Article
Creed
Easter
5 min read

Barbie’s rift in the universe is no doll play

How to heal it at Lent, with some help from AA too.

Julie connects Christian spirituality with ordinary life in Wenatchee, Washington State, where she teaches and writes.

Barbie stands on a balcony and waves while looking out over her city.
Barbie in Barbieland.
Warner Bros.

The Barbie movie opens with Stereotypical Barbie having a Perfect Day in Barbieland – until she has an intrusive thought about death. Everything screeches to a halt (even the music). This intrusive thought is about to ruin everything for Barbie, unless she can restore the rift in the universe (and the now resulting threat of cellulite) that it caused.  

Christians begin one of their most sacred seasons precisely here: facing thoughts of death. Refusing to name them as “intrusive” but instead acknowledging them, blessing them, and signing peoples’ foreheads with ashes as a reminder that they too will die. On Ash Wednesday, the worldwide church doesn’t rush forward to soothe this fear and move on to happier thoughts, but rather turns to face it and make the facing of it sacred. Annually, again and again. Barbie’s rift in the universe is no doll play. 

We create our own trances not only with alcohol, but with culturally acceptable addictions like obsessive thinking, performance hits, binge-watching, TikTok scrolling.

The earliest Christians began their anticipation of Easter by taking time to fast during the 40-hour lead-up to the day, knowing the psychology of short-term deprivation for long-term transformation. They wanted to anticipate the day of their spiritual liberation (Easter) from fear and death, with not only their minds but also their bodies. It was a fully integrated longing. (What is easier to feel – a hunger in one’s soul or body?) They knew the role of their body in their spirituality and discovered that often the body helped the transformation of their hearts. By the fourth century, these culturally specific fasts for Easter merged into a international consensus of forty days. Forty days which began with ... meditations on death. Lent begins by facing our intrusive thoughts of death – the rift not only in the universe, but in each of our souls as we pursue death in one thousand little ways daily. Things which, using the language of Alcoholics Anonymous and the Twelve Steps, we have become powerless to control. We create our own trances not only with alcohol, but with culturally acceptable addictions like obsessive thinking, performance hits, binge-watching, TikTok scrolling. None of us enjoy facing reality.  

And while freedom is at the top of our cultural priorities, for many of us it is not external things that limit our true freedom, but things internal to ourselves 

As Richard Rohr tells us, the old-fashioned language for addiction is “sin” – something we can’t seem to resist, change, and which perpetually has us in undertow. All of us, to an extent, are in the grip of some addiction, some thing we cannot change and that we continually choose to our own (and our deepest relationships’) destruction. Death and sin have always been held together in biblical poetry, because in many ways they are the same. We are all held in their grip. 

One of the most freeing things in AA is coming face to face with one’s powerlessness over addiction, to finally stop running from it. Step 1 says “We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.” But of course, there are other things we do to numb our pain. AA’s Twenty Questions regarding alcohol are a wonderful tool for diagnosing that neurotic thing lurking in the back of your mind as you read this article, and don’t want to face. Just fill in the blank: 

Has ____ ever damaged your primary relationships? 

Has ____ ever interfered with your work life? 

Do you ever ____ alone? 

For an alcoholic, the answers are easy: alcohol/alcohol/drink. But what about more socially acceptable numbing techniques: what about over-analysis? (Has thinking ever damaged your primary relationships – or interfered with your sleeping?) What about workaholism or an addiction to success? (Has an obsession with success ever damaged your primary relationships? Do you overwork to escape from worries or to build up your self-confidence?) Is there is something you do obsessively to relieve your anxiety, and is not working for you or those in your intimate sphere? Lent is the church’s annual invitation to take this obsession seriously, to stop making excuses, and to put yourself in an enforced recovery group with a bunch of other addicts for 40 days. Lent is not about restriction for its own sake, but freedom.  

Of course, you can just fast for 40 days to see if you can do it. You can do a “dry March” instead of a “dry January.” You can limit your screen time. Everyone knows the wisdom in these. But Lent is a call to the deeper freedom that these restrictions are for. Every spiritual tradition knows that without restriction, there can be no true freedom. (Every athlete knows this as well. Every musician. Every artist). And while freedom is at the top of our cultural priorities, for many of us it is not external things that limit our true freedom, but things internal to ourselves. Our freedom is not jeopardized by politics to the left or the right, but by the person looking at us in the mirror.  

To have our deepest hungers met, we have to clear away space. It is not a white-knuckling stunt.

Think of a time when you were in touch with your sense of being alive. Think of the feeling you have when watching a sunset. Or receiving the pure affection of a child. Think of that sense of happy satisfaction when you have just completed an unhurried project. Or a leisurely meal with friends. Or getting lost in a piece of music. Remember how experiences like this make you feel, and the feeling of being grounded and close to your true center.  

Now think of a time when you were cut off from your center but felt powerful – when you were able to get in the last word in a fight. Earned the top score. Rationalized why you were right. Were admired. Successful. Think of how different the energy is behind the first feeling and the second. Many traditions would associate the latter with the false self. The addicted self. The sub-self.  

Lent is about discerning each. Lent must be guided by our memory of freedom, as well as an awareness of what is keeping us from it. It is choosing a temporary restriction for the sake of being connected to our center, where God our Source is waiting for us. In the words of a famous addict from the fourth century, Augustine, “I was searching for you outside of me, but you were within me!”  

Another word for restriction is surrender  – letting go, embracing limits. (And as the Twelve Steppers know, whatever you let go of has claw marks on it). To have our deepest hungers met, we have to clear away space. It is not a white-knuckling stunt. Nor is it baptizing our culture’s fetish with weight loss or iron-man self-control. Lent helps us remember what it felt like when we felt absolutely alive, and to take clear steps towards recovering this sense. We might just find God waiting for us at our center when we do.  

  

Article
Community
Creed
Sin
3 min read

In the city of broken windows

Our fractures become fractal, breaking bigger and bigger windows.

Jamie is Associate Minister at Holy Trinity Clapham, London.

a multi-paned window mural shows people while amid it are broken window panes.
A broken window mural, Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital.
Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

We weren't expecting a knock on the door from our next-door neighbour on New Year's Day. It was pouring with rain, and said rain was pouring into the boot of our car, with the window smashed. Thanks for letting us know. Annoying, inconvenient and expensive. But just how expensive is a smashed window? 

The 'broken windows theory', that visible signs of crime, antisocial behaviour and civil disorder begets more serious crimes, was introduced American sociologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling: 

'Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one un-repaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)' 

This is not an academic theory. Where I live in London, i took the local council 1,315 days to replace a local resident's broken window. The sense of decay extends beyond borders, with fewer than half the residents thinking they live on clean streets, with rubbish and weeds gone unchecked. It is also one of the worst boroughs in London for varying types of crime, and over the past few years often being the worst. It's hard not to think the little things and the big things are linked. In other news, the now-resigned CEO of the council has pleaded guilty to drink-driving, failing to stop after a car crash and driving without insurance, and not guilty to possession of cocaine. 

Our problems in society all found their greenhouses somewhere inside of us.

Crime is on the move. As homes have become more difficult to burgle, crime has been pushed out onto the streets with shoplifting and bike theft. The Economist recently reported that 'stolen bikes and e-bikes have also become the getaway vehicle of choice for thieves, according to the Merseyside police. In one way or another, some 80 per cent of acquisitive crime in Liverpool involves a nicked bike.' It's going to be fascinating to see the wider impact, but simply by stopping suspicious riders and marking thousands of bikes across Liverpool, reported thefts have fallen by 46 per cent between July 2023 and July 2024 compared with the previous year. 

These problems can't be solved by overstretched police or the council. Everyone's responsible so no one's to blame. Practical implementations of the broken windows theory have not been without controversy. But for those of us who live in urban environments, to look out from our homes is to see a city of broken windows. The impact is more than weeds 'uprooting' pavements: it's an uprooted society. Correlation and causation might be blurred, but that's the point. In Christianity, sin is understood as having a polluting effect. Just as fossil fuels in China will pollute the atmosphere for someone in Scotland, sin is not hermetically sealed. Our problems in society all found their greenhouses somewhere inside of us. 

Jesus said 'what comes out of you is what makes you 'unclean'. For from within, out of your hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and they make you 'unclean'.' They pollute our lives. And they pollute the world around us. 

The Christian church, much like many institutions, is reckoning with prioritising competency at the expense of character. Little sins are not so little when they permeate and promote a culture where certain sins are permissible. Our fractures become fractal, breaking bigger and bigger windows. 

All this sounds pretty bleak and Dickensian when of course there's always another city to see: full of life, vibrancy and joy. But we'd be wilfully ignorant to ignore the disorder of broken windows and broken lives all around us. It might overwhelm us, or our eyes might glaze over as we see those broken windows. But we'd do well not to ignore the broken windows within us too. For our sake, and the sake of our streets.