FX’s hit series “The Bear” just concluded its fourth season, bringing the story of the titular restaurant and its growing family of employees to a point of critical inflection. Will the restaurant survive, and will the moral and psychological conversions experienced within its walls continue to unfold for the characters whose lives are intimately bound up with this broken and graced institution? 

Two of the series leads, Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) and Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri), end the season with a sacrifice of love made for the benefit of the restaurant, and the meaning of their risks taken lingers now for fans who await the fifth and final season. But what most resonated for me after the credits scrolled was the investment made by Richie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach)—the moral heart of the series, in my estimation—who undergoes the greatest transformation as a result of working in the restaurant. 

My mind turned to an episode from Season 2, “Forks,” whose mere 35 minutes depict eloquently how institutions, despite their sundry flaws, can foster revolutions in moral feeling and valuing. In this metamorphosis, values that once went unnoticed or dismissed as pseudo-values appear suddenly as live options, when the persons who embody them in these institutions become centers of gravity attracting us to change our lives.

By the time viewers reach “Forks,” we have known Richie as lovable but uncouth, faithful but reckless, so devoted to the old way of doing things at the restaurant that his very presence is a wrench in the gears of every improvement that the new owner, Carmy, attempts to implement. In his personal life, things are no better. Richie loves his young daughter but finds himself overshadowed by his ex-wife’s new partner, who seems to offer both his ex and his daughter something more stable and enriching than he can. Richie is stuck personally and professionally, and if there’s any movement in his inner life, it’s only on currents of despair.

That all changes when Richie begins a weeklong internship at Ever, one of the premier restaurants in Chicago (based on the real restaurant of the same name). Richie is assigned the entry-level task of polishing forks to perfection. The seemingly menial nature of the work not only bores him but evokes resistance and spite for the supposed indignity being visited upon him. Seeing himself as put upon, he tries to humiliate his supervisor, Garrett (Andrew Lopez), dubbing him “Junior” and reminding him that he too is an inferior to the restaurant’s “real boss,” the head chef. Such treatment is Garrett’s reward for demanding excellence from Richie in shining the silverware. Exasperated with this insubordination, Garrett explains what this seemingly trivial attention to detail means to him: an opportunity to serve their clientele, to bless their lives for just a few hours with the greatest restaurant hospitality they will ever know. 

“You’ve really drunk the Kool-Aid, huh?” Richie asks, even as it begins to dawn on him that there are values present in this “low” work that he has been unable to perceive. In time, Richie drinks the Kool-Aid too. He embraces the pleasure in the work. Devoting himself to learning the ins and outs of Ever’s meticulous procedure, he aims to master the coordinated and cooperative work of the place, all of the skills to be amassed, which produce consistently happy customers who will recall fondly for years an unforgettable night. 

Richie assimilates the values of Ever, mediated and modeled to him first through Garrett, and later by head Chef Andrea Terry (Olivia Colman), who invites Richie to join her in another “menial” task: peeling the restaurant’s mushrooms. Terry embodies the values she transmits to the institution; the restaurant reflects her, and she reflects it back, through Garrett, and now through Richie. 

In this transmission, Richie finds that his scale of values—those goods he would prefer, and which goods he would sacrifice to bring them about—has been upended. Once driven by patterns of avoiding and soothing his emotional pain, he now sees a new sun to revolve around: the significance of others, and how worthy they are to be known, served and valued. This recognition serves him as well, as his increased self-respect grows reciprocally with his elevation of others. He begins to know himself and love himself precisely in his willingness to lift others up. After seven days, Richie is a changed man: an enthusiastic member of a team who would rather do the invisible work of wiping down forks than take his place at a table of greater honor.

“The Bear” aims to present the positive power of institutions to catalyze personal change. Yet if institutions can play these elevating roles, they are also vectors of disvalues, of corruptions of the true value they intend to impart. One scene in “Forks” captures this well. Soon after Richie has begun to take seriously the values that his supervisor, Garrett, models, he is invited to witness his first staff review. In the middle of the meeting, Adam, one of the head chefs, erupts into a torrent of verbal abuse aimed at Garrett, who must bear the responsibility for one of his staff having smudged food on a plate. Chef Adam’s behavior is excessive and vicious. And in light of what has come immediately before, the outburst raises the question of whether those values Richie has taken as his own are merely masks for disvalue. 

What can this restaurant’s exactitude and excellence be worth if they can be used as cudgels against the workers asked to embody them? Further, how worthwhile can an institution so fervently devoted to these values be if this devotion can turn on a dime into a pretext for abuse? This question hovers over the episode, even as we see these values, and the institution mediating them, reconfiguring Richie’s life for the better. To judge simplistically, then, that the institution represents pure good or pure evil is to overlook the concrete interlocking of value and disvalue manifested in its daily operations.

“The good is always concrete,” wrote the Jesuit Bernard Lonergan in his reflections on education. By this he meant not just particular concrete goods, like meticulously prepared meals, but the systems that guarantee the regular and predictable delivery of those goods. Those too are concrete. But it is more than just systems. The good is also concrete in converted persons of service, who themselves embody and bring forth value in their devotion, care and selflessness to those around them. 

We err if we imagine that we can bypass institutions—persons and the systems they are embedded in—and miraculously still procure the goods they provide. Microbes do not spontaneously generate, and neither do brilliant leaders. They emerge from institutions that inculcate and transmit the values we admire and desperately need from those who would guide our communities to a desirable future. 

This connection to institutions matters even when their formation of us lies largely in the past. “Forks” depicts this truth subtly, by having the camera rest on a prayer card of “Jesus the Good Shepherd” taped to Richie’s bathroom mirror, which we see every new morning of the week. “The Bear” gives no indication that Richie is a regularly practicing Catholic, although we do see him pray in Season 4. But the church’s value of the compassionate shepherd continues to be transmitted to Richie through its symbols, and so begins to bear fruit long after his formation within it. He brings that fruit to the Bear (Carmy’s restaurant), where his very presence is a ballast in the face of Carmy’s volatility. By the end of Season 4, and as a result of the institutions that help nurture his conversion, Richie, as much as the others, has become the Bear: the institution and the person reflected in each other. 

In the shadow of scandal and exhaustion in the church, and under threat of increased government attacks on institutions that have fostered persons of excellence and knowledge, it can become easy to give up on all institutions. But Richie, and “The Bear,” remind us that the persons we most need and most inspire us exist in and through imperfect institutions, and that grace sees fit to abide in them even in their weakness. 

Roberto J. De La Noval is assistant professor of the practice of theology at Boston College.