1. So you finally did it — you set aside an evening to host friends. Dinner is cooking, the time is nigh. Fifteen minutes before go time, an awakening: the house is a wreck! Cue a panicked last-minute cleanup and perhaps a huge fight with your roomie and/or spouse right before said friends walk through the door.
All too familiar with this scenario, I breathed a sigh of relief upon reading this week’s first link: “Don’t Let a Messy House Stop You From Hosting: No One Cares as Much as You Do” by Allie Volpe at Vox.
“Often we project our own beliefs about ourselves onto what we believe others are thinking.” …
Many people crave more time with their friends, yet the anxiety of hosting what should be an undemanding get-together may preclude them from seeing their buds more often. So the only rule you really need to keep in mind is to make sure your house is just tidy enough for guests to relax, experts say…
Personal standards for how a home “should” look before hosting are shaped by past experiences, Bogdanovic says. Many people either had a relative who stressed the importance of cleaning up for guests or saw the caricature depicted in culture — or online.
Across social media, images of uber-organized homes and performative cleaning videos create the false perception that the average home looks like a magazine. We also have a tendency to compare our spaces to those of our friends. “You’re comparing your behind-the-scenes with someone else’s highlight reel,” says KC Davis, a therapist and author of How to Keep House While Drowning. […]
“What is important to you in a friendship?” Bogdanovic says. “Is cleanliness and perfection really the most important thing? Or would you prefer someone who listens to you and you have fun with?” […]
The primary goal of a host should be to pay attention to guests, not a stray toy. Davis says to focus your efforts on making the room where you’ll be hanging out comfortable for guests. Think practically: providing a place to sit (that isn’t covered in pet hair), making sure the floor is clear so people can walk around, offering drinks and snacks on fresh dishes, ensuring the bathroom is clean. …
“In the moments where we are a bit imperfect or we’re a little raw or we’re a little unpolished,” Petersel says, “we’re actually giving other people permission to show up as their full selves.”
I’ll add: if you clean too much, you’re setting the bar too high for your friends.
1b. This next one is very related, I think, and will be discussed on Monday’s [season finale of the] Mockingcast — tune in for that. In Southern Living, “Let’s Bring Back the Lost Art of the Afternoon Visit.” The key? It’s not so much of an “art” as “reprioritization” of standards (you might even say, “lowering” them). As writer Patricia Shannon puts it:
Before you think it’s too lofty of a goal to usher this social practice of yesteryear into the 21st century, remember that Nana had eight kids, two dogs, and a vegetable garden. If she could make time for a 30-minute visit with Aunt Charlene twice a month, there might be hope for us yet. […]
The whole point of an afternoon visit isn’t simply a means to catch up with friends, neighbors, and family (though, it’s certainly a perk). It can also serve to reprioritize your day, slow things down, or even eliminate the sense of mundanity that seems to creep in after our daytime hours begin to morph into a series of identical time blocks just to be crossed off one by one. Bringing back the afternoon visit (or Saturday morning drop-in, or Wednesday lunch-hour Zoom call, or post-church coffee with the girls) is as much about the “me” as it is about the “we.”
2. Part of the problem, at least for some of us, is that we have too much going on — we’re too focused on professional or personal goals (or emails!) to take time for an impromptu coffee or a spontaneous chat. We have things to do, ladders to climb. This week I’ve been thinking about what we give up for such pursuits thanks to the release of Miroslav Volf’s new book, The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse. In her review at Christianity Today, Bonnie Kristian evaluates the moral cost of ambition.
Volf’s work turns on a distinction between striving for superiority and striving for excellence. His concern, he explains early on, is “striving to be better than someone else, not simply striving to be better.”
This is a more meaningful difference than it may initially seem. In a competitive culture that trains its members to think in lists and rankings, any improvement will tend to be relative improvement, and that relativity is about the position of other people. If I strive to be better, as a matter of course I will become better than others. If one team wins, the other loses. If I get the big envelope from Yale, someone else gets the devastation of the one-page rejection […]
The problem, argues Aquinas, is not striving per se but striving for honor for myself, an aim achieved at the expense of others and in disregard for God and neighbor. […] “Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit,” [Paul] writes, “but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.”
As Kristian later explains, such a turn is not as easy as it sounds. The human condition is to be curved inwards — self-focused. Perhaps, then, what we ought to be striving for are opportunities for interruption, to catch sight of things outside of ourselves. More afternoon visits, say.
3. Volf’s diagnosis is exemplified rather potently by David Brooks this week. Writing in the NY Times, Brooks confronts some depressing but all too real facts about today’s young adults — “the most rejected generation.” Here at Mockingbird, we have been documenting the killer expectations of college admissions for more than a decade, and it seems as if the situation is only darkening, as the need for exclusive acceptances expands beyond college.
Things get even worse when students leave school and enter the job market. They enter what I’ve come to think of as the seventh circle of Indeed hell. Applying for jobs online is easy, so you have millions of people sending hundreds of applications each into the great miasma of the internet, and God knows which impersonal algorithm is reading them. I keep hearing and reading stories about young people who applied to 400 jobs and got rejected by all of them.
It seems we’ve created a vast multilayered system that evaluates the worth of millions of young adults and, most of the time, tells them they are not up to snuff.
From The New Yorker.
Brooks describes the exclusionary nature of campus clubs, especially in places like Harvard — student-run societies from which rejection is commonplace.
It’s worth emphasizing that these club rejections are ones that students are imposing on one another. Many administrators and faculty members I’ve spoken to are mystified that students would create such an unforgiving set of status competitions. But the world of competitive exclusion is the world they know, so of course they are going to replicate it. One student’s quote in that Crimson article leaped out at me: “You jump through this huge hoop of getting into Harvard, and you just want to jump through more to get this adrenaline going again.” The competitive game is its own reward. …
I have not even begun to discuss the everyday rejections that afflict everybody in this age group — the Instagram posts nobody likes, the cool friend groups that exclude you, the hookup partners who ghost you, the hundreds of times you swiped right on an online dating app, only to get no response. And in this column I’m not even trying to cover the rejections experienced by the 94 percent of American students who don’t go to elite schools and don’t apply for internships at Goldman Sachs. By middle school, the system has told them that because they don’t do well on academic tests, they are not smart, not winners. That’s among the most brutal rejections our society has to offer.
The unemployment rate is low, so you’d think jobs would be plentiful. But recent grads are buried under avalanches of rejections.
I think about (I am now always thinking about) the phenomenon of social acceleration, which indicates that every aspect of life is picking up speed. More applications, more rejections, all at a faster rate. Perhaps you will succeed, but only after a truly historic amount of failure.
Psychologists like Roy Baumeister and others have studied the long-term effects of rejection, and they are not pleasant. People who have suffered rejections become, on average, more aggressive, less empathetic, have a harder time with self-control. After all, rejection threatens some of our core psychic needs — for belonging, for agency, for competence.
On the other hand, constant acceptance into this system only presents another stair to climb. A curse in its own right. Rejection, at the right time, could be an escape hatch.
But probably not. For most, it will mean another chance to try harder.
3b. Another Life Is Possible. That’s the title of Clare Stober’s book, from which the following is taken. In an excerpt published at Plough, Stober tells of pioneering a successful design business — attaining such wealth that it left her “very uncomfortable” and “so empty inside.” She founded her business “in dependence on God,” but that dependence was “slowly replaced by self-reliance, business acumen, and a desire to meet ever higher financial goals.”
Living “another life” was not so simple:
Choosing God would mean leaving the agency I had built up and co-owned. Before leaving, I had to settle affairs with my business partner. This was complicated: he and his wife had once been my close friends and spiritual mentors, but over time we had grown apart.
It took multiple offers and counteroffers to come to a final agreement, but the result was that I ended up paying $50,000 in taxes which my partner should have paid. When I realized how he and his accountant had conspired to crush me, I was so consumed by anger that I couldn’t sleep for days. Sure, it was “only money,” and I didn’t need it at the time. But it was a lot of money, and it was mine. Obviously, the IRS could not be put off, though, so I wrote the check and hoped in a God of vengeance.
A journey to forgiveness took me two years, and was part of a deeper quest for renewal: the search for what Tolstoy calls the “true life.” Along the way, I stumbled on new treasures: vulnerability, humility, trust, and joy. … Life doesn’t stop. No community is perfect … I must continually go through new cycles of repentance and renewal – that there must always be new beginnings.
4. Or maybe what we all really need is a slap in the face. For this week’s humor let’s start there: “Woman in Desperate Need of Therapist Who Can Slap Her.”
In a dire story emerging from Los Angeles, CA, 28-year-old Maia Beauford is in desperate need of a therapist who can go beyond the typical techniques of cognitive behavioral therapy and instead just slap the shit out of her.
“I’ve been in therapy for a few years, so I’m well aware of the destructive patterns I’ve been repeating,” Maia told reporters gathered at the scene. “It’s not enough to know. I need something more. I need my therapist to slap me across the face.”
Sources confirm Maia is very good at intellectualizing her emotions and thinking her way out of any negative feeling, but this has only led to a deeper issue where she constantly recognizes destructive thought patterns but is still unable to break them. According to Maia, this is where the slap will come in. … the issue of “ethical practices” is the only thing standing in the way.
“Look, I want to slap her as much as the next person, perhaps even more,” Felicia told reporters. “I’m just not allowed to do it. Hearing her talk about how much she hates her career in marketing and just wants to be a full-time painter for the past three years has been infuriating. I would love to hit her really quickly across the face just once and yell, ‘QUIT!’ The sad thing is, therapists aren’t allowed to slap their clients the way they used to.”
Next, at least for city dwellers, this one is pretty good: “The Problem with My City Is That It’s a City.”
I’ve lived in this city for decades, but I’m noticing more and more problems. There’s crowding, congestion, changing people, tall buildings, and the biggest problem: This city is a literal city.
… I don’t recognize anyone in my neighborhood anymore! Why do the kids I used to know seem to grow taller, look older, and move away? I need every political candidate to clarify their position on the passage of linear time.
And from the New Yorker, here’s “What the Pope Was Like as a Kid“:
We played a lot of street hockey and he could be real competitive. Like, when he won he’d do this little dance and make a face, like, ‘You suck.’ He wouldn’t say those words, but it was that kind of a look. And if he lost—forget it. He’d say we cheated or something. And then he’d say, ‘But I forgive you. Not now, because you cheated, but someday, I will forgive you.’”
5. At the Church Times there was an excellent interview with writer Lamorna Ash, whose new book is Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion. She began the book on a lark: asking the “unserious” question, “Could I become a Christian in a year?” That leads her to serious appraisal of faith, ultimately finding herself attending church regularly and something of a spokesperson for the wave of younger people taking a fresh look at faith.
She wonders, too, whether faith is “something that you mature into”. If you had asked her as a teenager about love, she reflects, “I would have these grand notions, but no lived experience.” Throughout the book, we learn the truth of the observation made by a female Anglican priest, that “God finds you when you’re low.” …
Of young people, she suggests: “Let them enter into those religious spaces, let them read holy texts more, and again they have this armature or toolbox if they then one day want to enter into it. Knowing that every Sunday, all across the country, all across the world, these services are going on, that you can enter into quietly at the back, feels like a comfort to me.”
For those accustomed to the steady background hum of anxiety about the future of the Church, Ash’s book is itself a comfort: an opportunity to see the Church through the eyes of someone newly awakened to its potential. Noting that many of her friends have sought refuge in churches during times of despair, “engaged in something that approximated prayer”, she observes that there are “no other public spaces which fulfil this requirement, acting as portals to direct you to places outside of your ordinary modes of thought.”
Desirous of something “hard and bright. Not at the borders of Christianity, but right at its centre”, she finds herself “surprised by a longing for rituals”. It is at St Luke’s, Holloway, where she goes to receive communion during her travels, that Ash has, for now, found a home. “There is something about saying prayers alongside someone, singing alongside people with your terrible voice while the choir sings beautifully, that feels to me so valuable, and to my life is quite necessary.”
6. In a recent interview with Faith+Lead, Mockingbird director David Zahl discussed his new book The Big Relief — all about the urgency of grace. A common critique of grace is that it may sound very nice in theory — but what effect does it have in real life? As Zahl shows here, grace is, in practice, very much an antidote to the anxious pursuits detailed earlier in this post. A grace-centered community is “characterized by refreshment, honesty, and play — qualities increasingly rare in our achievement-oriented culture.”
David’s church has experienced unexpected growth by putting these principles into practice. He shares how they’ve embraced a different approach:
1. Make Grace Central: “We feel very strongly that if someone doesn’t walk out feeling lighter than when they came in, we have somehow not been faithful.”
2. Give Permission for Low Engagement: In their welcome video, they include a radical statement: “We’re a thriving church. There’s all sorts of ways to get involved, but if you just like to come on Christmas and Easter or sit in the back, that’s okay too.” David notes, “The amount of clergy I’ve heard from who have told me that they can’t believe we put that in our welcome video… And yet, our church has never been bigger.”
3. Wait for Lay-Led Initiatives: “What we try to do is we never almost never introduce fresh programming. We wait, we pray that God would just activate the gifts of our congregations and the interests and that when the time comes, we can be ready to support whatever it is they want to do.”
4. Meet Real Needs: By listening instead of prescribing, they’ve developed support groups for people dealing with infertility, caregiving for those with cognitive decline, and family estrangement – all initiated by congregation members, not clergy.
By embracing a posture of listening rather than fixing, acknowledging human limitations rather than demanding perfection, and prioritizing grace over achievement, communities of faith can become spaces of genuine refreshment.
Strays:
- I still haven’t watched Severance, ugh! But apparently it gets human nature right.
- I admit, also, that I haven’t read this (long read!) but it sounds amazing: novelist Karl Knausgaard on the re-enchanted world. I have, however, read [part of] the Morning Star series, so wouldn’t be surprised if this is very good.
- Third space: the gym that offers belonging, but at a cost.
- If you missed Will McDavid’s recent article on this site, here’s your sign: Five Ways to Make Your Enemies Repent. God bless!
