1. Wow, this first one. Writing in the Atlantic, Eve Fairbanks took the temperature of white South Africans, i.e., Afrikaners, and what she found was both startling and revealing. She describes a widespread sadness that’s palpable among the former ruling class of that country, even (especially?) among those who worked hardest to dismantle apartheid. Yes, there’s the loss of purpose that often accompanies the success of a long-held cause, but there’s also a hunger for further atonement, and most of all, a bafflement at what some social scientists call non-complementary behavior, and what we might call grace. Not unlike Javert at the end of Les Mis, but applied historically and demographically. I suppose you could also see it as an instance of the collective heaping of coals on the heads of one’s enemies, a la Romans 12:20. Whatever the case, it makes for a fascinating case study:
Many white South Africans told me that Black forgiveness felt like a slap on the face. By not acting toward you as you acted toward us, we’re showing you up, white South Africans seemed to hear. You’ll owe us a debt of gratitude forever.
Perhaps the strangest thing I saw was how deeply troubled white South Africans were by this feeling—that white people had never faced a full reckoning for apartheid […]
The Afrikaner journalist Rian Malan, who opposed apartheid, has written that, by most measures, its aftermath went better than almost any white person could have imagined. But, as with most white progressives, his experience of post-1994 South Africa has been complicated. A few years after the end of apartheid, he moved to an upscale Cape Town neighborhood. Most mornings, he drank macchiatos at an upscale seaside café — the kind of cosmopolitan place that, thanks to sanctions, had hardly existed under apartheid. “The sea is warm and the figs are ripe,” he wrote. He also described this existence as “unbearable.”
He just couldn’t forgive Black people for forgiving him. Paradoxically, being left undisturbed served as an ever-present reminder of his guilt, of how wrongly he had treated his maid and other Black people under apartheid. “The Bible was right about a thing or two,” he wrote. “It is infinitely worse to receive than to give, especially if … the gift is mercy.”
2. On the way back from the beach yesterday I listened to a podcast that was recommended by several readers. It was an episode of Honestly in which host Bari Weiss interviewed writer Freddie deBoer about what he sees as a trend of glorifying mental illness (what he terms “the gentrification of disability”). Freddie himself suffers from a particularly acute — and public — form of bi-polar disorder. The transcript isn’t available yet, but I commend the whole thing to you, especially the ending, where the two writers (of quite divergent viewpoints) delve into the larger crisis of meaning that haunts this debate, and so many others like it.
Freddie is troubled by the trend he’s observed of young people leaning on mental illness as an avenue of identity or, in #seculosity terms, Enoughness. This is troubling to him not only as someone who has been debilitated by his condition, but as someone who has caused real harm to others and himself during such episodes. It jives with something he wrote in a newsletter this past March (and something that Simeon mentioned in the “Depression” episode of the Brothers Zahl):
Self-diagnosis is an inherently fraught process that can cause serious problems for someone’s life, even if — especially if — they are indeed suffering from a mental illness. I do think that, practiced well, mental health diagnosis is a sometimes adversarial process, and that patients who come into it with an overly diagrammed vision of their condition need to be pushed back against. I don’t think that mental illness is an identity, though I am sometimes accused of acting that way myself, and the way people on social media treat having a mental illness as an attractive personality quirk is toxic and misleading. I do think that the endless search for new identity markers to validate people’s status as unique or, worse, to validate their suffering is a road that has no ending.
I do think that all of these adolescents who have decided that they have rare and debilitating conditions like dissociative identity disorder are no doubt reacting to real pain and really need help. But I also think that they fail to understand that suffering itself is not a rare condition, but a universal one, and that attempting to represent theirs as deeper because it supposedly stems from very uncommon conditions will do nothing to make them feel better. And that is the point, always, with mental illness, not to publicize it or revel in it or derive identity from it but to manage it, to reduce pain and instability.
3. When it comes to the crisis of meaning mentioned above, is anyone doing more right now, or speaking more hopefully and substantively into it, than Nick Cave??! A reader/fan wrote in to Red Hand Files and confessed her personal emptiness, asking Nick what, if anything, she might do to address it. Nick responded and in the process answered a separate question about the purpose of his oft-quoted Files:
It might be worth bearing in mind, Marina, that this emptiness that you feel, that we all feel to a greater or lesser degree, is not a condition in itself, rather it is an indicator of our own self-absorption, and signals a need. It asks something of us, this emptiness, this hollowness. It is a call. It is a call to meaning, and a call to love. It requires of us that we reach beyond our own dejection and attend to the condition of the world.
For me, personally, this is the gift of The Red Hand Files [read: ministry or the spiritual life -DZ]. By their very nature your questions draw me out of my own self-absorption, by demanding an engagement with you all. This is not always easy, but a call to meaning rarely is — how happy we can feel in our own misery! How cosy! How safe! — and so I read the hundreds of questions that come in each week and do my best to reply, regardless of my state of mind, truthfully and in good faith.
You ask me, John, what I want from The Red Hand Files. Well, the answer is this — I want to facilitate, in some small way, a mutual journey toward meaning; to decrease the dimensions of our emptiness and draw us closer to love and to beauty. I understand that these sound like grandiose claims, but they are not.
Would that these pages might do the same…! This morning Nick followed up that entry with one about grief that reads like something torn from the pages of Sarah Condon’s Churchy, not the least because it references reality TV so poignantly. Precious stuff.
4. I’ll be honest, I am seldom in the mood for a Paul Schrader film. I know he’s a serious talent and I respect the guy, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch most of his stuff, post-, well, Mosquito Coast. And that includes First Reformed, probably the definition of a must-watch movie for someone interested in faith and culture and church and America. Nevertheless, I was moved to tears by Andrew DeYoung’s essay on Schrader’s religious imagination in Image, on the occasion of Schrader’s new The Card Counter hitting screens. DeYoung grew up in the same Dutch Calvinist strain as Schrader and notes a deep resonance with the implied cosmology of the man’s filmic universe, if not the content of it, per se. The opening evocation of God on the other side of the (prison) glass got me, but even more so the closing paragraphs:
There’s something hard to shake about the faith you were brought up in. The theology you drank with your mother’s milk, the lessons you heard in Sunday school, the catechism you memorized when you were still too young to drive — that’s the stuff that’s hardest to shake, because it’s what cut the deepest groove in your soul. Maybe this is why Schrader has spoken of his “sacred past and profane present” even though he’s apparently still a person of faith: because on some level the religion of your childhood is the only one that feels real.
No, I’m not a Calvinist anymore — but on some level I can barely understand, I also sort of am. I’m still that kid lying awake in bed at night, wondering whether God has chosen him for heaven or hell, living in that quantum space, that space where both things are true at once: saved and damned, sinner and saint. A prisoner, trapped by the consequences of his own mistakes — but visited, even pursued, by a love that won’t give up on him.
5. In humor, for some reason the Hard Times made me laugh out loud with “I’m JD Power and These Are My Associates, Sure Would Be a Shame if Your Car Didn’t Win Any Awards” and The New Yorker weighed in with the clever #lowanthropology-leaning “God’s Grant Proposal.”
But this skit made me laugh hardest, and not just because I will never get enough Odenkirk (those last couple episodes of BCS!!):
6. Next up, a touching profile of gospel legend Mavis Staples appeared in the New Yorker last month, courtesy of editor David Remnick himself. Clearly I’m not the only one who finds her Christian witness infectious, to say nothing of her sense of vocation. No crisis of meaning here!
Sly, sociable, and funny, Staples reminds you of your mother’s most reliable and cheerful friend, the one who comes around with good gossip and a strawberry pie. Her cheeks are round and smooth; her hair is done in a copper bob; her resting expression is one of delight. “She is a ray of sunshine,” Bonnie Raitt, her frequent touring companion, said. “She’s never cranky. She has an abiding belief in God and His plan and believes the world is moving toward a higher and more loving world.” Staples has spent the past few decades lending her voice to a startling range of collaborators: Prince, Arcade Fire, Nona Hendryx, Ry Cooder, David Byrne. Anyone who has something to say, she’ll help them say it, in an inimitable gospel voice. One collaborator, Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco, said, “All day long, Mavis is having a good time. She’s excited about making music and just being alive. I hope I have that energy when I’m her age, but the truth is I don’t even have it now.”
[Remnick asks her if she thinks about the end.]
“You know, I do,” she said. “I do quite often. And I wonder how I’m going to go. Where will I be? I’ve prepared everything. I have a will— because I have a lot of nieces and nephews, Pervis’s children, and charities. But I seem to think about that more now than ever. And I tell myself, ‘I gotta stop thinking.’ Speedy, he tells me maybe I should talk to a therapist. I said, ‘Don’t need no therapist. The Lord is my therapist. That’s who I talk to when I need help.’ ”
[Remnick asks if she gets an answer.]
“Yes, indeed. That’s why I’m still here. He lets me know when I’m right and when I’m wrong, but he ain’t letting me know about when my time is coming. But, see, I just have to be ready. If it comes tomorrow, I’m ready. I have done all that I’m supposed to do. I’ve been good. I’ve kept my father’s legacy alive. Pops started this, and I’m not just going to squander it. I’m going to sing every time I get on the stage — I’m gonna sing with all my heart and all I can put out.”
7. Moving on, recent conference speaker Anne Helen Petersen’s latest newsletter tackles a familiar yet under-discussed divide/tension in young adulthood and mid-life, namely, between those who have kids and those who do not. Before delving into some very specific — and helpful! — pointers, she grounds the topic in the sort of humility that is so easy to lose sight of in a world of competitive grievance. The most important thing to remember in this scenario, Peterson writes, is the same thing to remember in all such scenarios:
1.) Most people feel left behind in some way — no matter what their life is like
Parents feel like their friends without kids have left them behind and are flaky. Kid-free people feel like their parent friends only want to hang out with other parents and are also flaky. Parents feel like society is incredibly hostile to them; single people feel like society is incredibly hostile to them; partnered people without kids feel like society is incredibly hostile to them.
All of this is true, because society is just flat-out hostile to all manner of people who aren’t exorbitantly wealthy (and even they aren’t having a great time). That hostility can force us into a defensive crouch where it’s very difficult to see anything past our own struggles, or to empathize with someone whose struggles feel like things that would make your life easier. (A vivid example from the pandemic: people with kids wished for the peace and quiet of people’s lives without kids; many people without kids felt incredibly isolated and yearned for the presence of other people).
Everyone’s struggle is different — but life is not a struggle contest. Competing for the most aggrieved is what keeps us from actually creating the sort of solidarity that can result in change.
If someone seems like they’re doing just fine without support, it’s a lie — a lie that upholds the myth that if you just follow the rules, you, too, can ride a wave of self-reliance to happiness, and financial stability, to some understanding of a perfect life.
8. Finally, on a more devotional note, Plough reprinted the foreword Eugene Peterson wrote in 2015 for the biography of his grandfather and maybe it’ll speak to you as, well, personally as it did me:
One of the most soul-damaging effects of modern life is the obfuscation of story: the fragmentation of story into disconnected anecdotes, the reduction of story to gossip, the dismemberment of story into lists of formulae or rules. In most of the words that come before us each day — delivered via television, internet, newspaper, billboard, and gossip – there is rarely any story beyond the immediate event. There is very little that connects to the past, reaches into the future, or soars to the heights. Instead of connecting us with a deeper reality, such words disconnect us, leaving us in a boneyard of incident and comment.
On the other hand, every time someone tells a story and tells it well and truly, the gospel is served. Out of the chaos of incident and accident, story-making words bring light, coherence, meaning, and value. If there is a story, then maybe, just maybe, there is (must be!) a Storyteller. […]
Every time someone is addressed by name and realizes that in the encounter they are being treated as one-of-a-kind — not as a customer, not as a patient, not as a voter, not as a sinner — the gospel is served. Saving love is always personally specific, never merely generic. Christ’s mercy is always customized to an individual, never swallowed up in an abstraction.
Strays:
- In his column for the NY Times, David Brooks not only echoed Peterson’s thesis but also picked up on the status theme I explored in the sermon we posted this week. Long story short, Gaming appears to be a more ascendant paradigm for daily life these days than Story (his preferred one). The following observation was new to me: “The role-playing game is to our century what the novel was to the 18th century, a new mode of experience and self-creation.”
- Speaking of unending status games, though, you may be a Hall of Fame ballplayer but … do you have a statue?
- Agnes Callard’s thoughts in the Point about how “Art Is For Seeing Evil” is well worth your attention.
- Can pickleball really save America? Not if we can’t avoid turning it into a vehicle of self-justification!
- In The New Yorker Helen Longstreth disclosed “A Recipe for Forgiveness” by way of a stirring family history. Spoiler: sausage pasta is involved.
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