The central feature of “The Office” (USA) is awkwardness. The absence of a laugh track leaves us with an uncanny silence that works upon us in mysterious ways. What’s going-on in these silences? Almost always, it is conviction. We are convicted just as the characters in the show are convicted. The humor is met with a “cringy” feelings deep down in our bellies: “I too am like that.”
In a talk I gave on “The Office” at a local high school earlier this week, I suggested that this convicting and humorous force of awkwardness works in the show like the Holy Spirit in our lives. The Holy Spirit was sent into the world, after all, to bring “conviction concerning sin, righteousness, and judgement” (Jn. 16:8). A chief part of what occurs in those uncomfortable awkward silences is a convicting work.
You can trace the trajectory of characters through the show by charting how they respond over time to the spiritual work of the awkward. Do they respond to the “Cross of the Awkward” or do they refuse it? Do they lay their lives down only to take them back-up, or do they cling to them only to lose them? (cf. Jn. 12:23-26).
But conviction isn’t the only awkward thing in “The Office”. People are awkward too! The sheer presence of someone outside of the Self presents all kinds of awkwardnesses. Loving the Other (as opposed to the Self) is an awkward cruciform work too. So we can trace a complimentary trajectory of transformation (for better or for worse) along this line too: in the awkwardness of the relationships in the show who lays down their life, the Self, for the Other? Those who do find themselves abounding in love and relationship (for a romantic example think Dwight and Angela, for a non-romantic example think Angela and Oscar). Those who refuse the awkwardness of the Other have chosen the way of torment and the sheer loss of life (think Ryan Howard, Charles Minor, and Robert California).
Press-in to the awkward. God is speaking there.