I don’t like doing what I’m no good at. Probably a common sentiment. We gravitate toward activities that come easily to us and avoid those that don’t. For instance, as an English major, it’s my duty to despise math, and despise it I do. Now, since I don’t like doing math I won’t be all that interested in hearing a mathematician speak. If I don’t care, I won’t bother trying to understand. And as I explained in my Ender’s Game post, there can be no love without understanding.
Now it’s all well and good for me to treat math like the plague and pay it no mind, but what if the same holds true for my relationships? To whom do I give my attention, and what are the consequences if that attention wavers, or worse, is diverted solely toward myself?
You could summarize my opening paragraph by saying, you love things you’re good at. As far as that claim applies to disciplines like writing and mathematics, I think that’s true. Even if you’re your only validation, a love for a discipline has to be rooted in some sense of fulfilled purpose. You put work in and you get something meaningful out of it. Caring attention to your chosen craft comes as a result.
Let’s translate ‘you love things you’re good at’ to a form that applies to personal relationships. You love people you’re good for and are good for you. There’s a similar sense of fulfilled purpose in caring for someone as there is in excelling at some discipline. The advantage relationships have is they can love you back. Love is reciprocated.
What is love may be the chorus of a certain 90s song by Haddaway, but it’s a question worth asking. In the previous paragraph I wrote love to mean an action, something you do for others because of what’s been for you. This is called agape love, or brotherly love.
First though, I want to introduce a film that will provide a possible answer to what I like to call, the Haddaway Question.
Two Birds
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the true story of Chris McCandless and how he sought to create a more attractive fiction for himself by changing his name to Alex Supertramp and living life on his own terms in Alaska. He was trying to define himself from within himself. Chris’s female counterpart is Christine McPherson from Greta Gerwig’s 2017 film, Lady Bird. As Christine tells her drama teacher when he questions why her nickname, “Lady Bird,” is in quotes: “Well, I gave it to myself. It’s given to me, by me.” You can think of her disassociating her given name from her identity as emblematic of her deeper desire to experience a life apart from what’s been given to her. For most of the movie, Christine is doing her best to separate herself from home and family without understanding the role they play in her life. Only after leaving for college is she free to feel the indelible marks left by affection for the familiar.
The core of the film though, is the relationship between a mother who is overbearing and a daughter who is rebellious and how they come to terms. Watch the opening scene to get a picture of their dynamic.
Dysfunctional to be sure, but what has to be one of the rawest most realistic mother-daughter relationships put to screen. Their first three exchanges do so much to establish their dynamic.
Take the very first one:
“Do I look like I’m from Sacramento?”
“You are from Sacramento.”
Christine is concerned about appearances. Marion is concerned about the truth. Christine is visionary. Marion is pragmatic. This dynamic is reinforced multiple times throughout the car ride. When Christine stresses her name as “Lady Bird,” Marion says, “Well actually it’s not, and it’s ridiculous. Your name is Christine.” Christine wants to go to where ‘culture’ is, citing the aesthetic of New England writers in cabins. Her mother, again, always the pragmatist, tells her the truth, albeit through a pessimistic lens, citing tuition costs and Christine’s poor work ethic.
When communicating with someone you care deeply for it can be tempting to tell them what they want to hear. To affirm, encourage, and celebrate her every feeling may seem like the right response because you know your validation will make that person happy. But feelings should never be the barometer for happiness. If that were the case, the more frequently a person acts on their feelings, the happier they’ll be. That certainly hasn’t been my experience.
Do You Like Me?
That being said, we should ‘speak the truth in love,’ as Paul writes in Ephesians. Marion’s blunt, often derogatory statements about her daughter’s character are major contributors to Christine’s rebellion. She expresses to a friend how her mother “hates her.” Outside a thrift store dressing room, after a series of ill-fitting dresses elicit criticisms from Marion, Christine asks her mother directly, “Do you like me?” Marion responds, “Of course I love you.”
“But do you like me?”
Is there a difference between being loved and being liked? We seem to use the words interchangeably after all. I say I love pizza. I also say I love my mom. Hopefully I say one more often than I do the other. In all seriousness, to ‘like’ something is to derive pleasure from it. So to be liked is someone taking pleasure from your company. To be loved is someone sacrificing that pleasure for your continued benefit. It’s saying I might not always enjoy being around you, but I know what’s best for you and I’m committed to getting you across that finish line.
Not to say loving someone is unpleasurable, but your purpose in being around that person is to foster their well-being, not for personal gratification (though gratification is the natural result of selfless love).
Look at John 3:16, the Bible’s most famous verse, “For God so loved that He gave His one and only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” God undoubtedly takes pleasure in His creation; why else would He have created us? But we aren’t saved because God likes us, we’re saved because he loves us. He loved us enough to send his son to die to give us the greatest gift we could ever receive.
Order from Chaos
Back to the thrift store dressing room for a second. When it comes down to it, Christine wants her mother to appreciate her presence. She wants to be recognized for what she’s doing right and not everything she’s doing wrong. Raise your hand if that’s you, right? We all want praise, we all want to be liked. Sometimes we seek the approval of others expecting to find the love that only God can give.
This threat of selfishness brings me to the opening scene’s second exchange.
“You don’t have to do that,” Christine says, catching her mother smoothing the hotel bed sheets.
“Well, it’s nice to make things neat and clean.”
Like I asked earlier, to whom, or what, do we give our attention? Marion fixes the hotel bed, then sits down beside her daughter and tucks loose hair behind Christine’s hair. She wants to make things “neat and clean.” More to the point, she wants to make Christine neat and clean. Order has to be created from the chaos, and for Marion to create order she must have control. Whether it’s reprimanding Christine for leaving her school uniform crumpled in one corner of the room or chastising her for thinking buying a magazine and reading in bed instead of going to the library is something they can afford to do, Marion’s overbearing tendencies stem from worries about money. Efficiency and thriftiness are the orders of the day, orders which inspire in Christine the desire to ‘live through something.’ In other words, she’s looking for the chaos that’s been denied her. So when her mother says in the opening scene, “You don’t care about anybody but yourself,” it’s an attack on what Christine wishes she could be: Lady Bird.
Nowhere is this rift more evident than in their discussion on college. Christine has her hopes set on attending a school in New York. Marion dismisses the wish as ridiculous because she couldn’t get in for one thing, and even if she did, they couldn’t afford the tuition. It’s a matter of order and chaos. The safe, affordable option of attending a local Sacramento school and the risky, unaffordable option of flying across the country to live through something different. The thought of Christine leaving breaks Marion’s heart, because for her, love is attention, and the only way she knows how to attend to Christine properly is to make her neat and clean and sensible. That would be impossible with her daughter three thousand miles away.
Hijacked Heaven
This idea of love as attention is something I want to spend a little time on. Later on in the movie there’s a line that stood out to me. Christine is talking to her college advisor. They’re reviewing her college application essay together, and the advisor comments:
“You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care.”
“Don’t you think they’re the same thing? Love and attention?”
It’s been said that the opposite of love isn’t hate but apathy.
I don’t like things I’m no good at. I don’t pay attention to what doesn’t interest me. It could exist or not exist and I wouldn’t care in the slightest. Take moths for example. I don’t feel strongly one way or another about them. They don’t bother me, I don’t bother them. I’m apathetic. Mosquitoes on the other hand irritate me to no end. Whenever I hear the tell-tale buzz I’m paying attention to its every move, daring it to come closer so I can make liberal use of my swatter.
Silly example maybe, but my point is that hate and love share a common element: attention. One of the reasons hate is so damaging is because it takes from the places that should be fed into. When we hate, we orient ourselves around another person–think of tracking a mosquito’s every move–not to give part of yourself for their well-being but to take, whether that be an emotional toll or a physical one. It’s raising your arm not to wave but to wack.
In order to reach the emotional depths necessary for hate, one needed to have an expectation that things were going to be better, that they ought to have been better. God hates sin because sin separates us from God. He created us perfect in the garden only for us to rebel and ruin what God had called good.
For us mortals, hate can be the result of hijacked expectations. We’re driving with Garden-of-Eden-blinders on, expecting world peace and harmonious relationships, when we’re overtaken by the cruel realities of living in a fallen world. The gap between expectation and reality, between good and evil, becomes too wide for us to accept, and so we become angry and learn to hate the world.
Stand By For A Fighter Pilot
There’s a passage from one of my favorite authors, Pat Conory, that illustrates this point well. I didn’t go into this post expecting to include this, but this passage has been on my mind recently and it relates well to the topic of turbulent parent-child relationships. Humor me as I quote the last few paragraphs of The Great Santini, a semi-autobiographical novel about a Marine’s son learning to break free from his abusive father’s shadow.
“And can one boy who has said ten thousand times in secret monologues, “I hate you. I hate you,” as his father passed him, can this boy approach this singing God and can he look into the eye of God and confess this sin and have that God say to him in the thunder that is perfect truth that the boy has not come to talk to him about the hatred of his father, but has come to talk about mysteries that only gods can interpret, that only gods can translate? Can there be a translation by this God all strong and embarrassed, all awkward and kind? Can He smile as He says it? How wonderful the smile of God as he talks to a boy. And the translation of a boy screaming “I hate you. I hate you” to his father who cannot hear him would be simply for such a God. Simple, direct, and transferable to all men, all women, all people of all nations of the earth.
But Ben knew the translation and he let God off with a smile, let him go back to his song, and back to his flowers on River Street. In the secret eye behind his eyes, in Ben’s true empire, he heard and saw and knew.
As for the flight-jacketed boy on the road to Atlanta, he filled up for the first time, he filled up even though he knew the hatred would return, but for now, he filled up as if he would burst. Ben Meecham filled up on the road to Atlanta with the love of his father, with the love of Santini.”
Pat Conroy, The Great Santini
In his actual auto-biography, Death of Santini, Pat Conroy shares how he wept for a long time after writing this scene. Whether it be catharsis or grief for a reality that could never be, Pat writes,
“I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred-page novel just because I needed to love my father. It never occurred to me that I was born with a need to love my dad. It seemed like a madman’s fantasy that my father could ever bring himself to love me.”
Pat Conroy, The Death of Santini
In a lecture C. S. Lewis gives on the The Four Loves, he says:
“To receive a love that is purely a gift, which bears witness solely to the lovingness of the giver and not at all to our loveliness is a severe mortification. We desperately need to receive such love from God or from fellow creatures, but we don’t naturally want to. Our necessities and our wishes are in conflict.”
C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Pat Conroy recognises this gift of love that he’s received. “It never occurred to me that I was born with a need to love my dad.” We don’t expect or even want unconditional love because we know it’s not something we can earn. It grates against our prideful instincts. Yet we need it just the same.
I think Pat was so distraught after writing this final scene because it demonstrates this gap between expectation and reality, of what ought to be–a loving father who is loved by his son–and what is–an abusive father who’s earned nothing but hate . . . but one that Pat feels the need to love anyway.
What makes Pat’s feelings translatable from hate to love is the attention he gives his father. Always standing by for a fighter pilot, always ready to protect his family from his father’s violent urges. His whole childhood has revolved around Santini. Breaking free is not as easy, or as desirable, as it first appeared.
Homeward Bound
One can draw milder comparisons to Christine’s attitude toward her mother and Sacramento. Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird’s director, had this to say about her intention behind making the film. “My intention was to make something about what home means and what family means and how it doesn’t really come into focus until you’re leaving.”
“You ready to go home?” Marion asks in her third line of the film.
“Ready,” Christine says.
The next hour and a half of the movie depicts her trying to sensationalize herself. Her attention shifts from Sacramento, which she finds unimportant, her best friend, who she sees as a competitor, and from her mother, who she finds infuriating.
Her best friend Julie calls her out. “You can’t do anything unless you’re the center of attention, can you?” Might it be that her mother conditioned her to seek attention as a form of validation? Christine finds her mother’s constant nagging infuriating, but it’s that back and forth that connects them, just like violence is what connects Pat to his father. Both Pat and Christine long to be free of this cancerous form of love, but they can’t kill the cancer without also ‘killing’ the host.
When Marion learns of Christine’s intention to attend college in New York she cuts off all communication with her. No more attention, no more love. “Talk to me,” Christine begs tearfully. She desperately wants her mother to acknowledge her plea for forgiveness. No longer the focus of her mother’s attention, she suddenly feels what it’s like to be separate from love.
In a heartbreaking scene, Marion allows Christine to board the plane to New York without getting out of the car to say goodbye. She regrets her decision almost immediately, but it’s too late. Christine is gone.
Here is Lady Bird’s final scene. It’s remarkably similar to Into the Wild’s final scene in terms of the character’s inner revelations.
There’s a poem by T. S. Elliot called “Little Gidding.” Here’s a few lines.
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time"
I think that’s what is happening inside Christine’s head when she walks into the church and listens to the choir. She is transported back home, to her Catholic school, and the familiar feelings associated with Sacramento. In the words of Eliot, she is ‘knowing the place for the first time.’
The city that she paid attention to all her life, and the woman who paid attention to her, suddenly seem more special. Distance makes the heart grow fonder is the oft repeated line, but I think it’s deeper than that. Christine gets what she’s always wanted at the end of the movie. She’s studying in New York, able to craft a whole new identity for herself. But the city isn’t Sacramento. The guy she was at the party with before she wound up in the hospital asked where she was from.
“Sacramento.”
“What?”
“San Francisco.”
“Oh, that’s a great city.”
Home takes on a new meaning. She doesn’t have to look like she’s from Sacramento. Just being from there is what really matters. Time enough to pay attention and learn to love the details. That’s what the car ride is about, appreciating the markers of familiarity that create the bond of love. The ultimate expression of this is when Christine introduces herself by her true name. “It’s the name you gave me, and it’s a good one.”
Created to Love
I’ll wrap this up with a quote from Christopher Watkin’s Biblical Critical Theory. “To be freed from attachment and constraint is to forfeit the possibility of ever knowing love . . . love’s open secret . . . is that there’s a greater, richer freedom in the love relationship than could ever be experienced in the serial encounters of noncommitment.”
To whom should we commit ourselves? To whom should we give our attention?
Well it probably shouldn’t be yourself. It makes sense that the more self-conscious you are, the more miserable you’ll be. When we put ourselves as the center of our attention, we’ll push people away and be consumed by our own dark thoughts. We become like an echo chamber for our deepest convictions. When we define ourself from within ourself, we exhaust ourselves, become sick of ourselves, and yearn for escape, which, ultimately, is still in service of, yes, ourself.
Start paying attention to others. Focus on the little details that you always take for granted.
Something my youth pastor said stuck out to me. You come to know people by their quirks. It may be a little awkward while you’re getting to know them. Their idiosyncrasies stand out. But as your relationship grows, their mannerism become part of them, and you can’t imagine them as them without those distinctive traits.
Commit to others and find God’s love. Pay attention to what is good and find fulfillment.
“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God.”
1 John 4: 7-8
My friends, let us know Him.