Hey everyone,
This newsletter has a little bit of everything. They say that to have success on the internet as a writer, you must find your “niche.” I have always bucked at this suggestion, as I, like every other person on Earth, contain multitudes. You want a nice melange of college football, church talk, movies, culture, and education? Here you go. Also, I’m sorry.
The Part Where There’s an Essay: Common Grace in the Student Section
A confession: College football culture is an enigma to me. I watch it like some people watch animals at a zoo. I am delighted by all of it, but it feels very far from me. I grew up in the Northeast, where the college football teams are a fun distraction on weekends, but they are not central to campus life itself like they are in the SEC.
Because of a podcast I’ve listened to in recent years, I’ve learned a lot about the culture around the Texas A&M Aggies. I’d wager that their culture runs about as deep as it can, though I know other teams do much of the same. There is a week of learning for freshmen each year, where they learn the songs, the symbols, the hand signals, and the stories surrounding being an Aggie. Every Friday night before a home game, you can go to the stadium and do “Midnight Yell” with other fans. The student section stands through every game — the entire game — because they are the “12th man.” There is a celebrity dog1. There are rings and things you do with rings. There is too much to write here. (Here is a website if you want to spend more time on this.)
Recently a friend was talking about the modern tendency to say “I’m spiritual, but I’m not religious.” He made a reference to the common phrase “it was a spiritual experience.” You’ve heard that one, right? It’s often used to describe a transcendent experience — perhaps like the student section at an Aggies game, or as my friend said, a Coldplay concert.
We might casually observe “it’s like a cult” in any of these cases. Devotion to a band or a team can take on religious fervor very easily if you give it enough time and effort. The fact that you have other people around you makes you feel less crazy for your devotion. There’s a comfort, a common grace, in being part of the engaged, excited crowd. There’s a thrill of recognition when you find some people “like you.”
It’s why Jeep owners have their own little greetings. It’s why soccer fans have their songs. It’s why parents tell their children the same family stories they heard as children. It’s part of being “one of us.”
But there truly is a “spiritual experience” to be had in cases such as these. Humans were made for connection — they were made to be part of a whole. So we’re not too far off when we recognize the joy and warmth that come from being one of a multitude. I’m reminded of Paul’s description of that “crowd,” the church, in Ephesians chapter 4:
And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.
Whether it be a college football fanbase or a crowd at a concert, these gatherings serve as a signpost to us that we are one of many. There are no solo Christians; the Bible does not give us this option. We are to take our place amongst the multitude, scrappy and enthusiastic, filling our role.
“These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
Lewis, The Weight of Glory
For the Anglophiles
Today we learn from the BBC about When Britain was Gripped by “Fairy-Mania.”
Reads & Listens of the Week
Self-care is What We Do to Heal from the Internet: “Taken as a whole, this list of self-care techniques barely conceals the fact that it’s a normal regiment for the individual who is not trapped online.”
Elon Musk is always in the news these days, it seems. The author of the forthcoming biography, Walter Isaacson, talks to the WSJ here about Musk’s reported “demon mode.”
Some good reminders here of 3 Reasons It’s Hard to Set Our Minds on Things Above. “it’s essential to examine our hearts and assess the primacy of the stories that shape our lives.”
As a person who enjoys movies, I found this article about Rotten Tomatoes very interesting. “If it sounds like a conflict of interest for a movie-review aggregator to be owned by two companies that make movies and another that sells tickets to them, it probably is.”
Children should be brought up, too, to perceive that a miracle is not less a miracle because it occurs so constantly and regularly that we call it a law; that sap rises in a tree, that a boy is born with his uncle’s eyes, that an answer that we can perceive comes to our serious prayers; these things are not the less miracles because they happen frequently or invariably, and because we have ceased to wonder about them.
-Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education
If the dog barks during any class it is attending, the class is immediately dismissed.
Good newsletter right here
Kelly, thank you for this. It is so such and good for the soul!