Twenty four years ago this week, I was on a flight to Portland to meet up with my parents. I had words I needed to say to them for the very first time. Words that were too big for an email or a phone call, or even a handwritten letter.
My words were also too big to say while on the drive from Portland to their house two hours away, but they couldn’t wait. So from the backseat of my dad’s car, I told them I was in love. With a woman. I was bisexual.
For a few moments, my silence instead became theirs.
Seconds passed, which felt like decades, as mile-marker reflectors flew by us in the dark. Finally, there was mocking laughter, and all of their defenses came up. They could not believe the words I was saying, refused to hear them. I tried again. And again, and again, to say words that they would understand.
It was the beginning of a years-long conversation between us, attempting to bridge the distance between my silence, and theirs. After all the many words we have said to each other over the decades since then, the truth is now, they mostly don’t remember that first conversation.
The speaking has changed them, and me, and us, and for the good. We did manage to bridge the distance. So much so now, they don’t even remember the silence.
But I do. I still hold it all, in my heart, I hold every word.
Some words are like spells. Bringing them to speech changes everything. Immediately, and then over time, as what is spoken sinks in and becomes a new reality, creates a new world. Words like, I love you. Or I’m trans. Or, let’s get married. Words like, I need help, or I’m sorry.
What are the words in your life that just by the speaking, moved you from one reality into another? The words that changed your life, the life of people you love, the words that made, and re-made whole worlds.
This power of words being spoken is what psychologist Robert Eichberg and activist Jean O’Leary understood in 1988 when they designated October 11th as National Coming Out Day. They were trying to decide how to respond to continuing anti-gay legislation, and decided that the act of saying true words would be their best hope for turning fear into celebration.
Over three decades later, coming out is a concept most of us have a sense of – the power of claiming your own truth to change things. But what can get lost in our understanding of coming out today, is the importance of the words themselves.
Instead we might emphasize the simple knowing of what is true – say, the coming out to ourselves, less than the actual saying of specific words.
Some balk at the idea of labels in all their concrete specificity for identities always emergent and truth that is always unfolding, and so downplay the importance of specific words.
Words are imperfect approximations of truth, of course – it’s why it took so damn long to bridge the distance of understanding with my parents – and words are always just a snapshot of a moment in time.
And still, there is something uniquely powerful in the bringing of these sounds to our lips, the particular consonants and vowels, the physical breaking of silence.
Silence can be so seductive, at least for a time.
Silence tries to convince us we can keep things from ever changing, that not-changing is better, that somehow by not bringing truth to speech you can make that truth no longer true, or at least no longer matter quite as much.
Silence over time can become a kind of culture, a self-protective habit passed down generation to generation, within families, and then communities, until there is silence about the silence itself.
As poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language – this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.”
This is the sort of silence upon which white supremacy and patriarchy depend, which is why speaking some words out loud can feel for some of us like such an impossibility, like learning a language long forgotten and forbidden.
In silence, the amygdala runs the show. That part of our brain that thrives on threats, and fear, and reduces all of our options into fight, or flight, freeze, or fawn, and that disregards all logic as nonsense.
Silence is seductive, and it is also eventually suffocating. To keep our truths unspoken is to be eaten alive from the inside.
As Black lesbian poet Audre Lorde writes, “you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day, it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.”
Scientifically speaking, to live with the amygdala in charge has significant implications on our health – it reduces immune response, increases physical pain, anxiety, and depression, and increases the risk for high blood pressure, heart attacks and stroke.
Studies have shown that the brain responds uniquely to words we speak out loud – it re-focuses our self-understanding, and calms the amygdala.
To break the silence is to literally save your own life.
As Audre Lorde writes, “I have come to believe over and over again, that what is most important to me, must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.”
It is one reason the practice of confession can be so powerful, to put to words the harm you have caused is to begin a process of healing in yourself, and in those you harmed.
This power of speaking words aloud is something that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his “Don’t Say Gay” law understand very well, and it’s also something that Moms for Liberty and book-banning politicians and local school board candidates understand – just how powerful it is to say specific words out loud.
Bringing words to speech is a dangerous act, not just psychologically, although that would be enough to justify fear, and trepidation, for saying certain words for the first time. As Lorde writes, “in the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear – fear of contempt, of censure, of some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation.”
We fear for ourselves, and sometimes even more persuasively, we fear for people we love. We sit on words that we have known in our hearts for a long time, maybe whole lifetimes because we are afraid that saying them would destroy more than we can handle.
Silence, for all of its suffocation, is still better, we believe, than such undoing.
I quit. I want a divorce. I’m sick. My child’s not reaching her developmental milestones. My drinking has become a problem. I was abused. I abused. I have dementia. I’m dying.
As ministers, we’re often the place people go to for a kind of trial run for first times with words like these. A safe person with whom you can try out the words with the idea that by position or trust we will un-hear it, if by the saying, the destruction becomes clearly too dangerous, or if the words once spoken no longer seem true or important after all.
Sometimes people will meet with me, and tell me they are thinking of leaving their marriage, for example. But then, some time later I check back, and they have genuinely found a way through it.
Sometimes the saying of words helps us to know the world we want to keep working for, the truth that is worth holding on to; and sometimes it just tells us we aren’t ready yet, but we will be, someday.
Sometimes people share things like this with ministers with the hopes that we will talk them out of it, that in some kind of holy wisdom we will see right through them and call it out as nonsense.
I should tell you now, at least when I’m showing up as I mean to, you might wish for this, but I won’t deliver. Unlike other faith leaders, UU ministers claim no special access to divine wisdom, and we don’t claim to know more about your life and your truth than you do.
The only thing we can affirm is that these words are your words, your truth, your story, and the best we can offer is to receive you in whatever you are wanting to share.
For any of us to receive lifewords like these, life-changing words from another – it is an honor, and a privilege. And it matters – almost as much as the speaking itself, how we receive the words.
The challenge of course, is to simply listen, and truly hear. Which requires a kind of double awareness.
First, of the ways we are entirely separate from the one speaking. It is their journey, their truth, their worlds coming undone, or beginning anew. Not ours. We may want to relate, and unthinkingly write our own experiences on to theirs, but we must let them be the central character of their own story, and set aside our own narration for a time.
However their truth is impacting us – whatever our reactions. We must refuse to fix, or problem solve – unless they explicitly ask for such support – and even then, we must tread lightly. Let their process unfold in whatever way it will. To leave space for them to reveal themselves to us, and to themselves. To leave space for them to be still growing, and becoming, and changing. To let the words be spells of freedom, rather than just new prisons. The more connected we are to another, the harder this first awareness will be.
Our children, our parents, our spouses – their revelations will inevitably feel close in, and we can get confused between their truth, and our own. The best practice in these moments is to return to our breath, and to pause. To know and affirm that we do have our own truth that we will need to say, but that maybe ironically, for a time, our silence will be our gift. To trust that the time will come, and the person to whom we will speak that truth may or may not be this person whose truth we are now receiving.
I never thought my parents shouldn’t have their own process about my coming out – their own feelings, their own words they needed to say and try out and work through. Of course they should. I just wasn’t the right person to receive those words.
This question comes up often when I am talking with a couple considering ending their relationship – they want to turn to each other, to continue to be the recipient of their respective emerging truths, but it is nearly impossible to be the person with whom you are struggling to be in relationship with and be the person to whom you are turning to for support about that struggle. It’s part of the process to find someone else to turn to, and to receive the words you very much need to speak.
It is such a critical part of breaking silence – to be aware of who the right person is to receive, and to discern the right timing. Especially in the earliest stages, it can get so confusing what to say to whom. And here I want to go back to one of the phrases I offered earlier – the words, I have dementia.
These words are often first spoken in our community – in a small group, or in a meeting you set with one of the ministers, or with a friend you’ve met here. I have dementia. Or maybe, my spouse has dementia. Dementia is such a particularly complex reality that so many of us are wrestling with these days. Dementia can make it hard to put things into words; to literally find the words. Memory is intertwined with our identity, especially for people who have been overly-identified with their capable brains for most of their lives, as many of us have. So that by saying I have dementia, we can have a sense that we will become somehow less of a person, at least in terms of how others see us.
It’s a fear, and it’s also a potential reality – just as with a lot of the other lifewords we might share for the first time – that they will be received with a de-humanizing distance. But this is why we who receive such words must hold on to a second awareness – alongside the awareness that we are entirely separate from the one speaking, must be the awareness that we are also entirely connected. That there is nothing another person can share that will make them any less human than we are, or that could be completely foreign to us or our potential realities. We must refuse to overly “other” another. We must retain a sense of humor, even a lightness. Not to downplay what someone is sharing, but more to hold on to the truth of the person that is unchanged, even as they are sharing something that may be world-shifting.
When we put to words something for the first time, we need to know that we can still be seen for the person we are, not overly identified with these new words themselves. As queer theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton reminds us, we need to leave some space between us and the words, to remember that the words – powerful as they are, are always an approximation of the truth, not the truth itself.
With this in mind, I have found that a willingness to say “I have dementia” when do have dementia – is one of the best ways to maintain and even deepen our connections with one another and our sense of shared humanity. Because it gives words to a reality that is there whether you name it or not. Which reduces anxiety, and makes space for that humor to come through, and for humanity to be retained.
It is often the case that we try not to say words because we are afraid that they will be disconnecting – that we will lose relationships as a result of our utterances. And for a time, that may be true. For some relationships, it will inevitably be true. But the truth spoken and acknowledged is ultimately always more connective than untruths left in silence. We are one in shared reality, whether it is a reality we explicitly name or not, and the truth still sets us free.
So, “What do you need to say? Audre Lorde asks. “What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”
In these days, speaking remains a revolutionary act. A resistance to the forces of shame and erasure,a willingness to be a full person, ever in progress, an act of trust that we could be received by another, a steadfast faith that through all of life’s tangled blessings, love persists. It is an act we do for ourselves, and it is an act we do for all of us collectively, to ensure the triumph of diverse human truth, that no truth will become unspeakable.
Let us be for one another, a safe place to say the words that need saying for the first time. Let us be the people who speak aloud the truth. Who refuse the suffocation of silence, and who proclaim the liberating life-saving necessity of speech.
For me, there is a big love [that exists regardless of me]. [Which means,] there are people I have boundaries with that I’m like, “I don’t know if I love you but there’s a big love, or an intactness. I want to remain intact, and want other people to remain intact. For me, that has to do with love. It might not be that I love you in the sense that I love my nephew. But I want everybody’s sovereignty over themselves. And my boundaries are gonna exist in places that allow us to have our sovereignty.
Boundaries give us the space to do the work of loving ourselves. They might be, actually, the first and fundamental expression of self-love. They also give us the space to love and witness others as they are, even those that have hurt us.
We actually don’t have much information about how to be with our own boundaries and when I work with clients I have to say, “it’s not like you’re going to identify a boundary and be like, ‘oh that feels so good, that feels so great. I held that boundary and it was awesome!’…it is the opposite!”Love doesn’t always feel like a weighted blanket and hot cocoa, sometimes it feels like withdrawal.
Boundaries and shame are all tied up together, [and] the reason it is hard for you to hold boundaries is because you feel shameful to hold boundaries where you need them, [but really,] it is a very loving act to have boundaries.
Sermon: Good Walls, Boundaries as Acs of Love
I am guessing we all have this one friend. Maybe from high school, or maybe they aren’t a friend, they’re family. My one friend I met in seminary. He was a lutheran, but not the progressive kind. We were sincerely friends, though. He was smart, and interesting, and extremely dedicated to his very conservative faith. And, every so often, he’d compare his faith with mine, specifically by noting how we Unitarian Universalists, or we liberals more generally, are such hypocrites.
Because we say that we are open to everyone, but really we just mean, we are open to people who think like us. We say we are open to all ways of thinking, unless you believe being gay is a sin, for example. Or we say we are welcoming of all, except those who would say there is only one true God, and one true religion in Christ. When that happens, he’d say we become just as fundamentalist as he is.
He would say these things in an offhand way, but he meant them. There was – from his perspective- a fundamental problem with our way of doing religion. Beyond the fact that we are all heretics who are going to hell.
This problem starts with Universalism. One of the two heresies at the heart of our faith. It is the premise that there is no one outside the circle of love. Like Prentis Hemphill describes, a big love is present for all of us, equally, unconditionally. Everyone’s in, no exceptions. Some would call it God’s love, but you don’t have to. You might also call it lovingkindess. It is the sort of love that has not much to do with your behavior, or beliefs, your circumstances or your choices.
Universalism is why we affirm inherent worth. Inherent, as in – a given. A gift. You might also call it grace. This is the good news of our faith – that there is a love that holds us all, A love that will not let us go, no matter what.
The problem begins when we start to wonder about the “no exceptions” part of this good news. No exceptions, we wonder? But what about….
Before 2016, most people would finish this sentence with Hitler. No exceptions…but what about Hitler?
More often since 2016, I’ve heard….What about Trump?
Leading up to the election, I never thought twice about speaking out against Donald Trump. As a queer woman, and parent to a biracial daughter, his xenophobic, racist, and misogynist comments felt intensely personal. Like he was coming for me, and my family, and being against him, and his way of bringing out our worst possible instincts felt like fighting for my right to exist.
Even more, as a Unitarian Universalist minister, his flagrant embrace of violence, his racist dog whistles, and his anti-democratic impulses on their face appear to me impossible to reconcile with Unitarian Universalist principles, which among other things include a promise to work for peace in one world community, for justice and equity for all, and for democracy as a universal value.
The night after Trump was elected, we held an emergency vespers service where we could grieve together, and the year after his election, we saw a huge influx of new members – we called it the Trump bump.
Before Trump, I was more cautious to make space for all sorts of voters in my preaching, and in our shared ministry – but Trump felt different. It wasn’t about politics, or partisanship. It was a matter of morality, and faith.
So…what about Donald Trump?
Despite everything I just said, I have never felt confused about Trump being in, not out, of the circle of the big love. I might find his words, his tactics, and his policies reprehensible, but that does not mean he no longer has an inherent worth, even if it is often obscured.
Because I believe this big love exists, I trust that all people are loved. But that also means I don’t necessarily have to be the one doing the loving. I just need to act with the understanding that all people are inherently worthy of love, and all people are held in love. Even if I don’t understand it, or feel it personally, I need to trust that it is true, and to treat people assuming that they are loved, just like every other person, including me.
This is how I think about Donald Trump, and any other person you might say “what about….”. It’s how I think about my friend’s cruel ex-husband, and it’s how I think about the girls who were mean to my daughter in 5th grade. Some days, it’s even how I think about my own self. I don’t need to figure out how to love myself, not all the time, because instead I just need to trust that I am loved. I am held in love, and this love will not let me go.
This helps address some of what my friend would ask me about, but it doesn’t get at the bigger issue.
Which is less a matter of Trump being worthy of love, and more about the ease with which we held the vespers service that night in November, or showed up as a church at protests about his policies. It’s about the people who weren’t grieving, but were celebrating. It’s the question of if these folks can also be tolerated within our faith that we say is built on tolerance. And if not – is that as my friend would say, hypocritical?
These questions get at the boundaries of our community. Who belongs, and who does not, and why.
As Charles Vogl says in his book The Art of Community, “a boundary is the recognized demarcation between insiders and outsiders. The boundary should be more about making the inside space safe for insiders than about keeping outsiders out. Where there’s a boundary, insiders feel more confident that they share values and that they understand one another better.”
For example, a few months ago we held a small group for grandparents who were trying to understand gender, and the boundary for being a part of the group is you needed to have a grandchild who was themselves exploring gender, and you needed to be sincerely trying to understand gender.
If someone tried to attend who didn’t have a grandchild, or who was not at all trying to understand and instead was judgmental or closed off – it would significantly decrease trust in the group, and make it feel unsafe.
Boundaries are the way we define what we say yes to, and to what we say no; or who we say yes to, who is our no. They are the good walls we put up, grounded not in fear, or hatred – but in love.
As Prentis Hemphill writes: “Boundaries give us the space to do the work of loving ourselves. They might be, actually, the first and fundamental expression of self-love. They also give us the space to love and witness others as they are, even those that have hurt us.”
In community, boundaries are rooted in shared values, common interests, and/or behavioral expectations. Which is why boundaries are usually one of the first things newcomers are trying to feel for when they are getting to know Foothills, even if they don’t name it that way. They want to know what those values are, what’s expected, and if they’ll fit in. What beliefs are welcome, what identities, what cultures. What abilities, what practices, what emotional states.
Seriously, you wouldn’t believe the number of people who apologize to me for crying at church – because crying in a lot of relatively public places would be crossing a boundary. But not here. Church is a very good, safe, and appropriate place to cry.
Crying isn’t one of our boundaries, but that doesn’t mean we have no boundaries.
Even a faith like ours that hopes to be extremely open, and accepting, and who affirms a BIG LOVE that holds everyone and everything, and who sometimes declares “we welcome all,” – even we have boundaries of who belongs, and who does not. After all, as Vogl says, “If everyone in the world belongs in your community, this means your community cannot be distinguished from no community.”
Some of you have heard me say before, that instead of we welcome everyone, we would do better to say, we welcome everyones who welcome everyone. This explicit boundary recognizes that our shared values are diversity, acceptance, and tolerance. Our shared value is welcoming everyone.
By saying we welcome everyone who welcomes everyone, we recognize that these values require us to limit acceptance wherever acceptance is limited, to limit diversity wherever diversity is limited, and to limit tolerance wherever tolerance is limited.
This is what philosopher Karl Popper described in his 1945 book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, as the Tolerance Paradox. As he writes:
“Unlimited tolerance [would] lead to the disappearance of tolerance. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
Popper was careful to clarify that intolerant ideas need not be entirely suppressed, as long as they were truly just ideas and not stirring up a fervor of intolerance.
I appreciate this caution, because the flip side of being intolerant of all intolerance is a community where none of us can learn, or grow. Because the only way growth happens is through exposure to different ideas and ways of thinking, which means that sometimes those who value tolerance must also sometimes be tolerant of intolerance.
I’m thinking specifically of my parents, and so many other people’s parents, who were initially and then for a while, not so tolerant, let alone embracing of my queer identity. But over time, they have become not just tolerant but great champions of LGBTQ rights and equality. And the only way that this change was possible was because my partner and I were tolerant of their intolerance.
Let me pause here to acknowledge, we have shied away in recent years, from the word tolerance – because it implies a lower bar we hope to surpass – we don’t want to just tolerate people, we want to accept, even embrace them. But my example of my parents reminds us that sometimes tolerate is exactly the right word. I wasn’t looking to accept my parents’ homophobia, let alone embrace it. But it did matter that I found a way to tolerate it.
I think of this complexity whenever someone brings up “cancel culture,” which is what I think of as the paradox of tolerance gone awry. Because saying or doing something that appears intolerant is often hurtful, offensive, shocking, and can feel like a betrayal. Especially when these words or actions come from someone you consider a leader or role model, an ally, or a friend.
The natural reaction to this betrayal, or at least what has become overly common in our culture, is to call out and/or shun the offending person. We can see this playing out in the Lizzo allegations, or more recently Jimmy Fallon. But shunning anyone who has said or done something intolerant will make their learning very difficult, if not impossible; it says, we’re not sure this person can change, or that they are worthy of change; it says instead, we must get rid of this person. See – the paradox of intolerance gone awry, because we mus be intolerant of all intolerance.
But just like we believe in diversity, we also believe in change, and the truth that this is not the end of the story. Whatever this is. It is the other good news of the big love, that there is a path of forgiveness available to us all.
It’s also the other way to think about boundaries. Because, just like we aren’t personally responsible to love every single person, the big love also means we aren’t personally responsible for healing every person.
We must be discerning about what makes for productive conflict; and also what the right time, place, and people are to heal harm that has been caused; and we must be careful not to confuse conflict with abuse, or to ask people who have been abused to tolerate their abuser so that they can change.
As Prentis Hemphill reminds us, “Love doesn’t always feel like a weighted blanket and hot cocoa, sometimes it feels like withdrawal.”
Even though Popper didn’t say all intolerant ideas must be banned entirely, he also believed there was a limit. When intolerant ideas begin to capture a certain irrational, and powerful energy among people, we must consider them as dangerous as inciting murder.
After all, Popper’s ideas weren’t just theoretical for him as an Austrian Jew forced to flee his homeland after it was taken over by Nazi Germany. Just like they aren’t theoretical for our world today, as evidenced most recently when the persistent anti-LGBTQ rhetoric translated into the murder of a California clothing store owner for hanging a rainbow flag.
To be a faith and a congregation, that welcomes all who welcome all, and also makes room for those who are on a path of learning, and growing their hearts, who make mistakes, and cause harm, and who seek to repair that harm – which, isn’t that all of us, at one time or another? This is the heart of our covenantal way of doing religion. It is what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist.
I don’t know if the folks who were celebrating Trump’s election in 2016 would find themselves in this definition – but if they do, they too would be welcome.
It is not a simple, or easy path we journey together. It requires curiosity, humility, and the extremely difficult practice of admitting you’re not always right. It also asks us to accept that sometimes we will be uncomfortable – because we know discomfort is what leads to growth; it requires a willingness to apologize, and make amends, to seek repair, and to forgive.
Maybe most of all, like it says in our covenant of right relations, and in our new member welcome – it means we know we know we will not always get our own way – and we know, that’s a good thing. Because it means that we are a part of an intentionally diverse community that believes in boundaries – which is not in fact hypocritical. And it means we can trust that there is a big love that exists, that cannot, and will not let us go.
The pop star Chynna Phillips (from the group Wilson Phillips) was on Family Feud a while back, and just before she had to answer questions to win money for a charity she needed to psyche herself up, so she started chanting “Holy Spirit Activate.” And apparently it worked because her team won $25,000 for charity. Her chant went viral as a way to express a desire for good things to happen and for the SPIRIT – of love, of goodness, of LIFE itself to flow right through you.
Baby Suggs is a former slave, freed by her daughter’s deal-making. The story goes that “When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, Holy, followed by every black man, woman and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing – a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of a path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place.
“In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees. After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs, Holy, bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down.
“Then she shouted, ‘Let the children come!’ and they ran from the trees toward her. ‘Let your mothers hear you laugh,’ she told them, and the woods rang.
“Then ‘Let the grown men come,’ she shouted. They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees.
“‘Let your wives and your children see you dance,’ she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet.
“Finally, she called the women to her, ‘Cry,’ she told them. ‘For the living and the dead. Just cry.’ And without covering their eyes, the women let loose.“It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got all mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath.
“In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart.”
This story of Baby Suggs in the clearing is a story of the Holy Spirit. It’s not named that way exactly, but in Baby Suggs’ pause, and then in her clarity, that is Spirit. And in her call to dance, and in the dancing; the laughter, the weeping, and in the way it all gets mixed up together – that is Spirit.
Most of all in all the bodies, the energy moving there, in the living – this is what we mean to describe when we try to talk about the Spirit. I say try, because whatever our efforts, the Spirit can only be experienced, not theorized about.
Spirit is the feeling among the worshippers in the clearing. Just as it may be the feeling stirring within you right now. Or among all of us on many Sunday mornings, when the songs are working, and the silence hits just right, and the tears flow, and the laughter comes over us. Spirit is what happens in us, among us.
By Spirit we mean the Spirit of Life, of course. The force of energy that animates creation – animals, plants, humans, oceans, stars. Spirit is not material, but would mean nothing without material expression. Spirit of Life, or Spirit of God, in the Hebrew Bible the word is ruach, or v’ruach – the spirit or wind, sweeping over the waters as one of the first acts of creation, compelling prophets to speak, and life to take shape.
Ruach. It even sounds like breath.
And by Spirit we also mean the Spirit of Truth. The transcendent reality across time and space, holding complexity and contradiction, creativity and imagination, paradox, and prophesy, the call to change, to heal, to redeem.
And, by Spirit we also mean, the in-dwelling presence of God. Felt in the silence, in each of us uniquely, the Spirit speaks with a deeper understanding than words can touch. In the silence, the Spirit is reassurance, comfort, and love.
We try to talk about the Spirit, we are trying, I am trying – we give it modifiers and proper names and capital letters, Even though, still, the Spirit refuses all our attempts to tame its wildness, its scorching beauty, its percussive pulse. For this reason, Spirit is dangerous, as it shakes off any efforts to fit into tradition or rules, let alone what you might call orthodoxy.
Which does not mean that people have not tried.
Most notably, a few centuries into the common era, the Emperor Constantine did not appreciate all the many ways church leaders talked about the Spirit, or God, or Jesus – diversity is afterall, hard to control.
And so Constantine called a council in Nicea, in the year 325, and there they decided how the Spirit works. And wrote it all down in the doctrine of the Trinity, that central teaching of Christianity, even today, that says God consists of three co-substantial persons – father, son, and the Holy Spirit. Nicea gave Constantine his orthodoxy, but still could not contain the uncontainable Spirit.
In individuals, and families, in small hidden communities, and across time, the many different ways of understanding, and the questions persisted, all the way until the 16th century when questions became the Protestant Reformation.
One way to think about Unitarian Universalism is as that long line of people who never stopped questioning – and still don’t. We are a part of the Protestant tradition, and we protested so much, we eventually protested ourselves right out of the tradition entirely.
It took another few centuries for that to happen, but in the most radical parts of the Reformation, you can find our roots. There, religious fanatic and proto-Unitarian Michael Servetus was stirring up questions about the Trinity.
According to historian Charles Howe, Servetus was “deeply disturbed that he had found no direct statements in the Bible supporting such a central doctrine [as the Trinity].” Rather than God being three distinct beings in one, Servetus found it more biblically accurate to describe God showing up in three different modes – father, son, spirit – as he wrote, the Holy Spirit is “simply God’s spirit moving within our hearts.”
In 1531, Servetus published On the Errors of the Trinity, and then spent the rest of his life trying to convince everyone else he was right; you might have guessed, he didn’t succeed. In 1553, he was put to death for heresy.
I have to admit, Servetus’ anti-trinitarian obsession has at times baffled me. Despite the name of our faith, and our church being Unitarian – which was originally an insult hurled at anyone who rejected the trinity – I would guess this is true for a lot of us today – it’s hard to understand why these distinctions -trinity, anti-trinity, unitarian….whether or not God is tri-modal or co-substantial…why any of this mattered so much to Servetus, why it was worth dying over.
But then, I remember that just a generation before Servetus wrote his treatise, in his home country of Spain, hundreds of thousands of Jews and Muslims had been forced to swear allegiance to the Trinity or face persecution, including death. Maybe, Servetus had their persecution in mind, and his obsession represented a kind of apology, or hope for redemption.
Maybe. Or maybe Servetus just didn’t know when to let an argument go. Which is sometimes a part of who we are today too.
Regardless, Servetus offers us one example of the ambivalence our faith has held across the centuries, when it comes to the Spirit. Because, on the one hand, we are fundamentally progressive, and as Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams said, our free and liberal churches are based in the understanding that the spirit blows where it will – as it says in the gospel of John.
Here we affirm, truth is ever unfolding, revelation is not sealed, we all have a piece of the truth, and we live in mystery, trusting the love that holds us and calls us ever-on.
And, at the same time, here we appreciate reason, and knowledge, and evidence. We often live in our heads, forget about our bodies entirely, and default to skepticism, and sometimes roll our eyes at woo-woo ideas like Spirit.
Back and forth, across our history, these two polarities have swung – so that it’s not just Jane that wasn’t sure how to answer the question about the Holy Spirit – it’s all of us.
For example, in the 18th Century, American religion was overtaken by what became known as the Great Awakening – which was itself a reaction against the enlightenment and other liberal theories that had tried to insert rationality into religion.
Through tent revivals and passionate extemporaneous preaching, the leaders of the Great Awakening put the untamed power of the Holy Spirit back in the center of worship, and reminded people forcefully of just how much they needed to feel God’s salvation – not just think about it. The Great Awakening was emotional and spontaneous and embodied and the liberal churches of the day would have none of it.
“The next thing to be considered is that sudden light and joy so many of late claim to be the subjects of…laughing so far as I am acquainted with the History of the Church is a method of expressing religious joy peculiar to these present times. This practice seems inconsistent with that holy fear and caution which must be thought reasonable where the salvation of the soul is the thing.”
Good thing Charles Chauncy can’t see us most Sundays- way too much laughter – not enough caution.
Still, we might agree with him about the swooning and falling to the ground – a practice we can see today in what is the fastest-growing segment of global christianity – the Charismatic, or Pentecostal church. Centered on the euphoric experience of receiving the gifts of the Holy Spirit, in the Charismatic Church, Spirit is performative, action-oriented, dramatic.
Whether through speaking in tongues, or divine healing, the Charismatic Church – which includes the primarily African American denomination, the Church of God in Christ, as well as Assemblies of God – understands its mandate based on the story of the Holy Spirit that descended after Jesus died.
His followers from many different countries gather for Shavuot, or what in Greek is called Pentecost, but they cannot understand each other – they don’t speak the same language. Until suddenly, a great wind moves through their room, in Greek, the word for this wind is Pneuma.
After wind, comes fire. Tongues of fire descend on each of those gathered, and then suddenly, they understand each other completely.
Spirit breathes, burns, sanctifies, transforms.
When we try to speak of Spirit, we call these attempts pneumatology, after the wind of God that descended in this story, and in the story of creation.
When Charles Chauncy questioned what was happening in the Great Awakening, he revealed his class bias. Official Unitarian history begins in New England, afterall, among the educated and upper class, those places where the Enlightenment was everything. Charles Chauncy and other upper class New Englanders didn’t like the Great Awakening – they said – because it was overly emotional – but just as much they didn’t like it because it was a great equalizer.
It made religious understanding accessible to anyone who felt moved by the spirit, and the Holy Spirit – it turns out – is unconcerned with academic credentials that would indicate who should “properly” receive and dispense wisdom, or have direct access to God.
The Holy Spirit shows up in makeshift tents and pop-up churches wherever the people gather, and cares not one bit about tall steeples, or learned clergy, and as we see in Baby Suggs’ clearing, is instead equally available to anyone and everyone who is open to it.
When we find ourselves being skeptical of Spirit-centered practiced, we need to keep in mind Chauncy’s blindspots, and the way they may live in us, too.
A few decades after Chauncy, however, liberal religion swung the other direction as Unitarian reformers known as the Transcendentalists called for a faith more filled with passion and heart, and for a religion centered around the wisdom of the in-dwelling spirit of God.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson declares in his 1860 essay, “Worship,”“There is a principle which is the basis of things, a simple, quiet, undescribed, indescribable presence, dwelling very peacefully in us, our rightful lord. We are not to do, but to let do, not to work, but to be worked upon.”
A few decades after the Transcendentalists, the Religious Humanists swung us back the other direction, prioritizing reason and the supremacy of science….until, a few decades after that, feminism, and earth-based traditions sent us the other way…..
When we think about our faith as a linear story – from Servetus to Chauncy to the Transcendentalists to the Humanists, to the feminists…our relationship with Spirit feels like a teeter totter – back, and forth, embrace and rejection. It makes you wonder which will ultimately win the day. But what life, and experience, and the James Webb telescope teach us is that the whole of our story, in all of its contradictions and ways of conceiving of truth, lives in us – not in a linear way – but all at once.
Which means that embracing Spirit does not require we abandon the thrill of knowledge and evidence – or vice versa. It does not have to be an either/or.
Both ways of seeking truth can and must work together, not in ambivalence, but in an ongoing creative tension of “pragmatism, and mystery, wonder and hope, chaos and order,” (a phrase from Unitarian ethicist, Sharon Welch as she decribes the Spirit). A creative tension that opens our hearts to truth in the greatest possible sense.
To put the two together is to recognize that not every intuition or great wind should be trusted or followed with abandon, and to know it is right to be skeptical of anyone claiming they are being led by the Spirit.
The Spirit is that feeling that leads us to feel more love for other people, and the profound sense of the inestimable worth, beauty and wonder of others,” which means we must learn to to question those who claim to be led by the Spirit “but use that power to denounce others, or to distance themselves from others self-righteously, or establish fear-based hierarchies.”
This discernment requires a committed community, where we each bring our piece of the truth – from all parts of our individual and collective stories, and where we can help each other listen for those times when we are following the “promptings of the Spirit,” and also those when we are “merely following our own vivid desires, and longings, that would be destructive of ourselves, and community.”
When we make this discernment a part of our promises to each other, and to ourselves, then we can with integrity, meet with openness the overwhelming joy and wild exuberance of the Holy Spirit, that in-dwelling and prophetic spirit that seeks to animate our lives in the direction of love….
Whether that’s by speaking in tongues – you never know….
Or in a call like Baby Suggs makes – to cry, and laugh, weeps and dance – together – freely.
Or, maybe even (don’t tell Charles Chauncy) in the hype-up chant of Holy Spirit Activate!
Thank you to the Rev. Fred Wooden for background insight on the tradition of the Holy Spirit within Unitarian Universalism and in the Hebrew Bible.
You know, Job. The one whose life was the epitome of #blessed. That is, until he lost everything. His money. His land. All ten of his children. Even his own health. By the end of it all, Job is covered in welts, every part of his body in pain, he is devastated.
And still, Job, the story goes, is faithful. Not just faithful, but, blameless. As in, he’s done nothing to deserve punishment, and nothing could make this pain make sense. Even Job’s wife literally told him to just give in, and curse God, and die. In response to this obvious logic, Job said to his wife:
Shall we receive good from God, and not receive evil? What punishments of God are not gifts?
This is Job’s mindset when three of his friends come to visit. They’d heard about his trouble, and as soon as they see him, they feel so overwhelmed by the obvious way his life has taken a turn, they tear their clothes and weep in mourning. His friends end up sitting with him for seven days and nights in silence, just bearing witness to his suffering.
It’s an incredible example of friendship and support, one we can all learn from. And, one that is quickly followed up by exactly the opposite, as Job’s faithfulness transforms inevitably to lament and anger at God, and Job’s friends, well, their compassion transforms to accusation, as they try to shake out what Job must have done to earn all of this suffering.
The story of Job is like the story of refugees of war, starving children, or the young person consumed by cancer before life has time to take hold. We don’t like to tell these sorts of stories, and we don’t want to believe these stories are actually true. There must be a reason. It must not be that that 10 year old Stephen Colbert would lose his father and his brothers all at once for nothing; or that any of the tragedies we can find in today’s headlines across the globe – that these would just – happen.
There must be some explanation, and therefore some way we can stop it, a way to make sure that the bad thing will never happen to us. We long for the world to be fair in some deeply personal sense.
It’s one of the motivations behind much of the modern wellness movements – if we can just find the right vitamin cocktail, avoid sugar, definitely artificial sweeteners, and set our intentions to the good – we can bring the good, avoid the bad.
The wellness movement probably wouldn’t think of itself as a theodicy, but it fits right in with the many other ways humans have tried to understand why bad things happen, to give a reason where there seems to be none.
As religious scholar and writer Kate Bowler puts it, theodicy is the human habit of continually asking why is this suffering happening, what does it mean, and, where is God in this?
Bowler comes at the question first from an academic perspective – she did a deep dive into the prosperity gospel. That way of conceiving of God as one who will bless you in direct proportion to the strength of your belief, and that the luxuries of life are, as Bowler says, a reward for your faith.
She went into her study, she acknowledges, with a lot of judgment – as I’m guessing a lot of us may have – for this flagrant embrace of wealth justified by way of a savior who regularly identifies with and glorifies the poor. But what she finds in the details of the prosperity gospel, is less judgment, and more understanding. Even, identification.
As she writes: “The prosperity gospel encourages people to buy private jets and multi-million dollar homes as evidence of God’s love.” But it also offers people an escape “from poverty, failing health, and the feeling that their lives are leaky buckets…some people wanted Bentleys, but more wanted relief from the wounds of their past and the pain of their present. People wanted salvation from bleak medical diagnoses; they wanted to see God rescue their broken teenagers or their misfiring marriages…they wanted a modicum of power over the things that ripped their lives apart at the seams.”
These feelings, she realized, were not foreign to her; just as they aren’t foreign to most of us. If we’re honest, we all hold at least a little of the ideas of the prosperity gospel within us – as it is a deeply American way of approaching life.
Bowler grew up with a traditional understanding of God – where God is all powerful, all present, all knowing, or what some call the omni-omni God: omni-present, omni-scient, omni-potent. Theodicy is an especially vexing problem with an omni-omni God, especially when you also want to claim that God is all-loving.
Because how can an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-everywhere God who is also all-loving allow for evil? Either God must not have the power to prevent suffering, or God has the power, but chooses not to use it – which means – unless you connect pain with love, God must not be all-loving.
Theology is often an act of deciding which trade-off you can live with. Which God feels more worthy of your devotion – all-powerful, or all-loving?
Process theologians – that way of conceiving of God that Sean explored a couple of weeks ago through improv exercises – prioritize the love over the power, conceiving of God as that which lures and persuades creation, but does not have power over it.
Classical Christian theologians avoid the question all together by instead turning their attention to human beings. To paraphrase Taylor Swift – hi, we’re the problem, it’s us.
In this way of thinking, it isn’t that God doesn’t have the power to stop evil, it’s that God loves us so much that God maintains our human free will, and humans, sinful worms that we are, keep choosing the bad, and causing the pain.
Sometimes, this is a generic assessment – as in, humanity is the source of evil generally, and so there are bad things generally; and sometimes it is more specific – you do something bad, you experience bad things.
In popular culture today, we often think of this personalized consequence as karma, but karma is more accurately understood as something accumulated across multiple lifetimes than it is about your own bad behavior coming back to haunt you.
It’s simpler and more accurate to say – we want to believe in the law of cause and effect, and that our moral lives follow this same logic. It’s why the idea of heaven and hell can be so compelling. Even if we don’t see the reward or the punishment, it will come.
Despite his friend’s insistence, Job is not worried about personalized cause and effect. He knows he is blameless, and that what God has brought to him is not because of something he did. There must be some greater purpose he can’t yet see.
This is another way people approach theodicy – to say God isn’t just not stopping suffering, but actually enacting it – all as a part of some greater good God has in mind.
This is of course, as most post-Holocaust theologians have said, obscene, full stop, which I hope you will remember, and repeat the next time someone tries to justify something horrible by saying it’s somehow a part of God’s plan.
According to the text, Job’s suffering is not actually from God – at least not directly. It’s the result of a bet that God makes with someone called The Satan – which is not yet the same figure as would evolve and emerge as a proper name for the devil in Jewish and Christian traditions, aka Satan.
Sometimes, the Satan fails to find things that are interesting enough to report on, and so becomes a sort of trickster and provocateur to stir up trouble, as he does in this story.
This is another way you might approach theodicy – to say that suffering is the fault of a third party – not God, not human – it comes from the Satan, or by the trickster gods of ancient Greek mythology, for example.
But even in this, you’d have then concede something of God’s power, or God’s goodness – either God is not able to stop the third party, or doesn’t care to – it’s the latter that we find at the start of Job.
After God brags to the Satan about how much Job loves him, the Satan tells God that Job only loves him because he has been so well blessed in his life – that if his life wasn’t so great, he would not love him nearly as much. This is where the wager comes in. God gives the Satan full permission to torture Job and see if Job loves God anyway.
Which for the most part, Job does.
This section of the text gives us a God that is cruel, uncaring, even if he is not directly responsible for Job’s pain – this is not an all-loving God; God here – like in many other places of the Hebrew Bible, is more interested in being loved, than in loving.
Mostly this is a way of thinking about God we reject, with disgust, or eye rolls, or with residual injuries carried from a time of attempting to please such a god, or really, please people who believed that this is exactly who God is.
And still, like Kate Bowler with the prosperity gospel, sometimes I wonder if there’s also something in here we can understand, and even identify with. Because sometimes it does feel like life makes as much sense as a wager between two clueless celestial beings with overblown egos wondering if they are loved for real.
One of the ways I think about the Hebrew Bible is as a series of attempts by people to describe their experience of reality – not truth in the same way that science is true. But true as in, I feel that. And here, in the first section of Job, we find a God that I have felt – an impetuous God who could care less about my good works, or anyone else’s, a neglectful God who lets some roaming trickster spy run things every once in a while, and a vain God who forgets the suffering of God’s people for hundreds of years, and more.
Job starts here in its portrayal of God, but doesn’t stay here. Remember, multiple authors in a story badly stitched together. After Job’s friends put him on trial for what they are sure must be some hidden sin, and after Job has offered every defense, and repeatedly plead his innocence.
After Job has screamed at God, and after he has surrendered to the silence that greets his pleas, when all that is left of Job is grief, in the final pages of the story, God speaks: not with an apology, or even an explanation.
Tell me, God says to Job, where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have you commanded the mornings since your days began, and caused dawn to know its place? On and on, God questions Job like this, as if cataloging the places where God holds knowledge, and power, the places across all of the earth, across all of life, living, dead, not yet born, and then into the cosmos, the stars, the planets, the galaxies, across all of the universe, across all of time.
God in this moment is a forceimpersonal, mysterious, not absent from our lives, exactly.
This is a creating God, who makes all life possible – a God who makes, and unmakes life – and a God that holds all of it – all at once so much complexity, and dynamism – a complexity we can never fully understand, or maybe even want to…
What suffering means within any one life cannot be fully squared with this complex force of reality of everything that is and ever was and will be- nor can any one life’s blessings – this is not the God of the prosperity gospel. And it definitely does not say we should be glad for terrible things because they are part of God’s plan for in this God there is no attempt to make sense of any of it – the good, the bad, the single life story.
For as much as we might imagine ourselves at the center of it all, or believe that our pain or our blessings must all make sense and fit into a clear cause and effect, this theodicy responds instead by reminding us that sometimes the mystery, is just a mystery – and most everything is a mystery.
What punishments of God are not Gifts?
This isn’t the answer that Job, or his friends, or most of us hope for when we go trying to make sense of suffering. But I also believe that this wisdom can be a gift, and even, a relief, a way of thinking about human life and our place in it all that can be in its honesty, a comfort.
As Wiccan healer Sadie Whip reminds us: “there are things that happen that will never make sense, and will never be a thing we find peace with, and will always haunt us. There are some things that are so incomprehensible, so wrong, so brutal, so beyond our ability to deal with, that we don’t try to deal with it. That’s not because there is something wrong with us – it is because life is sometimes just beyond our ability to hold or tolerate.”
And just as much, there are some things that are so incomprehensible because they are so right, and beautiful, so miraculous that they are beyond our ability to hold them either – we are overcome. And this beauty, and this brutality – none of it makes sense, exactly none of it can be held in a single rational container of cause and effect. It can only be received – as a part of this great mystery, where we stand in awe – and turn it all into gratitude and compassion, remembering the ways this mystery is our shared fate, and knowing it is all – as Colbert Says – a gift.
Before images of God, I had white Jesus. Hung in a picture frame in my childhood home.
You can see his perfectly groomed beard and goatee, his long brown hair with soft curls, and his brown eyes that follow you wherever you go. Which was both creepy, and also somehow, comforting.
Alternatively, I had Jesus hanging from a cross.
On the cross, Jesus is thin, wearing a crown of thorns, nails in his hands and feet. It never occurred to me that statues of a public execution from 2000 years ago would be inappropriate to hang amongst other home decor.
Because we were Catholic, I also had white Mary. Not in my home, not that I remember, at least not outside of Christmas time, but at my church, and Catholic school, Mary was everywhere.
Mostly with her head down and covered, in light blues and whites, or in the all-white statue at church where we’d place the crown of flowers on her head every May day, her eyes looked up at the sky, in longing and devotion.
Mary was the mother of God, not herself God – she was worthy of prayer and adoration, but mostly as a way to try to appeal to God himself.
Jesus on the other hand, had no such distinction. Jesus was God. Which meant God was bearded, brown eyed, with long hair. Every December God was a newborn baby; the rest of the year he was a late-twenties-looking shepherd that wears a white robe.
At the same time, God was also God’s Father. Which somehow made sense. He was very old, still with a beard, still white.
Year round, and all day, for all of my growing up years, God was most of all a man, and his pronouns were obviously he and him. Even if it was also true that he was a man that often dressed in long flowing robes…
It is difficult to articulate just how deep this original imagery runs in me, even now. The way it still infiltrates how I live in the world, how I live in my body. First and inescapably in the ways it can lead to my default assumptions that men are right, and good. No matter the evidence there may be to the contrary in a given scenario. I still catch myself in these assumptions. It’s embarrassing to acknowledge, and annoying, and much worse than annoying.
My first go at atheism was mostly an early feminist attempt to shake loose from God the Father, and my image of God as male. My first appreciation of the UU church basically came down to how infrequently they talked about Jesus.
Afterall, as Mary Daly said, 50 years ago – “If God is male, then male is God.”
All of this is worse than annoying because it also connects to pain, real and steady, cultural and persistent, pain, and also shame that no matter how many versions of atheism I’ve attempted I can’t fully exorcize. Unless I am actively tending to other images of God, I know this one will show up in my subconscious, ready to remind me that there will always be something in me that falls short – and God will always be other.
It’s why I know our God-talk must be more than absence, or rejection. Our God-talk must be constant expansion, curiosity, creativity, and growth.
The dominant images of God being male, and white is not just a problem for those of us who are not male or not white by the way.
There are other points of pain for those who are both, which in its most problematic expression looks something like what we see in the angry, lonely, terrifying and terrified world of the manosphere.
The manosphere is that mostly white mostly straight male online space filled with bloggers, influencers, and online forums dedicated to misogyny and the idea that (white) men are the ones who are actually oppressed. Which you might believe if you have been told your whole life that your very nature is the same as God’s.
I am confident Mary Daly would not be sympathetic with the manosphere.
In her 1973 book, Beyond God the Father Daly described how the “the biblical and popular images of God as a great patriarch in heaven, rewarding and punishing according to his mysterious and seemingly arbitrary will, has dominated the imagination of millions over thousands of years.” She describes the life-destroying consequences of this default-image of God – as she writes, “the divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination.”
Daly was not one to mince words. She always said she knew she’d be punished for being an “Itty-bitty” feminist, so she might as well just go the whole way.
The same year Daly published Beyond God the Father, Unitarian minister and theologian Bill Jones asked parallel questions in his book, Is God a White Racist? Except instead of gender, Jones described the destructive consequences across history and culture of having imaged God as white.
The way we imagine God always has huge consequences. Even if we are atheists – the God we don’t believe in still impacts us in reaction, and often subconsciously. Not to mention, we all live in the United States in 2023 where according to a recent Stanford University study, the majority of Americans still conceive of God as white, and male – especially Americans who are themselves white, and male.
Which in turn, the study also shows, leads them to believe that people who are white and male will make better leaders, and bosses, and make better decisions, and do a better job.
Whether we “believe” in God or not – we all live with the emotional, social and legal fall out of how God is being imagined and languaged today. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always been an advocate for atheists becoming the most fluent in God-talk.
To think of God-talk as the ultimate humanist project. Because despite the sometimes-needy portrayals of God in the Hebrew Bible, God talk is not actually for God. God – whatever God is – doesn’t need our God-talk. God-talk is for, and I’d even say – about humans.
Because ultimately, our images of God reflect what we believe about humanity, about ourselves – and our images of God determine what we believe about humanity and ourselves. Our images of God are reflections and determinants of how we see ourselves. So…. whatever limits we place on God, we place on ourselves – and whatever expanse we allow in our images of God, we make possible within our own human experience.
The way we imagine God determines our sense of who and who is not worthy of love; who is worthy of power, and who is not; who is worthy of life, and who is not.
The way we imagine God communicates what we believe to be the ultimate aim, our ultimate aim, and the most supreme expression of good – which in the negative also means that as we imagine God, we define and describe what we most despise, the least desirable, the most unwanted.
In many ways, this is what William Ellery Channing, who is sometimes described as the Founder of American Unitarianism, was after in his 1828 sermon, “Likeness to God.”
It was the early 19th century in New England, and Calvinism was all the rage. Calvin was that theologian who described humans as irredeemably worthless worms – and who declared that goodness was in God, and God only. By God’s grace some humans were saved – which has nothing to do with human effort, or human choice.
In Channing’s era, Calvinism felt to many like very good news – it gave some a sense of righteousness about their new country – just like God elects individuals for special salvation, God elects whole countries for a special destiny. Or at least, the white and male parts of the country.
So Channing, from his pulpit in 1828, was like – that is ridiculous. Except the 8500 word version.
His argument was primarily an epistemological one – the question of how we know what we know – as in, how do we know what we know about God, and how do we know what we know about humans? His assertion was just as I said before – What we know about God is a reflection of what we see in humanity, and what we know about humanity is a reflection of how we imagine God.
Channing asked: “Whence do we derive our knowledge of the attributes and perfections which constitute the Supreme Being?”
And then he answered: “We derive them from our own souls.”
What we know about God we know because of what we know in ourselves. Which means, we cannot describe God as good without it being a reflection of the goodness in ourselves. If we claim God to be good, Channing asserted, then we must also affirm ourselves as good.
Unitarian Universalists have consistently rejected these life-demeaning images of God, and sought to instead articulate a vision of God that would offer what the Gospel of John describes as the point of everything: abundant life for all.
Abundant life for all is a vision of joy and beauty and human flourishing not for men, or even for women; not for white people, or for Black people, not for straight or gay, young or old, rich or poor, for citizens or immigrants….abundant life for all is a vision of joy and beauty and human flourishing that extends beyond any of these binaries, beyond all borders, beyond any of our limited and limiting beliefs.
We need an image of God that trans-gresses all of our human-conceived binaries, and borders, our limiting beliefs – and then keeps going.
We need an image of God that transcends all language, and any words we might attempt to speak from our lips, let us imagine a God that transcends our lips, and our skin, our bones, and our blood; a God that transcends bodies entirely – limited, aging, and aching as they are.
Let us imagine a God that transgresses every idea we have about these bodies.
Every concept of what is beautiful, or sexy, or desired, or outcast. Let us imagine a God that transgresses every qualified concept of how we gender these bodies – girl, boy, woman, man;
Every way we’ve come to control and call out, every judgment that rises and falls with empires, and religions, and election cycles.
As Hipsher writes: “We need a trans-God that trans-gresses all our ideas about who and what God can be. One that trans-ports us to new possibilities for how God can incarnate in the multiplicity of human embodiments. One that trans-figures our mental images from limitations. One that trans-forms our ideas about our fellow humans and ourselves. One that trans-cends all we know or think we know about God and about humanity as the Imago Dei.”
Imago Dei, literally means the image of God, but as a theological term, it describes a special truth about humans, which is the relationship between God and humanity. Imago Dei is the theological idea at the root of Channing’s Likeness to God, and it is the root idea of any claim I am making in this sermon.
Imago Dei originates in the book of Genesis, when it says that God created humans in God’s image. The term has come to mean that there is something in human nature that reflects God’s nature, something in us that mirrors divinity in some unique way.
The biblical text that grounds Imago Dei – the first chapter of Genesis, verses 26 and 27, uses the Hebrew word Elohim for God – which is a plural word.
And Elohim said, let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness.
It is one of many times the word Elohim is used; other times, the word is Adonai or El which are both singular nouns. The use of Elohim, scholars agree, is never an attempt to describe multiple gods, because [one of the key distinguishing factors of the Hebrew religion was monotheism. Instead, Elohim was used as a grammatical indication of multiplicity within a single being – Christians later took this as justification for the Trinity. But more relevant to this sermon, I lift this up because I want to be clear that God’s pronouns at various points in the Hebrew Bible, including the definitive text meant to underscore the reflection of the divine in humanity – are inarguably they and them.
We need a trans-God, but let’s also be clear that in seeking a God that trans-cends, and trans-gresses, and trans-forms our bodies, and our lives – we do not mean to stop searching for an image of God that we can see in our bodies, and in our lives.
In a recent podcast on trans spirituality called Our Table, a group of trans religious leaders gathered to reflect on God and gender, and the possibility of a trans-God. While they were all eager to see more exploration of God’s gender, they also expressed caution that people would just stop using pronouns for God at all.
As the Rev. M Jade Kaiser says, what we need is to hear about God with all the different pronouns attached. Sometimes they and them, and sometimes he and she, and even ze and zem. Because remember, imagininging God cannot be a project only of absence, and rejection; it must be an adventure of expansion, and creativity, and growth.
We do not just need a trans-God that transcends and transgresses all of our gender categories. We literally need a God that is trans.
Queer Holy Family by Reena Burton
Alongside our images of God that is male, and a God that is female, we also God who is transgender, and non-binary and gender-queer. We need to imagine God as one who knows the experience of being assigned one gender – let’s say male, for example….who in turn knows this is a mis-match – and who longs to be seen in their deeper truth and fuller expression.
We need to imagine God as one who refuses to be pinned down, a God who defies our propensity to polarization, transcends all divisions, perpetually surprises us and re-invents themselves –
We need to imagine God who is queer, complex, confusing, even troubling – sometimes on purpose.
In my universe god is a black trans woman – posted on reddit by user r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns
All of these images in turn help us to expand how we imagine gender – this always sacred and strange concept we play with and struggle with and are still dying over.
When God is Trans, we understand that within the trans experience and the trans body lives a likeness to God. When God is trans, we know that trans lives are divine.
To paraphrase Mary Daly, when God is Trans, then Trans is God.
Every day in this country, our images of God are reflecting, and determining, the exact opposite message. Everyday in our country, the prevailing images of God have trans and non-binary and queer people begging to be “anything other than this.”
In response, let our Trans-God reach out their arms, “sweat-damp and weary” because they obviously they like dancing too – as they cup each person’s face in their hands, and say:
It happens quite often that I end up loving a show that I won’t recommend to everyone. Because it is particularly gory, explicit, or just plain weird, or really heavy in one genre (esp sci-fi or fantasy) that some people just don’t like. But then again, these shows are also often incredibly original, fascinating, creative, and entertaining. And so I offer this list of shows that I highly recommend, with the caveat that they may not be for you. But maybe, try them anyway, give them a shot, and try to appreciate them for what they are uniquely trying to do. Or….don’t.
Pen15 (Hulu, 2 Seasons, 10-15 episodes/season, 25-35 mins) This Hulu gem is nonstop cringy comedy. Mostly because the (adult) actors – Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle – are all in for a real and hard telling of middle school life in the late 90s/early 2000s, which is incredibly cringe-worthy. Just look at the title of the series as one example – middle school cringe! And still, Erskine is so fearless in her acting I can’t look away. This is one of the best stories of tween/teen best friends and how so much can be survived if you just have someone who will be there for you, no matter what. I should also mention that all the other actors who are not Erskine and Konkle are age appropriate (i.e. mostly actual middle schoolers), which only underscores what a strange, awkward, and often painful time middle school is for all of us.
2. Jessica Jones (Netflix, 3 Seasons, 13 episodes/seasons, 45-55 mins) This show is on this list because its entire premise needs a trigger warning. While it is a show about (baddie) superhero Jessica Jones, it is also a show about a woman who has been forced to do thing against her will by a truly horrendous villain. With that said, I had been waiting for Krysten Ritter to get a successful show of her own for a long time after admiring her work in Breaking Bad and The B in Apartment 23, and so I was immediately taken in by this series about a superhero who doesn’t want to be a superhero – and it does not disappoint. The storyline is (as I said) dark, dark, dark, but the ride is fast and surprising and often gloriously entertaining. Special bonus to see Mike Colter out of his drug-kingpin-role from The Good Wife and show up as the super-hottie Luke Cage. The series, on the whole, probably went a little long (funny to say for just three seasons), but ultimately became an incredible exploration of what it means to be a hero, the quest (and problems) of power, and the desire to control. It is a story of trauma, and healing, and the possibility of doing better.
3. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Hulu, 7 Seasons, 22 episodes/season, 44 mins) and 4. Angel (Hulu, 5 Seasons, 22 episodes/season, 44 mins) I put these together because if you haven’t watched them, then you probably batch them together in your mind as shows you won’t watch because vampires….which is legitimate. Buffy, and its spinoff Angel, are both set in worlds where vampires exist, as do vampire slayers. And so, if that’s a deal breaker for you….let me see if I can convince you to give it a shot anyway. Twenty-five years after it first premiered, Buffy remains a funny, tragic, brilliant tv show exploring the idea that high school is literally hell. Buffy (despite what you might think given her name…and that’s part of the show’s feminist commentary where the young blonde is not killed by the monster as per usual horror tropes, but is instead the enduring heroine) is a powerful, strong, complex hero, and friend, who is actually just trying to grow up, despite being the hope for humanity’s salvation. Buffy is helped by her friends Willow, Xander, Oz, Anya, and her lover/vampire-with-a-soul Angel (he of the spinoff). Over the course of seven seasons, the core friendships grow and shift; there is love, there is loss, and there is grief, and occasionally there is glory, as the world is saved by Buffy and her friends, over and over. As the characters grow up, the storyline becomes progressively darker, and more ambitious, and more complex – just like adulthood often feels as you try to find your way. A number of its episodes are singularly brilliant – including one where everyone in town loses their voices, so the entire episode is silent, and another where a spell forces everyone to sing their feelings, resulting in an entirely musical episode. Angel, the LA-based spinoff centered on Buffy’s doomed vampire lover, is even more oriented towards friendship, as Angel finds his own circle of vampire-fighting outcasts, including Buffy’s once-nemesis, Cordelia. While this show starts as a pretty straightforward crime-solving detective agency show, each of the seasons shakes things up so thoroughly that by the last season, it feels like a workplace drama set in a law firm. Along the way, Angel and his friends end up getting co-opted by the very system they originally intended to undo and upend. This arc makes Angel a pretty compelling critique of capitalism, in addition to its central strength as an ensemble show of friendship, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. I don’t know if I convinced you to check out these shows if you haven’t before, but for everyone who has already seen them, maybe it’s time to watch them again?!
5. Firefly (Hulu, 1 Season, 14 episodes, 42 mins) Speaking of Joss Whedon….this (unfortunately) short-run show has been billed as a western set in space…which is why it is on this list. Starring a pre-Castle (and much cooler IMHO) Nathan Fillion as Malcom Reynolds, Firefly is set 500 years in the future and follows the crew of the Serenity, which includes a preacher, a mechanic, a doctor, and a sex worker (they say “courtesan”), as they travel from planet to planet. They are bandits, mostly, but with a heart (again, mostly), as they seek to resist the corrupt and authoritarian government ruling the skies. Firefly is a relatively easy watch – it has a pretty easy-to-follow storyline, and the banter is typical Whedon wit and comedy. Although Fillion is clearly the lead, the female characters on this show are what really sell me – Zoe, the first mate, is a complete badass (Gina Torres), and Morena Baccarin’s strong and also vulnerable portrayal of sex worker Inara had me regularly watching for when her eventual breakout part would be – although I’m not sure it ever really happened. (Maybe her part in Homeland for which she was nominated for an Emmy?) Some parts of the show haven’t aged well – the mis- appropriation of the Chinese language, for example, or the way Mal repeatedly and often cruelly refers to Inara as a whore. But if you add in the movie Serenity, which was created as a way to thread together the storylines after it was shockingly canceled mid-season, Firefly continues to be a deeply satisfying, and highly imaginative, and entertaining show set in the future, but with plenty of resonance for our world today.
6. Dollhouse (Hulu, 2 Seasons, 12-13 episodes/season, 60 mins) Rounding out the Joss Whedon batch in this list is Dollhouse, definitely the weirdest of the group and maybe the most problematic. Starring Eliza Dushku (who also starred on Buffy off and on, but as a different character) as Echo, Dollhouse takes the idea of prostitution to an entirely new level, wherein the person you are paying to “date” can literally become any person you want them to be, by way of super powerful mind wiping/re-programming devices (of course). Each “doll” consents to being a part of the dollhouse before undergoing the mind-wiping, or at least that is what we are told, and so you are left with questions of consent, not unlike the ones posed by the 2022 Apple TV series Severance. This is where this show definitely becomes not for everyone. The various “engagements” that the “actives” (both men and women, by the way) are assigned to often go wrong, which over time ends up connecting to Echo’s slow rediscovery of her past self. One of the biggest original criticisms of the show was that the lack of a central character to connect with made it hard to get into (because all of the characters are “wiped” clean every week). I wonder if we are used enough to unusual narratives now (almost 15 years later) that this would be less of an obstacle. Personally, I found that if you stuck with the show long enough, Echo’s story begins to emerge, and it is completely worth it. To me, it always felt like the show knew and was actively exploring its own moral ambiguity, and it is attempting to comment on our willingness to justify anything by way of “someone paid for it” and/or “it was their choice.” Like a number of other shows on this list, Dollhouse is dark and strange and not nearly as quippy and witty as Whideon’s other shows, but it is also bolder, more experimental, and still with some incredible supporting actors. Amy Acker (previously of Angel) and Enver Gjokaj (why won’t anyone give him a great part?!) are particular standouts, mixing tragic and funny, and subtle commentary. Ultimately this show asks some big, difficult questions about the human soul and what makes a person a person. It’s weird and sometimes really hard to watch (and sometimes slow), but I really recommend you give Dollhouse a chance. And let me know what you think.
7. Orphan Black (Amazon Prime, 5 Seasons, 10 episodes/season, 43 mins) I put Orphan Black next on this list because there are some interesting connection points in its storyline. Except that instead of mind-wiping and personality replacement, Orphan Black brings us cloning – but in both cases, there remains a real question about consent and an ongoing critique of power and control. The background in Orphan Black begins with a genetics company, Neolution, which secretly perfected human cloning, made two projects (male and female), and then funneled the men into the military and the women into the world without any knowledge about any of this. The plot centers around one of the female clones, Sarah, who discovers to her own shock, that she is a clone, which starts her on a process of finding her “sisters” and uncovering the truth of their origin, as well as the bigger why behind Neoloution, including religious organizations and profit-seeking capitalists. I have now certainly revealed why this show isn’t for everyone, but let me tell you why it might be for you. Tatiana Maslany, the star of the show, is revolutionary. Watching her at work is constantly breathtaking and mind-bending. Equally worthwhile is the writing, which is nuanced and complex in its characterizations so that each clone is truly her own story that you feel compelled by and connected to. One of the sub-themes of the show is around motherhood, as Sarah and her brother Felix (the fabulous Jordan Gavaris) are foster/adopted siblings of the more-to-her-than-you-think Mrs. S (badass Maria Doyle Kennedy), and the fertility of the clones and their potential to be mothers is always in the background of the series, as is the ongoing question of nurture and nature, especially given how completely different each of these “clones” truly is. This show is also incredibly nerdy (more than just everything I’ve said so far) with references to Greek mythology, Charles Darwin, Francis Bacon, Margaret Thatcher’s government, feminist and scientist Donna Haraway, and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, to name just a few! Don’t let this nerdiness make you think this show is slow or not fun – it moves quickly and imaginatively across its whole run – it’s a brilliant, highly original powerhouse of a show, maybe a show just perfect for you. Or…not.
8. Euphoria (HBO/Max, 2 Seasons, 10 episodes/season, 45-60 mins) I started watching this show because my teenage daughter was watching this show, and I wanted to make sure we could talk about it together. It is theoretically a show about teenagers and being in high school, but it is also an incredibly adult show exploring addiction, grief, sexuality, and identity. One NPR article I read called it “a parent’s nightmare,” and in a lot of ways, that is true. Especially for the relationship between Rue (glorious, vulnerable, grief-stricken, drugged-out Zendaya) and her mom, Leslie (Nika King). And also for the dangerous, self-destructive, downright dumb choices that these teenagers make over and over when it comes to relationships, alcohol and drug use, sex, and their very casual relationship with the truth. Other than the drugs, most of these risky choices are made by characters other than Rue – her friends and classmates that make up the world of Euphoria that would make any of us wonder why we’d ever want to parent teenagers. And also, in most of these cases, the lack of parenting is often a major factor, as the adults are caught up in their own drama, and ego, and their own poor choices. Except for Rue, whose story is mostly one of grief, of losing her father to cancer when she was too young. And except for Jules (the luminous Hunter Shaffer), the (trans) girl who Rue loves and who is simply trying to find her way to self-confidence and self-actualization after her own mother’s addiction and poor choices. With all that said, the second season veers (for my taste) too often into self-indulgent soap opera tropes (i.e. predictable love triangles) and not enough into character development for Jules and Rue. Ultimately, in its portrayal of drug addiction and its impact on real lives, this show is often too painful, scary, and vulnerable – and not for everyone. And, in its brave and raw characters, yearning for joy and connection (even if by way of explicit/illicit attempts at getting high) it is also a show of singular creativity, bold imagination, and audacious beauty, and maybe for you.
9. True Blood (HBO, 7 Seasons, 10-12 episodes/season, 52 mins)Here’s another show that may not be for you because vampires. But in this case, it’s more adult/drama vampires than witty teenage vampires, and may also not be for you because of lots of blood and, in some cases, pretty explicit sex. In this world, vampires live alongside the living due to the invention of a synthetic blood that allows them to “come out,” and yes, they do regularly work with the gay parallel/metaphor that this implies. This series centers around telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) and vampire Bill (Stephen Moyer, Paquin’s then real-life love). The first season of True Blood is genuinely great, mixing intentional camp with real romance with erotic thriller and mystery. A few seasons in, it isn’t quite as steady, but still mostly enjoyable for a while, especially given the presence of the beautiful Alexander Skarsgard as the deplorable and gorgeous vampire Eric.
10. Bridgerton (Netflix, 2 Seasons, 8 episodes/season, 57-72 mins) Looking over this list, I realized I was a little too sci fi/fantasy/dark plots heavy. When really, just as many people will tell me how much they don’t like cheesy romance as will resist weird vampires. Which is what led me to include this pleasure romp as my number 10. Produced by tv mastermind Shonda Rhimes, Bridgerton is like Jane Austen meets Scandal in that it is both playing on the edges of what is acceptable and what is forbidden and also filled with formal dances, corsets, curtsies in front of Queens, as well as the potential of whole lives being destroyed if a man and a woman are seen kissing in public. Season two is slower and less explicit than season one, but still pretty good. Season one is delectable and also I’m going to just say now that no Bridgerton character will ever be as hot as Hot Duke Simon (Regé-Jean Page). While there is a little bit of commentary going on in this show, given that it offers an interracial monarchy (and aristocracy), it is mostly a show centered on pleasure for pleasure’s sake and downright escapism. Not for everyone, but a complete joy for the most devoted readers. IYKYK.
I’m writing a series of blog posts with TV recommendations for church because sometimes church is about joy for joy’s sake. For the first post, we’re staying right with the joy with a list of shows that are accessible, easy to get into, with a general feel-good ethos. Here are 19 Feel-Good Shows I highly recommend you check out:
The Good Place (4 Seasons, 22-30 mins, Netflix): An extremely Unitarian Universalist take on the afterlife. The truth of this won’t become clear until a few seasons in, so you’ll have to trust me. It’s funny, smart, and surprisingly wholesome. The best series finale in my memory.
2. Fleabag (2 Seasons, 30 minutes, Amazon Prime):Fleabag a show about grief, friendship, family, and regret. It’s witty, tragic (though, like the main character, it hides it well), funny, and smart. And it’s a great length for such a powerful show. The second season is a world unto itself, probably even better than the first. Especially fun (and again, tragic) to watch as a clergyperson who has spent a lot of time thinking about boundaries, intimacy, and power in the church. You’ll know what I mean after you watch. Also, just try not to become obsessed with (star and creator) Phoebe Waller-Bridge after watching this show.
3. Hacks (2 Seasons, 26-35 minutes, HBO):The formidable Jean Smart plays Deborah Vance, a groundbreaking female comic nearing the end of her career, though she doesn’t think so. When it looks like her Vegas contract will be pulled, her manager sends one of his other clients, a 25-year-old career-troubled comedian, Ava (Hannah Einbeinder), to help freshen up her act as a last-ditch effort. There are so many reasons I love this show. Most of all, I love that it takes an older woman seriously and gives her a full, complex history that fills out so much of who she has become, but not in a way that ever fully excuses her faults. I love that it does the same for a younger woman. I love that they both get to change through their relationship, or at least they try to. I love that both lead characters are trying to figure out just how brave they are willing to be and how much risk is worth it – both in their relationship and careers. I love that it is honest about what it takes for a woman to succeed at a big level in a career like comedy and how much it costs them.
4. Ted Lasso (3 Seasons, 30 minutes, Apple TV): It’s hard for me to imagine that someone out there hasn’t heard of Ted Lasso by now, but just in case, the quick summary is that a British soccer (football) team owner, Rebecca (played by the stunning Hannah Waddingham), hires an American football (not soccer) coach – Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) – to coach her team. She does it as a way to humiliate and punish her cheating ex-husband. It’s a joke – except no one told Ted. This show is funny, original, smart, and unapologetically earnest. It explores and celebrates non-toxic masculinity and positive female friendship and believes in a world where people try to be better through community, loyalty, and play. As Ted Lasso’s motto goes, by the end, you can’t help but Believe!
5. Schitt’s Creek (6 seasons, 22-30 minutes, Hulu): A bratty, superficial rich family loses all their money and ends up in a dead-end town living in a motel. Yes, it starts with some old tropes and some extremely unlikable characters, but this is a redemption tale wrapped in a love story held together by dry humor and bananas costume design. (In other words, if you aren’t sure through the first five or so episodes, keep going.) Second best series finale I can remember.
6. Kim’s Convenience (5 seasons, 30 minutes, Netflix): This sweet, smart, very funny, and heartwarming show centers on Korean immigrants to Canada, Mr. and Mrs. Kim (Paul Sung Hyung Lee and Jean Yoon), and their two now-adult children Janet (Andrea Bang) and Jung (Simu Liu). The Kims own a convenience store, where much of the episodes unfold and where they have grounded their own story of independence and making a life for themselves and their children in Canada. Kim’s Convenience explores the cultural tensions and expectations present in an immigrant family in original and often hilarious ways that also feel authentic and specific.
7. Grace and Frankie (7 Seasons, 30 minutes, Netflix): I was a little skeptical of this show when it first started because I don’t buy the connection between Sol and Robert, but I was hooked by the end of the second season. I’m so glad I stuck with it because it ended up being a singular portrayal of female friendship, older adult sexuality, and older adulthood, period. Not to mention Jane Fonda is stunning and vulnerable, and I Grace more than maybe any other character ever. It almost makes me forget how unbelievable I still find the chemistry between Sol and Robert….almost…
8. Heartstopper (Netflix, 8 episodes, 30 minutes, 1 season): After all of the struggles of the last few years, Heartstopper came bursting through in 2022 with a refreshing, unapologetic, adorable joy. Set in high school, it is the story of 14-year-old Charlie (Joe Locke) and his friend Nick (Kit Connor). Nick has the audacity to treat Charlie like a human, even though Nick is a popular rugby player and Charlie is relentlessly teased and bullied for being gay and out. Adapted from her graphic novel series by writer Alice Oseman and using on-screen graphics along with animated text messages as a part of the visuals, everything about this show brings you back into that scary, vulnerable, invigorating time of self-discovery that is the best part of high school. Because even though Heartstopper does address the more painful and angsty parts of being a teenager, most of all, this is a show that makes you feel good. It is instead funny, sweet, heartwarming, and even wholesome – without sacrificing depth or specificity, or diversity in the characters and their stories. It’s the story I wish I would’ve had to watch growing up (I cannot even imagine how my life would’ve been impacted…) and also that I am so grateful we can watch with our kids (and parents) now.
9. The Great (2 Seasons, 30 minutes, Hulu): My friend, who actually knows a lot about Catherine the Great, has a lot of problems watching this show because it’s so historically inaccurate. Luckily, I have no such problems, so I just got to thoroughly enjoy it in all my ignorance. Elle Fanning fearlessly plays Catherine, the smart and ambitious young German woman who heads to Russia to marry the Emperor, Peter III, the marvelously doltish Nicholas Hoult. The Great’s capacity to be both hilarious and absurd but also emotionally honest and tender is surprising and so much fun. There is a good amount of violence along the way – Peter’s constant disregard for anyone’s life except his own (and suddenly, Catherine’s) is offered by Catherine repeatedly as to why she’ll never love him. But mostly, it’s played more like a Shakespearean comedy than a tragedy – moving quickly, focusing on the main characters. Even though they are upfront about how much they’ve made up, the challenges of leading and being a woman with ambition and being a man who might prefer not to lead – all offer plenty of truth.
10. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (4 Seasons, 30 minutes, Netflix): A musical comedy exploring mental health, loneliness, and the search for meaning and purpose in life today…. Did I lose you already? This show is strange, brilliant, and completely worth getting to know, even if you don’t usually trend toward musicals, comedies, or shows whose titles reference a “crazy ex-girlfriend.” Star and producer Rachel Bloom is brilliant, creative, and bold in her vision, and the musical numbers are singularly hilarious and on-point.
11. Sex Education (3 Seasons, 30 minutes, Netflix): This has been one of my very favorite shows in each of the last three years. It is a comedy and, at times, very lighthearted, but it is also a deeply touching and sometimes heart-wrenching portrayal of the complex world of teenage sexuality. The show shies away from nothing, and fair warning, the first episode’s first few minutes almost made me stop watching because it was just a little too explicit. But that’s part of the beauty of the show…sex is portrayed as messy and awkward, as it often is in real life. The show revolves around the teenage Otis (Asa Butterfield) and his sex therapist mother (Gillian Anderson) until Otis takes all he’s learned into an advice business at school in partnership with his friend/crush Maeve (Emma Mackey). At its heart, this show is incredibly Unitarian Universalist in its message and is a lot of fun along the way.
12. Parks and Recreation (7 Seasons, 30 minutes, Netflix): Set in the fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana, this show centers on the employees of the Parks and Recreation Department, led by the optimistic and singularly determined Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler). Over their seven seasons, Leslie and her team navigate the challenges of local government bureaucracy while attempting to make their town a better place (or at least, that’s Leslie Knope’s mission…). If you haven’t ever taken the time to check out Parks and Rec, I’m so jealous because that means that this funny, smart, and authentically heart-warming show is still something for you to discover and then join the rest of us when we wonder if – whenever we are feeling especially earnest and enthusiastic – if we are being a little too much like Leslie Knope….
13. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (4 Seasons, 30 minutes, Netflix): Funny and smart with also a twinge of tragic – if you like Tina Fey’s sense of humor, you’ll probably love this show about a 29-year-old who was rescued from a kidnapper/cult leader after 15 years believing the world had ended. Supposedly it’s a story of Kimmy’s growth and self-discovery, but ultimately it’s a story of how it’s never too late for us to find and claim our own path of joy and meaning. All that sounds pretty serious – really, it’s mostly just a fun, silly, enjoyable show.
14. Derry Girls (4 Seasons, 25 minutes, Netflix): Set in a small town in occupied Northern Ireland in the 1990s, Derry Girls is a story of friendship and growing up. Centering on a group of five teenagers growing up amid The Troubles (the Northern Ireland conflict), Derry Girls reminds us of the persistence and consistency of human life regardless of what is happening around us. Don’t be afraid to turn on the subtitles if the Irish accents make it hard for you to follow, and don’t be shy about re-watching past episodes to remember the sweet and hilarious trouble the girls find themselves in as they attempt to grow up.
15. Ghosts (BBC version, 3 Seasons, 30 minutes, HBO): Shortly after a young couple inherits a mansion in the British countryside, the wife discovers that she can see and hear the entire cast of ghosts who reside there. The ghosts have died on the property over the centuries, representing a range of residents from an early Viking to a witch burned at the stake, a lovelorn Edwardian poet, and a sketchy Thatcher-era politician who died with his pants off (and thus appears in the afterlife… with no pants). What would the dead do with their time, given endless amounts of it? And how would they each engage with new technology and entertainment invented long after their death? And how should we think about their “rights” and quality of “life”? There is an American remake of the show that has gotten strong reviews, but I haven’t had a chance to check that out yet, so for now, I am focusing my recommendation on the BBC version, which is available on HBO.
16. We Are Lady Parts (1 Season, 30 minutes, Peacock): I get why you have likely not watched this show – it is very rare to find someone who is a Peacock subscriber. But I have to say that this show (in addition to a few others I’ll mention later in the month) is completely worth a 1-month subscription, after which you cancel the service (until the next season drops). We Are Lady Parts is an awesome, original comedy centered on an all-female, all-Muslim punk band. Led by the formidable Saira (Sarah Kameela Impey), the band is made up of a diverse and dynamic group who are each uniquely and unapologetically themselves – which makes the punk rock genre an especially perfect fit. The first season follows the character Amina (Anjana Vasan), who struggles to reconcile her cultural values with her love for (punk rock) music. Not to mention a wicked case of stage fright. My only critique of this show is that it is way too short – which hopefully will be fixed before too long with a second season.
17. The Other Two (3 Seasons, 30 minutes, HBO): We all likely have a sense of Justin Beiber’s story – but no one ever asks about the young star’s siblings. That’s the subject of this funny and heartfelt comedy series, which focuses on two struggling siblings, Brooke (Helen Yorke) and Cary (Drew Tarver), as they navigate the ups and downs of their careers and personal lives after their 13-year-old brother Chase (Case Walker) suddenly becomes a viral sensation. Although early episodes trend towards a satirical feeling, it doesn’t take long before you really feel for Brooke and Cary and their attempts to find themselves and what matters to them, regardless of their brother’s fame.
18. Extraordinary (1 Season, 30 minutes, Hulu): In the world of Extraordinary, everyone gets a superpower as a part of becoming an adult, which is why our main character Jen (Emma Moran, also the creator and writer), a 25-year-old who has yet to received her power, is both extra compelling and also really struggling. This British series combines the conventions of the superhero genre with a sentimental buddy comedy to give us a compelling underdog tale, complicated by the fact that Jen is often a selfish, short-sighted individual who continually asks too much of her closest friends, especially her best friend, Carrie. Like most of these shows, this last sentence makes it sound like it’s less heartwarming than it is complicated, but ultimately the otherworldly premise controls the tone of this show and keeps us squarely in a story of creativity and possibility – and the hope while watching it is that the main character will do the same.
19. Shrinking (1 Season, 30 minutes, Apple TV): Anyone in a therapeutic-related profession will likely relate with and struggle with the show, Shrinking. In many ways, it asks you to suspend your ethical disbelief to accept the premise that therapy might be even more effective if therapists abandon their professional training and just say whatever they believe their clients should do. Or at least, that’s how the show starts. Starring Jason Segel, Harrison Ford, and Jessica Williams and created by the folks who also brought us Ted Lasso, Shrinking is a show about boundaries and their usefulness – and the consequences for failing to respect boundaries. It is a show about friendship, grief, and the lostness we all feel these days. It is still also steadfastly a comedy, which mostly works because of the brilliance of the actors, who commit to finding the line between the intensity of what their characters are dealing with and the joy of playing out the scenes together.
My best friend from high school reached out to me last week. We’ve stayed in touch loosely over the years over Facebook, but not in any consistent way.
She was in our home town for the weekend, cleaning out things from her parents’ home after her father’s recent death. She’d come across a bunch of photos from of us from our high school days….and then she sent me the photos….
I recognized the three-decades-ago moments in the photos immediately. A sleep over at her house, and our Junior Prom. I also recognized my friend who was frozen there in those moments, forever 16.
What I struggled to recognize in the photos was me. It’s hard to believe that the person in those photos is the same person I know myself to be now.
Not just because of physical changes. More, I mean, the hidden ways molecules rearrange not only literally but metaphorically as life accumulates, and also strips away our sense of who we are, and who we are meant to be, and something new happens in us, over and over.
I mean, the inevitable hard-won lessons, and gifts of grace; the being loved, and the loving; the terrible losses, and the betrayals; the miracles, and the infinite in-betweens. Life changes you, makes you inevitably unrecognizable in one way or another, over time. It’s why people who are married a long time talk about having multiple marriages – we have to re-meet each other, and learn to recognize each other as both the one we have loved, and will love still.
The two people who walk the road to Emmaus, Cleophus, and likely his wife, Mary, were some of Jesus’ closest friends. And still, they could not figure out that the person who is walking beside them is their beloved teacher, that is, the person they are most longing to see.
“Their eyes were kept from recognizing him.”
In a lot of ways, Jesus was not the same person he was before. Days of torture had ended at the cross, and then…resurrection? Whatever the literal truth of the empty tomb, the story offers a way to understand the experience of transformation – that is, the story of life:
First the loss of ourselves as we were, the loss of everything we have known. Good Friday reminds us that no new beginning arrives without an ending. And then, Easter Sunday, and the empty tomb that says the worst thing is never the last thing.
Morning comes, and the light shines again, and there is Jesus walking beside his friends, both the same, and also totally changed. It’s not the first time the people closest to Jesus struggle to recognize him. It happens also at his tomb, when Mary Magdalene sits in grief. As her tears fall, Jesus appears to her, but she thinks he is the gardener. It also happens over and over during Jesus’ life, that even his closest friends aren’t sure who he is – maybe he’s a prophet, Moses, or Elijah; maybe a new prophet entirely. Maybe a teacher, or a healer; maybe, the Son of God, which was a term that ancient political figures used to justify their authority. Maybe he was a political leader, the long-awaited messiah of scripture.
No one ever knew for sure, and this struggle for recognition continued, even after his death.
Students of theatre and classical literature might notice the literary trope at work in this repeated struggle for recognition. Aristotle called it the anagnorisis, literally, the recognition scene. Generally, the anagnorisis is that moment in the story when people recognize someone who was previously unrecognizable – including, sometimes, themselves.
According to Aristotle, the recognition scene is the moment when someone experiences “a change from ignorance to knowledge,” and it is usually accompanied by a change in fortune, what Arisotle called peripeteia, or reversal. Life that seemed to be going along with some momentum in one direction, after the recognition scene instead moves in the opposite direction.
The recognition scene changes everything, in the same way that being truly seen, and seeing another in their truth, changes everything.
Last Friday, in honor of Trans Day of Visibility, a small group of trans folks gathered in Old Town Square, and laid down on the ground, some of them portraying on their bodies acts of potential violence towards them. I understood immediately what they were doing. Die-ins are a long tradition in queer and other marginalized and activist communities, starting in the 1960s with Black activists, and into the 1980s with the ACT Up movement during the AIDS crisis.
Staging a die-in is a way of saying – literally, we are dying. And even more, Let us live.
Trans Day of Visibility started in 2009 as a companion to Trans Day of Remembrance which is celebrated in November and started 20 years earlier as a way to honor and remember all the trans people who have died as a result of anti-trans violence in the prior year. While TDOR focuses on loss, and grief, TDOV means to focus on joy, and the celebration of trans people and their journey to be seen, fully, in their truth –whole and living, learning and growing, just like all other people.
Except this year, at least in our local gathering, trans joy was not enough for our trans day of visibility. And this makes sense. Just this year, 45 states have proposed anti-trans legislation, with 12 of those succeeding, and 27 states still pending.
These laws range from bans on drag, to limitations on health care, sports participation, school curriculum, bathroom use…whatever the details, the sum total feels like a systematic effort to create a future where there are no trans people, especially when you set these laws alongside the statistic from Poudre School District that shows that queer, non-binary, and trans kids are three times as likely as the average student to have attempted suicide in the last year.
Especially when you set this statistic alongside the fact the rates of suicide for trans and non-binary kids go down by 40% when they are experience environments affirming of their gender identity.
We are dying. Let us Live.
I didn’t expect universally warm reception to the plea of the die-in, of course. There wouldn’t be all those bills if there wasn’t real fear, and resistance.
But still I was not prepared for the comments on the photos in the Coloradoan. With just a few exceptions, the reactions were dehumanizing, demeaning, and dismissive.
Many connected the protestors in Old Town with the shooter in Nashville (who, in case you did not hear, was trans), saying “your people” are the ones who cause death.
“Our minds are primed to see the world in terms of us and them.” Valerie Kaur writes,
“We can’t help it. The moment we look upon another’s face, our minds discern in an instant whether or not they are one of us – part of our family or community – or one of them. This happens before conscious thought.
Our bodies release hormones that prime us to trust and listen to those we see as part of us and to fear and resent them. It is easier to feel empathy and compassion for one of us, much harder for one of them. When one of us does something bad, we tend to attribute it to circumstance, but when one of them does it, we attribute it to essence – oh, that’s just how they are. We tend to think of us as complex and multi-dimensional; we tend to think of them as simple and one-dimensional. We are much more likely to intervene when we see a victim of violence as a part of us. We tend to stand by when people we see as them are harmed.
In other words, who we see as one of us determines who we let inside our circle of care and concern.”
This too-common human impulse has been playing out this week at the Tennessee State House. In the days since the shooting, more than a thousand protestors- many of them young people and their parents – have been rallying around the capitol, and one day last week, many made their way through the security screening, and into the rotunda, to an area set aside for public viewing of the legislative session.
Once there, three House representatives led the protestors in a chant from the House Floor. The chants called for gun reform, while the young protestors held signs saying things like “Drag shows do not kill, guns do;” a reference to the bill signed into law last month in Tennessee banning all drag performances.
Although the sign that really got to me said: “Am I Next?”
We are dying. Let us Live.
On Friday, the Representatives who helped to lead the protestors’ chants – Justin Jones, Justin Pearson, Gloria Johnson – were each voted on for expulsion for breaking House decorum – as in, to be removed from their seats they were elected into. For Representative Jones and Pearson, both Black men, that vote was successful. Representative Johnson, a white woman, however, was not expelled.
When she was later asked why she thought she did not receive the same treatment, despite doing the same things her colleagues had done, Johnson said, “Well, I think it’s pretty clear. I’m a 60-year-old white woman and they are two young Black men.”
The expulsion is certainly a move against democracy in its extreme response to a break in decorum grounded in civil protest. But even more disturbingly, the expulsion represents an incapacity to recognize Jones, and Pearson, as an us, rather than a them, in all the ways Valerie Kaur describes.
It is the failure to recognize Jones and Pearson as equally worthy of being on the legislative floor in the first place. It is a failure that white people have been practicing towards Black people for the whole of our country’s history, as it is only through a failure of recognition of our common humanity that slavery becomes possible, or that lynching becomes common – which, coincidentally a few weeks ago, a member of the Tennessee House made a proposal to reinstate.
Valerie Kaur spent her childhood being seen as “them.” As an Indian American raised in the Sikh faith in the farmlands of Central California, she writes about constant bullying from her white, conservative Christian classmates.
Alongside these experiences, however, she learned the origin story of her own faith.As she tells it, “Five centuries ago, on the Indian subcontinent, there lived a young man named Nanak. He was deeply troubled by the violence around him, Hindus and Muslims in turmoil. One day, he disappeared on the bank of a river for three days. People thought he was dead, drowned.
But Nanak emerged on the third day with a vision of Oneness. The Oneness of humanity and of the world. This vision threw Nanak into a state of ecstatic wonder…he was in love, and love made him see with new eyes: Everyone around him was a part of him that he did not yet see….‘I see no stranger,’ said Guru Nanak. ‘I see no enemy.’” This too is a recognition scene – and recognition changes everything.
The struggle for recognition is at the heart of the American experiment, and the Unitarian Universalist faith.
Whether we are asking, Can two walk together lest they be agreed, as the prophet Amos puts it, and is often quoted when we talk about our covenantal faith – or claiming e pluribas unum, as in the traditional motto of the United States,the question of our capacity to see every other person as us, rather than splitting people into buckets of us and them, is both our national inheritance, and the central promise of our faith.
In both cases, we have more often failed to recognize our common humanity than we have played the recognition scene, especially when it comes to racial and cultural differences. As our political and generational divides have in recent years, turned more and more to tribalism and as the pandemic has atrophied our capacity to talk to people outside our smallest social circles…that is, as we are experiencing both an intense need for community and belonging – alongside a real ambivalence about the realities of dealing with other people….
We need this central promise and practice of our faith to deliver now more than ever. We need the declaration that all are worthy of love, and belonging, and we need the declaration that we are all irreversibly, undeniably, bound up together. We need these declarations of our faith, and even more, we need these declarations to translate into spiritual disciplines.
Disciplines we practice, every day, with every one – even with those who fail to offer us the same recognition in return.
I describe this practice as a discipline for two reasons – first because the word discipline reminds us that this practice is often not easy. It requires intention, and a commitment to overcoming that pre-conscious impulse, and widening the circle of who we see as part of us, before fear makes us unable to recognize each other.
And second, I use the word discipline because of its connections to the word disciple, which as I said last week, means learner. The practice of recognizing another as a connected part of you, equally worthy of love, requires a constant curiosity, or what Valerie Kaur describes as wonder.
As she writes, “Who we wonder about determines whose stories we hear and whose joy and pain we share. Those we grieve with, those we sit with and weep with, are ultimately those we organize with and advocate for… Wonder is to look upon the face of anyone and choose to say: You are a part of me I do not yet know. “
Kaur describes her own discipline of wonder as a daily practice of seeing each person on the street, or on the screen, and saying to herself, “Sister. Brother. Sibling. Aunt. Uncle.”
She says, “I start to wonder about each of them as a person. When I do this, I am retraining my mind to see more and more kinds of people as a part of us rather than them. I say in my mind, You are a part of me I do not yet know. I practice orienting to the world with wonder, preparing myself for the possibility of connection.”
Jesus and his friends walk the whole way to Emmaus. And the whole way, his friends do not recognize him.
It is only when they sit down to dinner together, and Jesus breaks bread, and blesses it, that they remember the last time they ate with Jesus, when he also broke bread and blessed it.
And finally, in this act, they recognize him. They know him as he was, in his humanity, still sitting down to eat with his friends.And they know him now changed, transformed by a love that endures everything, even death.
The momentum of our country and our world seems on a sure track in one direction. A direction of division, and derision; extraction and empire. But it is not too late for us to play the recognition scene.
To be resolute in our discipline of seeing no stranger, of beholding only kin. In this active discipline lies our hope for peripetia, that is, for reversal – “the longed-for tidal wave of justice, the great sea-change on the far side of revenge.” In the story of resurrection, let us find the hope of recognition, the promise of meeting each other, seeing each other as we are, held, and called, all of us, by the enduring and transforming power of love.
For at least a few moments, before we had children, Carri and I had this one perfect moment where we had a sense of control about who our kids would be.
See, we adopted through foster care, and as a part of our application, we filled out a questionnaire about which kids we would, and would not accept….Age, race, drug exposure, various medical conditions, a great variety of behaviors…All of these became options for us to consider – could we parent kids with that? Or like that? Or that came from that?
17 and a half years into parenting, I recognize, the whole thing was a fantasy. Mostly because being a parent is an experience of finally figuring out how to parent your kid just in time for them to completely change.
Andalso, for kids coming from foster care, which is to say, from trauma, it is important to seriously think about these questions. Because even though I do believe that love wins in an ultimate sense, I have also come to understand that love cannot fix everything in a single lifetime. And so, it’s good to spend time getting honest about your limits.
The checkboxes that required no conversation however, were the ones marked M and F. They didn’t give us an option for NB or Intersex but for the record, we would’ve checked those boxes too. Like a lot of parents, we just wanted a kid – whatever their gender, and actually as queer feminists we weren’t sure how much these early-on designations really mattered. We would be raising our kids without the traditional notions of gender – since gender is after all, a social construct.
For this reason, when our son Josef arrived when our daughter Gracie was 2 and a half, we did not make a concerted effort to go out and buy so-called boy-toys. Gracie had plenty of toys, and books, and dress up and items for imaginative play. These were obviously enough, because toys don’t have a gender.
Josef was in so many ways a different baby than Gracie. He was a good sleeper, he was easy going, and – unless he was over tired or hungry, he was pretty flexible overall. He didn’t seem to have any strong preferences, except that he did seem to really like it when we’d give him attention – we were always like – what a typical second kid to set such low bar expectations for his parents.
This impression of our son continued until he was just about a year old. Easy going, no real strong preferences, never really excitable, but also not sad either.
Until one day, we took Josef over to our friends’ house to play. They had two boys, exactly our kids’ age. And they also had every traditionally-boy toy that exists….
Monster trucks. Trains. Blocks. Balls. A tool bench and tools. Dinosaurs. And then all the books were about trucks and trains and blocks and balls. There were zero dolls, no musical instruments, no puzzles, and no cooking station like we had at our place – because remember – toys don’t have genders!
So, we walked into our friends’ house, and Josef saw the trucks all over the floor, and the trains on the table – and literally in that instant, he became a different kid.
He started cheering and making noises and saying what was his first word a lot – ball. Ball was his first word.
I put him down and he scootched himself faster than I ever saw him move, and started vrooming the trucks, and then the trains and then he threw the ball.
Carri and I laughed so hard. I guess we should get you some different toys, Jos, we said.
Ball, he said smiling.
My relationship with boys, and men, and masculinity has always been, to a degree, confusing.
I never had confusion about being a girl, and certainly didn’t want to be one of the boys, but I was perpetually confused about why boys were given access to things that I was not. From leadership roles to athletic attention to pants. Literally, in my Catholic school only boys could wear pants until I was in about 3rd or 4th grade. Until then, it was jumper dresses, and polos, and sweaters, and also the shorts under the jumper because boys would always be flipping the skirts up.
Because I was raised Catholic, I took it as a given that men were in charge – even if it was also obvious to me that women were doing most of the actual work.
As a self-proclaimed math-nerd, I spent a lot of time with boys (mostly white boys) growing up, my fellow math-nerds, who all found me a tolerable addition to the otherwise all-boys math team and knowledge bowl – at least, as long as I didn’t bring down our scores, which I didn’t.
I want to say that I thought the same of them, that I tolerated them as long as they didn’t bring down the scores, but I really didn’t. I knew my spot was contestable in ways theirs was not.
When my pre-calc teacher announced to the class one day that I was “scary smart” I literally argued with him. I said, no, Jason Zanon and Ron Belgau – they are scary smart. I just work hard.
Somewhat relatedly, the first boy I really liked seemed from all appearances to like me back, but for some reason would never make any moves. Finally, I asked him what was going on and he blurted out: boys don’t want to have sex with girls like you. I spent so many hours trying to figure out what he meant by that, what was wrong with me, even though in some weird way, I actually think he meant it as a compliment.
My parents were, for most of my growing up, traditional in their gender roles – my mom’s primary labor was raising me and my two sisters, along with caring for our home, and preparing food – and my dad’s was his professional career as an architect, a job that brought him – as he would often report at the dinner table – in contact with different types of – this is his word so I’m taking a chance you’ll tolerate it in a sermon: dicks.
My dad would spend a portion of every family dinner telling us about the book he was going to write some day called “dicks.” Each chapter would be about a different sort of dick that shows up in a business meeting to sabotage the possibility of progress, or collaboration. I hope it’s clear my dad didn’t mean he’d talk about chapters describing literal anatomy, although that was his consistent metaphor. It was his elaborate and highly entertaining explanation to his wife and two daughters about what it was like to work in the world of men.
Still, it wasn’t until college that I started to get a framework for gender and the ways it had impacted my whole life. Feminism undid Catholicism for me, way more than coming out did. I might have been able to reconcile being bisexual with being traditionally religious, but I could never figure out how to call something so integrated with patriarchy my religion.
In my new framework, men became less confusing, more problematic. Especially straight men, especially frat boy types, and what the culture now would call bros.
The stereotypical athletic sort who you’d find with face paint at a football stadium, or at the head of a large corporations – like a bank, or an oil company, or a law firm.
The sort, who, when I look at my now almost 6 foot tall almost 15-year-old son, suddenly appear to be much less like the enemy, and more like our collective responsibility – not to condemn, but to try to understand, and maybe even, to heal.
Or to say it another way. I have taken multiple graduate and undergraduate level classes on gender, feminism, intersectionality, womanism, eco-feminism, and queer theory. I have sat on a panel with one of the leading voices on gender, Kate Bornstein, and I am a religious professional in a tradition that offers lifespan education in gender and sexuality.
I say all of this not to flex, but to confess. Because even though I have all of these tools and gender “expertise,” I am still stumbling my way through this question of what it means to be a man, and to help my son become a man. Especially in ways not like my guy friends in theatre, or even like the boys on my math team and their extremely lucrative lives in programming today….because Josef has been telling us since he was a year old – that’s not his path.
My son is a football player, a weight lifter, a mountain biker. He likes video games, and wears an Oregon Ducks hat and shirts basically every day, and he sometimes calls me bruh, and I sometimes let him.
And so, what exactly, is that, in its best version?
Some days I feel so unsure, I start to wonder if I should’ve paused at the M checkbox after all.
It does help to know, however, that I am not alone in my confusion. In the last few decades, sociology professor Michael Kimmel has led an entire academic degree program exploring this question of men, and what makes a good man. Kimmel is at the forefront of the emerging field of men’s studies, which is a direct counterpoint to the long held idea that men don’t have a gender – since being a man is the default of what it means to be human.
As in: Women have gender. Trans people have gender.
The category of man, however, like the category of white, or the category of straight, is just the default. The word that needs no words. Besides, why would you need to study men’s history, for example, since isn’t that just what we usually call history?
This is what people have tended to think until recent years when some people – like Kimmel – started to realize that so much has been considered about what it means to be something other, it has left a lot underexplored, and unarticulated about the category “man”. Which in turn leaves unconscious assumptions about manhood in tact, even reinforced, and keeps the cone of being a man narrow, and confining.
In her important, insightful, and entirely troubling book Boys and Sex Peggy Orenstein shares that there appears to be a “huge shift” in how young men today perceive women. Most men today believe in gender equality in the classroom, in leadership, in athletics, and in professional opportunities. Yet, as she says, “when I asked them to describe the ideal guy, these same boys, who were coming of age in the 2000s, appeared to be channeling 1955; their definition of masculinity had barely budged. Emotional detachment. Rugged good looks (with an emphasis on height). Sexual prowess. Athleticism. Wealth (at least someday . . . ). Dominance. Aggression….
“A 2018 national survey of over a thousand adolescents found that although girls believed there were ‘many ways to be a girl’ (the big, honkin’ caveat being they still felt valued primarily for their appearance), boys felt there was only one narrow pathway to successful manhood. They still equated the display of most emotions, as well as vulnerability, crying, or appearing sensitive or moody, with ‘acting like a girl’— which, in case you were wondering, is not a good thing.
“Feminism may have afforded girls an escape from the constraints of conventional femininity, offered them alternative identities as women and a language with which to express their myriad problems, but it has made few inroads with boys. Whether you label it the ‘mask of masculinity,’ ‘toxic masculinity,’ or ‘the man box,’ the traditional conception of manhood still holds sway, dictating how boys think, feel, and behave.”
One of the biggest surprises for me in parenting a boy –and in therefore spending time with boys like him at different ages and stages – is how tender hearted and demonstrably loving boys can be. With each other, and towards their parents. Way more than my daughter and her friends tend to be. I confess I really didn’t understand that boys – particularly football-oriented boys – were so soft. In the cis-boys and men I’ve known, there have been a few I’d describe that way, but I always thought they were exceptions. I simply didn’t know that this story we’ve been told about boys lack of emotionality and warmth was indeed, a story – even for the ones that really really like monster trucks.
And, I also have to say that as the group of kids in Josef’s peer group has gotten older, this softness has slowly and surely slipped away. In place of hugs, there are high fives and man nods, you know, “hey.” My son and his friends, these boys I’ve known since they were five, are now teenagers. Teenage boys.
Boys who watch youtube, and play video games, and who spend at least some time every day in the locker room, where jokes and trash talk most likely seep with sexism, and homophobia, and racism, most likely sanctioned or even led by their coach and/or teacher.
Increasingly in their world, they will learn, have already learned, must keep learning, that they must protect themselves, and their identity as men – above all else, even if it means sacrificing their humanity. It is a kind of trade off where whatever side they choose – manhood, or personhood, there is a cost. Choose person and they risk their sense of self, and self worth, their relationships, their social status….or choose man, and risk their dignity, and their sense of what it means to be a whole person, a good person. Not to mention that regardless of whatever side you might be inclined to choose, many will always keep placing you in the “man” category, whatever claims you try to make to say you are not like that.
Unitarian Universalist minister Joanna Fontaine Crawford reminds us of the famous quote from Margaret Atwood – that “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” She says we usually pay attention to the disparity of the stakes men and women face – being laughed at vs. being killed.
But what we forget is that this statement also reveals just how afraid men are of being humiliated. Humiliation appears to be worse than death, for men. Which helps to explain why at least some young men seem to believe that picking up a semi-automatic weapon is a reasonable response when they are embarrassed.
It also helps to explain why, in recent years,increasing numbers of men have found a home in what some call the “manosphere.” Building on the ideas of the 1970s anti-feminist Men’s Rights Movement, the manosphere is a mostly-white-straight-male space filled with bloggers, influencers, and online forums dedicated to misogyny and the idea that (white) men are the ones who are actually oppressed.
It includes people who still identify as Men’s Rights Activists, as well as a group known as MGTOW, or Men Going Their Own Way – these are men who believe women are so toxic that they should be avoided; it also includes pick up artists – which is a group focused on seduction techniques – and finally incels – as in, involuntary celibates – aka those men who believe they are entitled to sex with women, but aren’t having it – and so who are mad at the women.
In the last decade, the manosphere – as with, and not distinct from white nationalism -has moved from the fringes of the internet and popular culture to the mainstream. As just one example, the self-proclaimed misogynist and also recently arrested for sex trafficking Andrew Tate is currently one of the most well-known, and even well-respected figures for tween and teen boys today, including for some of the boys you know, and love.
As middle school teacher Allison Ochs summarizes, “Tate espouses horrifically misogynistic views, but the problem is, he also offers some pretty basic life skills to promote a healthy life. He talks about depression, vaping, and even loneliness– things which young boys say they don’t hear enough about. He then skillfully mixes his own misogynistic and highly political views into this messaging.”
Ochs describes that in her classes, students she would think would see through him instead defend Tate, and a number “seem almost obsessed with his Bugattis, his money and fame, and the outlandish things he says.”
“They said things like, ‘I don’t agree with his sexist comments, but he defends us men.’ Or, ‘No one is taking care of our mental health, and he does. He told us not to vape. You see he is a good guy.’”
When we leave “man” out of our gender conversation, except as an object for critique, when young men go looking for a way to make sense of the world and their place in it, it makes sense that they would turn to a framework that offers something constructive and cohesive to address their experiences. As journalist Clint Edwards writes, “Tate gives young men a lens through which to view the world, and even rules to live by.”
Being a mom to my son over these last 15 years has challenged how I think about manhood, and masculinity. Challenged me first to redirect the anger I’ve had about behaviors that for much of my life I’ve had to struggle against, or heal from. Instead of being angry at men – I’ve become angry at the cone of masculinity and manhood itself, and all the ways we are all caught, and hurt by it. Not because it can apparently include a love of monster trucks, or trains, or even football – which it turns out, I love too – but because somehow the toughness of these things imply that the cone doesn’t also include tenderness, and tears, or any sort of vulnerability, even though Brene Brown has repeatedly reminded us that vulnerability is the birth place of courage, and strength.
I’ve also realized that a more helpful posture than confusion about men would be a posture of curiosity. At the start of this series, Sean asked us to get curious about the gender of each person we meet – whatever their surface appearance seems to indicate. To make space for more diversity than is immediately apparent, or even overtly claimed.
This is a practice I believe is especially needed for our cis-surfaced men. We need to get just as curious about cis-men as we are about all the other gender expressions. We need to interrogate our own assumptions, and the still-caught-in-the-1950s notions that even we have about what it means to be a man. We need to make space for softness, and struggle, even if it had to go dormant in order for the man to survive.
My guess is that this need for curiosity is especially true if you ARE yourself a cis-man. Because it is the water you swim in. Impossible to see without intention, and help.
This curiosity will help us to make space, as queer theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton has encouraged, between word, and object. Man, and person who is called man.
Holding this space, we make possible a world where men are no longer required to sacrifice personhood for manhood. Because we know, “man” can never really touch the person – there is always distance, space, breath. And into this space, there is the hope of creativity, imagination, diversity. In this space there is love. And in this space, there is God.
Sara and I are finally back with our list of our favorite shows from the past year! We had hoped to get this to you in mid-January, but the year new year didn’t quite cooperate with us….Still, even a few weeks later, we are thrilled to share our enthusiasm about these incredible shows with you.
As we said in our Top 21 of 2021, we make no claims other than this being a subjective list of shows that we personally loved, and also believe other people will likely love too. And of course, we could be wrong! Not everything is for everyone.
In compiling our list this year, we set a few rules for ourselves:
The shows must have had at least one season that was at least partially new in 2022 in the US. Which means shows like Peacock’s We Are Lady Parts – which we both watched in early 2022, but premiered entirely in 2021 – is not eligible, despite it being completely worthy and brilliant.
Any shows that were on our list last year are not eligible this year, even if they had a new season. This was a hard one because it meant two shows that would’ve made this list didn’t, but we really want to prioritize sharing about shows people don’t otherwise know about. More on this at the end.
We generally prioritized variety, and accessibility. As in, we thought about making sure we had different tones, and platforms, and sorts of stories/voices represented, especially from those who have been under-represented in tv historically. And we thought about how easy it is for people to jump in to these shows. It’s why an all-time best show like Better Call Saul would end up not our top show of the year.
We tried really hard (seriously hard work) but we definitely did not watch everything. If there is something here we missed that you think we should have included, please comment so we can watch it! We do this most of all because we love tv, and we want others to enjoy it as much as we do.
One more note, we split these reviews/summaries up between us – so when we speak in first person, hopefully it will become clear pretty quickly, who is doing the speaking. Ok…without any further ado….
After all of the struggles of the last few years, Heartstopper came bursting through in 2022 with a refreshing, unapologetic, adorable joy. Set in high school, it is the story of 14-year-old Charlie (Joe Locke) and his friend Nick (Kit Connor). Nick has the audacity to treat Charlie like a human, despite the fact that Nick is a popular rugby player, and Charlie is relentlessly teased and bullied for being gay and out. Adapted from her graphic novel series by writer Alice Oseman, and using on-screen graphics along with animated text-messages as a part of the visuals, everything about this show brings you back into that scary, vulnerable, invigorating time of self-discovery that is the best part of high school. Because, even though Heartstopper does address the more painful and angsty parts of being a teenager, most of all, this is a show that makes you feel good. Which is part of why Sara and I both agreed that it should be the top show for this year. If you haven’t watched it, or it’s been a while and you want to re-watch in time for season two (coming this summer!), this is an accessible show (on Netflix, eight 30 minute episodes!) that will truly just feel good to watch. So much so you start to forget just how revolutionary it is to offer a queer coming-of-age story that is entirely not tragic. It is instead funny, and sweet, heartwarming, and even wholesome – without sacrificing depth or specificity, or diversity in the characters and their stories. It’s the story I wish I would’ve had to watch growing up (I cannot even imagine how my life would’ve been impacted…) and also that I am so grateful we can watch with our kids (and parents) now.
Abbi Jacobson (along with Will Graham) co-created and stars in this clever remake of Penny Marshall’s classic 1992 film of the same name. The show tells the story of an all-female baseball league created during WWII, and in this reimagining queerness and race relations take center stage. Which turns out to be a much more accurate reflection of history and of the League dynamics, as some of the original players described during press tours for the series.
In the series – and in the League – nearly everyone turns out to be gay. Which means, it’s not just more accurate, it’s also pretty mind-boggling to watch a series (that isn’t The L Word) where nearly every character is queer! And where queer, Black relationships are explored authentically, and complexly. No wonder the right started to freak out about it.
Along with Jacobson (Broadcity), two of my favorite sitcom actors show up in the show, D’Arcy Carden (Janet from The Good Place) and Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation). The main storyline involves a budding love story between Jacobson, a married woman from Iowa who ran away to try out for the league while her husband was deployed, and Carden. The uncertainty of the team’s future (always assumed to be temporary until the men return from war) plays itself out in their relationship, and we are left wondering at the end of the season not only whether there will be a second season (still unknown at this writing) but also whether they will reunite.
While the storylines remain largely separate (the new league doesn’t accept Black players), Chante Williams’ storyline as Maxine, whose first choice (playing with the league) and assumed choice (working at her mother’s salon), give way to a third option of working in the local welding factory so that she can play on the factory team is probably my favorite. This storyline stands out in large part because of the brilliant acting of Gbemisola Ikumelo as her best friend Clance (I love her beyond words) and Lea Robinson as her aunt / trans uncle, a fact that Maxine discovers only when she goes to see her years after they have been ostracized from the family. I found watching a show set in the 1940s that presents such nuanced stories about race and gender deeply moving (and occasionally horrifying). I would recommend this show to everyone; while it’s a bit heavier than our top show Heartstoppers, it is a thoroughly enjoyable watch, and with only six episodes, a relatively quick one.
Melanie Field, Abbi Jacobson, and D’Arcy Carden in League of Their Own
Station Eleven is an adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel about a pandemic that kills 95% of the world’s population. It undoubtedly hits home differently and perhaps feels a bit more urgently than it would have three years ago, which means it may be too hard for some people to watch. But for me (after rewatching the first three episodes for a second time at Gretchen’s urging, and finally putting the storyline together), it wound up feeling like a deeply hopeful show about the ways that people continue to search for, create, and discover meaning despite the most catastrophic of losses. The show is set mostly in the post-pandemic era, and follows a Shakespearean traveling troupe as they make their bi-annual circuit (on foot, as virtually all modern technology no longer functions) around the Great Lakes region, returning to communities they know to be safe to put on plays.
This is a show that has one episode that stands out for me as one of the best hours of television ever made (spoiler: it’s episode 7). While the show toggles between the days before the pandemic, fifteen years after the pandemic, and the early days after the pandemic hits, episode 7 is set in those early days. It follows Kirsten (Matilda Lawdler), a nine year old acting in a professional performance of King Lear in Chicago when the death of King Lear himself on stage during the performance serves as the first inkling of the pandemic. Unable to reach her parents, she leaves with Jeevan Chaudury (played by Himesh Patel), a man who rushed to the stage in an attempt to save the actor playing Lear. We watch as Jeevan and Kristen wander through a mid-winter Chicago night figuring out where to go next as the tragedy of the situation becomes increasingly clear. They eventually make their way to Jeevan’s brother’s apartment, where most of this episode is set. Mackenzie Davis (the adult Kirsten) also makes several appearances in this episode, which I find so deeply touching because it explores deeply human themes like the perils and rewards of finally returning as an adult to childhood traumas, the complexities of family dynamics when difficult decisions are at stake, and the sacrifices we find ourselves called to make for love.
This is a stunning story of human endurance, and it is a story of the power of beauty, and art, and theatre and Black imagination all as sources for healing, and for the path forward when we realize, as the series reminds us, that “survival is insufficient.”
Daniel Zavatto and Mackenzie Davis in Station Eleven
It’s not right to call Better Call Saul a love story. Better to say that it is – like Breaking Bad, from which it spun off – a story of how a regular pretty-good person becomes a pretty-bad person. Or it might be right to say it is the embodiment of my mother-in-law’s saying “lies beget lies,” since the whole thing is filled with liars and the question of when and how they will be undone by their lies. It’s also a story of underdogs, and bullies, and a story of the law and who it is built for, and it is a story of crime, and drugs, and money, and power. All of these things are in so many ways the right way to describe this heartbreaking, beautiful, brilliant series that stars Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy McGill, who over the course of six seasons, mutates into Saul Goodman, the slimy attorney from Breaking Bad. (People wonder if you need to watch Breaking Bad to enjoy Better Call Saul; I don’t think you do, but you’ll find just a little more meaning there if you have. Since it is a prequel, you could also just start here, and then go to Breaking Bad, if you want. Or, just watch Saul, because I think it ended up being the better of the two, which is saying a lot!)
Still, none of these ways of describing this show get at the two key relational dynamics that for me are the most compelling reason that this show works. First, and especially in the earlier seasons, there is the relationship between Jimmy and his brother Chuck (Michael McKean). I don’t know if what is happening between them is love, or abuse. It is obviously both, and also mixed up with mental illness. But this driving question of the bond – or lack thereof – between Chuck, and Jimmy – is one of the key answers as to how Jimmy becomes Saul. That Jimmy isn’t ever really loved, or lovable by his brother, that he isn’t good enough, that he is treated like (and often acts like) a screw up. Becoming Saul is Jimmy’s response.
And secondly, and even more importantly, there is the love between Jimmy and Kim (the incredible and also underrated Rhea Seehorn). This too is a complicated love, tangled up with lies and scams, a struggle to feel like they are both worthy of love in the first place, and also a loyalty that is a direct counterpoint to the lack of loyalty Jimmy has with his brother. His love for and with Kim also turns Jimmy into Saul, but in more confusing, and also more devastating ways.
Creator Vince Gilligan (creator of Breaking Bad, also of all the best X-Files episodes), makes it clear that love isn’t enough to save us. Save us from ourselves, or save us from loneliness, or save us from the consequences of our own worst choices.
We didn’t end up ranking this show higher this year because we decided that if you’re new to it, it’s a pretty big lift to watch all six seasons, including because you can’t (re)watch the last season on Netflix until July (it was live on AMC originally). But ultimately, this series is for me one of the best shows of all time. The cinematography, writing, pacing, acting, and overall narrative consistently delivers on episode after episode. I will sincerely miss it, including and especially the painfully impossible love story of Kim and Jimmy.
You know something isn’t quite right from the very beginning of Severance, when the character we come to know as Helly R (Britt Lower) repeatedly attempts to escape from the conference room she has found herself in. And yet just as repeatedly, she is returned to the room, where Mark S. (Adam Scott) is trying to provide an extremely scripted orientation to Lumon, where they will both be working. See, in the world of Severance, people can choose to undergo a procedure that allows their brains to completely compartmentalize their work selves from their non-work selves. From the corporation’s perspective, this creates incredibly productive non-distracted employees, and also allows them to maintain a high degree of confidentiality. And from the perspective of the employee, it can allow you to leave work entirely at work – or in Mark S’s case, leave behind the pain of life’s realities so that you can actually have a productive work life, something he has struggled to have since his wife died tragically. But what neither those undergoing the procedure, nor the corporation itself fully understands is that a work self is still a self, a whole person who experiences the same full range of emotions and longings that a non-work self experiences. Or at least, they don’t realize this until the procedure is done, and it’s too late. While the characters try to figure out what to do with this realization while also being already-severed, this show also manages to explore the nature of grief, of consent, of love, and of friendship, and the risks of technology as it is and will continue to be mixed up with late-stage capitalism. And all of this is set in a bigger mystery of what this corporation really does, and what its end game is. This show is a little bit of a slow burn, so some of these themes take a while to emerge–if you start and then you aren’t quite getting it yet, stick with it. I ended up watching it twice so I could catch all the world-building elements along the way – it’s that well-considered.
The actors all do great work, but I do have to give a special shout out to Christopher Walken and John Turturro who are just the right amount of weird and tender. Can’t wait for season two, which hopefully will be out before the end of 2023!
Adam Scott, John Torturro, Zach Cherry, and Britt Lower in Severance
Before I started watching, for some reason, I’d assumed As We See It was a reality show. Maybe because it’s so rare to have a show about people on the autism spectrum that features actors who are actually on the spectrum – which this does. I was thrilled to discover that this is a thoughtful, tender, funny and fictional show about three 20-somethings who share an apartment in Los Angeles. Creator Jason Katims – who also created one of the best shows ever, Friday Night Lights – offers complex character development, and diversity in representation, all while tackling extremely relatable challenges that all young adults ultimately have to face: when and how to navigate independence from your parents, how to deal with conflicts at work, and how to find someone who will love you back. I just realized that this show is not renewed for a second season, which is so disappointing, because it is really wonderful, alongside being really important. Don’t let the non-renewal stop you from checking out the first season though, you won’t be disappointed.
Albert Rutecki, Rick Glassman, and Sue Ann Pien in As We See It
This is a show about Sabi (played by Bilal Baig, who also co-created and co-wrote the show), a twentysomething, non-binary child of Pakistani parents living in Toronto, and it is one of the most emotionally nuanced shows I have ever seen. Sabi’s life is, by any measure, difficult and complicated, and yet Sabi themself is one of the most grounded and emotionally mature characters on TV. All of the show’s main storylines are centered around Sabi’s relationships, including their best friend 7ven (played by Amanda Cordner), their employers (the parents of the children Sabi nannies for and the owner of the queer bar where they bartend), and their family (including the father who travels from Pakistan to make them “back into a man” when he finds out about Sabi’s identity). One of the things that really makes this show stand out is that every single relationship is complex and therefore interesting, and that the complexities get richer as the show unfolds (if you’re not sure about this show after an episode or two, or even after season one, I promise it is worth staying until the end of season two. And a third season is coming!). The tension between tending to what we know to be true for ourselves and what others expect of and need from us is one that is always present, and watching it play out differently within the particulars of each of Sabi’s relationships (and Sabi’s strength in tending carefully to themselves) helps me to see and name the tension more clearly when it arises in my own orbit.
Aden Bedard, Amanda Cordner, Billal Baig, and Kana Kanishiro in Sort Of
Like Station Eleven, this is one of those shows that has An Episode that blew me away (and it also happened to be the seventh episode of the season). Fleishman is in Trouble is a show about a marriage that has run aground, told from the perspective of the abandoned husband, played brilliantly by Jesse Eisenberg. Episode by episode, we are drawn into Toby’s world, as he is unceremoniously left with his two pre-teens without explanation. The show is narrated by one of Toby’s college besties, Libby, played by Lizzy Caplan, a friend who knew him when he was full of potential, and who struggles to reconnect with him as he enters middle age, a struggle that he shares in as he tries to figure out who he is now that his settled world has been turned upside down. Libby’s narration takes a while to draw attention to itself, so much so that it becomes confusing if this is really Toby’s perspective we are seeing, or if it is hers. That becomes significant in the seventh episode, which is the one where we finally get the perspective of Toby’s wife Rachel, played by Clare Danes. The withholding of her story until close to the end is a forceful reminder of how comfortable it is to fall into one version of the truth, and how incomplete our understanding of a situation can be when we do that.
This is also the too-common reality of a marriage, and of any relationship where we become caught in our own experience of what is happening, and end up unwilling or unable to see the fuller picture of all that is going on – let alone make it better.
Claire Danes and Jesse Einsenburg in Fleishman is in Trouble
After a four year hiatus, Atlanta came back in 2022 with two additional seasons, which means there was a lot of weird brilliance, strange comedy, and incisive social analysis missing from tv, and for much of the third and fourth seasons, Donald Glover and team delivered. In case you’re new to Atlanta, it centers (except for the occasional stand-alone different-planet episodes, which I will come back to in a moment) on Earn (Glover). In the first season, Earn is trying to figure out who he is, and how he fits in the world – starting by managing his cousin, Alfred, aka Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry, current oscar nominee), who blows up with a sudden hit. Henry’s sad and tired eyes have always felt like a perfect fit for Alfred’s ambivalence about fame and celebrity, and his tough/trauma-made shell. Early in the show, Alfred and Earn are slow to trust each other, and Alfred is rightfully doubtful that Earn will really be able to pull off being his manager. Earn is kind of a mess as he attempts to be a parent with his off-and-on-girlfriend Van (Zazie Beetz), while also dealing with the absurd and actually dangerous realities of being a young Black man in America.
By the time we reach the final season, Alfred has had global success, and is starting to be treated like a hip hop elder whose best next move, people are telling him, would be to mentor up and coming (white) rappers. Earn has also found a pretty solid degree of success, stability and domesticity with Van and their daughter.
Along with their friend Darius (LaKeith Stanfield), who always brings the vibes and often the wisdom, Earn and Alfred offer a look into what it means to be men in America, and specifically Black men. I’ve heard the tone of this show described as afrosurrealism, because sometimes, it is really hard to say what is really happening, and what is not in each show. I’ve always thought of this style as another layer of commentary about the strange nature of race, which is both real, and also made up. Just like fame, and wealth, and so much of what impacts our lives in America.
On a similar note, we need to return to those stand-alone episodes. For example, in the fourth season, there is a faux documentary episode about The Goofy Movie, and its racialized origins, based in a (made up) story about the first Black head of Disney. (!!!)
These seemingly random forays into a completely different narrative also feel like commentary – on the randomness of race in America, the randomness of America, the experience of random disruption and displacement of personal stories, and a sense of being at home that is the result of enslavement, Jim Crow, and systemic racism. These episodes are also wildly experimental attempts at taking the form of the tv series in a different direction, and also, as experiments, can be pretty hit or miss.For me, this is part of the fun of Atlanta. Seeing a creative team attempt to do something bold, and big, and new.
LaKeith Stanfield, Brian Tyree Henry, and Donald Glover in Atlanta
I can’t remember how I found The Undeclared War, but once I did I was immediately hooked (I admit to being a sucker for British shows). It is probably best described as a cyber-thriller, telling a wide-ranging story of a foreign power (Russia) interfering in a national election through hacking computer code. The main character, Saara (played by Hannah Khalique-Brown), is a young college student getting work experience in the malware department of the UK’s equivalent of the NSA. Her personal struggles with her intense work (where, despite her cracking the first bit of the code, she is in a subservient role–the equivalent of an intern), her colleagues (I especially love her friendship with the overlooked old-timer John Yeabsley, played by the brilliant Mark Rylance), and her family provide emotional balance to the complicated cyberstory that headlines the show. And yet even that complex story feels intelligible in a way that stories about cybercrime so often don’t. After watching this show, I have a much clearer understanding of how social media bots work, for example, and a more grounded take on how fake news can get created, seem real, and have very real world impacts. And it does now feel very clear to me that none of this is specific to the U.S., a feeling that is both deeply disturbing and somehow relieving at the same time. Even the coding aspect, which my coder husband Dug reports is remarkably accurate in a way that few such storylines are, feels comprehensible, aided by artistic representations of analogous activities (in the scenes where Saara is sifting through the code to find the Russian hacks, she always wears a toolbelt, and we see her, for example, sifting through old phone books or trying to find her way into a hidden cave). At six 45 minute episodes, this is essentially a long movie that is well worth the watch .
Last year, we could not be persuaded to include the well-reviewed White Lotus on our best-of list. Season one – though I respect its social critique, and enjoyed its cringy storylines (and as always, Connie Britton), it felt a little too forced, and not quite as deep as it was trying to be. The new season, however, really found its voice and tone, and was just as deliciously fun and weird (and still biting) as creator Mike White seems to be aiming for. The concept here is that the White Lotus is a luxury hotel experience across the globe. The first season was set in Hawaii; this season in Italy. The first season is focused on class and racial dynamics, especially in the ways that tourists exploit the locals who work at the hotel; the second season still brings the critique of wealth, but it is less clear who – between the locals, and the tourists – are left worse off from the travel. And even more, the second season introduces the complications of desire, and the ways that sex and sexual desire intersect with wealth.
Jennifer Coolidge stars in both seasons, portraying rich cluelessness, loneliness, and entitlement – all at once. Both seasons are actually filled with great performances – in this one, Aubrey Plaza is as always, compelling – but less well-known actors Meghann Fahy, Haley Lu Richardson, and Beatrice Granno were also incredibly sharp and particular in their performances, and make every scene interesting and beautiful.
To me, White Lotus is an exploration of white wealth and its corruptive inevitability. The way wealth – especially as it plays out in white communities – leads to distrust, and isolation, and shallow and transactional relationships. (It seems important that Ethan and Harper – who are struggling to fit in at the White Lotus, and to come to terms with their new wealth – are also the only two non-white characters.)
Whatever hesitation I had about season one has been relieved by the biting dark comedy of season two. It’ll be hard to find a location as visually compelling as the gorgeous beaches of Italy for the next season, but I’m looking forward already to seeing where the White Lotus resort turns up next.
Set in coastal Ireland and co-created by Sharon Horgan (from Catastrophe, who also stars in the show), Bad Sisters is a story about love and loyalty between sisters (in this case, five), and what can happen when one of them is in danger. The catchy opening credit sequence of the show sets us up for the plot, a tragi-comic mystery about who killed the villain (John Paul, the emotionally abusive husband of the sister who is shown as the meekest, played brilliantly by Claes Bang) and how they did it. We are first introduced to John Paul in his coffin, so we know from the beginning how the show will end. My characterization of the show shifted throughout the season; for the first two or three episodes, it felt like a fun comedy with great writing and a slapstick plot. As the season went on and John Paul’s behavior got increasingly egregious and he appeared frustratingly impervious to the sisters’ bungling attempts on his life, it got a bit harder to watch (Dug had to stop watching mid-season because he hated the character so much), but the comic overlay of the show (and my desire to finally find out how the bastard died) kept me hooked. By the end, the show felt like an emotional powerhouse, and I would recommend the show highly to anyone with the stomach to watch it.
Sharon Horgan, Eve Hewson, Eva Birthistle, and Sarah Greene in Bad Sisters
Jeremy Allen White brings his sensitive-genius-who-needs-a-shower schtick (perfected in Showtime’s Shameless) to this story of grief, masculinity, class, and cooking. White stars as Carmy, who inherits his family’s Chicago sandwich shop after his brother – who had been running the place – commits suicide. It’s an ironic turn of events, given that his brother had refused to let him work there – and in rebellion, Carmy got himself trained as one of the city’s top chefs. Carmy’s love for his brother, and for cooking, as well as his vision to transform the shop into something more than it has been, collide in the stress of the kitchen, where the staff are grieving, and also not at all on the same page as their new boss and his fancy ideas. Nearly every episode is stressful, and in a lot of ways just reveals Carmy’s inexperience and emotional immaturity – which in turn is mostly handed off to his new hire/sous chef Sydney (incredibly talented Ayo Edeberi) to handle and make work – but with ripple effects across the whole kitchen staff. But experiencing stress is part of the story, too, as you realize it has to go somewhere. These feelings can’t be pushed away forever. Which is the lesson Carmy – and the whole team, especially as they feel out what it means to be family – are trying to come to terms with, and also learn how to actually process, and deal with what’s actually happening around them, and all that has happened. I’m excited this well-written show with a great ensemble will be back this summer for a second season so we can see how they keep struggling, and growing.
Yellowjackets thoroughly captivated Dug and I through January and February of last year; it is one of those shows that we always watched immediately when a new episode dropped. It tells the story of a girls’ high school soccer team who survive a plane crash deep in the wilderness of Canada. Like many survivor tales, it follows them as they descend from relatively normal teenage girls to paranoid warring tribes that disagree on strategy for survival and descend into animalistic behaviors (this is definitely a show that won’t be for everyone). What makes the show most interesting is that it toggles back and forth between the post-crash period (and a few pre-crash scenes) to the surviving adults 25 years later, making it both a coming-of-age story and an exploration of middle age. The show keeps us hooked by slowly unraveling the mystery of what happened back then, while also creating a present-day drama when an unknown source begins sending bits of information to the survivors, information that they have worked hard to keep hidden over the years (Christina Ricci, Melanie Lynskey, Tawny Cypress, and Juliette Lewis all turn in compelling performances as the adult survivors). The trauma and the ways each character has worked to subsume it in the ensuing decades (some successfully some not) create layers of mystery that Season 1 only partially uncovers (Season 2 starts March 23; our calendars are marked!).
Melanie Lynsky, Christine Ricci, Tawny Cypress, and Juliette Lewis in Yellowjackets
There are a lot of reasons why you might not have watched this show, including the fact that it’s on a platform not many people have. But it also might be because you have a sense you’ve already seen it, or read it – from the Tom Cruise 90s movie, or the Anne Rice novels. I was definitely skeptical coming in, but was quickly persuaded, first by the beautiful Jacob Anderson who stars as the titular vampire, Louis de Pointe, and then ultimately by the ways the story allows race and queer sexuality in early 20th century New Orleans to become a major factor in this otherwise too well known vampire story. How much does it matter if you are immortal, and intensely powerful – if you are also Black? The other main actors are also doing great work, and also beautiful – Sam Reid as Lestat, and Bass Bailey as Claudia – in a queer, often brutal, surprisingly tender portrayal of a family. It can be – as you might guess – sometimes gory, and that is part of the tension between Louis and his lover/creator Lestat. Whether or not this killing can be reconciled with the loving. Whether the loving is really ever anything more than violence. The concept of the present-day interview, by the way, I am less interested in so far – but we’ll see what happens in season two – which I’ve read should be happening. I can’t wait.
Sam Reid, Jacob Anderson, and Bailey Bass in Interview With A Vanpire
Ben Whishaw, who heads up this series following junior doctor Adam Kay in his Ob/Gyn job in the British version of a public health clinic (and who I had never seen before watching this series) has shot right to the top of my list of actors to watch. I have since discovered that he voiced Paddington (endearing him to me further), and I was blown away watching him last week in the movie Women Talking (where he plays the gentle male scribe for a group of angry Mennonite women). This Is Going to Hurt feels like one of the most honest portrayals of working life I’ve seen, likely due in part to the fact that it is based on a highly acclaimed memoir by the same name.
Dr. Kay works 100 hour weeks, and the exhaustion of the lifestyle (and its cumulative effects over time) grows increasingly visceral throughout the season. His ability to manage his personal life, from his primary relationship with the very tolerant (and beautiful!) Harry, to his parents (who he has yet to come out to), to his junior colleague Shruti (Ambiki Mod), is drastically impaired by his fatigue. The consequences of his (understandable) inability to find the time and energy to deal thoughtfully with life’s challenges have devastating consequences, and by the end of the season we get a sense both that he is ready to face up to that reality and also that he doesn’t have any idea of how he can change. That unresolved space where we often find ourselves so rarely finds representation on TV, and its exploration on this show is such a gift. It’s a shame that this show is on a service that most people don’t have (and therefore not widely known), but if you have a week with some extra time, we encourage you to grab a 7 day free trial to AMC+ and watch this show (perhaps along with Interview with a Vampire; odd bedfellows, admittedly, but both well worth a watch!).
Ambika Mod and Ben Whishaw in This Is Going to Hurt
Not enough people are talking about this British intelligence thriller starring Gary Oldman as the weirdly charismatic and thoroughly unhygienic director of Slough House, the Mi-5 unit where screw up agents are sent for a kind of extended tour of shame and humiliation. This set up makes this crime thriller a perpetual story of underdog redemption, because inevitably these same officers are the ones who solve the case, save the day, best the bad guy – not to mention that means they are outdoing the more traditionally successful non-screw-up agents who think they are better than anyone sent to Slough House. The first season – especially all of the scenes with Oldman and his boss, Diana Taverner, played by the always solid Kristin Scott Thomas – was really good. But the second season was often edge-of-your-seat-can’t-wait-for-the-next-episode good. For a few reasons: first, because Oldman continues to be just so self-effacingly gross and strange and smart in his role as the boss who both loathes and loves his outcast staff; second,because the story itself got more interesting, complex, and surprising; and third, because the characters in that outcast staff continue to develop with nuance, humor, wit, and an enduring love and loyalty for one another, and for their strange, annoying, brilliant boss.
Jack Lowden, Gary Oldman, Olivia Cook, and Rosalind Eleazar in Slow Horses.
I intended to not enjoy this show (what little I knew was that it was about ranchers’ land rights, a topic I don’t have much interest in). It wasn’t even on my radar before this year, and then suddenly it was all over the place. Yellowstone had been running for four seasons before 2022, and has inspired three spin offs since then. We decided to watch it to see what the fuss was all about, and we both agreed that the first three seasons are highly entertaining, well written, and beautiful (it’s set in Montana, and the landscapes are breathtaking), but were less sold on seasons 4 and 5 (which settled into more predictable tropes, dropping it lower on our list). Yellowstone is an epic tale centered around the Dutton family and their ranch in Montana; it has a lot of thematic overlap with Succession and The Godfather. The patriarch (played by Kevin Costner) and his three children are involved in a battle with the government, native tribes, capitalists, and environmentalists to keep their 800,000 acre ranch (that’s bigger than Rhode Island). For me, Beth Dutton (the daughter, played by Kelly Reilly) is the most interesting part of the show. Of the three children, she is the most fiercely loyal (and I do mean FIERCE) to her father, due in part to residual guilt she feels over her role in her mother’s death when Beth was young. When the ranch is threatened, she moves back home (she was a financier in Salt Lake City) to fight alongside her father, and it is totally captivating (and a bit terrifying) to watch as she makes herself indispensable in the fight. She is abrasive and emotionally unstable and impossible to look away from; I can’t think of another character that I would dislike so much in real life who has kept my attention so thoroughly in fiction.
In the same year that Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison for defrauding investors in her blood-testing company Theranos, two TV miniseries came out with their versions of her story (I watched both and also read Bloodlines, a recent book about Holmes). The appeal of this version for me is threefold: first, it is an accessible retelling of a complicated story about science, technology, and capitalism. Second, Amanda Seyfried’s portrayal of Holmes is brilliant; we watch as she transforms herself through sheer will from a friendless 19-year-old Stanford dropout to one of the richest women in the world (with a reported net worth of $4.5 billion) within a decade. The scenes where she works to modulate her voice downwards after being told that she won’t be taken seriously with such a high-pitched voice are painful to watch, but clearly distill her determination. Third, it is a fascinating story about the ways that ambition can play out. I don’t think of myself as an ambitious person, which is perhaps why watching this show felt a little bit like going to the zoo–Holmes seems like a different species to me (I imagine this feeling was amplified by her being a woman; the show definitely has something to say about how gender and power can play out in Silicon Valley). I will note here that this is a rare show that Gretchen and I disagree on. I (Sara) found it to be one of the stickiest shows of the year; I thought about it often in the months after I finished watching it (and I had to convince Gretchen to continue watching after the first episode–she found the whole show painful to watch).
Derry Girls is a tremendously funny show set in a small town in occupied Northern Ireland in the 1990s. At the core of the show is a group of five teenagers: Erin (always trying to move up and more than a wee bit pretentious, her snooty accent and accompanying nose wrinkling almost makes the show on its own), Nicola (neurotic and nerdy, she nearly passes out several times when the gang is caught in various shenanigans), Michelle (the group’s party animal who instigates many of the aforementioned shenanigans), Orla (Erin’s seriously spaced-out cousin, who elevates the word “cracker” to a new level), and James (Michelle’s cousin who happens to be English and protestant, he is dropped off in Ireland by his wayward mum and allowed to attend Our Lady Immaculate College with the gang, despite it being an all-girls Catholic school). The Troubles (the Northern Ireland conflict) manifest in their daily lives as they face bomb threats and British army checkpoints, but the gang remains focused on procuring forbidden concert tickets, practicing for the school’s talent show, and, in one particularly memorable episode, evading a polar bear who has escaped from the Belfast Zoo – the show is never short on absurb scenarios. Nested around the core cast are friends and family members with highly entertaining quirks of their own (my particular favorite is a great uncle who drones on endlessly if allowed to begin a story). After premiering in 2019, Derry Girls had its final season in 2022, and I find myself regularly dipping back into any season, rewatching any episode, and discovering new bits to laugh out loud at (an ability undoubtedly enhanced by the fact that, despite the strong Irish brogue, I still refuse to turn on captions, so I catch new bits every time!).
There are so many reasons to love this sitcom-within-a-sitcom, most of all the actors, who are all clearly having such a good time with the material and each other. Rachel Bloom (from the brilliant Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) stars as the lead writer, Hannah, for a rebooted (fictional) 90s sitcom Step Right Up (fictionally, and also actually) green lit by Hulu, and featuring all of the original actors – played by Keegan Michael-Key, Johnny Knoxville, and Judy Greer. Hannah has big plans for making the show more real than the superficial sitcom of 90s – until the original showrunner, Gordon (Paul Reiser), gets re-hired to work with her to bring some of the original “success.” The clash of the generations and styles both between Hannah and Gordon, as well as in the writers’ room also serves as commentary on the ways sitcoms have changed in the last twenty years, including the ways Hulu is the same, and different, than “network tv.” Reboot’s producer and director, Stevan Levitan, is also the guy behind Modern Family, and you can feel some of that vibe among this cast, just in an updated way – and I mean that as a compliment. In a lot of ways it’s just a simply great ensemble sitcom, except with a fun and unique approach to the sitcom itself. Like…a reboot 😉
The first episode of Mo, the title character (played by comedian Mo Amer), is fired from his job at a cell phone shop, because the owner’s other store was recently raided by ICE. Even though Mo has lived almost all of his life in the U.S., and has never actually even lived in Palestine where his family immigrated from, he has been waiting for over twenty years for his asylum case to be approved. It’s just one of many complications Mo faces in straddling American, Palestinian, and Latino cultures while trying to claim some agency around his own identity and sense of belonging and understanding. Mo is a story of family, of friendship, and of growing up. It’s a story of coming to make sense of your childhood, and your parents, and your place in it all. It’s funny, and sweet, and a unique representation of a pretty common experience of immigrants in the United States, and also many of us who navigate truly diverse spaces and relationships. At eight 30 minute episodes, all available on Netflix, this is a really accessible and easy show to get into, and finish up…and keep thinking about.
Like I said at the start, Sara and I decided that since one of our main goals for these lists is to help expand people’s potential lists of shows, we would not repeat shows that we listed last year. I totally support this idea, and also it means I have to leave off this show that would otherwise be in my top five – it is just so brilliant. And so I want to give it a little side promo here because many people still haven’t seen it, or they haven’t come back for season 2. While season 1 was stunning and heartbreaking and darkly funny, season 2 is even better. I was especially impressed with the complex and brilliant comedy in these episodes, which are all still filled with grief and longing and displacement. The question of who gets to leave the reservation, and who is left behind continues is the under current of every conversation, and you start to better see the generational patterns, and the pain passed down, even while each person tries to do what they can to heal. There’s also more biting insight offered about those who attempt to “help” indigenous youth, and a continued commentary on the role of police, and the different ways this looks depending on if we’re talking about tribal or non-tribal police. This is an incredibly well-written, brilliantly acted, carefully crafted story that delivers consistently great tv this season – please don’t miss it.
A few other honorable mentions we debated about including….
Andor (Disney+) – The latest Star Wars series is really great, but the pacing is such a slow-build that I started to realize that non-Star Wars folks might not ever get through it. I could be wrong – it’s definitely worth checking out for its cohesive world building and compelling take on the seeds of long haul rebellions and hoped for revolutions.
Ramy (Hulu) – This show about Egyptian-American Ramy Hassan ran its third season this year, and both of the first two seasons were really strong. However I just didn’t get around to watching season three – but have heard that it is the best of all three, so I will!
Barry (HBO)– Similar to Ramy, Barry ran its third season this year, and I have only gotten to 2 episodes so far. This is a great, weird, darkly funny show about a hitman trying to reform by becoming an actor. I’ve heard season three is great, especially Henry Winkler, so I will get back to it.
The Rehearsal (HBO) – What a strange show this is. It’s maybe a reality show about a guy who offers people a “rehearsal” opportunity for things they are worried about. Like a hard conversation with a family member, or being a parent. He creates entire sets and hires actors, and then they just literally rehearse the scenarios. I say “maybe” because by the end it is really, really unclear what is real and what is all just part of the show. Which I assume is on purpose. I ultimately just could not understand this show enough to put it on the list, but I have continued to think about it.
Minx (NOTHING)- We both loved this show about a feminist porn magazine, but it is not accessible at all anymore (after HBO unjustly canceled it they pulled it off their platform entirely!) so we decided it was unfair to put it on the list since you can’t watch it.
Another Possibility 