Psalm 23

¹ The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
²     He makes me lie down in green pastures;
he leads me beside still waters;
³     he restores my soul.
He leads me in right paths
    for his name’s sake.

⁴ Even though I walk through the darkest valley,
    I fear no evil,
for you are with me;
    your rod and your staff,
    they comfort me.

⁵ You prepare a table before me
    in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
    my cup overflows.
⁶ Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
    all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
    my whole life 

My Church is in the middle of a short series on Psalm 23. More specifically, we are narrowing in on that troubled space between the first and second stanzas. A space that sees a sudden, seemingly unexpected shift in its tone and its focus, this difficult movement from the positive outlook of verses 1-3 to the sudden intrusion (or invasion) of this picture of the valley.

There were a couple of thoughts that stood out for me from this morning. First, I suddenly found myself very aware of the shift in language from “He”  to “You.” Second, given the presence of that shift in pronouns, verse 5 suddenly took on a whole new sense of meaning.

There’s no shortage of thoughts available online about this shift in language. The most common interpretation stays with the tendency to read this poem primarily as an internal struggle, typically one assigned to the voice of David. It reflects this movement from the more propositional yet somewhat more distanced nature of the claims in verses 1-3, to the more intimate nature of verse 4 “as” one who now find themselves in the valley.

There is likely some truth in this take. This certainly feels true to the human experience. When things are going good, its easy to cite theological truisms about the goodness of God and blessings of this life and this world. When we find ourselves in the valley it becomes much more difficult. This is where it moves from the propositional claims to the weathered statement of someone not only seeking the truth of such statements, but seeking them in the face of a reality that seems to challenge their trustworthiness and truthfulness. If we take the Psalm as a whole, you can see this intentional drawing out of a journey, one that begins with the confessions, sets those teachings within the fires of circumstnace, and ultimatley formulates a fresh persepctive on the same confessions- Surely, the Psalmist says, goodness and mercy shall follow me. Surely I shall dwell in the house of the Lord. This is what emerges from the valley with the Psalmist. In a powerful point of awareness regarding how this must work, the Psalmists emphasizes this now wheathered, formed and tested confession as “the whole” of ones life. Such knowledge can only come from the journey itself.

But I also couldn’t help but think there is yet another layer to this shift that was worth exploring.

As per the Bible Project in an article titled What Does Psalm 23 Mean: How a Famous Psalm Can Say God is the Shepherd- King of the Exodus Without Mentioning the Exodus, it writes,

“In the ancient world, kings were often portrayed as shepherds.”

Why does this matter. It matters to understanding the backdrop for the Psalm itself. The article goes on to cite Old Testament scholar Timothy Laniak in outlining how, for the ancients, the shepherd language was used specifically to denote the characteristics of a just ruler, something that the text intentionally contrasts using hyperlinked language with the primary narrative of the Psalm’s audience: the Exodus, where we find the story of the enslaving Powers and God’s liberation.

In an especailly intriguing note, it cites an early interpretive translation of 23:3 in the Hebrew;

“It is the LORD who fed his people in the desert; they lacked nothing… He restores my soul with manna.”

Again, why does this matter to our reading of the Psalm? For me, it satisfied this lingering sense that this Psalm was speaking to something much broader than just an individual’s journey, something that I think gets missed in our typical interpretations of this Psalm as a purely internal journey. Here the Psalmist is not citing a life, the Psalm is in fact telling the story of a people, of Israel itself. One is even able to imagine an audience for the words, inviting them in to a familiar liturgy of rememberance of that story’s pivotal event.

What happens when this larger story is teased to the surface is we are able to see the patterns that these scriptures are seeking to evoke. A pattern that begins with enslavement, moves through liberation, thus entering into the wilderness on the way to the new creation reality. The Bible Project article makes the point that for the ancients steeped in the  lanaguage of the Torah, this pattern is established in the first five books (the Pentateuch) and then becomes the framework for the rest of the scriptures, including the telling of the Gospel story. From this angle, the particular nature of this story takes on a cosmic interest, casting itself out into the expectation for the whole of creation. In finally arriving at the fresh conviction, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me (and) dwell in the house of the LORD,” becomes a conviction rooted in the hope of the new creation, the liberation and renewal of the whole of the cosmos. These two things cannot be torn apart. This also helps to reframe the shift in language to this common practice of a figure taking on the image of Israel, something that becomes integral to understanding the story of Jesus as well. This reaches all the way back ot Moses as a representative figure.

I mentioned how, for me, this also gives verse 5 a whole new meaning as well.

“You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head iwth oil; my cup overlow

This table now becomes an image not simply for the restoration of Israel from exile, but for the restoration of the whole of creaiton. In the chaos and the darkness we find Gods presence making itself known to the enslaved, but one aspect of this expectation that is baked into the story of Israel that gets forgotten is the cosmic renewal. This table is an invitation, but it is an invitation placed between the Powers and the oppressed. A table set to feed the desolate and the hungry, but also to tell a better story. A story that echos with the opening words of Psalm 24, declaring that “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it; for he has founded it on the seas, and established it on the rivers.” Here, in the midst of the choas waters, set in the darkest valley, in the hardened wildnerness of circumstance and struggle, that the initial confession of 23:1-3 finds its true embodiment.

The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want… even as I walk through the valley and wait for the promised renewal. Behold, a table has been set along the way, inviting the weary and the opppressed and bearing witness to the Powers to the simple truth that “God is with us.” God has taken residence among us. God is present, making, leading, restoring.

I hate politics

Or perhaps better put, I don’t believe in politics.

What do I mean by that statement? First off, the reason why I feel compelled to make that statement in this moment right now? That’s an easy one to answer: it’s a civic election year here in Winnipeg, which means the welcome mat to the gates of hell has been rolled out in all its glory.

When it comes to the initial statement in and of itself however, that’s a harder question to answer. I used to love politics. And by love, I mean I deemed it virtuous and my sworn duty on both sides of my fundamentalist past and subsequent deconstruction, to align myself with it. You couldn’t be your ideologies if you weren’t clearly identified with your politics after all, and those ideologies were the point.

I still deem it an irony to consider that I came to hate politics while standing far outisde of my particular “Christian” fundamentalist past. An irony, but one that makes perfect sense when I look back on it today. It stemmed from a moment when I recognized, in my movement away from that particular Christian expression I had inadvertently adopted an opposing fundamentlist approach and position. It turned out I hadn’t left the fundamentalism behind, I had simply switched ideological sides.

That’s when I met the cynics. That embattled and misunderstood philosphical tradition that believes all politics are built on a construction, an illusion, and therefore choses to liberate itself precisely through its rejection of all such constraints. This, it seemed, made sense. The problem the cycnics faced? It consistently positioned them on the outside of society, because society, as it turns out, needs those constructs to survive. Truth however, is not interested in the act of survival or utility, rather it is interested primarily in the authenticity of one’s beliefs. How it is that our constructs relate to those beliefs is the muddied ground it tries to clear away and clarify in the process, and usually around the prevailing question lobbied at functionalist approches regarding whether “truth” actually matters in the first place to a world obsessed with utilitarian terms.

In some odd way one can also argue that a constructed society and its politics equally needs the cynics in order to aspire to such a question.

More irony: a cynic doesn’t just emerge as a product of such a society, it can only exist by way of its response to something that transcends such constraints. In other words, someone from the outside might call you cynical about the ability of those societal constructs to say something true, but the cynics position can only be qualified in so far as it is seeking truth which transcends the constructs themselves. This is an extremely difficult distinction for a modernist to entertain, as we have become conditioned towards seeing the constructs as being synonymous with truth itself. It is in fact, for the cynics at least, the rejection of these constructs as authoritative that matters most to our concept of truth. It’s part of how this philosophical movement seeks this authenticity of belief beyond the utilitarian nature of the world’s constructions. It must be able to distinguish between these two things.

An important note here about what a cynic is. As with most words, our modern iterations and definitions exist quite removed from the words ancient origins or usage. It could be said that modernism sees cynicism as a purely negative act, a matter of choosing to or being uanble to believe in the thing we are indeed rejecting as a source or expression of truth, which in modernist terms relates to facts or material defintions of reality. The ancient role of the cynics was actually about a more positive act of reclaiming that which is true precisely by distinguishing between the construct and the reality. This transcends the superficial dualism that seperates material defintiions from other forms of truth. It is asking bigger questions than our modern definitions allow, mired as they have become in its politics (a material construction).

One mantra I have long carried with me on this journey, although I confess I no longer remember where I got it from, is simply this: Politics is what the world has when it detaches itself from philosophy. I would also say this reaches even more broadly into the reality of theology. In other words, when we become disinterested, willfully or not, in truth as something that transcends our constructs, politics becomes our central authority. We then become incapable of distinguishing between worldviews, with our opposing political sides arguing about ideology from within what functionally becomes the same, singular worldview (materialism or physicalism), a fact that renders arguments on both sides essentially incoherent.

A quick definition of politics taken from the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

Politics: the art or science of government such as, concern with guiding or influencing governmental policy, winning and holding control over a government, and actions and practices or policies relating to politics

This definition pushes further, adding subsequent uses that relate directly to a functioning political life, political opinions, and more broadly speaking “the complex of relations between people living in society.”

This, then, sets us within a much larger conversation about the relationship between what we believe to be true about this world and how it is that we partcipate in it. One could summarize this definition by saying it in the following way:

1. A political construct emerges within a functioning society

2. The political construct gains a voice of authority, and we treat that authority as truth

3. We fight for control by using the construct to create our ideological lines and our identity

4. The construct comes to define our relationship to truth

The cynic, in contrast (or more adequately in repsonse) seeks to name what politics is at the front, and moves to reframe the narrative by stripping it of its authority. In doing so it allows authentic truth to emerge detached from the limiting constraints of our participation in society. This doesn’t diminish the reality of our participation, rather it clarifies it.

There’s another layer that gets brought in though, one that relates more to our modern landscape than the ancient one, and that is the Enlightenments rebranding of this ideological warring (see above) as a new found secular-religious divide. Suddenly these ideological camps become synonymous with that divide, meaning one’s beliefs about transcendent philosophical and/or theological truth are now anchored to one’s political position as part of what can be called the creation of our culture wars. The cynics role now, by implication, becomes muddied by the weaponizing of our political rhetoric. You can no longer stand apart from politics because the wars inevitably drag you back in. Any and all cynicism now inadvertently serves these warring sides.

Thus, the most important thing I gleaned from my time with the cynics, something I still very much aspire towards, is the simple endeavor of continuing to argue for the most important task of any person, which is the formation and subsequent naming of our master narratives. Apart from this there can be no coherent debate, no legitimate argument, only this politically defined illusion the West likes to name and call democracy, a term that does a lot of work in compartmentalizing the different facets of our political side, work that I don’t think it can rightly own. I’ve often heard it said, democracy is not something that actually exists, rather it gains its power through convincing people to believe that it does. A cynic’s position would say the real crutch of the matter digs deeper yet, and that is towards the narratives that underlay the construct.

The pure cynic understands that the goal is not complete detachment from society, although some have tried. The cynic understands that we are all products of such a society and we cannot help but function within it. What the cynic does do however is apply their cynicism about what is actually authoritative to those very constructs they participating in. They refuse to allow it to become an authoratative voice in and of itself. They often made a practice out of random spectacle and intentional disruption of normative function, leaning into a practice of deconstructing what we often deem to be turned sacred within those constructs. This becomes a way of pointing out the foolishness of it all, even as we appear to be bound to its necessity at the same time (such as the idea of democracy one could say).

For such a cynic operating today, it tends to demand a habit of flipping sides, of refusing to allow this secular-religious divide to turn politics into a false image of itself, refusing to allow it to become an authoratative voice. This is a much more tepid and constrained expression of the ancient Tradition, constrained as it is by our modern dualism, but it is nevertheless still important in a society where the only unifying force now tends to be politics.

One thing to remember about the ancient Cynics is that they weren’t simply out to rock the boat for its own sake. Dig underneath the grand displays that were not hesitant about pushing their way into any ordered, seemingly sacred societal construct without fear of insulting its importance, and you will find their deep rooted convictions regarding a seeking after authenticity of belief. You find this consistent need to bring a clarifying authority to the surface. They were obsessed with this kind of integrity beteeen what they believed to be true and the reality of the functional life. What defeated a cynic more than anything was this sense that their life might betray a sense that they had ceased to care about the relationship between their beliefs and their life. One’s life could be deeply inconsistent, that was not the thing that condemned. What condemned was allowing something like politics to subsume a reasoned assessment of what is actually true about the nature of this world. The greatest enemy then was apathy or willful ignorance when it came to the hard work of attending for the implications of our beliefs. This would go on to have a huge influence on my life moving forward, even if it remains my greatest obstacle. The modern western world is not conducive to occupying this space. Even more difficult is figuring out how to translate this into the modern space in a way that isn’t completely self defeating. Ther’s a fine line between cycnism and despair.

I began this by noting that yes, Winnipeg is in an election year. And yes, I hate politics. Generally speaking I tend to stay at arms length from political discussions. Where I do tend to get involved is in matters of theology. The problem being, theology and politics have become muddied bedfellows in our present day and age.

If anything can draw me into the waters of political discussion it is a civic election. This, for me, is where the warring tends to have its most grassroots connection to day to day life. And this election year is proving to have its fair share of dramatics.

On one front we have incumbant mayor Scott Gillingham now running for a second term in office. I can still remember when he first started to emerge as a possible contender following consecutive terms by Brian Bowman, who became known as someone so aggressively determined to hold the status quo that decades and decades worth of long standing projects waiting for someone to remove the obstacles standing in their way, kept piling up, and up, and up, leaving his legacy to be remembered as a mild mannered, hold the fort mentality. Which of course is not the way to grow a city. More so it creates its biggest threats when cracks start to show in the foundation.

The issue at the time was two-fold. First, the baffling dismissive of Glen Murray, one of the strongest contendors on the ballot sheet in a long while. And second, the narrative surrounding Gillingham’s past as a pastor. The fear at the time surrounded those earlier signs of things going south “south of the border,” and the fact that anything signifying a mounting effort by the Christian right fueled that trepidation in a city known for occupying that centrist line between East and West.

My take: I have my deep felt criticisms of Gillingham, particularly when it comes to his appraoch to homelessness, which is the primary issue being driven by the NDP on the provincial front at present. There were ways to make this a more fruitful collaboration, and I think Gillingham’s growing into this new role trended towards fear and uncertainty instead, perhaps even a mix of some muddled ideological confusion on his front (if I am interpreting some of his public presence correctly). But there are two things that I would say surprised me about Gillingham:

1, Early in his tenure, after the fog of election period had died down (and notably where there wasn’t the same urgency to play to politics), there were numerous points in which you could see Gillingham publically and visibly being moved towards a change in perspective by what he was finding and what he was seeing in this new found role. The fact that this change in mindset likely pushed against the desires of a portion of his votership (the Christian right) to me was a welcome indication that this, at least by appearance, seemed authentic. It’s a good trait to have in a mayor regardless of their politics. 

2. When Gillingham first took office, I not only feared the potential igniting of that south of the border rhetoric bleeding south, primarily by way of Alberta and Saskatchewan, now creeping eastward, I also assumed that he was going to be another mayor beholden to “taxes and roads” and short on vision. If Gillingham surprised me, its in his uneexpected commmitment to our downtown core. For me, this is always the foundation for everything else. Without this the city suffers. If you actually peruse his list of promises and accomplishments, so many revolve around the core area: portage and main, investments, business innovation, relocating the transit cooridor, Portage Place, a surge in focus on residential neighborhoods, parks, and of course the different more nuanced policies and visions surrounding these things. Again, one doesn’t need to agree with all of these changes to recognize that he demonstrated an ability to remove obstacles for the things he cared about, which is a significant virtue for any mayor to hold.

I admit, I haven’t appreciated the ways he has indulged the political warring as of late, a sign that actual competition entered the race. It also does seem to bring to the surface another side of his public face. Rumours of the age old “inner circle” still being alive and well? The headlines about key counsilors resigning? All of this could be indicative of untold “issues.” To be fair, these are the same things that follow any mayors tenure. Even the inoffessensive Bowman, the very same one who came in promising to dismantle the inner circle Katz supposedly built was a target of the very same criticism.

And for that matter, the fact that there were zero women running for Mayor until very recently remains a deeply frustrating issue in this still reigning boys club.

For the purposes of this campaign, the main competition is the infamous Kevin Klein. Beyond his name bearing close resemblance to that famous product line from Back to the Future, Klein is the legitimate right leaning candidate, complete with shady connections, big business ties, cozy relations with the U.S., and a big name reaching long into Winnipegs history, unforunately alongside Peter Nygard, who is labeled Canada’s version of Epstein.  Say what you will about Klein (and there is plenty to say), but he knows his way around the political arena and brings a degree of professionalism to his credentials.

He’s not the only right leaning candidate. There is also Mike Vogiatzakis, who has been kicking around for the last 8 years in some form or fashion. I confess, while its uncertain how serious we need to take him as a candidate, he is the one I am far more concerned about and been vocal against. Part of the reason is, unlike Klein, he is far more immersed in what we might call the interests of the alt right. Even if he only gains a fraction of the votes, he stands to do the most damage when it comes to firing up that portion of Winnnipeg voters, and given the force of his ties, not even limited to just Winnipeg voters.

In my opinion he is dangerous because, where someone like Klein is a predictable beast, he presents to the public eye as a rogue entry, at least in perception. He comes with a controversial record of failed poliical aspirations over the last 8 years, a publically available list of corrupt and charged business practices, present accusations of sexual abuse, and the primary endorsements of shady personalities, including Patrick Allard, someone whom I have sparred with over the years for his extreme ultra right wing christian nationalist interests (partly because he’s in my neighborhood and voting block, and because he is extremely vocal about it). Mike V lives outside of the city (although he has said he will move to the city if elected), and has fostered momentum from far right leaning voices reaching beyond our provincial lines. One of the very first things he included in his platform was a public statement about how he was bringing his faith into his agenda. A little further down the road he was caught fabricating photos and penning a false narrative on his social media campaign page in a demonstrable and outright act of lying.

All of those things should raise red flags, but he is now being raised up by the Christian right (a segment I well recognize on his threads) as the “non-politician” who is going to restore Christian family values to our city, get tough on crime and immigration, put the money back in the pockets of businesses, and raise Winnipeg up to its once recognized but long buried economic glory. And oh ya, while he’s at it he’s going to help people avoid getting speeding tickets and skirt around red tape (yes, that is tongue and cheek). I say all that to suggest, if this brings up images of a certain red haired personality south of the border, you wouldn’t be the first one thinking that, even if this faction has grown awfully tired of that name being cited at seemingly every turn (they’ve formed their own rhetoric and everything for what is being called a syndrome). Mike V’s (very public and heavily controlled) votership has already been raising up narratives of conspiracy theory (they planted Klein to try and sink V’s campaign because they were afraid he was gainging traction and might win), In their eyes, we are all afraid, to quote a line I’ve seen repeated at nauseum on his election page. Images of “taking back our city” positioning a saintly figure with a figurative bible against a burning city have become common place, invoking a kind of holy war by those long suffering victims of the left, finally standing up and taking their crosses in a charged affront. As someone who spends a lot of time invested in the life of our downtown, it saddens me, because the most powerful force is that of perception. The biggest thing our downtown is in fact the perception, not the reality. Perception not only keeps people from participating in ts life, but it keeps people from actually understanding what the issues (and there are issues, to be sure) are.

I wish all of this could be considered hyperbolic. It’s not. The memes of Winnipeg as a burning cesspool adorned with flames and the rhetoric of “zombieland” are endless. The all too familiar rhetoric is abundant. We know how this works. We know where it leads. We know the outcome. And yet it keeps persisting. A part of the fabric of our modern age.

Just to be clear, my point here is not to lobby for a different “politic” as the answer. My point is call out a unique force on the narrative front. The reason marrying politics to faith is such a problem is not a lobbying for a “secular” ethic in its stead (to borrow a poorly defined and applied word), but because it inhibits our ability to recognize the narratives we have bound ourselves to. For the alt right, it is a political system that save us, justified by making it synonymous with Christian values. Thus, if it desires to bring an alternative “narrative” into the sphere of our shared secular politics, it has crippled its ability to do so. It has, in fact, given the politics an authoriity it does not have. It has simply become another side of a flawed and incoherent worldview.

All we have left at that point is politics.

Politics without a narrative.

And just to be fully clear on this front, I do think the rhetoric and implications of one political side is far greater than the other “as an authoirty.” And my grounds for saying that is my assessment of history. If we cannot help but be partcipants in politics, I will always side with the clearest line towards “love of neighbor” policies that allow me to actively recognize where I stand in resistance to the Powers and its allusions to the liberated self. But of course, what frees me to do this is recognizing that no politic actually has the authority to define how I respond in acts of love towards the very real challenges of living together. What it does have the power toi do is muddy the playing field so that I cannot tell the difference between politics and a guiding narrative. And that to me is always the biggest danger.

“Whats it like?”
“Losing your virginity?” 
“No, dying.” 

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, as it turns out, is about as strange a film as it was finding myself watching it with an audience of approx 10 middle aged men. 

Was this normal? In the scope of the film, maybe. In the context of the films themes, normalcy can probably be deemed the enemy. If nothing else, the films messaging made any form of judgment of ourselves feel misplaced, but I digress.

Fair warning, jts impossible to say anything about this film without spoilers. But then again, even the most blatant spoilers won’t really give this film away. It’s the sort of thing that seems to broadcast its themes in clear bold letters straight across the sky, while also leaving you entirely to your own interpretive devices. 

The first layer could be the simple interpretation or assumption that this film is about learning to be okay with sexual desire in the midst of a world of experience that also offers us those difficult feelings of shame and fear. In terms of where the director is coming from. They based this on their own experience of being offered the chance to reboot the old leprechaun franchise as a queer person. This would be, like I Saw The TV Glow, the Directors previous film, asking the aformentioned question (what does it mean to be okay with sexual desire) from the vantage point of a queer person navigating such desire from within a different or transformed body/perspective.

The movie however doesn’t quite let itself be reduced to those surface interests. Here we have to wade through a swirling mix of visuals and references and potential symbols and metaphors, including but not limited to: 
– the endless scenes featuring what we might call junk food (namely candy, but also fried chicken, both sensualized to the point of clear metaphor) 
– the phallic sword emerging from the water, and the constant references to penetration, be it the kills or the more symbolic internal process 

And then there is the whole “cinema” motif, playing as it does on those classic horror films that mark so many of our first forays into the forbidden territory of things like sex and violence and language. 

And this all just keeps digging a hole of potential interpretive moves deeper and deeper (and yes, a hole at the bottom of the lake where little death resides is also a metaphor).

In an interview with Them, the Director talks about how the images in this film function differenlty than their previous two works, moving from isolation (persons isolated from the world against extant forces) to connection.

“I thought, ‘I need to make sure this is a body movie, not a head movie,’” Schoenbrun tells Them. “It moves from the head to the body: skin performance, bodies moving and interacting with each other. I think it’s the best thing you can film.”

And in keeping with the Directors own story, this is a film that is fundamentally about ones experience of the world, shifting between the particular and the master narratives that govern our stories against such questions of what one might call our essential humanity.

There is the very clear and very broadcast early scene where the main character writes the word DESIRE on a sheet of pape. On one hand blatantly obvious in its definition. On the other hand, emphasizing a point where we need to then actually begin to flesh out what this means, especially as an embodied word, and further yet, as the film clearly notes, allowing it to reach further than the boundaries of sex. And certainly, desire here is manifested in many different forms throughout the film, playing with its unrestricted human capacity for both pleasure and destruction. 

From this word desire comes another word that reoccurs over the course of the film: judgment. A word that seems to keep bringing us back to ones judgment of themselves. At one point the main character, who has lobbied a diatribe about her “work” as a director in repsonse to a question about her life, is called to redirect her words towards answering instead “who she is” as a person. The journey of the story would then suggest an exercise of self discovery on a broader scale 

But it pushes further yet. How do we make sense of a story in which, at one point, our main character is instructed to smoke a joint and free her mind by getting out of her head, as the thing standing in the way of her experiencing and enjoying sex is her own fears about her own self. Only to later have the entire metaphor shift this perspective on its head, however subtly, by indicating the equal tension that such perceptions of liberation require, playing with what is real and what is not. How is it that we one needs to escape the fears of our minds, and yet sexual desire, as explored in this film, is fundamentally liberated by opening up our capacity to be formed by a fantasy, teaching us to ignore the world thats right in front of us for whatever mental escapes happen to turn us on. Getting out of ones head becomes a stepping off point for leading our main character, and indeed teaching her how to get lost even further “in her head.”

A mental escape that then brings us back to the horror movie motif, where what we have is a deluge of “fantasy” that tears down the walls between the different dynamics of the genres fascination with those taboos of violence, sex, fear. 

What emerges here as something of a revelatory point in the arc is the main characters central coveted desire to secretly “occupy” a role in the very film that she states led her to her sexual awakening as a queer person. The same film she is now adapting. A role that, in the span of this plotted movement regarding her characters adaptation of the film within the film, then becomes a muddied fusion of both victim and perpetrator (with, I think, intentional commentary).

As it’s said in the film, letting go is part of the process that really, when it comes to the subject of desire, underscores the fact that all of us are essentially occupying roles in what is a game. Life is a process of role playing, so give yourself over to it, becomes the mantra.

I’m not sure the character in this film can actually escape those lingering sentiments that creep in along the way about loneliness and depression and destruction, embodied feelings and experiences the Director seems inately aware of. These are the destructive things that work their way in from the real world on the outside into our constructed worlds on the inside. For example, the main character describes her polyamorous relationship in terms that reflect an incredible distance between carnal expressions of desire and the words actual sought after meaning. Here both uses want to masquerade as one another. The way she comes to take on the character of her obsession (the actress who plays the main character in the film within the film) is predicated on this same distance, pulling self wanted and self created pleasure out of a superficial relationship. What makes this intriguing to then unpack is, it seems like this theme of distance is something the Director really wants to tackle head on.

To go back to that quote I started with, “What is it like?” Here there seems to be a deep rooted sense that a sex obsessed culture is synonymous with a dead one. Which certainly throws those easy metaphors into disarray. This is purely an interpretive move on my part, but I do wonder if the Director’s own interests were seeking to play the metaphor of death into an exploration of what stands in the road of a liberated relationship to sexual desire, and yet, from my own vantage point, bringing my head back into that experiential lens, I couldn’t help but sense that this same sought after liberation made desire synonymous with the very thing it sought to escape.

It’s curious to me how this is a film directed by a millennial telling the story of a Gen Z building a relationship with a Gen X. I was listening to a podcast the other day where they were commenting on how this recent barrage of films about “enjoying sex” that have come out this year is a repsonse to Gen Z’s documented growing disinterest in it. There’s a rooted irony in the fact that this disinterest emerges from the so called liberated sex obsessed culture the millennials created. I half wondered if such sentiments are built on a degree of defensiveness on the part of millennials, not of self correcting but of needing to justify themsleves on this front. After all, if the world they created has led to an entire generation growing tired of all the “sex,” it does challenge that worldview. 

Borrowing from that same article mentioned above, it would seem the Director was interested in this same phenomenon.

“Everyone’s always on about how Gen Z doesn’t want to have sex. I was like, ‘I get it. I didn’t want to have sex, either,’” they tell. It’s a dark space, and it means looking at parts of yourself, the world, society, that are gonna be ugly or make you feel scared. And the movie is trying to talk about [exploring] those things in a way that is safe.”

It’s an interesting thought anyways to bring into this film, where the need to recover sex from the grips of fear essentially mean giving the fantasy precedence over reality. Here the problem to be overcoome is the fear that emerges with society’s struggle with larger human tendencies such as shame and vulnerability. Staring the percieved ugliness we find in its place. And certainly, this is where the particularness of their queer experience clashes with larger and more fundamental questions regarding desire itself. That’s the jumping off point into a more robust interpretive exercise.

For me, it seems that the reigning image here is of desire that needs to be satiated, and I have to think there will be a plethora of readings that see this film as a necessary embrace of the taboo, where overcoming fear means learning how to turn those taboo sources of ones sexual desire into a normalized and virtuous expression of ones identity. Where ones identity is tied to sex, but also where desire is desire and sex is sex and candy is candy and death is death, and jts all just part of the same mess of those human animal instincts. Something horror then helps us comment on and understand and perhaps hone into something the film seeks to name as human. Building a world inside our heads where this claim on individuality is able to imagine its own existence as working fantasies purely by placing a barrier between actual, real world destruction.  

And yet the irony is, the destruction does exist. That’s the real thing that needs to be grappled with. The greater irony? Grappling with that just might be found in looking at the reality of a whole culture responding with a well documented disinterest in sex. Perhaps this is indicative of what happens when those lines between fantasy and reality get blurred.

For me, one of the powerful take aways on this front is that subject of distance.

And just to be clear, one of the things I deeply appreciate about this Director is their ability and intention to allow their film to be open to different interpretations. That it can work to foster conversation rather than stifling it.

I found myself being struck by the distance the wanted seeking after such forms of individual liberation (desire) creates. One of the things about desire is ists ability to hand us a world devoid of actual definition. And once I bring my head into the picture, such an explanatory lens doesn’t seem to make sense of my actual experience of this world. Sex can’t be both meaningless and meaningul at the same time. It can’t be distant and intimate at the same time. This is the wrong place to locate a necessary dualism. Rather, where we need to shift that dualism is towards the nature of desire itself.

In the scope of this film, I found a portrait of reality where complex people end up being trapped inside these holes by desire, needing to feed on this desire just to stay alive. A commentary perhaps on how we arrived at a documented epidemic of depression amidst a world that seems to have lost all sense of desires dual edge. A world where meaningful sex is attached to our ability to guard ourselves against such wanted attachment and where the sex act has been relegated to role playing in our safely guarded fantasy worlds. Satiated desire in a fantasy world we have been liberated to indulge and create. A place where carnal nature and elevated humanness don’t have to be rationally attended for, because we have convinced ourselves we can indulge it without such logic implicating our preceptions of actual reality. Where the fantasy need not bleed out into destructive forces with the world itself.

Sure, that might create the appearance of saftety, but I find myself deeply skeptical that it translates to a coherent logic in the face of actual human experience. The hard truth is, this percieved liberation doesn’t escape the hole, it creates it. The only true escape is found in the hard work of defining the terms of our partcipation in this world. That’s where we can contront the ugliness and percieve the beauty.

A final note. I find myself juxtaposing many of these films about sex this year against Olivia Wilde’s The Invite. I’ve made no secret of how much I hated my experience with that film, and how frustated I was with the incoherence, and in many ways lacking in responsibilty and integrity, of its worldview. There a similar subject shows its face, only in this case it writes itself as defensive and reactionary grandstanding of the millenial narrative. A way of saying to the world, hey, we see the problem and it’s not our fault. That the world is going to hell in a pit of depression and sexless angst is simply the loss of the “good old days.” So here’s a story about a couple finally coming around to see that we were right. Finally stripping away those enslaving definitions and cultural constraints and indulging what’s been buried deep inside for far too long. The secret to fixing that broken marriage? Strip meaning from the construct, reject the institutions restrictions, and satisfy that hunger with whatever fantasy walks through that door. Zero interest in fleshing out a backstory that can tell us why this marriage mattered in the firs place, or etablishing why its deterioration should be seen as tragic. or a problem. Little more than, at best, a deceptive way of intellectualizing a superficial view of sex without any actual definition, and at worst a way of shaming ones experience of the destructive feelings by writing it as a failure to strip off the chains of those definitions. I found Camp Miasa to be far smarter and far more coherent in its themes, more integral in its investment, and more challenging in its revelations. Will it inspire viewers to think more deeply and more broadly about the real point of concern? I hope so, butI admit I remain cynical. My own generation had to reconcile our own relationship to the world of our making in all of its complexities, and it took a good while. I do hope that the same thing happens for millenials as they age. 

My wife Jen and I were out exploring Winnipeg’s Little Italy neighborhood on what has been dubbed Open Corydon Sunday’s, a day where they block the stretch of street off from traffic and open it up for patios and play. During out time we ended up grabbing a coffee and a slice of cake from the bakery and making our way over to the one of the small squares. While we were sitting there enjoying our cofee and pastry, I started to reminisce about my recent trip to England, trying to describe to her the phenomenon of their secret or hidden gardens, enclaves and green spaces hidden in corners and old residences on seemingly every block of the city. Often you have to duck through an alley or through an old gated wall to get to them.

As we were walking to catch the river boat back to our car, we passed what is essentially an oversized little free library, a cubed building made of transparent red inviting passserby’s to take a book and leave a book at their leisure.

So of course I stoppped. The first book I see staring back at me is this one. A book about a lost garden set in England during the war. I snatched it up.

Some of the first words on the first page describing our main character’s arrival in London at Paddington Station, coincidentally the same place I arrived at on my journeyl

“What I recognized in this place, from the moment i arrived here, was something within myself that I didn’t even know was there.”

Words that seemed to strike at something familiar to my own spirit, thinking back on what was the culmination of a life long dream to finally make this trip happen. Setting foot on that platform led me to wonder about the thing I was seeking to recover in what was a pilgrimage to the places of my childhood stories. As the character goes on to ponder, “Can words go straight to the heart? Is it possible? Can words be as direct as the scent of roses.” Particularly, in a time where the world itself “can no longer be trusted.” Words in this case pointing to a passing and fleeting hopefulness and innocence now fading from view.

“I do not know how to reconcile myself to useless random death,” she cries. “I do not know how to assimilate this much brutal change, or how to relearn this landscape that was once so familiar to me and is now different everyday. I cannot find my way back to my life when all my known landmarks are being removed.”

Here the city becomes a metaphor for ones life, or the practice and function of memory. It is a stated description of a reality that seeks its sense from our willingness to see beyond the darkness. A willingness to see a world that we are also able to love. “This is what I iknow about love,” she muses. “That is is tested every day, and what is not renewed is lost.”

If words have a power that constitutes life, a living breathing entity, and if the every change spaces that we occupy in the midst of time and circumstance is a metaphor for life, “There is (then) a vocabulary to existing, to taking up living space in the world, that cannot be translated over the chasm of death.” It requires something more. That is the journey this character is on.

If ever there were a question whether this character was someone I can relate to, she puts it to rest soon after as well in describing the luggage she brings with her. “I do not have much for being thirty-five years on this earth; mostly books, a few photographs. My clothes are few. But my books, my books are so many it looks as though I am on my way to open a small lending library.”

What she does in fact stumble over is a hidden library. One of those spaces that defines that nameless and hard to describe spirit that seems to permeate the landscape of England, bringing with it a language all its own. “Whoever made these gardens originally,” she wonders, “and whoever kept them going, reinvented them, knew what they were doing. And more than that, I think, looking over the ripple of fields past this meadow- more than that, someone loved this place.”

A wtiness to that something more.

A something more that finds its exprsesion in a single translated word. “There’s a word cut into the slate by a steady hand. A word buried and recovered, as this word always must be, because that is how it works in us, that is how it is read.

Longing.”

“it is a strange thing to find in an English garden,” and yet, as the her journey comes to uncover, it is what proves to be most revelatory and true.

It is also a hard thing to live. That longing is a double edged sword, just as the world itself torn between beauty and war. I love this description of the challenge of knowing such a revelatory force:
“I need to be right next to something, right up against it. No gaps. And if I couldnt be the one right next to knowledge, then I didn’t exist at all. That how it is with me.

This is a hard way to live, to feel.”

And yet, as we hear directly after, “There are many ways to tell a story.” In oopposition to or in sympathy with longing, that “great mystery” she describes.

All throughout the book we hear our main character dialoging with Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, a story that seems to be illuminating her own journey with this book. It becomes a fascinating juxataposition and interpretive device, playing Woolf’s own wrestlings and restlessness across the main characters seeking for more, especially as it fuses together Woolf’s real life struggles and eventually death. The character in this book has this longing to write a letter to Woolf, and in the passing of this literary figure seems to have lost the opportunity. And yet this longing, this hopefulness, persists in seeking ways to imagine life beyond that chasm of death. “It is how we learn to speak about something that is disappearing as we say its name” that becomes the thing that can make known. The question of such knowledge remains though- “is it a trick, a false comfort” or is it true.

That’s where we find ourselves when our longings won’t let us go. That’s where she finds herself attending to these gardens, which become both literal and figurative in their naming, in their words.

“The thing about gardens is that everyone thinks they go on growing, that in winter they sleep and in spring they rise. But it’s more that they die and return, die and return. They lose themselves. They haunt themselves.

Every story is a story about death. But perhaps, if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love. And this is what I have remembered of love.”

In this memory comes the imagination that seeks beyond the chasm, that finds in those lost gardens a story about resurrection. The giving life to a world that is at once unfamiliar and known. Places that, in the destruction, witness to that greater longing that we don’t always recognize is there.

The other day I posted about how I am enjoying the resurgance in interest in Johannine studies as of late. Two recent books I’ve been reading to this end: Paul N Anderson’s Archaeology, Jesus, and the Gospel of John: What Recent Discvories Show Us,” and Michael J. Gorman’s Paul and John in Harmony: A Theological and Historical Exploration. 

Some of the early sections from Gorman’s book, which I am still working my way through, have been leading me to think about some old questions in a new way, namely the question of how John’s writings (and within the scope of this argument, Paul’s writings as well) existed as part of a larger conversation within their (shared) worlds, a buried world that the study of history (and archeaology) keeps opening up for us more and more as the years push forward. 

As Gorman works to set  “Paul and John in harmony,” by which he doesn’t mean an act of harmonization but rather setting them within proper relationship given the evidence we have, he gives plenty of time in his introduction to zooming out and establishing some broad stroke understandings of the larger movements within currernt Johannine studies today, a text and tradition that has largely existed in the shadows of the dominating field of Pauline interest. One aspect of this conversation, something that has always lingered in the background of Pauline studies, is the question regarding the nature of this percieved relationship between Paul and John. And as Gorman suggests, if his interest begins with examing the nature of their theological concerns, shared or not, it inevitably spills out into a subsequent concern for what can be called the evident genetic relation between the two traditions. Different scholars will offer different theories regarding what this is, but it is nevertheless something we all have to grapple with when considering these writings.

Gorman’s primary interest in this project was an analysis of the theological shape of their seperate bodies of work. As he puts it, while this wasn’t a case of working towards a conclusion (or at least a differing conclusion) regarding the nature of their relationship, he found himself being persuaded towards one through the process of these studies. Meaning, this project actively changed his mind. As he puts it, he arrived at a conclusion that it is most likely Paul knew of John’s Gospel in some shape or form before and while he was writing his letters, and this Gospel would have been a primary source informing his life and ministry. This, for Gorman, is part of what comes from contiunually pursuing “the what and the so what of New Testament Theology.”

The bulk of the book will be spent exploring the theological framework, saving any discussion of his conclusion for a final chapter so as to allow it to emerge organically. He begins with looking at what he sees to be informing the master story (or narrative) of both John’s and Paul’s theological understanding. On John’s front he locates this in John 13:1-20 (the washing of the feet), and on Paul’s front Philippians 2:6-11 (the Christ hymn). In both cases he is narrowing in on a specific piece of text that the majority of scholars would say could be some of the earliest portions contained within these consecutive Traditions. One can see these texts acting as significant and important focal points for arguments that both precede and proceed from their particular proclamations and positioning on a textual level. Gorman sees the two texts sharing an essential and important framework regarding what he calls the two-dimensional story of Christology (the act of salvation) and participation (the lived Christian life).

Now here is where I get to the part that really struck me as especially interesting. Gorman writes,

“In the ancient world, footwashing was a necessity… (but) washing another’s feet by stooping very low- both physically and metaphorically- was not normal… What (Jesus) did was an act unparalleled in ancient literature and unrivaled in antiquity.”

He calls John 13 a “living parable”, which simply means he (Jesus, the historicaly positioned figure within the narrative) is playing out a parable not through the telling of a story but through the physical embodiment and action that brings in these two aforementioned working dimensions: the saving act, or Christology, and the exemplary act (participation). He undersscores the idea that the foot washing in this case, a practice that is a common part of the ancient purity culture, is primarily a symbolic act rather than simply a hygenic one. This is the nature of a parable, and indeed as a living parable, that it “requires and invites interpretation” where we find these symbols. Why does this matter for us as readers today? Because it is not about imitating a performative act in footwashing in this case. Rather, it is about how we interpret this symbol in the context of the saving work and the lived life. As its often said, where you find a parable you will find Jesus placing his hearers within it in the form of “symbolic characters.” In this case he is placing the lived life within the context of this new found reality called salvation. Salvation for John, and subsequently for Paul, can be understood as God’s act of coming to dwell in creation in Christ, thus ushering in the inaugeration of this long awaited promise of God’s transforming (renewing) of this creation.   And, embedded in the way that John sees this symbol working is this notion of cruciformity. This is what it means to participate in this new found reality “in Christ.” This is the pattern that John seeks to embed into the story he is telling, a pattern that explains the nature of this new reality to his readers.

To participate in the life of Christ must be and is always an act of participating “in” Christ according to this cruciform movement. This is the key to the two-fold paradigm. We don’t follow Jesus towards an act of personal “Deification,” as though we are imitating Christ’s identity in the way we might find in the Greco-Roman world. We imitate Christ’s life by following the movement of Jesus being revealed through this act of footwashing, and subsequently through the Christ Hymn in the letter to the Phillippians. It is in fact, in the eyes of both Paul and John, Jesus’ own identity that frees us to do precisely this. It is Christ’s own act in death (becoming human) that liberates us from the need to become “like God” through the common act of Divination that was so pervasive in the ancient world. The task is not to become like God, but rather to know God and thus be transformed by and sharing in that very nature. And not just know God, but to know God’s nature. That is a key distinctive in both Paul and John. A knowing that comes through our participation in Christ.

The important point here being simply this: Jesus’ identity, for both John and Paul, matters immensely to this picture of salvation. This is the primary revelation driving everything else in their subsequent Traditions. Further (and this is the point that gets to what has been capturing my mind as of late), the uniqueness of this revelation, however that gets defined, matters to the narrative it seeks to tell about the nature of this reality we all share. That means, it matters to those three ever important questions: the nature of God, the nature of humanity, and the nature of creaiton.  

Here’s the thing for me. I am very aware of the polemics embedded deep in the fabric of those popular forms of Christian apologetics from my past. These  polemics, usually acting in the interest of such apologetics, would be directly tied to what could be argued is the real point of concern for that evangelical culture: upholding right doctrine. This is what all arguments for belief in that cultural approach tended to be bent towards. And typically, the uniqueness of Christ became a popular talking point within these apologetic interests, as it targeted and defended against (quote on quote) “secular” attempts to make Christ and Christianity just like those Greek myths, a move that allowed secular (read: atheist) apologists (or as some liked to describe themselves, anti-apologists) to subsume the whole of religious belief under the single moniker “stories that are not true.” The primary defeater of the Christian apologietic is thus found in this move to take any claim of uniqueness and play it into a singular conception of the “myths” of this Greco-Roman period.

What’s interesting here is that usually, in my experience, these same atheist arguments would also single out “Christianity” as having a uniquely charged polemical force that made it (and makes it) the primary enemy of these polytheistic (and thus inclusive) Greek myths. Here the story becomes, Christianity took monotheism and weaponized it against the inclusionary nature of a polytheistic world. I’ve seen this same basic back and forth sparring match happen over and over again.

Part of the shifting of the tide in recent years, which is largely attempting to reclaim something lost to these apologetic moves (on both sides of that fence) is the need to recover a sense of the world these texts actually occupied. When, in our efforts to defeat one side or the other, we subsume the distinct parts of this world into a charateristic whole, what then happens to our ability to actually engage the history on its own terms? What happens to our ability to actually articulate the evidence for what it is? What happens to our ability to give the archeaology and other essential disciplines a voice in the conversation?

Part of what counters this approach is recognizing that this historical moment that informs the conversation Paul and John are having with their audiences has a particular shape. To understand this shape we must be able to locate it within their distinct (read: unique) context. Only then can we begin to properly assess precisely what it is they believed was uniquely challenging their partricular position (the thing that changed their perception of reality), and how it is they saw this speaking into those basic, important questions about reality (the nature of God, humanity and creation). And perhaps more importantly, this is what tempers both the use of and the highly charged accusations regarding polemicism. Polemics here become unnecessary.

The question concerning Gorman’s thesis then becomes, if what we find in this living parable is a particular revelation that reshaped their understanding of reality in this moment, what is this revelation and how did it change his readers/hearers perception?

This is where it becomes important to buffer our tendencies towards being subsumed by our tendency towards polemic. Here we can seek better questions. For example, what if the evidence seems to suggest an existing community (the hearers of and bearers of these subsequent Traditions preserved in the writings of John and Paul) who’s assumed, culturally laden paradigms about reality (meaning, the  nature of God, humanity and creation) were being challenged and overturned? What if common, and again culturally entrenched ways of thinking about God, humanity and creation were being critiqued, and not just critiqued but examined at that fundamental intersection of Empire (politics) and religious conviction out of concern for seeking what is true?

In other words, what if the problem scholarship is grappling with today is the challenge recent historical and archeological developments poses to years of polemicism, forcing us to reconcile what is an increasingly visible human portrait now taking its place. The more these communities (Pauline and Johannine) become flesh and blood portraits, the more difficult it is to avoid the more difficult but better questions surrounding what precisely these writings were doing in their day.

Of course, one of the most fundamental changes has been the ongoing effort to challenge problematic views of Paul as a “Christian” convert from “Judaism,” and similarly deconstructing widely held assumptions regarding this dichotomy between Law and Gospel (which is part of that polemic). This important and highly relevant movement in scholarship is well documented. What’s of interest now is a similar trajectory being applied to the area of Johannine studies, still largely in its infancy given how little attention it is has been given, and yet clearly following the same path. Years of assuming John to be an anti-Jewish Gospel is now being cast under the same light and the same critique, with scholarship working to filter out the polemic in favour of setting the living breathing community back in its world. And of course, what follows is a highly charged debate about the sharply imposed dichotomies such assumptions placed on John between its historical merit and its oft worn moniker “the spiritual Gospel.” If you want a robust example of the ways current scholarship is challenging this dichotomy, see the other book I mentioned at the start of this post by Paul N. Anderson.

A funny thing happens when such texts are given a flesh and blood “face” so to speak. It tends to close the distance between our own world and the world of the text. It becomes far more difficult to simply dismiss the ancient world out of hand. And maybe, just maybe, there’s an oppportuntiy for that world to inform the questions we are posing to our own day. Might there be parallels to be found in the present movements of our own day to challenge the dangers of Christian nationalism? Or challenging certain tenants of Western Protestantism which have handed us particular understandings of God, humanity and creation? Or challenging the still present tendency towards Platonic approaches to our understanding of reality that were baked into both Paul’s and John’s cultural reality? A world where the readers of these subsequent Traditions were wrestling in a very real way with things like conceptions of vengeful Deities, the craving of idols, the blurring of lines between politics and religion, hierachies within society, Empire and Hellenization, debating the role of Tradition and the text, the constant push and pull of movements and revolutions.

When the flesh and blood community is brought into proper focus, that’s where we are forced to reckon with the why questions. This is also where the writings of Paul and John become far more interesting as tools for helping us navigate the why questions with integrity. The convenience with which these texts have been compartmentalized alongside our polemic is harder to maintain. We can’t just punt it all into later centuries where it can be subsumed into the blanket term “gnosticism” and accordingly dismissed as “invention,” and subsquently subsumed later into the larger blanket term “myth” as part of the Greco-Roman catch-all in our modern age. Nor can one hide behind their conservatism by conventiently sheltering the text and its world from criticism through appeals to doctrines like inerrancy. From where I stand, grappling with the flesh and blood world made of flesh and blood people is far more exciting, far more fruitful, far more honest, and indeed far more challenging.

This is where I come back to Gorman’s interpretation of the historical evidence above and his use of the word “unique.” If the world of his readers was one in which footwashing was a common practice, and if the evidence seems to suggest that the text in John has Jesus using this culturally familiar language as an intentional symbol (read: something to be interpreted into the context of their lives), what is this symbol saying to his readers and why did it matter? Given that the evidence seems to strongly suggest that it did, in what ways was it overturning certain perceptions of God, humanity and creation? This is where Gorman contends that, at least for John’s readers, the evidence suggests not simply a motivating event behind the emergence of this text, but the interest of the text in outlining the significance of this motivating event on a cosmic (reality shaping) level. How we interpret this to fit within our own worldview is a subsequent step in a process that must, if it is going to be honest, grapple with the evidence for what it is and what it says in it’s world. And for Paul and John, they both are telling a story of a cosmic shift, or a shift in the cosmic story.

This is where certain implications arise when it comes to the emerging evidence regarding the world of the text. For example, what happens when emerging evidence challenges long held assumptions of a text once thought to be born from a Hellenized environment speaking to a Diaspora (a post 70’s reading), shifting our understanding towards a distinctly Jewish text emerging within the “process” of Hellenization (a pre-70’s reading)? What happens when assumptions about John’s community (readers) being a persecuted audience are being overturned by a more likely earlier context of people existing in relative economic stability? What happens when recent archeological discoveries continue to overturn long held assumptions of the Gospel according to John being largely disinterested in flesh and blood history and/or historically inaccurate in its descriptives? If the scholarship is an indication, it’s bringing a whole new slate of theories and debate to the table. This includes reassessing the primary relationships at play in what is a shared world, beginning with the most prevelant and relevant one: John and Paul.

Perhaps more specific to my point about polemic above, there seems to be room for relcaiming the notion of “uniqueness” as fundamental to any such given context, simply recasting it as the uniqueness of a given context. Generalizations do tend to exist for a reason, and it is difficult to flesh out an argument without them. But one needed corrective has been addressing a tendency to muddle such generalizations in our attempts to isolate the uniqueness of the Christian event on one side (which usually happens under the guise of an apologetic for Western Empire or Western politics/civilization), and attempts to subsume it into sweeping generatlizations on the other (see Ehrman for one of the most common examples of this move to collapse it into a singular idea called myth). The irony is, those appealing to those sweeping generalizations often bring the convenience of that uniqueness back into play when it comes to writing a narrative of Christianity’s weaponizing of monotheism against the once inlclusive world of polytheism that marked the Greco-Roman world, neither of which I think have much credibility as a story.

So here is where my own thinking has been landing as I’ve continued to ponder all of this in conversation with what I’ve been reading lately. It seems evident that the readers of John’s Gospel (or at least the initial readers of an initial form of that Gospel) were distinctly Jewish (or more accurately, Judean). The evidence seems to suggest John’s Gospel more or less assumes its readers will understand its distinctly Jewish language without need for clarification. The evidence seems to suggest the world behind the text was one of economic stability, and the evidence also seems to suggest that John’s Gospel, contrary to long held assumptions, is far more grounded in its language than was once thought. Meaning, reaching for a post 70’s gnostic setting of a Diaspora living through persecution and needing a developed theological treaties to reconcile a new Christian community against a fallen Jewish temple now far removed from that Judean context does not make sense of what we find. It would be interesting to bring in someone like Mendez on this front, a student of Ehrman who follows in his Tradition, whom represents the movement back towards arguing for single authorship, but whom also cannot let go of the assumption that John must be a later post 70 work. The sense I got reading through his newest book is that there is too much at stake in allowing the evidence to go that far, preferring to keep a comfortable space and buffer zone between the school of academics to which he belongs on one side and the inerrantists on the other, even where it involves bringing in a series of unestablished presumptions to keep that space afloat. His argument for single authorship is intriguing, his assumptions about John retaining a post 70’s gnostic setting far less so.

If the evidence is in fact bridging that gap, even where it makes us uncomfortable, that is where we can begin asking better questions and moving towards better justified interpretive conclusions. One doesn’t need to agree with Gorman on his conclusion that the Gospel of John influenced Paul’s writings, but that is an example of needing to engage fresh theories in the face of new evidence. As Gorman says, it’s impossible to avoid addressing the question of that relationship if we are taking our criticisms (be it textual, theological, archeaological, historical) seriously. So if you disagree, you need to justify a different position based on the same evidence, you can’t just ignore it. That’s where the dialogue in fact can become fun.

Fun, but also deeply serious in the ways it informs our conception of reality. One of Gorman’s strongest arguments in his book, for me personally, which would make a great pairing with Brant Pitre’s Jesus and Divine Chistology (a definitive work on the subject), pushes back against years of assumptions regarding the Gospels claims about the person and work of Jesus by demonstrating neither Paul nor John would be coherent apart from this basic two-fold posiitioning of the saving work and the subsequent theme of participation being defined through Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascencion. He does a really nice job of outlining how the narrative itself, when not pulled apart, clearly understands that its argument is dependent on establising Jesus’ identity within the framework of the story it is telling, a framework that is deeply interested in the stated uniqueness of this movement. In short: both Paul and John hold a conviction that something happened in history that changed our reality, and that this is tied to who Jesus is. Whether we interpret this event in the same way or not, what the texts themselves say and reveal about that world and its authors/readers matters to the justification of our own conclusions. Years of one side appealing to the critical fields to say Jesus made no such claim, and the other side protecting the text from those critical fields through doctrine, are in fact being challenged now through emergent scholarship in fresh ways.

And one of the main reasons we are recapturing a stated confidence to this end is precisely because of this recovering of the Jewish context of both Paul and John. What once was subsumed by a post 70’s gnostic setting now comes barrelling back in with a fresh relevance and new and better questions.

Time will tell whether Gorman’s particular interpretive conclusion gains more traction, but more importantly it’s the body of his work that will sustain it either way. And if it gives people greater confidence and ability and desire to embrace this notion of distinctiveness and uniqueness, along with the Jewish nature of both Paul and John, I am here for it. I think it’s exciting times.

Sure, technically speaking its not an actual disorder, but orthorexia, defined as an unheatlhy obsession with healthy eating, is in fact a real and recognizable thing. The day I discovered I had this disorder was a monumental one in my own life. Truth be told, it wasn’t just “a problem,” it was actively destroying me.

And yes, there is irony in that. But there was also a point of revelation for me personally that shifted how I see this world and the questions i am asking about what this world is today, a revelation that emerged from this awarness that an obsession rooted in healthy eating was the thing that was killing me.

Seems that every few years I come back to this topic. A testament to the subjects enduring power in culture at large, as well as the ongoing struggle of dealing with it on a personal level. Part of why it came to mind over these past few weeks is because of a recent reflection I penned in this space on Kahtryn Morton’s The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything. The disorder existed before social media emerged as the force it is today, but it’s take over of the way we do life significantly elevated the problem to a whole other level. That and, through social media, I was posed the question by someone upon recently turning 50, do you have goals for health and fitness. Someones who’s own public obsession draws itself from worldviews and narratives that I have come to see as largely problematic and incoherent.

I have told this story a few times before in this space, but to tell it again here:

Orthorexia is of course a disorder rooted in something other than food related issues, but it is a particular food related manifestation of those underlying issues. This is something I can trace back to my dad’s initial cancer diagnosis when I was between 10 and 12 years old. Two images come to mind of this phase in our lives. First, the image of my dad lying on our sofa taking his “natural” medicine (which were needle injections of a then unknown substance, paired with the oral consumption of a then equally strange substance in small vials… I’ll refrain from naming what these were so as not to mislead anyone). At the time, I had no idea what the word natural meant, and I had no idea of its significance when it comes to the different decisions people make around proposed treatments. But that was the moment when the word became commonplace in my life, and indeed came to hold power over my life.

The second image is of our kitchen. It wasn’t just a gradual change, it was a change that happened overnight. One day the familiar foods and routine snacks and meals were there, the next day they were not, replaced by a complete overhaul and pivot in our daily diet. Ya, I was young, and of course I complained. I was told these were “healthy” and therefore “good” foods, and from that point on every time I would visit (or they would visit) my extended family in the GTA I became known for my incessant complaining about this “healthy” food.

Nonetheless, this became the norm, and thus it became ingrained in my psyche and my consciosness in ways I then still did not understand.

Fast forward through my dad’s remission and consecutive reemergence of the same cancer, and I am now standing on the precipice of finally moving out of my parents house and home at 27 years of age. This is where years of this unconscious rhetoric and patterns and diet really showed its face, presenting me with a very real point of crisis. I can still remember my first time roaming those grocery aisles and suddenly being faced with a dilemma. In front of me were two packages of lettuce. One said organic, the other did not. The organic ones, of course, cost $2 more than the regular package. So what do I do? All these years of being taught that this “organic” lettuce was somehow important come rushing back in on this moment, and I realized that I didn’t actually know why it was important. What I knew was, I needed to make a decision. And that’s when I went home and started down the endless rabbit hole of researching the relationship between the foods we eat and our health.

When I say research, I mean an all out obsession. Next thing I know my wall, and pretty much every last inch of storage space I could find, was filled with articles and notes and information on everything from food to environmental sources to activities (or lack of them). I could tell you about every food and every link with every disease on the level of becoming a walking, talking encyclopedia fot this simple fact: everything is killing us (and that’s not hyperbolic). And the more I consumed, the greater the feedback loop became.

And yet, at this point I still didn’t recognize that I had a problem. I assumed that I was now officially part of this insiders club called the resistance, and my frequent visits to the “health food” store (and its very lucrative business) was the source of my new found superpower.

I didn’t know I had a problem until I got married, and suddenly it wasn’t just me browsing those supermarket aisles, but two of us. That’s when my obsession turned from an internal exercise to an external conflict. Forming these habitual exercises, such as intentionally tagging along behind my wife and quietly replacing the default options she would place in the cart with what I felt were the appropriate choices. And that’s one of the more tame examples of this now elevated point of crisis. I had turned our marriage into a never ending act of resistance, except that I was largely still acting entirely alone, and in my greatest moment of shame still unable to articulate precisely why what I was doing actually mattered or what I was actually looking to achieve.

It was around this time that social media was really starting to take off as the new driving force of our lives, and with that came a whole new level of research potential. Before I knew it, I was so far down this rabbit hole and so lost to my obsessions that I had actually driven myself to a physical breaking point. All of this information in my head coalesced in a literal week long bought of no sleep. When I say no sleep, I mean no sleep. My brain could not shut off. I spent every night moving to the couch, where nothing was working. Day 2. Day 3. Day 4. At this point I had exhausted every sleep aid source from the health food store I could find, at one point coming dangerously close to overdosing, and I ended up at a walk-in getting a prescribed sleep aid.

Which also didn’t work.

What eventually did work was a pill usually prescribed for epilespy. i was supposed to take two. I was leary about any prescribed medication and took a half of one. But that was all it took. In the middle of the afternoon, not long after taking that pill, I heard in my head what was (to me) an audible crack. As though lightning had struck me, it was that loud. And suddenly I was out.

It was in that moment that I recognized I had a problem. And not just a physical one (which was certainly there, from the eroded brain chemistry to the toll this obsession was taking on my internal organs), but a deeper rooted problem. I not only recognized the degree that my disorder was impacting my marriage, my relationships, my own life, but I began to seriously consider, and indeed know, how intertwined my assessment of these physical realities were with my underlying beliefs driving my actions.

All this research and I still hadn’t actually addressed the real question: why does it matter? What is this obsession actually trying to achieve and to what master narrative does it belong?

This began a slow process of reform. A process that started with purging my life of all this “information.” There was very little that I could do about the information already in my head, which to this day still acts as a trigger, but there was a helpful mantra I adopted to help me place a stop-gap between my continued absorption of these never ending articles, which was rooted in something I knew to have more truth than that data or information. The great irony of my obsession is that it is designed to feed itself. Every single study, every single theory, every single trend, fad, evidence based approach- and to be sure they are endless. All of them follow this same pattern: what we think is going to save our health today will be the very headlines that declare what’s killing us tomorrow. 

I knew this to be true, because I had a room full of researched data proving this to be the case. In every single case, be it through the “science” overturning what we once thought was “helpful,” or through our present ignorance of the newly disovered “destructive” force or entity or food that we failed to attend to, I could find this same narrative by placing multiple articles side by side. That was the common narrative, and it was by laying all of this out in front of me that I had an evidenced way of battling back against the obsession.

That then freed me to do the hard work of attending for what it was that I actually believed. Of attending for what my obsession was trying to control, and to what end it’s efforts were seeking to achieve something I couldn’t even yet articulate. That became my new act of resistance in a social media age where the health trends were now the norm.

Now here is where I also need to be careful. This is my story. It’s not everyones story. Caught up in nearly every single endeavor to be healthy is also the very real fact that every regimine also brings about certain outcomes, be it related to weight loss, strength training, endurance. Full discolsure: in those years of actively destroying myself, I was also fluctuating between 135 and 140 pounds and could run a marathon without any needed training. I could (and did) easily bike or rollerblade the 16 km route (one way) to work as part of my regular routine.

Here’s the thing. I understand that every story arrives with its own set of important nuances. But there are three things I have come to believe are also routiinely true about the culture at large, a culture that is in fact saturated with programs and regimes, endless ideologies and a never ending barrage of “facts” relating to how we make ourselves healthy: 

• there are a lot of people who have undiagnosed and largely normalized orthorexia in some form or fashion who don’t recognize what it is
• our culture is bad at asking the why questions surrounding our trends and regimes, and is even less adept at attending for what it is we actually believe
• the science that we root our certainty in today is the same science that will upend our control over our lives tomorrow

I admittedly have developed a necessary cynicism about the whole enterprise. But that cycnicism is not about overturning misinformation and contradictions in favor of the facts. My skepticism has more to do with how we define the aims of this enterprise in the first place. It’s rare that the point of our motivation is the problem. There is almost always a justifiable reason informing the why of our endeavors, and those are often rooted in real world issues, health and wellbeing related issues, that push us to respond. What’s also common though is the lack of clarity regarding the aim of our endeavors, our newly found habits. Here we can’t just sweep such questions under the rug of a largely undefined and ambiguous motivation to “make it to 100.” Again, this is my opinion, but where I hear that surface level assessment, I tend to immediately conclude that the real motivations are clearly lying underneath, and those motivations need the accountability of actual examined beliefs in order to be known and understood for what they are. This, in my experience, doesn’t happen because the mantra and the regimine itself so often become the virtue.

There is a learning I came to in my own journey towards attending for my battle with orthorexia. A battle that continues to this day. My family can tell you that I have left over trigger points. Things that I obsessively do or can’t do which are rooted in that head full of information that I will never be able to truly purge. I know I do them. But for as long as they remain tempered and contained, I have learned how to co-exist without it overtaking my life. The more difficult thing is navigating a world of honest to goodness emerging medical matters. I am probably the worst person who could get celiac disease, for example. Talk about a world defined by a life of endless obsession and control. Irionically, that disease is triggered or activated by extreme stress such as the events of my prolonged struggle with orthorexia.

My learning though. This comes from the honest to goodness aged lives I have encountered along my journey. What hit me one day was a particular study of those in their 100’s, regarding what their supposed “secret” was for their longevity. If this is the largely ambiguous and undefined aim assumed by the younger voices posing the question, the short answer is- there is no actual answer to that question. What there is however are articulated trends and patterns we can analyze within their responses. Like my own aged grandparernts, and the stories they told about their parents and grandparents before them, long before all of the modern inventions and conveniences and supplements and information overload and on and on were a thing, these were lives marked by unexpected realities. These were people who by and large valued a freshly baked loaf of bread with a knife full of melted butter and frseh jam. Who ate ice cream every night and handed you candies from the jar when you came for a visit. Whom enjoyed the value of a cherished walk instead of a run, a cup of coffee/tea and a good book. Whom lived in an age where what we deem today to be adverse weight was not frowned upon. Whom spent time doing the things we have now relegated to our machines, such as hand washing their clothes and keeping the furnace going and growing their gardens and walking to the post office to deliver hand written letters.

Which is to say, they spoke a different language, not inconsequentially born from an age where people did in fact die younger from viruses and diseases that had nothing to do with ones eating habits. When asked the qeustion about their longevity, their answers weren’t about what they did, but about defining a life in much different terms. The simple fact that they were 100 was simply an indication that they had survived the external forces “their” world was constantly throwing at them.

Here’s the truth I have come to know for myself. One of the reasons Orthorexia had so much power over my life is because it not only perpetuated underlying anxieties, it created them. In the terms of the world I had been handed, I did what I was supposed to do. I looked to the science, I got the facts, I used those facts to bring about a different and better wanted reality. I controlled my world on the level of such utility. And what I got in return were a freshly created package of anxieties and the rude awakening that science is not a set of facts but a process. I could run a marathon and bike that 16 kilometers to work, but there were a myriad of other ways my life was being eroded and and endless number of new information telling me I was going to die because I did or did not do A, B and C.

In such an endeavor, in such an approach, life becomes a matter of beating the odds, which then gets defined as an unarticulated goal of making it to 100, regardless of whether that narrative is actually coherent or rational. The difference however between the era of my grandparents and today is that, if we all occupy a world in which one can smoke packs a day and survive for 100 years while someone else can never pick up a cigareete and die at 20 (to use a crude example), it was far more important for them to attend for what they actually believed about this world and their lives than it was for them to be obsessed with controlling longevity. That, it turns out, was the secret.

We have reduced this world to information, to data points, to facts. A world that we can then control. If it was more common for someone in my grandparents time to die young at the hands of a virus or a plague that our modern vaccines have largely eradicated, the anxieties our changes have brought about today are rooted in that very perception of needed control. Thus, we find ourselves asking very different questions than our grandparents did when it comes to unpacking our answers.

This would be my own summation of my grandmother’s answer to this question: the secret? Find a better narrative that is asking better questions, one that seeks to know what this life truly is rather than getting all muddled up in chasing the headlines.

For me? It took a lot just to be able to learn how to enjoy that bowl of ice cream again. As my friends would say, to trade in the “potato ice cream” (yes, it’s a thing) for a good cream based concoction. It took a lot to throw away all those health products (and to not think about the vast amounts of money I spent feeding my addiction in the process). It took a lot to create barriers between myself and the endless world of health and wellness and fitness coaches vying for my attention and promising to hand me control over my world through the latest information about superfoods and balanced diets.

And please, forgive my cynycism towards that end if you are one. All I have to this end is my own story. And the truth is, I am far healthier today than I was when I could run a marathon. Just in a different way and in different terms,

We’ve internalized what the algorithm favours.

(We’ve bought into the idea) “that we are the authors of our own lives…

Redemptive narratives have power…. Baked into the story of individual triumph and redemption is the assumption that people can and will change when things aren’t working for them. The arc of success presumes that as conditions dictate, we adapt and come out better than we started. This is part and parcel of the masternarrative of redemption, that personal growth moves in a steady upward direction. It is also rooted in the concept of the personal brand. Successful brands pivot and remain nimble, surfing life’s waves of change with deftness and flexibility.

… It is conventional wisdom that when a person fails to adapt to change this signifies a problem, one that needs to be addressed. This pressumption, that change is inherently good, is a product of a culture fully committed to the growth oriented spirit of capitalism, an economic model based on maximizing the benefits that come from constant adjusment within the market place. But does this market place logic need to apply to (a) life?

These presuppositions form the foundation of a master narrative of redemption. A good story is one in which the main character conquers obstacles and comes out stronger.” (The Story of Your Life, Kathryn Jezer Morton)

In her book, The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything, author Kathryn Jezer Morton helps to connect studied, examined, universal human tendencies to the specific societal and culturally rooted realities of social media (and it’s use).

A key point of her argument functions on two levels, beginning with assessing the ways in which social media, for all of its particularness as a modern construction, can only truly be understood by examing its relationship to those larger, common human traits. Second, and likewise, a fruitful discussion of social media needs to move beyond reactionary trends that limiit themselves to our social media usage, and into a broader more reflective discussion of the predominant role narrative or story plays in all societies across human history. Deleting facebook accounts or intentional efforts to go off social media, however much this can bring about certain wanted outcomes in our lives, do not ultimatley change the shape of the world we are presently living in. Nor does it bring us to a greater understanding of that world. Whether we recognize it or not, the language and function of “social media” permeates nearly every facet of our modern society. It is integrated into our news sources, our communication, our jobs, our podcasts, the arts, politics, and even basic government and civic related duties and tasks. Meaning, its much larger than simply our facebook or instagram accounts.

To understand what this is, then, requires examining how it plays into one of the most crucial and necessary aspects of that human tendency mentioend above: the role of story in shaping the way we live in and make sense of and understand this world, and indeed our place in it. Not simply on an individual level, but on master/meta-narrative levels.

Such a discussion can then be a window into the particular cultural forces shaping our lives through this thing called social media. On this front, in the quote above Morton touches on something I have long felt and vocalized. Social media and its use adheres to a master narrative that stems from modern assumptions regarding how history must work in order to justify the shape this world and our lives take today. In this worldview, social media is simply the natural and necessary outflow of the world’s progress, a myth (using that word in its proper sense of those stories, or master narratives, that reveal what is true about this world and our place in it) that seeks its own justification in each subsequent generations rejection of the past. Here change isn’t just a constant, its the measure of a world’s progress. Adapt or die, as its often said. This is simply the way of things, and this is not only how humans survive, it is how we bring this world and our lives under our control. This is, to borrow from Morton, the language of the modern redemptive narrative, with the thing we are redeemed from being our enslavement to a lesser and inferior past.

How often does this basic assumption about change get brought up in chats and threads using all manners of precondiitioned rhetoric? I know I encounter it all the time. More importantly, how often does this basic assumption about what change is act as the driving force of our endless ideologies here in the West?

I’ve spent a lot of time immersed in the study of this basic idea, that the world I was born into, the reality I was handed, the culure I have been shaped by, hinges on this basic understanding about how history must work (and indeed does work). Or of how history must work in order to uphold our redemption narratives. We are who we are and we are where we are because of our accomplishments. Life is about this continued investment into who we are becoming through our efforts at (fill in the blank with a never ending list of self or societal frameworks designed to turn us into better versions of ourselves or hand us better versions of our world, all of which flow from our modern addiction to self improvement practices and into our myriad of cultural creations, from growing podcasts and youtube platforms, online business creations, to much broader realities such as scientific, technological, or space related inovations).

To be clear, neither Morton, nor myself in this space, are suggesting that these things are inherently bad. Rather, the problem is, in this narrative the concept of change is given an inherent virtue. Change means we are getting better. Change means we are better than who we were. And of course we have endless ways of measuring this in order to assure ourselves that we are in fact counted among that number. And the way the world functions, in its market laden structure, simply seems to affirm our suspicions: businesses that fail to adapt and change in this modern age die, therefore this must be the way our lives work as well.

What we aren’t good at is attending for what gets sacrificed in this incessent clamouring for forward movement (which is really a sacrificing of the whole of history), not to mention the ways in which it tells a very specific story of our lives that needs to be sctrutinized. This is in fact why the emergence of the modern world saw itself as the end of history. To see ourselves as part of history means we become the very thing we are seeking to scapegoat, holding ourselves above it.

We also aren’t good at asking the why questions, questions that concern where this forward movement is actually going or taking us precisely. We aren’t good at distinguishing between what a life is and how a redemption narrative fits into that equation. This is at least in part, I think, because our entire sense of the world and reality, and indeed our identity, has become wrapped up in upholding this myth of progress. Sure, we can speak of the failures of society (for example, the current climate crisis), but only in so far as we are able to categorize such failures in terms of “them” rather than “us.”

So again, change might be constant, but the problem emerges the minute it is assumed to be a self justifying virtue, an inherent truism regarding what a “good” or (successful or meaningful or accomplished or celebrated) life or world is. In fact, one of the things this book helps to underscore is how such a story of our lives engages in a critical error of judgment when it fails to recognize how this narrative of redemption actually defines us (or the past) according to the things that we are not. This is at the heart of what it means to assume that change is inherently good. It is anchored in that perpetual state of rejecting the past.

Once we step out of this broader perspective and these broader concerns, part of what Morton then begins to flesh out is a simple probing of the assumption that progress leads to a better world or better lives. That what comes from change is always good, or even desired or needed on a human level. That it brings greater experiences of satisfaction and happiness. All words of course that demand definition. What’s fascinating to me in the immediate though is that Morton challenges these assumptions by looking at the very human functions that social media exploits. If we are to take this seriously, we must then confront these narratives as a product of something else entirely: these underlying human tendencies. A robust examination of social media can reveal the ways in which such assumptions, which existed long before social media became a thing, actually act in accordance with what human experience appears to need, want, and desire.

If this is the case, why does this narrative have the power that it does? One answer could be that it taps into contrary parts of this same nature. Another answer, which likely can be taken together with the former suggestion, can be found in establishing visible patterns within the fabric of history itself. For example, we crave the sharing of our lives, and have always sought to shape our lives into stories that create a shared language. Here we can find the basic markers of this social exercise embedded in the interplay between persons within what we call communities. This means, long before social media was a thing we were, in different ways, analyzing these relationships in order to understand how to belong. We instinctively respond to these observations by way of projecting curated narratives while similtaneously absorbing others, always seeking measures that tell us whether we belong and are thus okay or not.

One can see how all of this fits with the modern social media framework. What makes this unique is simply the ways in which this modern technology has widened the sphere of belonging, increased the scope of the practice, and the way it has streamlined the risks and the costs of our participation in this world. We can see this in the growing body of research which suggests the line we tend to think still exists between our flesh and blood lives and our online lives no longer exists.

Further yet, we also see this in the way social media, a product of this new technological age, mimics a society in which the rate of change far surpasses any other period in our history. It’s no wonder change has taken on the mythic proportions that it is, as human function no longer has the ability to reflect on what these changes are. Similarly, social media, having far surpassed its origins as primarily a work of creatively profiling the story our lives, has taken on a life of its own, now becoming its own mirror.

Morton continues on in her assessment, defining our lives within social media as a constant act of management. We manage our brands (brands are either our own lives or the thing we have built our lives around). We manage perceptions. We manage reputation. And as we manage, we are selling the product that is our life. What’s fascinating to me about this idea is, as I fleshed out from Morton’s ideas above, all of these things, when we peer behind the curtain of social media, are inherently human traits. It’s simply the unique expression of our particular moment. In a sense we have always engaged these things. It’s how we have always come to belong somewhere (or to be excluded). But one of the unique things the modern narrative of redemption has handed us is this underlying belief in the redeemed “self,” a concept that both assumes the existence of the self made will, formulating that into the undercurrent of the larger enterprise of modernism itself, and has established necessary change or progress as the measure of it’s worth and the aim of its existence.

In case this sounds too lofty or too theorized, these thoughts have a very practical expression within the examined life. Curiously, we have become masters at comparmentalizing the different parts of our lives into seperate spaces. Our private life at home, and our social life online. Our retreat into nature and our occupational lives in the city. Our spiritual lives and our lived lives. Our professions and our leisure. In truth, these things not only can’t be compartmentalized in this way, they, in reality, are not. Such dualism, for as popular as it is, only serves to hold us at a distance from the story these lives and this world are telling. It’s little more than a convenient means of laying the blame of our frustrations and the merit of our accomplishments at the feet of whatever we chose to align ourselves with in a given moment.

One of the most common type of online personalities according to Morton is the observer, or passive surveillance. The one who doesn’t post but views. Here’s the thing though. Even this practice is an act of managment and selling. Such people are every bit as visible as the ones in the thick of the incessant shouting matches. And everything becomes a product of the judgement these actions make about us and about this world. Whether you’ve deleted your social media accounts or not, whether you post or not, in a social media age every single act is observed, and every observation weaves a story of this world and its lives in a particular way. And more to the point, it’s all still being written according to this master redemptive narrative. It simply becomes a question of where the circles get drawn.

So what does one do with all this? As with anything, recognizing the reality of things is the place to start. And it could be appropriate to adopt the posture of the cynic, something I have adhered to for a while. A cynic is simply one, if we are to see it through the lens of its long storied tradition, who rejects all social constructs as authoritative. However, what defines the cycnic is nevertheless one who also understands that they are products of this world at the same time. It is not simply that we see the absurdity of the enterprise, it’s that we know life exists within its own absurdities. This is not a contradiction for the cynic, rather it pushes us to constantly assess what is sacred and what is not. And equally, it remains aware of those inate human tendencies that persist underneath our constructs.

This is all well and good of course, until those inate human tendencies begin to grapple with things like lonliness, depression and anxiety, which social media has turned into an epidemic. We know that we are being observed and judged by the world every step of the way, and this is not something we can escape. It has tangible outcomes in the scope of our lives, bleeding through those now non-existent lines between our online and our private lives. We would do well then to also face these things head on, even as we keep a cynical eye on the absurdities that give these real and valid and very human experiences life.

Lastly, we can reclaim the idea of a master or meta-narrative, something the modern world has largely taught us to reject and/or ignore/demonize. We can do things that help deal with the epidemics, for example, but the real concern will always remain the story. Apart from that we cannot rationally and objectively attend for the problem. The greatest obstacle to this end? The fact that reclaiming a mastd\er or meta-narrative is the single greatest thing that challenges our illusions of control. Worse yet, it challenges the very story that tells us we are better than (fill the blank) for as long as we are changing. And that reaches into something long embedded in our human experience as well as a trigger. There’s a two-fold reality at play there though. We know we crave this control, but we also know the toll this takes on us at the same time. We know it’s not what we actually desire, and in our most vulnerable moments we tend to be willing to finally question the narrative. But the world still turns, and questioning the narrative in a world designed to avoid such questions (after all, the new world finally arrived at the answer to what plagued the old one and thus surpassed it and its superstitions, as the story goes) often only serves to perpetuate the very issues social media creates.

But we are still human after all, and that humanity also seems to be the greatest antitode. Thats the real beauty of the conversation Morton is having regarding one of the most recognizable facets of our own modern cultural landscape.

My wife (Jen) and I recently visited The Seine River Cafe for breakfast, a  quiet, unassuming store front diner tucked in behind a Shell station and a Dairy Queen on Provencher, the central route winding its way through Winnipeg’s French district. It had been on my list of restaurants to visit for a while, being a celiac who is always on the lookout for new places which can accomodate the inconvenciences of this auto-immune disease.

We went early on a Sunday morning, close to when it opened, arriving to an empty restaurant. As we were sat at one of the non-descript tables, the sort of tables you would expect to find at any like minded low key diner, a friendly waitress came to take our order, leading with welcome warm cups of coffee.

It would be soon after that the diner started to fill up with people, some by themselves others arriving in couples or larger groups, each sliding up to a different table in different corners with the obvious ease and aura catering to custom and routine. Both Jen and I noticed, quietly at first to ourselves, as we observed the growing activity and conversation, every single person that came through that door appeared to be a regular. The sort where the waitresses already knew their names and orders. One such table, saddled up close to the open kitchen, naturally fed into casual conversations with the the cook and (assumed) owner, as though they were simply picking up where they last left off. It became so obvious after a while that we, by all appearances, felt certain we were the only strangers in the bunch. We barely needed to verbalize what was on both of our minds in that moment, me just beginning to open my mouth to state the obvious and Jen speaking the all to familiar words of the old Cheers sitcom- “where everyone knows your name.”

What made this moment more startling was the conversation that preceded and followed this moment. With my 50th birthday coming up quick (two days away from this particular Sunday morning venture), such milestones have a way of pushing you into expected modes of reflection on the passage of time, and if you are me, the nature of life itself. Earlier that morning I found myself talking with Jen about how the passage of time has indeed reframed the ways I experience life today, caught in this space where a world, now made primarily visible through its endless online portals, just keeps going about its business even while, in my head, this particular moment for me feels monumental, as though its stopping my world in its tracks.

For me, this is the mark of something I have to similtaneously learn how to grieve and celebrate. One of the things I noted to Jen was how striking that realization actually is given my life today, thinking back on a life that was once dominated by the endless phsyical presence of a social circle, with that memory now ringing out into the uncertain space of this transition into a moment that, by all appearances and experience, now seeks to displace and forget and isolate. Where you know through your convesations with those whom have travelled this space ahead of you, that the process will require a constant process of reckoning with what will become a perpetual stream of loss. In various areas of course, but most pertiently of all the things that once made you “you.”

The notion that this phase of life is marked by the important process of learning how to more appropriately grieve in real time, but also the increased call to remember and to preserve.

These actions, as I’ve been told without the sugar coating, get harder as the years push forward, with life relegating you more and more to the sidelines. At the same time, the call to remember and preserve becomes all the more important precisely because of this reality. As someone once said, words that are lingering today, this is the hard work of aging. Something you are forced to learn in real time, leaning on all the wisdom you have forgotten, handerd down by those who went before. The most difficult thing being your ability to hold on to the simple truth that this process matters to something real and true regarding the meaning of a life.   

To be honest, the only word that fit in that moment, in my conversation with Jen, was “loneliness.” A feeling of lonliness that is also marked by existing in a world that now oeprates in that online space. A world in which my closest lifelong friendships remain marked more by distance than presence, for as valuable as they remain.

Fast forward to after our breakfast, where we attended the Sunday morning service at our Church. Here we were met by a message about the importance of having those voices in your life, the ones that truly know you, which can help you through the passage of time and different phases of a life. How telling the story of a life together matters, especially to how we imagine God’s relationship to this world and our continued participation in it.

That image of the diner, defined as it was through routines built over the passage of time, where those figures knew exactly where to sit without needing direction, where their names were known and orders made before any words had yet been spoken. Such an image pushes back against the dominant image of the way it seems life must work today. A world where we are taught that life is meant to be about some gradual progression towards some non-descript and undefined point of growth. Here, in this image, I find something much richer, preserved as it is in the passage of time, not a product of it. A timely image given the question my day started with, and the message that would follow.

I’ve been thinking about this (now) memory as I’ve been working through the newly released book by Kathryn Jezer-Merton called The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything. It’s a book about understanding this present moment. Which, whether we like it or not, whether we want to recognize it or not, runs straight through one of its primary driving forces- social media. A truism that holds whether you are among those deleting their facebook accounts or perhaps establishing limits and boundaries and reforming habits. “Social media” applies broadly to nearly every facet of our world and its function., far beyond the typical scapegoats. It’s written into the fabric of our econoimy, it’s the primary language of our social function in an online world, and it takes on many different forms.

I found it fascinating to journey with Merton back in time to the early adoption of social media (and I promise to connect this back to my thoughts above on turning 50). Back to the age of MySpace and Friendster and AOL. She outlines the way the early adoption of this form of communication complimented the way life worked before its reshaping. It was a mirror of that (now) lost world. Meaning, it once served as a space largely built for our relatively small physical circle of friends where we could engage in the largely experimental but active creative curation of ones story. Anyone who grew up in this era can understand that these early sites fit our lifetyles at the time, where they demanded the same sort of hours upon hours of time and attention that curating and collecting our tape and CD collections did in a largely still computer iliterate world used to (and loving) “being bored.” Building our MySpace platforms wasn’t that far removed from the practice of building our physical zines or our basement jam session hang outs, and it wasn’t abnormal to find ourselves doing it together either. We would build them, and then we would meet together to discuss and compare and chat about them. More importantly, which Merton points out, the first place we would gravitate to were the profiles.

But then came an important shift in the atmsophere. Where these connecting spaces experienced a movement from a small group of our close friends (our physical life) out into a small group of connections turned friends from outside of that physical circle. This began the gradual progression towards a world framed now through connections marked by physical distance. As this shift became the norm, those once physical spaces began to disappear, along with the once cherished practice of the curation of profiles. Facebook understood where these winds were shifting towards long before anyone else, and eventually that once world of creation curation of our physical lives turned into a world of online connection and content now replicating and chasing after itself. The world was now our collective space, and that space was now online, and every platform that followed became defined by the further implementation of “user friendly” streamlined designs, whicih is shorthand for “stripped of the need for time consuming personal curation.”

And the bigger the world became, the more these physical spaces we once occupied disappeared. Ironically, if you fast foward to some of the eventual fallout, what we eventually find is a world where carving out time for physical interaction (be it with spaces or people, the more predominant trend being towards the former) has now become an intentional trend, the necessary reprieve, the thing we build in to our lives as an antidote to the way the world now works.

A world where going off social media becomes a matter of virtue signalling for a lost world no one actually knows or understands masking the simple fact that even where we engage in such admirable practices of disciplined retreat, the world we occupy remains defined by social media. What’s also true, and maybe even more pertinent, is that this supposed reclamation of physical spaces tends to narrow our world into small, protected circles of like minded connection, not open it up. The lost world we think we are retreaving, in constrast, that was a world once necessitated by a room filled with disagreement by its nature. That’s what made it valuable. .

One of the things Merton brings to the forefront is that the thing (the social construct) that is telling the story of our lives is intimately connected to how we tell the stories of our lives. Meaning, we are always as much a product of the world as we are a product of the way the world functions. The first is the world we inherit, the second determines the paramaters of our participation in it. Within this we can note important and common human tendencies that remain universal across the shifting tides- the need to share of ourselves, the need to belong, the need to preserve. But we also have what we would call the unique dynamics of a particular moment in time, in this case our present online age. Knowing the difference is important.

She does state that this (book) is not about singling out the present online age and demonizing it. Although in some ways it is singling it out so as to understand the thing we are looking to critique (and its relevance to our lives)  Mostly though, it’s about learning how to distinguish between what those inate common human needs are, and the particular shape of our present moment that distinguishes us from the rest of history, a process that is equal parts reflective and predictive.

But there’s an important aspect of our navigation to this end that needs to be recognized. In order to get to the root of the problem we have to understand where it is situated in the history of it’s emergence. For example, we can look at the ways social media changed from that era of hands on curation to the automated forms we encounter today. That begs the question, why did it take this shape? It doesn’t just come out of nowhere. It’s following a pattern. That might push us to look at the nature of the market economy this emerges within, something Morton notes as a force that naturally seeks the commodification of emotional (lived lives) capitalism, something that economy craves in this online world.

But that also doesn’t come out of nowhere. Morton notes how we can reach back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to locate a pivotal shift in a way of doing life in this economic reality, observing the devleopment of the myth of “personal growth” or pesonal development, something that gets applied to telling our stories according to a preconditioned allegiance to expected notions of linear progressions and sought after narratives of self improvement.

But again, this doesn’t come out of nowhere. It is the natural outcome of a particular world of its time, one that follows the myth of progress, or a narrative of societal progression that is built on scapegoating the past. A world that finds its worth in today always necessarily being better than yesterday, lest the whole enterprise show itself to be a failure. Follow that line and we find ourselves, again as an example, standing on the precipice of a new societal shift, now known as the age of the Enlightenment. Itself a product of wide-spread shifts which divided East and West according to the terms old and new, tumbling as it was into the industrial age and everything else that would follow in its footsteps.

Perhaps reaching further back yet, as far back as James Suzman’s theory in Work: A Deep History, From the Stone Age to The Age of Robots (necessary reading), which sees the first truly universal shift in the way we do life with the discovery of fire, the singular moment where activity once the sole property of the active expenditure of human energy was now being contracted out to a different energy source (handing the work we once did to something other than ourselves). Which of course begins the long and patterned road to now grappling with the realities of AI.

All such digging requires us to work our way back up then to those pivotal points that mark our present point of concern, to something closer in relevance and which we can, perhaps, actually have a degree of control over and hold greater proximity to. But we do so with those helpful patternings in mind, which make us better equipped to understand the issues we are facing now, especially for that all important task of distinguishing between the familiar and common patterns that bind history together, and the uniqueness of this present moment.

A present moment marked in a unique way by

• the commodifcation of emotional capitalism
• a globalized world shaped predominantly by this seperation between digital and physical spaces
• widespread epidemics of depression and anxiety fueled by the erosion of the attention economy
• Increasing feelings and experiences of loneliness and a loss of a guiding narrative

Morton notes another important, and I think profound, observation. At the heart of the problem sits this essential idea: what we’ve lost is the basic vocabulary for describing, and thus knowing, the world before this present shift from physical space to the new online world (and the economic machine it would bear out in its image). That’s massively important for understanding where we find ourselves in this present moment. All narrative is, after allo, predicated on language. And not just language, but a shared language.

There is a reason why this matters though for how we understand this present moment. When you look at the patterns of history, what you find is a human tendency towards forms of dualism. Dualism is simply a way of seeing a world (or a facet of reality) as being made up of two distinct, seperate parts. Platonism is perhaps one of the most famous expressions of dualistic thought, and comes in and out of fashion like the 80s and 90s (also see the obsession of the West with retrieving ancient Greek Myth and reappropriating it, along with it’s infused dualism, as our latest iteration of a modern western origins story). These same patterns emerge when we look at our now online world seeking repreieve in the physical. Rather than acting as a critique of the online world, we create these dualistic realities, such as the world of nature versus the digital world of our now functional lives (or nature versus the city). More specific to the above analyszis is the tendency to carve out spaces and sections of our lives dedicated to physical space that are effectively seperate from the world we occupy in the online space.

Debate surrounding dualism looms large, especially where it intersects with our preservation of the modern western myth of progress, but critiques have long accused it of falsely writing reality into narratives of disparate parts. Such ways of thinking not only keeps us at arms length from attending to the way reality is on a more holistic level, it actively allows us to ignore it. Such critiques see it as enabling forms of escapism, which then sacfiice our ability to hone in on what actually matters when it comes to assessing a true narrative of the world we are inhabiting. Carving out wanted repreives doesn’t pose the necessary quesitons needed to actively address the online world we still inhabit.

And subsequently, it fails to pose those same questions to the unique challenges such a world represents: the loneliness epidemic, the challenges of widespread and systemic depression and anxiety, the erosion of the attention economy, the lack of narrative.

Coming back full circle to my restaurant experience and my struggle with turning 50 in a world that increasingly feels unfamiliar, but one which also no longer speaks my language. Being of that generation, the last suriving one which has one foot in both worlds, who grew up without the internet, but came of age in the great shift towards this online existence., in some ways makes it more difficult. It’s not simply that I feel the impact of such a world, it’s that I actively know what has been lost over the years. I also know that what is lost is part of a world that no longer exists, a world that “today” doesn’t have the language for. This, I think, is part of why the process of aging in a world where change happens at a rate which is unprecedented, brings with it those ineviatble feelings of growing isolation and loneliness. Attempting to communicate these parts of oursevles in a world that neither understands you nor cares to (or perhaps is able to) only serves to underscore the predominant narrative that relegates lives to the very past the myth of progress sees as the enemy. In some ways this has been true for a good long while about the ebb and flow of generational shifts, but to understand the challenges of aging today one also needs to note its unique expression in this now online world.

In truth, I don’t know that my generation fully grasped what it was getting into. We were taking our own journey into something we did not understand, and what has come from it is a world we no longer understand. A world so reshaped that it cannot recognize its own shadow, even in proper conversation. And yet it is also our world nonetheless. We, those of us who are aged, still live in it. Still occupy it. Still have to navigate it. Which is part of the challenge of that never ending grieving process, because the more we do, the more distanced we become from our mother tongue so to spaeak. The more the memory of the world we grew up in fades and retreats with the passage of time, and the more we become convinced of that ever repeating narrative: the past exists only to assure we have rejected it. Only now it’s as if the past never existed at all. In many ways, modern history is not history at all. In the online world it cannot be lost, it cannot be buried, and it will never need to be sought or wrestled with or understood. This is part of that vast language barrier that keeps these two worlds apart.

Here’s something interesting. Today I went to visit the Dalnavert Museum, the once home of John A. Macdonald, a former Prime Minister of Canada. While I was working my way through the old home, built in the late 1800’s, one of the workers asked me how I was enjoying the displays. The first thought I had was, if you took this home, cut it down to less than a quarter of its size, and took out some of the more lofty artifacts denoting that upper class status, the whole thing reminded me of being a young child visiting my grandmothers house. So many of the artifacts were exactly the things that they had in their home, from the old style washers and tub to the kitchen stove and pots, to the wallpaper and lamps. It all tbrought me straight back to those childhood memories. But it also struck me that, here I was seperated by two generations from that life, and my world can still share that language. in my ways. Being seperated now (in some respects) by two generations on the other side (given the rate of change, two generations between my grandpaterents and me translates to about 5 between me and and my nephews children) leaves me with a world that seems to share next to nothing in common. Case in point: I was teaching a confirmation class a little while ago, and in my lesson I brought up what I thought was the single generation occupying of that room- Gen Z. Turned out the room was actually divided by two whole generations, defined as such while only being a year apart. More shocking? Both sides stated that they really didn’t understand the other. They felt like they spoke a completely different language. That really shook me up.

Back to that breakfast outing. Somehow that simple act of eating breakfast in a long standing diner surrounded by visible acts of routine and tradition reminded me that certain revelations do break through the noise from time to time. A lost art? Perhaps. A dying relic in an age where such institutions only survive by changing names every four or fives years.? There’ a good chance this is true. For me it wasn’t so much about it being some ill fated reverance for the good old days (not that this isn’t part of it I assume for anyone remembering the past), rather it was a moment when I felt known., and understood. As though this shared language had the power to remind me that the past is still a thing. That life does indeed matter. That its not just an inevitable (and often tough) dance towards the reality of being erased. Or worse yet, living in a world where one has already been erased. After all, such discussions about a life are never contained to a single story. As Morton’s title denotes, its about “our” stories. It always has been. How we grapple with the relevance of the past in the face of this new online world impacts the whole. What we find the world saying about us, is precisely what allows us to say something about the world. This is why it matters. Perhaps then, this is precisely why figuring out, in this new phase of life, how to grieve and preserve at the same time matters as well. 

Every once in a while I unearth something from my childhood years that I forgot existed. I have no idea where this small remnant of a story was going, but it’s something I was starting to write back when, my best guess, I was around 10 or 12 years old. Figured I’d type it out and preserve it here:

(This was the working chapter title I assume?) Horrendous Yet Familiar

The town of Heradrin, located in the highlands of greater Mirlanda, was filled with the noise and excitment of hundreds of people, all out having a good time and enjoying the festivities of the Christmas season. A couple of houses sat at the edge of town lighting up the outskirts. One of these houses was owned by the Halworth family. Their house was located by a long dirt road serving as the main way to get in and out of town. Their house was old and run down, but that didn’t matter to the Halworths. They considered it home, and had worked hard to make it into a place where they could build a life.

The house was made up of two rooms. In the smaller of the two, Mrs. Halworth lay on her bed, her long blonde hair falling over the sides of her slender shoulders. She was in such a heavy sleep that a trumpet being blared in her ear couldn’t have woken her. One door down her two young girls, both 2 years apart but with similar feisty personalities, were stirring with restlessness as they awaited the coming dawn.  In the other room a shabbily dressed 14 year old boy named Edward sat at a warped and faded wooden desk staring intently down at two thick books that lay open on the desk in front of him. On the open page of one of the books there was written an ancient legend. The legend starts with a man named Gilbert A. Walworth,, who lived way back during the time of the Great Awakening. It told of a long lost treasure that was buried deep in the farthest depths of these legendary caves, known to the locals as the Caves of Death.

Everyone in the town of Heradrin knew about these caves. They were located just a 45 minute drive northward. They also knew of the cave’s protecter, a mysterious fire breathing dragon that lurked deep within the cavernous underground lakes. This dragon, as the story goes, keeps watch over the treasure. Many desire it, but all who venture to find it meet with death. Save for one. This is the one the legend remembers.

It is a town tradition to share the story at Christmas time of this man named Gilbert A. Walworth. As the story goes, Walworth was a man who once coveted untold riches, and upon discovering this map to the promised treasure he sacrificed everything he owned and loved to attain it. Determined to succeed and believing these riches would give him everything he desired, he eventually found himself lost in this cave and unable to find his way back out. Having disappeared for years, the towns-people assumed his death. Until one day, a Chistmas day not unlike this one, they saw this shadowy, weathered figure making his way down the road. Walworth had returned.

In the days that followed he would tell of his experience, describing his perilous journey deep into the darkness of these passageways, eventually one day coming upon a great expanse overlooking an underground lake. Here he found a treasure not made of gold, but of Wisdom. Angry about his findings, Walworth threw this treasure into the lake, thus awakening the great beast that lay sleeping beneath the surface. The beast was the most fearsome thing he had ever seen, with fangs as wide and as tall as he stood, and fiery red eyes that pierced staight into his soul. A body made of scales that glistened as though it was made of prized medals. Frozen in place, he prayed for deliverance, which is when he found himself suddenly subsumed by a glowing light, with an unfamiliar voice seemingly speaking from all sides all once. Here he was imparted with a choice. Desire the secrets of this Wisdom and these riches would serve as the true master of his heart, freeing him from the passions of his will and giving him an untold power over the forces of the world. Choose the passions, and he would become a slave to the dragon, giving him the untold powers of the world.

Walworth chose Wisdom, and upon his return he began to seek the gift that, for him, had become his salvation. For the rest of his days he grew more and more to love this Wisdom, giving him a power greater than anything he could have imagined, spilling out into the lives he surrounded, and over the years his renknown began to spread over the lands, forming into the greatest legend Herardrin has ever known. Eventually he would die, the secrets of his Wisdom being buried with his body where one day such riches might be unearthed by another, but ever since the people of the town came to believe that by telling this story each year, the mystery could be preserved. That in the telling it they might continue to experience and seek its power. As the legend goes, for those who’s hearts are guarded, the treasure of the dragon remains their desire. For those who journey to find this treasure, they are faced given this same choice. Apart from Walworth, no one else who has entered has returned to share their story. Thus, the sharing of this story year after year has been a way of protecting the town from the allure of the caves.

“Even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, (it) continues to be prized, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it.”(page 57, This Homeward Ache))

The “it” in this equation is Sehnsucht. Sehnsucht, a German word that Lewis cites in his autobiography as a defining point in his own spiritual journey, and which Amy Balk Lee describes in her book This Homeward Ache: How Our Yearning for the Life to Come Spurs on Our Life Today, as being notoriously prone to being subsumed by other words. Yet, “the essence” of this word is one that, by its nature, “can’t really be translated.” She goes on to cite Rebecca K. Reynolds’s work in trying to unpack a strong sense of its meaning, rooting it in a feeling that one can’t quite explain, either to oneself or to others. It is defined as, “A yearning that floats always in the peripheral vision of your soul, but which disappears every time you turn and try to look at it,” something that lends it a necessary part of its very quality and charachter. It is a word that is most at home in the mundane struggles of life, describing that basic human of an unnamed longing for a far-off land we have never seen, or a place we cannot name. (page 41)

Lee suggests this basic truism about how life works, which is that our human biological function, regardless of the beliefs that undergird our interpretation of it, actively protects us against being stuck in a perpetual state of longing. This might feel intuitive, but it’s not always obvious or recognized as we make our way through this life.

The science behind this basic truth of human function suggests that such perpetual longing connects to a further discussion of the nature of human (or creaturely) desire, and more importantly how this relates to the brain’s consistent mode of formulating predictions based on the world it is encountering. What this establishes is, this predictive function is not merely responding to dangers and rewards that are right in front of us, as though this is a simple call and response exercise dependent on what it sees, rather it appears that there is a fundamental need for our brains to seek something it cannot see and cannot name. This is why the concept of hope remains so central to the human experience. As humans, this is what our brains are (unconsciously) fighting to preserve. Without this we become enslaved to what the science could call “dysfunction” or “disorder,” which can take on many different forms. One of its most accute forms on the mental side of things would be things like anxiety, depression, and stress, and its ultimate shape melancholy, cynicism, and apathy.

Lee also cites Alan Jacobs here, saying that while we (our biological brains) do not want to be caught in a perpetual state of longing, we do want to experience joy (as an example). Lee cites this in underscoring C.S. Lewis’ own basic translation of Sehnsucht as Joy. In fact, this is at the core of nearly every spiritual practice, this idea that there is a key difference between fulfilled longings and our experience of Joy in the face of unfulfilled longings.

Here is what this seems to reveal. While our brains are wired to protect against it, this basic fact of Sehnsucht suggests that we are in fact in a perpetual state of longing. However, the crisis point, the thing our brains are responding to, hinges not on the present lack of fulfillment but rather on whether we believe the source of this longing to be true and to actually exist. This is where hope is derived from.

The real question then appears to come down to this basic idea. If it is true that Sehnsucht cannot be grasped or explained, what actually matters is a two-fold reality: first, the idea that we live according to a deeply held belief that it exists at all, and second, what this reveals about why such a thing matters in the first place.

There is a simple, utilitarian understanding of this two-fold equation. It would say, based on reducing the experience to its material parts, that the science tells us this essential human experience is the brain creating the illusion of hope, and subsequently the illusion of joy. These become necessary in order for a human to live in a world shaped by unfulfilled longings. It is, in many ways, described in terms that attach to that essential drive for survival that we find in nature itself, and in fact, nearly everything I’ve read to this end inevitably locates this within a larger section discussing the biological roots of this very drive.

In this case, the appeal to such illusions, especially once you get into the philosophers, is what then moves us from the biological grounds to the metaphysical discussion. What’s important to note here is, such ways of explaining this longing aren’t looking to strip it of its meaning, rather it is naming what that source actually is. Here, the most common move is to appeal to complexity as a sort of authority in and of itself, meaning, these illusions are built on (or are a product of) these emergent realities we call the essential human experience. This is the complexity from which we then derive our meaning. In this sense, we can speak of these illusions as a real thing, even while they are being defined as something that does not in fact exist. .

This is typically the point where this discussion finds its pushback. On one hand, Sehnsucht is comfortably positioned as something that both exists and does not exist at the same time. Complexity allows us to say, it is a true part of the human experience, and thus we can say it is meaningful. But its meaning derives from a Sehnsucht that points to something very different than that experience. Thus Sehnsucht is simply a way of naming a biological function in ways that accord with the illusion. Whether we can hold the obvious cognitive disonnance without losing our sense of hope is not the real question for such interpretations (at least from what I’ve seen), rather it is simply about whether we experience the benefits of these illusions or not. Which is where Joy, or its superficial and largely ill defined version, happiness, comes into play.

On the other hand, those who critique the coherency of this position tend to suggest that such interpretations do not have a particularly strong explanatory power when it comes to actually making sense of the human experience itself, or more accurately the world we oberve and experience. It is not simply cognitive disonnance at play, there is in fact far more at stake when it comes to why we appear to need such beliefs in the first place. One need not look any further than a life for whom hope has been challenged or even abolished. What is at stake is what we actually believe to be true about the world we observe and experience. In this case, the only way we can trust Joy is by believing it exists apart from the ebb and flow of this world we are experiencing. Otherwise it all is held captive to circumstance.

Now, it’s important to note here that, this is not an apologetic. This is not a proof argument. Rather, it is a way of attending to both the way things actually are, and how that relates to what we actually believe about this world we are inhabiting. Whether these things can be stated to have any inherent value, it seeks honesty and integrity in the relationship between these two things.

There are two other important elements here that Lee brings to the table. The first is the hard relationship between a world that bears witness to both the infinite and the finite. This is what motivated minds like Einstein to pursue their theories about existence. Which is to say, when it comes to Sehnsucht, the finite does not have the power to explain the whole. Again, we know this intuitively, but we don’t always give this basic fact about the world we observe and experience the attention it deserves. If this is the case, that we have these longings at all must be set in conversation with the infinite. The quality of these longsings suggest that we are seperated from something we don’t yet know and can’t yet see. Whether this is something our minds of “illusioned,” or whether it is something that exists, in both cases this points to something outside of ourselves. And not just outside of ourselves, but something that is beyond the very words we use to explain it. In both cases, Joy can only translate Sehsucht if Sehsucht is not held captive to our experience of Joy. It is the same for another word we often employ in service of making sense of that which cannot be known or seen: beauty. Lee writes,

“Sehnsucht is not found in but beyond beauty.”

To think otherwise is to be betrayed by something that never existed in the first place. This is the existential crisis. We can only trust beauty if it points beyond itself to its source. In the same way in which metaphor, for it to have power, must point beyond itself.

There is a second important aspect of this discussion though that Lee addresses, and that is the idea of nostalgia. Nostalgia often suffers from superficial readings and definitions in our modern day, but at its richest, Lee suggest that nostalgia is a “heartache for the homecoming,” or a “homecoming pain.”  Yes, it is a longing for a setting in the past, but where Sehnsucht reveals the source of this longing it “catches nostalgia and directs it toward something more fulfilling and complete, something of which the former time gave only a hint.”

What the experience of nostalgia reveals is that our longing has always been rooted in a sense of an inhabited space. Not some disembodied future but an incarnated reality. We aren’t longing for a past that is now gone, rather we are longing for the very same thing this past is bearing witness to in its memory. If this space is in fact a product of our brain’s creation of these necessary illusions, this sense of inhabiting an unnamed Home nevertheless still defines the shape of this longing. This is the only way our brains could convince us (a slippery word in this regard) that such a hope is true and trustworthy.  And if it’s true? If this Home does exist? Here is where we glimpse its true shape.

Sehnsucht is always with us. It is an integral part of the human experience. To live with that “homeward longing,” is to live with a certain hope that Senhsucht is in fact something we can trust. We can trust it enough to stake our very lives on it, as all humans do. We call these “beliefs.” Behind every human experience, be it experiences of joy, sadness, sorrow, beauty, awe, empathy, pain, love; behind each of these things is an underlying belief about the world we observe and experience, and a deep rooted trust in that belief. That is what allows us to experience these things. Not only this, but behind every human experience is this same witness to Sehnsucht, a world (and word) we cannot see and cannot expalin, but which drives our longings, even as we know they will remain unfulfilled. Here in lies our hope.