Carrying That Weight
Our lives have no substance without commitment
I just finished watching the George Clooney film Up In The Air for the first time since it came out in 2009. It’s so good. It’s about loneliness, and connection — maybe not the best movie to watch at the end of this Covid year, but I’m glad I did. Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a middle-aged business consultant who spends 270 days a year traveling for work. He hates that he can’t be on the road all the time. He loves the freedom he has by never putting roots down, never being obliged to anybody else. Ryan gives a canned speech to audiences, one that contains this sentiment:
How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you're carrying a backpack. I want you to feel the straps on your shoulders. Feel them? I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life. You start with the little things on shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, the collectibles. Feel the weight as that adds up. Then you start adding larger stuff.
The idea is that commitments weigh you down. You want to travel light through life, is Ryan’s point of view. A deeper philosophical point of the film is that we have constructed a society to suit economic priorities — and the most important aspect of capitalism is fluidity. That is, to be loyal to anything other than the bottom line is an intolerable hindrance. So we create procedures and narratives to rationalize the human destruction that comes with constant economic churn. Ryan’s consultant agency makes its money by hiring itself out to companies who need to “downsize” — fire people — but can’t bring themselves to do it. Ryan is the one who does the firing, and presents a spiel to people who have just had their lives upended, trying to convince them that it’s actually a good thing.
He can give these presentations with confidence, because he has committed himself to the same narrative, to justify his way of life. But then Ryan makes himself vulnerable by falling in love, and catching a glimpse of how wintry his own solitary life is without love.
A lesson of the film is that there are no substitutes for love and friendship. None. More than that, fidelity to binding commitments are the only thing that give our lives weight and meaning. I’m thinking now of Milan Kundera’s philosophical novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I re-read last year, and liked much less than I did when I first discovered it in my college years. Nevertheless, the book raises some deep questions. Here’s a key passage from chapter two, in which Kundera introduces the tension between lightness and heaviness:
The answer is, it depends. Life is the art of balancing between being crushed by gravity and floating off into the abyss of space. The opposition between lightness and heaviness, says Kundera, is “the most mysterious of all.” He goes on, introducing the characters Tomas and Tereza:
In Up In The Air, Ryan Bingham’s life spent flying from place to place is a symbol of his lightness. But this lightness is revealed as a heavy weight, because his existence has no justification, no substantiality. His freedom is maintained at the cost of human relationships — at the cost, ultimately, of love. As Kundera writes in the passages I’ve quoted, we have no way of knowing in advance if a choice is the right one before we make it. A meaningful life requires leaps of faith — in God, in others, and so forth. Yes, we will be let down. We will be taken advantage of. We will be hurt. And we will let down, take advantage of, and hurt others, even if we don’t mean to do it. But what else is there? A life lived without faith, in the sense I mean here, might as well not have been lived at all.
Last night I wrote here about faith, trust, and risk, focusing on the suffering of the Catholic writer Steve Skojec, who spent the earlier part of his life involved with a strict Catholic religious order called the Legionaries of Christ, which he now calls a cult. Skojec eventually left them, but writes about the deep scars left by his years in their company, talking about how the order exploited the faith of its followers, and abused their trust. In the piece, I wrote about how my own painful experience with religion and abuse was not in the same category as what Skojec endured, but that it did leave my ability to trust crippled. (This, I should say, is not the only reason I find myself in middle age impaired by trust issues, but it is the main one.) That said, I do believe that there is hope for restoration. One thing I hope to do with this newsletter is not only to write about hopeful things, when I find them, but also to curate a conversation among thoughtful people who ponder the same things. Maybe we can help each other.
To that end, I invited your letters about faith and trust. Here is a sampling of what you had to say:
Hello, Rod. 57 years ago today my mother told her children she was going to her sister's for awhile. When asked what time she'd be back she said " I don't know." She has five children. In 1963 we ranged in age from 14 to 2. I, the second, was 12. Of course we, nor my father, knew that she ended her marriage that day.
When it became apparent to my Dad that his wife had gone off the deep end ("wokeness," I kid you not, was the cause of her abandoning us) and that he now was the father of five children whose mother had skeedattled in order to give herself to making the world a better place, he succumbed to despair and self-pity, not to mention instant single-parent panic. This was 1963 in South Louisiana, New Orleans to be specific, and uptown women just didn't do this. A strange pall settled upon our home. The hurt, pain, fear, insecurity could all be expected. The freakishness and embarrassment was a surprise. Eventually my Dad pulled through and did very well by his children, albeit he was always suffocatingly over-protective, understandably so.
My mother returned to school and got a masters in History and began the glorious work of saving the world. First civil rights (I am not blind to the courage that took in the deep South in the 60s and 70s) and then socialism/communism and in due time militant feminism. Over the decades we have seen our Mom practice pretty much everything you write and worry about. I can tell you the people driving and riding on that bus have been at it a long time. She slid to the west coast, of course, and was way ahead of the rest when it comes to critical race theory, reparations, anti-racism etc. On a visit to San Francisco in the mid 80s, she instructed me to only give to black homeless, preferably black women first.
The above is offered as a bit of context to your musings on faith and trust. Like you I converted to Catholicism in the 90s. Before that, in 1979, I believe, I read a very long essay in the New Yorker about the media and culture, and wrote the author a fan letter. It turned out he lived down the block from us on Grand St. We became friends. He was brilliant and eccentric. And gave me a bible one Christmas. I was surprised and assumed he thought it good for my literary education. He moved in the high circles of culture, both traditional and pop, and it never even occurred to me that he was a practising Christian. That bible played a large part in my eventual conversion. Reading the gospels, I was immediately struck by the crazy upside downness of its saturated messages: love your enemy, lose your life to find it, forget about justice, die to live. Over the years, I read a lot of apologetics and the like and was enamored of Christian ideas. But as I got older, it became clearer to me that ideas will not save. For that it takes an open heart and that takes courage and mine has long been closed and cowardly. The open hearted open themselves to suffering again and again and again and do so because they trust. They trust their mothers, they trust their friends, their lover, their spouse and most of all their God.
Their faith and trust is not naive. They well know people, the ones above, might betray them and desecrate their love and trust and bring on suffering. And yet they remain open, faithful, trusting, believing. That takes courage and heart speaking to heart.
Faith requires the courage to surrender. There’s a thought. What if continuing to fight is the cowardly move? How are we to know?
Here’s another:
I learned about being betrayed in a somewhat different way, but I learned that bitter lesson. When we're outsiders, we think that when we finally find our tribe, we'll be safe. But it turns out that the line between good and evil is not between us and them, but between me, myself, and I: no matter how you draw that line, part of you is going to be on the wrong side.
As with many gay kids, I spent my youth isolated and alone. At first, when you finally start meeting other gay people, it's wonderful. Quite a few join a cult of sorts and never leave. But some of us get appalled at what we see. It drove me mad to see so many gay men disparage monogamy as a straight person thing. I'm married now, and my husband and I bonded in part because we felt like gay failures. Homophobia might just be hating gay people more than absolutely necessary.
It's human nature to tolerate more from groups of us than groups of them. When my child misbehaves, it's a kid having a bad day, but when other people's children misbehave, Western Civilization is doomed. Part of recovering from cultish behavior is to gain perspective. First, of our own group: behavior that we wouldn't tolerate from others shouldn't be tolerated within the group. We'd call the police if someone embezzled from another group, and should hold ourselves and our people to the same standard. But the second aspect involves other groups: they have their own flaws, and we must be reasonably charitable to them. This doesn't mean forgiving them everything--it isn't my place to forgive the bishop who covered up child molestation--but it does mean assuming that the people involved probably meant well when they erred. The erring bishop possibly hoped that therapy meant that the bad priest was now safe to reassign to a new parish, while the priests who know the terrible truth are terrified to come forward.
For me, oddly enough, the person who helped me through my disillusionment was Tolkien. Treebeard has a wonderful explanation:
I do not like worrying about the future. I am not altogether on anybody's side, because nobody is altogether on my side, if you understand me: nobody cares for the woods as I care for them, not even Elves nowadays . . . . I used to be anxious when the shadow lay on Mirkwood, but when it removed to Mordor, I did not trouble for a while: Mordor is a long way away. But it seems that the wind is setting East, and the withering of all woods may be drawing near. There is naught that an old Ent can do to hold back that storm: he must weather it or crack.
It isn't fun knowing that nobody else quite cares for things as you do. But when we find others who do, we know that a small miracle has taken place. We hope for miracles, but do not count on them--but let's remember that small miracles happen all the time if we know where to look.
Beautiful words. Thank you, friend. Here’s something short but sharp from another reader:
I am a bent human in the exact way you posed in your post. Divorce and pain, struggle to want love and be loved again. Ten years into a new relationship and marriage I still fight the idea of surrender. And so does my bent partner, for the hurt caused him by another. I haven’t been Orthodox for even two years, but my faith and my marriage are not a perfect kind of love. They are a pragmatic kind of love. Struggling to grow my heart, like the Grinch.
On trusting church:
I can't say I've been badly burned as you and Skojec, but I've had my fair share of bad experiences that has left me to, at times, trust God in what He's doing. The church I mentioned earlier was the church where I found Christ. It underwent a split due to internal politics that I'm still not entirely privy to, but the result was pretty ugly. A younger generation was feeling the effects of arguments between their spiritual fathers and naturally had to take sides, myself included. Ultimately, there was a shuffle of leadership, some people got installed, many left, and it became a shell of what it once was. Much like how in our denominations or institutions, we think, "Surely, it can't happen to us", but here we were. I stuck around mostly out of loyalty. There was too much emotional investment to let it sink, but it took the patient encouragement of my now wife to eventually leave, after years of trying to make things work. Upon reflection, I came to the conclusion that it's God's church, and He is free to do what he wants with it. We, as believers, have to trust that what He does is for its good. We as humans like to believe our grand machinations are what save things, but so often we forget that our plans fail in comparison to what God plans to do. Call me young and naive (I'm in my 30's), but I have to hold on to that, otherwise what's the point? Is our faith in men, institutions, or whatever 'idols' we have before us, or is it God, who is bigger than all of that?
I'm not sure what type of Christian I am, but I suppose protestant evangelical is the closest, and I guess that healthy skepticism of leaders is baked into our understanding of church hierarchy, but what do I know? I mean, look at the SBC and their internal collapse. I often look to the line in Ecclesiastes, "Nothing is new under the sun" to remind myself that even though sin looks new in our present age, I have to ask myself, "Is it really?" Perhaps it just has a new coat of paint, but what's inside is all the same.
Have faith in the church Rod. It's done some terrible things, but it's done some good as well. I hope you find your answers.
Objets de Woo-Woo
I also wrote last night about experiences with cursed objects and blessed objects, and invited your stories about experiences you have had with spiritual power seeming to reside within matter. Some really interesting letters came in. Among them, this knockout from a journalist:
Early in my career, I wrote for the local alternative publication, back home in West Virginia. One Halloween, the editor — a friend of mine — proposed a story on a practicing Satanist. He’d found a guy who worked at the city post office, of all places, who also practiced, and he proposed we interview the guy together.
From the outside, the gentleman’s home looked like any other nondescript house in his working-class neighborhood. Inside, however, everything was black, with symbols painted on the walls and lots of examples of the guy’s artwork all around. He noticed my friend staring at one piece — a ceremonial staff. There were symbols carved into the curved wooden handle, and a painted cow skull had been fastened to the top.
“Here,” the Satanist told my friend. “You can have it.” (It should be said that he was a nice guy and an attentive host.) My friend accepted the staff, as my eyes bulged.
When we left the house, I ripped into my editor friend.
“Haven’t you ever seen this movie?” I hissed, as soon as we were in the car. “Don’t you know what happens next?”
“What?” my friend protested. (He was, and is, a not-religious-but-spiritual fellow and nonpracticing Jew.)
From the moment my friend took the “devil stick,” as he called it, into his museum-like home, to join his various other exhibits (including his collection of glass eyes), bad things happened. I'm not sure if there was any poltergeist activity, per se, but a cloud descended on the house. The night after he brought the stick home, he arrived back from a gig (he’s the best guitarist I’ve ever known) to find his girlfriend had suddenly left him and taken everything — even their bed.
There was an unexplained fire that was put out before it did too much damage. There were professional and personal setbacks. There was a car failure and a near-miss accident.
After two weeks of this, my friend finally realized what the protagonists in these films so often do not. He called me and a couple of other friends, one Muslim and one Buddhist, and we went down to the banks of the local river.
I would never describe what we did an an exorcism, since none of us was in any qualified. But we all recited prayers, and my friend threw the devil stick into the churning waters. We all watched the cow skull grinning at us as it receded. Everyone was joking, but nobody, including me, found it completely funny. (I still don’t, even though we joke about it from time to time.) But the occurrences, if that’s the right word for them, stopped.
As if it needs to be added, that’s why you don’t take gifts from the local Satanist.
That … is great advice. Here’s another letter.
My wife and I just this week had an experience that involved objects with holy power that reading your post made me want to share. A little over two weeks ago I became afflicted with a horrible bout of insomnia. For a solid week I was having a terrible time falling asleep no matter what I tried. I’d often only get between 2-3 hours a night. More, whenever I walked into our bedroom - day or night- I was filled with intense, chest-clutching anxiety. I would try to pray while lying in bed but the more I did this the more I felt anxiety. After a week I spoke with our Orthodox priest about it and he prayed over me and I found some relief over the next week. Still no full night’s sleep - usually 5-6 hours - and still taking 2-3 hours to fall asleep. And still the deep anxiousness whenever I entered our bedroom. That week my wife starting having sleep problems too. Not in falling and staying asleep - but just restless sleep and distressing dreams. Over the weekend she began to have horrible anxiety of her own when in bed - she said she felt claustrophobic all night like something was pressing down on her.
On Monday afternoon after work I was sitting alone and fretting about the specter of sleeping that night. I began to pray the Rosary to try and calm my mind down. While doing so I suddenly had the thought that I should take holy water into our bedroom and apply it throughout. I did so, marking both sides of our door, the walls of the room, above our bed, and our bed itself with the sign of the cross. When finished, a realization came suddenly and immediately to mind: Our family had just moved two months prior into this home and our bedroom was literally the only room in the house in which I had not yet placed or hung an icon.
Straight away, I placed several icons in the room, including one of Jesus stilling the storm from the boat above our door (picture above) - which, you probably know, is depicted in Orthodox iconography as Jesus rebuking and banishing demons who are causing the storm. I then specifically prayed God’s protection in our room and banishment of any evil presence from both it and our home, to the Mother of God for her comfort, prayers, and protection of this room, and to St. Michael for his defense of our room and whole home from any evil presence. Immediately an intense peace came over me and also, it genuinely seemed, into the very room itself. The rest of the day, I’d periodically walk into our room and gone was the deep anxiety that Id had in the room. For the two nights since, both my wife and I have fallen asleep and have slept perfectly.
Now I can’t prove that there was anything evil oppressing us and that peace was restored to our room and our rest through the the mediation of grace through the holy water and icons. One could say it was all in my head. And scientifically, there’s no way I can prove otherwise. But, as you point out in your post, to be Orthodox is to believe in the power of matter and objects - like water and icons - that have been blessed and made holy to convey and mediate the grace and power of God. And that is exactly what my wife and I believe happened.
Another — this one more psychological than spiritual (but then, who’s to say where the border between the two is?):
You asked about objects creating bonds.
While in university, in the early 90s, I received a tie as a gift from a girlfriend. We broke up at graduation and went our separate ways.
The tie collected dust on the back of my closet door tie rack. It made the move from university, to first job, to marriage, to kids, to overseas. I never wore it, but I never threw it away.
Of all my previous girlfriends, and there were more than one or two, this particular girl remained in my mind. She would occasionally reach out to me on email, over the years, and then eventually social media.
One day, my wife and I were decluttering, and she asked about the tie. When I told her where it came from, she laughed, and she chucked it in the garbage. My precious. I wanted to grab it out and hand it back up.
Instead, it went out with the weekly trash. Since that time, she has truly been dead to me. I have never had another thought about the girl again...until this moment reading your post.
My eccentric friend Charles Cosimano, the Mage of Milwaukee and a professional ooga-boogist, writes:
I've had a few odd things happen but nothing super dramatic and nothing that frightened me. My friends would joke that that is because I'm so scary the spirits just run away from me. There have been a few poltergeist things but all so minor that there was no reason to even take them seriously, just sort of enjoy them as a curiosity and have a good laugh about something falling that should not have.
In the mid 1980s the elderly couple that lived next door took their once in a lifetime trip to Hawaii. Now as all know or should know, there are a lot of odd, supernatural things on those islands and Pele the Volcano Goddess is notoriously jealous of her rocks. Tourists are always warned not to take them and of course they often ignore the warnings and bad things happen to them. There is quite a collection in the tourist center of volcanic rock that was stolen and returned with some tale woe attached. Well, my neighbors, not being superstitious, could not resist a particularly large and beautiful piece of rock and brought it back with them. And all hell broke loose. The man even managed to break his arm! They were somewhat confused and did not know what to do so I told them to loan me the rock and I would fix it.
I took the rock and wrapped it thoroughly in aluminum foil and hooked the foil to one of my machines. I set the machine to clear out any energy in it and let it run for a week. After the appropriate test revealed that it was safe, I gave it back to the neighbors who never had any trouble again from it for the rest of their lives.
After all, a two-bit volcano goddess is not going to be a match for Uncle Chuckie.
Santa Claus doesn’t visit Uncle Chuckie. Know who comes down his chimney? Eccentrica Gallumbits. Look her up.
Another letter:
Yes, I had an inverted cross, known as the peace sign, used as a teething ring for a baby in a household that was not under explicit protection of God. I took it from him secretly, and holding it as we drove from the house, it suddenly felt like my hand was burning. I threw it out the window, and there was a painful red mark on my hand, which gradually subsided then disappeared as we prayed. Why had this particular item and not others had this happen? Power of suggestion, or the suggestion of the demonic empowered?
Another, from an Orthodox convert:
I was involved in paganism/occultism (aka demon worship) for a couple of decades. I have only been back in church for four years.
I had been putting off doing some major cleaning and decluttering, including getting rid of my occult books and items.
Then something happened that just about shattered my faith. I was badly hurt by my priest and bishop. I’m not covered in glory by any means, but I experienced real cruelty.
It was devastating. And two things happened that were simple but powerful.
The first is I found a new spiritual father and he isn’t a materialist. He’s practical, no-nonsense, and believes the devil exists and tempts us. That has been very good for my soul and his direction has grounded my prayer in solid Orthodoxy.
The second is that in my initial despair I started cleaning. Major cleaning. And I threw a bunch of stuff away. Occult books and items especially.
And between having a priest who acknowledges the spiritual world and throwing out my old occult items, I began to thrive in my spiritual life like never before.
I’m astonished that I have been faithful in my prayer rule for over three months now. That seemed so difficult before. I put my icon corner together and I use it. I’m off my anxiety meds and feel wonderful about life.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m single, childless, broke, and life is very far from a bed of roses. But for the first time in my life I feel like my struggle is aiding me in my salvation.
The biggest temptation for me after leaving the occult was divination. The power to know, even if the “knowing” was subjective hogwash. Today in cleaning out a cabinet I stumbled across an old tarot deck. I tossed it without hesitation, and after taking out the garbage my home felt a little lighter. I never experienced anything bizarre, but a real heaviness is gone.
And trust isn’t merely returning, but growing! As I have more trust in God I find it easier to trust priests, and other Christians. That in itself is a minor miracle.
For the past two years I didn’t have a priest willing to bless my home. After this experience I am determined to get my home blessed. I’m having the demons cast out of my home before Lent, and if it takes prime rib and a layer cake to convince a priest to make the drive, then that is totally worth it. I have experienced a deep peace, a closer walk with God, and I want more.
A Czech reader responded by sending me the translation of a short biography of a deceased Dominican priest who had been terribly persecuted by the Communist regime, but who had never succumbed to anger and resentment, remaining loving, open, and helpful to everyone for the rest of his life. The reader said this holy priest was a family friend:
Last time I talked with him was around 1990 .. 1991 in his small apartment in Lanškroun and the last question I asked him was “what happens when you bless an object? Anything or is it just for show?”, to which he replied, “It partially removes it from physical reality and embeds it in — for lack of a better term —the eternal realm." Blessing, he explained, is not some abracadabra nonsense, but a process that needs rigorous training, clarity of mind and extreme focus.
Curses work the same way. I knew someone who was cursed by somebody who knew how to do it. Her life turned into a living hell — quite inexplicably — but she deserved it
That Dominican, Father Jan M. Souček (d. 2005), was born on Christmas Day, 1921. The Czech reader says of him:
He was a great and holy man. People like him is what defines the Church for me. The rest — bishops, knights, and rooks — can kiss my hairy yellow butt (courtesy of Homer Simpson) and I have no compunction about it.
Ha! In the lives of priests (and people) like Father Souček, we find both a lightness and a weight that rebalances the world on the side of love. At least that’s what I believe. If we find ourselves lacking in faith at times, remember men like Father Souček, and let them carry the weight for us. I believe that men like him saw things more clearly than men like me. I put my arm through theirs, and let them lead the way on this pilgrimage. We can’t do it alone. Just knowing about him restores me. Here is a man whose commitment to God as a Dominican priest cost him even more under one of the twentieth century’s worst dictatorships than the price ordinary Czechs had to pay (which was considerable). And yet, look how he lived. Look at the difference he made. Look at how he was loved, and is remembered.
I had never heard of Father Souček before my Czech reader wrote me, but I live for knowing about people like him. Being able to pass that story on to you fulfills the main purpose of this newsletter. I’ve said here before that in this newsletter, I want to focus on reasons to hope. By that I don’t mean “find happiness” (though that’s part of it), but more seriously, on reminding ourselves that no matter what we are asked to endure, there is ultimate meaning, and redemption. That we don’t struggle in vain. That, to paraphrase my dear Auden, life remains a blessing, even when we cannot bless.
Dear readers, I am going to keep writing this newsletter for free for the rest of 2020, but right after the first of the year, I’m going to move to a paid subscription model. It will be five dollars per month for a newsletter on each weekday (if I miss a weekday, I will make it up on the weekend). That comes out to just over 25 cents per newsletter. Please think about whether or not you can afford it. I appreciate your support, and the correspondence I get from you. I think one reason my blog became so popular is because of the interaction I have with readers there. This newsletter format feels more intimate, though. I like it. Hope you do too.