The locker room and the Loach saga
he was actually rather a spiritually upbeat guy who just didn’t buy the brother’s sudden despair at the apparent absence of compassion and warmth in God’s supposed self-mimetic and divine creation […] Loach challenges his brother to let him prove somehow—risking his own time, Barry’s, and maybe safety somehow—that the basic human character wasn’t as unempathetic and necrotic as the brother’s present depressed condition was leading him to think.
Context
The Loach legend: Barry's older brother, the family's last hope for the clergy, in a crisis of despair at godless-seeming human coldness — framed explicitly as a "depressed condition" — and the wager it produces is the Park Street Challenge, Barry begging not for change but for touch, month after month, until Mario's handshake. Despair here is contagious and load-bearing.