Another Week Ends

1. Stating the obvious, it’s been a rough week in America, one that began with the shocking revelations of cover-ups in the Southern Baptist Church before those headlines gave way to the deeply upsetting mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. But alongside the collective tragedy felt this week has been a compounding sense of hopelessness and stagnation as the same talking points — literally decades in the making — get repeated ad nauseum with next to no action. How easily we forget that the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath, which is to say that the ideologies proposing solutions don’t matter more than making sure kids are safe. So when the Texas Attorney General grimly predicted “it’s not going to be the last time,” he voiced what many have come to intuitively feel. Alongside the anger and sadness, there is a resignation that will persist as the days turn into weeks. In the words of Elizabeth Bruenig,

we find ourselves foreclosing upon our own shared future both recklessly and deliberately — and perhaps, gradually, beginning to behave as if there is no future for us at all; soon, I sometimes worry, we may find ourselves faced with a darkening present, no faith in our future, and a doomed tendency to chase violence with violence. […] Resignation takes the form of anger, mistrust, hypervigilance, depression, withdrawal.

That last word, “withdrawal,” particularly sticks out to me as such a pervasive response to hopelessness and despair, both socially and interpersonally. We check out because the alternative is too much to bear.

2. Such withdrawal can happen in a number of different ways, not simply by inactivity, but also by means of self-absolving, ‘us vs. them’ judgment. In the absence of shared culpability — shared accountability — people withdraw entirely. Or, in the case of the SBC, they leave the church. This is the thread taken up by Wesley Hill, who himself left the SBC years ago for “conscience and doctrinal considerations”:

If you jump ship from one Christian denomination to another, you may — wittingly or unwittingly — be saying that, thank goodness, their missteps and crimes and rebellions are no longer yours to deal with. And if you say that, what are you ultimately saying about the centrality and finality of your shared baptism in the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? […]

I hope that those of us who have left won’t view ourselves as having somehow succeeded where our Southern Baptist siblings have failed, as having escaped unscathed from the judgment that’s coming for us all. I hope we’ll view ourselves as all alike floundering about in the ark of salvation, opposing each other on vital, urgent matters but, for that very reason, occupying the same space and trying, however haphazardly, to listen the same Lord. And I hope we’ll be granted the repentance and amendment of life that these awful days surely call for.

3. While withdrawal might be a natural response to distress, it’s also probably counterproductive. Along these lines, new research by neuroscientists confirms what we already know intuitively, that stress is more easily handled if you hug it out.

Researchers analyzed how 76 people responded to stress after a hug from a romantic partner in a study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One. Women who got to hug their significant other showed a decrease in the production of cortisol — a stress hormone — compared with those who did not. Cortisol can have an impact on memory recall, which could make the stressful task ahead even more difficult, said senior study author Julian Packheiser, a postdoctoral researcher with the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience. […] Affection with someone you love releases a neurotransmitter called oxytocin, often called the “love hormone,” which reduces cortisol levels. This response, paired with social support, buffers against stress, according to the study.

Unfortunately, benefits of hugs don’t seem to translate to men, who saw no drop in cortisol levels. Perhaps it’s not their “love language”? Ha! No, I don’t think so. Men (desperately) need all the hugs you have to spare, whatever the research here may say.

4. Trending along similar lines, the School of Life published “The Role of Love in Mental Health,” which lays out in interpersonal terms the many benefits of one-way love in mental illness (and beyond). The whole thing is worth the read, but here are a few highlights:

[On Non-Judgement] Part of what can make the attentions of others oppressive is the note of patronising pity we detect beneath their apparent kindness. They — the well-ones — have come to see us in order to help, but we sense how much they cling to a fundamental difference between the mess we are in and who they think they are. We are the insane ones and they will always fly the flags of health, rationality and balance. They feel sorry for us from afar, as if we were the proverbial drowning man and they the observer on dry land.

Loving companions bear no such hints of superiority. They do not judge us as beneath them when we lie crumpled in our pyjamas at midday because they do not fundamentally see themselves as ‘above’ someone who is mentally unwell. We may happen to be very ill at the moment, but it might as well have been them, were it not for the accidents of psychology and of neuro-chemistry. They don’t oppress us by covertly clinging to their belief in their own solidity and competence. All of us are potentially ill enough to be in the asylum, and those of us who are actually there there may not be the most afflicted. 

On reassurance:

The loving companion insists that they will be there to personally ensure that the future will be manageable. When it gets terrible, they can be in each other’s presence and hold each other’s spirits.

The loving companion doesn’t get bored of instilling the same fundamental message: I am here for you and it will be OK. Even if this OK isn’t what one would ideally want, still it will be OK, better than death — which usually remains the alternative in the sufferer’s mind.

Just the way you are:

But with any luck, in the presence of a loving companion, they can start to believe in something far more nuanced and miraculous: that they could be loved without prizes, that true love isn’t about impressing or intimidating someone, that an adult can love another adult a little like a good parent loves their child: not because of anything they have done, but simply and poignantly just because they exist.

5. Some grace-in-practice in the news this week. Nick Roker, son of talk show host Al Roker, recently spoke at his church on what the church has meant to him over the years. Nick is on the autism spectrum and while school was always challenging, the church was a haven.

Today I am 19 years old and about to graduate high school … I have a learning disability, and I have worked extra hard to get to this point. This last semester, I earned all ‘A’s on my report card. It feels really good, but my accomplishments haven’t all been about school. They have also been about perseverance here at St. James. … I have always felt loved and supported here,” he said. “I am happy and feel accomplished after each service. I feel empowered here and welcome. I am accepted here for who I am.

Nick spoke at length about the joy he has participating in the service as an acolyte. That might seem like a small thing to do, but to him it was anything but. See also on Mbird Matt Pearson’s latest, “Never Having to Apologize.”

6. In ‘seculosity’ news this week, the New York Times ran a stunning article by Carolyn Chen, “When Your Job Fills In for Your Faith, That’s a Problem,” containing more than a few notable takeaways:

The gospel of work is thin gruel, an ethically empty solution to meet our essential need for belonging and meaning. And it is starving us as individuals and communities.

Chen then tells the story of “John,” who grew up going to an evangelical church before working at a San Francisco start-up, where his desire to change the world morphed into an all-too common vocational idealism.

A 70-hour workweek left him little time to join a church or engage with any community outside of work. His co-workers became his closest friends. He ate nearly all his meals at work. It seemed to me that the inspirational rush he’d experienced at Sunday services now came from the weekly all-hands company meeting. Work gave John not only a new identity but also a new purpose in life and a different set of values. Instead of embracing the Christian mission to change the world by spreading the Gospel, John embraced the company mission: to “change the world” with its app. This is the same language Christian missionaries use — but with none of the moral and ethical reflecting that John had done with his Christian faith community. […]

[John’s employer] held regular meditation sessions that included readings from a spiritual text. And in place of a pastor, John had an executive coach hired by the company, who taught him prayerful practices of breathing, meditation, visualization and reflection, which he said helped him connect with his “authentic self” and manifest it through his work.

The overlap and subsequent supplanting of Christianity by work here is unsurprising. But the movement seems to derive, in part, to a theology of glory. Where failure is not an option, success must be found now matter the cost — even it means selling your soul to gain the world.

7. A bit of a quick hitter …. The Wall Street Journal’s “Why Most Pastors Avoid Politics” was an interesting read, but is precisely the kind of explanation you’d find from a political scientist (Preachers don’t talk about politics because they want job security?). But perhaps preachers don’t talk about politics explicitly because the gospel they preach aims higher.

8. In humor this week, I’m a sucker for satire that includes Greek mythology, so kudos the Belladonna Comedy, for “Welcome to Body By Sisyphus.” And Reductress is as much a fan of boundaries as I am: “Why Being Called on My BS Is a Violation of My Boundaries”

And for parents, this last one is too on the nose: “I LIVED IT: I Agreed With the Teenager’s Parents in a Coming of Age Movie“:

Years back, in another life, I would’ve been just as angry as the protagonist for having her freedoms violated. Now, I can’t help but wonder what the fuck is wrong with her, and by extension, teenage me as well. Like, your parents have been alive so much longer than you? Consider they know something you don’t. Fuck, I’m doing it again.

Obviously, as you age, you have different opinions about the media you’re watching, but never in a million years did I think I’d be on the parents’ side in a coming of age movie. I mean, the daughter’s gonna get herself into such a dangerous situation! Someone has to do something, right?

9. Finally, Oliver Burkeman isn’t so much a fan of self-consciously trying to develop good habits. Which, amid the current self-help discourse, counts as a revelation:

It’s often the case that the project of habit-building can serve as an invitation to avoidance. Sometimes that’s because the idea of building a habit seems rather daunting, and so you conclude that it’s best left until you have more time, later this year, or whatever. At other times, the idea of “building a habit” is so appealing precisely because the change in question is scary or uncomfortable — and so treating it as a long-term project is a convenient way of putting off the difficult stuff to another time.

What we’re craving when we use habit-building as avoidance in this way, I think, is our old friend, the feeling of control: we want to see ourselves as the captain of the superyacht, standing confidently on the bridge, steering our life to the point at which we’ll finally feel adequate, acceptable, and on top of things. Devising schemes for self-improvement obviously feeds into that fantasy, whereas just doing something today, as a one-off — just writing a chapter of the short story, just suggesting a meetup with a friend, just going for a run — requires the surrender of control. It means launching your little canoe onto the rapids and letting life take you wherever it’s going to take you. It means risking that you’ll do the thing badly, and the certainty that you’ll do it imperfectly.

Strays:

• A Fortress in the Face of Violence
• What did Thomas Jefferson really think about God?
• Digging the newest Harry Styles album. Don’t be fooled by the melodies, there’s a darkness that lurks beneath the surface.
• Theologian Stanley Hauerwas is always an interesting interview and in a discussion this week on the pandemic and the future theology, this line stuck out:

“I don’t know that there’s any peculiar challenge that the pandemic represents that isn’t just the challenge that was there before the pandemic. So, that we need to say something very special about the pandemic, I think is a misleading demand. It’s just that it has exposed limits and possibilities that were there before the pandemic.”