The Festival of Sensing Grace
Some fragmented thoughts on Thanksgiving, history, the holiday table, Annie Lennox's take on a 350-year-old aria, and a new book about online life
The 170th Day after Coronatide*
Thanksgiving Edition
Hello, dear reader.
Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday. I delight in all the cooking, and I rejoice in all the eating, even if I can no longer polish off the three or four full plates my teen self could. And this might be weird, but honestly, I might enjoy my customary post-Thanksgiving leftovers breakfast even more than Thanksgiving dinner itself.
Like so many other immigrant families, mine adopted Thanksgiving—turkey and mashed potatoes and canned cranberry sauce and all—because it seemed like the right, good, and American thing to do. Of course we put our own spin on it: There was usually a platter of bok choy or Chinese greens, wok-fried with abundant garlic. There was always a giant pot of soup simmering on the stove, because every extended-family dinner, no matter the occasion, had a giant pot of soup—a rich broth of pork and chicken, perhaps snow-ear fungus and dried scallop, maybe lotus root and wolfberry—simmering on the stove. My mom introduced sticky rice as a side dish; flecked with Chinese sausage, scallion, and shiitake mushroom, it’s still a regular on my Thanksgiving table. And because that industrial bird was almost always dry and overcooked, we found redemption in the savory hereafter—in post-Thanksgiving turkey congee and turkey fried rice. (A few years ago, my dad and his siblings decided they’d had enough turkey for a lifetime, and he made seafood fettuccine instead.)
As Tristan and I have built our life together, we’ve also constructed our own Thanksgiving table. Like our household, it’s a hybrid. So alongside my sticky rice, you’ll always find cornbread stuffing, a nod to Tristan’s upbringing. For the cornbread, I use a modified version of this recipe from Bon Appetit; my tweaks: I use 1.5 cups of cornmeal and just 0.5 c of flour, and because we don’t like our cornbread sweet—it’s called cornbread, not corn cake—I use just 1/3 c or sometimes even 1/4 c of honey.
In Chinese, Thanksgiving is 感恩節—literally, the festival of sensing grace. I love that. I love how it acknowledges all that we did not accomplish ourselves, all that we received but did not earn, all that was given to us. I love how it names a particular gratitude—thanks for what is beyond us and our own capabilities. I love how it encourages our appropriate smallness in the household of God, in which no human can claim to be self-made and in which every success is put in its proper context.
I wish I could remember to spend a few moments of every day sensing grace and then acknowledging it. But I am disappointingly and utterly human in needing to set aside an entire holiday just for gratitude, because the discipline isn’t woven sufficiently into my routines. I’m not alone in this. Even on that day, we’re not very good at staying focused on our gratitude; witness the encroachment of Black Friday onto Thanksgiving, our lust for more stuff crowding shamelessly onto that one occasion when we’re supposed to reflect on what we have, not on acquiring what we don’t.
This Thanksgiving will feel different, given the unique collection of horrors that have visited us in 2020. I wanted to understand better the holiday’s original context, so I read Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 presidential proclamation inviting the nation to reserve the last Thursday of November as “a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.” And then I did some reading about all that happened in 1863.
Turns out 1863 was not the Best of Times. Thousands—mostly poor, white women—rioted across the American South, looting shops and destroying property to protest the rising cost of bread. Nearly 8,000 soldiers were killed at Gettysburg, in the Civil War’s deadliest single battle, and some 4,000 died at Chickamauga, the third-deadliest. Out West, the U.S. Army killed more than 200 Shoshone in one of the worst massacres of Native Americans in history. Smallpox swept across the South, claiming thousands of lives. Though the wheat harvest was excellent, frost destroyed much of the sorghum and corn crops in the Midwest, and hog cholera swept through Indiana and Illinois in the summer, killing thousands of pigs.
Against that backdrop, Lincoln summoned the nation to gratitude. What healthy harvests had been reaped, what peace and strength had been preserved, he wrote, “are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.” Then Lincoln did something that we might do well to restore to our Thanksgiving practice: He called the people to repentance, “with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience.”
What might it be like if we returned to Lincoln’s framing of Thanksgiving? How might it change us if we recognized this occasion as being about both gratitude and repentance, grace and penitence? I have come to believe that the biblical descriptions of divine wrath and judgment are sometimes more descriptive than prescriptive, because the punishment is often built into the sin. If you fail to heed the biblical injunction to let your land rest, for instance, it won’t produce as it could or it should—and you will go hungry.
Perhaps we have grown complacent in our self-regard and lazy in our self-absorption, and perhaps we’re paying as a country for these compounding sins now. For many of us, whatever gratitude we feel this Thanksgiving will likely be tinged with grief—grief at friends and loved ones lost, grief at bitter harvests, grief at a pandemic that did not have to be this way, grief for a painfully divided society, grief at necessary distance and costly isolation. Amidst all that, and however and with whomever you’re able to mark this holiday, I do hope that you will sense some grace.
I sense grace in Fozzie’s weird presence in our lives. I sense grace in the thrum of the woodpecker outside my house, who reminds me that, even in the rot, some creature manages to find a buffet. I sense grace in the glorious alchemy of a rising buttermilk biscuit and the elegant downward dance of a falling leaf. I sense grace in an unexpected, perfectly timed text message from a friend and in the lavish generosity of my mother, who happens to be named Grace.
May our gratitude for all manner of grace stir our penitence and fuel our hope. And may that grace-fueled hope remind us of the life-giving love that we have received—and that we’re called to share, for the sake of a world that so desperately needs it.
What I’m Reading: Last month, my friend Chris Stedman released his new book, IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives. I commend it to you! Chris served as a humanist chaplain at Harvard and then at Yale, and he now teaches in the religion and philosophy department at Augsburg University in Minnesota. IRL is as thoughtful as he is, exploring how we live and interact, build and connect online. At its best (!), social media “can help us feel less alone in times when that’s monumentally important,” he writes. “[I]t can help us see ourselves more honestly, even with all the filtering and editing we do.” I spent some time talking with Chris earlier this week, and edited excerpts of our conversation are below. He’s such a kind, humble, and wise human being, and I think you’ll find in his words some thought-provoking—and perhaps even convicting—nuggets on which to reflect.
What I’m Listening to: I suppose only an artist as idiosyncratic as Annie Lennox would re-imagine “Dido’s Lament” as Earth’s dying song—and then throw that track onto a Christmas album. Anyway, Lennox released her version of this 17th century aria last week. It is haunting and, for something nearly 350 years old, it feels remarkably contemporary: “When I am laid, am laid in earth, May my wrongs create/ No trouble, no trouble in thy breast;/ Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate./ Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.” “When it comes to climate catastrophe, we are on the edge of abyss. I really believe we don’t have much time left to make an effective change,” Lennox says. “I see Dido’s Lament as a lament for our dying planet.”
Finally, a word of gratitude to you: Thank you for reading my random ramblings every week! If you’re willing to share, I’d love for you to leave a comment letting me know what you’re thankful for, whether in your life or in the world around you.
I’ll be taking next week off for the holiday. I’m so glad we can stumble through all this together, and I’ll try to write again soon.
Yours,
Jeff
*I’m still counting my days from June 1, when my governor, Gretchen Whitmer, lifted Michigan’s stay-at-home order. Full disclosure: I would like for her to reimpose the lockdown, because I am not sure we have the discipline or the wherewithal to control this virus ourselves. But in the meantime, please stay safe, wear your masks, and be wise—for the sake of your neighbors as well as yourselves.
A Conversation with Chris Stedman
I sat down to talk with Chris just as I was beginning an informal break from social media. I’m so grateful for his thoughts about what’s real and what’s not, how we show up in digital spaces, and the significance of retreat—and I hope they’ll be as helpful and meaningful to you as they have been to me. His new book, IRL, is now available everywhere decent books are sold.
Jeff: I’ve always been frustrated by the assertion that online is less real than offline. We’re always editing how we present ourselves in the world, whether we’re at school or at church, among friends or with strangers. None of that makes our presentation any less real, but perhaps online, the tools are just a little more explicit.
Chris: The whole conversation about whether life online is more real or less real misses the point, I think. There’s a parallel to be found in drag. Drag performers are not trying to blend in and pass. They’re trying to present a hyperreal or exaggerated performance of gender that gives us a chance to recognize the gender norms and scripts we all absorb. If the ways we perform a self online feel exaggerated or performed sometimes, it’s because we’re doing something that we’ve always done—curating a self—but in ways that can feel sort of hyper-realized. But I think, as in drag, the hyper-realized nature of that performance actually gives us a chance to see the influence of norms and scripts that have deeply shaped our sense of what makes for a “real” life. Besides, whatever we think of life online, we use social media for very real things. From very early on, I turned to the Internet for things that were of course real: connection, a sense of place. Yet in some ways, because this notion that life online is “fake” is so pervasive, it became easy to dismiss those parts of my life, and to not see them as spaces where I could learn. In some ways, not looking at our digital actions as opportunities to better understand ourselves can be self-protective. If I’m seeing things in my digital presentation that make me uncomfortable—like if I see myself trying to seem more generous than I actually am, or I see myself being cruel to someone in a response to a tweet—I can say, “Well, those don’t really count” if I consider life online less real.
Jeff: I’m pretty open about the fact that I try to be my most hopeful self online. It’s largely aspirational, but it’s also authentic to who I want to be. In other words, it’s a part of me.
Chris: I interviewed tons of people for this book, and one of the things I found is that when we build ourselves online, for a lot of people, it’s aspirational. Part of it can be about saying, “I have this characteristic that’s hard to bring out in other areas of my life—and I want to practice it online.” Each of us has always been a composite of multiple selves. The person I am right now in this conversation is different from the person I am with my mom, the person I am with my boyfriend, the person I am with my friends. Online, there’s this expectation that the person I am has to be acceptable to all those different groups of people—and we often simplify ourselves down to the most acceptable form as a result. But we could also choose to recognize that we’ve always been contradictory selves and see the Internet as an opportunity to embrace that.
Jeff: I’m intrigued by the idea of online spaces as places where imagination is allowed—and not just allowed but also encouraged, especially for people with marginalized identities.
Chris: There’s this immense cultural shift happening right now, from traditional institutions to the Internet—and many of us feel we’ve ditched institutions altogether. But the Internet is itself an institution. It has its own norms and conventions. One of the powers of this institution, of this digital space, is that it gives us the chance to imagine together. Online, we can collaboratively construct a vision for another world. We see this all the time—in the social movements that have emerged from the Internet and in our own individual behavior. Sometimes we speak something into existence online. We put forward a vision of ourselves and the world around us and we try to live into that. We’ve seen that in so many ways this year. I live in Minneapolis, just minutes from where George Floyd was murdered, and I was present at a lot of the uprising this summer. That event, which happened in my community and had all kinds of ramifications on the ground, has also had immense ramifications more broadly—and a lot of that has had to do with how conversations and ideas and ways of reimagining our world can spread online.
Jeff: As a map geek, I really appreciated your use of maps as a way of understanding social media. Maps, you write, “give us a feeling of coherence,” but coherence isn’t the same as completion or accuracy. And there are preferences—you can even call them biases—that go into mapmaking, and the resulting maps can contain plenty of evidence of prejudice and power dynamics.
Chris: The way we map can never represent all of reality. When we want to know and understand the “real” self, it’s often motivated by a desire to reach some kind of end point: You have this idea that you can figure out who you are and then be that person. The reality, though, is that we’re forever mapping ourselves, and that map is always getting more and more detailed. But it will never be the full portrait. So it’s less about figuring who we are online than figuring out how to be online. We should see digital selves and spaces as pointing the way to reality rather than seeing them as representative of every piece of reality itself. They’re a tool we can use, but they can’t contain everything—and we can’t expect them to. I end that chapter talking about the Bible. I recognize its limitations. It is a representation of a reality, but it can’t possibly contain every facet of that reality, because no book ever could.
Jeff: It’s so interesting to me that you write about the Bible. Earlier in our lives, you and I both spent a lot of time in the evangelical subculture, yet I’ve ended up in a mainline denomination and you ended up an atheist. We do share one particular conviction about Scripture, which you allude to: “It contains some very useful and valuable information about the world, but it is not—and could never be—the entire world,” you write. I’m curious whether you have retained any wisdom from it that you might apply to social media.
Chris: I find myself regularly thinking about ideas like generosity and welcome. Some of my most radical experiences of welcome from strangers have happened online—though I’ve experienced a lack of generosity, both in myself and in others, too. Also, while there are many critiques to be rightfully made of institutional religion, one value of religious traditions is that they emerged over a long period of time and developed a set of texts, practices, and rituals, which you can return to again and again and which can hold you in place as you make your way through something uncomfortable. Online, it’s so easy for everything to feel super-ephemeral and fleeting. The Internet is so new that we haven’t developed good rituals or a canon in which we wrestle with questions of meaning and purpose. I’m teaching a class right now in which we look at how the Biblical canon came to exist. The Bible is this sort of foundational text that people can come back to and wrestle with and revisit, even as they continue to change. What are our foundational texts online?
Jeff: You’re assuming that people want to wrestle with meaning and purpose. From the first time I interacted with you, I felt as if you were one of the more thoughtful and compassionate people I’d ever met, and you write in your book about your desire for empathy and compassion online. Do you think social media really has the capacity to grow that, or does it more amplify what’s really happening in us offline?
Chris: The Internet as it exists right now, our profit-driven Internet, is not trying to move us in the direction of self-reflection and accountability. But I don’t think the outcome is set. Just as there are religious traditions that don’t move people in that direction, right now the Internet is not structured in a way that engenders empathy. But I don’t think it’s fated to be that way. We can create the Internet that we want. The question is whether or not we want it. I want it. I think, as more and more of the things we consider central to the human experience move online, others will too.
Jeff: You use your interactions and analysis of social media not just to analyze the platforms and how we interact with them but also to understand what happened in your life at particular moments. That assumes a degree of self-knowledge or at least self-awareness and desire for self-understanding that might not be so common for many people on social media.
Chris: This book isn’t for everyone! It exists for people who do have some degree of curiosity about their digital life and what it means to be human. Not everyone is going to spend as much time fixating on how they show up in digital space and what it says about who they are as I do. I envy them. But for anyone who has the desire to understand themselves better and understand how the person that they are can have some kind of positive impact on the world around them, this space we have for so long cast aside as unworthy of examining more seriously is actually one of the richest spaces we can look at—because we’re trying online to be human in a brand new space and in a space that we don’t really know what we’re doing in yet, which gives us new opportunities to explore what it means to be human.
Jeff: You use the language of vocation and discernment to describe this.
Chris: I teach at a Lutheran university, and Lutherans love the word “vocation.” I do too. It’s about thinking about what makes for a meaningful life through the lens of where your particular passions and skills intersect with the needs of the world. You have to do two kinds of discernment: You have to discern yourself and you have to discern the world. The Internet, as it exists today, often moves us in the direction of thinking of the self as ever more atomized and individual. People are leaving the kinds of institutions where we have historically wrestled with the questions of self and world, like churches and other civic spaces, and moving into a more individualized online experience. The Internet can offer a space to think about what gives our lives meaning and how we want to show up in the world—a more vocational direction. But it can also move us in the direction of mindless use, especially in anxious times, where we’re not harnessing the Internet to help us think of a greater whole.
Jeff: So are you hopeful about the Internet’s possibilities?
Chris: The Internet is a human creation. We like to dismiss it as a dumpster fire, but it is a dumpster fire because we are a dumpster fire. We have to face it honestly as the dumpster fire within us and then create practices to move us in a different direction.
Jeff: Such as…
Chris: I talk at the end of the book about taking a three-month social-media sabbatical. It initially felt awful, and then it felt incredible. I was so much more at ease and so much less anxious, which would seem to confirm that social media is harmful or “fake.” But the reason I felt more at ease is that I was disconnected from the world. I was not confronted with other people’s struggles. I was home with my dog and taking long walks. It was like going on a meditation retreat: You step out of the world, so of course you feel more relaxed. But if I want to be present in the world, then that means I have to return to it. I argue for what I call a velveteen habit, which is very corny, but I am corny. In The Velveteen Rabbit, the titular rabbit wants more than anything to become real. As a kid, my understanding was it becomes real because it’s loved by the boy. As an adult, revisiting it, I realized of course it’s more than that. The rabbit is loved by the boy, yes, but the boy also gets very sick and has to discard all of his possessions. So the rabbit is loved but also loses that love—and it’s the love and loss that makes the rabbit real. We need moments of connection but also disconnection. Right now, disconnection feels difficult. But we shouldn’t be reactionary about it, either. Thomas Merton came to the conclusion that the value of retreat is that it gives you perspective that should bring you back into the world. So even as the Internet is a space where we can come to understand ourselves and the world better—a space where real life happens—part of coming to use the internet in a way that helps us feel real is both knowing when to step back and seeing the value in returning. In a time of constant connection, when the Internet is just a swipe away, we have to be intentional about both retreat and return. Both give us things we need in order to feel more fully human.
Follow Chris on Twitter or on Instagram. You can also read more about him and find links to more of his work on his website.