When somebody refers to a church that “never changes,” that adheres to “ancient tradition,” we picture one that requires strict adherence to correct forms and behavior—sort of like people who reenact historic battles, but this time wearing Byzantine outfits. The motivation might be fear of the new, and fixation on the old simply because it is old. The desired result would be something like a museum diorama.
But think instead about what “unchanging” and “tradition” mean in a family—say, Christmas traditions. Every family that celebrates Christmas has its own traditions. In one family, everyone knows that it’s the angel, not the star, that goes on top of the tree. They know that everyone must wear one of Great-Grandma’s homemade scarves to the midnight church service.
They know that you can open one, and only one, present on Christmas Eve. At Christmas dinner, they know to set the table with the now-faded red and green napkins.
But they also know that it doesn’t matter who gets what color. If Grandpa had a red one last year and gets a green one now, no one would even notice. An outsider might say, “Aha! You broke your tradition!” But those inside the family know, instinctively it seems, how to handle variations. There’s not only a tradition; there’s a tradition about the tradition. You couldn’t figure it out by looking from the outside. You’d think they were always breaking their own rules. But those who are inside a community learn by living, it seems, where tradition is stretchy and where it is not.
That’s the kind of tradition people follow willingly. It’s not a dead tradition, but a living, life-giving tradition. It can be called “living” even though it doesn’t change. In fact, its unchanging quality is somehow part of its strength, as those alive today link arms with all who went before.
Christmas traditions aren’t maintained for the sake of tradition, but for the sake of the family. Traditions are kept because they do something. They foster love and joy, and bind people together. Family members don’t complain that a Christmas tradition is old-fashioned, or that it’s the same thing they did last year. Old, familiar traditions seem fresh and lively, because they renew the family’s life.
Imagine that a member of this family wanted to add a new tradition—say, that on Christmas Eve they’d all watch the movie A Christmas Story together. That new tradition might fit right into the old, overarching tradition. It wouldn’t feel like it was challenging or revising that tradition, but like an enhancement, a bonus.
But now imagine that, after a few years, people have had more than enough of A Christmas Story. They start coming late to the Christmas gathering just so they don’t have to watch it again. That new tradition failed; it didn’t pass the test of generating life and joy. A custom could slide into, then out of, a family’s Christmas traditions without much fanfare either way. […]
When something new is added to the toolbox, it has to prove itself; it must be shown effective in the transformation process. […]
You’ll sometimes hear it said that there are big-T Traditions that are observed everywhere, and little-t traditions that are more flexible. That is sometimes a useful distinction, but not always, I think; the gradations can be so much more subtle than that, and there are also times when people disagree about whether something is a big or small T.
Such disagreements don’t always have to be resolved. Sometimes we can just wait them out, while the healing mission of the Church continues unimpeded.
one more time, all together now, with conviction
These devices, and especially these apps, were designed to hook your child. They were designed with full knowledge of brain development, dopamine circuits, motivation, insecurity. These are predatory programs that prey on children.
print the legend
I am far from the first to observe that while TikTok’s persona is defined by its teenaged users its reality is defined by adult users who would like to think of themselves as one of those teenaged users. It’s not a symbol of actual teen culture; it’s a symbol of the adult yearning to be a teen. The reality seems to be that when you hand people a front-facing camera, they look into it hoping to find someone who looks younger than they really do. This is a human impulse, an understandable one, but with the notion that adulthood is something to prize and maturity nothing to fear long dead, when there’s no counterweight, you end up with a culture that can’t look at itself in an honest way. Print the legend, I guess. […]
The more depressing thing about the short-lived TikTok freakout, to me, was the deepening sense that adults are not just refusing to ever adopt interests that are appropriate for their age, but increasingly shameless about doing so, unconcerned with even appearing to move on. That’s scarier, to me. Because while I believe that everything should be embraced in moderation, including maturity – yes, I did buy The Elder Scrolls Oblivion Remastered – I also think that a little guilt about our vices is a good thing. And what adult addiction to TikTok and FunkoPop and JoJo Siwa shows is an America that has rejected the idea that permanent childhood is a vice at all.
…What gets to me, these days, is not so much the fact that more and more people seem utterly resistant to acting their age. That’s an old story. What gets to me is the fact that more and more people are utterly unembarrassed about it – that they don’t even feel the need to pretend to act their age. The sensation that we should feel shame about a refusal to grow up now seems somewhat quaint to me. As in so many other domains of human socialization, it seems like many people feel like it’s too hard to object, and so just go along with wherever culture is blowing.
As a Millennial, I’ve gotten a front row seat to observe a generation reach middle age and decide, instead, to continue acting like we’re in the flower of our youth – delaying the trappings of adulthood like marriage and children, job hopping, obsessing over beauty and appearing young, drinking and smoking weed with the same frequency as the young, refusing to ever graduate on from the media and pop culture of one’s youth and towards something more mature, insisting to everyone and everything that you are still a work in progress or other expressions of responsibility-shucking bad faith, and more than anything, an all-encompassing belief that one should still be extended the affordances we give to people whose youth implies a lack of wisdom, knowledge, and grace. People love to unapologetically proclaim that they’re “a 33 year old teenager” or similar. Well, what cultural force exists now to pressure them to act their actual, numeric age? […]
I think the refusal of adulthood has many, many causes. But the identification of the death of context, here, is quite helpful. Ami and I are ingesting a lot amount of information about young babies, for obvious reasons, and it’s interesting to think of what it’s like to be a newborn – so many things are undifferentiated. I read that for infants colors bleed into each other, sounds can’t be separated, and in fact young enough babies are apparently not even aware that there is a difference between themselves and their environments. The point is that the cultural substrate has shifted in such a way that this undifferentiated affect, this sensory flood without context or development, has become a feature of not just infancy but of adult consciousness. The baby doesn’t know the difference between a lullaby and the hum of a refrigerator. Likewise, the adult in the algorithm doesn’t know the difference between sincerity and irony, the tragic and the comic, an actual person’s emotional unraveling and a bit. And crucially, more and more, they don’t want to know. Discernment is exhausting, and the vibe is everything. “Is this real?” becomes less important than “does this vibe?” Which is how you get people openly crying about a cat video one moment and then openly mocking someone else’s pain in the next, with neither leaving any mark. Swipe, swipe, swipe. Nothing matters. […]
So what’s left? If you abandon the moral authority of adulthood, if you abandon taste, if you abandon the concept of context, if you even abandon shame, then what remains is a kind of permanent ambient performance of “relatability.” That’s all TikTok is, at bottom: endless pantomimes of your internal life, designed to be recognized, not judged. It’s not about being funny or clever or beautiful or interesting, although all of those qualities are occasionally present. It’s about performing your proximity to the audience, performing sameness. I’m just like you, and you’re just like me. Which sounds democratic until you realize that the price of entry is the annihilation of self-differentiation. You can’t grow up if your prime directive is to remain legible to everyone else.
People sometimes ask me why I care. “Why do you care if a 38-year-old woman has a Squishmallow collection?” “Why do you care if a grown man cries over finally deciding on his Hogwarts House?” And I admit that this is a good-faith question. There are many things I don’t care about. If you’re not hurting anyone, if your regression is private, if you want to let your inner child out to play on weekends, go with God. But when the collective orientation of a society shifts away from maturity, and when entire media ecosystems are devoted to protecting people from the experience of being challenged or confronted, we don’t just lose some abstract dignity. We lose the capacity to solve real problems. Adults who refuse to be adults leave no adults to run the world. And somebody has to.
This, for me, is the core anxiety around TikTok and TikTokification: not that people are having fun, or even that people are being silly, but that so much of adult life is now defined by explicitly disavowing adulthood. Not by immaturity, but by a performative allergy to maturity. It’s not that we’re aging poorly, but that we’re pretending we’re not aging at all. And as always, once something becomes the dominant cultural mode, it becomes invisible. The fact that grown people spend multiple hours a day watching strangers lip sync and point at words in the air doesn’t strike anyone as odd anymore. We’ve all agreed not to be the scold, not to be the buzzkill, not to be the person who says “this might be a little bit sad.”
…There’s more people my age who want to live like teenagers than you may know. They like to believe that they’re still waiting for their lives to begin and they will do so even after they have the financial means to grow up. Again, undifferentiated – the denial of aging allows for the perpetual right to say “I am still unformed.” Adults cosplay as “neurodivergent” rather than admit to the mundane pains of being anxious or bored; adults refer to their spouses as “my partner in crime” and their dogs as their “fur babies”; adults find meaning only in being seen, rather than being responsible for anything. Adults brag about having no opinions, no preferences, no convictions, only vibes. It’s not a subculture. It’s the culture. […]
…The culture now rewards you for saying yes to everything. Yes to the 40-year-old’s toy haul, yes to never traveling anywhere but to Disneyland, yes to celebrity divorce gossip, yes to fake ADHD self-diagnosis, yes to the Spotify feed tube of pop dross that thrills 13-year-olds, yes to the holy algorithm. It’s so easy to say yes. And if that’s your prerogative, fine. But the more people who choose that route, the fewer people are left to say no: no to cruelty, no to laziness, no to willful ignorance. No to being less than what you are capable of becoming. Adulthood is hard. But it’s not a trap. It’s the mechanism by which we build a world worth living in.
seeking influential oxygen
I’m a writer. Though I’m given to waxing pretentious about my profession, here that’s not a philosophical statement or some soul-searching claim about vocation; I mean it in the most banal way possible. I write things, and sometimes people read them. If I’m lucky, they think about the things that I’ve written after they read them. If I’m really, really lucky, some small number of them change their minds, in however small a way. That is the actual arc of what I do: words, then readers, then (rare but real) effects on thinking, usually minor ones. That arc is narrow, fragile, and unpredictable. The range of things I can meaningfully influence is small. The kinds of readers I reach are finite. And when it comes to Donald Trump, there is nothing I can say that will matter, not even a little bit.
That’s not some empty gesture of fatalism. It’s a recognition of reality. There’s already an immense and suffocating media ecosystem built entirely around Donald Trump, pro and con, left and right, earnest and cynical. The man is the gravitational center of modern American political discourse. He is the sun around which all else orbits. He has been analyzed, dissected, profiled, parodied, investigated, indicted, psychoanalyzed, lionized, and demonized to a degree that exceeds comprehension. Every possible critique of him has already been made, often in triplicate. His corruption, his cruelty, his incompetence, his shamelessness – all of it has been written a thousand times, often by people far more credentialed and connected in the world of partisan politics than I am. He and his reign are topics so saturated with analysis that there’s scarcely any rhetorical oxygen left to consume.
sorrow tilting lovely
To my great surprise, I discovered that I was part of a common human story. I began to recognise the immense value and potential of our humanness while simultaneously acknowledging, at my core, our terrifyingly perilous situation. I learned we all actually die. I realised that although each of us is special and unique, our pain and brokenness is not. Over time, Susie and I came to understand that the world is not indifferent or cruel, but precious and loving – indeed, lovely – tilting ever toward good.
I discovered that the initial trauma of Arthur’s death was the coded cypher through which God spoke, and that God had less to do with faith or belief, and more to do with a way of seeing. I came to understand that God was a form of perception, a means of being alert to the poetic resonance of being. I found God to be woven into all things, even the greatest evils and our deepest despair. Sometimes I feel the world pulsating with a rich, lyrical energy, at other times it feels flat, void, and malevolent. I came to realise that God was present and active in both experiences.
These days, I am neither distrustful nor suspicious of the world, even though my heart breaks for it, and I am not despairing, depressed or embittered. Indeed, I see heartbreak as the most proportional response to the state of the world – to say I love you is to say my heart breaks for you, and this sentiment resonates within all things, bringing a clarity to both the world before us and the world beyond the veil. Sorrow becomes a way of life, part laughter, part tears, with very little space between. It is a way of conducting oneself in the world, of loving it, of worshipping it.
“craftsmen of the spiritual life”
The irony of proclaiming to have no creed but the Bible and to “speak where the Bible speaks” while quoting theologians and commentators (but passing it off as my own “bible study” and never attributing the sources) in classes and sermons was not lost on me.
I became fully aware that “we must obey God rather than men” was actually, “we must obey God as interpreted by my favorite men.” […]
If we substitute “sola scriptura” with “sola patristics” we have the same issues. The “sola” is about infallibility and a perfect message that can be perfectly interpreted and thus we can be assured we are right before God and can judge others. Sola scriptura has to prove the inerrancy and perfect harmony of scripture in order to stand. Sola patristics seeks to prove absolute inerrancy and lock step unity of “The Fathers” in all things dogmatic, pastoral and ecclesial to stand. (Why inerrancy in an imperfect world is so important to us is another blog post some day….)[…]
We are called to be craftsmen of the spiritual life, building the household of God according to the gifts we are given, not just scholars.How do we know we have the “phronema of the Spirit”? Jesus said, by your fruits you shall be known: The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23). If your dogma is not manifested in this way, your dogma is serving the phronema of your flesh: vainglory, conceit, provoking, engaging in fruitless disputes, and not restoring the lost in a spirit of gentleness, looking to your own sins. (Galatians 5:24-26, Timothy, Titus).
The Orthodox phronema, explicated over 2000 years through creeds, canons, liturgy, sacraments, holy elders, bishops, monastics and laity is simply this: Salvation is not a passing grade on a dogmatics seminary exam, it is the life you learned to live after you were offered a mysterious, free cure for your cancer from your Creator who loves you to death.
In the end, it is not wrong to study the cure, it is wrong to not take the medicine.
↕️
In the year 1831, it seems, this church was repaired and several new additions were made. One of them was a new steeple with a bell in it, and once it was set in place and painted, apparently, an extraordinary event took place. “When the steeple was added,” Howard Mudgett writes in his history, “one agile Lyman Woodard stood on his head in the belfry with his feet toward heaven.”
That’s the one and only thing I’ve been able to find out about Lyman Woodard, whoever he was, but it is enough. I love him for doing what he did. It was a crazy thing to do. It was a risky thing to do. It ran counter to all standards of New England practicality and prudence. It stood the whole idea that you’re supposed to be nothing but solemn in church on its head just like Lyman himself standing upside down on his. And it was also a magical and magnificent and Mozartian thing to do.
If the Lord is indeed our shepherd, then everything goes topsy-turvy. Losing becomes finding and crying becomes laughing. The last become first and the weak become strong. Instead of life being done in by death in the end as we always supposed, death is done in finally by life in the end. If the Lord is our host at the great feast, then the sky is the limit.
There is plenty of work to be done down here, God knows. To struggle each day to walk the paths of righteousness is no pushover, and struggle we must, because just as we are fed like sheep in green pastures, we must also feed his sheep, which are each other. Jesus, our shepherd, tells us that. We must help bear each other’s burdens. We must pray for each other. We must nourish each other, weep with each other, rejoice with each other. Sometimes we must just learn to let each other alone. In short, we must love each other. We must never forget that. But let us never forget Lyman Woodard either, silhouetted up there against the blue Rupert sky. Let us join him in the belfry with our feet toward heaven like his, because heaven is where we are heading. That is our faith and what better image of faith could there be? It is a little crazy. It is a little risky. It sets many a level head wagging. And it is also our richest treasure and the source of our deepest joy and highest hope.
“A Politics of Ease”
A summary I wrote for a writing class around 2016, of Jennifer Bagelman’s article “Sanctuary: A Politics of Ease”:
The End of Children
In Seoul, an endless, futuristic sprawl of Samsung- and LG-fabricated high-rises, an imminent shortage of people seems preposterous. The capital city’s metropolitan area, home to twenty-six million citizens, or about half of all South Koreans, is perhaps the most densely settled region in the industrialized world. When I visited, in November, I was advised to withdraw my phone from my pocket on the metro platform, because it would be impossible to do so once on board the train. Fuchsia metro seats are reserved for pregnant women. Those who aren’t yet showing are awarded special medallions as proof of gestation. A looping instructional video reminded passengers of the proper etiquette. Even amid the rush-hour crush, these seats were often left vacant. They seemed to represent less a practical consideration than an act of unanchored faith—like a place for Elijah at a Seder table.
Portents of desolation are everywhere. Middle-aged Koreans remember a time when children were plentiful. In 1970, a million Korean babies were born. An average baby-boomer classroom had seventy or eighty pupils, and schools were forced to divide their students into morning and afternoon shifts. It is as though these people were residents of a different country. In 2023, the number of births was just two hundred and thirty thousand. A baby-formula brand has retooled itself to manufacture muscle-retention smoothies for the elderly. About two hundred day-care facilities have been turned into nursing homes, sometimes with the same directors, the same rubberized play floors, and the same crayons. A rural school has been repurposed as a cat sanctuary. Every Korean has heard that their population will ineluctably approach zero. Cho Youngtae, a celebrity demographer at Seoul National University, said to me, “Ask people on the street, ‘What is the Korean total fertility rate?’ and they will know!” They often know to two decimal places. They have a celebrity demographer.
ballast
Not at every moment of our lives, Heaven knows, but at certain rare moments of greenness and stillness, we are shepherded by the knowledge that though all is far from right with any world you and I know anything about, all is right deep down. All will be right at last. I suspect that is at least part of what “He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness” is all about. It means righteousness not just in the sense of doing right but in the sense of being right—being right with God, trusting the deep-down rightness of the life God has created for us and in us, and riding that trust the way a red-tailed hawk rides the currents of the air in this valley where we live. I suspect that the paths of righteousness he leads us in are more than anything else the paths of trust like that and the kind of life that grows out of that trust. I think that is the shelter he calls us to with a bale in either hand when the wind blows bitter and the shadows are dark.