Cinemorphosis

Tag: faith

  • Can Movies Save My Soul?

    Can Movies Save My Soul?

    I write as an agnostic, so this is not a sermon. It is a meditation on Philippians that leads to what I see as three major orientations toward life.

    I’ll begin with Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians. I’m fascinated by Philippians because it defines the Christian message in a way that goes against human instinct. Throughout history and across cultures, the human default setting has been to prefer power, convenience, comfort, and pleasure over a life committed to a higher cause. But in Philippians, God comes to Earth, denies himself glory and power, and instead lowers himself to love and serve others. His life becomes a model for us, one that demands imitation.

    If we study his life, we learn that life is not a plaything, a toy designed to provide pleasure and excitement. Contrary to much of modern psychology, with its emphasis on self-agency, autonomy, and self-individuation, life does not belong entirely to us. It contains a purpose greater than our instincts for pleasure, power, and self-actualization. Philippians teaches us that our purpose is to lower ourselves in order to love and serve others. Christianity at its best is a distillation of that message in all its potency.

    Talk is cheap, of course. Many have marveled and wept at the beautiful, albeit challenging, message in Philippians and preached about it, but few have actually lived it. The literature suggests that Saint Francis of Assisi lived such a life. A life of self-renunciation in imitation of Christ, embracing poverty over riches, is rare indeed.

    When I first contemplated this humble life, I framed existence as a choice between two orientations: self-renunciation in service to God or self-gratification in service to our baser instincts. But as I’ve watched and enjoyed Sean Fennessey, Amanda Dobbins, and Chris Ryan discussing movies and culture on the Netflix presentation of the podcast The Big Picture, I’ve come to recognize a third orientation, one that may help explain my agnosticism.

    These three podcasters, who strike me as secular, seem to genuinely love what they do. No doubt about it, they work hard, slogging through hundreds of mediocre movies a year and occasionally encountering a few good ones. They are extremely smart, talented, and passionate about their work. They don’t strike me as greedy people who worship at the altar of money or lead grotesquely hedonistic lives that would make Gollum blush with shame.

    They are cosmopolitan and educated. They believe in smart conversations, the pleasures of nuanced analysis, the wonder of good art, and the power of storytelling. They understand the vitality cinema brings to culture. A successful movie becomes a sort of muse. It informs society. It reflects society. It changes society. It shares a language with society. Fans of Wayne’s World or A Few Good Men frequently quote famous lines, evidence of the permanent stamp these movies have left on them.

    A great movie like Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey or Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything creates a text for endless discussion. Such movies transcend entertainment by disrupting culture, changing the way we see things, and illuminating aspects of the human condition we may never have considered.

    To see art, and movies specifically, as a place of transcendence suggests that art, not religion, may be the muscle humanity needs to flex to stay vibrant. This is not a dogmatic transcendence tied to one doctrine or another. Watching The Godfather won’t help you on Judgment Day. But it will make you interrogate the messy relationship between business and family loyalty in new ways.

    Great movies won’t give you a religious doctrine, but they can help you distinguish between sacred and profane time, as in Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping. Movies don’t shut down conversations with absolute dogmas. They open new conversations that keep the mind alive. That’s what I see in the work of the talented Sean Fennessey, Amanda Dobbins, and Chris Ryan.

    I worry that a life of religious certainty, with its monk-like retreat into poverty and blissful prayer, may cut us off from art in all its contradictory, life-beating spectacle. I worry that religious doctrine can become stagnant and two-dimensional in a way that art remains dynamic and multidimensional.

    At the same time, when I contemplate the love described in Philippians, my heart longs for such a life. I wonder if such a life could save me and the lost, self-deceiving souls in Weapons, Eddington, and Bugonia.

  • The Problem with Becoming a Better Person

    The Problem with Becoming a Better Person

    In her memoir Will and Attention, Meghan O’Gieblyn reminds us that exhortations to listen more, engage more fully with the world, and pay closer attention to what is happening around us are easier said than done. Part of the struggle comes from the tension between the voices inside our heads and the voices in the outside world. When the internal voices become loud enough, they drown out everything else, making genuine attention nearly impossible. Nor are these thoughts necessarily useful or interesting. O’Gieblyn describes her own as “circular, deterministic, and relentlessly self-excoriating.”

    That last word, with its suggestion of self-laceration, reminded me of something writer Ana Marie Cox once said on her now-defunct podcast. Just as she had been addicted to alcohol, she suffered from another addiction: self-hatred. Her therapist warned her not to pick up the liquor bottle of self-loathing and drink from it. Yet she would lift this metaphorical bottle to her lips as compulsively as an alcoholic sipping vodka. Once such a habit becomes deeply entrenched, paying attention to it becomes extraordinarily difficult because the behavior feels almost as involuntary as breathing.

    As O’Gieblyn struggles to follow Simone Weil’s advice to abandon the will and replace it with attention, she learns that she must engage with the world “without the distorting lens of the ego.” She must confront what William James called the “sick soul,” the soul divided against itself. We cannot simply will these divided selves into wholeness. In the tradition of the great religions, wholeness often requires surrender to a power greater than ourselves. But O’Gieblyn no longer finds the tenets of religion useful to her, nor even the more universal spiritual tenets of AA. “Letting go” too often returns her to the original problem: the egotistical self doing the letting go.

    Rather than seek surrender in the traditional religious sense, O’Gieblyn turns toward the kind of surrender Simone Weil associates with attention. Attention is not merely focus. It involves what Weil calls the “indirect method,” an idea she never explicitly defines. We can infer, however, that the indirect method requires us to approach a problem with calm and patience rather than demand immediate results. We engage with our problems from different angles, remain attentive to what they reveal, and hope to plant seeds that eventually bear fruit.

    But this approach presents a maddening problem. It requires maturity, and maturity may be the very state we are trying to attain. If we need maturity to approach life’s challenges with patient attention, we arrive at a bootstrapping paradox: We need the capacity we are trying to develop in order to develop that capacity.

    We all need maturity, poise, and wholeness, but the patience required to travel that path may be precisely what the immature person lacks. A patient person is therefore better equipped to practice Weil’s indirect method and bear fruit. An impatient person may become frustrated, abandon the endeavor, and regress into deeper forms of infantilization and addiction. Thus, he who has, more shall be given; he who has not, more shall be taken away. This is the psychological Matthew Effect: maturity creates conditions for greater maturity, while immaturity can create conditions for deeper immaturity. The rich get richer not merely in money but in psychological resources.

    As I reach retirement age, I find myself caught inside this very problem. I am trying to live as long as possible so I can collect as many monthly retirement checks as possible, turning myself into a commodity in the name of gaming the system on the metaphorical game show I call Beat the Actuary. Intellectually, I know this is spiritual madness, but I cannot simply will the impulse away. Nor do I appear to possess the patience necessary to attend to it in the calm and mature manner Simone Weil describes.

    Fortunately, I remain genuinely amused by the comic absurdity of my predicament. Without that amusement, I might tumble into despair. But despair eludes me for now. I am content to read Meghan O’Gieblyn’s meditations on will and attention and hope that, by the time I finish her book, I will have become a slightly better man.

  • The Good Life Is Making Me Anxious

    The Good Life Is Making Me Anxious

    Of course, retirement is not about retiring. It’s about learning to live differently after you’ve been loosed from your professional obligations. The same goes for aging. It’s not about preparing to die. It’s about preparing to live appropriately in the face of death.

    So after hearing Notre Dame professor Meghan Sullivan discuss these issues on a podcast with David Brooks, I picked up The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning. Written by Sullivan and Paul Blaschko, the book’s ten chapters begin with action verbs: desire, live, take, work, love, wonder, take, struggle, contemplate, and prepare. I saw this as a promising start because my current action verbs are worry, fret, stew, and agonize. This book could represent an improvement in my approach.

    The Introduction immediately caught me. The authors observe that we are goal-oriented creatures. We see ourselves on a ladder, constantly climbing in the realms of health, fitness, social status, and material success. We devote enormous amounts of time and energy to achieving these goals, and the labor itself reassures us that we are headed somewhere worthwhile.

    As I read, I envisioned all of us standing over the parts of our lives as if they were machine pieces moving along a conveyor belt. We are assembly-line workers connecting some of the pieces, but we don’t know what the finished product is supposed to look like. We have our station on the line. We work earnestly. We tighten our bolts. But we’ve lost sight of the machine.

    The authors argue that there is an answer to this myopia. It’s called philosophy. Aristotle understood its purpose. Interrogating your life and the lives around you should help you develop a philosophy aimed at making you a good person. Good people have something in common: they lead “a good life.” Defining the good life, and then embodying it, becomes the purpose of philosophy.

    What strikes me about this lesson is that it applies to people of all ages and employment conditions. We have found the rare universal shoe that fits everyone’s feet.

    Aspiring to the good life puts everything else into context. If I want ten thousand people to watch one of my YouTube videos in three days and become grouchy with my family because only three thousand people have bothered to admire me, I’ve lost my way. I’ve lost what the authors call telos, the aim that gives life meaning and direction. We have a target. Our actions are arrows. The arrows should hit the target.

    Road rage, social-media disappointment, food hoarding, slothful TV bingeing, and compulsive internet shopping are arrows lying uselessly in the grass. Giving ourselves over to unruly passions becomes a recipe for misery. Happiness, by contrast, means hitting the target by living the good life. Aristotle called this goal eudaimonia.

    Because I am Ashkenazi Jewish on my mother’s side and Roman Catholic on my father’s, I am familiar with versions of this framework. In Judaism, we aspire to a good life while wrestling with the evil inclination. God has given us enough reason and strength to move toward him. We meet God halfway, and God reciprocates.

    Christianity tells a more severe story. We don’t merely fail to pursue the good life. We run from it. We love darkness and self-indulgence. We enjoy our little kingdoms of complacent narcissism, where the rest of humanity can suffer somewhere safely beyond the property line. But God is the Hound of Heaven. He hunts us down and drags us toward the fold while we scream and kick our legs. As Paul and John explain it, we are sinners in need of a divine rescue mission before we can turn around and walk the true path.

    So reading The Good Life Method makes me anxious.

    I agree with the general framework. Our lives should not be rooted in materialism, social status, and self-indulgence. We should seek to become good people. My anxiety begins with that old warning: the devil is in the details.

    Can we reach the good life and find atonement and redemption through Aristotle’s philosophy? Through the similar structure of Judaism? Through Christianity? There are similarities, certainly, but there are also enormous differences. Take eschatology, a frightening word for “last things.” What exactly are the last things? Does death bring annihilation, the complete extinction of consciousness? Do we enter some larval underworld imagined by ancient Greek religion? Do we haunt Hades, Sheol, or Gehenna, neither happy nor tortured, but half-conscious, like someone slowly waking from a codeine dream?

    Or is there a Judgment Day, a Lake of Fire, and a heavenly mansion where, as Aquinas notoriously suggested, part of the pleasure enjoyed by the blessed comes from witnessing the punishment of the damned? They mocked you on earth for your pious ways. Now look who’s laughing.

    The devil is in the details.

    So I am anxious.

    But I read on.

    I know the book ahead of me is not some saccharine self-help manual stuffed with fortune-cookie platitudes. Nor is it a New Age sales pitch assuring me that I can be spiritual and selfish at the same time because having my cake and eating it is apparently my God-given entitlement. Like any worthwhile book, The Good Life Method intends to challenge me. It will throw down a gauntlet. It will force me to examine my values and priorities.

    Because Sullivan and Blaschko teach at Notre Dame and are practicing Roman Catholics, however, I don’t yet know whether their goal is to convert me in the specifically religious sense or in the more universal philosophical sense. Nor do I know whether universal moral improvement is sufficient once eschatology enters the room.

    If I practiced a particular religious faith, I’m not sure I would be satisfied if people adopted my moral philosophy and stopped there. That would be like repainting an old car. You cleaned and stripped the surface. You repaired the body. You spread the Bondo, sanded it smooth, applied the primer, and congratulated yourself on the progress.

    But you stopped.

    No sealer. No base coat. No clear coat. No curing.

    You understood Aristotle. You understood the arrows and the target. You may even have become a nicer person. But you failed to conform those principles to the required orthodoxy. You are an unfinished automobile sitting under fluorescent shop lights with enormous patches of Bondo across the doors.

    You are an eyesore.

    I am overcome with these thoughts, and I haven’t even finished the Introduction.

    Apparently one thing that did not retire when I did was my compulsion to worry, fret, obsess, and make myself increasingly miserable while reading books designed to teach me how to be happy.

  • My Inner Buzzkill Has Tenure

    My Inner Buzzkill Has Tenure

    You don’t really understand the adage “you are your own worst enemy” until you hit your mid-sixties. A dark voice inside you grows louder, casts its shadow over the proceedings, and begins offering unsolicited commentary on your future. You can “stay active,” “think good thoughts,” exercise, and hit your daily nutrient macros, but the voice remains unimpressed.

    In my case, the voice sounds disturbingly like Glum, the slump-shouldered, pessimistic Lilliputian sad sack from the childhood cartoon The Adventures of Gulliver. Glum was famous for expecting catastrophe. His entire philosophy could be reduced to one sentence: “We’ll never make it.”

    My Glum has updated the script.

    “Handwriting’s on the wall.”

    I can be minding my own business, driving across town to run an errand, swinging kettlebells in my garage, preparing overnight buckwheat groats while NPR murmurs from the kitchen radio, or reading the amino-acid profile on the back of a five-pound tub of protein powder when the voice crawls out of some dark crevice in my soul.

    “Handwriting’s on the wall.”

    I’ve heard the expression all my life but never paid much attention to it. Now I understand its appeal. It is an efficient little package of doom. Bad days ahead. Imminent disaster. Catastrophe. Loneliness. Helplessness. Hopelessness. Futility.

    Thank you, Glum. I was just trying to make breakfast.

    You have to take this voice seriously, not because its predictions contain great wisdom, but because the voice can make the genuine difficulties of aging worse than they need to be.

    Challenges are baked into the human condition. They should be accepted, perhaps even embraced, rather than rehearsed in advance. Suppose you buy a brand-new car. There is much to enjoy: the pride of ownership, the satisfaction of having researched every model within your budget, the latest safety technology, the quiet cabin, the sleek contours announcing to the neighbors that you remain a person of impeccable judgment.

    You just spent forty thousand dollars. You would like twenty minutes to enjoy yourself.

    Glum appears in the passenger seat.

    “Handwriting’s on the wall.”

    There will be repairs. Recalls. Door dings. Insurance increases. Next year’s model will look better and get four more miles per gallon. Eventually the transmission will fail, and one day the entire magnificent machine will be crushed into a metallic cube.

    Enjoy your new car.

    Glum doesn’t help you prepare for life’s difficulties. He simply makes you suffer from them twice: once before they happen and again when they actually arrive. He is your inner buzzkill.

    Some people have a louder inner buzzkill than others. The source could be biology, culture, trauma, temperament, or some cocktail of all four. What matters is developing a strategy for dealing with him.

    First, identify the voice.

    In my case, Glum is a cognitive distortion—a mental event generated by fear and masquerading as prophecy. To understand him, I have to recognize that he is rooted in the primal fear of loss and death. The fear itself is real. Loss is real. Death is real. But Glum’s prognosis of my remaining life is not reality. It is fear pretending to be an oracle.

    Second, recognize the self-fulfilling prophecy.

    If I allow fear to curdle my ability to participate in the present, I will squander the very life I’m frightened of losing. I will have surrendered my power to Glum, and the resulting misery will appear to vindicate him.

    “See?” Glum will say. “Told you.”

    Of course he told me. He helped cause it.

    Third, recognize that Glum is the master of pre-suffering.

    Aging guarantees losses, frustrations, illness, uncertainty, and eventually death. Glum’s trick is making you experience these events before they happen. A future car repair becomes today’s anxiety. Future physical decline contaminates today’s workout. Eventual death ruins today’s oatmeal.

    You don’t need to deny future suffering. You need to refuse advance billing.

    When something bad happens, deal with the actual problem. Don’t pay interest on misery that hasn’t arrived. Otherwise you won’t be able to play the piano, work out, write, enjoy your breakfast, or do much of anything except rehearse catastrophes.

    Fourth, answer Glum by living.

    Glum says, “Handwriting’s on the wall.”

    Your response doesn’t need to be, “Everything will be wonderful.” That is merely Glum wearing a motivational-speaker costume.

    A better response is: “Perhaps. What can I do today?”

    Exercise. Write. Practice piano. Call someone. Eat well. Grade the essays. Take the walk.

    Agency doesn’t refute mortality. It prevents mortality from colonizing the present.

    Fifth, accept that you will never terminate Glum.

    He is with you. He has always been with you.

    Looking back, I realize Glum didn’t suddenly appear in my sixties. He was there during childhood. He was there during young adulthood. He has accompanied me through most of my life, providing an unwanted running commentary on the possibility that everything might go horribly wrong.

    I’ve even lost friends over the years because they consciously or unconsciously recognized my inner pessimist and went running for the hills.

    I don’t blame them.

    Some comedians have managed to turn Glum into a career. Richard Lewis comes to mind. He took the internal voice of catastrophe, dragged it onto a stage, put a microphone in front of it, and made people laugh.

    That may be one of the better ways of managing Glum.

    Mock him.

    Glum is an idiot worthy of ridicule, but he remains an idiot with tenure.

    And there is another uncomfortable truth. Glum is part of you. You’ve grown attached to him. You hate him, but you also love him. After decades together, you have developed one of those poisonous relationships neither party has the courage to end.

    Glum is your internal frenemy.

    So recognize him. Understand where he comes from. Laugh at his absurdity. Accept that he may never leave.

    But do not take orders from him.

  • There Is No Free Luau

    There Is No Free Luau

    I recently dreamed that a high school friend persuaded me to go with him to Hawaii. The appeal was that he had discovered a life hack: We could attend Hawaiian luaus—traditional feasts—for free. He had somehow discovered a loophole in the airline tickets that allowed us to attend any luau we wanted and gorge ourselves to our hearts’ content without paying a dime.

    I was intrigued. So off I went, jumping from one island to another in pursuit of the free buffet.

    But things didn’t go as planned. We would arrive at a luau, load up our plates, and gradually the mood would change. The paying customers began glaring at us. Eventually someone would mutter, “Freeloaders.”

    My friend was undeterred. He ate with tremendous pleasure. Roast pig, rice, pineapple, whatever appeared before him disappeared into his mouth. The hostility seemed to improve his appetite.

    I was different. I felt guilty. I wasn’t wanted, after all. But somehow I had committed myself to following my friend on his eating adventures. Feast after feast, we were greeted with increasing hostility. Soon the paying customers began sticking toothpicks into the food with little flags displaying the price of each item. Apparently they wanted my friend and me to understand precisely how much our free lunch was costing everybody else.

    I stopped eating altogether.

    My friend continued to gorge himself without so much as a sting of conscience. I sat there surrounded by roast pig and tropical fruit while strangers glared at me as if I had personally engineered the collapse of Western civilization. Eventually they knew I wasn’t even eating, but that didn’t matter. My mere presence made them angry. I had become a symbol of everything wrong with the world: a man sitting beside a buffet he hadn’t paid for.

    Meanwhile, my friend was happily feasting on roast pig. If anything, the fact that it was free made the pig taste better.

    The dream taught me something about the meaning of “free.” Something can be legally free and still exact a price. I had the legal entitlement to the food, but I couldn’t bear the ill will of the people who had paid for it. Their anger became the bill. My friend and I had discovered the same loophole but inhabited completely different moral universes. I experienced every hostile glance as an invoice. He experienced every hostile glance as seasoning.

    By the end of the dream, I understood that I could never become a true freeloader. I simply didn’t have the stomach for it.

    My friend did.

    And he was going back for seconds.

  • The Salvation Hustle

    The Salvation Hustle

    You reach a point in life when everything feels desperate. Losing weight will save you from dying in your bed at night from sleep apnea. Writing a publishable book or viral essay will save you from being both irrelevant and useless. Making a viral video will do the same. Embarking on a successful podcast will keep you mentally alive and “part of the conversation.” Starting your own restaurant featuring your grandmother’s brisket with gravy made from a secret family recipe will put you on the map and change what it means to enjoy good brisket. Become a yoga instructor and open your own studio to help people reinvent themselves in ways no one could have imagined. You’re special, dammit, and you’re going to prove it. You just need to work harder. So you must do this. You must do that. Make more sacrifices. Get on the true path. Never take your eyes off the prize.

    But a voice breaks through your insanity and tells you that you’re on a fool’s errand. You’re trying to save your life. Deep down, you know you are losing it.

    That same voice says: Let go. Surrender to the things you can’t control. Don’t live out other people’s fantasies of success. Don’t think fame and popularity will make you whole. Don’t confuse fame and popularity with love. It’s not love. It’s desperation.

    So you retire your delusions. You realize that all the time and energy invested in your various mirages were killing you. You were making a bad investment. Take stock. Assess the damage. You become certain that it’s time to abandon your many chimeras and start from scratch. Use your time and energy on projects rooted in sanity, projects that might actually bear fruit.

    The problem is, you don’t have a clue what these new projects will be. You’ve lived in a fever dream for years, perhaps decades. Where do you begin?

    Such is the existential challenge presented in Lindsay Crouse’s The Case for Quitting: The Surprise Benefits of Opting Out. She observes that too many of us spend enormous amounts of desperate energy auditioning for the role of superstar—the venerated, successful person who sets records and raises the bar in whatever field we pursue, believing that this prized status will make us whole and happy. We create unrealistic expectations and often head down the wrong path. Then we become so exhausted from pursuing our dreams that we no longer have enough distance to assess whether those dreams are even viable.

    Crouse uses the metaphor of a duck to describe this desperate period of her life: “gliding along on the surface while my legs churned furiously below.” That brief description perfectly captures the life of quiet desperation described by Henry David Thoreau. Always auditioning for some desirable role, we glide along on the surface while below our legs churn furiously in pursuit of some fruitless endeavor.

    Crouse argues that we should take stock of all that furious churning and, when necessary, put an end to it. It’s called quitting. Contrary to society’s condemnation of “the quitter” as someone who lacks perseverance, the real character flaw may be the refusal to quit: cowardice. You need the courage to interrogate the results of your endeavors and ask whether those results merit perseverance. In some cases, quitting can be a good thing. Crouse offers an “alternative definition” of quitter from the Middle French: “to set free.”

    All her life, Crouse confesses, she has been a high achiever, fiercely competitive, always pushing herself to the limit and loath to interrupt her path to glory. When an injury threatened her athletic training, she’d forego the doctor and take an Advil instead. Late-night runs were aided by GPS. When her grandmother died, she didn’t tell her team for fear that it would compromise their performance.

    Looking back at the ways she pushed and punished herself, Crouse questions the wisdom of these often ruthless efforts. Her self-interrogation became serious after she had two children and realized she didn’t want to pass on her “darker types of perseverance” to them. Self-abuse is one thing. Teaching your children the habits of self-abuse crosses the line.

    When the forces of ambition are no longer part of your flourishing but have become a dark pact with fear and desperation, it may be time to abandon ship. It may be time to move on.

  • Hell Insurance and the Problem of Love

    Hell Insurance and the Problem of Love

    I have struggled with the hell doctrine since the age of seventeen. When Francis Xavier preached Christianity in Japan, some converts reportedly wept through the night after learning that family members who had died outside the faith were condemned to eternal hell. I understood something of that anguish when I encountered Christianity in 1979. My new Christian friends told me that my Jewish relatives were in hell. In the next breath, they assured me that Jesus loved me. I had trouble reconciling the two propositions. I wasn’t feeling the love.

    Around 1981, after reading Erich Fromm’s critique of fundamentalist religion, I experienced an enormous release. I felt liberated from what Alfred North Whitehead, in Religion in the Making, describes as the image of an evil God. The relief was so powerful that it felt almost religious itself, as if an immense weight had been lifted from my chest. Over the years, I came to call that experience Fromm Night, a shorthand for an emotional and spiritual liberation too complicated to summarize every time I referred to it.

    This is where my attempts to return to Christianity become painful. Conversion can seem to require me to repudiate Fromm Night—the very experience that once restored my psychological and moral health. To accept orthodox Christianity, I seem required to return to the anguish of those Japanese converts and call that anguish truth. My Jewish relatives are lost. Their suffering is eternal. My horror at this doctrine is something I must overcome. That, presumably, is my cross to bear.

    And this is the love of Jesus. This is the light. This is the true path. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through him.

    But I keep encountering a problem that I cannot bully myself into resolving. Suppose I force myself to bow before Jesus. Is submission the same thing as love? If some part of me remains horrified by what I am required to believe, can I truthfully say that I love Jesus with all my heart, mind, and soul? If accepting Christ requires me to suppress Fromm Night, what exactly have I accepted—Jesus, or my fear of being wrong about Jesus?

    These questions lead me toward still more disturbing ones. Is Jesus cruel? Is orthodox Christianity cruel? Or have I misunderstood Christianity so profoundly that I have mistaken a human theology of exclusion for the person of Jesus himself?

    Yet the easy escape doesn’t satisfy me either. I don’t want to manufacture a domesticated Christianity stripped of every difficult doctrine until Jesus becomes little more than a dispenser of therapeutic reassurance. If Christianity is true, I want to confront what it actually claims, not dilute it into spiritual pablum because the harder version frightens me.

    So I remain caught between two powerful experiences. One tells me that escaping a theology of eternal punishment was among the great liberations of my life. The other tells me not to dismiss Jesus merely because Christianity makes demands upon me that I find unbearable.

    I am still trying to understand spiritual reality. I have not given up. There are profound aspects of Jesus that continue to draw me. Part of me longs to relinquish the selfish ego, turn outward, serve others, forgive, sacrifice, and discover whether that really is the path toward a fuller life.

    But the contradiction remains. I cannot make myself forget Fromm Night, nor can I make myself stop looking toward Jesus.

    That ambivalence is not an intellectual puzzle I occasionally entertain. It has been one of the enduring torments of my spiritual life.

  • The Crosswalk That Entered My Brain

    The Crosswalk That Entered My Brain

    At certain crosswalks, you press the button and wait for the light to change while a Martian voice begins issuing a command:

    Wait.

    A few seconds pass.

    Wait.

    Then again.

    Wait.

    I assume this auditory feature exists for visually impaired pedestrians who need a clear signal before crossing the street, an entirely sensible and necessary function. But apparently nobody designing these systems has discovered a way to make the human voice both audible and pleasant. The crosswalk voice doesn’t merely enter the ear. It arrives through the skull. Each Wait lands less like a word than the neurological thunderbolt that shoots through your body when your bare toe collides with the leg of a dresser.

    A couple of weeks ago, my family and I encountered these talking crosswalks while walking around downtown Carlsbad. At first, I merely disliked the voice. Then it began drilling into my brain. After sufficient exposure, something peculiar happened: my mind decided that the only way to survive the sound was to absorb it.

    I became a victim of Auditory Possession: the involuntary internalization of an irritating sound until you begin reproducing the very noise you desperately want to escape. The crosswalk doesn’t merely assault you with Wait. It enters the nervous system, establishes residency, and eventually begins broadcasting through your mouth. You haven’t imitated the machine. The machine has acquired a human speaker.

    So I began walking around downtown Carlsbad saying Wait in precisely the same robotic voice.

    Wait.

    My family asked me to stop.

    Wait.

    They asked again.

    Wait.

    At this point, they were presumably reconsidering the wisdom of bringing me on vacation. Perhaps I should have remained safely in Torrance, where I could work out, watch true-crime documentaries, and pose no threat to pedestrians.

    Instead, I wandered around a pleasant seaside town sounding like a malfunctioning piece of municipal infrastructure.

    By the end of our walks through Carlsbad, the only true crime anyone had actually witnessed was a grown man roaming the streets repeatedly barking Wait at strangers while his mortified family maintained a safe distance behind him.

  • The Edna Challenge

    The Edna Challenge

    My great-grandmother Edna was born in Poland shortly before 1900. In 1904, when she was still a little girl, pogroms swept through her city and her parents were massacred. She was taken in by a cruel stepmother who treated her less like a daughter than a household slave.

    Somehow, in 1911, Edna escaped. Still a girl, she crossed an ocean and arrived in New York.

    The family she left behind would fare even worse. Much of it was eventually annihilated by the Nazis. Her older brother Ellis, his wife, and their two children were sent to Auschwitz. His wife and children were murdered there. Ellis survived, came to New York after the war, became a dentist, and eventually retired to Miami.

    Edna married a man afflicted with severe arthritis. A doctor prescribed injections of gold, a treatment that sounds today like something devised by an alchemist with excellent malpractice insurance. The gold didn’t cure him. His condition worsened until he became an invalid, leaving Edna with the exhausting responsibility of caring for him.

    By the time I met her, in 1968, her husband was dead and Edna was living in Leisure World in Seal Beach.

    I was six.

    I loved her immediately.

    She spoke with a thick Polish accent and carried a melancholy that somehow made me feel safe. She cooked savory kasha dishes for me and let me sit beside her watching soap operas. Her favorite was As the World Turns. Edna, who had survived pogroms, an abusive childhood, immigration, family annihilation, and years caring for an invalid husband, could become magnificently agitated over the romantic judgment of a fictional woman on daytime television.

    When some charlatan started courting one of the female characters, Edna would shake her fist at the television.

    “Leave him!”

    Apparently surviving the twentieth century did not prepare her to tolerate a bad boyfriend.

    I found this deeply touching. Life had given Edna every conceivable reason to withdraw from the world, yet there she was, emotionally invested in some ridiculous soap-opera romance as though civilization itself depended upon this woman dumping the bum before the next commercial break.

    Edna was ethnically Jewish, but as far as I could tell, she wasn’t religious.

    And here begins what I call The Edna Challenge.

    The Edna Challenge is the difficulty of reconciling Christianity’s diagnosis of universal spiritual deficiency with the memory of a nonreligious person who seemed morally whole without religion.

    Edna didn’t strike me as someone waiting to be completed.

    She possessed a fierce moral intelligence. Once, one of her great-grandchildren, a red-haired boy with serious behavioral problems, knocked my younger brother off a bunk bed. My brother landed hard and began crying, a large bump rising on his head.

    Edna gathered him into her arms and rocked him.

    Then came the verdict.

    “He is not worthy of being my great-grandchild.”

    There was no committee meeting. No therapeutic language. No discussion of developmental stages or impulse control. The Supreme Court of Edna had convened, heard the evidence, and handed down its decision.

    I loved her all the more for it.

    Her daughter Mildred, my maternal grandmother, wasn’t religious either. When I was eight, she told me plainly that she believed this earthly life was the whole story. No heaven. No afterlife. No celestial sequel.

    Like Edna, Mildred seemed complete to me.

    Neither woman appeared to experience herself as fallen, spiritually dead, estranged from God, or afflicted by some invisible metaphysical disease requiring a supernatural cure. They loved people. They made moral judgments. They endured suffering. They possessed humor, loyalty, anger, tenderness, and dignity.

    I cannot look backward and identify the missing piece.

    Then there’s me.

    I’m a different beast altogether.

    When I read Paul’s Letter to the Romans, I feel as though Paul has somehow obtained my psychological records. I know what I should do and don’t do it. I do things I have already decided I shouldn’t do. Appetite fights judgment. Vanity fights humility. Intention fights behavior. The person I am seems perpetually at war with the person I believe I should become.

    Paul describes the divided consciousness, and I recognize the address.

    I understand the hunger for salvation because I experience the condition for which salvation appears to be the remedy. I want the wholeness and holiness Paul describes. I understand what it means to feel incapable of repairing yourself with the same machinery that keeps producing the damage.

    But then I remember Edna.

    And Christianity’s universal diagnosis becomes difficult for me.

    Perhaps Paul is right about me. But was he right about her?

    A Christian can answer that Edna’s apparent wholeness doesn’t matter. Sin isn’t merely psychological distress or bad behavior. She could have been loving, courageous, morally serious, and emotionally integrated while remaining estranged from God at some deeper level.

    I understand the argument.

    But The Edna Challenge remains.

    Because the diagnosis begins to describe something I cannot see.

    Edna survived horrors I can barely imagine. Her parents were murdered. Her childhood was stolen. Much of her family disappeared into the Holocaust. Her brother walked out of Auschwitz without his wife and children. She crossed an ocean, built a life, cared for an invalid husband, became a widow, and grew old carrying memories I was too young to understand.

    Yet she did not strike me as spiritually defective.

    She struck me as Edna.

    Meanwhile, her comparatively fortunate great-grandson sits decades later reading Romans and recognizing himself on every page.

    Perhaps Christianity is right that both of us needed the same salvation.

    Perhaps my memory of Edna tells me nothing about her deepest spiritual condition.

    Or perhaps Paul discovered something extraordinarily true about certain human beings and mistook it for the universal condition.

    I don’t know.

    That uncertainty sits at the center of my struggle with religious faith. Before I can accept the prescription, I have to understand the diagnosis. And whenever I’m told that humanity suffers from a universal spiritual deficiency that only religion can address, I find myself returning to Leisure World in 1968.

    There is Edna in her chair.

    The television is on.

    As the World Turns has presented another romantic scoundrel.

    Edna shakes her fist at the screen.

    And I find myself asking the question Christianity has not yet answered to my satisfaction:

    What, exactly, was missing from her?

  • Damascus Syndrome

    Damascus Syndrome

    Many years ago, my wife explained something about men that has stayed with me: we are suckers for violent conversions.

    She grew up in a church where people regularly stood before the congregation and delivered their testimonies. These were rarely modest affairs. Nobody announced that over several years he had gradually become less selfish and slightly easier to live with. That would hardly justify taking the microphone.

    No, there had to be an abyss.

    The man had been drinking, drugging, fighting, fornicating, worshipping money, driving ninety miles an hour toward eternal damnation—and then, at 3:17 one Tuesday morning, Jesus grabbed the steering wheel.

    My wife would roll her eyes.

    She suspected that some of these testimonies contained less piety than theater. Ostensibly, the man was glorifying God. Curiously, however, God had given him forty-five minutes of stage time to explain what an exceptionally fascinating sinner he had been.

    Call it Damascus Syndrome: the male longing for a catastrophic encounter that divides life into a disgraced Before and a redeemed After.

    Men seem particularly susceptible to it. We don’t want gradual improvement. We don’t want to become five percent more patient every year. We want an earthquake. We want the old self dragged from the wreckage and a new self emerging through the smoke.

    In other words, we want an origin story.

    Before Peter Parker gets bitten by the spider and Bruce Wayne enters the Batcave, Saul of Tarsus is riding toward Damascus with murder in his heart.

    Saul isn’t searching for truth. He believes he already owns it. He has his convictions, his mission, his enemies. Then comes the light.

    A vision. A voice.

    Suddenly the man who knows exactly where he is going cannot see the road.

    Saul is left blind, helpless, and disoriented. For three days he sits in darkness while a greater darkness collapses inside him. His old identity has suffered an internal earthquake. The load-bearing walls have cracked. The building has been condemned.

    Then a stranger arrives claiming to have been sent by the Lord.

    More unsettling still, Saul will become Paul.

    This new identity feels less like self-actualization than an eviction notice. Saul wants his old certainties back. His old mission. His old enemies. He doesn’t want transformation. He wants things returned to factory settings.

    But Damascus doesn’t negotiate.

    The light has hijacked his life.

    This is the part of the story that fascinates me and makes my wife suspicious. Men love the idea that somewhere out there awaits an event sufficiently violent to blast through the accumulated concrete of the false self. We don’t merely want to change. We want to be struck down, preferably with witnesses.

    A quiet epiphany while loading the dishwasher lacks production value.

    Damascus Syndrome demands thunder.

    Emmanuel Carrère captures the deeper paradox of Paul’s conversion in The Kingdom: “Paul was no longer himself; he was finally himself.”

    That sentence overturns our comforting modern idea of authenticity. We usually imagine the authentic self as something we express: Follow your instincts. Find your voice. Be true to yourself. Peel away society’s expectations until the magnificent original You finally appears.

    Damascus proposes something considerably more terrifying.

    What if the self you are determined to express is precisely the self that has to go?

    What if your deepest identity lies underneath the personality, convictions, ambitions, resentments, appetites, and certainties you have spent decades defending?

    Then becoming yourself requires losing yourself.

    This possibility gives Damascus Syndrome its genuine spiritual power. It also gives men an irresistible opportunity for grandiosity. After all, once you’ve been annihilated and reborn, somebody needs to hear about it.

    Preferably everybody.

    Preferably in hardcover.

    My wife remains skeptical. She has heard too many testimonies, watched too many men turn repentance into performance art, seen too many ordinary psychological crises inflated into The Dark Night of the Soul: My Journey from Darkness into Light.

    Perhaps she has a point.

    Maybe men can’t tolerate the thought that maturity might happen quietly—that becoming a better person could involve thousands of small corrections made without applause, lightning bolts, blindness, voices from heaven, or a publishing contract.

    We want Damascus.

    We want the spider bite.

    We want the Batcave.

    We want our old identity blown to pieces so that we can stagger from the crater transformed, finally ourselves, with one additional blessing from God:

    a hell of a story.