1. Kicking off this week with a fantastic article by Kate Bowler over at Comment magazine, “The Roof Always Caves In.” Bowler here zeros in on the first of David Zahl’s three pillars of a Low Anthropology: limitation, the idea that our embodied humanity is inherently finite and constrained. We cannot be or become whatever we set our mind to, no matter how much grit and determination we exhibit. Nowhere is this limitation more apparent than in death — that full stop at the end of the sentence of our lives — something made more plain to Bowler when she was diagnosed with cancer a few years back. If I could quote the entire article, I would.
All of our freedoms — our choices and our ridiculous attempts to plan our lives — are constrained by so many unchangeable details. I was born in this particular year to those parents in this town. This medication exists and that treatment doesn’t, but now it seems that all along I had these cancer cells in my colon, spreading to my liver, and scattered in my abdomen because of a genetic blueprint written long ago. This existential state is, to borrow a term from Martin Heidegger, the thrownness of human life. As we wake to the suffering of this world and our own existence, we find ourselves hurtling through time.
Even at my most durable, it took so many people to build my life, prop it up, and maintain it. […] Frankly, none of us can afford the lives we already have. We set out to build our own dreams, slay our own dragons, and pay our own taxes and find that we trip over our health and our marriages and the way our inboxes suck us into the void. We were promised that American individualism and a multi-billion-dollar self-help industry would set us on our feet. When North Americans look for answers to our dependence, we often turn to the easy promises of the gospel of self-help. “Try harder!” “Change your mindset.” “You are your greatest hope.” We bought cheap paperbacks in a frenzy to find a cure for being human. […]
We understand instinctively that we cannot win this game of solitaire. … “Absolute independence is a false ideal,” argued the sociologist Robert Bellah, whose trenchant understanding of the modern self rarely missed the mark. “It delivers not the autonomy it promises but loneliness and vulnerability instead.” But we usually only see this when we have sunk to the very bottom. Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber describes how she understood the truth of interdependence most fully when she began practicing the uncomfortable honesty demanded by Alcoholics Anonymous. “Recovery is hard to do on your own. You have to do it with a group of other people who are messed up in the same way but have found some light in their darkness. Sitting in those rooms in 12-step meetings, there’s a particular kind of hope that only comes from being in the midst of people who have really suffered — suffered at their own hand — who can be completely and totally honest about that.” […]
It is a miracle when we let ourselves, in desperation, be lowered into the unknown. When we let ourselves cry or scream or even whisper that we fear our own undoing. We will have almost nothing in our control except the knowledge of our fragility, and we watch someone else wear themselves out running to the pharmacist or cleaning the bathrooms and sanding a plank of wood for yet another Anabaptist form of love.
Now, pointing to community as the the safety net that catches us when the roof caves in is an OK solution. It certainly seemed to be what caught Bowler when she had cancer. But this communal solution increasingly feels like a distant mirage, particularly given how transient life is, how few of us who want to go to church can actually find a place to call home, social polarization, and the dwindling of friendships amid the “loneliness epidemic.” Our limitations might just beckon communal interdependence, but more than that, they are the very place where God’s power is most clearly seen. The God whose office resides at the end of our rope.
2. Happy Holidays! Happy Advent! Happy Elf on the Shelf? Ha, there’s nothing happy about that damned Elf reporting every misdeed back to the big man at the north pole. This week, my daughter told me that her class’s elf on the shelf carries a Bluetooth Santa Cam, as if to make the Big Brother surveillance even more explicit. Perhaps it’s all fun and games — Santa is nothing if not playfully jolly! — but the all-seeing Santa of the holidays can feel eerily similar to the Eye of Sauron. More law than gospel. Writing in Christianity Today, Russell Moore contrasts the watchful eye of the elf with that of God.
What’s interesting is that behind this argument is a critical question about what religion is. Is it merely an evolutionary adaptation whose purpose is to bind societies together? If so, then the Elf on the Shelf and other such games are simply pantomiming in miniature the way grown-ups are manipulated into behaving — just with a cosmically more significant “Elf.” […]
What stands out to me, though, is how strikingly more comprehensive the seeing of the God of the Bible is. Hagar — a servant woman in exile because of the mistreatment of Abram and Sarai — encounters God in the wilderness. “She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: ‘You are the God who sees me,’ for she said, ‘I have now seen the One who sees me’” (Gen. 16:13). This is a woman who is considered dispensable, no longer useful, and thus invisible to her community. But God sees her. She is not alone in the cosmos. His eye is on the sparrow, and his eye is on her.
Perhaps that’s why one of the most remarkable things about Jesus in his encounters with people — especially in the Gospel of John — is his seeing them as they are, such as the private character of Nathanael: “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you” (John 1:48). After Jesus’ conversation with the woman at the well, she tells her fellow villagers, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” (4:29). […] This seeing is more than moral control, more than social cohesion.
This is not an Elf-on-the-Shelf religion; this is good news of great joy.
It’s worth wondering why we can’t just let Santa be a jolly mythical, red-coated, cherry-nosed, patron who gives out gifts. Why must grace always be mixed with the law? Lots of reasons, of course, but social control is far easier than the risk of underserved gifts.
See also David Zahl’s thoughts on the pointy-eared spy from eleven years ago.
3. Church membership and attendance in many churches has been on a long, slow decline for a while now. An old story, I know. Secularization and all that. Diagnoses are many; solutions are few. The debate over what to do next has been raging “across the pond” for over a decade now, with some suggesting that the church become more modern in its outreach. Fancy TikToks and carnival slides in the church (I kid you not). Writing for Unherd this week, Giles Fraser has his own thoughts on church growth. The solution, to him, has less to do with being fashionable and more to do with being faithful:
Despite the success of the church worldwide, we are not called to be successful. We are called to be faithful. The central image of the Christian faith is of a man being strung up on a cross, mocked for his claims to royal authority. Whatever the outcome of this cosmic interruption, whatever its meaning, triumphalism has little place amongst the detritus of spears and spit that attended His gruesome end. For Christians, victory is claimed in the manner of His failing. A smaller church is not a failed church any more than a satsuma is a failed orange, as one bishop rightly put it.
“Fear not,” is the message of the Christmas angel. If God is in charge then, ultimately, we cannot fail. If God is not in charge, or does not exist, then we deserve to. We will not be saved by better management, or by a more compelling social media strategy: we will be saved by God or not at all. To say this is not to give us an alibi for inaction or laziness or lack of creativity — simply, to insist that we live or die by our theology.
You’d think we’d have learnt by now that relevance is an unappealing evangelistic strategy. We should be doing the very opposite of proclaiming our faith through the lens of popular culture. A minority church has the freedom to be defiantly culturally different, more learned even. It can be unapologetically serious about those things secular culture shies away from, like death and our need for salvation. We do not need to speak to God as if he were our mate. And we shouldn’t be so scared of people sometimes being a little bored in church: the silence of the monastic cloister is terrifying to a generation weaned on the internet and video games, but it is here that something deeper can be mined.
Whether Fraser is right about his other proposals (the viability of the parish model, for example) remains to be seen. But his essential point still stands. The foolishness of the gospel cannot so easily be separated from the foolishness of preaching.
4. Not an article in this next one, but I found this October Billie Eilish Vanity Fair interview to be fascinating. Eilish has been sitting down with Vanity Fair every year now for six years straight, each time being confronted by the foolishness of her past selves. Eilish cringes at her past with an uncommon charity. But the star of the show is her mom, who appears at the end with a tearful grace-in-practice zinger.
5. It’s the Spotify playlist time of year again, so all the cool kids are sharing their niche righteousness. Unless, of course, you happen to have “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” “Surface Pressure,” and “Into the Unknown” as your top three songs (ahem…). Cue the Hard Times’ “My Spotify Wrapped Does Not Define My Personality Unless It Makes Me Seem Cool“:
I believe in sharing my Wrapped the same way I believe in looking at my horoscope. It’s complete bullshit except for when I agree with the results. Just as all astrology is wrong unless my horoscope says our signs are compatible, Spotify Wrapped is not an accurate portrayal of my true personality unless it reflects the personality of someone with excellent taste. In that case, disregard this message and tell everyone how cool I am.
Elsewhere in humor, this editor lol’d at McSweeney’s “Here’s My Feedback on Your Writing. Thank You for Trusting Me With Your Work” … “I know all of your hopes and dreams are riding on this, so I’ll get right to it.” And their existential take on a children’s clapping song is pedantic, but also true. Finally, the New Yorker’s “Self-Care Conundrums” is A+ good:
You’re trying to be mindful of the ways in which following the law makes you unhappy. It’s time to let go of who you think you should be, and focus on being who you truly are. The bad news is it turns out that breaking laws is illegal — what a pickle!
You start a gratitude journal to manifest your best self. Truthfully, what you’re most grateful for is the pyramid scheme that you’ve successfully created. Do you post the journal entry publicly, even though doing so could lead the Feds to your door?
6. Over in First Things, Peter Leithart published the text of a wedding homily he gave. I’ve heard a number of terrible wedding sermons, ranging from summaries of the betrotheds’ Indeed profiles to the captive-audience alter call. To my mind, Leithart knocks this one out of the park:
We can’t keep love, not forever. The love of lovers and loved ones — parents, children, friends, husbands, wives — is “destroyed by death,” swallowed by Sheol. If our souls are going to be fully satisfied, if we’re going to live fully human lives, we must find a love that doesn’t end at death.
Here is the hope of the gospel: There is a love stronger than death, a love more jealously possessive than the grave. That Love is the source of the universe, for God himself is deathless, faithful, eternal, triumphant Love. He is the Love that casts out fear, the Love that turns mourning into dancing.
And he’s not a remote, distant “first cause.” Love is here. Love took flesh and mingled with us. The Love that is God became human love, and so there is a human love, a human Lover, who is stronger than death. Jesus is the lost Lover of the Song; he’s the true Bridegroom who gives his body as bread, his blood as wine. He departed in death, apparently lost forever. But Love returned, glorified in the Spirit. Jesus is the flame of divine love, burning through the grave, faithful to death, then yet again faithful.
Strays:
- “No Such Thing as a Safe Space“
- Who’d have guessed? “Four-day week trial confirms working less increases wellbeing and productivity.“
- “Staying for the Truth: A brief interrogation into the nature of truth.“
- #LetsGoUSMNT
COMMENTS
One response to “November 26-December 2”
Leave a Reply
I know our nation’s teachers are, by and large, just doing their best in a tough environment out there. But wow, what teacher (what person?) thinks that Elf on the Shelf *plus* a camera is a good idea?? As the meme goes, “This ain’t it, chief.”