Issuu

T H E S U C C E S S & FA I LU R E I S S U E

No. 20

5 1/2 HABITS OF REMARKABLY INEFFECTIVE PEOPLE | THE SINS OF THE SAINTS AN INTERVIEW WITH TED LASSO'S NATE THE GREAT | A FAILED MISSION TO THE GREEKS

Success is having to worry about every damn thing in the world except money. I still don't understand it. — Johnny Cash

The Mockingbird is a nonprofit magazine that seeks to connect the Christian message of God’s grace with the concerns of everyday life. Our staff believes that grace, by its nature, is dynamic, unmerited, and expansive; we hope the range of voices in this issue reflects that nature. We are careful not to publish exclusively Christian writers or perspectives and instead seek to embody, in surprising and down-to-earth ways, the freedom that is central to our belief. For more, visit our website, www.mbird.com.

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Photograph by Brad Jones. Courtesy the artist.

Spring 2022

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Cover: Photograph by Tim Davis. Courtesy the artist.

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“Water Spray, Arch Cape,” by Gloria Baker Feinstein, www.gloriabakerfeinstein.com.

Contents

Essays 08

Interviews

Undercover Campus Crusade GRANTLAND J. ROLLINS

34 The Pastor You Got, Not the

Pastor You Wanted TA S H A G E N C K M O RTO N

56 No Hero Stories J O S E P H M C S PA D D E N

KAREN WRIGHT MARSH

MADELINE LEVINE

NICK MOHAMMED

101

BRUCE COCKBURN

Lists & Columns

68 The Long Defeat B RYA N J A R R E L L

Dear Gracie…

On Our Bookshelf

80 This Failure Isn’t Half Bad K A R E N ST I L L E R

52 5 1/2 Habits of Remarkably

85 Scarlet Letter Secrets G R AC E L E U E N B E R G E R

Wheel of Fortune

The Confessional

92 DNF A L I K J E R GA A R D

110 A Bruce Cockburn

Ineffective People

Starter Playlist

97 What Truly Matters TO D D D. ST I L L

Fiction 27 Neon S A R A H H I N L I C KY W I L S O N

Poetry 17 Quick Walk to Figure Out

Everything

From the Soapbox

N AT E K LU G

112 Shell Game DAV I D Z A H L

51 My Jonathan Edwards N AT E K LU G 91 Had it not been spring! S T E P H E N S E X TO N

Spot illustrations by Ollie Silvester.

Depressing Successes & Happy Failures

here is a place where failure is not hidden but proudly displayed, even celebrated. It’s called the Museum of Failure, an exhibition most recently in Taipei that boasts more than 159 failures. Among these are the Nokia “taco phone” (bafflingly designed to be held along its narrow edge); Google’s “smart glasses” (creepy surveillance tech that never took off due to it obviously being creepy surveillance tech); and Rejuvenique (a beauty mask that “tones the facial muscles with electricity.” Ow!). Of course it’s funny that anyone ever thought the world needed such gizmos, but at the same time, as I consider them in the context of my own life, I begin to feel a sense of, I don’t know, kinship? I guess I might be a teensy bit comforted by the failure of others. It almost makes me feel less alone. But if the museum has this same gentle effect on its visitors, it would be subsidiary to its main goal: to “inspire us to take meaningful risks.” After all, the tagline declares, “Innovation needs failure!” Which is not wrong; we know that Thomas Edison failed some thousand times before he made a functioning lightbulb. But this improvementoriented mission seems to undercut what’s so magnetic about the museum in the first

place. Is there a way to talk about failure that isn’t slyly in service of success? Or perhaps the quest isn’t for language about failure, per se, but for language about success that isn’t just exhausting.

..... Surely, few people would say they love

failure—but Herman Melville might have been among them. In 1851, he published his sprawling, now-famous novel Moby-Dick to mixed reviews. Sales were poor. It was, as scholars would later put it, “a flop.” Three years later Melville would pen a lesser-known story, “The Happy Failure”—which could easily be read as a response to this experience. “The Happy Failure” tells of an ambitious inventor traveling up the Hudson River to test out a mysterious invention that he has spent ten years developing: the Great Hydraulic Hydrostatic Apparatus. It’s intended to drain water from swamps, to transform marshes into fertile fields. If the Apparatus works, it will not only justify its inventor’s life of struggle (which has left him mean and shorttempered) but will also symbolize the glory of human ingenuity. “Glory,” the man opines, “is not to be gained without pulling hard for it—against the stream.” So against the stream he pulls, while the Hudson pushes back steadily. When

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he finally reaches a secret destination (ten miles upstream, safe from the meddlesome gazes of any spies who might steal his idea), he places the Apparatus into the muddy shallows…and nothing happens. He adjusts the thing and still, “no perceptible effect yet followed.” Overcome by distress, the inventor begins destroying his invention, before collapsing back into his skiff. At once he is swept away from what remains of his life’s work, downstream, back “into the universal current into oblivion.” Strangely, though, he is liberated. His face brightens with a “rapt earnestness.” For the first time in ten years, he speaks kindly to his servant and admits to his nephew,

that the other promises to. Failure can feel like success and success like failure. Indeed, failure “is where success likes to hide in plain sight,” the cartoonist Scott Adams once wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “Where you want to be: steeped to your eyebrows in failure… Everything you want out of life is in that huge, bubbling vat of failure.” In this magazine, our contributors dive headfirst into the vat, resurfacing with an array of failures both spectacular and ordinary. It’s almost as if we’ve constructed our own museum of failure. We show off underbaked pastries, unfinished races, stalled business ventures, terrible church trips, and ineffective religious crusades. We also include four interviews, each of which redefines success and failure in compelling ways; at times, it may even seem as if we’ve inverted the terms completely. It’s not incorrect, after all, to say that here at Mockingbird we find humor in defeat, freedom in surrender, and life in death. All of which might be most clearly exhibited in our ongoing fascination with the crucified God—who makes quite a few appearances throughout this issue. It’s only appropriate, after all. Is there a more iconic example of the upside-down nature of our theme than the messiah who died on a cross, thereby becoming the most consequential person of the last two thousand years? This was the same man who promised to give rest to “all you who are weary and burdened.” So if you are weary of ambition, and burdened by expectation, we hope that in reading this issue you will find the Museum of Failure’s strange comfort. That you’ll feel free to relinquish whatever Apparatus you’ve been struggling with, relax into your skiff, and be swept to the place you can only get to by letting the river take you there. May all your failures be happy. - CJG

“It’s all over now. Boy, I’m glad I’ve failed. I say, boy, failure has made a good old man of me. It was horrible at first, but I’m glad I’ve failed. Praise be to God for the failure!” The nephew confirms, “the event made my uncle a good old man.” Not only that, but it also imparts upon the nephew a similar liberation, helping him to become a “wise” young man: “Example did for me the work of experience,” he says. In this way, failure can be good for the people we fail around. It can invite us to reevaluate our priorities, to question the values we’ve placed upon our personal pursuits. If we are lucky, it might even inspire compassion and understanding from those who’ve witnessed our defeat. You can’t quite say the same of success. As Gore Vidal once quipped, “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.” By contrast, Melville’s man goes on praising God that he failed, right up until his death. This is the curious nature of success and failure. One so often produces the effect 7

Undercover Campus Crusade

By Grantland

ush began the first of August, just a couple of weeks before class. I didn’t want to go back to campus early, but then again, I was glad to leave home. Mom and Dad had tried their best to convince me not to pledge a fraternity, and their vain efforts continued until I backed my car out the drive and waved out the window. Three hours later I checked in at the hotel and followed a sign to a large seminar room. There I found a few tables set up and fifty side-parts or so lined in front. I was nervous, like most of the guys there, but not because I was worried about getting in. I was worried about being found out. I signed the check-in sheet, got my nametag, and went to my room to settle in. I opened the door and found my roommate watching TV. We traded introductions and began talking. “So you’re a sophomore?” he asked. “Why’d you wait a year?”

J. Rollins

“Didn’t know if it was right for me,” I said, eyeing the floor. “The good thing is, I know what all the houses are like.” It would be the first lie of many. The truth was, I hadn’t set foot in a single house. I didn’t even drink. Hell, I still asked girls permission to side-hug. “What about you?” I asked. “Why are you joining?” He sighed. “My dad did it. He was a Pike. I’ll be one too.” I nodded, wondering how long to wait for an opening to talk to him about God. An hour? All evening? What if no openings appeared the whole weekend? This question— how to righteously yet respectfully seduce— was one of the most tormented of my young Christian life. And then it hit me. The reason I was pledging was to stop waiting for these mystical moments. I’d already sat silently and hopefully for years with nothing to show for it. The time to attack was now. “Actually,” I said, “I chose to join because… are you familiar with Romans 6:23?”

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“Painted Mask 2,” 2016, dye sublimation print on aluminum, by Roe Ethridge. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.

He looked like I’d asked to cuddle. He assured me, almost pleaded, that, as a fellow white sentient Southerner with Google and a mother, he was nauseatingly familiar with the man about whom Western Civilization swung. But I had to be sure because there were a lot of people out there who didn’t know the difference between “knowing about” and “knowing,” just as there were lots of people out there, like myself, who couldn’t distinguish God from the mirror or their head from their ass. So I dutifully trudged through my presentation of the gospel, being sure to emphasize “relationship” while skirting social cues. I finished with a compelling testimony about a rogue, syrup-addicted six-year-old and asked him whether he wanted to accept Jesus as his Lord, Savior, and perhaps only friend, because that was becoming my reality. He stood to leave, and I got the impression he wasn’t interested in even “knowing about” Jesus or especially me. When the door slammed, I stared back at the TV and reflected on my performance. It was rough but heroic, I decided. But unwise, too, given my need for secrecy. I hadn’t been accepted into a fraternity yet and didn’t want word to get out that I was getting the Word out. It was still hard to believe I was joining a fraternity, but I’d never imagined I’d be in a war either. And that’s what fraternities were for me—hot zones in a holy war. Joining wasn’t a question of desire; it was one of duty, like so much in life. I still liked sleep, sobriety, not vomiting, and disease-free genitals, but I wanted to be obedient more than anything. And after hundreds of sermons and years of guilt, I’d finally accepted that obedience meant steering nearly every social interaction 10

toward God. I had tried to remind myself that I would naturally be met with rejection, but experiencing it firsthand hurt more than I’d imagined. Doubt whispered that I maybe wasn’t cut out for this sort of thing, that maybe it wasn’t worth it, but I mostly wondered how my war would pan out. Would stepping out in faith take me to the next level with God, wherever that was? (Probably on-stage.) Would the malaise of Christian discipline slough off and be replaced with joy? Would I become a modern Billy Graham, helicoptering into stadiums, a single-ear headset-mic in place, lecturing thousands about how to be God’s secret ninja warrior? I didn’t know, but I did know God’s commands weren’t negotiable, so I hoped for the best and told myself something like love, joy, and headsets likely awaited if I just took the attack a day at a time. I stood and left my room for the lobby in search of other targets. “I’m really doing this,” I said to myself. I was going to be Paul reincarnated. I was, at last, ready to persecute others for and with my Savior.

..... Rush was a three-day affair. We would

visit every house the first day, with a process of elimination to follow. Pledges and houses crossed each other off each day until a match was made on Bid Day. It was kind of like the Bachelorette except all the candidates were Southern and out-of-shape. At ten a.m. on day number one, my bus pulled its hundred suits alongside a large, white house with Ionic columns. A dewy lawn shone beneath a pediment holding the golden letters “SAE.” We’d been told that every house attracted a certain personality.

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Some were rich, others poor; some white, others eggshell. The SAEs, we’d heard, were into drugs, which meant—because every house had drugs—that harder ones were there and easily obtained. All glistened from a sticky marinade of sex, beer, and body fluids, of course. All, that is, but the brand-new Christian fraternity BUX, or “Brothers Under Christ.” I was surprised to hear that Christians had ineptly co-opted a fading cultural trend, but the Lord works in over-compensatory ways. They had few fans, but I disliked them because they were the kind of culture-accommodating hypocrites I was desperate not to be. As we stepped off the bus, the walls of the building began to tremble. Unintelligible chanting hummed inside. We saw a flash of flesh and frantic eyes in the windows. Something was trying to get out. Something fierce. We clenched our fists and wobbled forward down the walkway parting the lawn. The

pounding on the walls grew fevered as we approached. A window shattered. Another pane shot open, revealing a half-naked kid dangling on the ledge and slobbering beer while shrieking. Suddenly the front door flung wide, blowing a gust against us and revealing a tunnel of flesh that crowed, spat, and writhed like some terrible, multi-limbed, poly-headed god. “S-A-E! S-A-E! S-A-E!” The voices beckoned us to come closer. Half-grinning and dazed, we, like some hypnotized meal, shuffled in, shaking hands and high-fiving the screaming, frothy throng lining either side of the hallway. They led us into an all-white room filled with white, wooden chairs where we sat, all swallows and sweat. The SAE members filed in behind, chanting still, and surrounded us. We then saw a gentleman in the front take a chair, lift it high above his head, and 11

begin smashing and stomping the thing till it lay there in sweat-drool-and-beer-drizzled pieces. Did I mention it was ten a.m.? We stared on lidless, wondering if we were going to need tetanus shots later. The president, wearing only a blazer with boxers, pushed his way forward and rocketed atop a chair. He quieted the room with his hands and then howled, “FUCKIN’ MOTHERFUCKERS!” His brethren exploded in response: “FUCKIN’ MOTHERFUCKERS!” “Welcome to the greatest fuckin’ fraternity in the whole wide fuckin’ world!” He then introduced one of his brothers, who announced how many “V-cards” he had taken. I put my face in my hands. What in God’s name am I doing here? A few more members then stood and added to the fraternity’s resume. They were like the X-Men of parties. Someone’s liver never pickled, another could snort coke through any orifice, and one guy’s erections always lasted more than four hours. We politely applauded. And then we were out the door and onto our next stop where the virginity-elimination theme continued. After eight houses and eight hours, we stumbled back to our hotel to consider what brand of hedonism we wanted. Day two was much calmer, thankfully, giving us time to meet the members and discuss the nuances of date-rape. And day three was basically an interview that focused on our depth of feeling regarding the tradition of alcoholism. The third day was also the most difficult for me to remain undercover, because of extended, sober face-time with members who had influence over who was selected. These guys were rightly suspicious of me. Why would anyone who didn’t drink join a 12

fraternity? Surprisingly, there were already non-zealot teetotalers who had joined and confused everyone, including myself. They were like the obese at a gym, just wanting to be near the action, I guess. I said I was like these weirdos, but I sensed the members were still disturbed by my aura of wholesomeness. So I was forced to employ a little-known maneuver I picked up at God & Bond’s Stealth Emporium: the wristwatch of rationalization! Or as the members later called it: lying. I told myself joining under false pretenses was okay because sinning for the kingdom was less bad than someone never converting at all. Did missionaries alert the Communist Party why they were coming? No. Come to think of it, our Lord and Savior wasn’t exactly Mr. Full Disclosure either. So I had plenty of good and bad, but mostly bad, examples to justify my evasion. I don’t remember what I said, but I do know that in the end, I didn’t have to say much because few suspect that a white guy in a suit is deranged.

..... On the morning of Bid Day, we gathered

on the campus lawn. We had ranked our top three fraternities the night before, and now we waited to see which den of iniquity, if any, had chosen us. Sigma Chi was my first choice, but I got Kappa Sigma instead. To me, it was like picking AIDS and getting cancer. I didn’t care so long as I got into a big one. Kappa Sig was the biggest, so I figured why not and went to greet my future disciples. After hugs and high-fives, the newest Kappa Sig class ran down from the campus lawn to the fraternity house for lunch. We

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were then whisked by a fleet of pick-up trucks to a non-descript house a few miles away. They pointed to the backyard, and there we found a huge pile of cheap beer that had been sitting in the sun for the past week. The point? Drink till you puke. I sighed. My counter-cultural stand had to begin at some point; I just didn’t think it’d be this soon. Strangely, they were very accommodating. It was like the Bloods and Crips had decided to make room for conscientious objectors and poets. We were all a little desperate, apparently. I may not have tippled, but I could still puke. My reward for keeping the faith was warm buttermilk and Sprite, and looking at them, I have never been tempted to drink more in all my life. As I hurled, part of me wanted to see it as persecution and imagine my place in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, but something about my voluntarily signing up for it had ruined the moment.

and more for a traveling endocrinologist with an industrial cleaning business. As you might imagine, campus soon became my refuge, while parties morphed into a weird sales-warm-up hell. I’d roam the premises, a cup of water in hand, engaging in tepid conversation with those too polite to ignore me or too drunk to escape. I’d return to my room, alone and defeated, until I mustered enough resolve to go back out and try again. After a month of this self-induced agony, I’d made no real friends but decided to lay siege anyway because I had a reputation to uphold. And you know, God’s love. In the coming year I offered hundreds too socialized by politeness the unbelievable chance to follow Christ crucified. Three accepted. And I soon learned they only nodded along to everything I asked just to end the meeting as soon as possible. If you’re wondering, this is the best strategy when dealing with the psychotically helpful. Speaking of psychotic, I would be surprised to learn I wasn’t the only pledge doing undercover work. When I met Josh, he seemed friendly and very rich. Except he was neither. Part of pledging meant that for one week we pledges ditched the rigors of our initiation, picked a place to take a trip, and went wild, or in my case, fell asleep. Our class picked New Orleans. Josh said he’d handle all the arrangements, but he inflated the expenses and pocketed the difference. When it all came out, both the fraternity and university kicked him out, and we learned that he also had a record as a paperhanger in his hometown. I mention him because, one, his tale is a tad shocking, and two, the house only hated me slightly less than Josh.

..... Now that I was in, the real work began.

My plan was simple in the sense that shooting up a bank is simple. I would hang out for a month or two, real subtle-like, try to make friends and connect, perhaps, over a shared hatred of myself, pray, and then start scheduling the most awkward meetings in history. If they accepted, great; if not, they were lovingly dead to me. In the meantime, I just had to survive a group of roaming adolescents saturated in booze and ooze. And it only took a week for me to learn that the floors, walls, beds, food, people, you name it, were invariably sticky, pube-dusted, and smelled of stale Budweiser. I started praying less for the miracle of salvation 13

..... Despite rumors to the contrary, the

hazing was mainly psychological, because of the threat of prior lawsuits. Some of it was even kind of fun. One night they woke us at two a.m., which was routine, and lined us up along the hallway shoulder to shoulder in our boxers to stare at “the crack,” or where the wall and ceiling met. This was usually when they’d shout insults at us for an hour, but one night they opened the cleaning closet, flooded the adjacent hallway, and added soap. It was my first indoor slip-n-slide. The men who owned our house dropped by now and then to remind everyone that the pledges were “in no way to be physically hazed.” And we weren’t. But when the cat was away, the mice drank, causing a constant unease among whatever mice eat. A guy in my class had a biological-brother brother who had told him about all the head games and not to worry. “But can we trust him?” we asked. “What if he’s in on it? What if...?” And round we went. Incredibly, my class was guilt-tripped into physical hazing at the very end. The members whined that they had to do wallsits and bows-and-toes when they pledged, and if we really cared, we’d do it, too. One by one my class caved. But volunteering to be hazed, like volunteering for religious persecution, just isn’t as fun as the real thing.

..... While I may have hated everything and

everyone in Kappa Sig, I must admit the process of becoming a “brother” was, more or less, meaningful. 14

One night they drove us blindfolded to the middle of the woods for a bonfire. No one said where we were going or why. There had been rumors of a circle-jerk, and some swore they were willing to do whatever it took, but I told the Lord I had my limits and hoped he understood. Fortunately, when we arrived, we found two kegs and a few guys ready to hang out. After an hour, we were quieted and told to form a platonic ring around the fire. The members then said there would be three rounds. Round one: tell a joke. I told one about how you get a nun pregnant, but thought I should get credit for the joke of my existence at that moment. Round two: tell your first or most memorable sexual encounter. My heart plummeted. Why try to clumsily and half-heartedly build rapport only to demolish it, I wondered. I should’ve realized there was no rapport to begin with. Having never even made out, I knew this was going to be worse than communal masturbation, which would have been my first and most memorable sexual encounter. Round three: discuss the most traumatic event in your life. The first guy burst into tears before uttering five words. It was all sobs and mumbling for a minute. He mentioned something about a dog and his grandmother and a cabin. I thought maybe the granny who had raised him had recently passed, but instead, the most traumatic event in this guy’s life was when his dog died. I sat there, wondering when The Worst Oprah Winfrey Show Episode Of All Time was going to end. Would it have been gauche to say I was in my most traumatic moment? Some of the stories were deeply sad, though. One guy’s sister had been raped by a friend.

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The guy next to me talked about attempting suicide. One of the saddest stories was that one kid made up what he and his dad did every other weekend because his dad dropped him off at his grandparents instead of spending time with him. But about half of the guys’ most traumatic event came when Mom and Dad sat them down and told them they didn’t love each other anymore. As I listened, I congratulated myself for joining and being there to hear their confessions, and silently praised my family for avoiding unchristian dysfunction. I forced sadness, too, about the decline of the American family and the wages of divorce, telling myself I needed to redouble my efforts. At the end of our ceremony, they said becoming a brother was about being able to share these wounds with one another, and I was annoyed to concede they had a point. It was a point reinforced later during another group confessional once our time as pledges had ended, though this time it was shorter and took place at the house with

more members. The crescendo of this sharetime came from a scrawny kid named Stan, who cryingly revealed he’d gotten a girl pregnant, and that they were going to go to Little Rock for an abortion. Horrified, I knew that even if I didn’t convert a soul I might still be there to advocate for life, family, and balanced budgets. I wrote Stan a long, anguished letter and gave it to him before he left, but I doubt he read it. They got the abortion. I was disappointed, once again, but proud of myself, once again, for doing my duty and getting the word out.

..... My own story of trauma was brief and felt

too tame to deserve the name. I was often depressed and didn’t know why. It was just one of those things, I’d decided. Who was really happy anyway? The sober, sturdier joy of the Lord was more realistic, more attainable, and just fine. I mean, I’d pledged 15

the fraternity with the belief that this “just fine” would blossom into joy, but that didn’t make fine traumatic. And I was fine most of the time, I thought. Yes, I had cried on every birthday I remembered, couldn’t tell my parents or anyone that I loved them, barely made eye contact with people, and, because of my love and affection deficit, cried myself to sleep many nights with a pillow over my eyes so no one would see, but this was also fine. Everything was fine! I’d gone to therapy the summer before, and the counselor had asked me three questions: What is intimacy? Do I want it? And am I willing to do what it takes to get it? But I couldn’t wait to flee each session, and only grew sadder, thinking that something was wrong with me for having to go there. I read and read too, hoping I’d figure out this intimacy stuff like I had with everything else in life, but I couldn’t. Maybe intimacy looked different for me? Maybe intimacy wasn’t so great after all? If it was, why was it so uncomfortable? Maybe telling people “I’m fine with you” would catch on? I had told a pastor about my sadness during the summer of therapy. He worked for the campus ministry Student Mobilization, which had devised and encouraged my ill-fated mission to the Greeks. He, too, had been depressed, he told me, but didn’t quite know the source either. He wanted to help me, and so, passed along his solution: obey God. It wasn’t working.

..... The nauseating uselessness of my mis-

sion hit home by the end of the first year. I could no longer deny that I was an exhausted pariah with only pretense to offer. I gave up and moved out. There were no farewell parties. I also bid adieu to the source of my humiliation as I saw it: evangelicalism. Many of the theories justifying it lingered, but bitterness and anger began drowning them out. And the thing that made me angriest was the smirk and knowing headshake of church people who found out about my pledging. “How could you be so stupid?” they seemed to say. I had no answer other than that the whole evangelizing enterprise seemed crazy, desperate, and impossible. It meant convincing; it meant control. It meant simultaneously playing God and playing dumb. It meant setting out each day as if life was something to conquer. If it was, life had won. I was beat, and unplugged my dream of single-ear headset-mics. I’d always assumed I understood the Chesterton quote, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” I had also assumed I knew whom his words applied to and that I wasn’t one of them. It would take several more years to see that Christian ideals like grace, forgiveness, and humility are not tried because they begin with failure. And I had only begun to fail.

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By Nate

Quick Walk to Figure Out Everything Each boxwood shrub and stoop gnome, check dazed like us and glistening Low mousy light of a droneless sky musk of steam off the kettle bog, check between these soundless rains No stone cried out in my direction No tongue of flame fluttered then came to rest Yesterday the neighbors picnicked in their own patchy yard, right near the street Esme repeating Assis, petit whenever their toddler son sputniked towards the sidewalk She couldn’t speak without losing her breath when we first moved in next door When I realized you knew what you wanted he was just holding up his head

Klug

INTERVIEW BY M A D DY G R E E N

Interview

The Saints and Sinners Matchmaker WITH

Karen Wright Marsh

hen you think of the saints, what comes to mind? Likely, they’re stiff, haloed figures in stained glass, gazing up to the heavens, a soft light shining through their faces. They’re the superstars of the Christian faith, celebrated for superhuman acts of piety and discipline. But as awe-inspiring as such people can be, their sanctity can also feel sanctimonious and unfamiliar, especially to those who are tentative about faith in the first place. As the Catholic social justice advocate Dorothy Day famously said, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” Karen Wright Marsh doesn’t want you to dismiss the saints, either. She employs the term “saint” generously, in the broadest sense, often pairing it with “sinner” to remind you that even the saints were hopelessly human. Marsh is the author of Vintage Saints and Sinners: 25 Christians Who Transformed My Faith, in which she writes about canonized icons like Augustine, Thérèse of Lisieux, and Mother Teresa, alongside figures like the fiction writer Flannery O’Connor, philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and pioneer and memoirist Mary Paik Lee.

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“The Pianist,” 2021, oil on canvas, by Gabriel Sanchez. Courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

For Marsh, these saints are more than their most pious acts; indeed, their acts of piety are inextricable from their muddier personal histories. Her favorite definition of “saint” comes from Thomas Merton, who said, “To be a saint means to be myself ”—that is, the good and the bad, all redeemed in Christ. “It’s not about the things that you do,” Marsh explained when we met for this interview. “But it’s who God created you to be.” Through her non-profit Theological Horizons, Marsh hosts weekly luncheons with college students, at which, over a homecooked meal, she discusses lesser known “saints” in down-toearth terms that the students can relate to. You can tune into her podcast, Vintage Saints and Sinners, to hear similar conversations. In this interview Marsh shares stories about some of her favorite saints, as well as why it’s important to study the lives of our forebears. She sheds light on some of their shortcomings and discusses what “success” might look like in the Christian life. Our conversation took place at a local restaurant near her home in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Mockingbird What inspired you to write about these saint-sinners? Karen Wright Marsh Early on, when my husband Charles and I first came here to the University of Virginia, a young woman asked if I would lead a Bible study for her and for her friends. She told me that her friends weren’t really Christians—they hadn’t grown up in the Church. And she herself had a very ambivalent relationship with the faith in which she’d grown up. So I got the idea that instead of doing a Bible study, which can be intimidating, we could simply explore readings from the Christian tradition. M Rather than the reading of the Christian tradition. 20

KWM Right. The Bible, where you feel like your reading of it has to be “right,” because we bring a certain absolute respect to the scripture. On the other hand, if you’re just telling somebody’s story, and you’re engaging with their writings, you can say, “What do you think about what C. S. Lewis is saying here?” And anyone can have an opinion. M It’s not like disagreeing with St. Paul. KWM Right? I mean, it takes a lot of confidence to say, “Romans is all wrong!” And so every week we would get together, and I would tell the story of one of these old brothers or sisters in the faith,

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whether it was Dorothy Day or François Fénelon or Amanda Berry Smith—people I didn’t really even know of at the time.

M It’s good for someone like me, because I would never sit down and read a full-blown biography of anyone. I would get bogged down in the details and never finish.

like, “Give me the short version.” My goal is to boil these stories down and deliver them for maximum effect. And I’ve been working with university students for so long that I’m always looking for the funny angle, asking, when these saint-sinners were 18 to 21, what were they doing? Okay, Augustine? The original party boy. It was crazy the way he was in college. He arrived at UCarthage with a reputation for drinking, stealing, and promiscuity; by eighteen, he’d fathered a baby with his girlfriend, and he was studying the Roman philosophy of Cicero—you never would have seen him at a Christian Bible study, ever. Some of these people are well-known— but there are many whose stories have never been told widely. There’s one woman, Pandita Ramabai, born in the 19th century in India, who was a Brahmin, part of the highest caste in Hindu society. Her father was a scholar of Sanskrit, and he taught her how to read their sacred texts, but at some point she discovered the Gospel of John, and she was really intrigued by it. It’s a long story, but she became widowed very young and lost her place in society, because widows were considered cursed. She ended up going to England in the company of missionaries and began teaching at a seminary there. And then she traveled across America, where she met Sojourner Truth, and then went back to India to start an orphanage and school for abandoned girls. Along the way she became a Christian, because she saw Christianity as a religion of liberation for women and as a faith of respect for all people. I just think that’s remarkable.

KWM Honestly, if I said, “Here is a riveting biography of Catherine of Sienna,” most people would be

M You don’t hear many Hindu-to-Christian conversion stories, not in a normal Bible study.

M You’ve written about so many saints. You’ve crossed continents. KWM Continents, centuries, ethnicities. I started looking more broadly, because I wanted to read about more women, and meet people from other countries who just don’t make it into the basic Western canon. What this has become for me is a way of talking about Christianity, about spirituality, in a way that is, hopefully, very welcoming. My intention is to remove any barriers to the conversation. I can say, Come, hear the story about Juana Inés de la Cruz, who was a Mexican woman who was born as an illegitimate child, so she couldn’t get married, so she had to become a nun—but she was also a great intellectual who had the biggest library in Mexico in her convent cell. Like, come check this out. Who is this female theologian you’ve never heard of? And what does she tell us? So it’s an invitation to hear stories. To me, it feels quirky and inviting. But it also puts everybody on a level playing field, because soon it’s clear that these people are human, like the rest of us.

KWM I never did! And I also realized when I was writing this book—it’s 25 chapters and 25 stories—that I had 25 chances to really mess up the history. Luckily I had a historian read the manuscript to look for mistakes. And she did tell me that the town of Norwich, which I’d said was on the coast, is in fact on a river. I was like, “Oh shoot! Glad we fixed that!” I’m not a historian, but I do think we all long to hear stories. We need to learn about our brothers and sisters who went before us, to see what it looks like to inhabit richly varied expressions of faith and human experience. And on this issue of success and failure, we’ve inherited powerful ideas from our own culture and from our peers and our parents and our bosses. But it’s an interesting experiment to imagine all the different ways and different circumstances in which Christians have lived. What does success mean in the jungle of India? Or in a cloister in France? Or in the Dark Ages? M I’m thinking of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who lived an extremely small life. As a teenager, she tries to go to a convent, gets rejected, finally gets in, kind of hates it. She writes this little journal, then she dies. Right? KWM Right. And when she died, the nuns literally said they could not possibly write an obituary because there was nothing to say. It appeared to them as if her life was a total failure, and now she’s the patron Saint of France. It’s just so weird, poignant and funny, in a way. Poor Thérèse. 22

M When you were a kid, didn’t you want to be a nun? KWM Well, we all experiment with wild ideas of how our lives could be different. Looking back, I realize I didn’t really want to be a nun. Maybe a Sound of Music nun, but not a real nun. The simplicity of it seemed attractive; I wouldn’t have had to make many decisions. I’d have known that, okay, you have to get up at four in the morning for prayer. But beyond that, a nun doesn’t have to think about, What is my calling? What is my job going to be? How am I going to get my health insurance covered? You just sign up, and you’re there for the rest of your life, until you die. But clearly I never committed. Sometimes we think of removed religious communities as an escape from the world. But Thérèse found out pretty quickly that it’s not that easy, because humans lived there. It was like… the classic problem. Haha. Wherever you go, there you are. But again, we often think our lives should look a certain way and that success means, you know, getting that consulting job or some variation on that theme. But there will always be such a range of ways to be in the world. I think it’s healthy to entertain that; you get freed up a little bit. There’s the story, for example, of a supermodel—her name is Amada Rosa Pérez—who was a pretty successful TV actress from Colombia. But in 2005 she became a nun, because she was just sick of the whole thing. She said, “I was always in a hurry and stressed out. Now I live in peace, and the world doesn’t appeal to me.”

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I just think that success and failure— these are such strange categories we have. And these saints—they were all different. That’s one thing I love about them. There’s so much variation. You can’t say they all did the same thing. For example, John Wesley preached on horseback, and people have said that if you measured how far he went, he rode around the entire globe four times or something like that. He preached five sermons a day. It was ridiculous. M A bit of a workaholic. there’s so much more to do?” The monk says, “Well, you get over it.” And they do.

KWM He was a mess, but that was his expression of faith. And he could preach out in the open air for, I don’t know, 20,000 people at a time. It wasn’t like he was meditating on a mountain. He was going hard, rising and grinding all the time. But then you look at somebody like Benedict. Even now Benedictine monastics only work three hours a day. That’s it. And when the bell rings at 12:40 p.m., work is done for the day. Then they eat, pray, sleep, pray—they pray a lot. And, you know, prayer is also their labor. There’s a new book out called The End of Burnout by Jon Malesic. Have you heard of it? He writes about visiting a monastery and seeing that their way of life is no secret because they’ve been doing it for, what, 1500 years? The monks are all about balancing the day. They have seven prayer periods throughout the day, so you begin to see why they literally do their work for three hours. One day the bell rings as usual at 12:40, and Malesic asks this one monk, who was a defense attorney in his former life, “How can you quit work after three hours, when you know that

M But these monks must feed themselves, and run their monastery? They’re not maximizing profits, obviously. KWM Part of the story is that these monks were designing a website, which became very successful—it was blowing up—but they didn’t have the staff to keep up with the demand. And they refused to compromise their schedule in service of this project. So they shut it down. It’s startling. But I think we can examine our own lives, and ask, What are the insane acts of discipline that we do in service to our gods or idols or ideals or ideas of success and perfection? We might think we’re free, that we’ve chosen how to live our lives, but in fact we’re following a lot of expectations. M And all those expectations are so normalized that you don’t think twice about them. 23

KWM Well, we’re trying to get recognition, money, promotion, advancement—the things that look like success. M What about the failures of these saints? Can you talk a little about that? KWM Well, I have a really hard time reconciling myself to A. W. Tozer, who was a renowned Bible preacher in Chicago. My grandmother loved him. He led intense Bible studies and college students would flock to him. He would pray for four hours a day, and he was esteemed as a phenomenal man of God. Even now, I know people who read his work and find it very helpful. But he was just the worst husband. He had seven kids, and he never took them on vacation. Ever! He was too busy doing the Lord’s work. And also he was like, “We don’t need a car”—so that meant that his wife had to track through the snow carrying their groceries. He gave away all his profits from his books, never copyrighted his work. He gave back all of his retirement money. He said, “I don’t need any of that”—and so when he died, there was no money for his family. His kids hated macaroni and cheese, because that’s all they ever ate. M It sounds like he took a vow of poverty— KWM On behalf of his whole family! Right. And so here was Tozer, a man whom everybody would say was a saint, apart from his family. There were no scandals of sexual abuse or financial misdeeds, which is what you typically think 24

about in terms of Church failure, but when it came to the people he was given to care for, he didn’t come through. When I read his biography, I told my husband, “This guy is not going in my book. I do not like him one bit.” Then we decided, okay, well, we have to put him in, because he raises important questions. Because it’s important to acknowledge that Christians do fail in personal ways. Or say shocking things, like Martin Luther, who said horrible things about Jews. And you look at the Holocaust—he played a role in perpetuating these evil ideologies that metastasized over the centuries. How do you follow a person who also was so flawed and awful? It’s so disappointing and perplexing! And then there are other things—I wouldn’t call them failures; maybe struggles. I feel like for every struggle we experience, there’s always a brother or sister who went before us who lived that, too. In a different context, but the same somehow. I think about Henry Nouwen, who was an incredibly compassionate person and teacher, and yet he lived with so much anxiety and depression. He would overwork and fall apart, and he had this need to be needed. Yet he kept coming back to the idea that we are beloved—that before we do anything, God loves us. It was a truth that Nouwen kept bringing up, but he learned it amidst lifelong, very difficult anxiety. So whatever your weakness or your trouble is—there’s a saint for you out there. Like, I can make you a match in the saints. M You can be the saint matchmaker! For a new dating show. KWM Yeah! Leave it to me. I can find your patron saint.

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But it’s only because the human experience on earth is one that we all share in varied ways.

But sometimes you do have to dig deep to find those stories.

M Exactly. Like the pandemic—so many people in the past have lived through a similar experience. Didn’t Dorothy Day live through the 1918 pandemic?

M As you’re getting further away from the “canon,” who are some of the people you’re writing about? KWM One of my latest favorites is a woman named Harriet Powers, who was enslaved in Georgia. She lived through emancipation from slavery, and she was married and had a bunch of kids—I think nine kids. She was illiterate for at least part of her life, perhaps for all of her life, but she was a quilter. And so she quilted what she called the Bible Quilt, among other quilts depicting Scriptural stories. She’s quoted as intending “to preach the gospel in patchwork.” The quilts are at the Smithsonian, and you can see them online. But these were Harriet Powers’ testimony and her sermons. She literally preached with quilts. See, she’s a saint to me. She’s not an intellectual, but she preached—a lot like the medieval artists who created stained glass for people who were illiterate and couldn’t follow the Latin sermons, right? Those people never heard the gospel in church, but they could sit in the pews and look up at the windows and receive the truth. So I feel like dogma and doctrine and biblical texts…these things are just not sufficient for people who grew up outside of religion, or outside of the Church, or who are feeling the constraints of whatever tradition in which they grew up. But I think this conversation about the saints opens up some rich opportunities as we wonder, how do we make room for new categories of meaning and purpose?

KWM Oh, she must have. And Julian of Norwich— the Black Plague went through her town three times. Literally 50% of the people died. And we say this pandemic is so unprecedented. I hate that word, because it’s actually untrue. It’s particular, but also, no, we’ve done this before. Julian lived from about 1342 to 1416. Some scholars think that she probably had a husband and children who all died from the plague—and the reason that she became an anchoress and lived by this church, living this life of prayer and counsel for others, was because she was alone, since everyone else had died. For every life choice we have, there’s somebody who’s been there: a sister who’s like, “Yeah, I know, honey. I know.” And I do think that today many people are considering whether they want to stay in the church. There’s so much working against that desire to stay and to engage with the Christian faith. Because right now in America you can look at these statistics about the Evangelical church—but that’s such a tiny little slice of the tradition. Even one of my own kids said, “I think I’m going to be a Buddhist, because I’m interested in meditation.” I was like, well, I get that. But guess what? There’s the contemplative, Brother Lawrence. I mean, we can learn a lot from different religions, but Christians can also teach us a lot. 25

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Shaz Sedighzadeh/Unsplash.

NEON A LEGEND

By Sarah

Hinlicky Wilson

his is the story of Georgie Appleseed, the great-greatgrand-nephew of Johnny Appleseed. By Georgie’s time there was no more Wild West left to conquer, no more flat grassy plains to transform into orchards with just a scattering of seed. All that was left were the hard asphalt cities and the choke of the smog. Georgie couldn’t roam so he made the best of it and opened a diner. But the diner didn’t do right by poor Georgie. It left him stretched thin and Thursday-night poor. Oh, he tried to make the best of it. He brewed the coffee thin and bitter. He used shortening for the pie crust and cherries right out of the can. He mixed the meatloaf with unmentionable odds and ends and stirred sawdust into the mashed potatoes. He saved money but lost business and spent his afternoons smoking cigarettes down to their stubs, slinging bowls of chicken noodle soup with no chicken in them. And the Bank wouldn’t take soup, chickeny or not, in place of monthly payments on his diner debt. When prospects were at their dimmest, Georgie called upon Fortune to help. Long ago in the Old World, Fortune had proclaimed her authority over Destiny, Luck, and Fate. But here in the New World, Fortune twirled around and unveiled her other face: as the benefactor of Wealth, Riches, and Money. She promised that all these things and more awaited those who wanted them badly enough. Georgie wanted, oh, how he wanted, but still the Wealth didn’t come. So he defied Fortune to make good on her promises, to send him a Fairy Godmother with a magic wand or a Gypsy with a crystal ball or a Genie in a lamp—someone, anyone who could take his useless diner and transform it into a goose that laid golden eggs. He pleaded his case to Fortune and challenged her to do him justice. Fortune herself descended one mild evening to find Georgie surrounded by pots of watery chili and a raft of stingy patty melts. He looked upon her with awe and fear. She spoke unto him and said that she could not send him a Fairy Godmother, for that was the way of the Old World. But she would send him something better, a new gift for the New World: a Salesman. Georgie fell on his knees in gratitude for he knew, like everyone knew, that a Salesman with a top-of-the-line product could turn any failing

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business right around. He wondered what it might be. A Self-Cranking Ice Cream Churn? A Fully Automated Soda Fountain? He was so curious that he was not as attentive as he should have been when Fortune issued the warning that always followed her promises. For, she said, if he took what the Salesman offered, Georgie would face three fearsome enemies. And he would defeat the first two. But the third— Georgie was so eager for Fortune to depart and the Salesman to arrive that he didn’t hear what she said. The Salesman manifested the very next day. He must have come from a line of wizards or psychics because he had powers. He could persuade the most hardbitten skeptic from Missouri that life wouldn’t be worth living another day without an Easy-Slick Shoehorn or a Battery-Operated Backscratcher. Something in his voice could sell kid gloves to a bricklayer and a dumbwaiter to the owners of a one-story house. “Business not so good? Even grim?” said the Salesman. “No, yes, what have you got?” Georgie Appleseed asked him eagerly. “Longing to turn the corner from Hardluck Lane to Easy Street?” “Yes, yes,” panted Georgie. “I have what you want and you want what I have,” crooned the Salesman. “What is it?” demanded Georgie. And the Salesman said, “Neon.” Upon uttering the magic word, the Salesman pulled the Neon out of his carpetbag and showed Georgie what it could do. He plugged it in and suddenly the room was soft aglow with the words “Good Food” pulsating in blue. A gentle tick-tick-tick kept the glow company. Georgie reached out gingerly to touch it, but it didn’t burn like an incandescent bulb: it remained supernaturally cool. In a split second Georgie was under its spell. “How much?” cried Georgie. The Salesman told him. Georgie frowned. “In twelve easy installments,” said the Salesman, “…plus interest.” Georgie brightened up again. The Salesman smiled and sold him the Neon. That very same day Georgie installed the Neon sign in the window of his diner. And that very same night his booths were filled. Nobody seemed to notice the flat root beer floats or the rubbery baked chicken. All they saw was the Neon, and they wanted to be a part of it.

“That’s a fine sign you’ve got there, Mr. Appleseed, and how about another slice of coconut cream pie,” even though there wasn’t much coconut in it. In no time flat business boomed and Georgie had Money and he didn’t have to work hard or change his ways. He was very happy and so was the Bank. But then came the first enemy. It was the Critic. As long as Georgie’s diner did little-to-no business, the newspapers were happy to leave it be. But now that everybody wanted to eat there, to sit near the Neon and watch its cool glow and hear its tick-ticktick, that drew the irresistible eye of the Critic. He was tall and fat and almost didn’t fit in the booth and right then and there he decided what his review would say. But the food at Georgie’s diner didn’t even try to change his mind. The tomato soup tasted of something but it sure wasn’t tomatoes. The spaghetti was swollen and the fish cakes still half frozen. Even the banana in the banana split was spotty and squishy. The Critic wrote a ferocious review. But Fortune had prophesied and so it came to pass that the Neon protected Georgie. The townsfolk read the review and shook their heads and said the Critic was a Crank. “The diner has that great Neon sign,” they said. “Let’s go there and get a reuben,” and they never even noticed how thin the layer of corned beef was. Georgie smiled and counted his Money, and at the Bank he thanked Fortune for sending him the Neon. Then the next enemy came. It was the Health Inspector. She was a solid woman with an immovable bust and a mouth without any curves. Her great-great-grandfather had been an eagle so her eyes missed nothing. “No hairnets in the kitchen,” she wrote on her clipboard, “and hair in the tuna salad. Weevils in the flour sacks, frying oil gone rancid, no soap in the toilet.” By the time she finished she had tabulated one hundred and thirteen offenses of Georgie’s diner against the state and body public. She shut him down for two weeks and slapped a sign on the door warning the regulars of his crimes against stomachs. But again Fortune was as good as her word and the blessing of the Neon remained upon Georgie. The townspeople made do for a fortnight but as soon as the diner opened again they flocked in, having waited outside the door and around the corner, impatient for a booth, hungry

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for green-ringed hard-boiled eggs and home fries burnt in old grease. “These Health Inspectors are zealots, they lead lonely lives, they’ve got to find something wrong or they lose their job,” the townsfolk said to one another, and “Please, a dish of tapioca pudding” to Georgie, even though the nubs of tapioca were still hard at the core. And Georgie again counted his Money and planted it in the Bank and blessed the Neon for shielding him from all harm. But although Fortune had spoken the truth, Georgie hadn’t heard it, so he didn’t prepare himself for the third enemy. And when the enemy came Georgie didn’t even spot the danger, not at first, because the enemy didn’t set foot in Georgie’s diner at all. It wasn’t the Critic and it wasn’t the Health Inspector. It was worse than either. It was the Competition. For while the townspeople were devouring Georgie’s gray pork chops and weeping lemon meringue pie, the Competition took due notice of the Neon. They scouted out other Salesmen endowed with Neon and paid for more of it and bigger. Their signs weren’t just blue but red too and sometimes green, and they said things like “Eat at Joe’s” and “Blue Plate Special” and “Sunday Brunch.” The Neon wasn’t loyal to Georgie but went to work for Alice and Mac and Phyllis and, yes, for Buster, too. Then the townsfolk began to notice how Georgie’s steak was mostly gristle and his macaroni had no cheese and his devil’s food cake really did belong in hell. They followed the trail to the other Neon signs and started eating at The Finer Diner and Mama’s Place and before long nobody was eating Georgie’s sorry meatballs at all. In the wake of the third enemy’s triumph, the first and second enemies swept back in. This time the townsfolk agreed with the review, and when Georgie’s diner opened again after a month shuttered due to bugs and bathrooms, nobody was waiting at the door. At last a fourth enemy came, one that Fortune hadn’t even bothered to mention because it was as inevitable as death, and that was Foreclosure. The Bank took the Neon sign along with everything else and sold it to the highest bidder. And Georgie? He had no diner and no appleseed. So he took the last refuge of the weary. He moved to Canada. “Neon” appears in Protons and Fleurons: Twenty-Two Elements of Fiction © 2022 Thornbush Press. Reprinted with permission.

Dear Grownup, I wish I knew. There are mornings when I wake up with a dread for everything the day might hold: meetings, laundry, showering, climate change reports, political angst, etc. I just want the day to be over already. I worry that we are all so isolated within the confines of our tiny screens and our rattling brains that time feels like it is zooming past in a very fixed way. I hope that makes sense. Lexapro has helped this some. But since I am far from a psychiatrist, I would also tell you that being with people has been the most helpful cure for the ache of time. When I manage to hurtle myself into the world or raise my half-moon neck from the glow of a screen, I am met with a face. Perhaps it’s the face of one of the college students I minister to, or my husband, or the face of one of our children. And I think to myself, “Oh, there you are. Here we are together. What a fleeting gift this moment is.” When I was in seminary, people talked about the “communion of saints” as being the dead people in our lives who surround us, most especially in church at the altar when the priest invokes the Holy Spirit to bless the wine and the bread. As a woman with Southern Baptist roots, I thought this was incredibly creepy. Who were these dead people who would just show up for church? And could somebody tell them not to? But not long after I lost my parents, I was standing behind the altar during the Act of Consecration, and my parents felt so near to me I could touch them. It was beautiful and jarring, and I hope to never forget it. In that moment, God had somehow suspended time. And so isn’t it all just incredibly out of our hands? And perhaps there is comfort there, too?

Dear Gracie… Good Advice for When Good Advice Fails You By Sarah

Condon

Dear Gracie, How are we supposed to be able to deal with time? When we are struggling it goes so slow, and when we want more of it, it vanishes. Signed, Grownup

Look for faces, Gracie Have a question for Gracie? Email magazine@mbird.com. All queries will be kept confidential.

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Dear Gracie, As the years go by, I’ve become increasingly embarrassed by my former online self. She has been all sorts of people I no longer relate to. Is it true that the internet never forgets? How should I cope with the shame of who I once was online? Signed, The New Me

Dear New Me, Oh goodness, please go gently on your former online self. She was younger and excited about this new-fangled way to communicate. Remember that we all hopped on social media the way people took to cigarettes in the 1920s. We were told it was good for us, and we did not know any better. I do wonder about your assessment that you’re very different now? Maybe you’ve become a bit better at self-editing, or perhaps you’ve seen a therapist, but I suspect that you are essentially the same person you were many profile iterations ago. Either way, God loves all the versions of you. As a word of comfort, I would suggest that the internet might not forget, but we are generally so consumed with ourselves that most everyone has forgotten but you. And that you have already been forgiven. If you find none of this helpful, then I would like to share with you that in one of my earliest posts on Facebook, almost twenty years ago now, I set my status as “knocking boots with my boyfriend.” And no, I did not marry him. And now it is also in print. Embarrassed and forgiven, Gracie

“Computer,” by Cyrus Karimipour. Courtesy the artist.

The Pastor You Got, Not the Pastor You Wanted

By Tasha

Genck Morton

A Life of Never Failing Up

failed _____________.” This was the free association prompt that greeted me at the psychological assessment I was required to take to become a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. I had already taken the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2, the Shipley Institute of Living Scale, the Strong Interest Inventory, and the Myers-Briggs Types Indicator and was preparing to discuss the results of all of these with the interviewing psychologist. But while I had sped through the others, this particular prompt stumped me. Eventually I filled in the blank with “an organic chemistry test.” Then I went through the interview, which involved a lot of talking about both my life and the results of the other inventories. At the end, the psychologist asked if I had any questions. I asked about those fill-in-the-blank prompts, specifically the one about failure. They had not come up in our conversation, and I was

‘‘I

curious what purpose they served. He kindly explained that they could serve as glimpses into deeper issues. For instance, if I had filled in the blank with “my marriage,” we would have had a lot to talk about. Turns out failing an organic chemistry test your sophomore year of college doesn’t set off a whole lot of alarm bells at the psychological interview of a prospective pastor. This memory is a well-preserved snapshot of the 22-year-old me whose biggest failure at the time had been getting a 50 on a science test. But fast forward 18 years, through a Master’s in Divinity program, ordination into the Church, a marriage of long enough duration that I’m starting to lose track (the year etched into my wedding band informs me it’s coming up on 13 years), a 6-yearold son, and nearly 14 years serving as a pastor—and there are many more things I could write in that blank. Recently I found myself speaking with someone who was thinking of going into ordained ministry. As we were talking about the ins and outs of the profession, they mentioned to me that they wanted to

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be fully aware of all the expectations—they did not want to fail a test they didn’t know they were taking. I managed to not burst out laughing in their face. Because if there’s anything I’ve learned about ministry in the past 14-plus years, it’s that I’m constantly failing tests I didn’t know I was taking. In that time, I’ve worked at two churches, and besides their general Lutheranism, there isn’t a whole lot my former and current congregations have in common—except “Upside-Down,” Quinn Dombrowski (CC BY-SA 2.0), cropped.

that in both there has been a certain very vocal group of older people who have hated my hair. Hated it. Hated it enough that they’ve accosted the male senior pastors and given these dumbfounded men everything from bobby pins to hair binders to pass along to me. But the haircut “failure” is indicative of a bigger “failure”—I simply don’t fit the part. My husband (also a pastor) and I interviewed at a lot of churches before we landed in 35

Lancaster, PA. In something that sounds a lot like modern dating, we shared our profiles with churches while churches also shared their profiles with us. Effectively, we had to determine whether we wanted to swipe left or swipe right and set up an interview. The first interview would be their first time seeing us unless they had bothered to google us. Everything about us was evaluated. Our dress, our height, our posture—our hair. We could fail before we even opened our mouths. Add to this the fact that I’m not what anyone first pictures when they think of a Lutheran pastor: my double last name Genck Morton does not indicate my KoreanAmerican adoptee status, and chances are I’ve surprised more than one person when arriving at an interview. While I’ve long embraced my mixed German-Scandinavian-Koreanand-a-bit-of-everything-else background, it has also meant I’m not quite Korean enough to be a full diversity hire, and I’m also not quite Scandinavian or German enough to offer the comfort of cultural familiarity to some of the old guard. Then I open my mouth. My commanding contralto voice, rising from my petite frame, coupled with my low-anthropology directness and wry intelligence, nestled within a Law/Gospelladen pop culture reference, can be translated as, “Keep up, please.” Maybe this explains why I’ve been rejected by more churches than I care to count. Not that this makes them racist or sexist or anything else-ist; my husband can also tell his own stories of similar rejection for different not-the-type-of-pastor-we’relooking-for reasons. As with dating, when it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit. Those are the tests I failed in ministry that I couldn’t control. But there are also plenty I could have controlled. There are the obvious 36

failures—like during my internship at the church where I overestimated the youth group’s level of excitement, booked a coach bus, and cost the church thousands of dollars for a trip that only five youth attended. Then there was a mission trip where the group nearly imploded from all the drama that could have been avoided if I had only done some team-building activities at the front end. There was the church that closed down in part because I failed to convince the people there that the church is more than a building, and that sharing ownership of the building with a school would have been a beneficial partnership. There are the sermons that didn’t land and the educational offerings that I thought looked good on paper but for which no one showed up. There are times when I should have led with compassion but led with the hammer of the law instead. There are numerous “bigger” failures I can’t list due to reasons of confidentiality. There are the failures that still gnaw at me today, like the times when I put off a visit to a sick congregation member, for either legitimate reasons or simply because I was procrastinating, only to learn that during that window they were hospitalized or even died. Nowadays, when I do visit members of my congregation who, because of the pandemic or other illnesses, cannot make it to worship, I will often be asked to share the current state of our congregation. Some want to hear that the church is as busy and bustling as they remember it—big confirmation classes of high school-aged youth, Sunday School taking up every room in the parish house, worship numbers so big that we fill every seat, and all the social justice initiatives running at full speed. Of course, this is not our reality, nor is it the reality of most churches today. But explaining that we’re all “failing togeth-

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er” doesn’t soften the blow. Nor are either of us completely satisfied with my descriptions of “success”: that our church continues to have a small but dedicated core group of families and youth, and that while we don’t “fill the house,” our worship numbers are steady—and even up— thanks to livestreaming, and that we continue to be dedicated to social justice initiatives even if the number of things we are able to do has shrunk during my tenure. The self-justification rings loudly. Then there are the ministry tests I foist upon myself. In the age of influencing and branding, I’m constantly telling myself I need to be doing more. Getting my name out there in more places, contributing more, hosting a podcast, and/or writing a book. What church doesn’t want someone marketable who will bring more people in by means of their “presence” and “influence”? Add to that the unique pressure that comes with being a Korean-American pastor: I can’t help but wonder if I’m failing my representation as a Korean-American Lutheran adoptee by not putting my “unique” perspective out into the world more often. My point is, ministry is a constant exercise in failure. I’m not talking about strategized failure, like “failing up” or learning from our failure so we can retake the test later. Ministry is a constant exercise in straightup failure. Even when I do see “success” in ministry, the success itself always demands more. An

overall decent track record with mission trips has led to requests for bigger and better trips each summer. Whenever I’ve successfully done something new, like developing a popular and moving educational opportunity from scratch (like interactive stations for the Seven Last Words of Christ), the first thing that comes to mind afterwards is, “How am I going to top this next year?” Every good sermon demands that next week’s be just as good or better. A popular Mockingbird article demands another, and another. All of this makes it an odd relief when I’m asked to go and be with someone who is dying. Death is the ultimate failure in our society. We do all we can to avoid it, delay it, soften it, and justify it. (“They’ve lived a long, full life.”) But it comes to all of us and, as a pastor, I’m often called to walk with people (and their loved ones) as they take this test they cannot pass. When I go, I am fully aware that I’m bringing with me my own failures—all the failures listed 37

above, as well as my impending failure— to their bedside. In other words: I bring nothing. When I come face-to-face with death, I come only with things that are not my own: Jesus’ words. His promise of new life and resurrection. “Sometimes ministry feels like dying, and sometimes it feels like being raised from the dead.” These words, passed along from my preaching professor Michael Rogness, are ones that I’ve come back to over and over again; I greatly underestimated them until I found myself surrounded on all sides by the failures that come with ministry and life. “Sometimes ministry feels like dying.” That’s the easiest thing to see and feel: all the letdowns, the failures, the deaths. It’s also a necessary lead-in, however, to the second part: “and sometimes it feels like being raised from the dead.” After all, the only thing we contribute to our resurrection is our death. 38

Therefore, if ever ministry feels like being raised from the dead, it is always the work of something beyond myself. It always comes from the outside. It is a gift. It is the moment that the very vocal members of the church I helped close tell me they forgive me. It is the sound of those same over-dramatic youth suddenly preaching sermons full of grace, mercy, and life during worship. It is the moment my internship supervisor looks at my dreadful financial dealings and says, “It’s okay; we’ve got you covered,” and then never mentions it again. It is the Sunday morning when, at the very last minute, I have to stay home to care for a sick kid and without a second thought everyone is there to cover for me. It is knowing that when I walk into those situations where people are dying, I bring nothing but the Word of God—but that this same Word is enough to forgive sins and to raise the dead.

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Of course, not all ministry failures are resolved neatly. I am aware of the damage that can be done by leaders, pastors and nonpastors alike, that can cause deep wounds that never really heal, because I have been on the receiving side of them before. My last two years in my high school youth group, I was part of a call committee to bring in a new youth minister, and at the very end of my senior year, we finally called someone. About a year later, this person would become embroiled in scandal and not only fired from my church but kicked off the pastoral roster. My friends and I were deeply shaken. Some left that church for others. Some left church altogether, and I’m not sure if they ever came back. While my path to ordained ministry was not marked by scandal, I have no doubt I’ve derailed someone’s personal spiritual journey not because I meant to, but because I’m a sinner, and I have failed. All I can do is ask for God’s mercy and forgiveness, and for the mercy and forgiveness of those I have knowingly and unknowingly failed. “Sometimes ministry feels like dying, and sometimes it feels like being raised from the dead.” I don’t know if those leaders of the church who have done harm to me spiritually have ever asked God for forgiveness; that is between God and them. What I do know is that there is an odd sense of comfort in

knowing that God can forgive them— because if God, through Jesus’ death and resurrection, can forgive them, then God can and has forgiven me, too. This is the scandalous, infuriating nature of grace. It is the Word that proclaims that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, neither height nor depth, neither our failures nor our successes, nor anything else in all of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God through Christ Jesus our Lord. For every test we face, God has already passed it for us, through the cross and the resurrection. “Sometimes ministry feels like dying and sometimes it feels like being raised from the dead.” I failed ____________________. Nowadays I’ve got a lot more that I could write in that blank. I also still have an endless list of ministry-related tasks including budgets that need to be balanced, people to be visited, sermons and lesson plans to write, and visions to cast. I still have the same haircut. I go about all of this knowing that I’m probably failing at least eight tests at any given moment. But I do so with the reassurance that my ministry never depended on me in the first place. Each day I die to both my failures and successes, and each day I am raised by a God who has given me grace, love, and new life. I failed, but God will never fail me.

Q&A with

Madeline Levine

ur current version of success is a failure,” concluded Madeline Levine at the end of her 2012 book Teach Your Children Well. At the time it seemed as if good grades might amount to good kids, and that parents’ success could be judged by their children’s extracurricular performances and/or admission to a high-profile college (even one they could not afford). To meet these standards, kids were being “relentlessly pushed, overloaded, and tested.” Ten years later, little seems to have changed in this regard. Who really thinks of success as kindness, a willingness to serve others, or composure in the face of change? Today all the typical markers—wealth, prestige, intelligence, one’s number of online followers—guide the pursuits of both parents and adolescents. Yet Levine’s diagnosis remains crucial, and even more so as we proceed further into this era of social isolation, political division, and unprecedented levels of mental illness. In her newest book

‘‘O

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“She was an honor student,” by Bill Vaccaro from the series The Things She Left Behind.

Ready or Not: Preparing Our Kids to Thrive in an Uncertain World (2020), Levine reports that anxiety is now the most prevalent mental health disorder in both adults and children. “Anxiety is nothing new,” she writes. “Historically, it has hummed along in the background. But our anxiety is no longer background noise.” Ready or Not was published three weeks before the pandemic would force millions of us to socially distance, to shut down our businesses, and to begin the exhausting process of refreshing newsfeeds for updates on a public health crisis that none of us could quite wrap our minds around. That the world was “uncertain,” as Levine’s subtitle suggested, became all too evident. Unsurprisingly, rates of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and loneliness have continued climbing to new heights over the last two years. A psychologist with forty years of clinical experience, Levine has treated both adolescents and parents trying to get their footing in shifting sands. She invites us to reconsider our deepest held values and to question what success might look like in the context of certain uncertainty. In 2007, she cofounded Challenge Success, an initiative that aims to equip families with research-based tools for raising healthy kids unconstrained by narrow, metricsbased expectations. Most people’s life paths, Levine writes in Ready or Not, follow an indirect route, full of trial and error, grief, rejection, and triumph of various stripes. Life’s paths are “winding and squiggly…with many false starts and detours.” To Levine, these “squiggly lines” are not mere diversions from an ultimate destination; they are crucial elements of a full, successful life. In January, we spoke to Levine over the phone. It was a delightful call, presented in a lightly edited form here. Levine highlights the importance of compassion and empathy, the value of trial and error—and why she loves being a grandparent.

When it comes to raising kids, how does our society broadly define success, and how have you been challenging that? There is a resilient myth about what constitutes success, and that myth says: If you go to the right school, and you get the right grades, and then you go to the right college and choose the right field, and make a certain amount of money, then you will be successful. But if success really was about how much money you made, then you ought to find very low rates of emotional problems or mental illness among the wealthiest people. But that’s not the case. I’ve been a psychologist for 40 years, and I’ve ended up treating some of the wealthiest people in this country. And what I take away from those experiences is that success has a limited relationship to the amount of money you make, the 41

school you went to, those kinds of things. You know all those bumper stickers on the backs of cars that say, “My kid is an honor student”? It’s like, shoot me. That’s how I feel when I see those bumper stickers, because what the parent is saying is, “Not only is my student an honor student, but I’m an honor parent.” At this point, I’m 70 years old, and I have grandchildren. I love this life-phase, because now it is so clear to me that the things I worried about as a parent— Would my kids make money? Would they do better than my husband and I?—are not at all critical; they’re absolutely incidental. Now when it comes to my kids, what I care about is their relationships, the way they parent, the kind of friend they are, the kind of spouse they are, their commitment to doing something of service in the world. I can remember being concerned whether my kid made the select team or didn’t, whether he got an A or didn’t, whether he took an advanced placement or didn’t. Raising children that way is very problematic, because you can get lost in any one of those things. And people do, particularly about what college you get into. But raising children is a movie; it’s not a snapshot.

Why do you think we haven’t pursued values of compassion and empathy to the same degree that we’ve pursued metrics-based success? The easy answer would be, because how do you measure compassion? It’s very easy to measure your geometry grade. I think part of it came with the wide appreciation of science, the idea that you could measure anything. When you want to know something about a bunch of kids, what do you do? You give them grades. But in life, when you want to know who to hang out with, to marry, to work for, you don’t really care who got the highest grade. You care about being with a kind, empathetic, knowledgeable person. My three boys all did well in school, particularly my oldest boy, but my youngest was not as much of a student. One day, I get a phone call from his calculus teacher, and she says, “This call has absolutely nothing to do with math, nothing. I just want you to know that I think your son is one of the kindest kids I’ve ever taught.” That phone call was the most important phone call I ever received about any of my three kids. And my personal opinion is that we have lost community. We have lost faith. That’s “faith” in the very broadest sense of the word—faith that there’s something we’re sent here to do. Faith that our values matter. We’ve lost that, and as a result, we turn toward things that are easier to measure. And I want to be clear about one thing, because every once in a while, somebody will write to me and say, “Madeline Levine, you’re just trying to lower the bar, to dumb down our kids,” which always makes me laugh, because I’m a Jewish PhD, married to what even my own children call “a real doctor.” So we’re not known for low academic bars, right? 42

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My point is not to lower the bar. I don’t want to be seen as saying that performance doesn’t matter. I think it does, but kids are much better positioned to perform when somebody is not looking over their shoulder, insisting that they be at the top of the class all the time. My point is to shift emphasis from the things that matter less to the things that matter more.

At the end of Ready or Not, I was pleasantly surprised to read about the importance of religion in your life. Why did you include that in this book? That’s in there because of a strong belief that all the timeless values are what make for a successful life. I was just taking a quick look at how people did in COVID, depending on the degree of religion in their life. And the studies say basically that religion is a really good thing to have, because it gives you a center for values, a sense of moral commitment to do something in the world. It’s not driven by these mythical ideas of what success is. My one true regret is that I didn’t spend more time at my synagogue when my kids were growing up. If there was one thing I could do over, it would be that. My kids were quite involved, but I wasn’t. They went to the synagogue and got bar mitzvah’d and went to Hebrew school. We tend to think, “Do these things, because it’s good for your kids.” But I should have done it because it would’ve been good for me too.

The book is partially a response to escalating rates of anxiety and depression, especially among teens and younger people. How can we help the younger generation through this extraordinary crisis? During these last unbearable two years, the most useful thing I did for young adults was to help turn their attention from their own challenges to the greater challenges that were out there. They would come in and talk about how depressed they were, or anxious (but more depressed). They would say things like, “I’m never going to be able to date,” or “My life is over.” And I wasn’t going to give them the usual list—you know, take up a foreign language, or bake, or do yoga, or breathe. Those are all good things. We know that breathing and meditation are good. But I made them a list of organizations in need of service—Jewish family services, Catholic family services, the local food bank, Meals on Wheels, that kind of thing. I had the kids choose something to do, and they reported back to me—and those kids got better. Making them responsible for getting back to me was also about building connection and relationships. Everything, at the end of the day, comes down to relationships. The kid-parent relationship is also important, because when it comes to anxiety, kids and their parents co-regulate. So when your kid comes home 43

from school, you’re not standing at the door saying, “How was it? Are you okay? Did everybody wear their mask today?” That’s not a good environment to come home to. Because your anxiety will become your kid’s anxiety. And the last thing is a significant switch away from performance toward questions like, “What was interesting for you? What’s exciting? What are you looking forward to?” And really hearing kids’ stories.

What are some values we can be highlighting for our kids? I’ll tell you two stories from my own family. First, I recently had my threeyear-old granddaughter over to the house, and we were working on something together—my husband, my granddaughter, and myself. And she said, “Great teamwork.” Again, she’s three years old. That is a value to start with early on, right? Not, “You’re so special and great,” which we’re all going to say to our children. But something more like teamwork, collaboration. The other story is about a time when my youngest son was in college, and I went to refinance my house. My son says, “Can I come along?” And I say sure. This is the same son whom the teacher said was so kind. So I’m sitting there negotiating a mortgage, and he’s being very quiet. He looks at his watch and says, “Hey Ma, I think the meter is going to expire. Can I put in a quarter?” And I say sure. We’re there for over an hour, so he asks that twice. And my voice sounds a little scratchy, so he says, “Hey Ma, I saw some tea and honey out there—can I get you some?” And I say, “That would be great.” Then he turns to the head of the mortgage department and asks if she would also like some. This is maybe a 90-second exchange in a 90-minute period. And at the end, she turns to my son and says, “I want to hire you.” My jaw drops. She doesn’t know a thing about him—whether he has any income, or is a pottery major, nothing. She says, “I don’t care what he studies or what his grades are. He is the person I want sitting next to me when I have a sore throat, who notices and offers to get tea for me.” So he became one of her righthand people. That was pretty much when I started writing this book, because it became clear to me that, in life, people are not looking for good grades, they’re looking for compassion. They’re looking for conscientiousness. They’re looking for creativity. They’re looking for resilience, self-control, integrity. The big firms that used to recruit only from the Ivy Leagues… none of them do that anymore, because now they understand how much talent they’ve missed due to that singular focus.

The first edition of Ready or Not came out three weeks before the pandemic. How did the pandemic illuminate, or underscore, your work? The pandemic shifted our focus toward resilience, which is a big theme in the book. It was kind of hard not to say, “Look! I told you!” 44

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People use the word all the time—“resilience.” It’s good to be resilient, but people really don’t know what that means. We tend to think of resilience as something you have or don’t have. But that’s not how it works; there’s no gene for resilience. There is no doubt some predisposition to it. But resilience is a skillset. And if you think of resilience as a toolbox, then you know you can always add more to it. As a personal example, my dad died when I was a teenager, and that’s when I started writing. When times are tough, I write. When COVID hit, I wrote. Writing is something you can do for a month or two, or you can do it for a couple of years, part-time, but you can’t do it all the time every day. And at the point when it became clear that COVID wasn’t going to be a matter of months, I realized I needed to add a few more things to my toolbox, to make it through. Nobody is resilient in all situations. And nobody sees this more clearly than a psychologist treating a kid whose parents were divorced and who managed through that pretty well—and then she didn’t get into the college of her choice and she’s ready to kill herself. So every time you allow your child to face something without interference, you’re helping them build resilience. And every time you interfere unnecessarily, because it makes you anxious to see your kid upset—every time you alleviate their normal developmental anxiety—you have robbed them of an opportunity to learn to manage it on their own. 45

In the book I tell the story of a kid who comes home teary-eyed after a dog barks at her. Her parents can do one of three things. They can say, “Don’t be such a wuss; go walk past that dog.” Or they can say, “I’ll walk with you.” Or they can say, “We’re going to take a different route to school tomorrow so you don’t have to walk past the dog.” Too often parents say, “We’ll avoid it.” Avoidance is what makes anxiety robust. The right answer is, “I know you’re anxious, and I’ll walk with you for a couple of days, but we’ve known that dog for a long time, and he’s never hurt anybody.” And then your kid might say, “No, I’m afraid. I don’t want to go.” The extent to which the parents says, “You’re right. Dogs are dangerous. We’re going to avoid it” is the extent to which you’ve contributed to what I call “accumulated disability,” which would be problematic for any generation, but is especially problematic for kids today. Because it should be absolutely clear by now that this is not the last pandemic; this is not the last crisis. Allowing kids to experience some anxiety and figure it out on their own is one of the most important things parents can do, and it’s something they have trouble with. To be clear, I’m not saying let them run out into traffic or do heroin or anything like that. But I am saying that, for what we call normative developmental tasks, like learning how to walk, learning how to sleep, learning how to drive a car, parents are guardrails, but they are not telling the story. We have to learn to tolerate our own anxiety about that.

You use the term “squiggly” to define a certain life trajectory—I love that idea. Can you explain more about that, and maybe talk a bit about why failure can be a good thing? Sometimes there are super bright kids who have never failed in life. They’re the kings of their community until they go to college, and then they meet a whole bunch of other equally smart kids, and that can be very difficult. I knew a guy like this from Yale, and at 48 years old, he was still talking about how tough it was when he discovered there were lots of other people just like him, or even more competitive; it sent him into a severe depression, because he had never failed at anything. I treated him for two and a half years. But most of us have had some experience of failure, and most of us, if we’re fortunate, have learned something from our failures. You know, when your one-year-old child starts babbling, you would never say, “Don’t talk to me until you can talk in full sentences.” Because you understand that it’s a process, and you’re going to be enthusiastic even when they don’t get it right. I think we spend way too much time worrying about what our kids are not so good at. I’ll often get a call from someone who says, “Dr. Levine, I’m really worried about my kid’s grades.” And I know what’s coming. It’s the kid who has four As and a C, and they want to know what to do about the 46

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C. Guess what? If your kid is outstanding in a bunch of things and average in something else, my guess is they will do the things that they’re good at. Now if a kid is totally failing in school, that’s different. But nobody’s one hundred percent great at everything, and when you realize that, you can learn about yourself.

Can you share about your own “squiggly” line? As a student, I was very good at English and very average at math. If my parents had decided to spend time and money to help bring up my math grade—and they couldn’t possibly have, because they had no money—that would have taken away from the work that I really was good at and loved to do, which was writing. And when I grew up, I became a teacher in the South Bronx, and I was terrible at it—that’s not false humility. I was just not a good teacher. And the South Bronx was a very tough area. And so after school I would visit the home of this one kid and sit around a table with him and his mother, trying to figuring out how to help him get out of that environment. And I discovered I was really good at that. So if you never take the risk of failing at something, you really don’t end up knowing your strengths and weaknesses. Nobody likes failure, right? It’s very hard to say to an audience, “Make sure your kid fails.” That, even to me, sounds harsh. “Trial and error”—I like that better than “failure.” And if you were to look at your own trajectory, I’d be surprised if you didn’t find some failures in there that you really benefited from. Every grownup has failed at something, and has learned something as a result.

Is there a degree to which failure, or this process of trial and error, can also teach children to value deeper things, like compassion and empathy? That’s an interesting question. Is failure a good teacher? Well, without encouragement, I’m not sure that it is. I think compassion and empathy are all about relationships. So I think what you’re really asking about is how a parent relates to their child’s failure. For example, I have a kid who’s a brilliant math student and is enrolled in calculus. His father graphs every grade he gets, and the kid ends up with something called trichotillomania. He’s pulling out his hair and eyebrows and eyelashes due to tremendous amounts of anxiety, because his father will not let him fail. The kid’s taking calculus, yet his dad feels the need to make the graph! So if this kid fails, or is less than perfect, will he learn empathy or compassion? I don’t think so. He’s just learned to pull out his eyebrows. But when a parent is welcoming and curious and nonjudgmental—and non-punitive about failure—then that shifts the relationship. The parent says something like, “I’m proud of you for trying. How did it feel?” 47

FOR THE RECORD

On Our Bookshelf

Gods, Grades, and Graduation by Ilana Horwitz A researcher of Evangelical Christianity and higher education, Ilana Horwitz finds that students with “religious restrictions” self-select colleges below what their grades would qualify them for. Are Evangelicals failing to live up to their educational potential, or are they successfully living out their faith’s insistence that status isn’t what makes us happy?

About Success & Failure

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell A classic, instantly quotable book that “debunks rugged individualism.” Invesigating “the story of success,” Gladwell exposes the many influences that amount to a person’s prosperity. Spoiler: it never comes about from hard work alone. Foreverland by Heather Havrilesky This perceptive, quick-witted memoir on the highs and lows of marriage begins with this: “Every book about marriage is also a book about mortality, since the success of any marriage is defined not by happiness or good fortune but by death. The assignment, after all, is to stay together until you die. Once one spouse perishes, the marriage has succeeded.” Ha…! For a fresh, funny assessment of an age-old institution, look no further.

Ready or Not by Madeline Levine Few things are as certain as the uncertainty of the future. In light of that, Madeline Levine’s Ready or Not explores our deep misvaluation of metricsbased prestige, and points instead to the timeless values that can stabilize us over the long-term, like resilience, compassion, and empathy. This is an excellent follow-up to Levine’s parenting tour-de-force Teach Your Children Well. The End of Burnout by Jonathan Malesic “Burnout” has become the go-to word to describe any feeling of work-related exhaustion. But there is more to it. In this personal yet thoroughly researched book, Malesic explores why work can’t be as fulfilling as we’ve been told it should be. And he reveals that Total Work is a demon which no mere time management solutions can exorcize.

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friendship, and the creative power of imagination, is full of resonant, upsidedown wisdom.

Vintage Saints and Sinners by Karen Marsh What do Søren Kierkegaard, C. S. Lewis, Amanda Berry Smith, and Mother Teresa have in common? They are all “vintage Christians,” as Karen Wright Marsh puts it. In her down-to-earth language, Marsh tells the stories of these “saints and sinners” (along with many others), including their personal struggles and their inspiring leaps of faith.

An Ordinary Age by Rainesford Stauffer Stauffer is painfully aware of the pressures of being a twenty-something. Through the combination of personal stories and those of others, An Ordinary Age creates space for young adults to consider what life has in store besides endless expectations, daunting demands, and fleeting accomplishments.

Very Good Lives by J.K. Rowling A good commencement speech can be measured by its ability not to inspire but to subvert the occasion with humanity and surprise. “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life,” Rowling told Harvard graduates in 2008. “Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations.” This speech, which also praises humility,

The Status Game by Will Storr Surveying human nature from the hunter-gatherers to the culture warriors, Storr argues that we all have (and always have had) a need to win a game we may not even know we’re playing. That is, of course, the status game. This is a major work of psychological and social insight.

Etc. Godric by Frederick Buechner How might a medieval saint’s story be told if he could tell it himself? Well, Frederick Buechner attempted to answer that question in this Pulitzer-Prize-nominated novel from 1980, inspired by the life of St. Godric of Finchale. In this hilariously bawdy account, we are both captivated and appalled by the messy, regret-laden life of a geriatric saint—a life nevertheless shot through with the redeeming love of an awesome God. This Boy We Made by Taylor Harris This beautifully woven memoir is about the hope that exists within the uncertainties of motherhood. Harris is vulnerable in sharing her experiences with anxiety, unknown diagnoses, and what it means to be a Black mother in the heart of Charlottesville, Virginia. The Word of the Cross by Jonathan A. Linebaugh This collection of essays is a treasure trove of Pauline research, reflecting uncommon exegetical acumen and theological depth. For all the ink spilt over the last few decades on the New Perspective on Paul, Linebaugh argues extensively for a Paul beyond the New Perspective while simultaneously vindicating many of Martin Luther's great insights. The Everlasting People by Matthew J. Milliner Is there a more unexpected combination of topics than the cross and the thunderbird? 50

Seamlessly, Milliner distills the work of G. K. Chesterton alongside the history of Indigenous Americans and ultimately offers readers a fresh appreciation of both. The Fullness of Time by Kara Slade Grand notions of progress permeate how many think of themselves and the world. Whether it be moral claims derived from the theory of evolution or an imagined technological utopia, things are, or should be, getting better all the time; few of us want to appear “backward” or “behind the times.” But Slade offers a different idea: that Christianity configures time around the person and work of Jesus, and that time revolves around God. The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is by Justin E. H. Smith This dense (yet short!) and incredibly sharp “philosophy of the internet” reframes the thing that has come to dominate our lives. What is the internet, and what have we become in relation to it? A self-professed Catholic “but in a weird, uncertain way,” Smith gives off a faint whiff of Christian values while exploring a topic that too often proves despairing and/or dehumanizes humanity as data points. Protons and Fleurons by Sarah Hinlicky Wilson A collection of 20 short stories across a slew of genres, Protons and Fleurons includes everything from cyberpunk to a gothic mystery to a religious allegory about a talking toad. Hinlicky Wilson is an immersive storyteller with an eye for subtlety and the unexpected.

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My Jonathan Edwards By Nate

Klug

No reason for any next moment accident so constant we forget how sweet Skin of an old rain flexed within a funnel weaver’s web bristle-legs following a meandering poem across the dune path Yet to be devoured we wormed the long way around each step tensed, minding the construction and felt happy, looking back to choose like that only Brambles in random handfuls clasped to our shirts

5 1/2 Habits of Remarkably Ineffective People

By Bill Borror

as Jesus successful? I guess it depends on your definition and criteria. The gospels themselves swing between accounts of Jesus drawing a crowd then preaching it down to a dozen (e.g. John 6:1-13; John 6:66ff). Recently I was preparing to preach on the rich and strange story of Jesus’ temptation in Luke 4. Clearly the Devil is offering Jesus a highly effective path to glory—to trade his Passion for praise and recognition. Had Jesus done exactly what the Devil said, there would have been no question among his followers about his messianic destiny. Jesus declined the offer anyway.1 Can there be a Christian concept of success that somehow navigates through the Scylla of secular prosperity and the Charybdis of Christian triumphalism? In my own life and ministry, learning to balance a legitimate commitment to excellence over and against a reductive numbers game (from budgeting to the size of congregation) has not been easy. How can the gospel guide us when we are being judged by quarterly profit margins? This “post-everything” moment offers us an opportunity to question what seems unquestionable, to study our values—and maybe even reconsider Jesus’ upside-down approach. So in that spirit, with no disrespect to Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (which I was supposed to read but never quite got around to), I would like to offer my own five and a half habits of remarkably ineffective people:

1. Go where you are needed, not wanted. From an early age, we spend a lot of energy climbing to the tops of temples (cf. Luke 4:9) in order to prove ourselves to others. These may be temples of dance competitions or elite sports teams; college admissions or fraternities; job interviews or living in the right zip code. All of these endeavors and a thousand others—both consciously and unconsciously—are based in a desire to feel wanted. 1. For more, read Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor,” which among other things can be read as a midrash on this scene.

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But remarkably ineffective people seek the places they are needed, not wanted. Sometimes that may be as simple as buying from the small local business or choosing to attend the small, struggling church; at times it may be attending to seemingly forsaken places and people. The young priest in Georges Bernanos’ Diary of A Country Priest, for example, was ill-fitted for the disinterested parish in which he was placed, but it was precisely through what appears on the surface to be weakness and failure that he discovers “grace is everywhere.” Even if we are not ultimately where we hope to be, either professionally or personally, God is there with us.

2. Do not network for success. The social network has always been a thing. Homo sapiens are a social species that survived and thrived in large part because of our ability to be interdependent; both shame and affinity evolved from the need for conformity to tribal norms. The power of persuasion is why the Romans valued rhetoric over logic and why Americans no longer know the difference between the two. But whether you are a social media influencer working the crowd, or deciding who lives in a nuclear war, the presupposition is the same: your fellow humans are primarily means towards an end. This reduces your life and everything else to an exchange of commodities. I remember being at a staff conference years ago. My regional director and I happened to be standing together watching folks mingle, and he asked me what I saw. I said some version of people kissing up to each other. He then pointed to a few folks cleaning up everyone else’s mess. “Those are the people who impress me the most,” he said. They did not seem to be trying to impress anyone; instead, they were simply following the example of Jesus himself, who “came not to be served but to serve.”

3. Avoid positive thinking. To be clear, I am not saying you should purposely think negatively, and I believe goalsetting is an important component of living well. But positive thinking and “manifesting” have become modern-day versions of alchemy. The truth is that secular optimism makes no sense in the face of inevitable suffering, and often requires that we cover up the harder things about life and pretend they are not happening. Frankly, the Christian varieties of this—“name it and claim it”—are equally obnoxious (and harmful). But hope is of a starkly different order. Hope looks directly at the painful things in life and says that nothing is impossible with God. In his book Night of the Confessor, the Czech theologian Tomas Halik writes: I reject secular and “pious” optimism alike, on account of both their naïveté and their superficiality, and because of their unavowed striving to make the future (and possibly God) fit into our limited visions, plans, and perceptions about what is good and right. Whereas Christian hope is openness and a readiness to search for meaning in what is to come, I sense at the back of [optimism] a cockeyed assumption that we always know in advance, after all, what is best for us. 53

4. Do not “do you.” The absolutizing of the construct of “self ” is a destructive perversion of a Christian idea—the inherent sacred worth of the individual. The tyranny of self-fulfillment is suffocating us. But what is the self? Dr. Tony Campolo once shared how a student came to him and said that he was dropping out of school to find himself. Campolo responded, “What if, after you peel away each of these socially prescribed identities and socially generated selves, you discover you’re an onion?” You keep peeling layers away until there is nothing left. If you were to “look inward” for “yourself,” I’m not sure what you would find; I do not know what constitutes the core of a human personality. I do know that, oftentimes, “me being me” is not good either for those around me or myself. I also know that brain disease and trauma change people’s “selves” and make them unrecognizable. But I believe God loves us, whatever “us” is, and that is amazing and enough; even if someday I forget who I am, God will remember me. Jesus’ call to find ourselves in losing ourselves makes as much sense to contemporary folks as counting angels on the head of a needle, but its strangeness does not negate its necessity.

5. Look beyond the cutting edge. There is an insatiable drive for the “new and improved.” At some point “new” became a synonym for “good” and, for some, even “necessary.” Our consumer-driven economy even shapes our religious appetites. Frustrated would-be Christian leaders often self-comfort by bantering around the rhetoric of how the church needs to change or die. I am not without some sympathy for their frustration, but I am not sure replacing the sentimental unsingable hymns of the past with equally sentimental unsingable contemporary songs with too many bridges is an improvement. As the late Frank Herbert observed, “Religion often partakes of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future.” Humans, like all living things, need to grow, but growth requires roots. As Simone Weil observed, To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul… Human beings have roots by virtue of their real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape particular treasures of the past and particular expectations for the future. We are more than our appetites, though you wouldn’t guess it just looking around. Innovation and consumption have uprooted us into isolation, to the jeopardy not only of our souls and mental health but also the future of the planet. As C. S. Lewis famously said, “When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.” Which brings us to…

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5 ½. Choose noble lost causes (emphasis on “noble”). Though nobody plays to lose, or for that matter tie (except in soccer and tee-ball), I think failure is generally much better for the soul than success. As in Narnia, there is a deeper magic at work as we strive and stumble in this life. Bernanos again reminds us that what is really needed for the soul is counterintuitive; his “failed priest” is an agent of grace to both his community and himself. The priest writes in his diary, “How easy it is to hate oneself! True grace is to forget. Yet if pride could die in us, the supreme grace would be to love oneself in all simplicity—as one would love any one of those who themselves have suffered and loved in Christ.” Not all lost causes should be embraced (i.e. the Southern myth of the “Lost Cause”), but all of us at some point have been the lost coin, the lost sheep, or one of the lost brothers (older, younger, or both). We are surrounded by kids and addicts and refugees and bigots and idiots and losers who no one thinks are worth fighting for—except the God of lost causes, who never gives up. Not even on you.

No Hero Stories

By Joseph

McSpadden

Eff-Up Nights and the Healing Power of Failing in Public

n the opening scene of Patton (1970), the brilliant World War II commander, played by George C. Scott, delivers some stern words. “Americans love a winner, and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed.” But in fact, that is precisely what people in Richmond, Virginia, and around the world, have been doing. Laughing at failure might run contrary to the entrepreneurial American spirit, yet for those attending F*ckup Nights, the experience has been quite liberating. Our bootstrap culture is saturated with books that expound the Six Secrets of Super Success, or the Seven Habits of Highly Overworked People, but there aren’t many manuals on how to close down your failed business. What resources are there for those of us who made the calculated decision to launch into the uncharted territory of our ambition, only to crash and burn? Nobody likes that F word—failure—or the shame that accompanies it. But we need not feel alone. A F*ckup Night is your chance to take your

inner critic, the one who mouths cheap slogans like “man up,” and jettison him, as in “man overboard.” At F*ckup Nights people gather to talk about their biggest screw-ups. Thus, the name. Birthed in Mexico City in 2012, F*ckup Nights has over 330 chapters world-wide. The brainchild of Pepe Villatoro and Leticia Gasca, the purpose of the organization is to bring people together to talk about their failures. In Richmond, the meetings have been exciting and fast-paced. Set up like a TED Talk, the evening starts with an open bar and a chance to network and socialize. A DJ keeps things lively with some funky music, and the prevailing mood is festive. Some in attendance wear shirts with slogans like “Try, Fail, Learn, Repeat” or “Everybody Fails, We Talk About It.” Many sport a self-adhesive name tag that says, “Hi! My name is _________ … and I’m a F*ckupper.” The conference space is packed. At the appointed time, the crowd settles into their seats, and the meeting begins. A typical F*ckup Night features three speakers who each talk for ten minutes, followed by ten minutes of questions and an-

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swers. The speakers, like the audience, come from all walks of life: they are entrepreneurs, techies, creatives, and corporate types. The event is ultimately uplifting, in the way that confession unburdens the soul. The Richmond chapter is headed up by Zane Gibbs and David Graham, partners in a consulting firm, ZADA Strategy. They kicked off their first event in June of 2019, with meetings following on a quarterly basis. Though in-person meetings were suspended due to the pandemic, post-COVID meetings will resume in summer 2022. It’s a good thing, too. F*ckup Nights, with their frank discussions about failure, are cathartic. As David points out, “People are way more comfortable saying f*ck than talking about failure, and failure sucks.” The idea is to demystify and destigmatize failure. You may have effed-up, but that doesn’t mean you are a hopeless failure. “The Illuminated Man,” 1968, gelatin silver print, by Duane Michals © the artist. Courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York.

For some, the name of the event might be off-putting, but Zane sees it as a positive. “It’s not about the F word; it’s about having genuine, honest, unfiltered conversation.” I found it refreshing to hear testimonies from others who have had to take the business walk of shame. Zane and David have very high standards for the stories that are told at F*ckup Nights. The first rule is that these are stories of professional failure, not tales of substance abuse or moral lapses. Second, speakers must avoid giving advice. The reason is simple: listeners will be at different places in their own personal journeys, and what one person takes away from a talk will be different from what the person seated next to them learns. Finally, no hero stories. The hero story: “Yes, I failed, but I’ve got it all together now.” The upbeat ending often robs the failure story of its inherent power. 57

Even if there is a happy ending, Zane and David don’t want to hear it. “Tell the authentic story of your journey to the bottom,” Zane says. This approach ushers the speakers and the audience into a covenant of sorts, where it is safe to be vulnerable and human. Done right, F*ckup Nights rise to a level of honesty often found in the most effective 12 Step groups. And much like 12 Step groups, the best chapters keep their eyes firmly on the prize: naked honesty. One attendee, a local pastor commented, “I wish my parishioners were as comfortable being honest about their failings as they are with dropping an f-bomb.” In the right context, failure is just a lesson; it’s the tuition we pay for our ongoing education in life. It sucks, but there is no way around it. The best lessons aren’t the ones we acquire from textbooks; they are the ones experience burns into our souls. Shame. Five letters that spell one of the most insidious forces we all face. Even Christ himself endured the cross; he understood the destructive power of shame all too well, and despised it. In the church, “shame” is a word most often associated with moral failures. But shame connected to business or finance is often just as devastating. This is especially true if your church places a strong emphasis on performance and excellence. As a man who had faced financial trouble and two failed attempts at self-employment, I knew I would never be considered for church leadership. Opportunities to speak were also rare. I felt like a football strike season; I would forever have an asterisk by any good plays I made. I sat in church meetings and compared myself to my brothers. The guys with the close-cropped haircuts and business casual vibe were the guys I knew had it together in all the ways I didn’t. I was 58

sure they paid cash for the Beamer and that their five-year-old son’s college education was already fully funded. The only reason they hadn’t retired at thirty-eight was that they actually liked going in to the office. As a man with a strong creative bent, who gets the big picture but has trouble with the details, I never measured up in my own eyes. I struggled to understand the verse “faithful in the little things.” It took a friend to help me see. “Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides,” he said. They had problems, too; they just weren’t on display as mine were. This wisdom was a stepping stone towards self-acceptance. “Whenever I share my story,” one speaker, Todd Waldo, told me, “I am hoping to find a place of intersection between me and the audience. I think it’s helpful for people to see my own vulnerability. And I am still dealing with the impacts of the choices I made.” With a background in event planning, Waldo had started his own company, launching himself into the choppy waters of self-employment. “It was therapeutic,” he recalled, about one Richmond chapter event. “It was therapeutic to reel in my past and examine my journey. It was helpful to see that I am in a different place. I’m not failing the same way.” A perspective like Waldo’s can be the difference between a caution sign and a dead-end sign on the road of life. One of the first things you notice at a F*ckup Night is that the vibe is unrelentingly positive. This is not a group of keening mourners drawn together to weep over the corpse of your endeavor. This is a group of supportive friends and family there to help you give that dreaded moment its proper send off. It’s a celebration of life, complete with its own Big Easy-style second line celebrants.

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One small detail stands out. Much like the baseball player approaching home plate for his turn at bat, the speaker gets to choose his or her own walk-up song. That singular act of self-determination serves to send the message that what happened before is in the past. You may have struck out the last time, but you’re still standing, bat in hand. You will, in fact, live to fight another day. Sharing our moments of failure exposes our humanity. In the eyes of others, we become approachable, relatable. Too often, especially in church and on social media, we present illusions of a perfect life. Without realizing what we have done, we create a

wall, we become unapproachable. We should know better, but those observing us get the wrong message: They have it all together. We could never be real with them. The truth about our failures is the doorway to grace. Failure removes our imposter masks and allows us to stand emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually naked. Only in this nakedness can we be clothed in friendship and forgiveness and in the affirmation that we failed because we tried. In this way, an eff-up can be a badge of honor. As much as you may feel embarrassed by it, you do not have to be ashamed. That in itself is healing.

Inverting the Pyramid WITH

Interview

Nick Mohammed

f you’re alive today, you’ve either watched Ted Lasso or you’ve been told to watch Ted Lasso—and if you haven’t been told to watch Ted Lasso, now you have: Watch Ted Lasso! The muchpraised show follows an American football coach as he attempts to head up an English football team—a seemingly slapstick premise that doesn’t at all reflect the depth plumbed over the show’s two seasons. Balancing humor with heart, Ted Lasso offers psychological insight and emotional catharsis, and deftly upends the definitions of success and failure. Ted, played by a winsome Jason Sudeikis, prioritizes his players over their performances. He determinedly scales their protective fences and rattles off puns and wise aphorisms, opining, for example, that the goldfish is the happiest animal on Earth. “You know why? It’s got a ten-second memory.” Ted, like the proverbial goldfish, proceeds with a non-judgmental openness that to onlookers looks like foolishness. This gracious guru posts a crooked sign on the locker room wall that only says, “Believe.” It’s no wonder Brené Brown, the well-known champion of vulnerability, has pronounced herself president of the Ted Lasso Fan Club. For this issue of the magazine, we were privileged to interview actor Nick Mohammed, who plays “Nate the Great” (so dubbed by Ted), one of the series’ more complicated characters. Spoilers follow for both the first and second seasons, particularly regarding Nate’s character arc. Beginning the show as a “kit man” responsible for the players’ equipment, Nate is lifted out of relative obscurity by Ted, who ultimately promotes him to assistant coach.

“Found Footballs,” England, by Liam Bailey © the artist.

Throughout the second season, however, success goes to Nate’s head, which also happens to be graying from stress. By the end, he makes an enemy of everyone who was once his friend. Scrolling social media, he turns to the public for affirmation and brutally betrays Ted’s trust. The about-face, which Mohammed describes as having an “Empire Strikes Back tone,” is seismic. When the finale aired, viewers’ responses ranged from acute distress to understanding. Mohammed plays Nate with a dynamic mixture of humor, magnetism, and humility. He spoke to us from London, where he was prepping to film the show’s third season. Originally from Leeds, Mohammed graduated from Durham University having studied geophysics; he was figuring he would work for an oil company before his comedy career took off. In addition to his work on Ted Lasso, he also helms a cyber-security comedy, Intelligence, and practices magic on the regular. He took our call around dinner time.

MOCKINGBIRD So what did you have for dinner? NICK MOHAMMED I’m actually cooking at the moment. We’re having a casserole, and so I’m literally chopping veg right now. M Are you the family cook? NM No, I wouldn’t say so! My wife and I share it between us. But once the kids are down, we can chill out and all that. M Very nice. Well, I’d love to talk for a bit about Ted Lasso. For starters, why do you think the show has taken off the way it has?

NM Well, it’s probably quite wise to not anticipate any kind of success, but I do remember when we started filming back in 2019, I said, this is good—it feels different. At the time, the comedy landscape was quite snarky and cynical, which, don’t get me wrong, I love a lot of those comedies. But it felt genuinely positive and hopeful to have a character in Ted who didn’t have an ounce of cynicism. And obviously no one aimed to release a show during a global pandemic, but the fact that it had a positive and hopeful message at its core I think resonated with people at a time when they were going through lots of very difficult stuff. And as a comedydrama, Ted Lasso manages equally to let people laugh and also feel the emotion, without sacrificing on either, and that’s a very difficult thing to do.

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and it’s going to have all the tropes you’d expect. But quite quickly people learned that we’re going to do more than that— we’re going to look into masculinity, and mental health, and redemption. And you look at the success of someone like Ted and the way that he is able to be this catalyst for good in almost everyone’s life—yet he’s got a failed marriage, and is sort of set up for failure at his job. So how individuals quantify success, you know, depends on what prism they’re viewing that success through. As the audience, we approach that Season One finale in the same way. We’re disappointed for AFC Richmond, and we feel that devastating loss, but we also see success in other things, like when Nate gets promoted from kit man to coach. That scene is just euphoric.

M When we first meet your character Nate, he can’t believe that Ted, the coach, would care to even know his name. He starts out as this real underdog. Yet you’re given this incredible plotline with so much character development. I feel like that speaks to the way that the show conceives of the underdog—offering an amazing story to a person who in another show might have been mostly a side character. NM And it’s not just with Nate. You take any of those characters—Sam, Jamie Tartt, Roy, Rebecca. Everyone gets their moment to shine. All the characters are developing in their own ways. And the bits and pieces I’ve heard about season three—I’m like, that’s so exciting. You just know the writers are going to serve everyone so well. But often in shows, especially with such great leads as we have, there isn’t space to have the supporting characters have their own arcs. And also, as someone who has previously been in a lot of sitcoms where those characters are just foils and don’t really develop at all—it’s a pleasure to stay with the characters a lot longer and see them develop over periods of time.

M But then the finale of season two also ends with a loss—the loss of Nate, as a coach— even though the team wins. NM Yeah, it’s almost like the Season One finale is inverted in the Season Two finale. And I feel like Ted is in a really dark place as well. Despite his therapy with Dr. Sharon, he’s still not fixed, is Ted, and that interaction with Nate at the end—Nate’s ripping the “Believe” sign in two—that’s a huge gut punch to Ted, massively. Because Ted doesn’t really care about football. He cares about people, and I think the show cares about people more than it cares about football. So I think it’s correct to say that at the end of Season Two, we’re all feeling a little bit lost. And I think viewers are feeling that.

M Ted Lasso is ostensibly a sports show, so it’s very surprising when season one ends with a huge loss—the team is relegated from the Premier League. What is the show saying about success in that case? NM I think that when people were introduced to Ted Lasso they understood superficially that, okay, this is going to be a sports show 63

M That episode is titled “Inverting the Pyramid of Success.” What does that mean to you?

episodes, you’ll notice he’s been getting closer and closer to where Ted sits. So for me as an actor, that was quite fun.

NM Well, I do know that “inverting the pyramid” is a football thing, right? It’s the name of a football book—is that right?

M The bedrock of the pyramid includes these deeper values like “friendship” and “loyalty,” while closer to the top there’s “competitive greatness” and “confidence.” As Nate gets more obsessed with success, he seems to be inverting that, and ignoring the more foundational values.

M Yes, I just looked it up, and it’s way over my head. I don’t follow the sport. NM Likewise! I don’t follow football at all! I have to ask so many questions. Brendan, who plays Coach Beard, is a football nut. He knows everything, and he hides loads of Easter eggs in the show. But my dad’s a huge football fan, and one Christmas I did get him a book called Inverting the Pyramid, because he’s massively into the sport. So that title has a slight double meaning. And the “pyramid of success” is a diagram posted on the wall behind Ted’s desk.1 And so in that finale, just before they’re about to start the match, Nate is staring up at that pyramid, and also—I don’t think I’ve ever said this in an interview before—that’s the closest Nate has ever got to Ted’s desk, the seat of power in the show. The fact that Nate’s almost pacing behind the chair where Ted sits is, like, a metaphor for Nate seeing himself in this powerful position. And if you watch him in the later 1. A triangular diagram, “the pyramid of success” was conceived by American basketball coach John Wooden. The pyramid itself makes no mention of sports and is intended more broadly as a guide to life, which is perhaps why Ted has it framed on his wall. Such values as “loyalty” and “enthusiasm” are its foundational building blocks. “Faith” and “patience” reinforce the pyramid from top to bottom. 64

NM I remember mouthing the words towards the top of the pyramid—for Nate, it’s almost his mantra. Along the axis of the pyramid is “ambition,” and then at the top there’s “competitiveness.” He’s using this symbolism as a way of trying to achieve success. But obviously what he doesn’t really realize is, he’s ignoring a lot of the real values of human morality at the expense of that success. M Were you satisfied with Nate’s character arc, personally? NM I was aware that it was going to happen quite early on; when we were filming Season One, Jason had this plan outlined. This was before it had even got recommissioned. But I had known for a while that Nate was effectively going to become the villain, and Season Two would chart his downfall. To be honest, I was slightly in two minds, because on the one hand I relish the opportunity as an actor to do something different. Because it was taking this darker turn, I realized that Nate was going to have far fewer jokes and moments for comedy,

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which is my safe area. So I knew it was going to be a challenge. But then on top of that, yes, I knew it would possibly polarize the audience. I don’t know if “polarize” is the right word, because I think most people appreciated what the writers did—and I think the writers did a great job at portraying it quite realistically. But yeah, my goodness, audiences didn’t enjoy seeing it. M Nate justifies his behavior by saying that Ted abandoned him. In your view, is he right? NM A lot of this obviously stems from Nate’s toxic relationship with his dad. He’s never been able to please his dad, despite having these moments of success in his career. And now that he’s getting more attention professionally, things are going to his head, and he’s turning against all the wrong people. The things he’s saying to Ted are what he should be saying to his father. The thing is, with Nate, he’s never really had a real relationship with anybody, male or female. He’s always been at the receiving end of a bully, whether that’s in the locker room or through his father’s actions or lack of love. And Ted did bring him to this place where he suddenly felt that he had real worth and value. It’s not Ted’s fault, but he has been blind to what’s becoming of Nate, because of his own personal problems. They’ve just been going through very different stories. And so without Ted’s support he’s floundering, is Nate. That scene at the end of Season Two [when Nate and Ted have their falling out] is the only scene just between Ted and Nate. It feels like that can’t be true, but it is, and that was

really deliberate. I remember Jason telling me, way back when we were filming Season One, to allow this tension between them, to allow the viewers to try and empathize with the fact that Nate has felt abandoned because he hasn’t had that one-on-one time with Ted that he needs. M Nate has that practice of spitting on himself in the mirror to hype himself up. What’s that about? NM First of all I should say that that is based on a real person. I can’t quite remember… It was either a friend of the writers, or they had seen it happen—a guy would spit at himself in the mirror as a way of motivating himself. Obviously, metaphorically, it’s weird. It was also quite gross to film because, you know, it’s really frowned upon to be spitting in COVID. I didn’t like doing it. But I like to think that Nate hates what he’s becoming, and I think he recognizes that it’s not him. Some of his behavior is so far 65

removed from Season One Nate. He’s quite romanced by the notion of being, I guess, more powerful. But I think ultimately he massively oversteps the mark. At one point, when he goes to ask Rebecca for advice, she basically says to him that you deserve to be here and that you should do what you need to do to get what you want, effectively. But he’s taken that slightly the wrong way, or taken it to an extreme. M Has there been a memorable bit of feedback that you’ve gotten since you’ve been on the show, or is there something notable somebody said to you in response to the show? NM I mean, listen, I try to stay off social media, partly because it was slightly blowing up, particularly when we got into the latter half of the season. And I also was aware that Nate starts scrolling through social media in an unhealthy way. M I was just going to say that! NM Haha. So it might be a bit of life imitating art here, and I don’t want to get sucked into that. But when the finale came out, I was genuinely moved by people who were getting in contact. So I did allow myself once a day to just have a little look, and then I’d come off it. The one that really struck me was that Lin-Manuel Miranda got in contact. He sent me a direct message, and I was like, “What! Why is he getting in contact?” It was a real eye-opener that so many people 66

were watching this show, that it’s connecting with people. So many people were saying that they understood Nate, actually, and that even though they didn’t like what they were seeing, they could relate to it—they could relate to, you know, the bullied becoming a bully. People were really opening up about it and talking about their mental health. It was strange—psychologists were discussing it in threads, and people were writing essays and bringing it up in school. I’ve been involved in other shows that have sort of done well, but nothing that’s had as strong an emotional reaction as this. The ripping of the “Believe” sign got an especially big reaction—that sign had always been this emblem of hope and optimism, and to see that ripped in two… People felt like, “Ah, what are you doing? Like, what has happened?” M Would you prefer to see Nate continue to be a villain, or would you want him to have a redemptive arc eventually? NM It is fun being a villain, because I don’t get to play that role much. But it would be great to see him redeemed. Personally, I like a story that goes full circle, and I think it would be a nice completion of the circle if we saw Nate redeemed. But he’s done some pretty nasty things, has Nate, like going to the press about Ted’s panic attack. He’s been quite backstabbing. So it’s going to take a lot for him to be redeemed, and I don’t know whether people would accept it. You know, the audience has already been tested with Nate, so it’s quite a tall order to ask them to see his nice side again.

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M I’m reminded of what you said earlier, which is that Ted Lasso is refreshing because it’s so genuinely hopeful. So I’m rooting for Nate, too. To see him come back would be in keeping with that powerful message of hope. You know, we don’t always have to be so cynical.

to be working, and to be doing something that resonates with people. I’m also aware that at some point, when Ted Lasso finishes, and Intelligence as well, I’ll be like, “Right, what’s next?” You’ve always got to be looking ahead and not, I guess, resting on your laurels or getting too self-aggrandizing.

NM Yeah, completely. But all I know is that they’ve got some exciting things planned. Actually, in full disclosure, we start filming in three weeks, and I went for a drink yesterday with Brendan, who plays Coach Beard [and is also a writer for the show]. So we just had a quick drink— actually at the pub where they film a lot of Ted Lasso scenes, which was a bit weird—but I was like, “I’m not going to ask you questions, I’m not, I’m not,” and then I had a drink, and I was like, “Oh, maybe just one question I’ll ask,” and then, “Actually, I’ve got one more question.” But whether they’re able to redeem Nate, or whether he’s irredeemable, I can’t say I know the answer yet—hand on the heart.

M I read that in addition to being a comedian and actor, you’re also a magician. I’m curious: what’s the most memorable trick you’ve pulled off?

M How have you processed your success over the last few years? It’s been pretty astronomical.

NM We did, I think, 70 shows. But even though we were quite used to it, and it was all choreographed, and I had these assistants who were watching to make sure that I wasn’t in any real trouble—there was always a point when I was like, “Hmm, it would be a shame if, you know, I did want to breathe just now.” So that’s the one that stands out as the most mentally and physically challenging, and I don’t think I’d ever do it again. But listen, I’m a huge fan of mentalism and card magic, and I used to work as a magician at hotels and weddings, and that was always close-up stuff. But I still read about it every night. I’ve got magic books on the go. It’s my passion project, really.

NM The one I’m most proud of is the famous Houdini water tank escape—I learned how to do it for a live show onstage. It involves getting in this big vat of water and having someone padlock me in and close the lid. And you can’t breathe—I got up to two minutes underwater! And that was always quite scary. M That sounds very scary.

NM You’re right in saying that these last three years I’ve been particularly fortunate, and I’m really grateful for that. But what’s been nice is that it’s taken a while to get to this point. I’ve managed to get a really nice group of friends around me, and my wife and I got married back in 2014, and now we’ve got a family, and we’re quite private, and very stable. And obviously Ted Lasso was a casting that happened to go my direction, but a lot of that is just luck. And particularly with Ted Lasso, I think we just all felt lucky 67

The Long Defeat Alan Paton’s Quest to Become an Instrument of God’s Peace By Bryan

Jarrell

n December of 1960, after three weeks of business in Europe, Alan Paton stepped off the plane in his homeland of South Africa. The famed author had gained global notoriety in 1948 with the publication of his novel Cry, the Beloved Country, and had used the proceeds from his book to fund his own anti-Apartheid activism. He was a key founder of the Liberal Party of South Africa, one of the only mixedrace political parties in a deeply segregated nation. Paton was also a well-known Anglican Christian, a faithful churchman, and a guiding voice for global Christians waking up to the racial implications of the gospel. Hopes were high that he could rally national and international voices against the

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Photograph by Norman Mauskopf from A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta, published by Twin Palms. Image courtesy Obscura Gallery.

entrenching power of Apartheid. But in December 1960, once he’d returned to South Africa, police confiscated his passport. His activism had not gone unnoticed. Grounded, the internationally renowned Paton would spend the next ten years confined in his home nation. By the end of the decade he would suffer harassment by secret police, the dissolution of the political party he helped build, the death of his wife, and a criminal accusation that jeopardized his whole life’s work. Paton’s hopes for his beloved South Africa, particularly his hope for peace between its black and white citizens, would be crushed by authoritarian whims. He would die in 1988, a mere six years before Apartheid finally suffered political defeat. What must it be like to devote one’s life to a goal and never see its fruition? Certainly it must be heartbreaking, even if the goal itself is full of virtue and value. Paton spent much of his career writing and speaking about “man’s inhumanity to man” and the need to love indiscriminately, as Jesus did. Late in life he wrote that for South Africa he wished to be—quoting the famous prayer attributed to St. Francis—an instrument of God’s peace. He believed firmly that love, specifically divine love, was the only way to navigate the complex post-colonial and racial realties of his time. Paton’s life shows that to be one of God’s instruments is a costly prospect, a mixed bag of victory and loss that often lacks the glory we would associate with religion. Paton may not be as well-known as other civil rights authors or politicians, but for Christians of any stripe or denomination who care about matters of race and matters of grace, his life and literature and successes and failures are a wellspring of sobering insight.

Although Paton was of English descent, he did not grow up in an Anglican context. His father was abusive and unkind, and held the family to the legalism and anti-Trinitarian doctrines of the Christadelphian sect. Thanks to kind mentors in his boarding school, Paton excelled academically and came to a broad church and evangelical faith in the context of a campus ministry. He developed a lifelong appreciation of the Bible and began to read it with regularity. After graduating, he taught at several regional boarding schools and joined his wife’s Anglican church, all the while hoping to secure a position in politics. Perhaps because he had spent most of his young adult life in a world of prep schools and academia, he would be known as a strict schoolmaster—slow to listen and quick to paddle, his church membership notwithstanding. In 1936, Paton was hired at 33 as the warden at Diepkloof, a borstal (a type of prison) for black boys outside of Johannesburg. It would be his first political appointment, his first significant cross-cultural experience with black South Africans, and his first significant exposure to systemic racism. What Paton discovered when he arrived at Diepkloof was a moral tragedy. The youth were malnourished, uneducated, sick, and loaned out to local farmers like slaves. They were packed into dirty cells and frequently tried to escape. Paton was appalled, noting that the institution seemed designed to maximize suffering instead of social rehabilitation. Over the next 14 years, Paton overhauled Diepkloof. Perpetual punishment was out; freedom (paired with responsibility) was in. His wards, whom he called “students,” were given proper food, clothing, and healthcare. They were suitably educated, taught trades, and if well behaved were permitted to visit 69

family on the weekends. Paton hired a number of black teachers, and released the white teachers who refused to work alongside their new colleagues. His students passed national standardized tests, and proudly marched in paramilitary formations around the camp to impress visiting dignitaries. The reforms were so successful that the barbed wire fencing enclosing the institution was torn down. The students weren’t running away anymore. It’s not wrong to say that Paton was a prison reformer ahead of his time, implementing successful reforms in the 1930s that still seem novel ninety years later. While overseeing the borstal, however, he realized that the problems facing his youth were much larger than poor discipline, education, and daily structure. The stern guidance of an English schoolmaster helped these boys, but it was not enough. He saw how the dissolution of tribal communities had broken down family support systems. White supremacy and economic racism kept black South Africans from the kind of good jobs that could have lowered the crime rate. True juvenile reform was impossible, he concluded, without greater social reforms. He could help the students under his care, but was it possible to imagine a South Africa that sent him fewer boys in need of care? While exploring these ideas, Paton was asked to serve on a special Bishop’s Committee with the Anglican Church in South Africa to address the church’s official stances on race and politics. He had been a regular attendee at his local Anglican church, serving as a churchwarden and on diocesan councils. For two years, Paton met with delegates weekly to study theology, politics, and the Bible, and to recommend policy stances for the church. Their conclusion was 70

scripturally sound but politically unpopular: white supremacy cannot be supported by any Christian church. In 1946, after World War II had concluded, Paton self-funded a trip around the world to visit other juvenile reformatories. He walked away unimpressed, and gratified to see that his work at Diepkloof was truly world-class. Long transcontinental train and boat rides gave him time to reflect on the political, racial, and spiritual realities he had witnessed at Diepkloof and studied with the Bishop’s commission. He began to compose a novel that integrated these themes. In San Francisco, as his world tour came to a close, Paton handed off a finished manuscript to eager American publishers. It came to be called Cry, the Beloved Country. A true masterpiece, the novel weaves together the story of two fathers whose sons are swept away in the colonial fissures of postwar South Africa. The first is a black father, the Anglican pastor of his small rural church, who is called into Johannesburg to rescue his sister and his son, who have slipped into dangerous and criminal lifestyles. The second is a white father, a wealthy businessman whose son has eschewed the family business and embraced a life of racial activism. When both sons are killed, the two fathers come together in mutual grief, realizing that the racism of their nation takes the lives of everyone’s children, black and white, oppressor and oppressed. Perhaps the death of these sons, mirroring the death of the Son of God, could bring together disparate peoples so that nobody else’s sons would have to die. Written in plain, elegant prose, Cry, the Beloved Country gave the world a glimpse at the beauty of South Africa alongside the tragedy of its systemic racism. It’s hard to overstate the impact of this nov-

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el, which in Paton’s lifetime would sell more than 15 million copies and be translated into 20 languages. Paton had managed to turn the world’s attention to the rising tide of white nationalism in South Africa. Fan letters poured in from across the world, as did offers for movie, musical, and stage rights. Even in 2022, the book remains required reading in many high school literature classes. Paton loathed nothing more than authoritarians— undoubtedly a reflection of his own abusive upbringing—and he was delighted that the book gave his nationalist political opponents a worldwide black eye. Few people in South Africa, however, would be moved by Paton’s novel. Three months after the book hit the American shelves in 1948, the Nationalist Party (NP) won the general elections and took control of South Africa’s parliament. The NP was an all-white Afrikaner party, run by descendants of Dutch and French colonials from the 1600s. The word “apartheid” is derived from the Afrikaner word for “separate,” an appropriate word to describe the ideology explicitly held by the party. Coming to control parliament for the first time, the NP began to implement a number of strict racial divides that kept white South Africans in political power and barred black South Africans from economic and political opportunities. In the same year that Cry was making waves across the world, Apartheid was officially established in South Africa.

Indeed, Paton saw the political tides turning. Once assured of his novel’s financial success, he resigned from his post at Diepkloof, unable to bear the thought of his beloved school being torn apart by politicians, and unwilling to stay around and watch it happen. Financially independent from the sales of his book, he looked for new ways to fight in the political arena. Informed by a Christian zeal and his years of penal reform, Paton joined with a number of his allies to form the Liberal Party of South Africa in 1953. Against the authoritarianism of the new government, the group argued for classic liberal ideas, like one-man, onevote and due process of law, regardless of skin color. It uniquely welcomed black and white members in its ranks and committed itself to nonviolent actions. The party rarely succeeded in elections: few members were 71

ever elected to national seats. But the political process gave the Liberal Party a platform to try and convince white South Africans to oppose the National Party. At a time when black South Africans were required to carry passbooks to enter white neighborhoods, the Liberal Party would hold desegregated rallies featuring black and white political voices sharing the same stage. That same year, Paton also finished his second novel, Too Late the Phalarope, which, like his first, was eagerly devoured and approved of by the literary critics of the world. Between his global notoriety and international fundraising efforts, Paton and his party were more like prophets than politicians, calling the nation to reform at a time it refused to do so. The politics of South Africa dramatically changed after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, when 69 black demonstrators were killed and hundreds wounded by white South African police. Across the nation enraged black protestors rioted in the streets and were met by violent retaliation from white police. Martial law was declared, major black political parties were deemed terrorist organizations, and a decade of violence began to take shape. Members of Paton’s Liberal Party were arrested and would find themselves imprisoned or on house arrest for years. The very week that the Sharpeville Massacre took place, Paton had premiered a musical about gang life and urbanization called Mkhumbane to an integrated audience in a public theater. And while the NP hadn’t targeted him yet due to his global notoriety, his passport would be confiscated by the end of the year. Over the next decade, Paton would find himself increasingly isolated. Politics had grown violent after Sharpeville, and many activists rejected the Liberal Party’s firm commitment (along with Paton’s faith-filled 72

commitment) to nonviolence. Not only was he considered an enemy by the white NP, but some black activists also began to condemn him for not supporting their call to violent resistance. Paton’s elderly mother, who had shunned him after he left the Christadelphian cult, needed extra care for her dementia, and came to live with him in 1965. Soon after her arrival, she died. Meanwhile, Paton’s wife had developed emphysema and was slowly losing her lungs to the disease. Theirs was a difficult marriage, one marked by sexual and vocational frustrations but also a dutiful love and a Christian spirit. Paton himself developed crippling migraines and hemorrhoids, symptoms of overwhelming stress. Police were stalking him daily, parking outside his house, trailing his car rides, recording his whereabouts, raiding his home for illicit material. At least twice, he went to start his car, only to find a bullet hole in the vehicle’s engine block or gas tank. Amidst all this, Paton wrote a small devotional book titled Instrument of Thy Peace. It included 21 short reflections on the famous Franciscan prayer, and spoke to his spirituality at the time. Though it would become Paton’s second bestselling book next to Cry, it is not a groundbreaking work of Christian devotion. Modern readers are likely to find the volume dated, moralistic, and uninspiring. The prayer in question includes a number of self-abnegations, which form the backbone for Paton’s reflections: “O Master, let me not seek as much to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love.” Reading the work now, and knowing the difficult season Paton was enduring at the time, one wonders if he could have been praying the opposite. It was a time when anyone would have needed consolation,

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understanding, and love. One senses in Paton a holy frustration, a deep anxiety over his Christian identity and his activism and writing—a fear that although he said his prayers, supported Christian organizations, and dutifully attended church, God wasn’t using him. Why wasn’t any of it working? Instrument arrived in 1968, which proved to be the darkest year of Paton’s life. His wife died from her emphysema after 40 years of marriage, leaving him tired and alone, as many of his friends and supporters were under house arrest and in jail. The NP passed a law forbidding mixed-race political parties, which shut down the Liberal Party after 15 years of toil. For a season, Paton sank into depression, drinking heavily and scaring his friends and neighbors with erratic behavior. His lowest moment came when a policeman found him unconscious and nearly dead in his car on the side of a road, while two figures ran off into the night escaping arrest. Eventually, those two figures were caught, a criminal and a prostitute, both black. They in turn accused Paton of soliciting the black woman for sex before a disagreement on the details brought them to blows. Paton was found innocent by the court, though many who knew him well, including his sons and his authorized biographer, believed he was not. Regardless, it was, for Paton, a nationwide front-page embarrassment. It was Paton’s second marriage, to his newly hired secretary in early 1969, that brought him out of his depressive tailspin. Then aged 65, his most active years were behind him. His political party was gone, but he continued to write for political magazines and compose poetry. In 1970 his passport was reissued, and he began to travel and speak across the world again. This time, however, the invitations to speak often came with honorifics—awards

and honorary degrees for the man who had turned the world’s attention to the beauties and tragedies of South Africa. At age 78, Paton penned his third and final novel, Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful, to reverent but mixed reviews. He died peacefully with family nearby at age 85 in 1988.

..... What, then, to make of this long and

varied life? In Paton we have the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. A penal reformer of the highest caliber, blessing the lives of thousands of young black men who otherwise would have been destined to suffer. A novelist of global fame, embroidering the passion of Christ into the fabric of South African Apartheid. A political figure, who longed to change the hearts and minds of his fellow countrymen, but never made the progress he envisioned. An instrument of God’s peace, albeit one whose moral character frequently missed the mark he so desperately wanted to hit. Peter Alexander writes in his exhaustive 1994 biography of Paton that his faith was the core conviction behind his public and private life. Christianity was “the linchpin of his existence… He was, in fact, a rich and strange mixture of sinner and saint, of simplicity and complexity, pride and humility. It was the constant lifelong struggle with himself that gave him the capacity to understand the weakness of others.” One of Paton’s contemporaries was The Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien, though there’s no evidence the two ever met. In Tolkien’s fantasy world, Galadriel, the radiant and immortal elven queen, describes her own lifelong battle, against the evil wizard Sauron. “Together through ages of the world we have 73

fought the long defeat,” she says, collapsing thousands of years of conflict and hardship into a single weighty sentence. True virtue, Tolkien suggests, is not defined by victory, but by holding fast to the good even when defeat seems inevitable. Success isn’t the final word for every hero, and it certainly wasn’t for Paton. Faithfulness to the good is laudable, but it is doubly so in the face of oblivion. “Fighting the long defeat” well describes the life of Alan Paton. Alongside all these other good works, Paton ghostwrote speeches for black leaders, funded Christian youth summer camp programs, and funneled global donations into South Africa to those facing political persecution. But he would not live to see the great victory of Apartheid’s downfall in 1994, when the NP finally lost its political hold on the nation. Nor would he see that his novel would still be recognized and loved 75 years after its publication. Still, such a literary victory serves to highlight the work yet to be done in the heart of man. Paton would have been content to know that he kept firm in his faith and his commitment to love. He would likely have appreciated the words St. Paul, in his old age, wrote to his protégé Timothy: “I have fought the good 74

fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Tim. 4:7). It is notable that in St. Paul’s sentiment, the race and the fight are completed, but neither are necessarily “won.” We might also reflect with curiosity on whether Paton’s activism did as much to spread his vision of love as his writing or his educational work. His time as warden at Diepkloof, of course, directly impacted the lives of thousands of young black boys. And his novels reached just about every corner of the globe. One wonders if there isn’t a lesson here for our own work in addressing the racial and colonial wounds in our context. The desire for political influence is intoxicating, surely, but it was a decade of selfless service and a great work of literature that ultimately became Paton’s greatest and most fulfilling successes. Still, in the year 2022, the Christian may wonder with legitimate frustration why the social ills of our time have not been solved. Why haven’t human hearts turned to love? Why haven’t our sincere efforts to change the world been met with heavenly blessing and ultimate victory? In Paton, we find that such frustrations are common for those instruments of God’s peace. What might it look like, then, to reframe our lives in the terms of “faithfulness to the good” instead of a completed todo list? Would it make a difference to our understanding of providence if we redefined success as fidelity? Paton’s life suggests that a desire to be an instrument is more effective than a desire to win. Somehow in the mix of an abusive father, a difficult first marriage, penal reform, literary stardom, and political disappointment, God’s work was accomplished in the life of Alan Paton. He would never be able to see exactly how, of course, but that was never his prayer, either. As long as he was useful, he could be at peace.

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Wheel of Fortune

A Timeline of Quotes about Luck

Fortune always will confer an aura Of worth, unworthily; and in this world The lucky person passes for a genius. ■ – Euripides, c. 429 BC

My child, there is not wealth enough in the whole world to satisfy gamblers. ■ – Somadeva, c. 1070

Beware good luck: fattening hogs think themselves fortunate. ■ – German proverb

Good luck must be followed by bad, bad in turn bow to good. Sorrow and joy throng the gate, weal and woe in the same land… Thus fortune and disaster entwine like the strands of a rope. Fate cannot be told of, for who shall know its ending? Water, troubled, runs wild; the arrow, quick-sped, flies far. All things, whirling and driving, compelling and pushing each other, roll on. The clouds rise up, the rains come down, in confusion inextricably joined. The Great Potter fashions all creatures, infinite, boundless, limit unknown. There is no reckoning heaven, nor divining beforehand the Dao. ■ – Jia Yi, from “The Owl,” c. 174 BC

Hanged, then, was Croesus, this tremendous king; His royal scepter was of no avail. Tragedy is no other kind of thing Nor tunes her song save only to bewail How Fortune, ever fickle, will assail With sudden stroke the kingdoms of the proud, And when men trust in her she then will fail And cover her bright face as with a cloud. ■ – Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, c. 1400 75

Don Quixote [said], “I would rather have a ration of bread or a large loaf and a couple of sardine heads than all the plants described by Dioscorides or commented on by Dr. Laguna. But be that as it may, mount your donkey, my good Sancho, and follow me, for God, who provides all things, will not fail us, especially since we are so much in his service, when he does not fail the gnats in the air, or the grubs in the earth, or the tadpoles in the water; he is so merciful that he makes his sun to shine on the good and the evil and his rain to fall on the unjust and the just.” “Your grace would do better,” said Sancho, “as a preacher than as a knight errant.” ■ – Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1605

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steer'd. ■ – Shakespeare, Cymbeline, c. 1610

The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular. ■ – Edward Gibbon, c. 1794

Alas, the door of fortune does not open inward so that one can force it by charging at it; it opens outward and so there is nothing one can do.

In order to enter into a real knowledge of your condition, consider it in this image: a man was cast by a tempest onto an unknown island, the inhabitants of which were in trouble to find their king, who was lost. Having a strong resemblance both in form and face to this king, he was taken for him, and acknowledged in this capacity by all the people. At first he knew not what course to take, but finally he resolved to give himself up to his good fortune. He received all the homage that they chose to render him, and suffered himself to be treated as a king. […] Do not imagine that it is less an accident by which you find yourself master of the wealth that you possess than that by which this man found himself king. You have no right to it of yourself and by your own nature any more than he… it is only this concurrence of chance that caused your birth with the caprice of laws favorable in your behalf that puts you in possession of all this property. […] What would you say of that man who was made king by the error of the people, if he had so far forgotten his natural condition as to imagine that this kingdom was due to him, that he deserved it, and that it belonged to him of right? You would marvel at his stupidity and folly. But is there less in the people of rank who live in so strange a forgetfulness of their natural condition? ■ – Blaise Pascal, from Discourses on the Condition of the Great, 1670

■ – Søren Kierkegaard, 1843 76

T H E MTOHCEKM I NOGCBKI IRNDG B I R D

Win in the lottery, and behold! you are a clever man. ■ – Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, 1862

Can one even as much as touch a gaming table without becoming immediately infected with superstition? ■ – Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The Gambler,” 1866

[T]he angel of luck slapped his palms together and moaned, “Oh, what hard luck! I made a terrible mistake when I agreed to be the angel of luck. Where is the angel of mercy? He should see and hear firsthand how I’ve spent my entire life trying to help these people, but I’ve never succeeded, and neither will I ever succeed, in pleasing them.”

I sometimes think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not the bad luck of the early worm. ■ – FDR, 1919

Cruel blows of fate call for extreme kindness in the family circle. ■ – Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle, 1948

■ – Ulfat al-Idilbi, “Hard Luck,” 1954

You ought to be thankful, a whole heaping lot, for the places and people you’re lucky you’re not. ■ – Dr. Seuss, Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?, 1973

You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocket ship underpants don’t help. ■ – Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes, 1995

Luck was a joke. Even good luck was just bad luck with its hair combed. ■ – Stephen King, “Lucky Quarter,” 1995

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from. ■ – Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men, 2005

The Confessional Dear God, I’ve heard it said that karma’s a bitch. And from my personal experience I know this to be true. After all, there must be a reason why I just got the worst haircut of my life mere hours before I’m supposed to go on my first-ever date. And then there was that time recently when I was craving McDonald’s for breakfast but I took so long getting my butt out of bed that I arrived at the drive thru at 10:32 to find the menu displaying Big Macs instead of my precious sausage McMuffin. All this is happening because I lied on my resume, right Lord? Okay, maybe I lied twice on my resume. The truth is that I am not a master at Excel, nor do I have good time management skills. I use Excel like it’s graph paper and don’t know the first thing about cells or formulas. On top of it all, I did not get the job I applied for. They emailed me back with the generic, “Thank you for your application, but we are looking for someone with more experience.” It has to be the karma—right, Lord? Because aside from that, I am indeed a person perfectly positioned to succeed, or at least that is what my self-help books say. I need an explanation for why some things don’t go my way and others do. And if karma isn’t the reason, then Jesus, it would seem as if I have no control over anything that happens to me, and that doesn’t seem fair at all. So, Lord, I’ve decided that from now on I’m only welcoming good karma and feng shui into my life. From now on I’m going to be a good person. I won’t lie on my resume again, I promise. But next time I might also delete that one job I had for only four months because I know that doesn’t look good for me. Omission isn’t quite the same thing as lying, is it? Maybe I can work on my

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time management, too. Tomorrow I’ll shoot to arrive at the drivethru right at 10:30, not a minute after, and if their menu happens to have changed already, I’ll simply remind the workers that I made it on time, that the customer is always right, and that I just want my gosh darn $2.29 McMuffin. Good news, Lord! I just received another email. It said, “Due to an unusually small pool of applicants we would like to give you a second interview. Please disregard our previous email.” Did you see that? I got a second interview all thanks to the good karma that I manifested. I couldn’t have done it without my promise to you, God, to be a better person. I guess this bodes well for my date tonight. Not sure what we are going to talk about, but at least I won’t have to tell him that my job application was rejected outright. On the other hand, Lord, I still have to deal with these wretched tendrils of hair across my forehead, which the internet calls bangs. This is going to take a lot of bobby pins, hairspray, and probably some tears. Either that or I’ll be forced to wear a hat for three months straight. Christ, have mercy.

This Failure Isn’t Half Bad

By Karen

Stiller

The Dining Room Table as a Metaphor for Work

n a recent winter day in Quebec, my friend, who was hosting us that night, purchased a raspberry pie, and forgot to bake it. The remains of our delicately herbed, perfectly cooked chicken dinner had just been swept away into our host’s gorgeous kitchen when she brought out four wedges of pie. The slices were as pale as the moon and the white dessert plates she had set them on. “Is this a special French pastry?” my husband asked. “Yes,” she answered, “I suppose. I bought it at a French bakery.” We ate a bite or two of the exotic dessert (soft, thicker than one would expect, not flaky) with tart, room-temperature raspberry filling. “Does it taste a little doughy?” our hostess asked. Whether it made me a good friend or bad would be for her to say, but I decided to give this excellent and experienced cook the truth. “I’m pretty sure it is dough,” I admitted. Astonished, she said, “I didn’t bake the pie! Why didn’t they tell me to bake the pie?” That was a question for the pâtisserie, and certainly not for anyone at the dinner table, especially not her now-chuckling husband. I can report that while unbaked pie is

unusual, it is not horrible. In solidarity with my friend, I ate every last bite. I sensed she was not as accustomed as I to these particular kinds of failures. She’s a skilled hostess, with art on the walls she painted herself. She dresses in linen tunics and lovely, dangly earrings. She follows recipes printed on glossy pages free of large, mustardy splotches and oily stains, from hardcover cookbooks that look perfect on a coffee table. This is not a kitchen where mishaps abound. I grew even closer to my friend that night, thanks to that pie. Our kinship grew not because of all that went right, but because of that one thing that went wrong. Anybody, after all, can stick a pie in an oven for 40 minutes. To serve it raw is a singular event. We will never talk about the fully cooked chicken. But we will laugh about the pie.

..... Fifteen months after my book was

published, and 28 years after my husband Brent graduated from Regent College, we visited the college bookstore for only the second time since we had moved away from Vancouver. While Brent had studied there, I had worked in the admissions department. On my breaks, I would wander the bookstore as booklovers do, noses twitching, tails wagging.

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“Do you think your book will be there?” Brent asked me. “I’m not going to look for it,” I answered, bee-lining my way through the atrium. “If it is, it is. If it’s not, it’s not. I’m not getting caught up in that.” By then I had weaned myself off checking Amazon rankings so often, and had forgiven Margaret, who seemed like a nice lady, for her three-star rating on Goodreads. I had worked hard—with Margo my spiritual director, my husband, and the penultimate chapter of Bird by Bird where Anne Lamott brilliantly unpacks the inevitable letdowns of publication—to reach this point of maturity and emotional equilibrium. But when Brent said “It’s here!”, I felt as if gorgeous fireworks had exploded in my Untitled, Rome series, 2010, archival ink print, by Laura Letinsky © the artist. Courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery and Document Gallery.

mind. My body warmed. My heart melted. Tears welled. There were four copies, right there on the shelf in front of me, yes, a little dusty on the top, but no matter. They were in Spirituality, nestled between A Man in Christ by James S. Stewart on one side and the beautiful Birthing Hope by Rachel Marie Stone on the other. “Let’s get a picture,” my husband said, and so we did. I shared with the salesclerk that I was the author, just in case she wanted to know. As I floated onto the #99 bus for our ride back to West Broadway, I said, “I’m so touched. This might be the high point for me of this whole book thing.” It was a 20-minute ride or so back to the Holiday Inn, through light drizzle and heavy 81

construction. Low clouds covered the high mountains that I knew were still out there somewhere, their peaks well hidden. I wonder how long those books have sat there? They will probably sit there forever. They are just being kind to stock them. They are only doing me a favor. What is wrong with me? I climbed off the bus, ready for a sadnap. “I need to get off this emotional rollercoaster,” I announced to Brent, for the one hundredth time.

..... In Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue

Through Our Words, authors Richard Hughes Gibson and James E. Beitler III urge writers (and this goes for anyone) to “acknowledge our work as a gift from God and give it back to him as an offering, letting it go in the hope that it might be used for his glory.” The work after our work is to cut ourselves off from caring so deeply about its success or failure. This alone can be as challenging as actually building the table, hatching the plan, or writing the song. But it’s a relief to remember that our creative endeavors come from God and are, in the end, for God. “Enjoy getting there, versus what you think the end is going to give you. Thinking in that way is not so goal-orientated, or outcome orientated,” suggests Scott Erickson, artist and author of Say Yes: Discover the Surprising Life Beyond the Death of a Dream. I spoke with Scott, for a podcast I host, just a few weeks after his latest book was released. “I am in the post-book release lows,” he admitted. “When you release a book, you get really sad on the other side of it. It’s a weird thing, that finally this thing is over, but there’s a low on the other side. Maybe 82

other authors who are really successful feel different. But for most of us, you hope your stuff will go everywhere, and it has its humble participation. But it’s never going to be what you hope it is.” Even if we experience some level of success—if one or two of our hopes do come true—it’s likely that we will rain on our own parade through over-examination and second-guessing on the #99 bus. Our disappointments, though, can almost always be counted on for some kind of wisdom. They are mirrors. They are moments that we do not ask for, and would like to return with a “no thanks” card, but do offer a particular gift. Our failures provide us an opportunity to see how tightly we might have clung to the wrong thing: which was success, or our preferred outcome, which we cannot control, instead of the process, which we can. We can see how rigid our white-knuckled grip was on the way we thought things would and should be. We can see also how tender we still are, and maybe a little needy. Failure is an invitation to trust and risk again, and another opportunity to decide to keep working. Failure is mirror first, then window, to help us look ahead to what comes next. What is out there waiting for us now? “I sit at my desk,” writes Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, “and I work like a farmer, and that’s how it gets done,” which is the best writing advice since Anne Lamott told us all to just put our butts in the chair. The work behind the work is to keep going, no matter the outcome: failure, success, or that blech feeling when we realize that success, if it’s found, is not as fantastic as we thought it would be, and that it flies away so quickly, like a bird. Gilbert also writes about the skittishness of success: “You might be offered rewards

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on a silver platter, even as a rug is simultaneously being pulled out from under you.”

..... I have decided to think of

my writing as my dining room table. With all the leaves in, our table can seat 14 or so, if we really cram in around it. It’s nicked and worn, and some of the chair backs are loose from friends leaning back too heavily. It’s okay. Please, go ahead. Make yourself comfortable. Have some pie warm from the oven, or even if it’s not. Seeing my writing as the dining room table, weirdly, is a metaphor that helps me navigate my way between the heady fireworks of success and the afternoon rain of what I might otherwise think of as failure. A table is a place for people to gather round and talk. There is laughter and sharing, or maybe sadness and pinot grigio; or just big pitchers of cool water at either end for the thirsty. You can’t always control how the evening turns out, or even who will show, but you can set the table and open wide the front door. You can ask questions, listen, and see all that is in common between your shared stories. The table is a place for exploration and conversation, and for growing closer to new and old friends. Table is not dependent on the polarities of success and failure, winning and losing, but it is deeply valuable for the experience it

offers, for its process. When we stay seated, we learn something new, always, no matter what happens in the end. That’s why the table, as a metaphor for work, works for me. Failure is dangerous only when success is our sole objective. In our tender hearts, we know this. We learned this lesson first in grade three gym class, in some horrible race we lost. We started out crouched and staring at our socks, our front knee in front of us and both hands right on top of the starting line in the runner’s starting position, like Mrs. Purdy showed us. When we sprang up, our legs felt like they would propel us right up and off the ground. Our arms pumped and so did our hearts. But we didn’t win. At least not that time. But we were a little bit glorious anyway.

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“Blue Prayer,” 2021, acrylic on canvas, by Claire Milbrath. Courtesy the artist and de boer, Los Angeles, CA. Photo: Jacob Phillip.

Scarlet Letter Secrets

By Grace

Leuenberger

The Good News about Bad Words

ow!” (They pause.) “Now, what do you think you’ll do with that?” Are you familiar with this interaction? If so, you might have majored in one of the following areas of study during college:

And study I did. From poetry to public speaking, communication theory to creative writing, I became a student of words. I learned how language could inspire or indoctrinate, assuage or anger, connect or confuse. I learned how to craft sentences like the one you just read and why alliterations are so alluring. Finally, I learned a very important lesson: Words are the secret to success. Nowhere was this secret more obvious than in the Career Services office of my alma mater. As a student worker, I had an up-close view: a slight change in adjectives on a resume, a liberally edited cover letter, or an interview sprinkled with a few strategically chosen anecdotes could mean the difference between someone getting the job and someone crying in the corner office to one of the career counselors because they didn’t get the job. Words are the secret to success. Once I entered the professional world myself, a whole other lexicon emerged that set apart the professionally proficient from the professionally prolific. Being able to cor-

‘‘W a. b. c. d.

English History Philosophy Communications

I had the privilege of studying two of the above: English and Communications. Well, to be specific, the latter was “Communication Studies,” the academy’s rebranded name for a discipline that no one outside of Communication Studies majors took seriously, which is why we added the word “studies” to the end of it. 85

rectly integrate buzzwords that were blessed by the business gods was a sure way to secure a “quick win” and to “level up.” Sure, the actual work mattered, but the way to increase your “value proposition” was to adopt the language of LinkedIn. Words are the secret to success. The importance of choosing the right words even applies to romance and dating. If you Google “words to avoid in your dating profile,” lists like “32 Red Flag Phrases” or “15 Annoying Words to Avoid on Dating Apps” or even “20 Sentences to Make Yourself Sound More Charming” act as the Dictionary for Dating. Use the right words and you’ll have a better chance of meeting that special someone; use the wrong words and you’ll end up dying alone. Or so the articles tell me. Words are the secret to success. Whether we are using our words to get hired, promoted, or swiped-right-on, the words we choose undeniably matter. Even some of the most ancient words preserved by our culture clearly state that our use of language is of great consequence. “The getting of treasures by a lying tongue is a fleeting vapor and a snare of death,” reads Proverbs 21:6. “How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire!” says James 3:5. Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of Matthew 12 hammers the point home: “Words are powerful; take them seriously. Words can be your salvation. Words can also be your damnation.” Words are the secret to success. Choosing the “right” words might be the secret to our successes, but we cannot forget that words have another secret: they can also be wielded as weapons. And much more covertly, too. Even the Psalmist warns: “My companion attacks his friends; he violates his covenant. His talk is smooth as butter, yet war is in his heart; his words are more 86

soothing than oil, yet they are drawn swords” (Psalm 55:20-21). The “right” words might get us the job, impressing the recruiter with our use of beloved business buzzwords. But those same words can also conceal our debilitating depression until we finally have a breakdown. The “right” words can charm the guy, winning his affection with clever jokes and quick turns of phrase. But those same words can also keep us from the vulnerable confessions required to deepen our relationships. The “right” words can keep the wrong people in power. But those same words can burn good things to the ground. The “right” words can convince us, as they do Eve in Genesis 3, that “You will not certainly die”—even as those same sly words follow us to our graves. Perhaps you felt like going to your grave while reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (a book I was assigned not once, not twice, but three times throughout my education), but the novel is an indelible testament to the weight of our words. Arthur Dimmesdale is introduced as an authoritative, well-respected reverend—a man who spends his life preaching the word of God. But Dimmesdale uses Scripture not only to bring salvation to others, but also to save himself from the suspicious eyes of the public. Dimmesdale’s words are the secret to his professional success and his personal damnation. For seven years, Dimmesdale’s puritanical predications and clerical clothing hide the secret of his affair and the child it produced. Conversely, Hester Prynne, the woman Dimmesdale had the affair with, famously wears her secret on the front of her frock for all to see, emblazoned in red. After years of hiding his side of the secret, Dimmesdale confesses

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to Hester one night under the cover of darkness: “I should long ago have thrown off these garments of mock holiness, and have shown myself to mankind as they will see me at the judgment-seat. Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet letter openly upon your bosom! Mine burns in secret! Thou little knowest what a relief it is, after the torment of a seven years’ cheat, to look into an eye that recognizes me for what I am!” Maybe you missed this part of The Scarlet Letter because your A.P. English experience was sponsored by SparkNotes. Personally, I missed the punch of this passage because I thought The Scarlet Letter seemed outdated and unrelatable. Years later, however, The Scarlet Letter sadly no longer feels like a work of fiction written two hundred years ago about people two hundred years before that. All it took was seeing The Tweet(s), or reading The Article(s), or listening to The Podcast(s). It seems like every week a new closet door of the church is being thrown open to reveal skeletons, garments of mock holiness, and spools of scarlet thread. We all take our places outside the door: the bystander who silently takes in the spectacle; the judge who says they saw it coming; the seven years’ cheat confessing his own sins; the woman in scarlet who finds it all to be too little, too late; the person who throws gasoline on the fire; the one who tries to put it out with a spray

bottle. No one walks away without burns. Like Arthur Dimmesdale, we have all used language—even of religion—to boost our image before others. Or like Hester Prynne, we have been burned by the words other people have called us, even people we thought were our friends. Each of us has felt the fear of the judgment-seat and known the torment that comes from living a lie. We all know what it feels like to be Adam as we find him in Genesis 3: “I heard you coming and didn’t want you to see me naked. So I hid.” Many of us have spent our lives learning how to hide behind the right words—our own garments of mock holiness—as we seek to 87

ensure our success and hide our secrets. But as easy as it is to disdain Arthur Dimmesdale, he gets one thing right: there is a relief that comes when we look into eyes that recognize us for who we are, even when we’re still hiding from them. During his trial and crucifixion, Jesus’ words are not really the “right” ones at all, given the situation. In fact, the account in Matthew 27, when Jesus appears before Pilate, says that he doesn’t say anything to his accusers: Then Pilate asked him, “Don’t you hear the testimony they are bringing against you?” But Jesus made no reply, not even to a single charge—to the great amazement of the governor. Christ does not speak again in Matthew’s account until he is nearing his death, crying out, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” or “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus’ words in this moment are not easy to take in; they show Christ in his full humanity as they also show the gravity of our humanity. In Luke, he looks to his right and to his left and recognizes us for who we are. “Father, forgive them,” he says, “for they do not know what they are doing.” And so we return to the question we began with: “Now, what do you think you’ll do with that?” This is the question all of us will spend our lives trying to answer. What do we do with the Bible’s words, with Jesus’ words? I have an idea, one that is rather challenging for me, a woman of many words. We listen.

We listen to the words of the One whom society has dismissed and cast aside. We listen to words that call out our hypocrisies. We listen to words that challenge us at church, at home, at work, and in love. We listen even to the words that we don’t feel are for us, because those truths can heal our burns and mend our wounds. The Word says we are beloved. The Word calls us his children. The Word declares us a new creation. Through Christ, God’s words of grace and mercy are words for all of us. They’re for the writer who wields words like weapons, sometimes against others, but mostly against herself. For the teacher who assigned you The Scarlet Letter and the relative who mocked your English/History/Philosophy/Communications major. For the three-times denier who hides his face. For the success addict, the straight-A academic, the shadow dweller, the truth teller. For you—the one who is forgiven and called by a new name. I have spent many hours of my life reading stories, but there is one story I keep coming back to. And no (thanks be to God), it was not written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. But it is a story of scarlet sin made as white as snow—a story for spectacular sinners and seven years’ cheats: for you and for me. It’s a story that offers ancient words of hope in our heartache and promises relief for our grief. You don’t need an English degree to interpret it, a Communications degree to tell it, or an alluring alliteration to accentuate it. The Good News is for all people.

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Grace Leuenberger Kent, Ohio Email I Use for Coupons • LinkedIn Profile I Feel Obligated to Keep Phone that I won’t answer if you call because I don’t recognize your number:(---) --- ---@Twitter Where I Retweet Memes

Objective With 28 years of experience, I would bring a hopeful attitude to the role of Well-Adjusted Adult. I look forward to the possibilities of this position (vocational clarity, increased wisdom, children to care for me as I age, etc.) and enthusiastically present my qualifications below. Education Kids of the Kingdom and First Nursery Preschool | Ages 3-5 | 1997-1999 • Exhibited proficiency for snack consumption and singing songs about Jesus. • Introduced to the concepts of sharing and caring; adopted these practices when they served my purposes. Sheridan, Luther Low, and Oakview Elementary Schools | Grades K-6 | 1999 to 2006 • Demonstrated propensity for growth (~20 inches in 6 years), an uncontrollable genetic trait I once resented but have come to accept as it allows me to reach all manner of shelves, luggage compartments, etc. • Developed a sense of humor, endearing me to peers, elders, and older brothers whose favor I wanted to earn, a skill I still employ for deflection and protection in vulnerable and/or tense situations. Mercer Area Junior/Senior High School | Grades 7-12 | 2006 to 2012 • Survived high-stakes situations including but not limited to: 8th-grade Spanish “Fiesta Days”; co-ed gym class dodgeball tournaments; Junior Prom; and marching band away game bus rides. • Displayed aptitude for writing, exhibiting an enduring ability to exceed assigned word count across a variety of mediums including essays, emails, text messages, Instagram captions, and tweets. • Established honest line of communication with parental unit, persevered by God’s mercy through learner’s permit hours, summer SAT prep class, and a variety of existential crises. Grove City College | B.A. in Communication Studies | 2012 to 2016 • Passed required pre-calculus, statistics, and chemistry classes without succumbing to despair. • Expanded knowledge of how little knowledge I actually possess. • Experienced crippling weight of self-imposed expectations, which threatened to rob me of all joy. • Observed a mysterious freedom exhibited by certain adults who spoke of things like “grace,” “mercy,” and the merits of “just chilling the heck out a bit.” • Uncovered new relational perks deriving from the opportunity to love others and be loved just as I am. Continued ➙

Experience Home of Family Whose Last Name I’ve Forgotten | Mason’s Babysitter | Summer of 2010 • Confirmed that children are hard to take care of and screen time is God’s grace. • Overhauled strategic plan to not marry by age 22 or procreate by age 23. • Enhanced the practice of gratitude towards parental unit who raised four children to become Well-Adjusted Adults* *Child #4 pending review.

Places I’ve Done the Jobs I’ve Had After College | Young Professional | May 2016 to Present • Exceeded expectations for how quickly parental unit would be contacted regarding vocational errors, streamlining the tearful process from a two-month turnaround to an efficient two days. • Survived resigning from three jobs, discovering that the discernment of Career Stuff ™ is Pretty Freaking Hard™. • Verified that many Well-Adjusted Adults are also insecure and need encouragement too. Everywhere Else That I Didn’t Work | Young Adult, Less Professional | May 2016 to Present • Navigated a series of disconcerting events such as the 2016 Presidential Election, the death of childhood dog, the move to a city with no friends, the raising of a puppy, the acquisition of health insurance, the 2020 Presidential Election, the novel ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and the series finale of The Good Place. • Completed one (1) marathon* (*vomited and cried on finish line volunteer). • Partnered with older and wiser mentors to learn something from ancient text called “The Bible.” • Collaborated with family, friends, and the Holy Spirit on quest to live The Good Life. Awards and Honors 1st place, Distance Softball Toss • Field Day, 2005 • Oakview Elementary School Named “Best Dog Mom” five years running • 2016-2021 • Tess Leuenberger, Golden Retriever Internally Awarded Gold Star for Entering Target and Resisting Impulse Buys • January 4, 2022 • Kent-Stow Target Skills Submitting taxes without being imprisoned ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Recalling mom’s phone number from memory ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Knowing which lightbulb to buy ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Baking cookies ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Saying “I love you” to people I love without cringing ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Summary With all this life experience, it seems clear that whatever I have accomplished, acquired, demonstrated, developed, experienced, established, gained, and gleaned is because of the love of others who have gone behind me and before me and that I am ready as I will ever be to step into the position of Well-Adjusted Adult. As relevant parties consider me for this role, I remain hopeful for the future, where all manner of things shall be made well-adjusted.

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Had it not been spring! By Stephen

Sexton

The moral of the story I don’t know, but in the end the fifty sovereigns were safe in the magpie’s nest, and the farmer wasn’t murdered by the soldiers. God in the spit and tinsel of the nest, or the secular magic of coincidence— something kept the hundred-eyed regiment staring in its legacy of footprints. Yes and yes—more than nature loves the meek, nature loves their stories. The king’s army killed and was killed, the farmer is long in his paradise. And since its whole bright sprawl is gold: parking meters, kerbstones, sewer grates, the spell of it is broken by abundance. Heaven’s gold is thoughtfuls of earth. Remember mutable textures of dream, the first glimpse of the gates, refugees stripped, keening widows scraping soldiers’ boots for dirt where beyond prayer they pray something grows?

DNF

By Ali

Kjergaard

The Cross and the Finish Line

came to with a blur of faces standing over me. “Let me finish,” I mumbled. “Please, please let me finish.” I tried to get up from the stretcher but was gently pushed back down. “We need to make sure you’re okay first,” someone told me. “We need a doctor to clear you.” I nodded and lay back down. I told myself that I would be fine, that I just needed to start running again. A man who I assumed was the doctor came over to my stretcher. He looked me over. He asked the nurses, “She threw up?” “Yeah.” “Temperature?” “103.” “Absolutely not. She’s not going back out there.” “Honey, we can’t let you finish the race today, okay? We’re sending you to the hospital.” At this I started crying, hard. “Please let me finish,” I begged. “I have to finish—I have to.” “Honey, you’re pretty sick. You can’t go back and run right now.” By that point I knew I wasn’t being entirely rational, so I laid my head back down, feeling

the uncomfortable warmth of the tears on my face. So into an ambulance, away from the course, to the hospital—not the finish line I had hoped for. People talk about a runner’s high, and there is nothing quite like finishing a marathon. In spite of crippling soreness for days afterwards, you feel like you can do anything. I’d been training for this—my third marathon—since June, and now that it was October, I was eager for that “finish line feeling.” But this particular race had not started well. It began in a downpour, we runners wading through a flooded road for a mile to the start line. By the time I started running, my clothes and shoes were already soaked through, and each step made an unpleasant squishing noise. This wasn’t going to be a fun 26.2. At mile six I had to stop on the side of the road to unload the contents of my stomach. Whatever fuel I had consumed was gone. I told myself I’d be fine. Plenty of people get sick during a race, and at least now, I thought, I was lighter. I ran back onto the road in the pouring rain, thinking about how, at the finish line, I’d proudly reveal that I’d dealt with this mishap and had been able to finish even so. That thought was the only fuel I thought I needed.

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At mile ten I drank some water, telling myself I was only dizzy because I needed to rehydrate. At the station they were handing out orange slices, and I felt nauseous just looking at them. For the first time that day I felt I might not actually be able to finish. I quickly waved the thought away, muttering, “Mind over matter. I can push through this. I’m tougher than this.” By mile thirteen, the rain had slowed to a dull trickle, and the sun brought the temperature to a humid, suffocating 82 degrees. I felt horrible. The wet clothes clung heavily to my skin. I looked down and realized I was sloshing through a puddle higher than my ankles. My fellow runners had all swerved to avoid it, and I hadn’t even “Sinking Through,” 2019, acrylic on canvas, by Erin Armstrong © the artist. Courtesy of Bau-Xi Gallery.

noticed. I waded onward, though it felt more like a stagger than a jog. At mile sixteen someone was rolling me over on my back from where I had fallen. I tried to sit up but couldn’t. My face felt like it had caught on fire; whether from the heat, embarrassment, or fever, I wasn’t sure. “Get her some water,” someone said. I drank, then coughed it up. All I wanted was to finish the race. My pride didn’t care about the fever or dizziness. I didn’t want to fail at what I had set out to do. All that mattered was that I prove myself and finish the race. But a growing ache on my side reminded me that I had fallen hard on the cement, that something in me had broken down, that I had collapsed. 93

My little crew of friends met me at the hospital, one of them offering a carton of goldfish crackers, but I didn’t want to eat. I was given fluids, my fever went down, and the hospital sent me home. The triumphant brunch my friends had planned was graciously canceled. In the end, I quietly returned to the house, no big triumph, no medal around my neck, just me knowing that I now had a “DNF” (“Did Not Finish”) next to my name on the online roster.

..... The morning after felt like waking from

a nightmare, only to realize it had all happened. There were bruises and scrapes from my fall, and even after I healed physically it would take me far longer to mentally process the pain of my disappointment and failure. It was no secret that I’d been training. On social media I’d proudly announce to the whole world whenever I completed 20-plus mile runs, which made the admission of the collapse that much more humbling. People’s reactions were nothing but kind. The fact that I had trained at all, they’d say, was an accomplishment in and of itself. But no one trains for months, slogs through long August runs, without hoping to reach the finish line, and in that I’d fallen short of the mark. Life went on. As it turned out, the world didn’t hold a grudge against my failure the way I did. On the surface I made light of it, even laughing about it at times. But I looked at the pullover I had received for signing up for the race and shoved it to the bottom of the drawer. You didn’t earn it, I thought. You don’t get to wear it. You failed. I was on the phone with a friend, walking her through the details of the race, when I said, “So, yup, I didn’t finish.” 94

“It’s interesting,” she pointed out, “that you keep using that phrase, and that Christ’s final words on the cross were ‘it is finished.’ Maybe He finished so you didn’t have to?” Awkward laugh. “Yeah, maybe,” I said. At the time I thought, “What on earth does the cross have to do with this?” But in hindsight I can see that this race had a lot to do with my sense of self-worth, and that my sense of selfworth had a lot to do with Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. She had a good point after all. Still, I wanted to be the one to finish. I wanted the recognition. I wanted to be strong enough, tough enough, resilient enough. But the truth was, my own strength, toughness, and resilience were not enough—I wasn’t enough—and my pride was still grappling against that fact. It’s in Daniel 5 where the Babylonian King Belshazzar is told he has “been found wanting.” He is sitting at a banquet of glory and splendor—much how I had imagined my post-race brunch would be—when writing literally appears on the wall. Daniel is called in to interpret the writing and tells the king he has not humbled himself and has set himself up against the Lord of Heaven. The writing signifies an end to his reign; it signifies that he has been weighed on scales and is found wanting. In the chapter just before, Nebuchadnezzar is similarly humbled. In his arrogance and pride, he becomes like a beast of the field, “eating grass like cattle.” But when he is restored to his right mind, Nebuchadnezzar praises God, professing that “all [God’s] ways are just, and those who walk in pride he is able to humble.” Praising God after an experience like that…that’s something that only God can bring about. The day after my race, I was not thinking about getting on my knees and thanking God for humbling me.

THE MOCKINGBIRD

When you’re doggedly pursuing the wrong thing, have you ever noticed how painful it is to give it up? Acknowledging your shortcomings feels a lot more like a surrender than a victory, because it is. But it’s not a surrender to a God eager to laugh and pounce on your failings; it’s to a God who wants to build you up again, only, this time, to be more like him. He will stoop to meet us where we’ve fallen, but will not leave us there. I believe that race was God asking me to lay down my pride and run toward him. And running toward Him felt a lot like turning around and backtracking down a road I’d come so far already. It felt like God had suddenly pried my hands off an idol. I had been clenching it so tightly that I hadn’t realized I was hurting myself in the process. I pushed and pushed until all that could have stopped me was the collapse of my body. Like Nebuchadnezzar, I was brought low, my body “drenched with the dew of heaven.” For months I had been measuring myself by my ability to finish the race. Oh, how often do we measure ourselves by these human scales? We place our value in all sorts of things—our relationships, our productivity, our salaries—and when we fall short in these areas we are left devastated. We’re found wanting on our self-made scales. But God’s scales are different from ours. They are completely upside-down. The first are last, the last are first. After the marathon, the pressure that I had put on myself was released, my pride replaced with meekness. The race was a worldly failure that did me a world of spiritual good, even though it hurt. The life of the Christian is primarily marked not by triumph but failure. The humbling truth is that we fall short all the time. Recognizing that is kind of the first step; the second is knowing that our success is going to

look far different than how we’re imagining it. I saw a race, another medal to hang alongside the others, another #humblebrag to post online—but God saw a moment to refine and mold me. It’s not through medals and glory that He does His best work, but through humbling moments of collapse. This is most powerfully illustrated in the turning point of the Christian story, when God comes to commune with us, not through triumph and glory but through His death on a cross. His death reminds us that those of us who do not finish have one who finishes in our place. I’m back to running again, but there is a lightness to it now. The pressure to perform may return occasionally, but I see a lot more grace in each run—there is something steadier than my own frail human strength, and I am learning to lean on it. Whatever races I may run in the future, I know that my value doesn’t rest at the finish line. I know that the race has been run. I know that it is finished. 95

By Todd

What Truly Matters

D. Still

The Apostle Paul as Paradox and Paradigm

hile it is not unusual for people to speak openly of their successes and even their failures, it is rather rare for people to denigrate their successes and to celebrate their failures. Be that as it may, the Apostle Paul, who was also known as Saul of Tarsus, had a penchant for doing precisely that. In his instructions to the Philippians— with whom Paul had a special, reciprocal relationship—he maintains that Christfollowers are to boast in the Lord and to put no confidence in the flesh. They are, in a word, to live in dependence upon the Spirit (Philippians 3:3). That said, Paul contends that if anyone else had reason to be confident in their pedigree, performance, and progress according to “the flesh,” he himself could make an even stronger case (3:4). Then, in the next two verses, Paul “puts his money where his mouth is.” Truth be told, from an ancient Jewish perspective, he was something of a muckety-muck. His ascribed status markers were four: 1. circumcised on the eighth day (per Jewish regulations); 2. from the people of Israel (i.e., not a proselyte); 3. from the tribe of Benjamin (as was his namesake King Saul); and 4. a Hebrew

of Hebrews (who could communicate in Aramaic). Adding additional luster, he was a Pharisee who zealously persecuted Christfollowers and who observed the law with righteous, faultless fastidiousness. The picture Paul paints of himself to the Philippians is congruent with the selfportrait he offers the Galatians: He was on a meteoric rise in Judaism, leaving his contemporaries in the dust as he eagerly— and successfully—pursued his ancestral traditions and customs (Galatians 1:14). But after his encounter with the Risen Jesus en route to Damascus, Paul would come to view many of his previous commitments, and much of his previous conduct, as misguided, however earnest he may have been (see esp. 1 Corinthians 15:9; Galatians 1:23; 1 Timothy 1:13-14). Paul’s conversion led him to reevaluate all of his previous metrics. He was forced to ask afresh what truly mattered, and he could have hardly anticipated what would prove to be the radical, revolutionary answer. As Philippians 3:7-14 evinces, what he had previously regarded as credit he came to view as debit. Considerable success, status, and standing within Judaism notwithstanding, he considered all such achievements and accolades as loss and dross. Furthermore, he came to view everything as paling

Trae Gould/Unsplash.

in comparison to Jesus’ incomparable person. Regardless of their seeming glory, Paul perceived all his previous prizes as skybala (that is, offscouring, rubbish, even excrement) in light of the surpassing worth of knowing, gaining, and being found in Christ. The “secret of his success,” then, became the righteousness he received and the resurrection he hoped for through his faith in the faithful Lord Jesus Christ—for whose sake he lost all things (Philippians 3:8). In short, Paul’s winning came through losing, his gain through loss. Regarding this topsy-turvy attitude, another passage is especially pertinent: 2 Corinthians 12:7-10. Having boasted in a roundabout way about being caught up in a vision into the third heaven (or paradise) some fourteen years previous (see 2 Corinthians 12:1-4; scholars agree that the man in Christ about whom Paul speaks is almost certainly he himself ), Paul pivots, indicating in verses 6-7 that he will refrain from boasting about such revelations and will instead boast about his weaknesses. Moreover, he maintains in verse 7 that in order to keep himself from becoming puffed up (with respect to such ecstatic religious experiences), he had been given (by God?) what he describes as a “thorn” or “stake” in his flesh, i.e., his body. Paul further depicts this thorn/stake as a “messenger of Satan” sent to buffet or torment him. Like Job of old, Paul did not tread a primrose path. Far from a masochist, Paul took no pleasure whatsoever in this pain or its source, whatever it might have been. (One can rise early and retire late and still not be able to identify with certainty Paul’s mysterious thorn in the flesh. Had it been important to him, he would certainly have revealed it. Apparently he had bigger fish to fry, and so do we.) In 98

fact, according to 2 Corinthians 12:8, Paul pleaded with the Lord that this unidentified thorn might be removed, not once, or twice, but thrice. For whatever combination of reasons, the Lord denied his appeal, saying, “My grace is sufficient for you, for [my] power is perfected in weakness” (12:9a). Instead of sulking, simply resigning to such an “unfair” fate, or throwing in the proverbial towel, Paul embraces, indeed boasts, in such weakness(es). He does not do so, however, to exalt (his) weakness(es) per se; rather, he does so in order that the power of God, which is made manifest in human weakness, might rest upon him (12:9b). What is more, he goes so far as to say that for the sake of Christ he will delight (!) in weaknesses as well as any number of other unsavory experiences like insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. Again, such a response does not indicate a delight in drudgery or difficulty in and of itself. Instead, Paul had discovered through the school of hard knocks (in which he had long been enrolled as a prized and experienced pupil) that when he was weak, he (somehow) was (made) strong (12:10; cf. Philippians 4:13). For some, this summative statement of Paul’s may well bring to mind the memorable line from the children’s song, “Little ones to him belong; they are weak but he is strong.” And while the passages above are two of the most prominent texts in which Paul reflects upon gain and loss, strength and weakness, his letters are replete with examples where the apostle overturns the apple cart of cultural expectations and conventions along these lines. We do well to ponder where Paul might have developed his counter-cultural notions of what counts and who is keeping score: Where did he come up with such stuff to say?

THE MOCKINGBIRD

As his letters reveal, Paul’s understanding of what is valuable was birthed in the crucible of his own experience. Paul could not have anticipated his conversion and call any more than he would have signed up for his arduous plight as a Jewish apostle to the Gentiles. Neither, however, could he deny or disregard what God had graced him to do. But Paul’s assessment of what matters in life and in death—and what counts as success and failure—cannot be reduced to his single experience alone. Rather, it is clear that Jesus’ own life and example of self-giving deeply impacted him. Paul implores the Philippians, for example, “to have the same mindset as Christ Jesus” (2:5). And were one to ask what might characterize such an attitude, one would need to look no further than to Jesus’ kenosis—that is, his renunciation of privilege and rights and his embrace of sacrificial, faithful service to God for the sake of others (note well Philippians 2:6-8). In his own earthly ministry, Jesus declared, “For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). Similarly, while encouraging the Corinthians to give liberally to a collection for impoverished saints in Jerusalem, Paul speaks of the “grace of the Lord Jesus Christ,” who “although he was rich became poor” so that through his poverty the Corinthians (and others) might be enriched (2 Corinthians 8:9). Paul more than implies that the Corinthians should do likewise; that is, they should give generously (literally “hilariously”) just as God has done through the indescribable gift of Jesus Christ (2

Corinthians 9:7, 12-13, 15). One experiences great gain not by hoarding but by helping, not by getting but by giving. In writing to both the Philippians and the Corinthians, Paul admonishes them to imitate him (see 1 Corinthians 4:16; Philippians 3:17). It is in 1 Corinthians 11:1, however, that Paul explicitly states that his converts should be imitators of him as he is of Christ. Because not even Paul was always worthy of emulating. Whenever he was, it was because he was following Jesus’ way. Some have suggested, unconvincingly to my mind, that Jesus and Paul were poles apart in the way they were in the world. The way I see it, they viewed success and, correlatively, failure likemindedly. The one who famously said that “the last will be first, and the first will be last” (Matthew 20:16) also said, “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25). Although employing different terms, tactics, and tone, Paul came to view success and failure similarly. Furthermore, he began to consider his own life in light of Christ and “the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:1011). For Paul, “to live [was] Christ and to die [was] gain” (Philippians 1:21). Far from selfabsorption—which, as our own times can attest, ironically and ultimately leads to selfnegation—Paul discovered that valuing others above oneself and pursuing Christ above all else are the metrics that ultimately matter both here and in the hereafter.

INTERVIEW BY BEN SELF

“Big Circumstance” Has Brought Us Here WITH

Bruce Cockburn

espite growing up in what he calls “a typical 1950s Canadian middle class household” in suburban Ottawa, Bruce Cockburn has done his share of wandering. He first became a star in the Canadian music scene in the early 1970s, winning the JUNO for Folksinger of the Year three years running. In 1974, he converted to Christianity and went on to release several albums with overtly religious themes. Among the best of these was In the Falling Dark (1976), which includes stirring songs of faith like “Lord of the Starfields” and “Festival of Friends.” While he never quite embraced the label of a “Christian” musician, and has often struggled with the legalism and reactionary politics of much organized religion, the pushand-pull of Christian faith has remained a central thread in Cockburn’s work and life. Following the dissolution of his first marriage in the late 70s, Cockburn made a conscious decision to “embrace human society” and moved to Toronto, Canada’s largest city. His musical style soon became heavier and grittier, and his lyrics darker and more politically-charged. He was also deeply impacted by his travels abroad, especially an intense Oxfam-led trip to Central America in 1983. These influences culminated in a “NorthSouth trilogy” of albums that included the bracing hit Stealing Fire (1984), which featured two of his career’s biggest singles: “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” and “Lovers in a Dangerous Time.” After an exhausting decade that ended in a period of writer’s block, Cockburn reinvented himself again in the 1990s, shifting

“I Figured Out I Kinda Like It,” 2021, oil on polyester restoration fabric, by Martine Poppe. Courtesy the artist and Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery.

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Interview

back to more acoustic, introspective material. His output from the period included deeply meditative albums like The Charity of Night (1997), which captures the world-weary wisdom of middle-age in songs like “Pacing the Cage” and the final track “Strange Waters.” The latter, for example, functions like a grungy, latter-day psalm: You’ve been leading me Beside strange waters Streams of beautiful lights in the night But where is my pastureland in these dark valleys? If I loose my grip, will I take flight? Now in his mid-seventies and settled in San Francisco, Cockburn is still asking the deep questions and watching for those “inexorable promptings” of the Spirit, or what he sometimes calls “Big Circumstance.”1 To the delight of his fans, he continues to tour and release new studio albums, including the soulful Bone On Bone (2017), for which he won his 13th JUNO award, and the rich instrumental album Crowing Ignites (2019). Below he shares about both his musical and his religious journeys, his complicated relationship to success, along with insights on the creative process, and much more.

MOCKINGBIRD To get us started, I’d love to hear a bit about your musical origins. What kinds of things did you listen to growing up? BRUCE COCKBURN Well, the first music I remember being aware of was the stuff my dad used to play. When I was born, I think he thought that he would educate me, so he enrolled us in the record of the month club. Every month we got a

nice classical album in the mail, and we’d have to sit and listen to it. Some of them got listened to only once, some of them more than once. But he kept them, and I was able to rediscover those records when I was older. Anyway, later on I heard all the stuff that was on the radio at that time—Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Bobby Darin—as well as the first rock-n-roll. It was listening to that first rock-n-roll when I first got really interested in music. I was a huge Elvis Presley fan.

1. Big Circumstance is the title of Cockburn’s 1988 studio album; the phrase appears in the song “Shipwrecked at the Stable Door” as a kind of stand-in for the guiding hand of God in the world. Here’s an excerpt: “Big Circumstance has brought me here / Wish it would send me home / Never was clear where home is / But it’s nothing you can own.’

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THE MOCKINGBIRD

solo work from the early-to-mid 70s was totally different. It seemed to have a kind of earthiness and acoustic purity that, at least to me, evokes the wild spaces of eastern Canada. Does that resonate at all?

M Is that when you started getting into the guitar? BC Yeah. The explosion of rock-n-roll all started around 1956 or so, and I started playing guitar in 1959. My parents were initially concerned about the association of the guitar with rock-n-roll—and the association of rock-n-roll with leather jackets and switchblades—so they were worried. But they said, “Look, we’ll support your guitar lessons if you promise not to get a leather jacket and grow sideburns.” And it was easy to make that promise. Like, what the hell! I couldn’t even grow sideburns. So I started taking guitar lessons, which exposed me to jazz and Les-Paul-style pop country guitar. Then I started studying composition on my own, and I eventually got more into folk music—country blues and ragtime, that kind of stuff. That period of anybody’s life tends to be so full. There’s this accumulation, this constantly shifting exposure to things, because you’re young, and you’re soaking it up like a sponge. By the time I got out of high school, I wasn’t good at anything, but I had a very well-rounded view of musical possibilities. After that I went to music school in Boston for a year and a half, before dropping out. But I came out of that with an even broader view. By then it was the 60s, and we were listening to Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles. And jug band music. Anyway, all of that went into me and formed this big musical soup out of which, eventually, songs came.

BC Yeah, I’m glad you could hear that in the music. One of the things that maybe distinguishes a lot of Canadian songwriting from American songwriting, say, or British songwriting, is that sense of space. I think you can hear it in Leonard Cohen, in Joni Mitchell, in Neil Young—it’s there even in his electric stuff, I think. In the 70s, I was focused on the natural world and the spiritual doorway that that seems to represent. I loved the way in which one’s own spirit feels enlarged. You find yourself in a setting where human presence can be either ignored completely or just isn’t there. From my experience, the soul expands, seems to touch the spirit of the wilderness. And that was a big part of my childhood—spending summers in Algonquin Park, canoe-tripping, portaging over horrible mud patches, surrounded by that wild Precambrian shield landscape. M You had a conversion to Christianity around 1974, which of course showed up very prominently in your songwriting. But you once said something interesting about that time in your life: “I was trying to figure out what it meant to be a Christian now that I’d made this move, and the first thing you try to do is to find what all the rules are, and then you try to obey them. That makes you kind of a fundamentalist… But in the end I was completely unsuccessful at being a fundamentalist.” What did you mean by that?

M When you first started playing in bands in the mid-60s, you were playing mostly psychedelic rock. But then your initial 103

BC When I first started thinking of myself as a Christian, I listened to the loudest Christians, the fundamentalists. I mean, I’d gone to a very bland United Church for a while growing up—the sort where you have to put on your scratchy gray flannels, you know—but that hadn’t made a big impression on me. So now here I was in the mid-70s, calling myself a Christian, and I thought: I’m supposed to figure out what that means, and how to be a Christian in the world. And the loudest voices were the ones on TV. So I started listening to Ernest Angley and the Bakkers and these other TV evangelists, and I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I wasn’t successful. The version of Christianity that they were presenting was just ridiculous. It didn’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny that I could bring to it, emotional or intellectual. And there were other voices that were a little more subtle but in the end weren’t much better. I’d buy these books that were by highlyreputed Christian writers or whatever, and you’d get all this BS. There was this one guy who kept going on about how minor key music should be banned because it makes people depressed. I mean, give me a break! That has nothing to do with Jesus. Sounds more like Hitler. So it didn’t take very long for me to lose interest in that stuff. But even a decade later, I would still occasionally watch the TV guys, thinking there might be something there— that maybe I’m supposed to watch this today, maybe there’s something in there for me. Because I do think that things work like that. Quite often the things we’re exposed to have some purpose to them—it’s what I called “Big Circumstance” later on—where it’s not random but it’s not exactly preordained, 104

either. It’s like the whole cosmos is this kind of jigsaw flux and you’re in it, and you’re moving in it. I’m not even sure what it is. You could call it the “will of God,” but it might not be that simple. But anyway, once in a while I would watch the TV evangelists. Actually, occasionally I still do, if I’m in a hotel somewhere, you know, and I turn on the TV and on comes one of these characters, I might listen to them to see if there’s anything there. Generally there isn’t, but once in a while there is. Once in a while something turns up that’s valuable. At one point in the 70s or 80s, I saw a very skeptical—you could say cynical— Canadian TV journalist interview Mother Teresa, and it was unbelievably great. Mother Teresa burned off the screen. She just was so absolutely real and free of any kind of pretense. It was an impressive thing to witness. I don’t remember what she said, but the way she came across made a big impression. Those kinds of things happen. In the end though, my flirtation with that stuff turned out to be just that. I realized, well, these televangelists don’t really know what they’re talking about. Or maybe they do, but they’re not really communicating the part that’s true about what they know. They’re communicating “send me money” and all kinds of other stuff. So through the 80s I still thought of myself as a Christian, but I was less and less inclined to go to church. When I moved to Toronto at the end of the 70s, I never found a church that I felt at home in. And I found myself mostly among people who were not believers, because I’d decided it was time for me to embrace human society in a way that I had not previously done; and in the 80s, humanity replaced nature as my focus. I mean, I still had the connection to nature, but as a source of energy

THE MOCKINGBIRD

and an avenue of spiritual expression, people became more the scene for me. I got involved in the kinds of supposedly “political” stuff people say I got involved in—and I wrote songs about those things. That shift was natural; it wasn’t planned. Moving to Toronto and embracing human society was a deliberate choice, but after that, everything just flowed. M For people who are new converts, I think there’s often this sense that you have to live up to some strict Christian standard and follow all the rules, which can be very selfdefeating. Did you feel that way—like a failed Christian? About the Bond.”3 Those are kind of break up songs. But they’re also liberation songs. I was working through a bunch of unexamined assumptions. Like: we got married in the presence of God, made promises in the presence of God, and we were breaking those promises. What did that mean? Turned out God seemed more interested in us growing as people, and we hadn’t been doing that together. I think both of us have done a lot of growing since then.

BC I certainly did at times, and I still do, I think. Not severely. I’m sure other people have felt it worse. But I don’t pay nearly enough attention on a day-to-day basis to my relationship with God. I talk about it a fair amount, but I don’t do much about it. But then, once in a while, I do do something about it, and I’m reminded that it exists, and that it’s really happening. And it feels pretty darn good when that happens. But, interestingly, one of the first tests of that for me came when I got divorced. A lot of stuff on the Humans album (1980) is about that.

M Did you feel wracked with guilt, though? BC Yeah. But I think guilt is an excuse for not feeling like a failure. It’s easier to look at the guilt than at the failure—at what should I have done differently? Where do I go next? I mean, guilt is a kind of demonic implant that gets in the way of taking that next step with a

M Like the song “Fascist Architecture”?2 BC Yeah, “Fascist Architecture” and “What 2. “I’ve been in trouble but I’m okay / Been through the wringer but I’m okay / Walls are falling and I’m okay / Under the mercy and I’m okay.”

3. “Man and woman / Made to be one flesh / Nobody said it would be easy / But can we let go now and fail the test?”

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clear mind. So I think guilt is to be resisted, unless of course you’re genuinely guilty of some heinous crime. That’s different. We’re talking about spiritual or emotional stuff here. M Does faith help with guilt and shame? BC It’s supposed to. I mean, Jesus kind of says that. Like, I’m here for you. You’re never going to get it right, but I did, so lean on me. That, to me, is something that a lot of the hurch— the body of Christ—doesn’t pay attention to. There’s so much shaming. But the message of Jesus is like a hammock you can relax into. It’s love and forgiveness. And it’s not just the Christian part of the Bible that talks about that—the Old Testament talks about love and forbearance; it runs right through. But Jesus exemplifies it in so many ways and makes it so clear, yet people still miss the message. M In the late 70s and early 80s you had some breakthrough hits that garnered you acclaim well beyond Canada; at one point you even played on Saturday Night Live. What were the blessings and the curses that came with that kind of success? BC It came about in a strange way. “Wondering Where the Lions Are” was the first actual national hit I had in Canada, and it got a lot of airplay in the United States—it was on the Billboard charts, and that’s what we ended up doing on SNL. But the song that people remember more than that one was “If I Had a Rocket Launcher,” which came 106

around 4-5 years later. It wasn’t as big a hit, but that’s still the one that made a bigger impression, which is odd because that one isn’t really a typical Cockburn song at all. It was such an anomaly. In the United States people didn’t know my history. I had a relationship with Canadian audiences, but I didn’t have that relationship with the American audience, and so I got labeled a “political” singer because of “If I Had a Rocket Launcher.”4 I mean, yeah okay, that political message is in there, but I don’t like to be categorized, and I don’t like pinning down things that don’t need to be pinned down. Early on in Canada, after my first three albums, I was getting typecast as a nature guy, and I resented that. “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” did the same thing later on in a different direction. I don’t like being called a “Christian” singer, either, even though that’s true. But I don’t want my audience to only be Christians who only listen to Christian singers. I’ve tried so hard not to have an image, and maybe I made more of it than I needed to. I didn’t want to be a “star,” because that’s a falsehood. It’s a public construct. I wanted to be me. So I went out of my way to avoid all sorts of things that I thought might lead to the creation of the “star” construct. And I was fairly successful at that, except that I got the image of being a guy who went out of his way to avoid having an image. So, that became its own kind of trap. And the lesson there was: well, you can’t avoid this. 4. Cockburn wrote the song after witnessing first-hand the horrors of the refugee camps along the GuatemalanMexican border in 1983. As others have noted, the song comes “close to a call to arms” with incendiary lines like “If I had a rocket launcher, some son of a bitch would die.” However, Cockburn himself has emphasized that the song “is not a call to arms. This is… a cry.”

THE MOCKINGBIRD

As soon as you stand up in public and do anything, that process begins. And the more you do, the more it happens. But the success I had also came with a lot of perks. There was more money, more gigs, better traveling and working conditions. You know, all that stuff came to me, and because of the public visibility that went with that, I got invited to do lots of interesting things—like go to Nicaragua and Nepal and other places where stuff was going on that was meaningful to me. In some cases, it provided material for songs—I mean, that’s not why I went to those places, but it was a side effect of being there, and it certainly deepened my understanding of people and how people work and what we’re capable of, in all directions.

I was a little kid. But then I decided that before I did anything too radical, I should just take a rest and step away from it all. So I declared myself on sabbatical for the year 1990, and you know, my sabbatical hadn’t even started yet when I started writing songs again. For Christmas, my thengirlfriend and I and my older daughter— who was 14 then—we went to a dude ranch in Arizona. It was a magical experience in lots of ways, but sitting there I wrote “Child of the Wind.” And all it took for the creative process to start again was the declaration to myself that I was free from whatever encumbrances I thought I had. And it came back. And on I went. I wrote the songs that are on Nothing but a Burning Light (1991) through that period. And I ended up having a lot of fun on my year off. Riding horses and shooting— that’s mostly what I did. But I did a lot of playing music for myself, too, with no ulterior motive.

M In the late 80s, if I’m not mistaken, you experienced a period of writer’s block. What do you think caused that? BC Burnout. That’s what I felt at the time. I went for about a year and a half where I didn’t write anything—I didn’t have any ideas, or any motivation. I had the desire to write but nothing making it happen. And for half of ’88 and all of ’89 I felt like that. And I thought, this has been a decade of such intense travel for me, and travel in some places where there’s a lot of pain, and even though it wasn’t my pain, you still soak up some of it. And I just felt like I needed a break. But my actual first thought was, “Well, this is the end. I’ve got to think of something new to do, because there are no more songs coming.” I thought about enrolling in art school, because I’ve always liked graphic novels, and I had some drawing chops when

M I listened to a recent podcast you did with Les Stroud and one of the things you guys talked about was the nature of creativity. You said you felt like some of your creative impulses basically come from God—that God is involved in the process, always “stirring the pot.” In crafting songs, what is the relationship for you between grace and effort? BC Hmm. First the grace, then the effort. And the effort is more like translation, in a way; it’s analogous to that at least. It’s a question of taking that initial idea—which is a gift, I find—and then kind of wrestling it into something that makes sense musically and 107

lyrically, and will be as compelling as it can be for whoever hears it. M It sounds like Jacob wrestling the angel of God in the night. BC Haha—a little bit like that. Except you come away with something that might be a win. M Not a busted hip. BC Yeah. It’s a little bit hard to articulate. But the feeling is in the heart. And the process varies from song to song. Some songs require much more labor and some songs not so much. Sometimes a single idea will trigger an immediate flow of associations that shape themselves into a song, and other times that single idea will have to sit around for a while before you find something to connect it to, to develop it. And some of these things I don’t look at too hard—I don’t try to imagine what God might want from these things. In certain songs, it might seem obvious, but other songs are just songs. They’re reflective of my life in various ways, of various attitudes and so on. M What happens if the song-writing process doesn’t go well? BC Even if I fail to get a good song out of what should have been a good idea, I don’t really see it as failure as much as just a blind trail, a false start. Because if it’s a real thing, it will come back around at some point. 108

I’ve never put much pressure on myself to produce. But I sometimes feel a visceral need to write. And when I don’t write for a long time, then I feel frustrated and kind of constipated, and it’s a great relief when stuff starts to come. For me, the control, and how “well” I do with a given idea, is all beside the point. One other thing I notice in myself is a desire not to repeat myself. I don’t try to duplicate the songs that were “successful.” I am aware of certain things that I can put in a song that are going to make it more or less appealing to people, and those are creative choices to be made. But you see it all the time—certain artists who make one great record and then try to do the same record again, and it’s just not a good idea, you know? M In 2013, you started regularly attending a church again for the first time in several decades. How did that come about? BC It’s interesting, you know. It was one of those inexorable promptings. It was “Big Circumstance” at work. But it started with a tragedy. Sadly, a neighbor of ours that my wife was quite friendly with died in a house fire. That pushed her into looking for the meaning behind things like that, and looking in the direction of God for some understanding. I have my own experiences and thoughts about that sort of thing, but you know we weren’t churchgoers then. I hadn’t thought of myself as a churchgoer for decades, and neither had she. But in the course of that search on her part, she discovered the San Francisco Lighthouse Church. And she kept inviting me to come with her—you know, like, “You

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gotta come check this out, the pastor’s really great, and there’s great music.”

tipping points around us. We’ve got to be really careful where we step—as a culture, as individuals, even as a species. And it’s not clear to me that those steps are going to be taken the way they need to be. But that said, as individuals, we still have that relationship with the divine to keep us focused.

M Great music always helps. BC Yeah, but I resisted it for quite a while, and then I finally caved and went, and I just kept going after that. It was like, the minute I walked in I felt surrounded by love. And that’s something you don’t want to pass up.

M And free? BC Free! Yes. I mean, that’s real freedom. Never mind protesting about mask mandates or whatever. If you think your freedom is really about not wearing a mask, you’re already screwed.

M For many people, these have been pretty dark and stressful times—with the pandemic, environmental crises, all kinds of intense political and social stuff. So in times like these, what gives you hope?

M Right. I love that line from one of the new songs you posted online recently: “Time takes its toll, but in my soul I’m on a roll.”

BC Well, my relationship with God doesn’t depend on any of that stuff you mentioned. Of course, you can be distracted by external things of whatever sort, but really, if that relationship is where you’re focused, then the other stuff is tolerable in one way or another. But, I mean, there’s still lots to worry about. We’re confronted with all sorts of precarious

BC I felt good about that line. But you know, it’s an old guy writing that song. M That’s true. Old and wise.

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FOR THE RECORD

A Bruce Cockburn Starter Playlist By Ben Self

One Day I Walk (1970) Written from the point of view of a wandering busker, this simple tune from Cockburn’s early solo career evokes a young man’s hopeful embrace of life’s twists and turns. The stripped-down style also conveys his own early search for musical and philosophical purity. All the Diamonds (1973) Cockburn said he wrote this song “the day after I actually took a look at myself and realized that I was a Christian.” As you might expect, it basks in the afterglow of conversion: it’s luminous and full of gratitude. Festival of Friends (1975) This little tune was borne of tragedy—the death of a friend’s baby to SIDS—but again illustrates the purity of Cockburn’s newfound faith, with a simple yet beautiful metaphor for the Kingdom of God. Lord of the Starfields (1976) Cockburn attempted to write “something like a psalm” here, capturing both the awesome sweep of God’s glory in creation

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and our own compressed longing for connection, purpose, and transcendence. It’s one of the most memorable and unique songs of his career. Wondering Where the Lions Are (1979) The lyrics to this upbeat pop song— Cockburn’s first international hit—were inspired by a dream he had (involving lions) after an ominous conversation with a relative about the looming threat of nuclear war. He wrote it after waking up the next morning to find that, thanks be to God, there was no “nuclear war. It was a real nice day.” Tokyo (1979) This is one of Cockburn’s first “documentary-style” songs, comprised of a bevy of precise observations strung together to form a broader impression. It centers around a strange experience he had passing by a road accident while on tour in Tokyo. Rumours of Glory (1979) On an album full of grim themes, this buoyant reggae-styled single conveyed

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what Cockburn described as “the other side of the coin”—that however bleak things may seem, “something is shining” beneath the surface.

Don’t Feel Your Touch (1987) This achingly beautiful tune was undoubtedly written at a dark moment for Cockburn. It radiates desolation, a longing for something that feels lost. What, exactly? It’s hard to say.

The Coldest Night of the Year (1981) Cockburn’s conscious effort in the early 1980s to “immerse [himself ] in human society” is evident in this catchy urbancentered tune. One imagines that if it was really the “coldest night of the year” by Toronto standards, it must have been pretty darn cold.

Burden of the Angel / Beast (1992) Here Cockburn meditates memorably on the persistent frustrations of human nature, of being “simultaneously justified and sinner.” As he put it elsewhere, “I think we are redeemed spiritually but in terms of our earthly existence, [that beastly potential] is always there.”

Dweller By a Dark Stream (1981) Lyrically, this song hearkens back to a more explicitly religious phase in Cockburn’s songwriting. But it’s also a little darker, being preoccupied with our sinfulness and desperate need for salvation.

Pacing the Cage (1995) If I had to pick a favorite song from Cockburn’s catalog, this would probably be it. It employs the perfect metaphor—an animal “pacing the cage”—for modern restlessness and anxiety, one especially poignant in the age of Covid-19.

If I Had a Rocket Launcher (1983) This is probably Cockburn’s single most famous song, and also, understandably, his most controversial. As Rolling Stone explained: “[After] observing the horrors of refugee camps along the GuatemalanMexican border, he went back to his hotel room and cried and wrote in his notebook, ‘I understand now why people want to kill.’” This is a visceral cry for justice.

40 Years in the Wilderness (2016) In this stirring latter-day tune, Cockburn reflects on his 40-year search for God—or God’s 40-year search for him—from his conversion in 1973 through to his decision in the mid-2010s to start regularly attending a church again after a decades-long hiatus. After all these years, it seems he’s still hearing the call to “Take up your load” and run the race set before you.

Lovers in a Dangerous Time (1983) Somehow “Lovers” never cracked the Billboard Hot 100, yet as far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the catchiest songs of the 1980s. It pits the joys of young love against what Cockburn saw as a backdrop of despair and foreboding at this juncture of the Cold War.

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From the Soapbox

Shell Game A SERMON BY

[Jesus asked his disciples], “What were you arguing about on the road?” But they kept quiet because on the way they had argued about who was the greatest. Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.”

David Zahl

He took a little child whom he placed among them. Taking the child in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.” (Mark 9:33-37)

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here’s a book I’ve been enjoying called The Status Game, by the British journalist Will Storr. His main thesis is that human beings are extraordinarily imaginative creatures who can use almost anything to symbolize status. Money and social media followers may be the first such markers that spring to mind. But there’s also one’s neighborhood, taste in literature, number of dinner party invitations, advanced degrees, political views, body mass index, golf handicap,

busy-ness. There’s the brand of shoes you wear, where your kids go to school, who gets to go on a private trip to space first— and, of course, who sees through status games the quickest. Those of us in the church, of course, are not immune to this at all. We play all sorts of status games, from attendance and tithing to how many hungry mouths we feed and how much money we give away—all sorts of things. Status games, it would seem, are built into our brains. They take place within groups, even within families—who is the most beloved child, et cetera, et cetera.

“Even On a Good Day,” acrylic on canvas, by Qin Tan. Courtesy the artist.

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According to Storr, the question is not if we’re playing status games, but which ones we’re playing. Another way to put it is that we share a tendency, mostly an unconscious one, to turn the good things in our lives into ladders. Some of us have even turned the pandemic into one. I was talking to a pastor last week and he said, “I really felt it was important that I came out of the pandemic not only okay, but that my church would be doing better than ever, and my family would be at their peak, and I would be crushing my career. Ridiculous as it sounds, I wanted to win COVID.” Today we’ve come to a passage in Mark’s Gospel where the disciples are playing a status game. Jesus says, “What were you arguing about?” And they respond, “We were arguing about who was the greatest.” This happens immediately on the heels of the transfiguration, in which Christ was revealed in glory on a mountaintop. On the way back down, Jesus is asked to heal a young man, which he does, in full view of his disciples. If you were one of the followers in attendance, you might have thought, “Gosh, we’re on the gravy train. This elevator’s going to the top. And if it’s going to the top, I want to be at the very top of it.” By the way, I highly doubt that Peter is looking at John here and saying, “Hey buddy, I think I’m better than you,” or that Mark is looking at Matthew and saying, “Actually, I’m probably a little bit more important than you are.” No, I’d wager that Jesus is inferring what’s going on. After all, status games rarely take place on the surface. It’s more, “How did you spend your summer? Which beach did you go to? Huh, that’s interesting. Well, I went to this other beach,” which naturally is much fancier. Or, “I got clearly a lot more 114

vacation than you did.” “Oh, well, I didn't, because I work much harder than you do,” which of course translates to “I’m better than you.” “Oh, you served in the military? Well, did you see any action?” We can infer that these kinds of statements are status games, even when they’re not overt. There’s subtext. This is not unique to today, and it’s not unique to Facebook. In his book, Storr references an anthropologist named William Bascom, who in 1948 tells of a Micronesian island called Pohnpei, where there was a status game that was played with yams. Yes, that’s right. The men of Pohnpei would furiously compete to grow the largest… yam. Every year in overgrown, remote plots they would raise around fifty yams in secret. They would creep out of bed in the middle of the night to tend to them. A single one of these yams could take ten years to grow, reach more than four meters in length, weigh over ninety kilograms, and require twelve men to carry into the feast using a stretcher. They weren’t kidding around! At the annual feast, the guy with the largest yam would be declared number one. So this sort of thing happens all the time, in all places. Which means that if you are caught up in status games and think you’re the only one, you’re not. We all play them. We’re playing them right now in fact. Isn’t it a relief to know that you are not the only one who feels the need to jockey for position constantly? Why do we do it, though? What makes status games so alluring? Well, in the simplest terms, everyone needs to feel like they’re worth something. We all ask the question: Do I matter? We ask it of our loved ones, and we ask it of society. We ask it of our bank accounts, and we ask it of our bosses. We need to know that we’re enough.

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And so, in pursuit of an answer, we seek to win some kind of contest. If we lose the first one we try, then we change the game and play one we can possibly win or at least be competitive in. If you’re a kid and you’re not so great in the classroom, then maybe you can excel on the sports field. If you’re not amazing on the sports field, well perhaps physical appearance is the place where you can stand out, and if your physical appearance isn’t really the best, maybe you can be the funniest. And if you’re not very funny, then maybe you can be the sarcastic one who sees through everything, and if you can’t see through everything, well, then you just get really sad. I’m not just saying this. For the people who don’t feel like they can win anything, the mental and emotional consequences can be dire. Because we’re addicted to status. We’re drawn to it because we see it as a means of love. We believe that we are loved according to our status. What we find out—and what every single wisdom tradition will tell you—is that status games are shell games. They don’t work. That is, the love and value we believe our status will bring us never comes. We know this in our heads, but that understanding seldom makes it to our hearts. In September 2021, the great JapaneseAmerican tennis champion, Naomi Osaka, made a stunning confession. At the time she was the highest paid female athlete in the world. She’d won the U.S. Open in 2018 and 2020, but the following year for her had been rife with well-publicized mental

health struggles. After losing in the third round of the U.S. Open in 2021, she held a press conference. Here’s what she said: “I feel like for me, recently, when I win I don’t feel happy. I feel more like a relief. And then when I lose, I feel very sad. I don’t think that’s normal.” And then she started crying. “I honestly don’t know when I’m going to play my next tennis match.” Osaka had earned gazillions of dollars, worldwide acclaim, and the admiration of millions. And yet if we are to take her at her word, her triumph in the status game had ushered in a situation where maintenance became so crushing that she wanted to give it up altogether. Hope, it turns out, does not lie at the top of the status ladder. Jesus responds to his disciples’ status obsession with a striking alternative. What he says is simple, and he says it a lot: “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, 115

and the servant of all.” To illustrate his point, he takes a child on his lap and says, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me.” A note on first century children, though: don’t think of them as Instagrammable, cute little kids; think of them in tatters, children who have been overlooked and neglected, with a very runny nose and sticky fingers—a little gross in fact. Today we tend to venerate children, and we forget how, well, disgusting they can be. If you want to be first, Jesus says, then be like this child, who’s powerless, who’s dependent, who has no political or economic power. The point he’s trying to drive home is that the Christian answer to the question of whether we really matter is not status. It’s belovedness. You are loved, like this child: unconditionally and eternally, in spite of the fact that you bring nothing to the table, in spite of the fact that you are losing— and will lose—whatever status game you’re wrapped up in. And these words, you know, are coming from the one who was willing to lose every status game for your sake. The one who actually had the highest status possible, yet did not consider it something to be prideful about. Perhaps you’ve heard of the infamous English politician, John Profumo. John Profumo served as the secretary of state for war in the early 1960s in the U.K. He came from a very aristocratic background—high status, in other words. During his tenure, Profumo had an extramarital affair with a 19-year-old woman who was simultaneously engaged in an alliance with a Russian attaché. This Russian turned out to be a spy. And so when this was found out—in spectacular fashion, with photographs and all, basically the original 116

tabloid scandal—Profumo was humiliated on every front page as an adulterer, a liar, and a man of such poor judgment that he had mindlessly cavorted with enemy spies. He was disgraced and stripped of all public dignities in 1963. In the years after, his name became an English euphemism for people who’d really blown it. John Profumo never knew political power again—and he never asked for it. In the wake of the scandal, he did something extremely confounding. He did the very hardest thing for any politician, preacher, or author to do: he went away. Really went away. To be specific, he went to a place that helped the poor, a rundown settlement called Toynbee Hall in the East End of London. At Toynbee he did social work—and not just the good stuff. Profumo did the grunt work, washed dishes, cleaned toilets. He visited prisons for the criminally insane. Profumo’s service, however, wasn’t for show. It wasn’t a step on the path toward some political redemption. He didn’t give interviews. He didn’t go on television. He never wrote a book. For the next 40 years, he simply worked at Toynbee Hall. Slowly it became known what was going on there, to the extent that, in 1995, when the who’s who of the British establishment was invited to celebrate Margaret Thatcher’s 70th birthday, Profumo received an invitation. The powers-that-be decided to use the opportunity to show him what they really thought of him. You might think that they were just going to pay lip service to this man who is now living a life of quiet servitude, that he’s going to be sitting on the outskirts of the party. Instead, Profumo is ushered to the front of the hall and seated next to her majesty Queen Elizabeth—at her right hand, the seat of highest honor.

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In 2006, the Daily Telegraph wrote that when he died at 91, “No one in public life ever did more to atone for his sins; no one behaved with more silent dignity, as his name was repeatedly dragged through the mud, and few have ended their lives as loved and revered by those who knew him.” You see, John Profumo had fallen off the ladder. All of his status had been taken from him. And what he discovered in that place was something much better than a new ladder. He discovered love. He discovered Jesus Christ. So is this just some lengthy sermon about giving up your status and renouncing your club memberships? No, because even if that was my point, it wouldn’t work. I mean, I’ve never seen someone not accept an admittance to the highest status college or club or what have you. People pretend to, but you can never really quit the status game. It’s that addictive and that intoxicating.

But where you can’t, and where I can’t, Jesus nonetheless does. When he pulled that child into his lap, he was ultimately talking about himself. He was saying, I am last. I am the one who is betrayed into human hands, who was killed and three days later rose again. I am the one who came not to consolidate godlike status, but to give it away, even to those who are hellbent on accruing it at all costs. I am here to descend to a world that is asphyxiating itself trying to ascend, a world obsessed with winning the shell games that cannot be won. And so, to answer the question—the ultimate question, always on our minds— the question of do I matter, do I matter, Lord? Well, what he says to you and to me this morning is yes. Yes, you matter, my child. You matter so much. You matter this much, pointing to the empty holes in his hands, the wounds in his feet, the pools of undying love in his eyes. Amen.

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Contributors BILL BORROR holds the Arthur Schopenhauer Chair of Happiness and Positivity— not a teaching position, just a chair his grandfather stole from a burned out and bitter clown. Bill and his wife Laura live in New Jersey where he is a pastor, professor, and church consultant. They have six amazing children and six exceptional grandchildren and can still successfully name all of them on demand. SARAH CONDON lives in Houston, Texas, where she leans into failures and is terrified of success. She co-hosts Mockingbird’s podcast The Mockingcast. TASHA GENCK MORTON is a wife, mother, and pastor, among other things, and has almost certainly dropped the ball on something as she’s writing this. But by the grace of God she goes. MADDY GREEN is a wife, mother, and overeager DIYer, she is also a notorious user of comma splices. BRYAN JARRELL runs Mockingbird’s Twitter and Facebook pages, and is also the pastor of Epiphany Anglican Fellowship in Ligonier PA. His big successes are his wife Beth, son Tom, dog Ginger, and the second baby arriving in August of 2022. His big failure was once buying a PT Cruiser.

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ALI KJERGAARD dwells in Washington, D.C., where she can be found jogging around the monuments trying to get the perfect sunrise picture with her really burned out phone. When not musing about failures and successes, she muses about books, her crazy city, and how to make the perfect scone. NATE KLUG is a poet and Congregationalist minister. His most recent book is Hosts and Guests. GRACE LEUENBERGER feels most successful when she is able to finish a tube of chapstick without losing it. She lives in Kent, Ohio, with her golden retriever and spends her free time baking, running, and watching wholesome British television shows. JOSEPH MCSPADDEN is a writer and editor whose work has appeared at Style Weekly in Richmond, VA, and okra. magazine. When asked to write a short bio that referenced the theme of success and failure, he produced a 3500-word tome on failure; as for successes, all he could conjure was “Jesus wept.” GRANTLAND J. ROLLINS lives in Arkansas and in reinforced aluminum. Unsatisfied with failing at evangelism, he now stinks at—but still enjoys—curating yard art and playing bingo, as well as doing life, doing sleep, and doing queso.

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BEN SELF owns a coffee mug that says “World’s Okayest Teacher” but tries not to let such accolades go to his head. When he’s not wrangling deranged middle schoolers, he enjoys sleeping, complaining, hiking, eating pie, scouring Spotify, and days when he doesn’t ruminate gloomily on humankind’s unmitigated failure to mitigate climate change. STEPHEN SEXTON’S first book, If All the World and Love Were Young, was the winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2019 and the Shine / Strong Award for Best First Collection. He has been awarded the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and was the winner of the National Poetry Competition. Cheryl’s Destinies was published in 2021. O LLIE SILVESTER is an illustrator and all ’round daydreamer from Bristol, UK. He loves to draw from the mundane and the moments in between moments and is always trying to document the nonsensical humor found in the everyday, the color within the seemingly drab, the noise within the quiet and the quiet within the noise.

TODD D. STILL (Ph.D. Glasgow) is Dean and Professor of Christian Scriptures at Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary, where he has served since 2003. A Texas native, he enjoys big skies, church choirs, spring (wild)flowers, and being married to Carolyn, his wife of 32 years. KAREN STILLER is author of The Minister’s Wife: a memoir of faith, doubt, friendship, loneliness, forgiveness and more (2020). She hosts the Faith Today podcast, and lives in Ottawa where her dining room table is covered in books, newspapers, story notes, and a giant dispenser of hand sanitizer. SARAH HINLICKY WILSON is associate pastor at Tokyo Lutheran Church, which is surrounded by tons of neon and excellent diners. She publishes orthodox theology and heterodox fiction through Thornbush Press, and tries to snare her dad with theological whoppers on their podcast Queen of the Sciences. DAVID ZAHL is the director of Mockingbird, editor-in-chief of the Mockingbird website, co-host of The Mockingcast, and probably one of the two or three most successful licensed lay preachers in the Episcopal diocese of Virginia. Top ten for sure. Then again, between the ages of 12 and 14, he was cut from three basketball teams in two different countries, so let’s not jump to conclusions.

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The Mockingbird: Issue 20