Another Week Ends

1. Do I really need to go through with it, you guys? Do I need to take the time to collate and curate and craft another one of these overfilled weekender columns? They take eight hours (minimum) to put together and involve scanning the web for days, reading a bunch more articles than ever get included, some of which are pretty depressing and strange. So… “Should [I] Just Give Up?” This is the subject of a fascinating new essay by Joshua Rothman in the New Yorker, surveying recent books by two of our favorite thinkers, Oliver Burkeman (Meditations for Mortals) and Adam Phillips (On Giving Up). Both men are advocating for a countercultural view of surrender as “a sign not of weakness but of imagination, acceptance, or wisdom.” Here’s Rothman:

Many people, [Burkeman] argues, refuse to give up: they are perfectionists who strive ceaselessly to get control of their lives as workers, parents, citizens, and friends. Unfortunately, Burkeman writes, experiencing life “as an endless series of things we must master, learn, or conquer” has the effect of turning it into “a dull, solitary, and often infuriating chore, something to be endured, in order to make it to a supposedly better time, which never quite seems to arrive.” As a counterbalance, Burkeman advocates “imperfectionism.” He invokes the British Zen master Houn Jiyu-Kennett, who, instead of lightening the burden she placed on her students, made it “so heavy that he or she would put it down.”

Sounds to these ears like a less rhetorical version of what Jesus does in the Sermon on the Mount, namely dialing up the volume of the law in order to engender surrender, and, God willing, faith. (Engender Surrender would be a great name for an album or board game, would it not?) Alas, the permission to throw in the towel is having the reverse effect on me. Grace is funny that way. I think I’ll keep going:

In an early chapter, [Burkeman] writes that many of us aspire to command our lives as though we were the captain of a superyacht, controlling our route “from the plush-leather swivel chair on the serene and silent bridge.” Yet it’s more realistic to see each of us as occupying “a little one-person kayak,” tossed about by waves and “borne along on the river of time” toward death.

“Meditations for Mortals” provides useful answers to the questions of when and why you should give up: you should do it when your optimized, productivity-hacked life starts to feel constricting, deadening, or unrealistic, so that you can get more value out of your all-too-brief existence.

In Phillips’s view, we have a bias against giving up; we associate it with failure, mortality, and even suicide, as though every act of relinquishment were a step away from life. “Heroes and heroines are people who don’t give up,” he writes. And yet tragic heroes are tragic precisely because they never give up; hell-bent on their purposes, they pursue them until they destroy themselves. During a conversation, we might be telling a story or making a point when the conversation drowns us out; this can be an infuriating experience. But our anguish, Phillips suggests, flows partly from the bizarre way we associate giving up with annihilation. We yearn to be dauntless, and dauntless people “are people who cannot interrupt themselves or be interrupted”:

They are people who have refused the benefits of giving up, or even of hesitation, people for whom giving up feels like giving up everything. Not being able to give up is not to be able to allow for loss, for vulnerability; not to be able to allow for the passing of time, and the revisions it brings.

I would add “resurrection” to Phillips’ list. After all, God does some of his strongest work when we cry uncle — including when Jesus himself does (Lk 23:46). Best song ever about surrender, you ask? There are a lot of great ones, but top of my personal list would be:

2. Next, a pair of tributes to tears, the first being Joe Jackson’s “Cry Daddy,” in which a youngish father discloses what it’s like to be a man who cries easily and often (and how his six-year-old daughter responds). Very touching stuff — wish I had his courage! Reminds me of Brian Wilson, who sang about male tears more than anyone.

Second, there’s Wendy Kiyomi’s stirring “Lessons in Crying,” which speaks about the benefits of crying in public, as well as the theological dimension of doing so. We’ve spoken before about how church remains one of the best places to lose it, and Wendy not only concurs, she suggests that tears “may be a gift of the Spirit, come to rest like a divided flame, an utterance over which I have little control and which conveys things I do not author.” She goes on:

Sermons and prayers, indeed, often prompt crying. At the church my husband and I attended as newlyweds, our pastor frequently paused his sermon due to sudden tears. His voice would garble, he would quietly grin – perhaps to himself, perhaps to the Lord – then reach under his glasses to press away his tears and resume preaching. Crying would out even through his Calvinist theology and expository style.

And why not? The Word of God is eminently cry-able. Scripture is full of bawlers and weepers who cry for many different reasons, including despair (Hagar), bereavement (Abraham), true love (Jacob), reunion (Joseph), longing (Hannah), war (Israelites), partings (Naomi), friendship (David), remorse (David again), broken heart (Paltiel), suffering (Job), intense prayer (Hezekiah), exile (Ezra), and seeking the Lord (Jeremiah). Crying is common in the New Testament as well. Mary wept. Martha wept. Peter wept. Paul wept. Jesus wept, and the salvation of the world is traced in the tracks of his tears.

I have learned two lessons from crying. The first is that crying is a public good. In a world that often chooses cruelty over compassion, crying brings our common humanity to the forefront of even street-level encounters and increases the amount of free empathy. Many times in my crying my heart has been laid open to exchange tiny jewels of mutual sympathy with people bearing the imago Dei all around me. Perhaps I too wear my grief like a vestment, because people come to me with their sacred griefs. In ministering to others, I try not register any surprise at all, but to take their crying as a complete matter of course. When I ask, “what is behind your tears?” people are relieved to unburden the sorrows that have risen to the surface. Now I am ever aware that the Spirit may grant me such beauty among strangers and in the most unlikely places.

The second lesson is of the nature of hope. I won’t go so far as to say that all crying is virtuous, but on the whole, crying signals God’s immanence … Crying presages a time when those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy.

3. Speaking of tears, tears, and more tears, a clip of actor Andrew Garfield shedding them has been making the rounds this week. During the promotional cycle for his (total tearjerker of a) new film, We Live in Time, Garfield stopped by the New York Times to read an entry in their Modern Love column, Chris Huntington’s stunning piece, “Learning to Measure Time in Love and Loss.” Midway through the session Garfield had to stop because he was overcome with emotion, prompting some beautiful comments on the cruciform nature not only of art but of having one’s heart cracked open. You can hear the whole discussion here.

@nytimes “I’m sad at the transience of certain relationships in my life. I’m sad at losing my mother.” The actor Andrew Garfield talked about love, loss and grief on “Modern Love.” The result was a conversation unlike any other in the history of the show. Tap the link in bio to listen. #AndrewGarfield #loss #grief ♬ original sound – The New York Times

4. In the Atlantic, Shayla Love sets about “Understanding Desire in the Age of Ozempic.” As you may be aware at this point, many of those taking weight loss medications are finding that “without even trying, they’ve suddenly released their desires for food, alcohol, tobacco, shopping, and more.” These reports led Love to seek out a group who’ve been contemplating the renunciation (and extinguishing) of desire for millennia, i.e., Buddhists.

In his first sermon after reaching enlightenment, the Buddha taught that humans suffer because of our desires, and we must unshackle ourselves from them in order to become enlightened. And to some people who take Ozempic, the lack of cravings feels like freedom. For others, life becomes a little empty. If renunciation of desire is the key to enlightenment, why does the medication version of Nirvana seem relatively lackluster?

Some might have previously relied on food to regulate their emotions, and can’t eat at the same volume anymore. Others may feel lethargic simply because they’re eating less. And for a person who is used to strong feelings of wanting, “all of a sudden, that goes away, and you have to reestablish what your behavioral drivers should be,” [says] Karolina Skibicka, a neuroscientist at Penn State.

When people strongly identify with their cravings, feeling them disappear over a matter of weeks can be jarring. But it can also be an opportunity to uncover the roots of our desire in order to eventually let them go in a more deliberate way, Sister True Vow said.

If an overattachment to every craving can bring suffering, a total renunciation of them can be unsatisfying too.

My mind goes to Augustine, who defined sin as disordered desire — wanting the wrong things too much and the right things too little. He understood the Christian response to desire was not its total extinguishing but its reordering. Easier said than done, eh? A God-sized job, no doubt. See also: item 1.

5. Up next, Willy Staley explains “How Everyone Got Lost in Netflix’s Endless Library” in the New York Times Magazine. Takes him a while to get to the gist, but when he does, the insights come fast and furious. Basically, when Netflix finally released their streaming data in 2023, it exposed a significant disconnect “between what people watch and what we think we’re watching.” It’s not too much to say this gap has become emblematic of the Internet age. Not that it originated with Al Gore; the difference between who we’d like to be (or present ourselves to be) and who we actually are goes back to the Garden, does it not?

When it comes to streaming, this means that there is a vast discrepancy between what gets written about and what actually gets watched, between what gets kudos and what makes money, between tastemakers and actual viewers. According to the data, our sensibilities and proclivities (viewing and otherwise) may not have shifted as much as the terminally online sometimes claim. This is comforting and scary and oh-so-lowanthropological:

Netflix has continued to release these [streaming data] reports, and I have continued to look at the top of them, mystified. “The Night Agent,” “Outer Banks,” “ONE PIECE,” “Dear Child,” “Who Is Erin Carter?” “The Gentlemen” — these are all Top 5 shows on Netflix from the three spreadsheets released so far. I don’t know anyone who watches these, and I don’t think I’d ever read a word about them until I sat down to write this. They seem to be relics from another timeline where none of this ever happened, evidence of the commercial wisdom of doing things the old way. And it makes you wonder about the Talmudic discourse that surrounds every episode of buzzy television shows, trying to use them to make sense of the zeitgeist. What if the geist of our zeit mostly involves bingeing some British murder mystery based on a Harlan Coben (?!) novel called “Fool Me Once”? That was the most-watched show on Netflix in the first half of this year.

I suspect it’d be more accurate for Staley to have written, “I don’t know anyone who talks openly about watching these.” The shame incurred by these little-l laws of appropriate/respectable/cool media consumption is real. The Gentlemen was a blast, fwiw. Pure candy in every sense.

6. In humor, the Daily Mash gave us “Woman sets healthy boundaries of only doing what she wants to.” The Bee finally got me laughing again with “Local Man Slips Into Deep Depression After Running Out Of Things To Pressure Wash.” Reductress hit that inspired mixture of funny and profound with “I LIVED IT: My Healing Was Linear but It Was Linear Downward.”

On Instagram, I can’t deny chuckling at some of Jonathan Malm‘s reels of churchy phrases. I’d never heard the “circles are better than rows” thing. But the skit that’s kept me smiling since I saw it is this one from Nate Bargatze’s recent SNL appearance (Washington’s Dream 2 was also pretty great, eh?):

7. We’ll close with Russell Moore’s terrific “The Bible Doesn’t Fit an Information Age.” Russell begins by recounting the response that a non-Christian acquaintance expressed to reading the Gospel of Mark. “It was kind of creepy,” the young man said. Which, it turns out, is exactly the response that Russell had hoped. He then recounts the story he heard years ago that informed this policy of recommending Mark to seekers/skeptics. Bonus points for mentioning Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem and the work of Mbird’s current must-read philosopher Byung-Chul Han:

If I remember right, a man who had been some sort of New Age Eastern religionist, the kind found often in the hippie countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s, became a Christian because a professor in his comparative religion class assigned the Gospel of Mark. Like the young man, he was drawn to the figure of Jesus and started to feel as though he was not only reading the text but that he was being beckoned from the other side of it […]

In an information age, [philosopher Byung-Chul] Han writes, an actual story is a disruption. Information, after all, is direct, controllable, and consumable. A story works a different way … “Information pushes to the margins those events that cannot be explained but only narrated. A narrative often has something wondrous and mysterious around its edges.” That kind of mystery is startlingly rare in an era of algorithms […]

When one finds authority amid the algorithms, revelation among the consumption, that can feel creepy — just as after a time of starvation, the smell of baking bread can seem nauseating. It’s not those who find all this strange who are not “getting it” but rather those who find it all familiar and boring. That’s what a plot does, but it’s especially what a plot breathed out by the Spirit of Christ does, a plot in which we are meant to hear the voice of a Shepherd (John 10:4).

What if someone on the other side of those ancient words knows that you’re there? What if, in those words, you can almost hear the Galilean-accented voice that once disrupted the plotlines of some fishermen by saying, “Follow me”? What if it’s speaking to you? If so, finding that disturbingly strange isn’t the end of the story, but it’s a good place to start.

Amen to that. And amen on persevering with reading (and writing) this week’s roundup. And amen to Robert Smith finally breaking his band’s silence to speak to me. “There’s nothing you can do to change the end” is the Cure at their most inadvertently Gospel:

Strays:

• Real art in museums stimulates brain much more than reprints, study finds
• How faith inspired the Netflix comedy series Kim’s Convenience. Great show.
• Good news! Mbird contributor and friend Sarah Hinlicky Wilson is serializing her novel A-Tumblin Down on her new substack, which concerns, among other things, pastors, congregations, grief, and grace. Do yourself a favor.
• Our friend and NYC Conference musician Blake Flattley has a devilish new track out, “Helter Skelter Man,” in which he sings from you-know-who’s point of view. Video below.
• I had the privilege of guesting on a joint episode of the Beautifully Woven and Grace in Grind podcasts, to discuss some Low Anthropology.