Blessed Are the Type-B’s
This weeks’ blog comes from David Zahl. You can find this post (lightly edited below for context) and others at mbird.com. This week’s post is part of a series David wrote based on a class he was teaching, Things You Won’t Hear Anywhere Else (But Church). For fuller context, read the intro to the series.There’s a moment at the end of Wallace’s recent podcast interview with Scott Galloway that sheds some light. Galloway suggests that social media use is the decisive factor involved. The “toxic benchmarking” that happens on Instagram in particular (number of likes, shares, etc) must be where things go wrong for these affluent young people.
Of all the personality types we throw around these days, none is more ubiquitous than the Type-A vs Type-B dichotomy. Drop your Enneagram number into casual conversation and only a few folks will have a frame of reference. Myers Briggs code, perhaps a couple more. But describe another person as a “real Type-A” and odds are, you won’t need to extrapolate. That person is a go-getter. Driven, high-energy, assertive. Not what you’d call ‘chill.’
Like the other personality types in question, the Type-A vs Type-B thing is more of a useful shorthand than, well, anything real. No one is strictly one thing and not another. God wasn’t sorting people into two (or nine!) personality buckets at creation.
The A-B distinction was coined in the mid-1970s by two cardiologists, Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman, to characterize those on their operating tables. So-called ‘Alphas’ tended to have more stressful lives, leading to greater risk of heart disease. More laid-back ‘Betas’ went easier on their arteries. The distinction was an anecdotal one, and hasn’t really held up to scientific scrutiny. Not that that has ever stopped something from entering our vernacular!
Certainly we live a Type-A culture, in which this distinction has taken on a moral dimension. Entrepreneurs, not poets, are our heroes these days. “Stop waiting — start living” we are told. And technology allows us to make such slogans a reality. Just hang out in a cardiologist’s waiting room these days. No one is idle. God forbid.
The message is clear: activity is better than passivity. Passive Type-B-ness is akin to incompetence and resignation and non-seriousness. You only live once so you better get after it. Never stop grinding. Hustle hustle hustle.
Which brings us to this week’s example of something you will only ever hear at church: “Blessed Are the Type-B’s.” Think of it as a variation on “don’t just do something, sit there!”
For our text, take Jesus’s healing of the paralytic in Mark 2. Psychologist Frank Lake wrote this about the passage:
“[The paralytic] had been condemned by his illness to a passivity that overcame his contradictory and self-destructive drives. Thus the paralytic was lowered, like a dead body into a grave. The priest, Jesus himself, is waiting for the ‘corpse,’ not at the graveside, but at the bottom of it
…
The point of the story is best sustained if we regard the paralytic as one who contributed nothing whatever of himself to the cure. The healing person of Christ was working with the faith of the four friends, not of the man himself.”
When it comes to the spiritual life, passivity trumps activity. In fact, your endless activity may be a problem when it comes to experiencing healing, goodness, and God. The less you bring to the table, the better. Faith often looks a whole lot like patience — AKA waiting AKA not ‘doing’ anything.
In the preface to his commentary on Galatians, Martin Luther drew things out further. He lists a few different forms of ‘active righteousness’ — civil, cultural, ethical — before subordinating them all to that which the paralytic encounters. No less than Tim Keller translated Luther’s words thusly:
“There is another righteousness, far above the others, which Paul calls “the righteousness of faith” — Christian righteousness. God imputes it to us apart from our works — in other words, it is passive righteousness, as the others are active. For we do nothing for it, and we give nothing for it. We only receive it.
This “passive” righteousness is a mystery that the world cannot understand. Indeed, Christians never completely understand it themselves, and thus do not take advantage of it when they are troubled and tempted. So we have to constantly teach it, repeat it, and work it out in practice. Anyone who does not understand this righteousness or cherish it in the heart and conscience will continually be buffeted by fears and depression. Nothing gives peace like this passive righteousness.
For human beings by nature, when they get near either danger or death itself, will of necessity examine their own worthiness. We defend ourselves before all threats by recounting our good deeds and moral efforts. We become obsessed with our active righteousness and are terrified by its imperfections. But the real evil is that we trust our own power to be righteous and will not lift up our eyes to see what Christ has done for us. […]
So the troubled conscience has no cure for its desperation and feeling of unworthiness unless it takes hold of the forgiveness of sins by grace, offered free of charge in Jesus Christ, which is this passive or Christian righteousness … If I tried to fulfill the law myself, I could not trust in what I had accomplished, neither could it stand up to the judgment of God. So … I rest only upon the righteousness of Christ … which I do not produce but receive.”
I’m fairly certain that Robert Capon developed his notion of ‘left-handed power’ from Luther’s bedrock above. Right-handed power is what Capon called straight-line power. Do this and get that result (technique!). It has many uses. Build a house, train a horse, fly to the moon.
But right-handed power doesn’t do much for a broken heart, or an anxious mind, or a rebellious child. For those sorts of impasses, a different approach is required, namely, left-handed power, which Capon defines as “paradoxical power: power that looks for all the world like weakness, intervention that seems indistinguishable from nonintervention.”
This sort of power is inescapable in a service of Christian worship, at least one where the cross lurks anywhere in sight. We come together to worship a man who prayed ‘not my will but thine be done’. Who went silent before Pilate. Who did not hang himself on a cross but was hung there by those he came to save.
The voices we hear six days a week (from outside and in-) tell us that any good thing we get will be something we earn. It will be something we take. Blessed are the self-starters. But Christianity says the opposite: any good thing that you’re going to get in life is going to be something you receive. Something that is given to you. The work of a Christian — to the extent it can be called ‘work’ — involves the emptying of one’s hands to receive such gifts.
Spoiler alert: life will often empty them for you. It will make you into a passive agent, whether you like it or not. Just ask my childhood hero Darryl Strawberry.
The potency of left-handed power is on full display in The Saint of Second Chances documentary (dir. Morgan Neville). In 1994, baseball superstar Darryl Strawberry acted out to such an extent that he lost every good thing he had been given in life. A multi-million dollar contract with the San Francisco Giants, endorsement deals, the adoration of the public, and so on. Drug offenses landed him in the proverbial gutter, where he was turned down by 206 teams — not coincidentally the number of bones in the human body.
Enter minor league impresario Mike Veeck, no stranger to the engineering of one’s own demise. When no one will give Darryl a “fourth second-chance,” Veeck, at the urging of his incredible wife Libby, offers the downtrodden star a contract to play for his team, the St. Paul Saints. Veeck can’t not do so after considering how many times he himself has been on the receiving end of undeserved opportunity.
But St Paul is a long way from San Francisco or New York or Los Angeles. Professionally speaking, it is the end of the line, a club populated by players (and commentators and owners) that no one else will take. The empty-handed, if you will.
Yet it is in St Paul that Strawberry makes friends with Dave Stevens, a legless outfielder, whose perspective jolts the superstar out of his self-pity and gives him a fresh sense of how fun it is to play baseball. “I realized I’m just not that darn important,” he says with a chuckle.
Suffice it to say, their unexpected friendship becomes the catalyst for “something new” in the slugger’s life. The precise gifts he receives are gratitude, joy, and a future where there was none before. The segment ends with Darryl saying, “I didn’t want to be a superstar anymore. I just wanted to be.”
B, you say? I don’t know about you but those sure sound like the words of a Saint to me.