Another Week Ends

1. The days are coming when we will reckon with what really went down during the COVID lockdown. I’m not talking politically or institutionally, though I’m sure that will happen too (or is happening now). I mean relationally, psychologically, and spiritually. For the most part, we’ve spent the last couple years just grateful it’s behind us, glad to move on from what feels increasingly like a bad dream. No one could be blamed for wanting a little distance before uncorking that bottle again.

Maybe that’s the healthiest option, who knows. Even though avoidance never healed anyone of anything, the prospect of relitigating who did what and when does not sound appealing. Do you remember how thick the condemnation was? Oy vey. People are still very much picking up the pieces.

Yet in the not-so-distant future, those who were kids at the time will start writing memoirs and thinkpieces, and it will all come crashing back. When it does, I hope I’ll be able to summon a semblance of the humility and grace that Kathryn Jezer-Morton did in her column on the Cut last week, “Time to Ditch the COVID-era Judginess.” After surfacing the self-righteousness (and presentation anxiety) that poisoned so many of our relationships during that period, she gestures toward a blanket forgiveness. Something like a year of post-pandemic jubilee:

The epidemiological reality of COVID was that what other people did became our business, but many of us maladaptively applied that basic rule to our lives and haven’t looked back. Sometimes I think what really stuck with us from the COVID years was a sense of entitlement to the moral high ground. We’ve made moral superiority a habit — families in particular. I am wondering if this habit has outlasted its utility.

At the start of the pandemic, there was plenty of judgment to go around, both for people who weren’t cautious enough and those who were considered too cautious. It sometimes felt like every family had their own highly specific definition for what constituted acceptable COVID safety, and everyone who didn’t fall into that narrow path must be crazy. For every act of carelessness that put vulnerable people at risk, there were acts of social surveillance that ratcheted up the feelings of distrust, even within friend groups. COVID theater was an art form we all embraced as much for the sake of our reputations as for the safety of others, which strikes me, in retrospect, as a missed opportunity for real solidarity.

You might say that all of this was a small price to pay for saving people’s lives — but I’m not convinced the judgment didn’t do more harm than good.

Isolation made everyone more suspicious of each other; being face-to-face with people makes it harder to judge. “It is so much easier to judge parents on the group chat than at the PTA meeting.” When we spend more time around other parents, it’s obvious that most parents are fundamentally doing the same thing — balancing a bunch of competing priorities. “The healing that we need as parents is some kind of restorative justice circle that’s just like, ‘I’m sorry I judged you during COVID,’” joked [podcaster Sarah] Wheeler.

2. Over at the Atlantic, Ross Andersen looks at a different, though no less delicious form of parenting criticism, namely, the relationship between NBA superstar LeBron James and his son/teammate Bronny James. LeBron caused a stir a couple weeks ago when he confronted ESPN guru Stephen A. Smith during an actual Lakers game about comments Smith had made on air about Bronny’s less-than-impressive rookie season. From a grace standpoint, it’s hard not to find LeBron’s unwavering advocacy on behalf of his son, especially in the midst of public failure, very touching. From a law perspective, his attempt to shape the narrative by force of will may not be having the intended consequence. From a basic human perspective, it’s a testament to the capability of love to overpower, well, everything — even the GOAT is no match for it:

Nearly all parents experience something akin to [LeBron’s] naive desire, a wish to give their kid the future of their dreams while shielding them from pain and disappointment. LeBron may have felt some anguish as he watched his son this season. Few things are as excruciating as watching your kids suffer. No amount of money or fame can insure against it. LeBron may well be haunted by his role in bringing about that suffering. But even one of the greatest athletes of our age doesn’t have the power to protect his adult son from criticism.

Now, by appearing to threaten Smith, LeBron has not only acted like a petty strongman; he has drawn new attention to his son’s disappointing season, enlarging the very story that he sought to suppress. It’s a rare misstep for someone so media-savvy, who has stayed almost entirely scandal-free across a long career that began when he was still a teenager. The mistake is, perhaps, understandable. The emotions of parenthood are gigantic. They can knock anyone off their game, even the great LeBron James.

Speaking of kids, how about another gorgeous single from Jon Guerra’s upcoming Jesus album??

3. Before we move on from questionable behavior — and the motivations that lie behind it — writing in the Wall Street Journal, Jason Zweig digs deep into “The Last Decision by the World’s Leading Thinker on Decisions.” The title refers to Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his decision last year, at age 90, to travel to Switzerland for the sake of a physician-assisted suicide. Zweig canvasses many of Kahneman’s friends and colleagues, nearly all of whom have struggled to come to terms with the man’s decision (i.e., they haven’t). Instead they insinuate that Kahneman failed to “follow the science” when it came to ending his own life.

Then again, maybe his act proves once and for all his own thesis that “self-delusion helps sustain most people”, including Nobel Prize winners. A thorny subject to be sure and one which we tried to parse on the Mockingcast this week (out Monday). All I’ll say is that I feel for his loved ones, who won’t have the privilege of caring for him in his final decline, and I find the aversion to dependency evinced in his final letter more than a little sad — tragic even:

[Prior to the] groundbreaking research that Kahneman had conducted, economists had long assumed that human beings are rational. By that, they meant that people’s beliefs are internally consistent, they make decisions based on all the relevant information and their preferences don’t change. In a series of simple, brilliant experiments, Kahneman and [colleague Amos] Tversky refuted that definition of rationality. But Kahneman never contended that people are irrational. Instead he argued that they are inconsistent, emotional and easily fooled — most easily of all, by themselves.  In short, he made the case that people are neither rational nor irrational; they are, simply, human.

Kahneman often said that decades of studying the human mind had taught him how to recognize — but not how to avoid — these pitfalls of decision-making.

I think Danny wanted, above all, to avoid a long decline, to go out on his terms, to own his own death. Maybe the principles of good decision-making that he had so long espoused—rely on data, don’t trust most intuitions, view the evidence in the broadest possible perspective—had little to do with his decision.

Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon who befriended Kahneman more than 50 years ago, says, “Danny was the type of person who would think long and hard about things, so I figured he must have thought about it very slowly and deliberatively. Of course, those of us who spend our lives studying decisions, we think a lot about the reasons for those decisions. But often the reasons aren’t reasons. They’re feelings.”

4. Time for something lighter. “Too Many Trends!” is the title of a fascinating article in the New York Times by Callie Holtermann which details another way in which our moment is characterized by the acceleration-of-all-things. Contending with trends in fashion and consumerism has long been a hallmark of adolescence, but Holtermann’s reporting suggests that the pace of such trends, especially among Gen Z-ers, has quickened to the point of absurdity. I was thankful that the doublebind of justification-via-identity-formation gets an airing at the end; that is, the eschewing of “It” water bottles may be a Stanley all its own:

Young people I spoke with described an online trend ecosystem that resembles a soupy flood plain of fads — trends that are at once flimsy and a genuine source of stress for young people eager to fit in. The insecurity that young people feel when they don’t have the “it” item is amplified when there’s a new “it” item every week.

Francesca Oliva, an 18-year-old college freshman in Hopewell Junction, N.Y. “When you have 18,000 different ‘core’ identities being thrown at you — like eclectic grandpa, or coastal grandmother, or office siren — you’re like, What am I supposed to be?” she said.

A sense of consumption fatigue has set in … Others pushed “underconsumption core,” which encourages users to show off their off-trend, but still thoroughly wearable, clothes. Still more have documented their attempts at a “low-buy year” in which they vowed to cut back on shopping. Such neatly packaged repudiations of trendiness strike Abner Gordan, a 21-year-old college student in New York City, as ironic. “In a weird way, I think being anti-trend is very trendy,” he said.

5. Long read of the week would have to be “How I Learned That the Problem in My Marriage Was Me” by Daniel Oppenheimer, in which the writer and his wife dive into an intensive with legendary couples therapist Terry Real. Oppenheimer describes Real as “the bluntest and most charismatic of the therapists I’ve seen, the New Jersey Jewish version of Robin Williams’s irascible Boston character in ‘Good Will Hunting’ — profane, charismatic, open about his own life, forged in his own story of pain.” The piece is uncomfortable and confrontational, especially if you are a married middle-aged man, and I doubt it would stand up to theological scrutiny (not that it has to). But in a sea of articles that position therapy as glorified self-optimization and/or self-exoneration, it’s refreshing to see something so other-centered and raw.

For example, Oppenheimer describes their marital friction as follows:

If I was on alert, all it took was a tease from her with a smidgen of subtext or a tossed off complaint to trigger a reaction. Then we would go at it, our familiar dance of distrust. Her dart. My anger. Her fear. My grievances. Her grievances. She doesn’t care about me. He doesn’t care about me.

This is us trapped in what Real calls our “core negative image” of each other. It is not all of us. We have a lot in common, including a fascination with human relationships and an endearing tendency to over-analyze them. We both love music by feely white dudes with beards. We are united in our devotion to our three children. Too often, though, we revert to the worst stories we have about each other. In the videos of our sessions, I can see Real carefully stepping around and through these narratives, helping us to revise them… He explains, more cogently than we’ve gotten from a couples therapist before, why we sought each other out, drive each other crazy and have the potential to be great together.

“In our hearts,” Real said in one of our sessions, “we all think that we deserve the goddess or god who will deliver us from our childhood, even heal us and make it all better and give to us what we didn’t get. What we wind up with is somebody who is perfectly designed to stick it to us.”

Woof. Fortunately, those who read to the end will be rewarded with a vivid example of how a good therapist can, after careful excavation, spring those inner traps and help heal the “core negative images” that reside in the deepest recesses of one’s mental architecture. I’m talking about the inner child encounter that Real sets up, which I realize sounds pretty woo. In Oppenheimer’s telling, however, it becomes about as visceral a description of grace following law — of light entering an opened wound — as my delicate sensibility can tolerate. What might initially read as self-healing is, at least to my ears, the fruit of Real’s skilled, scalpel-like intervention.

6. In Humor, Reductress gave me a chuckle with their “REPORT: Meaning of Tattoo Will Certainly Convince Parents to Like It” and so did the Hard Times with “I Became ‘California Sober’ Because I Don’t Enjoy Alcohol but Still Want to Talk About Me.” McSweeney’s had me in their crosshairs with the admittedly niche “No One on the Basketball Moms Text Thread Laughed When I Compared Our Winless Season to Billy Joel’s “Goodnight Saigon’.” But the thing I laughed hardest about this week, Internet-wise, was another of the Prayers for Everyday Life that Todd highlighted last Friday. This is the one that got me:

Almighty God,
Who created Good,
You also created self-checkout.
And now you see
That the “Assistance Needed” light
On the self-checkout machine
That I am using is blinking.
Why did you make the slot for
Cash payment
And the slot for coupons so alike?
Oh, dear Lord,
Now they have to take the whole
Machine apart
To get back the twenty-dollar bill
That I put into the slot for coupons
By mistake.
My enemies, including Dalen,
The self-checkout-monitor guy,
Laugh me to shame.
Lord, be with me in the time of trial.

7. “‘Severance’ Makes a Case for Suffering” writes Morgan Lee in Christianity Today and [no spoilers!] tonight’s finale certainly bears that out. I won’t pretend to be among the show’s superfans, but it’s fun to connect the Christological dots below (see: final sentence of excerpt):

Severance fans have speculated for years about the nature of Lumon’s business. But recent episodes suggest the corporation has a far more relatable objective: a distress-free world. “We don’t want to experience anything unpleasant,” said Dichen Lachman, the actress who plays Mark’s late wife (and Lumon’s test subject) in a recent interview. “We kind of want to get on a prescription of not having to suffer.”

When we escape sufferings instead of participating in them, we pursue a kind of false relief—relief that neither positively forms our character nor helps us work through our underlying needs.

If philosophers and theologians posit that the human experience demands suffering, Severance both underscores and inverts this truth: Suffering demands a human experience. At Lumon, every attempt to rid one’s life of pain merely begets another human whose existence will be defined by that pain.

8. Lastly, last year’s plenary speaker at our NYC Conference, Andrew Root, has a new book out this week, Evangelism in an Age of Despair: Hope Beyond the Failed Promise of Happiness, and it’s phenomenal. I’ll leave you with a few choice soundbites from the first chapter to shape your weekend/life:

Ultimately, and ironically, we are in sad times in the early twenty-first century because we’re a society obsessed with happiness. We are so depressed and anxious because we so deeply just want to be happy … We are in sad times because we’ve asked happiness to bear the weight of signaling our self-fulfillment.

The confession of faith in Jesus Christ is the claim that his life, death, resurrection, and ascension save the world. His life frees the cosmos from death by him dying then overcoming death with life. Christianity is the cleaving to the body of Jesus Christ who does this cosmic saving. And yet here in late modernity we think we must save Jesus Christ, giving Christianity a future — the hubris is intense.

A world like ours — filled with sad happiness-seekers in misery who are stuck in their self-imposed châteaus of fragile authenticity — needs evangelism and ministry not as polemics but as consolation, not as arguments but as visions of how sorrow itself is shared by God and brings peace and mercy.

Consolation — walking into and joining sorrow — is the deepest witness to the beautiful truth that God sacramentally enters death to bring life.

Strays:

• Writer, pastor and Mbird speaker/contributor Sarah Hinlicky Wilson has a new book project on the horizon and it sounds predictably awesome. Forty Facets of the Ascension is the working title, and you can sign up for the kickstarter here. Highly recommended.
• Seculosity-adjacent podcast of the week would have to be the recent episode of It’s Been A Minute “Goodbye Church … Hello Wellness Industrial Complex” with Rina Raphael.
• Across the pond in the London Times, Graham Tomlin proposes that “Blaise Pascal is Haunting Our Unbelieving Age,” and I can’t say I disagree.
• Grace in Practice find of the week would be the @Empoweringcuts_ account on Instagram. That’s some serious ministry. Bravo x 1,000.
• Finally, what a pleasant surprise to see the Living Church’s article “Simeon Zahl and Life in the Spirit.”