Impostor Syndrome 3: Not Your Real Job

"Nobody's going to be mad at you for going to your brother's wedding. Nobody's going to be mad at you for going to school. That's your job. Your real job."

Ms. Marvel (2015) #6 (2016)

It's good cover art behind the bad lighting because I took this picture at midnight, promise.

One day sixteen-year-old Kamala Khan - aka Ms. Marvel: polymorph, masked hero, sworn protector of Jersey City, new recruit to the Avengers - gets a call from Iron Man. He's got a job for her to do: "Our Intel says a classified shipment of experimental neurotoxin has been stolen from the Port of Jersey City. That's your turf - you know it better than any of us. If you take care of it, Cap'll be putting gold stars next to your name on the team roster from here to eternity." 

Kamala is thrilled. She's one of the youngest and least experienced Avengers on the team, and this could be her chance to really prove herself: it is, as she says, exactly the opportunity she's been waiting for. So she heads off that evening to bust the bad guys. Unfortunately, though, she's not exactly on her best form: between preparations for her brother's upcoming wedding and the need to hike up her dipping marks at school to keep her parents happy, she's not been getting much sleep between her hero-ing jaunts. She slips up. She loses control of the situation. She ends up having to call in the other Avengers for backup.

"With everything that's going on, I feel like I'm always letting somebody down," laments her internal monologue. "And a lot of the time? That somebody is me." In the same panel, Thor reassures her, not terribly reassuringly: "It's all right. You did fine for someone so inexperienced." Ouch. Kamala starts to explain the situation, but Captain America cuts her off: "Thanks, Ms. Marvel. We'll take it from here. You do what you gotta do."

Ms. Marvel drops her gaze and turns away. "Oh. Okay." Her internal monologue elaborates: "They think I can't handle it. They don't realize how much stuff I'm dealing with outside of avenging. Home and school and everything - I want to be an Avenger. An Avenger. Not some super hero kid sister who can't clean up after herself."

Does this strike you as reminiscent of impostor syndrome at all? Kamala needs to call in backup one time because she's been pushing herself too hard to keep on top of everything, and that one little failure is this huge blow to her identity: it exposes that she's not a real Avenger, just the kid sister. She's not on the same level as the rest of them. They expect her to be present and correct for Avengers business whatever else is happening, and if she doesn't show them that she's capable of keeping up with their pace, they're going to realise that she doesn't deserve her place on the team.

The brilliant plan that Kamala comes up with to buy herself more time to focus on hero stuff and prove herself to her teammates is to create, with the help of her science-genius best friend Bruno, two polymer clones of herself to live the other bits of her life for her: one to go to school, and the other to attend all the social engagements happening in the lead-up to her brother's wedding. The clones aren't terribly sophisticated, but they look realistic and can repeat one or two prescribed phrases, which Kamala things should do the trick. Bruno's not so sure: "I'm kinda worried about your priorities, dude! Most people want to do well in school and show up at their brothers' weddings!"

Undeterred, Kamala sends the clones to their duties and sets off hero-ing - but then it turns out that that stolen neurotoxin that she tried to intercept down at the docks has contaminated her, and though it hasn't had any adverse effects on her personally thanks to her healing powers, it's engendered a rather unfortunate malfunction in the clones, that causes them to reproduce copies of themselves. Soon the city is swarming with clones. And there's also a giant mega-clone. And then Bruno makes a huge polymer Tyrannosaurus Rex to fight them, which doesn't help. And Bruno also summons Loki to fight the clones and … well, you get the picture, the whole thing is the most hilariously overblown chaotic mess.

Kamala knows she can't fix this by herself. She calls in backup, again - this time her inspiration and the former bearer of the Ms. Marvel title, Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel, who sorts the whole thing out in a jiffy the way that Captain Marvel tends to do. And then they have a bit of a chat about how Kamala let things get so on top of her. Kamala has finally grasped the fact that she's been missing important stuff because she's been so preoccupied with living up to the Avengers' expectations of her. Carol, echoing Bruno's words from earlier, encourages her to prioritise: what will she be sorry she missed thirty years from now? Everything suddenly becomes a whole lot clearer.

But before Kamala can rush off to find her family at the latest pre-wedding do, Iron Man shows up, having gathered that something was amiss from the massive explosion when Captain Marvel got rid of the clones. Captain Marvel rebukes Iron Man for allowing Kamala to get so overworked, before heading off to deal with Loki. Iron Man turns to Kamala: "Spill it. Whatever it is. Otherwise you're gonna have to explain the whole thing to Patriot Pants, and you know how he is."

Kamala hesitates, but then admits the truth: "I - I need to be in school. Even if that means I sometimes have to skip out on Avengers-related stuff sometimes [sic]. And sometimes I really, really need to be with my family. Especially two Saturdays from now. My goofy brother is getting married. That's all."

"Oh, kid," responds Iron Man, pulling her into a hug. "This is what Google Calendars are for. Nobody's going to be mad at you for going to your brother's wedding. Nobody's going to be mad at you for going to school. That's your job. Your real job."

And yes, there's an important truth there about the need to take care of yourself and say no to some things and avoid burning out. But that's not the point I want to make from this. The point I want to make is that Kamala forgot what her real job was. The Avengers stuff was important, sure, but it wasn't the most important. It was a thing, but it wasn't the only thing - and she was behaving as if it were. She'd got to a point where she was going to let a polymer clone go in her place to her own brother's wedding because she was so consumed with the need to prove herself as an Avenger - to be Good Enough.

Good enough at what, though? What if being a good Avenger required her to be a bad sister, or a bad daughter, or a bad student? She got into this hero-ing business because she wanted to do the right thing, but then she let it become her whole identity, and that actually kept her from doing the right thing. It kept her from doing rightly by her family and her friends and her teachers and, actually, even her hero teammates, because she was pushing herself so hard that she wasn't putting in her best work with them, and even caused a total unnecessary clone catastrophe that she had to call in their help to get sorted.

So here's a question for you, dear reader: what's your real job?

Take as long as you need to ponder that one, though if you're a Christian and you haven't immediately jumped in with "following Jesus" or "seeking the kingdom of God and his righteousness" or "glorifying God and enjoying him forever" or something to similar effect, I'd be a little worried. If you've committed to following Jesus, that really is your real job. No other priority tops that, not even family: he himself has explicitly said so.

At which point you may be ready to chastise yourself for having the wrong priorities, and do by all means toddle off and do some repenting if you're feeling convicted, but again, that's not the point I want to make. The point I want to make is that among those who follow Jesus there are, categorically, no impostors. I'm not talking about the visible church, I hasten to add - plenty of wolves in sheep's clothing hanging out there - but among those who have truly been born again of water and the Spirit, nobody is the kid sister who doesn't really deserve to be there. None of us in our natural state deserve to be there. But our natural state isn't our real identity. The prospect of being exposed for what we truly are holds no dread for us as Christians, because what we truly are is the very righteousness of Christ: God himself has wrought it and declares it so.

Following Jesus is our real job, and in that we have nothing to prove - nothing we could prove. You can't bring your impostor-syndrome perfectionism to the pursuit of holiness, because there God actually does demand perfection, of a standard you haven't the slightest shadow of a chance of ever achieving. Your only hope is Jesus' perfection freely given you through his death on the cross. Impostor syndrome tortures you with the promise that Good Enough is something attainable, though it'll never let you reach a point where you suppose you've attained it; it nurtures that pride, that need to show everyone else you can keep up and even excel at what you're doing. The gospel, on the other hand, confronts you with the fact that, before God, it's true that you're Not Good Enough - but that he loves you so much he purposed and executed the death of his beloved Son so that you wouldn't have to be. You don't have to be Good Enough, because Jesus is Good Enough and you're covered by his blood. If he's no impostor, then neither are you.

What's your real job? And what other priorities are you prone to mistaking for your real job? They probably won't be inherently bad things, any more than Kamala's Avenging was a bad thing; rather, they'll be good things that have persuaded you to ground your identity in them instead of where it belongs. Where do you feel the need to prove yourself? Because that need to prove yourself, much as it might feel like working hard and doing the right thing, is probably holding you back from doing the right thing with respect to your real job.

The ironic thing about Kamala's impostor syndrome was that, in her determination to prove herself a worthy Avenger, she send literal impostors to do the things that really mattered in her place. You can't be and do everything. If I might slightly misappropriate Jesus' comments about the love of money here, you can't serve two masters: you'll love one and hate the other. You'll see one as the identity that really matters and the other as some extra thing on the side. You'll freely offer your time to one and begrudge it to the other. You'll be fully present and correct in engaging with one and wish you had a polymer clone to send to the other in your place.

What's your real job? And what's not your real job? And if that thing's not your real job - not your most fundamental identity - then what real dread is there in being exposed as Not Good Enough at it? Set aside the pride that tells you you can do everything, and contemplate the predicament of sin you were in about which you couldn't do anything - which God redeemed you out of at the highest ransom-price ever paid. Know which Master you're serving, and that his yoke his easy, his burden light. Forget the need to prove yourself: he already proved himself in your place.

Useful Spiritual Analogies: A Post Not About Endgame

“I understood that reference.”

Marvel Avengers Assemble (2012)

I do enjoy the Subtle Christian Traits Facebook group. If you’re not familiar with it, content posted in this community consists of funny, relatable anecdotes and observations of a Christian and church-culture nature, along with a neverending avalanche of memes on the same subject, a steady trickle of ‘inspirational quotations’, and the occasional profound question or prayer request. Facebook friends, do ask me to add you if you fancy joining the party, though I’ll warn you now that you might want to impose some pretty stringent restrictions on the kinds of notifications you’ll let the group give you if you don’t want to find yourself promptly deluged by them.

Anyway, the reason I brought that up was because this post was prompted by something I saw on Subtle Christian Traits this weekend just gone. The below photograph was captioned by the one who posted it as follows: “Every sermon in every church everywhere this weekend.”

 

I want to credit the photo, but it seems inappropriate to use the name of the person who posted it given that Subtle Christian Traits is a closed group. I'll settle for initials: credit to JP.

And I thought – really?

I mean, yes, obviously, the caption was exaggerating and was perfectly aware of the fact, but equally, at the church in the picture and presumably quite a large number of others, whichever human was responsible for delivering the sermon put said sermon together deliberately around the theme of Avengers: Endgame. Now, as you may remember if you read my blog a lot, I went to a midnight screening of the film in question, so I am as acutely aware as anyone that the earliest possible point at which any ordinary Marvel fan could have completed her first viewing of Endgame was at some stage in the bleary-eyed small hours of the Thursday just gone. In order to have written a sermon about it in time for the service on the Sunday immediately following that Thursday, therefore, our theoretical ordinary Marvel fan must surely have done one of the following:

1) Blocked out that particular slot in the sermon-series calendar as a special one-off as soon as she found out Endgame’s release date, then spent the ensuing weeks and months blindly banking on the hope that a maximum of a couple of days spent contemplating the film’s contents would yield a Useful Spiritual Analogy worth forming a special one-off sermon around;

2) Hazarded, in advance, a guess at what the contents of Endgame might consist of, or at least what its broad intentions as a piece of cinema might be, decided that there was a Useful Spiritual Analogy in that hazarded idea, and then tweaked that analogy after viewing the film to make it fit with the actual contents;

3) Clumsily shoehorned some aspect of Endgame’s contents into what she was planning to spend that sermon talking about anyway;

4) Clumsily shoehorned some aspect of spiritual truth into a speech that essentially consisted of an Endgame review;

5) Bribed, blackmailed, tricked, or otherwise coerced someone heavily involved with the making of the film into spilling some major spoilers a long time ago, and happened to have come up with a Useful Spiritual Analogy off the back off those stolen spoilers in the intervening peroiod;

6) Or possibly, just possibly I suppose, genuinely had a flash of inspiration upon viewing Endgame and been so excited about the Useful Spiritual Analogy that thereupon occurred to her that she simply had to talk about it on Sunday, regardless of how well it fitted with whatever other sermon-series plan she might have been following (or, granted, not; maybe this is the sort of church where you really don’t know what the sermon’s going to be about from one week to the next).

Look, I love Useful Spiritual Analogies lifted out of the world of fiction, as you’ll know very well if you have any familiarity to speak of with me and my weekly ramblings. I’d be the last person to criticise the use of such analogies. But because I love them and I use them, allow me to assure you that I know how they work. They do not occur to one reliably. I can’t walk into a screening of a film knowing that the next couple of hours will definitely yield a blog post; equally, sometimes I leave the cinema spilling over with ideas for at least five. There are pieces of fiction I love that I can’t plausibly relate to gospel truths at all,¹ and others I really don’t care for that Useful Spiritual Analogies just fall out of without me having ever willed them to. I don’t personally have anything to say about Endgame right now that I think would actually edify any of you, but it’s quite possible that in several weeks’ or months’ or years’ time, I’ll be reading the scriptures and something will suddenly click in my brain to the effect of, oh, it’s like that bit in Endgame.

Thanks to CaptainThinker at newgrounds.com for the super cute Endgame fanart.

Which in fact brings us to another point, because sometimes, yes, the analogy occurs to you when you’ve got your head in the Bible, but more usually, it occurs to you when you’ve got your head in the fiction. And I’d say that’s the right way round, actually, because you very much want to have the Bible in your brain when you’re looking at fiction, and indeed all the rest of the time as well; you want to view everything else the world presents you with, with scripture as your lens² – whereas, by contrast, if my mind keeps straying onto Marvel or Doctor Who or Harry Potter or whatever when I’m trying to study God’s word, I tend to consider that more of a hindrance than a help. Makes sense, right? And this means that usually, when the analogies I blog about occur to me, they consist of things I already know about the gospel that are highlighted particularly well by some aspect of the fiction I’m currently enjoying.

Useful Spiritual Analogies are not, in other words, an exercise in going deeper into the meaning of scripture for myself. They rarely start with scripture; sometimes, indeed, I have to go on a bit of a hunt for a passage that makes the gospel point that occurred to me in a way that suits the context. I might perhaps be illustrating a point that’s a new one to some of my delightful readers, and crucially, it’s a very good thing to be reminded of the core gospel truths that one already knows from new and different angles, but Useful Spiritual Analogies are not and must not be the beating heart of a teaching ministry. They’re a great sort of side dish, if you will, but the main meal – the part without which the thing is not substantial – has to start with the scriptures. It has to be rooted in them and grow out of them; it can’t rely on any other material for its form and identity.

The typical faith-and-fiction format of my blog is not, therefore, what I’d call a main-meal teaching ministry. I’d be worried, I mean to say, about any Christian who was receiving most of her teaching in a format like that, that makes the outside analogy a part of what it fundamentally is. If it imposes that on itself as a condition, then the goal has become something other than simply to open the scriptures to one’s brothers and sisters so that they might be built up by them. Doesn’t that strike you as very dangerous?

Now, I’m in no position to comment on the quality of the teaching at the church depicted above, or indeed any church whose sermon last Sunday was themed around Endgame. Maybe some of those sermons were really excellent, I don’t know. Again, I’d be the last person to deny that analogies lifted from fiction can be useful for highlighting spiritual truths. But I really don’t buy that all these preachers themed their Sunday sermons around Endgame because they had seen a genuinely Useful Spiritual Analogy in it that they believed would be more helpful for the edification of the congregation than anything else they might have spoken about.

I suppose the obvious question off the back of that is, well, why, if not for the sake of maximum edification, did all the preachers give sermons about Endgame, then? I suppose I can only assume it comes out of a desire to be making up-to-the-minute references. Maybe they don’t trust their listeners not to be thinking about Endgame all through the service anyway and figure they may as well as try to tap into that. Maybe they think that sermons of this type are a way of attracting more people into the church. Maybe they, like me, are just a little too fond of fiction and prone to getting carried away rambling about it. Any which way, the phenomenon worries me.

Please do your very best to put yourself in the way of proper main-meal teaching, adelphoi – teaching governed by no condition except that it should help the Church to understand what God has said and so be moved to love and serve him more wholeheartedly. And as far as your giftings allow, dispense such teaching. I’d be the last person to deny the value of Useful Spiritual Analogies taken from fiction, but I’d also be the last to say that that’s what the normal pattern of church teaching ought to look like.

Footnotes

¹ For example, the Japanese animated feature Your Name, which I have now decided is my favourite film, has never yielded so much as the germ of a blog post idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU47nhruN-Q.

² Speaking of lenses, by the way, shout out to Pullen & Symes Opticians who recently supplied me with a gorgeous new pair of specs to replace the ones I broke at my baptism: http://opticiansinexeter.co.uk/.

Asgard is a People

“Asgard is not a place, it’s a people.”

Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

Later tonight, my housemates and I will be attending a local midnight screening of Avengers: Endgame.¹ A worthy offering, I think, for what will constitute my first ever midnight screening – as a consequence of which, I’m even more hyped than I might have been to go and see this film. And yet more coal was shovelled into the firebox of that hype train this Sunday just gone when I and the good friend I was staying with spent a happy few hours over ginger beer, popcorn, and fancy Easter eggs,² taking in Avengers: Infinity War (which she hadn’t seen) and, prior to that, Thor: Ragnarok (which I hadn’t). Beyond the fact that it made a lot of sense out of certain aspects of Infinity War, I liked Ragnarok a lot as a film in its own right: it was consistently funny, had a solid storyline, and offered a sizeable heap of blog fodder – though for the moment I’ll confine myself to the most obvious analogy only. Spoilers, needless to say, are ahead.

 

Thanks to the talented gaurav-salunkhe at newgrounds.com for this ace picture of Thor as in the arena scene in Ragnarok.

Asgard is not a place, it’s a people. So says Odin in Thor’s weird little dream-vision thing (Marvel sure is keen on major characters having moving encounters with their fathers in spaces that transcend normal barriers of life and death, isn’t it?); so says Heimdall in reassurance as Thor looks out on the destruction his choices have caused. The principle defined in this line was what made the film’s conclusion satisfactory, even triumphant, rather than sad and disappointing. For most of Ragnarok’s duration, the event denoted by that title was exactly what our hero was furiously striving to prevent, but by the conclusion, he had instead deliberately initiated that same event. Ragnarok, as per the Norse mythology from which this region of the Marvel universe draws much of its source material,³ is the prophesied destruction of Asgard at the hands of the fire-giant Surtr, and, since Thor is from Asgard and indeed prince of it, you can see why this is something he’d naturally be keen to avert. But then his long-lost older sister Hela shows up and starts killing people, and even if that’s really only to be expected given that she is goddess of death and all, it’s still clearly Not At All A Good Thing. The crucial fact about Hela is that she draws her power from Asgard-the-place; the longer she stays there, the stronger she gets. And Thor isn’t strong enough to defeat her or expel her, so the only way to be sure of neutralising the threat she poses to the Asgardians and indeed pretty much anyone else who gets in her way, is to bring about Ragnarok and have her go down with the ship, as it were. Asgard-the-place was always bound for destruction: the prophecies left that fact indisputable – but Asgard-the-people is a different matter altogether. Asgard-the-people can file onto a handy getaway spaceship and fly the heck out of there before it all goes down in flames. Asgard-the-people is rescued out of the cataclysm and lives on even as Asgard-the-place is brought to nothing just as it always inescapably would be.

The similarities between Marvel’s Asgard and the real world we inhabit may be reasonably few, but among them is that same inevitable trajectory towards total destruction. Everything that belongs to the present order of things is ultimately going down in flames – literally, as per 2 Peter 3:11: “the present heavens and earth are by the same word reserved for fire, kept unto the day of judgement and destruction of the ungodly people” – and will come to nothing so absolutely that it won’t even be remembered afterwards. “For I am creating new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered, nor come into mind,” God declares towards the end of the book of Isaiah; and John sees that promise fulfilled in his vision of the things to come: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth passed away.”⁴ The current world will be destroyed in fire: the prophecies of scripture leave that fact indisputable for anyone who claims to follow the Lord Jesus Christ to whom every page of those scriptures testifies. And in actual fact, we wouldn’t want it any other way, because the present order is held in the clutches of death and destruction as surely as Asgard-the-place was held in Hela’s clutches. Creation has been subjected to futility, writes Paul; it’s in slavery to corruption and groans in longing for freedom. If that freedom is to be obtained, the reign of sin and death has to be toppled just as was Hela’s reign. What is perishable must pass away so that death can die with it. And then will we reach the fullness of our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.⁵

Our adoption as sons; the redemption of our bodies – this is about us as people. Asgard is a people, not a place, and so too is the Church. My general policy when blogging is to try to use Church-with-a-capital-C only in this first sense, because goodness knows there’s a whole host of other senses in which the word might plausibly be construed, and employing that initial uppercase letter or not helps to make a distinction. A small-c church is a building; it’s a particular bit of a building, distinct from the hall where they serve the coffee and host children’s birthday parties; it’s a worship service at a particular time; it’s a denomination or an aggregation of denominations. A Christian talks of ‘my church’, of ‘a different church’, of ‘going to church’, of ‘changing churches’ – none of these are Church in the capital-C sense. The multiple senses of the word aren’t, in themselves, really a problem, mind you – not unless we allow such lowercase-c meanings to cloud the capital-C meaning from our focus. Lots of words have multiple related meanings, and it’s convenient enough to refer to Asgard-the-place as Asgard, but if you can’t tell the difference between Asgard-the-place and Asgard-the-people, you’re not going to be willing to let the place go down in flames and fly the heck out of there – which kind of leaves you going down in flames with it.

 

Down in flames.

The Church is a people. It’s not a people plus extras. It’s people that are going to be rescued out of the cataclysm at the end of the age – not buildings, not patterns of worship, not institutions or administrations or systems of governance. You didn’t catch the Asgardians hauling pieces of Asgard-the-place with them when they ran for the spaceship that would carry them safely away, and nor should you catch us clinging to any structure of church practice or policy or experience as if it belonged to the world to come and weren’t going to go down in flames with everything else. To refuse to let go of some aspect of the present order is to assign oneself to enduring its fated destruction along with it.

This means that we, as a community of believers, should be willing to give up resources and change habits and dissociate from institutions without so much as a backwards glance; and on the flipside, it means that we need to be devoted to helping one another work out the salvation we have been granted, because the Church is a people, not a place or a time or a system or anything else, and people, therefore, are what matter. People are what Christ died to rescue, and people are what we are called to pour our gifts and energy into serving and preserving. Anything else that we might dub ‘church’ can and must be unhesistantly chucked out of the figurative window for the sake of better serving and preserving those people.

And of course, the rescue we have received is far better than the one the Asgardians got: as we learn at the beginning of Infinity War, they escaped Ragnarok only to run straight into Thanos and his population-halving rampage, whereas we once rescued are permanently safe. The present order goes down in flames, yes, but the new heavens and earth that God creates is perfect and everlasting: “death shall be no longer; neither shall mourning, nor crying, nor pain be any longer; the former things have passed away” (that’s Revelation 21 again). The Church is a people, and that people is rescued out of the cataclysm and lives on, and on, and indeed on, forever and ever. Amen.

Footnotes

¹ Trailer to get you extra hyped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jNvJU52LvU. It’s all been leading up to this…

² Did you know there’s a thing called ruby chocolate now that’s made from a different kind of cocoa bean so that it’s naturally pink and tastes like berries? https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/sep/06/ruby-chocolate-barry-callebaut-instagram-foodies

³ Though, not going to lie, most of my knowledge of Norse mythology comes out of Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase series: http://rickriordan.com/series/magnus-chase-and-the-gods-of-asgard/.

⁴ Bible Gateway links time; here’s the Isaiah, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+65&version=ESVUK, and the Revelation, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rev+21&version=ESVUK.

⁵ I’m riffing on a few verses from the middle of Romans 8 here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rom+8&version=ESVUK.