Another day, another progressive catchphrase that drives me fucking nuts. This time it’s “showing up,” although this particular term has been kicking around for at least a year. Anyone out there start hearing it sooner? Or have any of you not heard it yet? It’s like a horsefly buzzing in my ear throughout the week, and its ubiquity does nothing to stop those uttering it from acting as though they have discovered some kind of rare conceptual gem, as though they are the first to propose such a glittering neologism.
“We’re showing up for each other,” Taylor Swift recently cooed about her relationship with hairy hunk Travis Kelce. In September, Psychology Today promoted the importance of “showing up” for others. Newsweek says showing up is essential to the bottom line. And then, there’s the most vomit-worthy upshowing of all, that of showing up for yourself. Or, even better, as Your Unapologetic Self! I don’t know about you, but encountering someone’s Unapologetic Self seems rather unpleasant, even intimidating, and all this Showing Up is enough to make a person want to run and hide.
I have a deeply misanthropic streak. Most of the time, I have to convince myself to leave my apartment. And it’s like dragging someone out the door who is clinging to the doorframe with their feet. My idea of heaven is to sit in a silent room, with a full wall of books, and a crucifix to gaze at. Kind of like this:
Also, I really like the idea of wearing the same outfit every day. Something about the elegance and simplicity of a habit, knowing that what you are wearing is the same thing that others of your ilk wore hundreds of years ago, is deeply appealing. So is retreating to the upper room of a house and wearing white flowing garments while scrawling things like Emily Dickinson did. It’s all a hell of a lot better than wearing rag after rag that will eventually end up in the dungheap of our throwaway culture like these clothes:
What is the opposite of showing up? Disappearing. Seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal famously said that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” And the early Christian Desert Father known as Moses the Ethiopian once said to a young monk to “go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”
Katie Roiphe writes: “In times of trouble, some people turn to cigarettes and other people turn to drink and I read books I have read a million times before.” And I, too, when I feel depressed or lost or anxious, love to sit in my one-room apartment (my cell) and gaze at my bookshelf. All the answers to all the questions in the world can be found there. And something about the colors of the books, their well-worn spines, thinking of the people who gave them to me, or even the way they feel in my hands, makes me feel better.
A friend once told me about a method for devising an essay: pick two random books from your collection, and place them next to each other. See what emerges. So, let’s play this little game —
There’s something here about nature and freedom. A meditation, perhaps, on alternative health and the liberty one needs and deserves in order to turn away from other people’s prescriptions, both medicinal and intellectual. Or maybe it’s about the herbal healing to be found in Hitch’s cigarette.
This book on the left is very rich, containing contributions from Emily Brontë, Anaïs Nin, and Mary Wollstonecraft. I hate feminism, but as I was reminded by — improbably — a monk last spring, “there are different kinds of feminism,” and I suppose I begrudgingly agree. There’s something about freedom here, too, something about the First Amendment, perhaps. Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. And what about this last combination:
I really enjoyed reading “Last Best Hope” in the summer of 2021, devoured it like a delicious piece of pie. But Packer spends pages on his antipathy for Sarah Palin, for whom I’ve always had a soft spot. She strikes me as similar to the figure on the other book — Artemis-like, displaying a muscularity completely alien to the fragility “smart” feminists are expected to perform.
What is the throughline in all of these books? There’s a libertarian streak, yes. And a simultaneous focus on something having to do with healing, with the holistic, with the sensual. “Healing” is not regarded as a subject worthy of intelligent attention. Contemporary writing on healing is often unintellectual. But if Christ was a genius, as He certainly was, in addition to being the Son of God, and if healing was one of His foremost preoccupations, then it is a subject worth exploring in the most rigorous possible way.
Part of what I don’t like about the therapeutic mentality or the social initiatives of progressives or our modern mores or whatever the hell it is that we’re swimming in, is that it is based on a false spirituality while being so obviously borne of religious impulses. It offers false solutions. It is so clear that those seeking “safe spaces” are actually seeking sanctuary, that those engaged in paranoid sexual culture are actually seeking chastity, and that those promoting “showing up” are actually talking about incarnation. In becoming man, God performed the ultimate act of showing up: He became flesh for us, so that we might heal, so that we might be shown the right way of being human in our lifetimes. And it is perfectly natural that in an era of online correspondence, plague-avoidant isolation, and relationships being thrown away like trash, people should seek some concept of realness, of physicality, of presence and availability. When the Incarnation happens, eternity touches time, and all those who believe in Him are to house His Spirit in our own flesh and blood. So even if I encapsulate myself in my cell, where paradoxically I have my greatest interior freedom, I have no need for modern therapeutic proposals which skirt the edge of the wound but do not soothe it, for all has been provided for me.
A few afternoons ago I spent some time trimming ivy plants that had grown wild and weedy on a glasstop table. I arranged the cuttings around the cross that hangs over my bed, and it filled me with peace.
It is a strange thing to begin a writing project and realize that the objectives you started with are probably very different from what is emerging. But I seek to be open to God’s will. I am probably too zealous to be a secular journalist, too profane to be a religious writer, and too willful to be a monastic. I am interested in writing that serves as witness — no matter the situation, healing is possible, recovery is possible, and Heaven is real.