Barbie’s rift in the universe is no doll play

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

Julie Canlis

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

Creed

Redemption

16 January 2024

4 min read

Discover the kindness of a Blue Monday snowfall

Waking to a new world, Henna Cundill considers the transformation of more than just the view.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Two small chidlren push a curtain aside to stare out the window at snow.

“Blue Monday” in Aberdeenshire (the third Monday in January) turned out to be a “white Monday” in the end. The snow began on Sunday evening, and it continued on and off throughout the night. It was accompanied by an atmospheric howling wind, which woke me up from time to time. At each waking I peeped through the window to see the world gradually disappear under a thick white blanket.

Monday morning was a liminal place – all of us dressed for work and school but drifting about the house as if it were still the weekend. We live next to a busy road, but there were few cars and what traffic noise there was had become strangely muted. None of us could settle to anything, we simply alternated peering out of the windows with checking online for news about school. Then came the announcement that school would open at 10am (there’s little that really stops for snow in Aberdeenshire) so on went the wellies and the woollies and off we went down the front path, both excited and a little awed to sully the unbroken blanket of white with those first few footprints.

Snow suspends the rule that we have to be standoffish and dour, even in Scotland.

But as we walked, we noticed that our footprints weren’t at all the first. Tiny scratch marks testified that the sparrows, the robin, and the blackbirds had long been out and about, busy with their day’s travail. A slinky line of pawprints revealed the neighbour’s cat had paid us a visit too. All around our house, countless tiny stories of industry and encounter had already been told – (some sliding pawmarks and a few stray feathers suggested a gripping plot twist.) Later that morning, it began to snow again, and all these stories gradually disappeared. By the time my boys came tramping home from school, they were once more tasked with picking out a brand-new path across a fresh unbroken expanse of white.

After dinner I went for my own habitual walk. We’d had yet more flurries, so I had to make new footsteps all over again. By then the wind had dropped, the sky was crystal clear, and the snow had gone from powdery to satisfyingly crunchy underfoot. It felt like an awe-filled privilege to leave my trail of footprints. I walked one of my usual routes, but the white covering had softened both the landscape and the soundscape, making everything seem new and unfamiliar. As I trailed back through the housing estate, I noticed snowmen that had popped up in some front gardens, and neighbours who were chatting as they helped each other to shovel driveways and grit paths. Snow suspends the rule that we have to be standoffish and dour, even in Scotland.

What if I could always watch yesterday’s path being gently erased, and always have another chance to make new?

All in all, it was difficult to feel blue on a white Monday. The snow made it feel as if nothing was permanent, let alone usual. There was no drudgery, no same-old, same-old. I wondered if I could become like one of those tiny birds, skipping lightly through each day’s work? Even whilst canny to the fact that a certain sneaky cat was prowling about. By the time I got home, there were new prints from him also.

In the Bible, snow appears as a metaphor for forgiveness, for making a fresh start. We read in the book of Isaiah: “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” There is much in this idea that runs counter to how our modern society responds to misdeeds – especially in this age of instant messaging and social media, when photographic evidence of our blunders can travel the world instantly and be preserved for posterity. There is also much that runs counter to how I respond to myself when I mess things up. It is not usually the howling wind that keeps me up with ‘the dreads’ on a Sunday night, but my mind’s hobby of regurgitating memories of the previous week’s mistakes, misspeaks, and misunderstandings. In the pre-dawn hours of a Monday morning, I am usually awake and well occupied with the prospect that, in the week to come, I will almost certainly make many of those same mistakes again. I walk those same old paths, re-tread those familiar footsteps – the inevitability of my own imperfection is ever before me.

But what if I peered out of the window at the daybreak of every Monday morning and found that there was snow? That I was held in a liminal moment – less sure of what the coming week would hold. What if I could always watch yesterday’s path being gently erased, and always have another chance to make new? Ideas such as this are at the heart of the Christian hope. In the Bible, the Psalmist writes that God does not treat us as our sins deserve, nor repay us according to our mistakes. Instead, God takes them away so infinitely that they are: “as far as the East is from the West.” They are gone, from red as scarlet to as white as snow.

I suppose snow every Monday would be inconvenient. But snow on Blue Monday felt like a kindness – a gentle rendering of the familiar into the unfamiliar, allowing me to see things anew, to reflect, to reconsider, to redirect my steps in certain ways. As I write, there is more snow falling. Later I shall have to go out with the shovel and the grit, but I won’t do it yet. If I leave it for now, then when my boys return from school in a few minutes time, they too can tread one more time with awe across a fresh, unbroken expanse of white.