Becoming the Given: Christian Belonging After the Therapeutic

This is a lightly edited transcript of my remarks given at the Lewis House at the University of Kentucky earlier this week.

I want to begin this evening with a poem from a great son of this university, the poet, essayist, and novelist Wendell Berry:

Let’s pray and then jump in:

O God, you know us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright: Grant to us such strength and protection as may support us in all dangers and carry us through all temptations, through Jesus Christ Our Lord, Amen.

In his science fiction short story 17776 the writer Jon Bois imagines a future in which human beings have inexplicably stopped being born and also have stopped getting sick and dying. Not only that, they have developed technologies that protect them from any bodily harm. So if you decide to jump out a tenth floor window, these small robots called “nanos” will sweep under you and catch you so you don’t hurt yourself. 

In other words, Bois’s imagined world in one which both suffering and, in one sense, scarcity have been abolished–people don’t get sick and they don’t die, so you don’t really need to worry about food or shelter because you aren’t going to die anyway. 

So: What do people do with this new utopia? The answer is that they invent and play increasingly elaborate games of football.

For example, in one game Washington State and New Mexico field teams that play on a field that is precisely 53 yards wide, like a normal football field, but the endzones are marked off by the Washington/Canada border and the New Mexico/Mexico border. And there are still only 11 players on each team. So the two teams go up and down the “field” which is 53 yards wide by two million yards long, cutting across mountains, deserts, and bodies of water.

In another game, a running back who is about to be tackled decides to run up into a tornado so that she can be thrown several miles away, thereby escaping her pursuers.

You get the idea: New people aren’t being born. No one gets sick. No one dies. All they have is eternity stretching before them–and what they do is play football.

The obvious question you are probably wondering is “given all eternity without any fear of death or sickness, why would people play football?” Here I want to quote Bois’s response–and this is from a conversation taking place between two of the main narrators in which the older of the two explains to the other why people play football.

(The Hubble telescope) gave people stunning images of the cosmos, an endlessly bright and colorful universe for us to explore and conquer. It didn’t turn out that way. Humanity tried and tried to send themselves to other solar systems. In 3143, they succeeded, and found… nothing. No life. Nothing interesting. A bunch of planets full of rocks and gas. They then deployed probes to visit other stars in the Milky Way galaxy. But do you know how many stars are in their galaxy?

There are 250 billion. Specifically, there are 257,880,113,002 stars. You have to use a minimum of 900 pounds of metal to build a deep-space probe. So if you want to send one to each star, that’s nearly 120 billion tons of metal. That demonstrates the enormity of the galaxy, yes? We can’t visit each star because we literally don’t have enough stuff to build it. We couldn’t mine that much without seriously damaging our planet or another planet. So we built what we could, and sent them out there. They found nothing even the slightest bit interesting. Everything was as we guessed it was when we saw it through the telescopes.

It was the grandest anticlimax imaginable. It shattered what people thought of themselves and their destinies. The letdown was, in itself, sort of a brilliant wonder of its own. The space probes are all out here. We’re still out here, ready to tell Ground Control if we see something. That is a fantasy, because we won’t. And if we do, it will be on a scale of time so impossibly vast that it may as well be never.

People had a choice. They could continue wandering through the endless darkness, an absence of everything they loved, an endless void of disappointment and loneliness… or they could look down, and embrace what they always had and loved.

In another passage, the same narrator explains further:

I think they’re doing the best they can with immortality. A human being will rarely admit this to you, but they tend to be terrified of living forever. They were born and raised with the understanding that their lives would end. They’ve achieved everything they wanted to achieve, all the ills that plagued them.

And now boredom is their only enemy. And they get up in the morning and fight it every day of their eternal lives. Recreation and play sustain them. Football sustains them. And if you find yourself in a football game that’s such a gargantuan task, that seems undefeatable, that will claim eons of your time and passion? I think that makes you one of the lucky ones.

What I want to suggest is that Bois’s imagined story is simply a kind of exaggerated, absolutized version of the world we already have. 

Consider: We have been to the Moon. We have eradicated or learned to treat countless diseases and maladies that have, in the past, killed us. We produce amounts of energy and calories every year that are on a scale beyond anything that someone living 500 years ago could have imagined. Without overstating it, there is part of me that thinks if you took someone from the 16th century, or perhaps from the 6th century, and showed them our world today, they might well regard it in the same way we regard the world of Bois’s story.

But if that’s true, why are so many of us so unhappy? Why do I see signs for suicide hotlines when I park on the roof of the parking garage that I use when I take my kids to the children’s museum? Why are there billboards on my street encouraging everyone to carry narcan so they can save the life of someone who is ODing? Why is there a growing genre of reported features documenting the increasingly heavy relational loads that people now ask technology to bear for them as they turn to AI bots for everything from ordinary daily encouragement to persevere in life to relationship advice to help with financial planning? Why have we made it so easy to engage in activities that give a surge of dopamine in the short-term but destroy us in the long-term? I am thinking of things like consuming pornography or gambling on sports. 

When I set Bois’s short story next to the world we encounter every day I cannot help thinking about the comedian Louis CK’s famous late night TV rant in which he listed out the technological marvels of our age before concluding, “everything’s amazing and no one is happy.”

This might seem an odd way to begin a discussion of the ubiquity of therapeutic rhetoric and beliefs in contemporary America, including the contemporary church. But I think it defines the context for us in which the therapeutic has emerged as a defining cultural influence. We have been given a world of comparative wealth and technical accomplishment and comfort, but this world tells us no stories to anchor us or help us make sense of our lives, to make sense of the opportunity and wealth afforded to us.

Here is how we might name the problem facing us: One of the primary ways we make sense of our lives, understand our own identities and how to live well, is through stories. This is the point made in the title of Berry’s forthcoming novel: Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story. I’ve experienced this in my own life. 

When I was in college I was about to graduate and needed some space to think and pray and just to have some quiet. So I drove out into the country late one night to go for a walk and look at the stars. It was January and the temperatures were around zero and, like an idiot, I got my car stuck on the shoulder of a gravel road 20 miles from my apartment and more than 30 miles from my parents place. After trying and failing to reach my roommates, I got my phone out and called my parents. By this time it was after midnight. After assuring my alarmed mother that I was fine and safe, she passed the phone to dad and after asking me where I was and telling me to stay in the car, he said he was on his way.

About 35 minutes later he pulled up, parked his truck in a better spot than I had, walked up to me, asked if I was OK and after I said yes he walked around my car, looked at my tires, shoveled some snow away, and then told me to start the car, put it in the lowest gear, and wait for him to tell me to slowly press the gas. He got into the snow on the passenger side of the car, opened the door, and braced his body against the frame of the car. “Give it some gas,” he said, and as I accelerated to push the car forward he pressed the car laterally with his shoulders. I fishtailed a bit and then was on the road. He walked around to the driver side of the car. I said “thanks.” “Can you get back into town?” he asked me. “Yes,” I said. He paused. Then continued: “Actually, do you know the service station on West O near the stadium?” “Yes,” I replied. “Why don’t you follow me there?” It was a question, but he wasn’t asking me. He was telling me. “OK,” I said.

So I followed him into town and when we got to the gas station he pulled over and parked. I followed him in, got out of my car and walked over to him and said “thanks” again. He laughed and said, “you should’ve seen the ways I got my car stuck when I was your age. My dad always came and got me. Just don’t do it again. You can get home from here, right?” I told him I could and he said he loved me and got back in the truck and drove home. Ten minutes later I was in my bedroom, feeling very stupid but also warm and relieved and ready for bed.

The “force” of a story like that is simple enough to understand: Being a father means that when someone in your family needs help and you’re able to do it, you go there and help, even if it means going out into zero degree weather at midnight. I have thought about that story many times in the years since and it has exercised a certain “force” on me in those moments when my own children need help. That is what stories do. They help us know the good and they give us the courage and drive to pursue it because we’ve already seen it done and so we know it can be done. That’s partially how my dad knew what to do, after all: He had seen his dad do it for him. What I was asking of him was not anything different than what he had once asked of his own father. All of this is normal and healthy.

The problem arises when we lose these stories. And, I think, that is the world we are living in now. One way of defining our cultural moment is that we have rejected given stories as being inherently tyrannical and unjust. This is the logic of retired Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy’s famous “Mystery of Life” passage in his 1992 opinion in Casey v Planned Parenthood when Kennedy said that, 

“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.” 

Another way of getting at the same dynamic is to say, as my friend Joseph Minich has in his work, that modernity is the simultaneous negotiation of all customs and traditions.

Put another way: The sources of meaning, identity, and rootedness are not regarded as things that help us know who we are and what we ought to do, but instead as overbearing tyrants who hinder us from discovering and manifesting our own individualized sense of meaning and purpose. The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, who perhaps articulated this framework better than anyone else in his lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” defined this state well when he said that people are “condemned to be free.”

What he means is that we are each of thrust into the world apart from our choosing and on our arrival here we find nothing to guide us. We are free. And, for Sartre, this is not a prison, even if it is a condemnation. It is emancipatory because it means each of us is fully responsible for ourselves, we make of our own lives what we will. Sartre’s sometimes friend Albert Camus comes to a similar conclusion in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in which he essentially accepts Sartre’s frame and even extends it, likening us Sisyphus, the figure of Greek mythology who, for his transgressions, is condemned by the gods to spend eternity pushing a boulder up hill only to watch it roll back down and have to go push it again. For Camus this is not hopelessness, for the struggle is the point. And so Camus ends by exhorting us to picture Sisyphus smiling, finding in the struggle itself a source of meaning and purpose.

What we are confronting today, I think, is what happens when many embrace Sartre and Camus’s calling–to live freely in the world, creating their own sense of meaning and purpose–and find that such a life cannot be sustained indefinitely because we are not made to construct identities out of nothing save our own desires and ambitions–all of which waver and flag and fail over time. One might say that the exhausted existentialist becomes a patient of the therapeutic. The therapeutic emerges as a solution to our fatigue and dismay at the impossibilities demanded of us by a world without meaning or stories. Which at last brings us to the core concern of this paper: How do we make sense of the ascent of therapeutic norms and discourses in our moment and how might Christians respond to it?

The Australian pastor Mark Sayers has defined the therapeutic in this way, using five diagnostic questions one might put to any system of belief about the world and questions of meaning:

What is the purpose of life? To feel peace.

What is sin? The causing of mental or emotional discomfort or pain.

What is the world? A dangerous place filled with pain, trauma, and discomfort. You’re seeking a smaller world where you don’t feel those things.

What is the attitude toward faith? It can be acceptable when used as a tool for personal peace. It’s utilitarian.

What is the solution to the moral ills of the world? Harm minimalization. Create a place that’s safe where harm will not be done.

We might describe the trajectory here in this way: Given forms of identity and meaning are discarded. A kind of vision question to create one’s own sense of significance and purpose is begun. When the world pushes back on that quest in ways that over time begin to seem insurmountable, the quester searches for help. But the help they want is not someone helping them adopt a form of life defined from outside and given to them. The help they want is how to best live out of their own chosen identity in a world that has proven itself to be dangerous and painful and riddled with trauma. If you want to understand how we have shifted from taking our questions and fears and distress to pastors (“shepherds”) and toward counselors instead, this it seems to be must at least be part of the answer.

The difficulty here is that the therapeutic–in this particular framework–is built atop an approach to the world that is inherently individualistic and hostile to given forms of identity. So if you are curious as to how the vocation of the therapist or counselor might relate to this topic, I think this is key to understand. 

There is such a thing as a trained professional who understands things like childhood development, mental illness, and so on and who serves as a kind of external witness to another person’s struggles and seeks to help them make sense of that as a person both outside that experience and uniquely equipped to understand and interpret it. A marriage counselor, for instance, might be able to recognize and understand certain dynamics in a marriage that a husband and wife miss simply because the counselor possesses expertise and experience that the couple lacks. In this way, the counselor is filling a role not unlike the one that a wise old aunt or grandfather might have in ages past–a person from the outside who, through their knowledge and experience, is able to offer guidance that the suffering person cannot offer themselves. This is different from what I–or Sayers or many others, such as the American sociologist Philip Rieff–mean when we talk about the triumph of the “therapeutic.” The former we can think of as a form of care and counsel. The latter is a kind of ideology that has grown out of the experiential gaps of older existentialism.

It’s important to be sufficiently precise here. If I’m correct and the therapeutic has emerged out of the spiritual void then its answers will be different from those of traditional religious belief systems. The traditional belief systems suggested some kind of end or goal to the human experience that was shared by all, but I do not think we have a belief in such a commonly shared end today. The therapeutic is not repudiating the existential idea that we make our own meaning, that we are left to ourselves to sort through the chaos and opportunity of our life.

Rather, the therapeutic is a kind of extension of it, an acknowledgement that such a life is immensely difficult and we need to be able to name the realities, internal and external, that thwart us in those goals and we need external support to help us actually successfully manifest our own sense of meaning and identity and purpose. Rieff at one point refers to the therapeutic as a "secular methodism." Put another way, rather than striving toward a common end together as defined by, say, religious belief or a shared familial life or the life of a common place, we now strive separately toward individualized ends while lamenting together the conditions and structures that thwart us in that pursuit. As my colleague at Mere Orthodoxy Ian Harber put it, “With nothing left outside of us to give us an identity, we have nothing left to identify with except for what is inside of us.”

What comes to unify us, then, is not the end to which we desire, but the maladies and evils that hinder us in pursuing our own separate ends. In other words, we have rejected the idea of an end, replaced it with a journey to nowhere, and the associational bonds we now have are the irritants and opposing forces we encounter on that journey. 

Several alarming things follow from this move.

First, identifying with a condition. The bonds of our associational life now shift toward something like one’s attachment style or an identification we feel with some form of mental illness. Yet this actually does not help us confront our condition because the condition has now become an aspect of our identity. Freddie de Boer, a socialist writer who suffers from severe bipolar and whose life was turned upside down by an especially bad depressive episode in 2016, writes,

This is what mental illness is, now, everything and anything except being sick, being unstable, being pathetic. When someone announces that they have depression, we nod along like they’ve told us their favorite baseball team. We slot it into our understanding of them: “Ah yes, she’s the one with depression, that’s her thing.” People call anxiety “my anxiety” the way you might talk about “my freckles” or “my soft spot for old sitcoms.” There’s a knowing little smile when someone admits they’re “kind of OCD,” as though it’s charming, as though a habit of fussing with the dishwasher is the same condition as being so debilitated by intrusive thoughts about germs that you wash your hands until the skin sloughs off. Please read my memoir about how my borderline personality diagnosis prompted me to take a globetrotting jaunt to a variety of picturesque locales where I learned lessons about life, love, and everything in between. Mental illness, after all, is only a character trait, an aesthetic, a posture.

Yet when someone’s depression leads them to ghost their friends for months, or when their mania makes them blow up a work meeting, or when their OCD makes it impossible for them to leave the house without hours of rituals, causing them to lose their job and fall into total financial ruin, well, then all of these woke, ableism-decrying people act blindsided. It’s not just surprise; it’s a sense of grievance. As if it’s somehow unfair when someone who has declared themselves to be mentally ill actually behaves that way.

What worries both de Boer and another writer, Freya India, is that suffering people are taught to reinterpret something intrusive and destructive, something that ought to be treated as being something essential to who a person is.

Second, I worry that the adoption of therapeutic categories to interpret life can be expanded so much so that ordinary human characteristics and qualities become maladies to be analyzed, defined, and treated. In the memorable phrase of Freya India, “no one has a personality anymore.” Here is how she expands on that:

In a therapeutic culture, every personality trait becomes a problem to be solved. Anything too human—every habit, every eccentricity, every feeling too strong—has to be labelled and explained. And this inevitably expands over time, encompassing more and more of us, until nobody is normal. Some say young people are making their disorders their whole personality. No; it’s worse than that. Now they are being taught that their normal personality is a disorder. According to a 2024 survey, 72% of Gen Z girls said that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” Only 27% of Boomer men said the same.

This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life, I think, to explain everything. Psychologically, scientifically, evolutionarily. Everything about us is caused, categorised, and can be corrected. We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, I think, ourselves.

We have lost the sentimental ways we used to describe people. Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful, not because you are scattered and interesting and secretly loved for never arriving on time, but because of ADHD. You are shy and stare at your feet when people talk to you not because you are your mother’s child, not because you are gentle and sweet and blush the same way she does, but autism. You are the way you are not because you have a soul but because of your symptoms and diagnoses; you are not an amalgam of your ancestors or curious constellation of traits but the clinical result of a timeline of childhood events. Every heartfelt, annoying, interesting piece of you, categorised. The fond ways your family describe you, medicalised. The pieces of us once written into wedding vows, read out in eulogies, remembered with a smile, now live on doctors’ notes and mental health assessments and BetterHelp applications. We are not people anymore. We have been products for a long time, and these are our labels.

Third, a reliance upon force to help you manifest your true self.

A correlate to this point is that if you accept the therapeutic frame as defined by Sayers, then the world is chaotic and dangerous and out to get you and some kind of agent or power is needed to save you from that. The assumption becomes, as I once heard a friend put it, that it is not safe for you to exist in the world–for the real you as you internally understand yourself. 

Note here that I am not talking about, say, a medical intervention of some kind to treat depression. Rather, I am talking about the public space and how we encounter one another in it. The more sympathetic way of framing “politically correct” speech, after all, is that it is a question of recognition: Am I recognized as my true self in the communities that I am part of? And to a large degree this is a deeply human problem that concerns all of us: We all desire to be recognized–not in the sense of receiving some award or prestige, but simply in the sense of being known. The difficulty comes when you presuppose that the world is chaotic and unsafe, perhaps especially so for someone like you because of some internal identity you strongly feel or experience, then a precondition for your being recognized in the world is some kind of act of force to push back the chaos and create a safe space for you to be your true self.

One implication of this, because the American left tends to be far more influenced by therapeutic forms than the right, is that an ironic alliance developed between corporate capitalism and the therapeutic left in which HR departments became essential to creating that sort of place of safety for workers enmeshed with therapeutic ideas and beliefs. The difficulty with this is that force is a capricious thing, as we have seen in the past several years. The same forces that could create a kind of corporate culture normed by therapeutic values can destroy it. 

This raises an alarming final question: If a person comes to believe that the expression of their authentic self is impossible, that they will never receive the recognition they desire, that they will never be able to live their own truth, what do they do?

After the Therapeutic

Consider another popular account of heaven produced in the last ten years: The final episode of the NBC sitcom The Good Place. Without explaining the entire show to you, suffice to say in this episode the characters are all in Heaven–which is depicted as a kind of endless parade of pleasures set at one’s fingertips–and they find that Heaven is kind of boring after awhile. They desire escape—and in the show the way they escape is they walk through an archway in the woods and their being is dissolved into the universe. Here is how Chidi, one of the show’s main characters, explains it:

The point I want to draw out here is that whether it’s Bois’s absurdist scifi story or the more mainstream humor of The Good Place, the thing that links them together is the idea that even shorn of the things that frustrate and hurt us, the world ultimately exhausts itself; it becomes boring and tiresome. In Bois’s account, we cope with that through games of increasingly absurd design. In The Good Place, we deal with it by dissolving our own distinct personal self and then somehow telling us that it is good or desirable because what really mattered all along was Being Itself. The point that links them is a certain disappointment with the world and a need to find some way of escaping it or coping with it.

The way I want to close tonight is to suggest, in the phrase of Berry, that perhaps we have thought up the wrong world. We have thought up a world that exists, as Hartmut Rosa says, “as a point of aggression” which threatens us and must be brought under control so that we can carry out our project of identity creation. And as we have found this work hard and unrewarding and alienating we have cultivated new theories of the person and of society to help us cope. But what if the world isn’t a point of aggression, or isn’t purely a point of aggression?

Two nights ago I was driving in late to the guest house I’m staying in at Asbury University a little way down the road from here. I was relying on mapping software on my phone to help me find my way and it took me, as it sometimes does, via a rather circuitous route. I was driving down narrow, meandering roads, flanked by ancient trees, winding through Jessamine County. And then I came round a bend and in the eastern sky, framed by hills and trees, was an orange waxing gibbous moon, sitting perfectly between the hills to my left. I stopped the car–perhaps not safe but it was after midnight on a winding rural Kentucky road and no one was out. And I just sat there for a moment to enjoy the sight. It crossed my mind that I hadn’t seen a moon quite like that before–we have no hills that size or, frankly, trees that old in southeast Nebraska. I was experiencing the moon, this celestial body I had known my entire life, in an entirely new way. And it further struck me that I was seeing the same moon that Mr. Berry, a hero of mine, has seen countless times from his own place in this hilly country that is his native place. And it struck me further that the same moon I was now seeing and that Mr. Berry has seen and loved is what the many people who came before him in this place and made a way for him had also seen and loved.

What I am trying to say is simply this: When we experience the world as a threat to ourselves or as an alienating thing, perhaps the deficiency is not in the world, or not only within the world, but also within us. Chesterton remarked once that children delight to see the same thing done over and over and perhaps God causes the sun to rise each day because he is like a child and it is his joy to say to the sun “again!” Perhaps, Chesterton said, in our sin we have become older than our creator.

If there is a way of reckoning with the therapeutic, I do not think it is with a simple dismissal of anything adjacent to therapy culture–be that mental health diagnoses, which are often all too real, or counseling help, which is often badly needed. Rather, I think we do this best by questioning the latent narrative that undergirds much of what might be called therapeutic culture, even if discrete therapeutic practices can be disambiguated from that culture. The narrative that justifies and grounds therapeutic culture is one in which prevailing stories about the ends of human life, its purposes and meaning, have been deconstructed and displaced. In Rieff’s terms, the cultural superego has lost its focal point or purpose. The therapeutic asserts itself as a means of helping us reckon with what it is to live in a world of chaos lacking purpose or belonging.

I think, to borrow once more from Berry, this is an exercise in thinking up the wrong world. And what is needed is a turn back toward what Marilynne Robinson has called “the givenness of things.” But there is a wrinkle here we must recognize, or else we will end up sounding like mere sentimentalists or romantics, encouraging people who feel radically alienated from the world to look at the world and find joy and beauty in it. That alone will not be enough, I fear, in an age where so many of our neighbors and friends are spiritual orphans of one kind or another.

What I want to suggest is that we must become someone else’s given, we must become a forgotten or neglected place’s given. We can, ourselves, in some sense become that givenness in our relationship to our neighbors and our homes. I fully recognize that there is something paradoxical or ironic in this–isn’t the point of something being “given” that it is not up to you to produce it? But I think this is the wrong approach. 

A condition of creaturely life in a tragic world is that there are few good, true, or beautiful things that cannot be overthrown or destroyed. To the extent that we can speak of receiving good given things in our own lives that is often only because our elders preserved them and gave them to us. It may be the case that in an age of spiritual orphanhood it is our calling to retrieve and repair those given creaturely goods so that they can become a home or anchor of sorts for those who come after us.

This, of course, is precisely what I think Mr. Berry has done: The poem I read to begin tonight is a story of destruction and unmaking. And Mr. Berry has witnessed much of that first hand. But in his imagination, in his affections, and in his written work he has kept alive the memory of these things and made it accessible to people like me. It is not that we must make these things because they have never existed, to be clear, but I do think we must recover a great many things that have been forgotten.

And this will be difficult in itself but also doubly difficulty because the postures that allow us to recover and repair are not the postures of violent revolution and reaction–and much in our day incentivizes us toward the revolutionary. So our project is not to move fast and break things, as in the much cited slogan of Silicon Valley, but rather to move slowly and repair things, as Tish Harrison Warren has said. It is to model through our own living and the living of our communities these older forms of life in which meaning and belonging is found through common loves and pursuit of common ends and in doing this perhaps we can help people who have lost hope of ever having a shared purpose or end to discover that such a life is still possible.

My friend Stiven Peter put it well when he said,

The posture of repair attunes the Church to its need to minister and preserve a society on the verge of breaking down. The Church's rhetoric in other models is blind to the Culture's great need for leadership, character, and vision. Instead of having a defensive or even triumphalist posture, repair taps into what Christians are best at doing: helping those in need. Our Culture does not give guidance on how to interact with the opposite sex.  The Church should aid in modeling romance, flourishing marriages, and fulfilling family life.  Zero-child households are becoming the norm. The Church, in response, should be saying, “Here is how you date. Let us help you. Here is how we've married. Let us help you. Here is how we've parented, let us help you." Our Culture is marked by profound loneliness. The Church should model generous hospitality and deep commitment to the community. Our Culture does not know how to have hope in times of adversity. The Church should model suffering and perseverance. No one else is going to repair these institutions. Only the Church can.