1. “‘I Shall Be Very Surprised If There Isn’t A Next Chapter’” is the title of the remarkable interview with English theologian Sarah Coakley that appeared on the New York Times website this past week, courtesy of Peter Wehner. We’ve been at this Another Week Ends game for a couple decades now, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so much theological substance published in America’s once-and-future(?) paper of record.
I’ve been aware of Coakley’s work and reputation for some time but never taken the plunge, which, after reading their conversation, feels like a bit of a shame-on-me situation. One of my favorite bits comes at the very beginning, when Coakley talks about her teenage years. Apparently the confirmation classes at her little Church of England parish lacked the rigor she was hoping for. Thus, she did what all kids that age do these days:
My eldest brother and I organized our own theological discussion group in that same parish. We brought a lot of our atheistical and skeptical school friends into it. And this very holy rector was very clever at this point, because he just sat watching the arguments go backward and forward, rather like the umpire at Wimbledon. He never intervened, never put us right, never told us what the right answer was. When my brother and I recently thought about who had attended those discussions, the vast majority of our friends who attended at that age, 14 to 16, subsequently became Christians. So that tells you something about opening the Pandora’s box theologically and how important it is for the clergy not to stifle that.
A lovely little testament to the power of grace in practice, I’d say, and one which jibes with my own decades working with young people. Allow students to ask their questions, raise their objections and air their doubts without threat of defensiveness — let that stuff hang in the air — and the craziest things can happen, especially over the long haul. Squash their arguments with doctrine, even right doctrine, and you risk alienating them forever. Such is the emotional wallop of correction, however well intentioned.
Coakley goes on to provide some rather damning commentary on the gap in theology between the academy and the pew, the professor and the layperson. One of the core hopes of her own work, she claims, is the closing of that gap chasm, to which I can only add a hearty amen. I’ve tried to do something similar in my own books, albeit on a much smaller scale. (Whether utilizing a French phrase for that project — théologie totale — screams accessibility is a separate question.)
In Coakley’s view, uncoupling the study of theology from the practice of prayer is dangerous. This leads her into one of the most beautiful articulations of prayer I’ve read anywhere, let alone the New York Times:
How do I pray? Well, you hand yourself over to the source of your being, and then you ask some things. But the handing over is primary, and learning how to do that. It changes your perspective on God — because when you practice this, even for a very short time each day, simple opening up space in which God is God. You don’t control it. That’s what’s so frightening.
This is not a new skill, like learning how to make a very good omelet or to ride a bicycle. This is a nonskill. It’s an unskilling, an unmastery. It completely changes your view of God, because up to that point you’ve probably subliminally been thinking about God as a very large entity, the largest and the best in a universe of entities whom somehow you’ve got to get on your side or cajole or get to answer your request.
I know that’s a very naïve sounding description, but as a priest I can tell you that’s the God I hear about all the time. All the great theologians of the tradition have slain that God, and they’ve had to slay that God — think of Luther — with great terror. It’s really just opening up to the possibility of grace. Contemplation isn’t special. It’s just very difficult for people who are relatively educated and privileged. For people who are already absolutely broken, as Jesus said, they know about it.
The interview ends with some hopeful words about death and heaven, as well as a bold distillation of the true purpose of the church — a purpose which tends to meet, she’s found, with resistance in mainline denominations where “certain political topics become all important, and theology is seen as an unnecessary obfuscation and a sideline.”
What the Church is at base is a church of reconciliation and forgiveness, and that’s our gift to the world. We live in a very unforgiving world. But then our churches are not forgiving places either. It seems to me that reconciliation and forgiveness is our task.
2. Next up, in the Atlantic, Faith Hill reviews a new book by psychologist Marisa G. Franco entitled Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment. I prefer Hill’s blunt heading, “Stop Trying to Be Your Best Self.” It starts with a refreshing blast of low anthropology, usually in short supply in the pop “positive psychology” genre, and the acknowledgement that self-esteem cannot be approached head-on:
Nominally, Worth is about how to become more self-assured. But as soon as Franco presents that possibility, she upends it by suggesting that it may be impossible. Maybe most people are just a bunch of insecurities in a trench coat, one stiff wind away from toppling over. Perhaps, she suggests, they should accept their weak or tender spots, all of their little ways of being defensive or touchy—and settle, if anything, for “secure-ish.” […]
Before she started this book, she looked around and saw a “group of people that was just trying so hard to heal,” she told me. They could resolve conflict with “I” statements, speaking about their own feelings rather than jumping to blame others. They could set boundaries. They were hoping to become the perfect partner, or break cycles of generational trauma. And yet, she said, “it just didn’t seem like it was working.” She recognized herself in their show of composure.
It gets even more interesting when Franco stumbles onto/into several of our pet theological themes, not only the impotence of the law (the Clear and Reasonable Should) to create change in a person but also its tendency toward counterproductivity:
A conventional idea of self-worth might involve embracing what Franco called “glittery” attributes: reminding yourself of your strengths, accepting compliments, spending time with people who see your best sides. But she calls on evidence that shows that, much of the time, positive feedback can backfire. Psychology studies have shown that participants with low self-esteem felt worse after receiving compliments or after repeating aloud “I’m a lovable person.” When people received praise for giving a speech, researchers observed actual spikes in their blood pressure.
I’ll refrain from commenting on the generational aspect here, but let’s just say those of us who grew up being told nonstop we were special didn’t end up feeling that way all the time. Hill worries that the abiding emphasis on self, positive or negative, might be part of the problem:
Perhaps devoting so much attention to your own wounds sounds a little navel-gazey; I myself wondered, at times, whether Franco might be preaching self-reflection to a whole lot of people who already monitor their own happiness and growth so much that it makes them miserable. But she argues that the point is ultimately to avoid that kind of endlessly self-involved intellectualizing by having an actual emotional experience. […]
The goal, instead, is “integration”: welcoming the hurt and ugly parts of yourself into your self-image along with the shiny parts, and feeling that you deserve kindness anyhow. That message might be especially crucial for the self-help heads — the ones trying so hard to fix themselves that they’re re-creating all the shame that may have made them feel unworthy in the first place.
If Franco’s words ring any bells for longtime Mockingbird readers, it’s because she’s essentially paraphrasing what my father calls “the assimilation of negativity.” He wrote about the phenomenon years ago in his book Who Will Deliver Us? as something the gospel of grace often makes possible:
The “assimilation of negativity” refers to a person’s willing, painful embrace of the sorrows of life, of himself and his flaws, in coexistence, almost union, with his confidence, aspirations, and joys. It is the opposite of splitting — the phenomenon of distancing our conscious self from unacceptable feelings and experiences to such an extent that a fissure opens between the conscious self and the unconscious self.
With reality knocking at the door, the age-old message persists — “Accentuate the Positive!!”, if you don’t, there is no way to survive. The message of the Gospel — of God unjustly crediting us as good — allows us to unsplit (break down the wall, let the shark back in the water) and deal with the real troubles that we have long cordoned off and do so without being crushed and devoured.
3. I’m proud of myself for making it this far into the column before bringing up certain documentaries. But three items in, I can wait no longer to talk about the trio that’ve grabbed my attention.
First up, of course, there’s You Can See Everything, in which Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim follow Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the weeks before she went to prison in 2023. This is one where you really do need to go in cold, so if you plan to see the film, I’d suggest moving on to the next item below. (Not that I plan to give actual spoilers.) I’ll add my voice to those calling it a masterpiece, not just thought-provoking and novel but also breathtakingly beautiful. The cinematographer deserves an Academy Award.
Is there a Mockingbird dimension to this film? Well, I suppose anything that complicates the black-and-white narratives we have about cultural heroes and villains contains a dash of biblical insight, especially if there’s some compassion at play, which I believe there is in this case. You could also read the film as “a haunting exploration of the limits of other people’s knowability” as Naomi Fry does in the New Yorker (i.e., an extended meditation on “epistemological modesty” in the age of the meme), or as a study in the malformations of true codependency. You could just as easily interpret it as a meditation on story itself, or on personal catastrophe, or self-deception, or as an indictment of what I’ve increasingly come to think of as the Anti-Wisdom of contemporary startup culture.
That’s what’s so fun about this movie, it’s doing that much. Here’s Fry:
Holmes’s soul remains a cipher. Who is this woman, with her wide, unblinking, cornflower-blue eyes, with her frequent tears and earnest proclamations, who keeps insisting on her utter sincerity — going so far as to say that she can’t remember telling a single lie? “She’s really weird. She’s just not normal,” Evans tells Fielder, while attesting to Holmes’s honesty, but the idea of full transparency — the notion that one can and will see everything about another person if there is willingness on both sides to do so — is both troubled and troubling in the film. The more access Holmes allows, the less Fielder is, seemingly, able to know her. […]
I thought of Theranos’s promise to provide people with crucial medical knowledge through a tiny blood sample. This promise, as we now know, was fraudulent. No puzzles were solved; blood, it turned out, would not tell, and the mysteries of the self remained locked within it. Fielder, too, resists being known: after spending weeks trying to get into his subjects’ heads, he dismisses the possibility that they’d be able to get into his. “I know what you’re feeling,” Evans tells him, at one point in the film. Fielder’s response is immediate, and notably heated: “No, you don’t.”
How does that Prayer Book collect go? Something about a God “to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hidden.” Maybe amidst all our unknowability, the promise of a God who truly knows everything — yet whose disposition somehow remains merciful — still has the power to go viral. Or maybe it’s enough to say: In a world full of Billys, I’m thankful there’s at least one Nathan.
4. The second documentary that rocked my world this week was Norm, Judd Apatow’s feature on the life and comedy of Norm Macdonald. I am what the kids call a “Norm stan,” which means you can count me among the hordes of middle-aged guys who, when they need a laugh, jump down the Norm rabbit hole on YouTube.
Yet as hilarious and original as the guy was, there was a lot more going on than just genius-level absurdism: the love of Russian literature, for starters, to say nothing of the love of his amazing mother and bajillion friends. The sincerity he reserved almost exclusively for matters of faith too. How about his near-pathological refusal to leverage his cancer diagnosis for attention? And while it won him zero fans at the time, watching him advocate for forgiveness re: cancelled colleagues, I couldn’t help but think of that amazing Chris Rock interview Bryan highlighted last week. (Would that Norm had lived long enough to contemplate forgiveness being extended in a certain running back’s direction!) I’ve watched his final Letterman performance upwards of thirty times, and his closing “I love you” never fails to pierce my heart. I’m glad to have been alive to watch him do his thing.
As far as other sources of humor, “Druid Loving this Cloak Weather” from the Onion made me laugh, as did “Unsubscribing, Huh?” by Dave Fromm on Medium, and “Meta Glasses capture footage of man being avoided for wearing Meta Glasses” on the Chaser.
But nothing had me in stitches more than the return of Ali G this week. I realize he, like Norm, may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but any excuse I can find to embed the bit below is welcome:
5. The third gobsmacking documentary I watched this past week was Don’t Look Back in Anger, which covers last summer’s immensely popular reunion of the British band Oasis. Of the three films mentioned here, I would not in a million years have expected this one to contain the most gospel resonance, but here we are, and I’m wrong again, thank God.
I first suspected things might take an interesting turn when, early on, Noel Gallagher confesses a lifelong aversion to forgiveness. It just isn’t in him, he says. We then watch for the next hour plus as he and brother Liam not only reunite but reconcile — to the point where Noel admits to looking at his younger brother with real forgiveness. To drive this aspect home, the final words of the documentary come out of the mouth of a Catholic priest(!), who lauds their reunion from the pulpit, interpreting the stratospherically enthusiastic reception to their tour as evidence of a deeper public appetite not for infectious Britpop anthems or even ’90s nostalgia so much as reconciliation itself. It’s a stretch, perhaps, but one I’m willing to, uh, acquiesce to. What’s the word Liam loves so much again? Oh yeah: Biblical.
Any punters looking for an Alternate Best-Of Oasis Playlist need look no further.
Also on the music front, “Inside The Inexplicable Intimacy Of Phoebe Bridgers’ Phoneless Tour” in Coveteur functions as a poignant follow-up to Caroline Devitt’s “Sad Girl Pentecost” from a few months ago on this site. Very cool.
I’ve finally been reading Ian Leslie’s John & Paul book as preparation for the Friendship Issue of The Mockingbird magazine (out early next month!), and it’s as good as people say. I couldn’t help but notice one interesting factoid. Not only did John Lennon and Paul McCartney both lose their mothers at an early age, they were both the products of interconfessional homes. That is, John’s father was Irish-Catholic and mother English Protestant, while for Paul it was the inverse, albeit both of Irish descent à la the Gallaghers. Coinkydink? Who knows. But I do know that the third rock star with a similar pedigree is none other than David Hewson, aka Bono from U2, whose mother was Irish-Protestant and father Irish-Catholic.
6. Cue the Times feature this week, “50 Years In, What’s the Point of U2?” in which David Marchese interviewed Bono and The Edge. They have a new album coming out in a few weeks, and while I wasn’t blown away by the first two singles, the third (“The Greatest Show on Earth”) finds them back in their gospel sweet spot, singing (I think) about the church. A couple soundbites:
Marchese: When you say there are ideas that you want to be in the mainstream, what are they?
Bono: The metaphysical thing, the gospel side of U2 — that was only allowed in rock ’n’ roll if you were Black. You can’t be white people talking about God, because generally white people who talk about God make our audience very nervous, you know? But not in the Black church in America. Coming to the United States, we’d just seen those televangelists, and we were like, Wow, these people are in deep trouble. Then you walk into a Black church and you hear the abandonment of the singing and that feeling — it’s fervor, but not freaky fervor. So being able to sing songs of faith and devotion and songs of doubt, to put the gospel with the blues, which is rock ’n’ roll. There’s nowhere you can’t go, including the pop charts. My constant argument is don’t cede the charts to just those pop mechanics. Hip-hop did it and got revolutionary ideas on the radio. But a lot of indie stuff just gave up. They weren’t even bothering. […]
The Edge: People have said that we’re the band that people who don’t know that they believe in God like. It’s in the work in such a natural way. There’s no polemic there. It’s just our search, our inquiry. And it involves so much doubt. It has to, I think. Because if it’s not dogma, then it’s constantly in flux. I would say I’m agnostic about half of the week, and then the rest of the week I’ve got an incredibly strong faith. But it’s always changing, ready to be upgraded. […]
Marchese: I was listening just this morning to “Glorify,” and there’s a line that goes, “You spit in my eye, you’re a barefaced lie, and there’s nothing you can do to keep me from loving you.” It’s the idea of having love for your enemies. Do you have love for the people doing the things that you’re calling unconscionable?
Bono: Yeah, I love these people because I believe God loves them and Christianity calls us not only to love our neighbor but to love our enemies.
7. Elsewhere the duo talk about their resolve to counter dark times with a record of party music, not as an act of self-absorption so much as a witness to a deeper and more hopeful reality. An act of resistance, if you will. It’s not so dissimilar to what I tried to say in that essay on Play for CT (oh, CT!) back in January. Yet I suspect Bono and The Edge would sign on to this next piece by poet Kathleen Kilcup published in Commonweal, “Beauty on the Edge,” (no relation) in which the recent memoirist ponders whether poetry has a moral obligation to sufferers. Een-ter-esting:
I believe that art and beauty are never more fully themselves than when they encounter human suffering. Similarly, the message of salvation is no doubt good news to the happy and contented, but for people in extremity without hope, it is life itself — living water for those dying of thirst. […]
Of course, not all art need address suffering directly. Human anguish is not the only subject suitable for artistic interpretation. W. H. Auden, for one, puts awe, not suffering, at the center of the poetic impulse. […]
I don’t think we can say art birthed from suffering is intrinsically superior to the poem written on a lazy Sunday afternoon. But I do think that the greatest works of art are so faithful to the real, so completely absorbed in rendering out of air, breath, and imagination what is true, both in human experience and beyond it, that joy and sorrow become entangled with one another. Praise and suffering become inseparable. Such beauty can and does address suffering, even if suffering is not its explicit subject. Consider the marigolds. Somehow their earnest bobbing heads and innocent color spoke directly to the hearts of soldiers on the fringe of a senseless war.
For Christians, there is no beauty as complete, as strange, or as troublesome as that of the cross. There, life and death, hope and devastation, shame and joy are inextricably mixed. […] Such paradoxes present difficulties for the theologian and philosopher, who remove themselves from life in order to grasp it from the outside, but for the artist who is “rooted in imaginative awe,” those mysteries can live, breathe, and spread their wings.
8. Rounding the final bend here. I’m pleased to report that former Mbird conference speaker Elizabeth Oldfield continues to tear the internet up with her pen. A couple Fridays ago, we mentioned her timely dinner party article, and today our Long Read of the Week has to be her “Living in Community Is Where Self-Illusions Go to Die” on Aeon.
Living with others has shown me things in myself that I would prefer to ignore. How much of me is still a child, wanting my way, quick to cry ‘it’s not fair’. […]
This project finds faint echoes in the self-improvement, self-development, self-optimisation we are all constantly hectored into – therapy (or psychedelics, or stoicism) for the mind and Hyrox (or reformer Pilates, or yoga) for the body (with those who are not working on themselves in some way being the exception). Interestingly, the unconventional way our household lives is rarely recommended to those seeking self-knowledge or self-development. The standard advice is an inward turn in order to facilitate a private excavation of an authentic self, along with strong personal boundaries that draw distinct lines between that self and others. Porousness tends to be framed as deleterious to Project Self. Most monastic orders encourage periods of solitude and silence, to be sure, but much of daily life is spent in an exposing proximity to others, the very idea of which would bring most of us out in hives.
This difficult proximity, where we witness and are witnessed without our protective, polished personas is an immensely powerful change agent. You can see it in action in group therapy, the recovery movement and some short-term intensive self-development programmes, but this powerful ‘technology of the self’, to use Michel Foucault’s phrase, is vanishingly rare. This kind of witnessing is effective because change requires us to be honest about who we currently are. Living in community is where illusions about the self go to die! […]
My experience is that our community (and other lasting ones) hold together by turning attention beyond ourselves.
She then turns to the Jesus-shaped “beyond” holding her particular experiment together. The language she uses is so exquisite that you’re really best served reading it over there, in context.
9. We’ll close with a stirring sermon from another former Mbird conference speaker Nadia Bolz-Weber, posted to The Corners under the perfect title “We are exactly that stupid.” Her text was the passage in Exodus about the golden calf, and boy oh boy does she get there in end:
Maybe the Israelites took a God too big to manage and melted it down into a God they could hold. But maybe we just come at it from the other direction. We make ourselves bigger until God fits comfortably in our pocket. Different method, but maybe the same calf. Because a God I only really need on occasion is a God I can domesticate like cattle and carry around like a little worry stone for when I get anxious. […]
And when we are anxious, friends, do we not also do whatever we can to make it stop? We follow leaders who are confident but not trustworthy. We hoard wealth. We lean into temporary oblivion through scrolling, drinking, online betting, binge eating, which works for a minute, and then the dopamine wears off and we have to start it all over again.
And does my own heart not cling to false promises more than to God’s word? Do I not come up with a backup plan when it feels like God is taking too long? Do I not rely on my own strength more than God’s? As if I have to meet some sort of self-sufficiency deductible before my spiritual benefits kick in.
I don’t say all this to be a bummer. I say it because we are the likes of whom God saves, just like they were the likes of whom God delivers. If we don’t think those people are we people, then I’m not sure what exactly we are doing here. The fact is, God has only ever had the likes of them and the likes of us to work with; we who forget that when anxiety circles in on us, and God feels silent, or absent, or angry, that we cannot actually run away from God because: there is nowhere else to go. […]
Yes, we have a God who cannot be held in our hands. But we also have a God who will not let us go from his own. Amen.
Strays:
- Mockingcast Episode 300 is in the bag and should be out early next week. Thank you to everyone who sent in such wonderful and encouraging notes.
- Other must-listens are Zadie Smith on Wild Card, Andy Squyres’ conversation with John Mark McMillan, and the recent episode of The Permanent Questions, in which David Brooks talks to Jeffrey Goldberg (fast forward to the 17-minute mark for a primer on #Seculosity). Paul McCartney on Good Hang with Amy Poehler was pretty special too. Oh, and if you haven’t gotten around to the “Tamara” installment of Heavyweight, do yourself a favor.
- Go Brewers!
