What Kind of Love Is Winning?

Some fragmented thoughts on the plethora of hot takes in this post-election season, a problem with love, faithful foolishness, French wallpaper, and breakfast sandwiches

Saturday, November 23
East Sandwich, Mass.

It’s been nearly three weeks since the election, and I’m spent. I’ve started and scrapped at least a dozen letters to you, but maybe this failure wasn’t really a failure. 

By my estimation, at least 250% of the punditocracy had already chimed in with their in-depth analyses and authoritative explanations on what exactly happened. Alongside these self-certain breakdowns of what “we” got wrong came numerous utterly confident thinkpieces about what “we” have to do now and how “we” ought to cope. We are told how “we” should feel (disappointment isn’t enough, it seems—the righteous should be devastated). Once again, “we” are told to #resist.

I have three main reactions:
1. How the hell are all these commentators so sure of themselves?
2. Nobody needs more takes, hot or otherwise.*
3. Please count me out.

Even as the president-elect tries to diversify his Cabinet by including some nominees who do not face allegations of criminal or sexual misconduct, I’m still gathering my feelings—and, yes, there are a lot of feelings. Among them: that animal desire to punch something, particularly every time Matt Gaetz’s face has appeared on my TV in recent days. 

I include this image for no other reason than that this dog is super-cute and we need more dog pix in this newsletter and in the world right now. His name is Bully, I met him in South Africa last month, and we could use more bullies like this Bully.

Then I pause, and I rest in the tiny solace of Gaetz’s withdrawal of his candidacy, and I remind myself that I believe in nonviolence, and I consider what kind of human I want to be, and I contemplate how I want to spend not only the next four years but also the rest of my life. Surely I can do better than this. Surely I can be better than this.

Will I exist in an interminable state of high alert, constantly waiting for an undisciplined, feckless man’s next outrageous move? Will I find myself in suspended animation until something stirs me to angry life? Will I walk right into this prison of someone else’s objectionable new normal, locking myself in and then raging against the bars of their behavior, their values, and their ethics?

No. No. No.

And even as I say no, I feel as if it’s not enough to say “no.” It isn’t enough to object or even to rebuke. It isn’t enough to #resist. 

I’m just beginning to put words to my resistance to the resistance (lol), but here’s where I am right now: It feels too flimsy, too fickle. It draws its insufficient strength from disgust. Its source of meaning and motivation is an unreliable other. It seems to center the thing I wish ultimately to disempower.

I need—I want—the purpose and the propulsion found not in a “no” but in a “yes,” not refusal but resolve, not rejection but embrace. My heart longs to be rooted in and restored by a more hopeful vision. Both revulsion and love are forms of renewable energy, and given the choice, I’d like to believe that I’d choose love.

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Here’s one problem: “Love” is nowhere near as clarifying a concept as one might wish it to be. 

“To be human is to have a heart. You can’t not love,” the philosopher James K.A. Smith writes in You Are What You Love. “So the question isn’t whether you will love something as ultimate; the question is what you will love as ultimate.... You are what you love because you live toward what you want.” To be human, in other words, “is to be animated and oriented by some vision of the good life, some picture of what we think counts as ‘flourishing.’ And we want that. We crave it. We desire it.”

But what precisely is it? When I think about “the good life,” I’ve got lots of vibes but little clear or compelling vision. Truly, I wish my picture of the good life were a shining, high-resolution photograph from the future. But what I have now is more of an Impressionist painting—or maybe even just a smudgy study for one, with frustratingly vague notions of justice and mutuality and goodness. 

What’s clearer to me is that I live every day amidst a great rivalry of loves—and I’m not even speaking of the wild world around me, just the tumultuous one inside. Among the loves cohabitating awkwardly in my heart and competing for attention: 

My love for privacy.
My love for a God who calls for public witness.
My love for nice things.
My love for supporting worthy causes.
My love for financial security.
My love for comfort. 
My love for convenience, particularly the kind that doesn’t require me to account in any way for the costs borne by others.
My love for air-conditioning in midsummer and heat in the midwinter.
My love for travel, for airplane rides, for the views outside the airplane window.
My love for a natural world that is imperiled by some of these other loves.

My view from the airplane window somewhere over the Atlantic, between Washington and Cape Town, last month. Is it nature? Is it pollution? Who can say?

Alongside my complicated love for the U.S., there is, for instance, my much lonelier love for Hong Kong, where, last week, forty-five pro-democracy advocates—scholars, lawyers, journalists, social workers, students—were sentenced to years in prison for subversion. 

The enduring ache within me for what’s happened to Hong Kong has intensified as I’ve realized that, with all the world’s sorrows, there’s little room in most people’s hearts to care. Governments around the globe issued their standard denunciations of the Chinese government and its ever more authoritarian rule—the U.S. State Department’s spokesperson “strongly condemned” the sentences—but such statements are perfunctory and toothless. While we love to love freedom and democracy publicly, we love the Chinese-made stuff that fills our Wal-Marts and our Targets, our storage units and our affordably furnished homes, more—to the tune of more than $1.5 billion worth on an average day. And let me be honest: There are material limits to my love too, given that I’m writing to you on a Chinese-assembled laptop as I sit on a Chinese-made Ikea chair.

Here’s my point: Who among us does not have complicated, contradictory loves? We’re all hypocrites. We all lust and grieve and try and fail and want better and do worse and rail about the big things and barely manage with the small things. 

“Love wins,” the slogan goes, and I suppose that’s true, though not necessarily in the way whoever came up with it intended. We all love something or someone, somethings and someones. The question is, What kind of love is winning? 

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Amid my stumbling around in search of answers to these questions, I got the latest installment of my friend Sarah Bessey’s newsletter, which was especially tender and lovely this week. Love was on her mind too. And because it’s Sarah, who has one of the biggest, most faithful hearts of anyone I know, she was wrestling with the kind of love that deserves victory but won’t come by it easily: soul-shatteringly expansive, self-sacrificial, and generous love. 

It's no small thing

“Love wins, sure, but right now she has a split lip and a black eye,” Sarah writes. “She’s gotten like the bad end of a street brawl and it doesn’t look good out there.” 

Such love wants the world to be gentler, fairer, and kinder to the kids and to the grandkids than it has been to so many of us. Too often, though, its work is as imperceptible as that of water against rock. Because its progress can seem so slow and so daunting, and because its triumph can even feel like too much to wish for, Sarah says, “I am stubbornly hopeful about small things now. About soup kitchens and newspaper delivery guys and food banks and school fundraisers and knowing your neighbors and writing out Bible verses to stick on the mirrors.” 

Look, I don’t think I’m ever going to be that “write out Bible verses to stick on the mirrors” guy, but I get her point, and I’m right there alongside her: “I think we have to be this foolish because I will not become what I despise. I won’t give up on who I am or what I believe God loves in us, hopes for us, longs for us now.” 

Sarah is undoubtedly bolder and closer to God than I am, so I’m not quite as certain about that last part. (I’d rather say that I don’t want to give up on who I want to be or what I like to imagine God loves in us.) But yes to this kind of faithful foolishness. Absolutely yes. 

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It isn’t lost on me that I send you this letter a few days before the national holiday in the United States that is purportedly about gratitude. The practice of gratitude is, in a sense, a recognition of love: The things for which we are thankful are, one would imagine, things that we love.

I’m thankful for another essay I came across this week—a thought-provoking, multi-layered reflection on resistance by the writer Eula Biss. In the piece, which she wrote in February 2021, Biss recalls the appearance, in 2016, of a sign on her neighbor’s porch: RESIST. “It bothered me, I told myself, because it wasn’t doing anything. What we needed, I thought, was action, not a word, not a sign,” Biss writes. “But the sign was doing something by bothering me. It was inviting me, every morning, to consider what that word meant, and to face my own bafflement about what constituted action.” 

I’m thankful for the reminder to let our irritations become invitations, and, on reflection, I suppose I ought therefore to be least a bit thankful for the annoyance of the renewed calls to #resist. They compel me to consider, again and again, what the word “love” means and how I will choose to embody love in my life.

We all love—but toward what end and for whose sake?

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What I’m Seeing: Tristan and I are spending the rest of November on Cape Cod, as we usually do. Earlier this week, we drove into Providence and, because we’re big dorks, we went to the museum at the Rhode Island School of Design, which recently opened a show on French wallpaper. There are more than 100 papers on display, all created in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They’re so pretty—and at a time when so much ugliness seems to want to steal our attention, I appreciate reminders of enduring beauty.

What I’m Eating: Also from the Department of Things I Love: The breakfast sandwich is, I am convinced, an under-appreciated expression of culinary artistry. I like sandwiches just fine, but I adore a good breakfast sandwich. Perhaps one day I will build out a spreadsheet detailing the best breakfast sandwiches I’ve ever had, but I can tell you that Amy’s Place in Providence has a place in the top tier. Most of its breakfast sandwiches come on bolos levedos, the slightly sweet Portuguese cousins of the English muffin. My favorite, the Sunday sandwich, is ridiculous: egg, American cheese, bacon, hash brown (!!!!), guacamole, spinach, tomato, and spicy aioli on a toasted bolo. It is absolutely absurd to include potatoes in a sandwich—and as a potato addict, I’d say it’s the delightfully crispy edges of the hash brown make this sandwich as spectacular as it is.

What I’m Cooking: The Thanksgiving turkey arrived yesterday, and by that, I mean the FedEx guy brought it, because, yes, of course I had to overcomplicate things. I couldn’t just go to the supermarket like a normal person. I had to buy some happy bird that spent its life in a Pennsylvania pasture, its foraging supplemented by locally grown vegetarian feed and, I’m sure, homeopathic medical care and full access to therapy too. (See above, about my complicated loves.) The turkey will start dry-brining tomorrow evening, and probably on Tuesday, I’ll make the cornbread, which will be the basis for my stuffing, if Tristan and I manage not to eat it first. I’ve used the same recipe for at least 15 years. I think it’s pretty good—not too sweet and quite hearty.  

Skillet cornbread: Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees F. While it’s pre-heating, pop a 10- or 12-inch cast-iron pan into the oven, with 4 ounces (half a cup) of butter. In a bowl, mix together a cup and a half of cornmeal (medium- or coarse-ground, preferably), half a cup of flour, one tablespoon of baking powder, and a teaspoon of salt. In another bowl, whisk together a cup of whole milk, an egg, and a quarter-cup of honey (use up to half a cup if you prefer sweeter cornbread). Carefully take the hot cast-iron pan out of the oven, pour the melted butter into the milk/egg/honey bowl, and mix well. Then pour the liquid ingredients into the bowl with the dry ingredients, and mix until just combined. Pour the batter into the hot pan and bake for 20 minutes. (I usually go 22. We like our cornbread a bit darker around the edges.) 

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In other news: Early reviews for Good Soil have been trickling in. I will always read all the reviews; it’s just who I am. Fortunately, as I age, I’m getting better at accepting them all graciously too. I don’t write for every reader; nobody does, and nobody can. I know I’ve done the best job I could with what I had, and in a sense, the book does not belong to me anymore. That’s a little scary, but it’s also right and good, and I hope, somehow, it will bless as many readers as possible.

Planning for book tour continues—details soon, I promise—but obviously I’m never going to be able to visit all the places. So I’m delighted to partner with Schuler Books, a beloved institution of an indie bookstore in Michigan, to offer signed copies of Good Soil. Please pre-order here before March 16th. Then, a few days before the book is released, I’ll go into the store and sign your book, and it will be magically dispatched to you wherever you live. If you’d like the book personalized, just provide the details in the comments box of the order form. 

Thank you, as ever, for reading these ramblings. Thank you, too, for your ongoing support of me and my work.

What are you grateful for? What are you irritated by—and what’s the invitation in the irritation? What else is on your minds? What can I be praying for?

With gratitude and in hope,
Jeff

*I guess I still wrote one. Oops.