The problem I’ve had and continue to have is that we (upper-middle-class, educated Westerners, for the most part) are a self-celebrating lot. We click “like” on each other, whether by private flattery or public review, and expect to be “liked” back. As a result we churn our culture that’s less threatening, less offensive and cutting, producing about one Allen Ginsberg for every 99 Anne Lamotts—one Nick Cave for every multitude of Mumfords. We’re less inclined to walk away from bullshit than we are to rationalize it, frame it in acceptable terms. We dismiss criticism as negativism. Faced with failure, we specialize. We love to admire beauty but don’t get around to discussing death. We don’t traffic in horror, the gnarly terror of the grave.

…Because this is a world of deviltry and silliness, closer to Bunyan’s Vanity Fair and Lewis’s Narnia—one in which only bourgeois comfortableness can give rise to hundreds of best-selling memoirs. It’s a world of distorted values, too: We’re all Cake Boss when we ought to be The Wire. We’re Game of Thrones when we should be Gulag Archipelago. Thankfully we begin at a point of grace so radical it can say, “Forgive them, for they known not what they do.” Thankfully our lives are shot through with blessing so rich we can hardly begin to understand it.