Culture, that hazy subject upon which this publication focuses, has at its root the word “cult,” which essentially means a sub-group of people who share the same beliefs and practices, fostering in this way a shared identity. That the term is linked to religious or spiritual devotion—that these practices and beliefs point to an object of devotion or a commitment of a kind of worship—broadly confirms the title of David Dark’s 2016 book, Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious, or Dylan’s born-again-phase song, “Gotta Serve Somebody.”

Given these definitions, one of the cultic rituals I practice, throughout the day, is a quick scan of my three e-mail inboxes, my phone’s news app, and my Twitter and Facebook feeds. I do it automatically, as easily as breathing. I remember reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer stating something about how a daily practice of “putting on Christ” trains the body so that to act out Jesus’ utterly selfless love to others becomes habitual, unconscious, the left hand not knowing what the right is doing, etc. I remember how, in Infinite Jest, young tennis players are trained to endlessly repeat the same body movements, so that the game could be played, at its best, with “a kind of automatic beauty” with “surprisingly little thought.”

On Monday, after the misery and shock of reading the weekend’s news, and, after one of my devotional offices where I listened to our president’s inability to correctly name, during a press conference, the city in Ohio where the third mass shooting last week took place, I went to Facebook and wrote, as easily as I type it now, “Trump is such a bad president, it’s breathtaking,” thus establishing my identity in another, small and sometimes cramped cult: Those who use social media to make their political opinions known. (As if any of my friends didn’t know where my sympathies lie already.)

I received both affirmation (some people liked my terse opinion!) and heated push-back (some people didn’t!), then I decided to remove the post. I’m not sure why, exactly, but something in it didn’t sit right with me. Perhaps because, to borrow from the poet Heather McHugh, what I had written “was easiest to say.” I say it, or think it, all the time, in fact. Too often opinions, and the identities of those who express them, encourage me to slot people in to various camps, deepening my suspicions of those people, shoring up my reductive trust in these other people. I don’t want that for me. I don’t want that for my friends.

I began to draft a different post that instead meant to offer hopeful news I had recently gathered from other products of culture, mined from other, regular cultic practices (podcast subscriptions, church services) that shape my life. I never posted that draft on Facebook. I’m sharing it here, because it contains some things that are more profitable, if more difficult to express on social media (because they’re longer), things that make me want to try instead of throwing up my hands and lobbing angry comments into the void.

One of those products came at the end of an episode of “This American Life” (ep. 680, if you’re interested). In it, Ben Calhoun recalls a grocery-shopping trip he took as a seven-year-old child, in his native Milwaukee, with his Chinese-American mother (Calhoun is mixed race) and his sister. Inside the store, a white man began to berate Calhoun’s mother because his two-year-old sister had a melt-down, as two-year-olds tend to do. The man followed the mother and her children outside, repeatedly shouting to her, “You people need to go back to where you came from,” eventually preventing her from entering the family car. Calhoun says, “I remember how my mom kind of froze. And I remember being very, very scared. This man was so much bigger than my mom. For a second, I thought he might hit her, or push her. My mom, she had this panicked look on her face…and that made me even more scared.”

Just then, a younger guy, probably a teenager, who worked at the store and was collecting shopping carts in the parking lot, came nearby while on his rounds. This young worker shouted at the older, aggressive man, “Leave her alone!” The man did, and the situation just sort of ended. Calhoun remarks, “This was the first time I realized that someone could do this, that my mother’s right to belong was somehow different. That because she looks the way she looks, and I look the way I look, there was an invisible trap door always under us, a question about whether we belonged as much as others, which itself was a statement that we hadn’t totally belonged in the first place.”

Calhoun says he has hesitated in the past to share the story, as he wasn’t sure of its resonance, yet recent events have compelled him to see how relevant it remains: “I’ve been thinking about [this incident] a lot, in part because those congresswomen don’t look unlike my mom did, when she was in her thirties, and the guy [yelling at her] did not look unlike the president.” Years later, Calhoun’s mother went back to the story to tell the owner how thankful she was for the shopping-cart worker’s intervention. She wanted to tell the manager because, in Calhoun’s words, “whoever that clerk was, he’d seen what that man was doing, and he’d stepped in. She didn’t know who [the clerk] was, or think the owner would know, but she wanted someone to know how grateful she still is. I am too.”

In church last Sunday, we were appropriately reminded about how those who are marginalized by our current economy are prized in the economy of God. We showed our fealty to this more generous economy by sitting in the pews, participating in the service, putting our bodies to use by listening and singing along. But outside, the current economy, the one that is rife with power and fear, waste and distraction, racism and the threat of violence, carries on. Our pastor expressed his dismay at the weekend’s two mass shootings, stating how he feels unsure what he can do to make a difference in the face of such violence, telling us—I believe sincerely—that he finds it easier to say a phrase like “Be the change you want to see in the world” than know how to do embody it, as he is only one person in a big world shaped by forces that feel overwhelming and inevitable.

But we can bear witness to our faith, he said, as when we take communion, which we proceeded to do. Then we sang, prayed the benediction and hoped for peace. However, as Miroslav Volf writes, in a sentence widely shared on Twitter last weekend, “There is something deeply hypocritical about praying for a problem you are unwilling to resolve.” I know how often I’m that hypocrite. I am not, nor could ever have been, the Chinese-American mother, fearing for her children’s safety in the parking lot, nor the Guatemalan father risking arrest, assault, or worse by traveling thousands of miles to find a better life for his family. Yet I can, I want to want to, tell people to knock it off when they’re threatening others. To intervene when necessary. But I need practice. I need to train the habits of my body and my voice. I want to be like that grocery-store clerk, that nameless saint of the parking lot, who may not have been thinking about what he was doing, but whose kind act is remembered.