness the endless procession of lives marching toward the heavenly banquet, I have come to embrace Death as a wise taskmaster and occasional friend. Its presence, sometimes welcomed and sometimes not, means life is changed, but not ended. Death has taught me that each of our lives is a thread in a consecrated tapestry of divine love entwined with sorrow and hope — a tapestry that survives our bodily surrender and endures forever.

Strays:

• Alan Jacobs provides something I’ve longed for: “A Concise Introduction to Thomas Pynchon.” The stuff about Pynchon’s theological heritage was totally new to me.
• Ooooof. Ted Gioia’s “30 Signs You Are Living in an Information Crap-pocalypse” may not be comfortable reading but I dare say it’s the (genuinely) necessary kind.
• Giddy up, it’s the the Summer of Kramercore! Or so Amanda Mull tells us in Atlantic.
• Richard Beck issued a timely refresh on “Why Tolkien Still Stands Alone.”
• Is religion becoming a luxury good? Some recent data suggests as much.