The Hulk Is a 9: An Enneagram Adventure | Part One: "I'm Sorry, That Was Mean"

For the rationale for this running series of posts on the enneagram, click here.

We first meet Bruce Banner, in the first act of The Avengers, in a remote village in Kolkata. He has taken himself off the grid and entered a monkish life: celibacy, solitude, service. Serenity. His life there is interrupted when an emissary (Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow) is sent to “persuade” him to help confront an imminent threat. She marvels at the fact that he hasn’t had “an incident” (by which she means becoming the Hulk) in over a year. She’s all the more impressed given that he’s set up shop in a deeply impoverished, justice-deprived corner of the world - not exactly the best place to avoid stress.

”Avoiding stress isn’t the secret,” he replies, and we are introduced to a running theme for Bruce throughout the film. We won’t learn the secret until the world is about to end.

Turns out it’s not the Hulk that Natasha is looking for. The government needs Bruce’s expertise in gamma radiation to track down a weapon. But come for Bruce and you get the Hulk as a bonus, whether you want him or not.

Bruce is savvy. As we’ll see in future scenes, he’s always assessing the situation, considering what might cause the “other guy” (his language for the Hulk) to emerge. ”You brought me to the edge of the city—” he notes to Natasha. ”That’s smart.” He even tests the situation, startling Natasha to react instinctively with her military training. He apologizes as she pulls a gun on him. “I’m sorry. That was mean. ... Why don’t we do this the easy way where you don’t use that and the other guy doesn’t make a mess?” An entire military contingent stands down, and Bruce/Hulk joins the Avengers. He has made peace, in a manner of speaking.

We next see Bruce at a flying military base. (Remember - it’s a comic book movie. Don’t overthink it.) All the members of the fledgling Avengers are being introduced to each other, taking stock of each other. Bruce, unlike the others, moves to the margins, avoiding direct encounters. We’ll learn from Natasha in a future film what drives this behavior.

Two people—Loki, god of mischief, and Tony Stark, the insatiably curious Iron Man—are interested in seeing Bruce release the beast. Loki has scornful, malevolent reasons: He mocks Bruce as “a mindless beast who makes play he’s still a man” and wants to manipulate him for his own purposes. But Tony, a self-made superhero who clearly enjoys the savior business, is convinced that the Hulk is inherently heroic.

Bruce is unconvinced. Unlike Tony, whose heroic persona is securely encased in armor, “I’m exposed, like a nerve—it’s a nightmare.” As tensions mount, he gives voice to his motivation to keep the Hulk contained. “I moved on. I focused on helping other people. I was good" — note that he equates goodness with the active suppression of a central aspect of himself — "until you dragged me back into this freak show and put everyone here at risk.” The enneagram 9, it is widely understood, is happily left alone. No people, no problems. A lonely existence is a small price to pay for peace.

We return to the film’s steady tease: “You want to know my secret? ... You want to know how I stay calm?” He’s interrupted before he can tell us. Soon enough, his anger takes over and the Hulk finally emerges. Chaos ensues. Loki wins this battle, and we watch Hulk fall to the earth.

But we learn quickly that the Hulk is not the mindless beast Loki takes him for. We learn that he took care that no one would be hurt by his fall. “Son,” says an observer,” you’ve got a condition.” But whatever condition he has, the Hulk is human, created good, capable of good.

***

Check back here in a couple weeks for part two.

The Hulk Is a 9: An Enneagram Adventure (Prologue)

Every now and then I come out of my shell and risk ridicule by suggesting, ever so softly, that in the pantheon of the Marvel Entertainment Universe, the best representation of an enneagram 9 is not the stoic Vision or the empathic Mantis but the Incredible Hulk. People think I’m kidding. I’m not.

The enneagram is a system devised to explore human personality. Organized by nine spaces in three triads, it considers how individuals learn to go through life, how their inner logic is derived from their essential identity but damaged through trauma and misunderstanding, and ultimately how they might confront the inner barriers to their becoming their true selves.

The enneagram 9 is commonly thought of as the peacemaker, the person most invested in establishing or restoring equilibrium to an environment. “Can’t we all just get along?” is something of a mantra to the 9 (at least in caricature). People come to rely on the 9’s quietude, unflappability. You might say they enable it.

The first goal of the enneagram is not to classify a person for the sake of social organization; it is rather to help a person come to an awareness of their shadow self, the thing that is keeping them from a full and fulfilling experience of life in community. (It is, in fact, pretty easy to damage people through a preoccupation with enneagram numbers.) If there is any fictional character in the modern imagination that would benefit from such help, it is the Hulk—a man-monster alternately reclusive and disengaged from society, on the one hand, and violently destructive, on the other.

What is keeping the Hulk from a full and flourishing life? And what is the internal logic that drives the Hulk’s dysfunctions? We can ask the same questions of ourselves. The challenge we are led through with the enneagram is to stare the monster in the face and not flinch, and to come out the other side closer to shalom for ourselves and for those around us.

So then, over the course of a series of posts, I'll be taking a close look at the Hulk, or Bruce Banner as he’s known to his friends. I’ll skip over the two major films in which the Hulk is the central character, not because they’re unhelpful to my argument but because they aren’t as deeply rooted in our cultural imagination, so only the true nerds would know or appreciate the references. No, for now we’ll stick with Marvel’s movies in phases 1-3, starting with The Avengers, in which the Hulk plays a significant, though not central, role.

Final prefatory note: I am by no means an expert on the enneagram. I am, I believe, an enneagram 9, and so I think I bring some helpful perspective to bear on the question. (I did run this article by a friend or two who are enneagram experts, and they seemed to think it would be harmless.) If you find yourself wishing for better footnotes and more overt references to Richard Rohr, may I advise you to relax? It’s an article about a comic book character.

Check back here for new installments over the next several weeks. If you want to pick a fight with me along the way, feel free. But fair warning: You may like me in my resting enneagram 9 state, but you wouldn't like me when I'm angry.

You're So Fabulously Absolute: Excerpts from Middling

I write an occasional newsletter (quarterly when I don't forget) to friends and family about my life: music, books, work, and getting older. I'd love to send it to you if you're game. What follows is an excerpt from the spring 2019 issue, a tribute to musician Joe Jackson on the occasion of his fortieth anniversary as a recording artist.

(This is as good a time as any to tell you that I keep a Spotify playlist of the songs I commend in my newsletter. You can access it here:

***

I have no illusions about the superficiality of my musical interests when I was a kid. I grew up in a town with a very limited musical palate, with radio stations that focused narrowly on Top 40 and classic rock. I did, however, come into early adolescence at the dawn of MTV, and in those early days of music television the dominant form was the New Wave. I have clear recollections of Elvis Costello asking what's so funny about peace, love, and understanding; I somehow identified with the relational angst of Squeeze as they drank black coffee in bed and reflected on times they were tempted by the fruit of another; and I was regularly cut to the heart by the ferocious melancholy of the great Joe Jackson.

Jackson, in the unforgiving glare of history, is one of the New Wave's lesser lights. There are certainly reasons: He lacked the charm of contemporaries like David Byrne (of Talking Heads) and Sting (of The Police), and while his musicianship is indisputable, his pretentiousness worked at cross purposes with the democratization of music that came with its transition to television. Video did, in fact, kill the radio star, and Joe Jackson is arguably one of its many victims.

This year marks Jackson's fortieth anniversary as a recording artist, and so I was excited to purchase his new record, Fool. The liberation that comes with a marginalization precipitated by pretentiousness is evident in the music Jackson has made in the intervening decades: He's a remarkable pianist and composer, and so his tracks are consistently intricate and interesting, even as they break the reductionist rules of radio-friendliness. The new record kicks off with a decidedly cool track called "Big Black Cloud," reflecting the artist's fundamental cynicism: "Hey, hey, today's another day" is the first line of this first track. The chorus rejects the graces of grammar and punctuation to shout its indictment on life in our age:

NO LUCK NO MONEY NO SEX NO FUN
GET ON THE TREADMILL AND RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN.

Let's be honest: To fully appreciate this record, it helps to have already become a fan of Joe Jackson. You have to accept the worldview that colors his art, and that train left the station in 1979. But I'm absolutely a fan, and so I don't even take it personally when he writes a damning anthem of modern midlife and calls it "Dave":

COULD IT BE THAT
WHILE WE'RE RUSHING ROUND THE WORLD
WE'RE WASTING ALL OUR TIME?

Forty years ago Jackson released the impressive introductory album Look Sharp! featuring tracks like "Is She Really Going Out with Him?" and "Fools in Love." So cynicism is kind of his thing. Jackson wrote about this record in his memoir A Cure for Gravity (yeah, I read it--bought it off the rack in a resale shop, which made me simultaneously happy for myself and sad for Joe Jackson). Here's what he had to say:

It positively reeks of the year 1978, although it wasn't released until the beginning of 1979. . . . At twenty-three or twenty-four it seems very clever to say that the world is just a bag of woe. By the time you get to, say, forty, you've seen some woe, and it's not so funny anymore.

The album that won me over came out in 1982: Night and Day, featuring three tracks on heavy rotation on MTV in my formative youth: "Breaking Us in Two," about a relationship in the process of falling apart; "Stepping Out," about a relationship on the hunt for a renewed hope in one another; and "Real Men," a confusing song for a twelve-year-old, I freely admit: In it he addresses toxic masculinity and fluid sexuality. I didn't know what to do with the song; I only knew that it made me want to cry a little:

What's a man now, what's a man mean
Is he rough or is he rugged
Is he cultural and clean
Now it's all change, it's got to change more
Cause we think it's getting better
But nobody's really sure

Check out two tracks: One a chart-topper from his glory days, and one a throwback track from today. He's an acquired taste, I freely admit, but maybe you'll acquire it.

***

Let me know if you'd like to be signed up to get Middling in your in-box. Thanks for reading!

Simultaneous Gravitas and Lightness of Heart: Excerpts from Middling

I write an occasional newsletter (quarterly when I don't forget) to friends and family about my life: music, books, work, and getting older. I'd love to send it to you if you're game. What follows is an excerpt from the spring 2019 issue, a tribute to my godmother, who had recently died.

***

I grew up in a tradition in which infants are baptized into the Christian faith, with parents designating two people to see to the spiritual nurture of the child into adulthood. For me, one of those two people was Sharon Kobusch. (The other was her first husband, Bob, who died twenty years ago.) I grew up a little resentful of this arrangement, as I was the only kid in my family whose godparents weren't blood relations. Sharon was a dear friend of my parents and a sensible choice, but I was a bit dense and self-involved, and so I occasionally experienced her choice as a personal affront. On the infrequent occasions when Sharon and I crossed paths, I wasn't very friendly or deferential toward her.

In the decades since, I've become a godparent to two of my nieces, and I've come to understand how complicated the role is in the modern age. Officially, godparents commit themselves to help a child learn "to practice the Gospel in personal and social life" and to do so in part by being "a bearer of Christian witness and a guardian over growth in baptismal life." We live in a time, however, when the godparent role is mainly an honorific. Unsolicited spiritual nurture these days is not generally considered especially caring, and positional authority tends to be the weakest kind of authority. And so the role of the godparent is something of an archaism.

Over time, I've come to respect Sharon more and more--her willingness to be the adult in our relationship and to let me be whoever I was becoming at any given moment. With a little critical distance, and in the process of figuring out how I would relate helpfully and meaningfully to the people I have committed to godparent, I've come to see the depth of her spiritual maturity and the grace with which she's dealt with me over the decades.

Sharon died a few months ago, shortly after Thanksgiving, after a brief period of hospice care in her home. I had the opportunity to sit with her briefly over the holiday; I was visiting my parents, and they live a short distance from Sharon as the crow flies. We had a nice chat and I was impressed with Sharon's simultaneous gravitas and lightness of heart as she was coming to terms with the nearness of her death. She gave her final witness to me and I'm grateful for it. God is good, and precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints (Psalm 116:15).

***

If you'd like to be added to the distribution for Middling, give me a shout and I'll set you up. Thanks for reading!

Seeing More Clearly in 2020

This year's reading is from the book of 2 Kings, chapter 6.

The king of Aram, upon discovering that Elisha the prophet of God is anticipating and thwarting all his planned attacks on the Israelites, sends troops to Dothan to capture the prophet.

When the servant of the man of God got up and went out early the next morning, an army with horses and chariots had surrounded the city. “Oh no, my lord! What shall we do?” the servant asked.

“Don’t be afraid,” the prophet answered. “Those who are with us are more than those who are with them.”

And Elisha prayed, “Open his eyes, LORD, so that he may see.” Then the LORD opened the servant’s eyes, and he looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.

As the enemy came down toward him, Elisha prayed to the LORD, “Strike this army with blindness.” So he struck them with blindness, as Elisha had asked.

Elisha told them, “This is not the road and this is not the city. Follow me, and I will lead you to the man you are looking for.” And he led them to Samaria.

After they entered the city, Elisha said, “LORD, open the eyes of these men so they can see.” Then the LORD opened their eyes and they looked, and there they were, inside Samaria.

When the king of Israel saw them, he asked Elisha, “Shall I kill them, my father? Shall I kill them?”

“Do not kill them,” he answered. “Would you kill those you have captured with your own sword or bow? Set food and water before them so that they may eat and drink and then go back to their master.” So he prepared a great feast for them, and after they had finished eating and drinking, he sent them away, and they returned to their master. So the bands from Aram stopped raiding Israel’s territory.

At the end of one year and the beginning of the next, it can be helpful to take stock of things, to step back from the day to day and get a fuller sense of where things stand for you.

To do so requires a kind of seeing—not simply seeing by sight but seeing by faith.

In this story we find Elisha leading his servant and his captives into a fuller view of things.

He prays for his servant: “Open his eyes, LORD, so that he may see,” and the servant suddenly sees armies of angels, guarding them against the real challenges they are facing.

He prays for his captives, whom God has struck blind, after the danger has passed: “Open their eyes, LORD, so that they may see.” And God restores their sight, so that they may learn that they have been taken captive, that their power is no match for the power of God.

They are fed and sent home, and they learn that Almighty God doesn’t wield power capriciously.

And—and this is a pretty funny punchline to the story if you think about it—“the bands from Aram stopped raiding Israel’s territory.” They saw things as they really are, and they got the message.

To see clearly with the eyes of faith is a liberating experience. No wonder Jesus healed so many blind people; no wonder Jesus castigated the powerful for their spiritual blindness.

When we don’t see clearly, we act out of fear, and we take desperate measures to secure our safety: We fight or take flight.

When we don’t see clearly, we scramble for what we can see, doing violence to one another, seeking others’ harm in service to our own purposes.

When we see clearly with eyes of faith, we can lay those acts of desperation aside.

We can react to stress and foreboding circumstances with a sense of calm, even confidence.

We can call on the power of God and trust his creativity to bring good outcomes to our circumstances.

We can offer our enemies a feast and send them home unharmed.

We can live out our callings unhindered. We can live by faith because we can see by faith.

A Couple of Train Songs: Excerpts from Middling

I write an occasional newsletter (quarterly when I don't forget) to friends and family about my life: music, books, work, and getting older. I'd love to send it to you if you're game. What follows is an excerpt from the fall 2018 issue.

***

Kara’s parents are downsizing, which has meant, for us, a little bit of upsizing. They visited us this fall, bringing gifts, which for me included crates upon crates of records. This well-tended vinyl has become a portal to another time, a time when “Hang down your head, Tom Dooley” was a trailblazing lyric, a time just prior to the time when a lack of personal grooming was an act of virtue signaling. Working my way through these albums has been a tour of mid-century Americana, a regular ole hootenanny, so to speak.

Tucked in amongst the button-downs and khakis are some jazz and blues albums as well—a fair bit of Frank Sinatra, a dash of Ray Charles, a dollop of Dinah Washington. And the 1970s make an appearance as well, with a seemingly endless run of Linda Ronstadt records. It’s been fun to listen to the songs that my parents listened to when they were kids and later young adults. The times were not simpler but the tech sure was, and all the things we take for granted about popular music were still being teased out.

For whatever reason, a couple of train songs have stuck with me. Trains have a mythic quality to them in American culture, but our relationship to trains is different based on where and how we live. Neither of these examples was new to me, but they’ve been fun to rediscover: The legendary quality of the Wabash Cannonball, the legendary nuisance of the MTA.

***

Let me know if you'd like to be added to the Middling distribution list. Thanks for reading!

Living Carefree Is Difficult: Excerpts from Middling

I write an occasional newsletter (quarterly when I don't forget) to friends and family about my life: music, books, work, and getting older. I'd love to send it to you if you're game. What follows is an excerpt from the fall 2018 issue.

***

2018 was defined, in large part, by baseball.

Kara and I watched an entire season of Chicago Cubs baseball for the first time in our lives. At three hours a game, that adds up to a remarkable amount of time not hiking. We attached a flag mount to our house so that we could show our team spirit ( it’s in the back yard; we’re not crazy) and put a Cubs decal on Kara’s car. (It started peeling off almost immediately, which I suppose foreshadowed the team’s sad September.) Honestly, we barely recognize ourselves anymore.

The fall hasn’t been all peanuts and Cracker Jack, though. We have, in fact, gone outside from time to time. We went again to the Palisade Peach Festival, now in its fiftieth year, and while the festival hasn’t gotten any less lame for reaching that milestone, the peaches were once again awesome and the road trip was magnificent. In September a deer LICKED MY HAND in the parking lot of a Franciscan retreat center, a bucket list item I didn’t even know I had. And we got bikes, which a friend found for us while he was garage saling. We’re so Colorado now we almost rooted for the Rockies in the post-season.

I went on a few retreats this fall, mostly unforeseen opportunities. One was intended to help us discover a “rule of life” and an annual intention for ourselves. I didn’t expect it to be as impactful as it was, to be honest. I came out of it lingering on a verse that St. Peter wrote in one of his letters: “Live carefree before God; he is most careful with you” (1 Peter 5:6-7, The Message). Not a bad challenge, and not a bad assurance.

Living carefree is more difficult than it might seem on the surface, though. We live in worrisome times, made more worrisome by the seeming lack of care we extend to one another. To turn away from the toxicity can appear to be an act of negligence—if you’re not angry/worried/stressed you’re not paying attention. But there must be a way to live responsibly that also involves living carefree; and when we find that sweet spot, I think we very well may be pointing the whole world to the God who so loves it.

***

Let me know if you'd like to be added to the distribution list for Middling. I'd love for you to get it.

Rewarding Reading: Excerpts from Middling

I write an occasional newsletter (quarterly when I don't forget) to friends and family about my life: music, books, work, and getting older. I'd love to send it to you if you're game. What follows is an excerpt from the summer 2018 issue, focused on books I was into in the moment.

***

I’ve been into letters lately—an antiquated genre of writing, it reveals (and demands) a lot of the letter writer. So I appreciated An American Marriage by Tayari Jones. This novel is made up in the middle of correspondence between a man and a woman working out the complexities of their relationship. How they stand up for themselves—how they fight—via letter was pretty compelling to me.

Meanwhile, I’m now starting to get back from the printer some of the books I edited for this fall—a particularly rich season for me. Quick call outs for three of them, although all told there are seven or eight of them, and they’re all quite good.

White Picket Fences by Amy Julia Becker. It takes a special kind of brilliance and humility to write a book on privilege as a white person and not be obnoxious about it. Rewarding reading.

Keep Christianity Weird by Mike Frost. I’m a geek for Mike Frost going way back, and this is the kind of book that I would only trust from someone like him. He delivers the goods.

The Message Devotional Bible. It’s entirely possible and even somewhat common to feel ambivalent about (and even scornful toward) Eugene Peterson’s Message version of the Bible, and yet be hopelessly enamored with every word of Eugene’s other writings. This project

brings them together, and besides enriching a Bible reading experience, it gives you a great window into how the biblical texts inform our thinking, and how our thinking informs our reading of the biblical texts. I edited this precisely so that I could read it.

Len Sweet Is About to Blow Up

I remember the first time I saw Len Sweet live.

It was at a conference for Christian editors. I know, right? Borrrrring. But Len blew my brain all to bits.

He was talking about sourdough—how this breadmaking approach dates back thousands of years and how sourdough bread has a pedigree, whole generations of loaves tracing back to the same sourdough starter. I had never heard of sourdough starter, had never thought to ask how one starts a loaf of sourdough bread. I was blown away.

And of course the metaphorical potency he drew out of this sourdough story: Jesus, the Bread of Life, is our own sourdough starter, and we enrich the world when we allow our lives to be started by his life. Such a simple, organic image. Such a powerful vision for people of faith.

He ended (I think; maybe this was from the second time I saw Len live) with another metaphor, the swing. How do you ride a swing? You lean back and kick forward. He was arguing that we need to consistently both think about the future and tether ourselves to our history. I was hooked.

And then—because Christian editors are, by and large, back-row Baptists, whereas I like to be where the action is—I happened to be sitting at the front table, and Len came and sat down next to me. We engaged in niceties, and he asked me if I had seen U2 on the previous week’s episode of Saturday Night Live. I had, I said. He said (and I’m reasonably confident this is a direct quote), “What Bono did on that stage will change musical performance forever.”

Wow, I thought. I hope that comes on in reruns again soon.

In recent years I’ve had the great pleasure of getting to know Len beyond the niceties. I’m further into my career now and less intimidated into giddiness by Christian celebrity, and I’ve served as his editor on three of his recent books. The first was his delightful, brief From Tablet to Table, where he contrasted the two metaphors (both biblical) to consider how we might live more faithfully and fruitfully in our time. A theologian I admire tweeted the question, “Why do I think this might be Len Sweet’s best book ever?” I replied, “Because it’s awesome.” The second was his Mother Tongue, a lovingly crafted homage to Mabel Boggs Sweet, a spitfire gospel preacher who endured countless indignities in the pursuit of her vocation. That book was an honor to edit. And now, the third in his NavPress canon, Rings of Fire: Walking in Faith through a Volcanic Future.

When we first discussed Rings of Fire, he was thinking of it as Soul Tsunami II, sequel to a book I had read before first meeting Len and which had contributed to my starry-eyed giddiness. The comparison is apt, because like that earlier book, Rings of Fire is the type of tome that will knock you around even as it’s getting you where you need to go. Len as future-forecaster is like the rocks we find Jesus talking about: Within this book you’ll be exposed to eruptive and disruptive social forces that threaten to trip you up and even crush you if you’re not careful; but also in here you’ll find solid rocks to stand on, even stones that cry out in witness to the work of the Spirit when we’re being too timid or cynical to pay attention.

I shouldn’t be talking about rocks. Len’s operating metaphor in Rings of Fire is a volcano—generating heat, spewing destruction, dramatically reconfiguring the landscape. He counts somewhere around 25 of these culture-reshaping forces in this book, each of which could be its own book and probably soon will be, which is sort of the point. He’s looking a century into the future, considering the questions we need to start asking about our faith and our world on behalf of our kids, who are already the church of the twenty-second century. A century into the future—can you imagine? I can’t look a century into the past without getting a little bewildered. But that’s Len: He’s kicking forward, leaning back as he does.

Here’s a little easter egg for you: If you look closely at the cover of Rings of Fire (I won’t tell you where) you’ll find a coffee bean. Why? Because it’s volcanic ash that makes possible the Kona bean, source of some of the richest, most flavorful coffee in the world. Volcanos are a fact of nature, and people of vision can see beyond the risk of them to the possibility of them, and can lead the rest of us to something bold and audacious and enormously gratifying. What coffee growers do with volcanoes is what each of us, with enough faith (faith being the magical mixture of vision and audacity and boldness that comes from a basic trust that God is always inviting us to lean back on his goodness and mercy as we go even as he’s kicking us forward into a desired future) can do for the world we find ourselves in: We can see beyond the eruption and disruption of our times to the possibility of the world God is leading us all into, and we can communicate that sense of possibility to the world around us as good news of the highest order.

I know, right? Blowing my brain all to bits.

Nowhere to Go but Forward: Excerpts from Middling

I write an occasional newsletter (quarterly when I don't forget) to friends and family about my life: music, books, work, and getting older. I'd love to send it to you if you're game. What follows is an excerpt from the summer 2018 issue, focused on music that was really doing it for me at the time.

***

Households of the future will be identified by one thing: which global corporation they’ve allowed to take up residence. We’ve recently become serfs under the House of Amazon, inasmuch as we’ve invited Alexa under our roof. For the most part this is a great convenience—we can now listen to any music we’ve bought through Amazon all throughout the house simply by saying “Alexa, play ____________. Everywhere.”

I’ve already shared with you some of the limitations of this proprietary technology (see Middling 2: Electric Boogaloo). But I’ve discovered another one: I have no idea what album a particular artist’s music comes from.

Exhibit A, in which the A stands for Audrey Assad. This very talented Catholic songwriter has restored my faith in contemporary Christian music (or, at least, has mitigated my general lack of regard for it). She’s consistently contemplative and resists the cliches and tropes that make so much CCM sound the same. Some of Assad’s songs are made for radio and yet they still defy the constraints of radio friendliness; others are deeply spiritual in that they are deeply thoughtful while also being thoughtfully crafted. She challenges the genre she competes in, which is always a good thing, even though I would imagine it sets her up for the occasional bout of loneliness.

I first heard Assad on a podcast, talking about music rather than performing it. That probably biased me toward her, as I heard her reflecting on her craft and process. I’m a sucker for such things. My wife discovered her a little later and bought her whole catalog, and now almost every weekend there’s a block of time inaugurated by the phrase “Alexa, play Audrey Assad everywhere.” I dare say such a command might make the world a slightly better place.

The only problem: I have no idea which of her albums is my favorite, which song goes with which. Here are a couple of favorite tracks; I’ll let you decide how to bring them home.

On the turntable lately is Good Thing, the sophomore effort by Leon Bridges. His first album was so good that his second album made me nervous: nowhere to go but down. But he proved me wrong by going forward. His first album was an homage to 60s soul and earned him comparisons to the great Sam Cooke; this new album is of-the-minute but no less soulful—and by “soulful” I mean heartfelt and expertly performed. We had some houseguests over and I put it on for them, and the thirteen-year-old bobbed her head in critical approval. She’ll probably still be listening to Leon Bridges when she’s thirty-three and a third; that’s how good this guy is.

***

Come back soon for more excerpts from Middling. And do let me know if you want to receive the newsletter.

The Gospel According to Sisyphus: Chapter Seven

This is the final installment of a seven-part thought experiment, in which the myth of Sisyphus collides with the gospel of Jesus.

Chapter one, along with an explanation of the project, is here.
Chapter two is here.
Chapter three is here.
Chapter four is here.
Chapter five is here.
Chapter six is here.

If you find you like your Sisyphii a little more cynical, read my "Triumph of Sisyphus" here.

***

He motioned to the others. “They need you,” he told me, “and you need them. You’ve got a rough stretch ahead. The ones who came for me are not going to stop till my message gets crushed to fine powder. They’re going to bring to bear all the power they think they have. They’re going to try to intimidate you into silence. I’m telling you now, it’s not going to work. You’re a new person. Don’t worry.

“But they won’t stop with intimidation. You need to know this. They’re kings of the hill here, and they’ll win every battle on this hill. But they won’t win in the end. In the end I’ll be with you, and you’ll be with me, and this place will be salvaged from the rock heap they’ve made it. There’s a good life ahead of you, even though it’s a hard road to get there.”

He motioned for the others to join us. “Here’s what I want you to do,” he said. “My work here is finished, and I’m going back to where I came from. When I get there I’m going to keep preparing the place I’ve been promising you. And when I come back to you, I’ll bring it with me.

“In the meantime, your job is what it’s been all along: Ease people’s burdens, not least of all each others’ burdens. When people are injured, stop and help. When overseers tell you to stop, tell them to follow you to freedom. And wherever you find yourself, whoever you’re talking to, tell them what I’ve been telling you: There’s a better life than this, and you know the way there. Tell them to follow you. Tell them that I’m coming back.

“You need to know that you won’t be alone in this. I won’t be right next to you, and I don’t expect you to understand this, but trust me: I’ll be with you. I’ll be in you, giving you strength, continuing to heal your souls from all the damage this hill has done. You won’t lose me, and I won’t lose you.

“Now, get going.” That was the last thing he said. And just as he suddenly showed up, he suddenly left.

Since then, every day has been the same. Wherever we find ourselves, whoever we’re talking to, we tell them what he told us: There’s a better life than this. And we don’t just say it, we show it: We notice people who never get noticed—even by the overseers, whose job it is to see. We take care of people (not least each other). We enjoy each other. And we remind each other that he’s coming back, and he’s bringing a better life with him.

That said, this life—this life he led us into? Turns out it’s a pretty good life. ***

Thanks for reading this little thought experiment. I hope you enjoyed it.