Hot Cocoa with a Dash of Dread: How to Avoid Causing Existential Crisis This Holiday Season

All over the country, high school seniors are dropping their pencils on their last scantron of the semester. College kids and grad students are hitting send on their last final paper or lab report. And everywhere, the stress over exams and final projects melts away, only to expose a looming dread: the question.

At family holiday parties and church services and community prayers and dinner tables, every one of these young people will be asked at least once, and more likely a thousand times, a seemingly innocuous, pleasant question – one that inspires existential dread.

The question takes a number of forms. For the high school senior, it’s more and more often, “Where are you going to college?” For the college or grad school student, it’s “What do you want to do with that degree?” For anyone finishing up, it’s the fundamental, dreaded “What are you doing next year?”

The questioner, in my (very recent) experience, is always just trying to be kind, to demonstrate interest. You want to know what they’re interested in, what their hopes and dreams are. You want to understand a path that’s different from the one you took, or maybe feel confirmed in your own life choices. You want to know that they’ve thought about it, that they’ll be able to earn a living – that all the hopes you’ve invested in them will be borne out.

But those are not the sentiments the young person in your life hears.

The high school senior hears, “Were you good enough to get into the best school? Or are you a failure?” She hears, “Shouldn’t you have heard by now?” And if she’s not planning to go to college – she’s taking a gap year, or going to vocational school, or just trying to figure out how to be an adult for awhile – she hears, “What’s wrong with you?”

The college or grad student bears this wider kind of dread. Before, it was just which college. Now, it’s the whole yawning universe of possibilities, each one feeling like a permanent choice. He read Death of a Salesman in high school; he knows what happens to people who choose unfulfilling careers. In your kindly-meant “What do you hope to do with that?” he hears “You don’t have your whole life mapped out? You’d better get on it!” 

But all is not lost. You do not have to leave the young person in your life stewing alone in the corner with their increasingly fragile psyche. As alternatives to the questions that cause panic to creep further up with each iteration, I want to offer you some conversation starters:

• What project have you learned the most from this year?
• What book or thing you’ve learned has made the biggest difference in how you think?
• Are there any books or classes you thought were worthless at the time, but later you realized you’ve learned a lot from them?
• What are you most excited about for the next semester? How can I encourage you in that?
• What are you most nervous about? How can I be supportive as you go through that?
• How have your career hopes and goals changed over the last few years?

Resist the temptation to give advice without asking, but offer reassurance that indeed your career plans changed over time, that change is good and normal. And remind them that there is a thoughtful person inside them, and your love of that person is not pegged to their GPA.

In short, aim for conversations that don’t require them to measure themselves against our cultural milestones of personal adequacy. Instead, ask questions that encourage them to reflect on learning and growth – after all, aren’t those the point of education? 

On Your Feet

Isaiah 52:7 How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” 

I think sometimes we forget we have bodies. We live the life of the mind, we Harvard people, so we power through the caffeine jitters and the muscle fatigue, undeterred by the weight of our books and our laptops, preoccupied with the weight of the world on our shoulders, the sure knowledge that there are ideas to be thought up, by us, right now. 

And some theologies teach that we are better off escaping the will of the flesh, rising above our sinful, hungry, lustful bodies to some higher plane of prayer and spirit. But I am reminded that the miracle of Jesus was that he chose to live in a body. 

We are midway between seasons in the church: In December we remembered that love came down into a tiny, fragile baby body, the beloved son of an unwed mother. And this week we began Lent, the long walk to Easter, of remembering that Jesus’ choice was so painful. It hurts to live in these achy, fretful, shivering bodies. These bodies are violable, susceptible to attack by viruses and humans both. Even our love, our holy love, stretches us, as the harder and more joyfully we love another person, the deeper the ache when the body we love is with us no more. 

But in a market that offers us a thousand ways to distract ourselves from the pain of these bodies, there is something to be gained by paying attention, by listening carefully to the flesh and bones that make up so much of what we are. Knowing the value of my own body opens my eyes and my mind to the needs of the bodies around me. Loving the warmth of my body reminds me to offer a coat or a dollar to the person outside these doors struggling to keep his body warm. Taking pleasure in the strength and stretchiness of my sinews allows me to feel for the hotel worker whose back aches from lifting too many heavy beds, too quickly, and so I seek her justice. Caring for my body with rest and food and medicine strengthens my heart for the work of caring for my neighbor, who has no access to healthcare, because our politics have gotten in the way of our humanity, our egos in the way of our hearts.

We need these bodies, well-loved and well-cared-for. We need to know what a cared-for body feels like so that we can honor and care for bodies of every shape, size, color, and ability. As a friend recently reminded me, Jesus’ sacrifice of his body on the cross is a call to live as he lived, not as he died. For we cannot be the body of Christ if we treat the body as disposable. 

I confess this has been a difficult truth for me to live. I have had cause to learn the damage that can be done by trying to live as though my body were but a painful nuisance. For many years I have lived with a constant background of deep, bone-shaking anxiety, and I taught myself to ignore it, to tamp down the ache in my shoulders and the lump in my belly. But this body would not let me get away with that. When I ignore it, this body offers me explosive reminders, panic attacks that only subside when someone helps me to breathe, to inspire my body and slow down my mind. 

So I want you to breathe. To slow down. To slow down. To make space in your mind for the still small voice, for the presence of the Holy Spirit. 

Because she will come a knockin'. You will know her breath by yours, her stirring of the waters by the stirring in your beloved body, the rise of energy that tells you this moment of healing, of creation, is your calling. I am here as her harbinger. I am here to remind you to breathe, so that you are ready. I am here to stand sentinel on the hilltops of Zion and proclaim that the spirit of God is upon us, to declare peace with our bodies, to preach their salvation, in joy and in pain. I am here to live my way into some beautiful feet.

Water

The crisis in Flint, Michigan, is unconscionable. Two years ago, someone made a suggestion and a group of people voted and someone allowed a decision not to provide people with the most basic service of government: safe water. They decided to go part-way – perhaps three-fifths of the way – toward allowing people to live. That decision was despicable, and people will die because the government carried too great a burden with too few resources and too little conscience. 

The crisis in Flint is the result of a decision, and we must hold that policymaker responsible. But this crisis is more than one person’s crime: the poison in Flint’s water is a manifestation of a poisoned culture that cares too little about black bodies. Amidst all newborn America’s great dreams for a democratic Garden of Eden, sin slithered in, and we have been compromising ever since. 

This crisis is horrifying, but its causes are not shocking news. Our racial politics are made visible every day in school suspension rates and in black bodies shot dead in the streets. What shocks me is that those of us who know better, who know that black lives matter and that we will not be whole until our society reflects that, are still compromising. Somewhere along the lines, we have decided that just for now, we will fight for black bodies, and deal with the brown ones later. And we are poisoning those bodies still. 

The ABC affiliate in Flint is reporting that undocumented residents only learned that Flint’s water was poisoned “a couple weeks ago.” Increasingly isolated by ICE raids explicitly targeting families, people living undocumented in Flint for decades never knew that the well had soured. And now they are afraid to seek safe water because they fear they will leave their house for a bottle and never come home. 

The Bible is full of reminders to be kind to those who come from a foreign land. Perhaps those reminders are so frequent because in crisis it is easy to compromise the lives of those unlike us. It is easy to balance the broken budget on black backs. It is easy to give our beleaguered president a few wins on homeland security at the expense of brown families. It is easy to deny the water of life to a stranger for our own convenience. Justice will be harder.