5 Quick Things #324 🪴

making sense of suffering, anxiety is fixable, watching what we watch, & cereal

Hey there,

Happy Good Friday — and yes, happy, even though it always feels strange to say that.

“God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing—or should we say ‘seeing’? there are no tenses in God—the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is ‘host’ who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and ‘take advantage of’ Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.”

-C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Crown of Thorns, by Jeremy Matick (2017)

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5 Quick Things ☕️

1. It may seem like a strange tradition, but it’s actually a fairly long and one with a purpose: on Good Friday, hear a story or two about someone’s personal suffering. These stories remind us not only of the why of Christ’s suffering—that this world is not all there is, thanks to the resurrection—but that he also walks with us and shares our current, personal suffering. The cross makes sense of suffering. If you need that story today, here’s Kristine Nicole Mauss’: “In order to be made like Jesus we have to walk what he walked: abandonment, having no place to lay his head, being stripped and laid bare, experiencing the evils of this world, struggling with the day-to-day. We are not only made like Him but we are then able to relate to Him. He can come to us and say, ‘I know what you’re feeling, I’ve walked that too…’ and we can go to Him and say, ‘I know what you’re feeling, I’ve walked that too…’”

2. I know I linked to Jon Haidt of After Babel’s new book in last week’s letter, but I can’t help but mention his work again… I loved this conversation he had with Bari Weiss about why — and more importantly, what to do about — Gen Z’s insane rate of anxiety. Really, really good and important stuff.

3. This letter from Rachel Joy Welcher to her young daughter is so true (and side note: this is a lovely way to use the Substack platform!)—and while we didn't do it perfectly, I'll say that now that we have all teens, we have reaped some of the benefits of being rather vigilant. It’s genuinely a joy to watch legit good things with our kids now, partly because we made an effort to not just protect them from bad stuff, but also cultivate good taste in them—not in a hoity-toity way, more in a what-actually-is-good-art? way. I'm grateful we went through the (sometimes annoying) effort.

4. Even though here in the Catholic Church in the West we don’t formally celebrate the Annunciation this year until March 8 (because of Holy Week), it was technically this past week and it’s an essential, pivotal moment in history for us all to recognize. I love Kristin Haakenson’s ideas for celebrating Mary’s ‘yes’ within community. Annunciation waffles? Yes, please.

5. And finally, what a delightful tradition from Maile Silva! And a great idea if you’re scrambling as to what to leave out for your children besides the expected Easter baskets: “In our family, we don’t do Easter baskets. It has nothing to do with shunning pagan rituals or anything so thought out as that. It’s simply because my mother-in-law owns a candy shop, thus trying to compete with the Easter baskets she provides each year is a losing battle.”

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Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📻

The Bitter & Sweet playlist — just a few more plays until Sunday!

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Quotable 💬

“Let all this be rightly weighed in your mind: as he was once fixed to the cross in every part of his body for you, so he may now be fixed in every part of your soul.”

-St. Augustine

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You've got three hours to spend in a museum by yourself. Which kind are you going to? 🖼

This question stemmed from a conversation with my son, where we shared the recognition that many times the best museums bleed categories. For instance, is a natural history museum a science or history museum? Both, I’d say. And clearly most art museums are history as well—what else would you call any sort of work done before last week?

That’s why I’m going with history museum for my choice—it covers them all. (I’ve actually been in this situation a few times, particularly in London. I’ve chosen the Victoria & Albert Museum, which I say is decidedly history, as well as the National Gallery, which is clearly art.)

• Art: 56.3%

• History: 35.7%

• Science: 8.1%

Find this week’s poll here.

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Quick Links 🔗

• 📐Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

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ICYMI 🗝

Subscribers, join in on the most recent Grat Chat — it’s arguably my favorite thing we do every month on The Commonplace!

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Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

The feast of Eastertide is fifty days long (!) in the liturgical calendar — what’s one small life-giving way you can regularly “feast” for the next few months?

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Have a good weekend,

- Tsh

p.s. Um, how is this even a question? (My only response: Why stop at one month?)