The other day I posted about how I am enjoying the resurgance in interest in Johannine studies as of late. Two recent books I’ve been reading to this end: Paul N Anderson’s Archaeology, Jesus, and the Gospel of John: What Recent Discvories Show Us,” and Michael J. Gorman’s Paul and John in Harmony: A Theological and Historical Exploration. 

Some of the early sections from Gorman’s book, which I am still working my way through, have been leading me to think about some old questions in a new way, namely the question of how John’s writings (and within the scope of this argument, Paul’s writings as well) existed as part of a larger conversation within their (shared) worlds, a buried world that the study of history (and archeaology) keeps opening up for us more and more as the years push forward. 

As Gorman works to set  “Paul and John in harmony,” by which he doesn’t mean an act of harmonization but rather setting them within proper relationship given the evidence we have, he gives plenty of time in his introduction to zooming out and establishing some broad stroke understandings of the larger movements within currernt Johannine studies today, a text and tradition that has largely existed in the shadows of the dominating field of Pauline interest. One aspect of this conversation, something that has always lingered in the background of Pauline studies, is the question regarding the nature of this percieved relationship between Paul and John. And as Gorman suggests, if his interest begins with examing the nature of their theological concerns, shared or not, it inevitably spills out into a subsequent concern for what can be called the evident genetic relation between the two traditions. Different scholars will offer different theories regarding what this is, but it is nevertheless something we all have to grapple with when considering these writings.

Gorman’s primary interest in this project was an analysis of the theological shape of their seperate bodies of work. As he puts it, while this wasn’t a case of working towards a conclusion (or at least a differing conclusion) regarding the nature of their relationship, he found himself being persuaded towards one through the process of these studies. Meaning, this project actively changed his mind. As he puts it, he arrived at a conclusion that it is most likely Paul knew of John’s Gospel in some shape or form before and while he was writing his letters, and this Gospel would have been a primary source informing his life and ministry. This, for Gorman, is part of what comes from contiunually pursuing “the what and the so what of New Testament Theology.”

The bulk of the book will be spent exploring the theological framework, saving any discussion of his conclusion for a final chapter so as to allow it to emerge organically. He begins with looking at what he sees to be informing the master story (or narrative) of both John’s and Paul’s theological understanding. On John’s front he locates this in John 13:1-20 (the washing of the feet), and on Paul’s front Philippians 2:6-11 (the Christ hymn). In both cases he is narrowing in on a specific piece of text that the majority of scholars would say could be some of the earliest portions contained within these consecutive Traditions. One can see these texts acting as significant and important focal points for arguments that both precede and proceed from their particular proclamations and positioning on a textual level. Gorman sees the two texts sharing an essential and important framework regarding what he calls the two-dimensional story of Christology (the act of salvation) and participation (the lived Christian life).

Now here is where I get to the part that really struck me as especially interesting. Gorman writes,

“In the ancient world, footwashing was a necessity… (but) washing another’s feet by stooping very low- both physically and metaphorically- was not normal… What (Jesus) did was an act unparalleled in ancient literature and unrivaled in antiquity.”

He calls John 13 a “living parable”, which simply means he (Jesus, the historicaly positioned figure within the narrative) is playing out a parable not through the telling of a story but through the physical embodiment and action that brings in these two aforementioned working dimensions: the saving act, or Christology, and the exemplary act (participation). He undersscores the idea that the foot washing in this case, a practice that is a common part of the ancient purity culture, is primarily a symbolic act rather than simply a hygenic one. This is the nature of a parable, and indeed as a living parable, that it “requires and invites interpretation” where we find these symbols. Why does this matter for us as readers today? Because it is not about imitating a performative act in footwashing in this case. Rather, it is about how we interpret this symbol in the context of the saving work and the lived life. As its often said, where you find a parable you will find Jesus placing his hearers within it in the form of “symbolic characters.” In this case he is placing the lived life within the context of this new found reality called salvation. Salvation for John, and subsequently for Paul, can be understood as God’s act of coming to dwell in creation in Christ, thus ushering in the inaugeration of this long awaited promise of God’s transforming (renewing) of this creation.   And, embedded in the way that John sees this symbol working is this notion of cruciformity. This is what it means to participate in this new found reality “in Christ.” This is the pattern that John seeks to embed into the story he is telling, a pattern that explains the nature of this new reality to his readers.

To participate in the life of Christ must be and is always an act of participating “in” Christ according to this cruciform movement. This is the key to the two-fold paradigm. We don’t follow Jesus towards an act of personal “Deification,” as though we are imitating Christ’s identity in the way we might find in the Greco-Roman world. We imitate Christ’s life by following the movement of Jesus being revealed through this act of footwashing, and subsequently through the Christ Hymn in the letter to the Phillippians. It is in fact, in the eyes of both Paul and John, Jesus’ own identity that frees us to do precisely this. It is Christ’s own act in death (becoming human) that liberates us from the need to become “like God” through the common act of Divination that was so pervasive in the ancient world. The task is not to become like God, but rather to know God and thus be transformed by and sharing in that very nature. And not just know God, but to know God’s nature. That is a key distinctive in both Paul and John. A knowing that comes through our participation in Christ.

The important point here being simply this: Jesus’ identity, for both John and Paul, matters immensely to this picture of salvation. This is the primary revelation driving everything else in their subsequent Traditions. Further (and this is the point that gets to what has been capturing my mind as of late), the uniqueness of this revelation, however that gets defined, matters to the narrative it seeks to tell about the nature of this reality we all share. That means, it matters to those three ever important questions: the nature of God, the nature of humanity, and the nature of creaiton.  

Here’s the thing for me. I am very aware of the polemics embedded deep in the fabric of those popular forms of Christian apologetics from my past. These  polemics, usually acting in the interest of such apologetics, would be directly tied to what could be argued is the real point of concern for that evangelical culture: upholding right doctrine. This is what all arguments for belief in that cultural approach tended to be bent towards. And typically, the uniqueness of Christ became a popular talking point within these apologetic interests, as it targeted and defended against (quote on quote) “secular” attempts to make Christ and Christianity just like those Greek myths, a move that allowed secular (read: atheist) apologists (or as some liked to describe themselves, anti-apologists) to subsume the whole of religious belief under the single moniker “stories that are not true.” The primary defeater of the Christian apologietic is thus found in this move to take any claim of uniqueness and play it into a singular conception of the “myths” of this Greco-Roman period.

What’s interesting here is that usually, in my experience, these same atheist arguments would also single out “Christianity” as having a uniquely charged polemical force that made it (and makes it) the primary enemy of these polytheistic (and thus inclusive) Greek myths. Here the story becomes, Christianity took monotheism and weaponized it against the inclusionary nature of a polytheistic world. I’ve seen this same basic back and forth sparring match happen over and over again.

Part of the shifting of the tide in recent years, which is largely attempting to reclaim something lost to these apologetic moves (on both sides of that fence) is the need to recover a sense of the world these texts actually occupied. When, in our efforts to defeat one side or the other, we subsume the distinct parts of this world into a charateristic whole, what then happens to our ability to actually engage the history on its own terms? What happens to our ability to actually articulate the evidence for what it is? What happens to our ability to give the archeaology and other essential disciplines a voice in the conversation?

Part of what counters this approach is recognizing that this historical moment that informs the conversation Paul and John are having with their audiences has a particular shape. To understand this shape we must be able to locate it within their distinct (read: unique) context. Only then can we begin to properly assess precisely what it is they believed was uniquely challenging their partricular position (the thing that changed their perception of reality), and how it is they saw this speaking into those basic, important questions about reality (the nature of God, humanity and creation). And perhaps more importantly, this is what tempers both the use of and the highly charged accusations regarding polemicism. Polemics here become unnecessary.

The question concerning Gorman’s thesis then becomes, if what we find in this living parable is a particular revelation that reshaped their understanding of reality in this moment, what is this revelation and how did it change his readers/hearers perception?

This is where it becomes important to buffer our tendencies towards being subsumed by our tendency towards polemic. Here we can seek better questions. For example, what if the evidence seems to suggest an existing community (the hearers of and bearers of these subsequent Traditions preserved in the writings of John and Paul) who’s assumed, culturally laden paradigms about reality (meaning, the  nature of God, humanity and creation) were being challenged and overturned? What if common, and again culturally entrenched ways of thinking about God, humanity and creation were being critiqued, and not just critiqued but examined at that fundamental intersection of Empire (politics) and religious conviction out of concern for seeking what is true?

In other words, what if the problem scholarship is grappling with today is the challenge recent historical and archeological developments poses to years of polemicism, forcing us to reconcile what is an increasingly visible human portrait now taking its place. The more these communities (Pauline and Johannine) become flesh and blood portraits, the more difficult it is to avoid the more difficult but better questions surrounding what precisely these writings were doing in their day.

Of course, one of the most fundamental changes has been the ongoing effort to challenge problematic views of Paul as a “Christian” convert from “Judaism,” and similarly deconstructing widely held assumptions regarding this dichotomy between Law and Gospel (which is part of that polemic). This important and highly relevant movement in scholarship is well documented. What’s of interest now is a similar trajectory being applied to the area of Johannine studies, still largely in its infancy given how little attention it is has been given, and yet clearly following the same path. Years of assuming John to be an anti-Jewish Gospel is now being cast under the same light and the same critique, with scholarship working to filter out the polemic in favour of setting the living breathing community back in its world. And of course, what follows is a highly charged debate about the sharply imposed dichotomies such assumptions placed on John between its historical merit and its oft worn moniker “the spiritual Gospel.” If you want a robust example of the ways current scholarship is challenging this dichotomy, see the other book I mentioned at the start of this post by Paul N. Anderson.

A funny thing happens when such texts are given a flesh and blood “face” so to speak. It tends to close the distance between our own world and the world of the text. It becomes far more difficult to simply dismiss the ancient world out of hand. And maybe, just maybe, there’s an oppportuntiy for that world to inform the questions we are posing to our own day. Might there be parallels to be found in the present movements of our own day to challenge the dangers of Christian nationalism? Or challenging certain tenants of Western Protestantism which have handed us particular understandings of God, humanity and creation? Or challenging the still present tendency towards Platonic approaches to our understanding of reality that were baked into both Paul’s and John’s cultural reality? A world where the readers of these subsequent Traditions were wrestling in a very real way with things like conceptions of vengeful Deities, the craving of idols, the blurring of lines between politics and religion, hierachies within society, Empire and Hellenization, debating the role of Tradition and the text, the constant push and pull of movements and revolutions.

When the flesh and blood community is brought into proper focus, that’s where we are forced to reckon with the why questions. This is also where the writings of Paul and John become far more interesting as tools for helping us navigate the why questions with integrity. The convenience with which these texts have been compartmentalized alongside our polemic is harder to maintain. We can’t just punt it all into later centuries where it can be subsumed into the blanket term “gnosticism” and accordingly dismissed as “invention,” and subsquently subsumed later into the larger blanket term “myth” as part of the Greco-Roman catch-all in our modern age. Nor can one hide behind their conservatism by conventiently sheltering the text and its world from criticism through appeals to doctrines like inerrancy. From where I stand, grappling with the flesh and blood world made of flesh and blood people is far more exciting, far more fruitful, far more honest, and indeed far more challenging.

This is where I come back to Gorman’s interpretation of the historical evidence above and his use of the word “unique.” If the world of his readers was one in which footwashing was a common practice, and if the evidence seems to suggest that the text in John has Jesus using this culturally familiar language as an intentional symbol (read: something to be interpreted into the context of their lives), what is this symbol saying to his readers and why did it matter? Given that the evidence seems to strongly suggest that it did, in what ways was it overturning certain perceptions of God, humanity and creation? This is where Gorman contends that, at least for John’s readers, the evidence suggests not simply a motivating event behind the emergence of this text, but the interest of the text in outlining the significance of this motivating event on a cosmic (reality shaping) level. How we interpret this to fit within our own worldview is a subsequent step in a process that must, if it is going to be honest, grapple with the evidence for what it is and what it says in it’s world. And for Paul and John, they both are telling a story of a cosmic shift, or a shift in the cosmic story.

This is where certain implications arise when it comes to the emerging evidence regarding the world of the text. For example, what happens when emerging evidence challenges long held assumptions of a text once thought to be born from a Hellenized environment speaking to a Diaspora (a post 70’s reading), shifting our understanding towards a distinctly Jewish text emerging within the “process” of Hellenization (a pre-70’s reading)? What happens when assumptions about John’s community (readers) being a persecuted audience are being overturned by a more likely earlier context of people existing in relative economic stability? What happens when recent archeological discoveries continue to overturn long held assumptions of the Gospel according to John being largely disinterested in flesh and blood history and/or historically inaccurate in its descriptives? If the scholarship is an indication, it’s bringing a whole new slate of theories and debate to the table. This includes reassessing the primary relationships at play in what is a shared world, beginning with the most prevelant and relevant one: John and Paul.

Perhaps more specific to my point about polemic above, there seems to be room for relcaiming the notion of “uniqueness” as fundamental to any such given context, simply recasting it as the uniqueness of a given context. Generalizations do tend to exist for a reason, and it is difficult to flesh out an argument without them. But one needed corrective has been addressing a tendency to muddle such generalizations in our attempts to isolate the uniqueness of the Christian event on one side (which usually happens under the guise of an apologetic for Western Empire or Western politics/civilization), and attempts to subsume it into sweeping generatlizations on the other (see Ehrman for one of the most common examples of this move to collapse it into a singular idea called myth). The irony is, those appealing to those sweeping generalizations often bring the convenience of that uniqueness back into play when it comes to writing a narrative of Christianity’s weaponizing of monotheism against the once inlclusive world of polytheism that marked the Greco-Roman world, neither of which I think have much credibility as a story.

So here is where my own thinking has been landing as I’ve continued to ponder all of this in conversation with what I’ve been reading lately. It seems evident that the readers of John’s Gospel (or at least the initial readers of an initial form of that Gospel) were distinctly Jewish (or more accurately, Judean). The evidence seems to suggest John’s Gospel more or less assumes its readers will understand its distinctly Jewish language without need for clarification. The evidence seems to suggest the world behind the text was one of economic stability, and the evidence also seems to suggest that John’s Gospel, contrary to long held assumptions, is far more grounded in its language than was once thought. Meaning, reaching for a post 70’s gnostic setting of a Diaspora living through persecution and needing a developed theological treaties to reconcile a new Christian community against a fallen Jewish temple now far removed from that Judean context does not make sense of what we find. It would be interesting to bring in someone like Mendez on this front, a student of Ehrman who follows in his Tradition, whom represents the movement back towards arguing for single authorship, but whom also cannot let go of the assumption that John must be a later post 70 work. The sense I got reading through his newest book is that there is too much at stake in allowing the evidence to go that far, preferring to keep a comfortable space and buffer zone between the school of academics to which he belongs on one side and the inerrantists on the other, even where it involves bringing in a series of unestablished presumptions to keep that space afloat. His argument for single authorship is intriguing, his assumptions about John retaining a post 70’s gnostic setting far less so.

If the evidence is in fact bridging that gap, even where it makes us uncomfortable, that is where we can begin asking better questions and moving towards better justified interpretive conclusions. One doesn’t need to agree with Gorman on his conclusion that the Gospel of John influenced Paul’s writings, but that is an example of needing to engage fresh theories in the face of new evidence. As Gorman says, it’s impossible to avoid addressing the question of that relationship if we are taking our criticisms (be it textual, theological, archeaological, historical) seriously. So if you disagree, you need to justify a different position based on the same evidence, you can’t just ignore it. That’s where the dialogue in fact can become fun.

Fun, but also deeply serious in the ways it informs our conception of reality. One of Gorman’s strongest arguments in his book, for me personally, which would make a great pairing with Brant Pitre’s Jesus and Divine Chistology (a definitive work on the subject), pushes back against years of assumptions regarding the Gospels claims about the person and work of Jesus by demonstrating neither Paul nor John would be coherent apart from this basic two-fold posiitioning of the saving work and the subsequent theme of participation being defined through Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascencion. He does a really nice job of outlining how the narrative itself, when not pulled apart, clearly understands that its argument is dependent on establising Jesus’ identity within the framework of the story it is telling, a framework that is deeply interested in the stated uniqueness of this movement. In short: both Paul and John hold a conviction that something happened in history that changed our reality, and that this is tied to who Jesus is. Whether we interpret this event in the same way or not, what the texts themselves say and reveal about that world and its authors/readers matters to the justification of our own conclusions. Years of one side appealing to the critical fields to say Jesus made no such claim, and the other side protecting the text from those critical fields through doctrine, are in fact being challenged now through emergent scholarship in fresh ways.

And one of the main reasons we are recapturing a stated confidence to this end is precisely because of this recovering of the Jewish context of both Paul and John. What once was subsumed by a post 70’s gnostic setting now comes barrelling back in with a fresh relevance and new and better questions.

Time will tell whether Gorman’s particular interpretive conclusion gains more traction, but more importantly it’s the body of his work that will sustain it either way. And if it gives people greater confidence and ability and desire to embrace this notion of distinctiveness and uniqueness, along with the Jewish nature of both Paul and John, I am here for it. I think it’s exciting times.

Sure, technically speaking its not an actual disorder, but orthorexia, defined as an unheatlhy obsession with healthy eating, is in fact a real and recognizable thing. The day I discovered I had this disorder was a monumental one in my own life. Truth be told, it wasn’t just “a problem,” it was actively destroying me.

And yes, there is irony in that. But there was also a point of revelation for me personally that shifted how I see this world and the questions i am asking about what this world is today, a revelation that emerged from this awarness that an obsession rooted in healthy eating was the thing that was killing me.

Seems that every few years I come back to this topic. A testament to the subjects enduring power in culture at large, as well as the ongoing struggle of dealing with it on a personal level. Part of why it came to mind over these past few weeks is because of a recent reflection I penned in this space on Kahtryn Morton’s The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything. The disorder existed before social media emerged as the force it is today, but it’s take over of the way we do life significantly elevated the problem to a whole other level. That and, through social media, I was posed the question by someone upon recently turning 50, do you have goals for health and fitness. Someones who’s own public obsession draws itself from worldviews and narratives that I have come to see as largely problematic and incoherent.

I have told this story a few times before in this space, but to tell it again here:

Orthorexia is of course a disorder rooted in something other than food related issues, but it is a particular food related manifestation of those underlying issues. This is something I can trace back to my dad’s initial cancer diagnosis when I was between 10 and 12 years old. Two images come to mind of this phase in our lives. First, the image of my dad lying on our sofa taking his “natural” medicine (which were needle injections of a then unknown substance, paired with the oral consumption of a then equally strange substance in small vials… I’ll refrain from naming what these were so as not to mislead anyone). At the time, I had no idea what the word natural meant, and I had no idea of its significance when it comes to the different decisions people make around proposed treatments. But that was the moment when the word became commonplace in my life, and indeed came to hold power over my life.

The second image is of our kitchen. It wasn’t just a gradual change, it was a change that happened overnight. One day the familiar foods and routine snacks and meals were there, the next day they were not, replaced by a complete overhaul and pivot in our daily diet. Ya, I was young, and of course I complained. I was told these were “healthy” and therefore “good” foods, and from that point on every time I would visit (or they would visit) my extended family in the GTA I became known for my incessant complaining about this “healthy” food.

Nonetheless, this became the norm, and thus it became ingrained in my psyche and my consciosness in ways I then still did not understand.

Fast forward through my dad’s remission and consecutive reemergence of the same cancer, and I am now standing on the precipice of finally moving out of my parents house and home at 27 years of age. This is where years of this unconscious rhetoric and patterns and diet really showed its face, presenting me with a very real point of crisis. I can still remember my first time roaming those grocery aisles and suddenly being faced with a dilemma. In front of me were two packages of lettuce. One said organic, the other did not. The organic ones, of course, cost $2 more than the regular package. So what do I do? All these years of being taught that this “organic” lettuce was somehow important come rushing back in on this moment, and I realized that I didn’t actually know why it was important. What I knew was, I needed to make a decision. And that’s when I went home and started down the endless rabbit hole of researching the relationship between the foods we eat and our health.

When I say research, I mean an all out obsession. Next thing I know my wall, and pretty much every last inch of storage space I could find, was filled with articles and notes and information on everything from food to environmental sources to activities (or lack of them). I could tell you about every food and every link with every disease on the level of becoming a walking, talking encyclopedia fot this simple fact: everything is killing us (and that’s not hyperbolic). And the more I consumed, the greater the feedback loop became.

And yet, at this point I still didn’t recognize that I had a problem. I assumed that I was now officially part of this insiders club called the resistance, and my frequent visits to the “health food” store (and its very lucrative business) was the source of my new found superpower.

I didn’t know I had a problem until I got married, and suddenly it wasn’t just me browsing those supermarket aisles, but two of us. That’s when my obsession turned from an internal exercise to an external conflict. Forming these habitual exercises, such as intentionally tagging along behind my wife and quietly replacing the default options she would place in the cart with what I felt were the appropriate choices. And that’s one of the more tame examples of this now elevated point of crisis. I had turned our marriage into a never ending act of resistance, except that I was largely still acting entirely alone, and in my greatest moment of shame still unable to articulate precisely why what I was doing actually mattered or what I was actually looking to achieve.

It was around this time that social media was really starting to take off as the new driving force of our lives, and with that came a whole new level of research potential. Before I knew it, I was so far down this rabbit hole and so lost to my obsessions that I had actually driven myself to a physical breaking point. All of this information in my head coalesced in a literal week long bought of no sleep. When I say no sleep, I mean no sleep. My brain could not shut off. I spent every night moving to the couch, where nothing was working. Day 2. Day 3. Day 4. At this point I had exhausted every sleep aid source from the health food store I could find, at one point coming dangerously close to overdosing, and I ended up at a walk-in getting a prescribed sleep aid.

Which also didn’t work.

What eventually did work was a pill usually prescribed for epilespy. i was supposed to take two. I was leary about any prescribed medication and took a half of one. But that was all it took. In the middle of the afternoon, not long after taking that pill, I heard in my head what was (to me) an audible crack. As though lightning had struck me, it was that loud. And suddenly I was out.

It was in that moment that I recognized I had a problem. And not just a physical one (which was certainly there, from the eroded brain chemistry to the toll this obsession was taking on my internal organs), but a deeper rooted problem. I not only recognized the degree that my disorder was impacting my marriage, my relationships, my own life, but I began to seriously consider, and indeed know, how intertwined my assessment of these physical realities were with my underlying beliefs driving my actions.

All this research and I still hadn’t actually addressed the real question: why does it matter? What is this obsession actually trying to achieve and to what master narrative does it belong?

This began a slow process of reform. A process that started with purging my life of all this “information.” There was very little that I could do about the information already in my head, which to this day still acts as a trigger, but there was a helpful mantra I adopted to help me place a stop-gap between my continued absorption of these never ending articles, which was rooted in something I knew to have more truth than that data or information. The great irony of my obsession is that it is designed to feed itself. Every single study, every single theory, every single trend, fad, evidence based approach- and to be sure they are endless. All of them follow this same pattern: what we think is going to save our health today will be the very headlines that declare what’s killing us tomorrow. 

I knew this to be true, because I had a room full of researched data proving this to be the case. In every single case, be it through the “science” overturning what we once thought was “helpful,” or through our present ignorance of the newly disovered “destructive” force or entity or food that we failed to attend to, I could find this same narrative by placing multiple articles side by side. That was the common narrative, and it was by laying all of this out in front of me that I had an evidenced way of battling back against the obsession.

That then freed me to do the hard work of attending for what it was that I actually believed. Of attending for what my obsession was trying to control, and to what end it’s efforts were seeking to achieve something I couldn’t even yet articulate. That became my new act of resistance in a social media age where the health trends were now the norm.

Now here is where I also need to be careful. This is my story. It’s not everyones story. Caught up in nearly every single endeavor to be healthy is also the very real fact that every regimine also brings about certain outcomes, be it related to weight loss, strength training, endurance. Full discolsure: in those years of actively destroying myself, I was also fluctuating between 135 and 140 pounds and could run a marathon without any needed training. I could (and did) easily bike or rollerblade the 16 km route (one way) to work as part of my regular routine.

Here’s the thing. I understand that every story arrives with its own set of important nuances. But there are three things I have come to believe are also routiinely true about the culture at large, a culture that is in fact saturated with programs and regimes, endless ideologies and a never ending barrage of “facts” relating to how we make ourselves healthy: 

• there are a lot of people who have undiagnosed and largely normalized orthorexia in some form or fashion who don’t recognize what it is
• our culture is bad at asking the why questions surrounding our trends and regimes, and is even less adept at attending for what it is we actually believe
• the science that we root our certainty in today is the same science that will upend our control over our lives tomorrow

I admittedly have developed a necessary cynicism about the whole enterprise. But that cycnicism is not about overturning misinformation and contradictions in favor of the facts. My skepticism has more to do with how we define the aims of this enterprise in the first place. It’s rare that the point of our motivation is the problem. There is almost always a justifiable reason informing the why of our endeavors, and those are often rooted in real world issues, health and wellbeing related issues, that push us to respond. What’s also common though is the lack of clarity regarding the aim of our endeavors, our newly found habits. Here we can’t just sweep such questions under the rug of a largely undefined and ambiguous motivation to “make it to 100.” Again, this is my opinion, but where I hear that surface level assessment, I tend to immediately conclude that the real motivations are clearly lying underneath, and those motivations need the accountability of actual examined beliefs in order to be known and understood for what they are. This, in my experience, doesn’t happen because the mantra and the regimine itself so often become the virtue.

There is a learning I came to in my own journey towards attending for my battle with orthorexia. A battle that continues to this day. My family can tell you that I have left over trigger points. Things that I obsessively do or can’t do which are rooted in that head full of information that I will never be able to truly purge. I know I do them. But for as long as they remain tempered and contained, I have learned how to co-exist without it overtaking my life. The more difficult thing is navigating a world of honest to goodness emerging medical matters. I am probably the worst person who could get celiac disease, for example. Talk about a world defined by a life of endless obsession and control. Irionically, that disease is triggered or activated by extreme stress such as the events of my prolonged struggle with orthorexia.

My learning though. This comes from the honest to goodness aged lives I have encountered along my journey. What hit me one day was a particular study of those in their 100’s, regarding what their supposed “secret” was for their longevity. If this is the largely ambiguous and undefined aim assumed by the younger voices posing the question, the short answer is- there is no actual answer to that question. What there is however are articulated trends and patterns we can analyze within their responses. Like my own aged grandparernts, and the stories they told about their parents and grandparents before them, long before all of the modern inventions and conveniences and supplements and information overload and on and on were a thing, these were lives marked by unexpected realities. These were people who by and large valued a freshly baked loaf of bread with a knife full of melted butter and frseh jam. Who ate ice cream every night and handed you candies from the jar when you came for a visit. Whom enjoyed the value of a cherished walk instead of a run, a cup of coffee/tea and a good book. Whom lived in an age where what we deem today to be adverse weight was not frowned upon. Whom spent time doing the things we have now relegated to our machines, such as hand washing their clothes and keeping the furnace going and growing their gardens and walking to the post office to deliver hand written letters.

Which is to say, they spoke a different language, not inconsequentially born from an age where people did in fact die younger from viruses and diseases that had nothing to do with ones eating habits. When asked the qeustion about their longevity, their answers weren’t about what they did, but about defining a life in much different terms. The simple fact that they were 100 was simply an indication that they had survived the external forces “their” world was constantly throwing at them.

Here’s the truth I have come to know for myself. One of the reasons Orthorexia had so much power over my life is because it not only perpetuated underlying anxieties, it created them. In the terms of the world I had been handed, I did what I was supposed to do. I looked to the science, I got the facts, I used those facts to bring about a different and better wanted reality. I controlled my world on the level of such utility. And what I got in return were a freshly created package of anxieties and the rude awakening that science is not a set of facts but a process. I could run a marathon and bike that 16 kilometers to work, but there were a myriad of other ways my life was being eroded and and endless number of new information telling me I was going to die because I did or did not do A, B and C.

In such an endeavor, in such an approach, life becomes a matter of beating the odds, which then gets defined as an unarticulated goal of making it to 100, regardless of whether that narrative is actually coherent or rational. The difference however between the era of my grandparents and today is that, if we all occupy a world in which one can smoke packs a day and survive for 100 years while someone else can never pick up a cigareete and die at 20 (to use a crude example), it was far more important for them to attend for what they actually believed about this world and their lives than it was for them to be obsessed with controlling longevity. That, it turns out, was the secret.

We have reduced this world to information, to data points, to facts. A world that we can then control. If it was more common for someone in my grandparents time to die young at the hands of a virus or a plague that our modern vaccines have largely eradicated, the anxieties our changes have brought about today are rooted in that very perception of needed control. Thus, we find ourselves asking very different questions than our grandparents did when it comes to unpacking our answers.

This would be my own summation of my grandmother’s answer to this question: the secret? Find a better narrative that is asking better questions, one that seeks to know what this life truly is rather than getting all muddled up in chasing the headlines.

For me? It took a lot just to be able to learn how to enjoy that bowl of ice cream again. As my friends would say, to trade in the “potato ice cream” (yes, it’s a thing) for a good cream based concoction. It took a lot to throw away all those health products (and to not think about the vast amounts of money I spent feeding my addiction in the process). It took a lot to create barriers between myself and the endless world of health and wellness and fitness coaches vying for my attention and promising to hand me control over my world through the latest information about superfoods and balanced diets.

And please, forgive my cynycism towards that end if you are one. All I have to this end is my own story. And the truth is, I am far healthier today than I was when I could run a marathon. Just in a different way and in different terms,

We’ve internalized what the algorithm favours.

(We’ve bought into the idea) “that we are the authors of our own lives…

Redemptive narratives have power…. Baked into the story of individual triumph and redemption is the assumption that people can and will change when things aren’t working for them. The arc of success presumes that as conditions dictate, we adapt and come out better than we started. This is part and parcel of the masternarrative of redemption, that personal growth moves in a steady upward direction. It is also rooted in the concept of the personal brand. Successful brands pivot and remain nimble, surfing life’s waves of change with deftness and flexibility.

… It is conventional wisdom that when a person fails to adapt to change this signifies a problem, one that needs to be addressed. This pressumption, that change is inherently good, is a product of a culture fully committed to the growth oriented spirit of capitalism, an economic model based on maximizing the benefits that come from constant adjusment within the market place. But does this market place logic need to apply to (a) life?

These presuppositions form the foundation of a master narrative of redemption. A good story is one in which the main character conquers obstacles and comes out stronger.” (The Story of Your Life, Kathryn Jezer Morton)

In her book, The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything, author Kathryn Jezer Morton helps to connect studied, examined, universal human tendencies to the specific societal and culturally rooted realities of social media (and it’s use).

A key point of her argument functions on two levels, beginning with assessing the ways in which social media, for all of its particularness as a modern construction, can only truly be understood by examing its relationship to those larger, common human traits. Second, and likewise, a fruitful discussion of social media needs to move beyond reactionary trends that limiit themselves to our social media usage, and into a broader more reflective discussion of the predominant role narrative or story plays in all societies across human history. Deleting facebook accounts or intentional efforts to go off social media, however much this can bring about certain wanted outcomes in our lives, do not ultimatley change the shape of the world we are presently living in. Nor does it bring us to a greater understanding of that world. Whether we recognize it or not, the language and function of “social media” permeates nearly every facet of our modern society. It is integrated into our news sources, our communication, our jobs, our podcasts, the arts, politics, and even basic government and civic related duties and tasks. Meaning, its much larger than simply our facebook or instagram accounts.

To understand what this is, then, requires examining how it plays into one of the most crucial and necessary aspects of that human tendency mentioend above: the role of story in shaping the way we live in and make sense of and understand this world, and indeed our place in it. Not simply on an individual level, but on master/meta-narrative levels.

Such a discussion can then be a window into the particular cultural forces shaping our lives through this thing called social media. On this front, in the quote above Morton touches on something I have long felt and vocalized. Social media and its use adheres to a master narrative that stems from modern assumptions regarding how history must work in order to justify the shape this world and our lives take today. In this worldview, social media is simply the natural and necessary outflow of the world’s progress, a myth (using that word in its proper sense of those stories, or master narratives, that reveal what is true about this world and our place in it) that seeks its own justification in each subsequent generations rejection of the past. Here change isn’t just a constant, its the measure of a world’s progress. Adapt or die, as its often said. This is simply the way of things, and this is not only how humans survive, it is how we bring this world and our lives under our control. This is, to borrow from Morton, the language of the modern redemptive narrative, with the thing we are redeemed from being our enslavement to a lesser and inferior past.

How often does this basic assumption about change get brought up in chats and threads using all manners of precondiitioned rhetoric? I know I encounter it all the time. More importantly, how often does this basic assumption about what change is act as the driving force of our endless ideologies here in the West?

I’ve spent a lot of time immersed in the study of this basic idea, that the world I was born into, the reality I was handed, the culure I have been shaped by, hinges on this basic understanding about how history must work (and indeed does work). Or of how history must work in order to uphold our redemption narratives. We are who we are and we are where we are because of our accomplishments. Life is about this continued investment into who we are becoming through our efforts at (fill in the blank with a never ending list of self or societal frameworks designed to turn us into better versions of ourselves or hand us better versions of our world, all of which flow from our modern addiction to self improvement practices and into our myriad of cultural creations, from growing podcasts and youtube platforms, online business creations, to much broader realities such as scientific, technological, or space related inovations).

To be clear, neither Morton, nor myself in this space, are suggesting that these things are inherently bad. Rather, the problem is, in this narrative the concept of change is given an inherent virtue. Change means we are getting better. Change means we are better than who we were. And of course we have endless ways of measuring this in order to assure ourselves that we are in fact counted among that number. And the way the world functions, in its market laden structure, simply seems to affirm our suspicions: businesses that fail to adapt and change in this modern age die, therefore this must be the way our lives work as well.

What we aren’t good at is attending for what gets sacrificed in this incessent clamouring for forward movement (which is really a sacrificing of the whole of history), not to mention the ways in which it tells a very specific story of our lives that needs to be sctrutinized. This is in fact why the emergence of the modern world saw itself as the end of history. To see ourselves as part of history means we become the very thing we are seeking to scapegoat, holding ourselves above it.

We also aren’t good at asking the why questions, questions that concern where this forward movement is actually going or taking us precisely. We aren’t good at distinguishing between what a life is and how a redemption narrative fits into that equation. This is at least in part, I think, because our entire sense of the world and reality, and indeed our identity, has become wrapped up in upholding this myth of progress. Sure, we can speak of the failures of society (for example, the current climate crisis), but only in so far as we are able to categorize such failures in terms of “them” rather than “us.”

So again, change might be constant, but the problem emerges the minute it is assumed to be a self justifying virtue, an inherent truism regarding what a “good” or (successful or meaningful or accomplished or celebrated) life or world is. In fact, one of the things this book helps to underscore is how such a story of our lives engages in a critical error of judgment when it fails to recognize how this narrative of redemption actually defines us (or the past) according to the things that we are not. This is at the heart of what it means to assume that change is inherently good. It is anchored in that perpetual state of rejecting the past.

Once we step out of this broader perspective and these broader concerns, part of what Morton then begins to flesh out is a simple probing of the assumption that progress leads to a better world or better lives. That what comes from change is always good, or even desired or needed on a human level. That it brings greater experiences of satisfaction and happiness. All words of course that demand definition. What’s fascinating to me in the immediate though is that Morton challenges these assumptions by looking at the very human functions that social media exploits. If we are to take this seriously, we must then confront these narratives as a product of something else entirely: these underlying human tendencies. A robust examination of social media can reveal the ways in which such assumptions, which existed long before social media became a thing, actually act in accordance with what human experience appears to need, want, and desire.

If this is the case, why does this narrative have the power that it does? One answer could be that it taps into contrary parts of this same nature. Another answer, which likely can be taken together with the former suggestion, can be found in establishing visible patterns within the fabric of history itself. For example, we crave the sharing of our lives, and have always sought to shape our lives into stories that create a shared language. Here we can find the basic markers of this social exercise embedded in the interplay between persons within what we call communities. This means, long before social media was a thing we were, in different ways, analyzing these relationships in order to understand how to belong. We instinctively respond to these observations by way of projecting curated narratives while similtaneously absorbing others, always seeking measures that tell us whether we belong and are thus okay or not.

One can see how all of this fits with the modern social media framework. What makes this unique is simply the ways in which this modern technology has widened the sphere of belonging, increased the scope of the practice, and the way it has streamlined the risks and the costs of our participation in this world. We can see this in the growing body of research which suggests the line we tend to think still exists between our flesh and blood lives and our online lives no longer exists.

Further yet, we also see this in the way social media, a product of this new technological age, mimics a society in which the rate of change far surpasses any other period in our history. It’s no wonder change has taken on the mythic proportions that it is, as human function no longer has the ability to reflect on what these changes are. Similarly, social media, having far surpassed its origins as primarily a work of creatively profiling the story our lives, has taken on a life of its own, now becoming its own mirror.

Morton continues on in her assessment, defining our lives within social media as a constant act of management. We manage our brands (brands are either our own lives or the thing we have built our lives around). We manage perceptions. We manage reputation. And as we manage, we are selling the product that is our life. What’s fascinating to me about this idea is, as I fleshed out from Morton’s ideas above, all of these things, when we peer behind the curtain of social media, are inherently human traits. It’s simply the unique expression of our particular moment. In a sense we have always engaged these things. It’s how we have always come to belong somewhere (or to be excluded). But one of the unique things the modern narrative of redemption has handed us is this underlying belief in the redeemed “self,” a concept that both assumes the existence of the self made will, formulating that into the undercurrent of the larger enterprise of modernism itself, and has established necessary change or progress as the measure of it’s worth and the aim of its existence.

In case this sounds too lofty or too theorized, these thoughts have a very practical expression within the examined life. Curiously, we have become masters at comparmentalizing the different parts of our lives into seperate spaces. Our private life at home, and our social life online. Our retreat into nature and our occupational lives in the city. Our spiritual lives and our lived lives. Our professions and our leisure. In truth, these things not only can’t be compartmentalized in this way, they, in reality, are not. Such dualism, for as popular as it is, only serves to hold us at a distance from the story these lives and this world are telling. It’s little more than a convenient means of laying the blame of our frustrations and the merit of our accomplishments at the feet of whatever we chose to align ourselves with in a given moment.

One of the most common type of online personalities according to Morton is the observer, or passive surveillance. The one who doesn’t post but views. Here’s the thing though. Even this practice is an act of managment and selling. Such people are every bit as visible as the ones in the thick of the incessant shouting matches. And everything becomes a product of the judgement these actions make about us and about this world. Whether you’ve deleted your social media accounts or not, whether you post or not, in a social media age every single act is observed, and every observation weaves a story of this world and its lives in a particular way. And more to the point, it’s all still being written according to this master redemptive narrative. It simply becomes a question of where the circles get drawn.

So what does one do with all this? As with anything, recognizing the reality of things is the place to start. And it could be appropriate to adopt the posture of the cynic, something I have adhered to for a while. A cynic is simply one, if we are to see it through the lens of its long storied tradition, who rejects all social constructs as authoritative. However, what defines the cycnic is nevertheless one who also understands that they are products of this world at the same time. It is not simply that we see the absurdity of the enterprise, it’s that we know life exists within its own absurdities. This is not a contradiction for the cynic, rather it pushes us to constantly assess what is sacred and what is not. And equally, it remains aware of those inate human tendencies that persist underneath our constructs.

This is all well and good of course, until those inate human tendencies begin to grapple with things like lonliness, depression and anxiety, which social media has turned into an epidemic. We know that we are being observed and judged by the world every step of the way, and this is not something we can escape. It has tangible outcomes in the scope of our lives, bleeding through those now non-existent lines between our online and our private lives. We would do well then to also face these things head on, even as we keep a cynical eye on the absurdities that give these real and valid and very human experiences life.

Lastly, we can reclaim the idea of a master or meta-narrative, something the modern world has largely taught us to reject and/or ignore/demonize. We can do things that help deal with the epidemics, for example, but the real concern will always remain the story. Apart from that we cannot rationally and objectively attend for the problem. The greatest obstacle to this end? The fact that reclaiming a mastd\er or meta-narrative is the single greatest thing that challenges our illusions of control. Worse yet, it challenges the very story that tells us we are better than (fill the blank) for as long as we are changing. And that reaches into something long embedded in our human experience as well as a trigger. There’s a two-fold reality at play there though. We know we crave this control, but we also know the toll this takes on us at the same time. We know it’s not what we actually desire, and in our most vulnerable moments we tend to be willing to finally question the narrative. But the world still turns, and questioning the narrative in a world designed to avoid such questions (after all, the new world finally arrived at the answer to what plagued the old one and thus surpassed it and its superstitions, as the story goes) often only serves to perpetuate the very issues social media creates.

But we are still human after all, and that humanity also seems to be the greatest antitode. Thats the real beauty of the conversation Morton is having regarding one of the most recognizable facets of our own modern cultural landscape.

My wife (Jen) and I recently visited The Seine River Cafe for breakfast, a  quiet, unassuming store front diner tucked in behind a Shell station and a Dairy Queen on Provencher, the central route winding its way through Winnipeg’s French district. It had been on my list of restaurants to visit for a while, being a celiac who is always on the lookout for new places which can accomodate the inconvenciences of this auto-immune disease.

We went early on a Sunday morning, close to when it opened, arriving to an empty restaurant. As we were sat at one of the non-descript tables, the sort of tables you would expect to find at any like minded low key diner, a friendly waitress came to take our order, leading with welcome warm cups of coffee.

It would be soon after that the diner started to fill up with people, some by themselves others arriving in couples or larger groups, each sliding up to a different table in different corners with the obvious ease and aura catering to custom and routine. Both Jen and I noticed, quietly at first to ourselves, as we observed the growing activity and conversation, every single person that came through that door appeared to be a regular. The sort where the waitresses already knew their names and orders. One such table, saddled up close to the open kitchen, naturally fed into casual conversations with the the cook and (assumed) owner, as though they were simply picking up where they last left off. It became so obvious after a while that we, by all appearances, felt certain we were the only strangers in the bunch. We barely needed to verbalize what was on both of our minds in that moment, me just beginning to open my mouth to state the obvious and Jen speaking the all to familiar words of the old Cheers sitcom- “where everyone knows your name.”

What made this moment more startling was the conversation that preceded and followed this moment. With my 50th birthday coming up quick (two days away from this particular Sunday morning venture), such milestones have a way of pushing you into expected modes of reflection on the passage of time, and if you are me, the nature of life itself. Earlier that morning I found myself talking with Jen about how the passage of time has indeed reframed the ways I experience life today, caught in this space where a world, now made primarily visible through its endless online portals, just keeps going about its business even while, in my head, this particular moment for me feels monumental, as though its stopping my world in its tracks.

For me, this is the mark of something I have to similtaneously learn how to grieve and celebrate. One of the things I noted to Jen was how striking that realization actually is given my life today, thinking back on a life that was once dominated by the endless phsyical presence of a social circle, with that memory now ringing out into the uncertain space of this transition into a moment that, by all appearances and experience, now seeks to displace and forget and isolate. Where you know through your convesations with those whom have travelled this space ahead of you, that the process will require a constant process of reckoning with what will become a perpetual stream of loss. In various areas of course, but most pertiently of all the things that once made you “you.”

The notion that this phase of life is marked by the important process of learning how to more appropriately grieve in real time, but also the increased call to remember and to preserve.

These actions, as I’ve been told without the sugar coating, get harder as the years push forward, with life relegating you more and more to the sidelines. At the same time, the call to remember and preserve becomes all the more important precisely because of this reality. As someone once said, words that are lingering today, this is the hard work of aging. Something you are forced to learn in real time, leaning on all the wisdom you have forgotten, handerd down by those who went before. The most difficult thing being your ability to hold on to the simple truth that this process matters to something real and true regarding the meaning of a life.   

To be honest, the only word that fit in that moment, in my conversation with Jen, was “loneliness.” A feeling of lonliness that is also marked by existing in a world that now oeprates in that online space. A world in which my closest lifelong friendships remain marked more by distance than presence, for as valuable as they remain.

Fast forward to after our breakfast, where we attended the Sunday morning service at our Church. Here we were met by a message about the importance of having those voices in your life, the ones that truly know you, which can help you through the passage of time and different phases of a life. How telling the story of a life together matters, especially to how we imagine God’s relationship to this world and our continued participation in it.

That image of the diner, defined as it was through routines built over the passage of time, where those figures knew exactly where to sit without needing direction, where their names were known and orders made before any words had yet been spoken. Such an image pushes back against the dominant image of the way it seems life must work today. A world where we are taught that life is meant to be about some gradual progression towards some non-descript and undefined point of growth. Here, in this image, I find something much richer, preserved as it is in the passage of time, not a product of it. A timely image given the question my day started with, and the message that would follow.

I’ve been thinking about this (now) memory as I’ve been working through the newly released book by Kathryn Jezer-Merton called The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything. It’s a book about understanding this present moment. Which, whether we like it or not, whether we want to recognize it or not, runs straight through one of its primary driving forces- social media. A truism that holds whether you are among those deleting their facebook accounts or perhaps establishing limits and boundaries and reforming habits. “Social media” applies broadly to nearly every facet of our world and its function., far beyond the typical scapegoats. It’s written into the fabric of our econoimy, it’s the primary language of our social function in an online world, and it takes on many different forms.

I found it fascinating to journey with Merton back in time to the early adoption of social media (and I promise to connect this back to my thoughts above on turning 50). Back to the age of MySpace and Friendster and AOL. She outlines the way the early adoption of this form of communication complimented the way life worked before its reshaping. It was a mirror of that (now) lost world. Meaning, it once served as a space largely built for our relatively small physical circle of friends where we could engage in the largely experimental but active creative curation of ones story. Anyone who grew up in this era can understand that these early sites fit our lifetyles at the time, where they demanded the same sort of hours upon hours of time and attention that curating and collecting our tape and CD collections did in a largely still computer iliterate world used to (and loving) “being bored.” Building our MySpace platforms wasn’t that far removed from the practice of building our physical zines or our basement jam session hang outs, and it wasn’t abnormal to find ourselves doing it together either. We would build them, and then we would meet together to discuss and compare and chat about them. More importantly, which Merton points out, the first place we would gravitate to were the profiles.

But then came an important shift in the atmsophere. Where these connecting spaces experienced a movement from a small group of our close friends (our physical life) out into a small group of connections turned friends from outside of that physical circle. This began the gradual progression towards a world framed now through connections marked by physical distance. As this shift became the norm, those once physical spaces began to disappear, along with the once cherished practice of the curation of profiles. Facebook understood where these winds were shifting towards long before anyone else, and eventually that once world of creation curation of our physical lives turned into a world of online connection and content now replicating and chasing after itself. The world was now our collective space, and that space was now online, and every platform that followed became defined by the further implementation of “user friendly” streamlined designs, whicih is shorthand for “stripped of the need for time consuming personal curation.”

And the bigger the world became, the more these physical spaces we once occupied disappeared. Ironically, if you fast foward to some of the eventual fallout, what we eventually find is a world where carving out time for physical interaction (be it with spaces or people, the more predominant trend being towards the former) has now become an intentional trend, the necessary reprieve, the thing we build in to our lives as an antidote to the way the world now works.

A world where going off social media becomes a matter of virtue signalling for a lost world no one actually knows or understands masking the simple fact that even where we engage in such admirable practices of disciplined retreat, the world we occupy remains defined by social media. What’s also true, and maybe even more pertinent, is that this supposed reclamation of physical spaces tends to narrow our world into small, protected circles of like minded connection, not open it up. The lost world we think we are retreaving, in constrast, that was a world once necessitated by a room filled with disagreement by its nature. That’s what made it valuable. .

One of the things Merton brings to the forefront is that the thing (the social construct) that is telling the story of our lives is intimately connected to how we tell the stories of our lives. Meaning, we are always as much a product of the world as we are a product of the way the world functions. The first is the world we inherit, the second determines the paramaters of our participation in it. Within this we can note important and common human tendencies that remain universal across the shifting tides- the need to share of ourselves, the need to belong, the need to preserve. But we also have what we would call the unique dynamics of a particular moment in time, in this case our present online age. Knowing the difference is important.

She does state that this (book) is not about singling out the present online age and demonizing it. Although in some ways it is singling it out so as to understand the thing we are looking to critique (and its relevance to our lives)  Mostly though, it’s about learning how to distinguish between what those inate common human needs are, and the particular shape of our present moment that distinguishes us from the rest of history, a process that is equal parts reflective and predictive.

But there’s an important aspect of our navigation to this end that needs to be recognized. In order to get to the root of the problem we have to understand where it is situated in the history of it’s emergence. For example, we can look at the ways social media changed from that era of hands on curation to the automated forms we encounter today. That begs the question, why did it take this shape? It doesn’t just come out of nowhere. It’s following a pattern. That might push us to look at the nature of the market economy this emerges within, something Morton notes as a force that naturally seeks the commodification of emotional (lived lives) capitalism, something that economy craves in this online world.

But that also doesn’t come out of nowhere. Morton notes how we can reach back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to locate a pivotal shift in a way of doing life in this economic reality, observing the devleopment of the myth of “personal growth” or pesonal development, something that gets applied to telling our stories according to a preconditioned allegiance to expected notions of linear progressions and sought after narratives of self improvement.

But again, this doesn’t come out of nowhere. It is the natural outcome of a particular world of its time, one that follows the myth of progress, or a narrative of societal progression that is built on scapegoating the past. A world that finds its worth in today always necessarily being better than yesterday, lest the whole enterprise show itself to be a failure. Follow that line and we find ourselves, again as an example, standing on the precipice of a new societal shift, now known as the age of the Enlightenment. Itself a product of wide-spread shifts which divided East and West according to the terms old and new, tumbling as it was into the industrial age and everything else that would follow in its footsteps.

Perhaps reaching further back yet, as far back as James Suzman’s theory in Work: A Deep History, From the Stone Age to The Age of Robots (necessary reading), which sees the first truly universal shift in the way we do life with the discovery of fire, the singular moment where activity once the sole property of the active expenditure of human energy was now being contracted out to a different energy source (handing the work we once did to something other than ourselves). Which of course begins the long and patterned road to now grappling with the realities of AI.

All such digging requires us to work our way back up then to those pivotal points that mark our present point of concern, to something closer in relevance and which we can, perhaps, actually have a degree of control over and hold greater proximity to. But we do so with those helpful patternings in mind, which make us better equipped to understand the issues we are facing now, especially for that all important task of distinguishing between the familiar and common patterns that bind history together, and the uniqueness of this present moment.

A present moment marked in a unique way by

• the commodifcation of emotional capitalism
• a globalized world shaped predominantly by this seperation between digital and physical spaces
• widespread epidemics of depression and anxiety fueled by the erosion of the attention economy
• Increasing feelings and experiences of loneliness and a loss of a guiding narrative

Morton notes another important, and I think profound, observation. At the heart of the problem sits this essential idea: what we’ve lost is the basic vocabulary for describing, and thus knowing, the world before this present shift from physical space to the new online world (and the economic machine it would bear out in its image). That’s massively important for understanding where we find ourselves in this present moment. All narrative is, after allo, predicated on language. And not just language, but a shared language.

There is a reason why this matters though for how we understand this present moment. When you look at the patterns of history, what you find is a human tendency towards forms of dualism. Dualism is simply a way of seeing a world (or a facet of reality) as being made up of two distinct, seperate parts. Platonism is perhaps one of the most famous expressions of dualistic thought, and comes in and out of fashion like the 80s and 90s (also see the obsession of the West with retrieving ancient Greek Myth and reappropriating it, along with it’s infused dualism, as our latest iteration of a modern western origins story). These same patterns emerge when we look at our now online world seeking repreieve in the physical. Rather than acting as a critique of the online world, we create these dualistic realities, such as the world of nature versus the digital world of our now functional lives (or nature versus the city). More specific to the above analyszis is the tendency to carve out spaces and sections of our lives dedicated to physical space that are effectively seperate from the world we occupy in the online space.

Debate surrounding dualism looms large, especially where it intersects with our preservation of the modern western myth of progress, but critiques have long accused it of falsely writing reality into narratives of disparate parts. Such ways of thinking not only keeps us at arms length from attending to the way reality is on a more holistic level, it actively allows us to ignore it. Such critiques see it as enabling forms of escapism, which then sacfiice our ability to hone in on what actually matters when it comes to assessing a true narrative of the world we are inhabiting. Carving out wanted repreives doesn’t pose the necessary quesitons needed to actively address the online world we still inhabit.

And subsequently, it fails to pose those same questions to the unique challenges such a world represents: the loneliness epidemic, the challenges of widespread and systemic depression and anxiety, the erosion of the attention economy, the lack of narrative.

Coming back full circle to my restaurant experience and my struggle with turning 50 in a world that increasingly feels unfamiliar, but one which also no longer speaks my language. Being of that generation, the last suriving one which has one foot in both worlds, who grew up without the internet, but came of age in the great shift towards this online existence., in some ways makes it more difficult. It’s not simply that I feel the impact of such a world, it’s that I actively know what has been lost over the years. I also know that what is lost is part of a world that no longer exists, a world that “today” doesn’t have the language for. This, I think, is part of why the process of aging in a world where change happens at a rate which is unprecedented, brings with it those ineviatble feelings of growing isolation and loneliness. Attempting to communicate these parts of oursevles in a world that neither understands you nor cares to (or perhaps is able to) only serves to underscore the predominant narrative that relegates lives to the very past the myth of progress sees as the enemy. In some ways this has been true for a good long while about the ebb and flow of generational shifts, but to understand the challenges of aging today one also needs to note its unique expression in this now online world.

In truth, I don’t know that my generation fully grasped what it was getting into. We were taking our own journey into something we did not understand, and what has come from it is a world we no longer understand. A world so reshaped that it cannot recognize its own shadow, even in proper conversation. And yet it is also our world nonetheless. We, those of us who are aged, still live in it. Still occupy it. Still have to navigate it. Which is part of the challenge of that never ending grieving process, because the more we do, the more distanced we become from our mother tongue so to spaeak. The more the memory of the world we grew up in fades and retreats with the passage of time, and the more we become convinced of that ever repeating narrative: the past exists only to assure we have rejected it. Only now it’s as if the past never existed at all. In many ways, modern history is not history at all. In the online world it cannot be lost, it cannot be buried, and it will never need to be sought or wrestled with or understood. This is part of that vast language barrier that keeps these two worlds apart.

Here’s something interesting. Today I went to visit the Dalnavert Museum, the once home of John A. Macdonald, a former Prime Minister of Canada. While I was working my way through the old home, built in the late 1800’s, one of the workers asked me how I was enjoying the displays. The first thought I had was, if you took this home, cut it down to less than a quarter of its size, and took out some of the more lofty artifacts denoting that upper class status, the whole thing reminded me of being a young child visiting my grandmothers house. So many of the artifacts were exactly the things that they had in their home, from the old style washers and tub to the kitchen stove and pots, to the wallpaper and lamps. It all tbrought me straight back to those childhood memories. But it also struck me that, here I was seperated by two generations from that life, and my world can still share that language. in my ways. Being seperated now (in some respects) by two generations on the other side (given the rate of change, two generations between my grandpaterents and me translates to about 5 between me and and my nephews children) leaves me with a world that seems to share next to nothing in common. Case in point: I was teaching a confirmation class a little while ago, and in my lesson I brought up what I thought was the single generation occupying of that room- Gen Z. Turned out the room was actually divided by two whole generations, defined as such while only being a year apart. More shocking? Both sides stated that they really didn’t understand the other. They felt like they spoke a completely different language. That really shook me up.

Back to that breakfast outing. Somehow that simple act of eating breakfast in a long standing diner surrounded by visible acts of routine and tradition reminded me that certain revelations do break through the noise from time to time. A lost art? Perhaps. A dying relic in an age where such institutions only survive by changing names every four or fives years.? There’ a good chance this is true. For me it wasn’t so much about it being some ill fated reverance for the good old days (not that this isn’t part of it I assume for anyone remembering the past), rather it was a moment when I felt known., and understood. As though this shared language had the power to remind me that the past is still a thing. That life does indeed matter. That its not just an inevitable (and often tough) dance towards the reality of being erased. Or worse yet, living in a world where one has already been erased. After all, such discussions about a life are never contained to a single story. As Morton’s title denotes, its about “our” stories. It always has been. How we grapple with the relevance of the past in the face of this new online world impacts the whole. What we find the world saying about us, is precisely what allows us to say something about the world. This is why it matters. Perhaps then, this is precisely why figuring out, in this new phase of life, how to grieve and preserve at the same time matters as well. 

Every once in a while I unearth something from my childhood years that I forgot existed. I have no idea where this small remnant of a story was going, but it’s something I was starting to write back when, my best guess, I was around 10 or 12 years old. Figured I’d type it out and preserve it here:

(This was the working chapter title I assume?) Horrendous Yet Familiar

The town of Heradrin, located in the highlands of greater Mirlanda, was filled with the noise and excitment of hundreds of people, all out having a good time and enjoying the festivities of the Christmas season. A couple of houses sat at the edge of town lighting up the outskirts. One of these houses was owned by the Halworth family. Their house was located by a long dirt road serving as the main way to get in and out of town. Their house was old and run down, but that didn’t matter to the Halworths. They considered it home, and had worked hard to make it into a place where they could build a life.

The house was made up of two rooms. In the smaller of the two, Mrs. Halworth lay on her bed, her long blonde hair falling over the sides of her slender shoulders. She was in such a heavy sleep that a trumpet being blared in her ear couldn’t have woken her. One door down her two young girls, both 2 years apart but with similar feisty personalities, were stirring with restlessness as they awaited the coming dawn.  In the other room a shabbily dressed 14 year old boy named Edward sat at a warped and faded wooden desk staring intently down at two thick books that lay open on the desk in front of him. On the open page of one of the books there was written an ancient legend. The legend starts with a man named Gilbert A. Walworth,, who lived way back during the time of the Great Awakening. It told of a long lost treasure that was buried deep in the farthest depths of these legendary caves, known to the locals as the Caves of Death.

Everyone in the town of Heradrin knew about these caves. They were located just a 45 minute drive northward. They also knew of the cave’s protecter, a mysterious fire breathing dragon that lurked deep within the cavernous underground lakes. This dragon, as the story goes, keeps watch over the treasure. Many desire it, but all who venture to find it meet with death. Save for one. This is the one the legend remembers.

It is a town tradition to share the story at Christmas time of this man named Gilbert A. Walworth. As the story goes, Walworth was a man who once coveted untold riches, and upon discovering this map to the promised treasure he sacrificed everything he owned and loved to attain it. Determined to succeed and believing these riches would give him everything he desired, he eventually found himself lost in this cave and unable to find his way back out. Having disappeared for years, the towns-people assumed his death. Until one day, a Chistmas day not unlike this one, they saw this shadowy, weathered figure making his way down the road. Walworth had returned.

In the days that followed he would tell of his experience, describing his perilous journey deep into the darkness of these passageways, eventually one day coming upon a great expanse overlooking an underground lake. Here he found a treasure not made of gold, but of Wisdom. Angry about his findings, Walworth threw this treasure into the lake, thus awakening the great beast that lay sleeping beneath the surface. The beast was the most fearsome thing he had ever seen, with fangs as wide and as tall as he stood, and fiery red eyes that pierced staight into his soul. A body made of scales that glistened as though it was made of prized medals. Frozen in place, he prayed for deliverance, which is when he found himself suddenly subsumed by a glowing light, with an unfamiliar voice seemingly speaking from all sides all once. Here he was imparted with a choice. Desire the secrets of this Wisdom and these riches would serve as the true master of his heart, freeing him from the passions of his will and giving him an untold power over the forces of the world. Choose the passions, and he would become a slave to the dragon, giving him the untold powers of the world.

Walworth chose Wisdom, and upon his return he began to seek the gift that, for him, had become his salvation. For the rest of his days he grew more and more to love this Wisdom, giving him a power greater than anything he could have imagined, spilling out into the lives he surrounded, and over the years his renknown began to spread over the lands, forming into the greatest legend Herardrin has ever known. Eventually he would die, the secrets of his Wisdom being buried with his body where one day such riches might be unearthed by another, but ever since the people of the town came to believe that by telling this story each year, the mystery could be preserved. That in the telling it they might continue to experience and seek its power. As the legend goes, for those who’s hearts are guarded, the treasure of the dragon remains their desire. For those who journey to find this treasure, they are faced given this same choice. Apart from Walworth, no one else who has entered has returned to share their story. Thus, the sharing of this story year after year has been a way of protecting the town from the allure of the caves.

“Even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, (it) continues to be prized, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it.”(page 57, This Homeward Ache))

The “it” in this equation is Sehnsucht. Sehnsucht, a German word that Lewis cites in his autobiography as a defining point in his own spiritual journey, and which Amy Balk Lee describes in her book This Homeward Ache: How Our Yearning for the Life to Come Spurs on Our Life Today, as being notoriously prone to being subsumed by other words. Yet, “the essence” of this word is one that, by its nature, “can’t really be translated.” She goes on to cite Rebecca K. Reynolds’s work in trying to unpack a strong sense of its meaning, rooting it in a feeling that one can’t quite explain, either to oneself or to others. It is defined as, “A yearning that floats always in the peripheral vision of your soul, but which disappears every time you turn and try to look at it,” something that lends it a necessary part of its very quality and charachter. It is a word that is most at home in the mundane struggles of life, describing that basic human of an unnamed longing for a far-off land we have never seen, or a place we cannot name. (page 41)

Lee suggests this basic truism about how life works, which is that our human biological function, regardless of the beliefs that undergird our interpretation of it, actively protects us against being stuck in a perpetual state of longing. This might feel intuitive, but it’s not always obvious or recognized as we make our way through this life.

The science behind this basic truth of human function suggests that such perpetual longing connects to a further discussion of the nature of human (or creaturely) desire, and more importantly how this relates to the brain’s consistent mode of formulating predictions based on the world it is encountering. What this establishes is, this predictive function is not merely responding to dangers and rewards that are right in front of us, as though this is a simple call and response exercise dependent on what it sees, rather it appears that there is a fundamental need for our brains to seek something it cannot see and cannot name. This is why the concept of hope remains so central to the human experience. As humans, this is what our brains are (unconsciously) fighting to preserve. Without this we become enslaved to what the science could call “dysfunction” or “disorder,” which can take on many different forms. One of its most accute forms on the mental side of things would be things like anxiety, depression, and stress, and its ultimate shape melancholy, cynicism, and apathy.

Lee also cites Alan Jacobs here, saying that while we (our biological brains) do not want to be caught in a perpetual state of longing, we do want to experience joy (as an example). Lee cites this in underscoring C.S. Lewis’ own basic translation of Sehnsucht as Joy. In fact, this is at the core of nearly every spiritual practice, this idea that there is a key difference between fulfilled longings and our experience of Joy in the face of unfulfilled longings.

Here is what this seems to reveal. While our brains are wired to protect against it, this basic fact of Sehnsucht suggests that we are in fact in a perpetual state of longing. However, the crisis point, the thing our brains are responding to, hinges not on the present lack of fulfillment but rather on whether we believe the source of this longing to be true and to actually exist. This is where hope is derived from.

The real question then appears to come down to this basic idea. If it is true that Sehnsucht cannot be grasped or explained, what actually matters is a two-fold reality: first, the idea that we live according to a deeply held belief that it exists at all, and second, what this reveals about why such a thing matters in the first place.

There is a simple, utilitarian understanding of this two-fold equation. It would say, based on reducing the experience to its material parts, that the science tells us this essential human experience is the brain creating the illusion of hope, and subsequently the illusion of joy. These become necessary in order for a human to live in a world shaped by unfulfilled longings. It is, in many ways, described in terms that attach to that essential drive for survival that we find in nature itself, and in fact, nearly everything I’ve read to this end inevitably locates this within a larger section discussing the biological roots of this very drive.

In this case, the appeal to such illusions, especially once you get into the philosophers, is what then moves us from the biological grounds to the metaphysical discussion. What’s important to note here is, such ways of explaining this longing aren’t looking to strip it of its meaning, rather it is naming what that source actually is. Here, the most common move is to appeal to complexity as a sort of authority in and of itself, meaning, these illusions are built on (or are a product of) these emergent realities we call the essential human experience. This is the complexity from which we then derive our meaning. In this sense, we can speak of these illusions as a real thing, even while they are being defined as something that does not in fact exist. .

This is typically the point where this discussion finds its pushback. On one hand, Sehnsucht is comfortably positioned as something that both exists and does not exist at the same time. Complexity allows us to say, it is a true part of the human experience, and thus we can say it is meaningful. But its meaning derives from a Sehnsucht that points to something very different than that experience. Thus Sehnsucht is simply a way of naming a biological function in ways that accord with the illusion. Whether we can hold the obvious cognitive disonnance without losing our sense of hope is not the real question for such interpretations (at least from what I’ve seen), rather it is simply about whether we experience the benefits of these illusions or not. Which is where Joy, or its superficial and largely ill defined version, happiness, comes into play.

On the other hand, those who critique the coherency of this position tend to suggest that such interpretations do not have a particularly strong explanatory power when it comes to actually making sense of the human experience itself, or more accurately the world we oberve and experience. It is not simply cognitive disonnance at play, there is in fact far more at stake when it comes to why we appear to need such beliefs in the first place. One need not look any further than a life for whom hope has been challenged or even abolished. What is at stake is what we actually believe to be true about the world we observe and experience. In this case, the only way we can trust Joy is by believing it exists apart from the ebb and flow of this world we are experiencing. Otherwise it all is held captive to circumstance.

Now, it’s important to note here that, this is not an apologetic. This is not a proof argument. Rather, it is a way of attending to both the way things actually are, and how that relates to what we actually believe about this world we are inhabiting. Whether these things can be stated to have any inherent value, it seeks honesty and integrity in the relationship between these two things.

There are two other important elements here that Lee brings to the table. The first is the hard relationship between a world that bears witness to both the infinite and the finite. This is what motivated minds like Einstein to pursue their theories about existence. Which is to say, when it comes to Sehnsucht, the finite does not have the power to explain the whole. Again, we know this intuitively, but we don’t always give this basic fact about the world we observe and experience the attention it deserves. If this is the case, that we have these longings at all must be set in conversation with the infinite. The quality of these longsings suggest that we are seperated from something we don’t yet know and can’t yet see. Whether this is something our minds of “illusioned,” or whether it is something that exists, in both cases this points to something outside of ourselves. And not just outside of ourselves, but something that is beyond the very words we use to explain it. In both cases, Joy can only translate Sehsucht if Sehsucht is not held captive to our experience of Joy. It is the same for another word we often employ in service of making sense of that which cannot be known or seen: beauty. Lee writes,

“Sehnsucht is not found in but beyond beauty.”

To think otherwise is to be betrayed by something that never existed in the first place. This is the existential crisis. We can only trust beauty if it points beyond itself to its source. In the same way in which metaphor, for it to have power, must point beyond itself.

There is a second important aspect of this discussion though that Lee addresses, and that is the idea of nostalgia. Nostalgia often suffers from superficial readings and definitions in our modern day, but at its richest, Lee suggest that nostalgia is a “heartache for the homecoming,” or a “homecoming pain.”  Yes, it is a longing for a setting in the past, but where Sehnsucht reveals the source of this longing it “catches nostalgia and directs it toward something more fulfilling and complete, something of which the former time gave only a hint.”

What the experience of nostalgia reveals is that our longing has always been rooted in a sense of an inhabited space. Not some disembodied future but an incarnated reality. We aren’t longing for a past that is now gone, rather we are longing for the very same thing this past is bearing witness to in its memory. If this space is in fact a product of our brain’s creation of these necessary illusions, this sense of inhabiting an unnamed Home nevertheless still defines the shape of this longing. This is the only way our brains could convince us (a slippery word in this regard) that such a hope is true and trustworthy.  And if it’s true? If this Home does exist? Here is where we glimpse its true shape.

Sehnsucht is always with us. It is an integral part of the human experience. To live with that “homeward longing,” is to live with a certain hope that Senhsucht is in fact something we can trust. We can trust it enough to stake our very lives on it, as all humans do. We call these “beliefs.” Behind every human experience, be it experiences of joy, sadness, sorrow, beauty, awe, empathy, pain, love; behind each of these things is an underlying belief about the world we observe and experience, and a deep rooted trust in that belief. That is what allows us to experience these things. Not only this, but behind every human experience is this same witness to Sehnsucht, a world (and word) we cannot see and cannot expalin, but which drives our longings, even as we know they will remain unfulfilled. Here in lies our hope.

Only fitting that a train (among other) disruptions would go on to define the final part of my pilgrimage. It begins with my shuttle from Stonehenge back to Salisbury Station, where I would complete the final leg of my journey over to Oxford, being an hour late. This required changing my train ticket to a later time, at which point I accidentally clicked on the right day, just on the wrong week, inadvertently booking my train for precisely a week later than the time I needed to leave, and which also then charged me for the price of a new ticket when it wasn’t supposed to.

Which led to me making the wrong decision to speak to the station agent about the mistake rather than trying to go through the third party app (Trainline). Turns out when the train station adjusts a ticket purchased through a third party app, it becomes impossible to correct the mistake or get a refund, with both parties punting the responsiblity back to the other in an effort to absolve themselves of any responsibility or decision.

Should have just rented that car.

Which meant I payed three times over for the same ticket. On top of this, the train also ended up being disrupted.

In all of that, being rerouted provided me with a fresh dilemma. The town of Woking had been on my list, being the hometown of H.G. Wells. As things go, other things took priority and it gradually ended up being taken out of the potential plans. Being re-routed, I now had an opportunity to do a short layover in Woking before continuing on to Oxford. I took the opportunity, partly because I was already missing my window of opportunity to arrive in Oxford before the college grounds closed their doors, and because my father in law was a big fan of H.G. Wells. I figured I could document the place and find him a souvenir. I couldn’t find a souvenir, but I did document the place, seeing his home, the bridge, the location of the martian landing (Horsell Common), the martian tripod sculpture in Crown Square, the memorial statues, the murals (all marked by the heritage trail). I added that to my list of blue plaques from London (including a 5,000 square foot townhouse at Regent Park where he died, which I found out was listed 5 years ago for 13.95 million pounds).

While I didn’t have an accompanying book to fill in his story, Wells’ name popped up so often in association with the others I was visiting that it seemed fitting to be able to work him in to the picture. In either case, given everything that happened just to finally get on that train, I was relieved to be on route and ultimately heading to my primary destination: Oxford.

Grieving the loss of that opportunity to fully experience the college grounds of Tolkien, Carroll and Lewis, I set out to make the most of my experience. In what I felt was a stroke of genius at the time, I was able to book a ticket for a 1:00 am train, which would then take me to Reading where I could transfer to a bus heading to Heathrow for what was an early morning flight. This both extended my stay in Oxford, while also putting me in transport for a fair portion of the night (as opposed to wandering the streets). There I could relax and have a place to store my luggage (which was now missing a whole wheel).

A stroke of genuis until the bus ended up being cancelled. But I digress.

My time in Oxford would be framed by two graves (Tolkien on the front end, Lewis on the back end, being located at opposite ends up the city), with a visit to St. Mary’s Passage to see the famous Narnia door anchoring the middle of what was a tour around the outskirts of Magdalen College, the (under construction) Eagle and Child, getting to stand at the foot of Christ Church where Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) lived and worked (and the Meadows that were his inspiration),  Alice’s Shop (the 15th century grocery store that the real life inspiration for Alice frequented), getting to stand at the doors of  the Church of St. Mary’s where Lewis preached the sermon The Weight of Glory, and taking a cab ride out to the gravesite of Lewis and the Kilns/nature reserve (where Lewis wrote his books).

In all of that, perhaps the most profound moment for me was simply sitting on a bench along the river, close by St. Mary’s Passage, with N.T. Wright’s newest, God’s Homecoming, in hand. A formative voice in my life, and a resident of Oxford, I was able to imagine being surrounded by all those who walked these same streets: Tolkien, Lewis, Carroll, Susan Cooper, and the still living author Stephen Lawhead, with Wright’s reminder of this relationship between the spaces we call home in this world and the great promise of God’s coming to dwell amongst it, reminding me of how all these stories speak to the hope of transformation. All of this converging on these very grounds. Here is where my childhood stories truly come alive, dancing as they are in my imagination under the now moonlit skies, all being brought in line with an important turn in my own theological understanding all these years later.

Having come all this way, I am able to look back on this pilgrimage and consider it through the lens of that cosmic story, the same one that informed each of these voices now standing in front of me. The Story that carries us all, making sense  of the very human joys and struggles all our stories represent. I have noted this along the way, but it feels to me to be a profound thought to consider, each of these voices reflect a part of a much larger conversation, one that flows directly from their communion with one another and which points to the world they both experienced and observed right in front of them. One of the reasons the Inklings themselves remain so present in my own imagination is because here, at this very point in history, I also find the buried remnants of my own past. A past when I once understood and knew what this sort of communion was, and occupied a world in which it was still possible. Here, in the lives of these literary voices, is this rare moment where divergent voices converge in this singular space working to preserve the lost art of discourse and debate. Friendships that see in their differences a window into the most important questions that all our lives are asking through our acts of living. A people for whom every conversation is, by its nature, of utmost importance. Where every discussion, big or small, is seen as a life and death matter. Discouirse that shared equal space with the simple joys of laughter and celebration which informed their life together around the table at the same time.

As Michael D.C Drout suggests in his masterful book The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R Tolkiens Creation, in taking stock of the textual and literary criticism of Tolkien’s body of work and creations, it simply does not do to reduce it to just another entry into what were the common genre writings of his time. This does not have the power to explain why these stories mattered, and indeed continue to matter. Applying this to the whole of this community of writers shaping the character of England at this time, these stories do indeed represent a particular resonant force in history that seems unique and rare, and to dig into Tolkien’s world brings us into a more rational conversation about why this is. This moment in time represents a convergence of disparate feelings in what were the shifting tides of history on a meta level. This is why these stories continue to speak today, because they bring an important conversation about this intersection of worldviews to the forefront. The present shape of our own political realities, finding their own sorts of shifting tides in a more micro fashion, belongs to the larger narrative that this collection of literary voices both capture and preserve. It is their critique of modernism that becomes the necessary tool for understanding how we arrive where we are today. It was their ability to take the stories of the old world and carve out a conversation with the new that gives us the lens through which to see the revelance of appealing to and reclaiming the notion of it all belonging to a larger Story.

And I have become convinced at this point in my pilgrimage that one of the key factors that enabled this unique moment to emerge was the communion that these literary voices shared with one another. In our now global world, we simply do not find this at work today. The communion that inspired them to find their inspiration in one another’s creative work, as though the creative act itself needed this ongoing collaborative process, is a lost art, given now to a more superficial prioritizing of ideological divides. The richness of the symbols that ring out over these ancient grounds, indeed representing a lost language, contrasts heavily with the tendency today to write modern morality tales, bent as they are towards our obsession with utilitarian definitions, symbols and metaphors left swimming around without an actual anchor. Narratives that no longer seek revelation or the uncovering of mystery, but rather the continued deconstruction of these things in favour of a world built on facts and propositions. Where the need for our stories to wrestle with and acknolwedge the weight of our existential questions through story has come to be seen as inferior academics, traded for a tendency, in its endless ebb and flow, for grabbing on to older patterns of deifying a natural world that has similtaneously been reduced to our arguments for a robust physicalism and material reality, both in and outside of our modern religious systems. An act that sits uncomfortably alongside an equal commitment to its reigning humanist assumptions. This has become the shared language of our day, only, as Mircea Eliade once so brilliantly put it in the book The Sacred and the Profane, such language has little explanatory power when it comes to making sense of actual human experience and observance of the world.

Of course there are great stories still being told, great storytellers still telling them. What I think this pilgrimage is opening up for me though is that we’ve lost the ability to articulate why these stories have the power that they do. Not unlike my own act of growing up out of the juvenile nature of my childhood self, the world now sees itself as having grown up out of its old world superstitions.

Thus, to recover my childhood stories, to encounter them in their world, becomes an act, for me, of learning what it means to grow into my childhood, not to stand above it. Here this process reaches into the most fundamental of all my questions: why do we tell stories in the first place. What draws us to its apparent power. What allows this to endure.

And even more important, what world do these stories reveal and how do we inhabit such a world.

My generation, existing as we did in a world both before and after the internet became a thing, is often described as being the last of the living voices whom know what it is to exist in both worlds. We are in fact prone to thinking in terms of this liminal space (there are genuine studies demonstrating this), holding both worlds together even when we don’t realize it. One of the great vantage points this provides is seeing the ways in which the myth of progress, the central and guiding narrative of the new world, works to reshape the world. This hands us a certain conundrum. We are tasked with adopting the ways of the new world while knowing what has been lost in the erasure of the old. We can see firsthand the ways in which we are shaped by the world we’ve been handed, and we can also see how this foreward movement works, built on a constant demand to reject the past and valourize an unnamed future, which as I said in my previous reflections actively works to judge and erase the relevance of our present.

To have the world after the internet bury the old world in its wake is to feel the myth of progress actively working to throw the very value of these things into question. The only value that remains is the constant rejection of our past.

This basic awareness is, in its own way, a kind of fervent, perpetual existential crisis, and whether we feel it or pay attention to it or ignore it, its there. For those of us who watched the world change right in front of us in real time, it’s imbedded in the way we participate in the new world. No single generation since has experienced the same kind of transition. Even the present dialogue around AI must reach back to that old world in order to make sense of its inherent crisis and wanted anxieties.

Sitting on that bench, thinking about these figures that played such a formative part in my own childhood, I realized that the basic shape of this unique generational vantage point mirrors the shape of this literary community, having one foot in the old world of a now dying Empire, and one foot in the new world of a rising one. One foot in a world on either side of a world shaping war. One could argue, no generation since has that same vantage point. This is what makes it unique.

In many ways then, this journey into my childhood stories was about recovering a lost language. Or perhaps it was about learning how to speak all over again. Voices which once taught me how to read the world, how to ask my questions, are the very ones my adult self would grow to rebel against. Here the new world taught me that the true point was learning how to grow up out of those childhood stories, that life is defined by our constant and necessary rejection of the past, and that our greatest tool to this end was science, and the only true explanatory narrative the myth of progress.

I recognized something here in my journaling. I knew what it was to be taught by the world to be angry at my upbringing, to be mad at the ways it indoctrinated me into its old ways of thinking, to blame religion for all of the worlds shortcomings. I knew this well. I also knew the ways in which a whole generation, not content to toss away those old stories (or unable to do so), came to be defined by a wanted acceptance of this anger, trading the old critiques of these shifting worldviews for a targeted embrace. Where everything becomes metaphor, and subsequent questions about and any challenging of what these metaphors are in fact rooted in becomes taboo and intollerant. 

What I recognized was, both of these ways of approaching the world had left me feeling equally unable to speak for a long, long time. The outright confusion of being taught to be angry about such indoctrination on one hand, but having no recourse for expressing what it was to feel lied to by the other side as well. Try to speak and it becomes an exercise of being saddled in with one side or the other as part of this same inevitable game of modern apologetics. 

Maybe the worst part of this is feeling like, for so long I’ve carried this sense that not only is there no recourse, there’s not even the shared language needed to communicate these feelings, for explaining what this space that I am occupying actually is. Which is perhaps why, encountering a shared language in these litearary voices feels so incredibly liberating. To enter into a space that seems like it would feel equally out of place in the world I described above is something I have so desperately been craving. Here I am allowed to speak. I am allowed to leave my anger behind. I am in the company of others whom understand, and whom intimately communicated these feelings through their writings. They believed that story finds its power precisely in the way it reveals a world that is both beyond us and right in front of us. They shared the restlessness of my childhood questions, and saw it not as something I needed to grow out of, but as something I needed to learn how to embrace and to know more intimately. That such an exercise is not anti-intellectual or a less than academic exercise, but rather the most rational venture we can embark on.

Here, in the safety of this place, I am free to pursue a full knowledge of this world as it is. I am free to embark on the quest that was set out before me all those years before: that invitation to remember. 

“We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” (T.S. Eliot)

With my bus being cancelled, I utltimately found myself being rerouted straight to Paddington Station, where I now find myself waiting for the first early morning express train to Heathrow. Indeed, arriving back where I started. It’s a neat experience, getting to watch this space go through what, for it, is a routine process of this transition between the final train of the night and its first morning departure. The quiet, gentle and methodical nature by which the noise begins to disipate, the lights, however briefly, get turned off, and the cleaners move about doing their thing. And then the slow, gradual process by which the lights come back on and the first travellers start to arrive, indicating the beginnning of another day. A dance that happens with the distant clues of those first glimmers of the morning sun sneaking their way in, letting us know that this brief moment of reprieve is readying for a new day. A cycle that I know will be repeated when that sun goes down, and yet here I get to witness it for this one, single, unique moment.

The simplye rhythms of a life, the life of this space, particpating as on ongoing act of creation. A space that is now far more familiar than the one I first encounterd upon my arrival.

Soon I will be stepping on that train and eventually boarding my plane to return home. Where those similar rhythms are waiting to be re-established in my own city, my own home, my own place of work. And yet I return to these spaces a different person. I return with this pilgrimage, this quest, now a permanent part of me, shaping the memory of who I was against the revelations this act of exploration sought to bring about. This is not progress, but transformation. An act of becoming. And what I am bringing with me into these familiar rhythms is a deep rooted sense that this act of becoming is in fact an act of growing into my childhood, not against it. This has always been the case.

Perhaps it is the case that I have never in fact felt closer to who I actually am than when I was that young kid encountering these stories for the first time. Aware of all the complicated feelings and emotions, carrying the raw struggles of simply learning what it means to exist in this world, and trying to figure out what this world is. And yet, the wonder of my adult self is that it gets to grow in its knowledge of what this is. That is the thing, I think, these authors understood, in an age where we didn’t draw the same lines between childrens stories and adult ones. These were stories that transcended such distinctions. Stories that we are meant to reencounter at every turn of our lives, asking the same questions simply from a different vantage point. That is how and why they endure.

As the sun comes up on the final full day of my literary pilgrimage, I find myself climbing the hill to the heart of the ancient city of Exeter. Knowing this was the central hub for all trains travelling in any direction, be it west to Cornwall, South to the Salisbury Plains, East to London, or North to Wales and the Dales, I decided to utilize the split ticket option and stop for an early breakfast before continuing on my way to Stonehenge.

The city is known for containing the Exeter Book, the, to quote, “largest surviving poetry anthology from the Anglo-Saxon era (970 AD).” Maybe slightly less well known is that this is the birthplace of Penguin Books (1934), being designated today as a UNESCO City of Literature.

Just for kicks, it’s also home (Powderham Castle) to the Courtenay family, whom I’m fairly certain has no ties to my own Courtney line (we come from a different Irish root of the similar sounding namesake), but hey, let ones imagination run wild when such encounters call for it.

Fun fact: it’s also home to the first independent library and first woman librarian. And, for that matter, the early suffrage activist Mary Willcocks.

Another fun fact: this is where Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the Book of Were-Wolves and Morgery of Quether, one of the inspirations for Bram Stoker’s Dracula (this is where the character Jonathan Harker comes from). It’s also where Bram Stoker’s brother (George) is buried.

Michael Morpurgo (War Horse), Philip Reeve (The Exeter Riddles), Thomas Hardy (The Woodlands), Gene Kemp (The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler). This city, nestled in an area called Devon, was where the writers of Englands literary history came to study and develop their craft (including Charles Dickens). Standing in the train station (the Exeter St. Davids station) is the Penguin vending machine, a reference to Sir Allen Lane (the founder of the publishing imprint, whom came up with the idea of Penguin books while waiting at this very station following a meeting with Agatha Christie)

If all of that sounds like a wikipedia page full of information, it is in fact my jotted notes I took while I was preparing for the trip. The stuff that connects me to the very roads I’m walking and their relevance to my childhood stories. My interests here, though, also spill out from Exeter into the surrounding area. When my plans had still involved a rented car, my carved path to Tintagel/Torquay was a stop at Mevagissey, the setting for Susan Cooper’s Over Sea, Under Stone, through Dartmoor National Park, the inspiration for and featuring the different locations of the plot for Doyle’s The Hounds of Baskerville, and my carved path from Torquay, running through Exeter was the northern edges of Exmoor National Park, the place where Coleridge wrote The Mariner and the start of a 50 mile stretch celebrating his life and works.

Exeter would be the closest I would get to the convergence of these stories (with the exception of the train being 6 miles out from Mevagissey), my train ride taking me mostly around the edges of these places. One of the things that struck me here at Exeter, a thought that I had been carrying with me ever since leaving London, is just how interconnected these literary voices actually were. It’s as much the case that one would be tracking down the heritage of a single voice, as doing so places you in these meeting points of what was a larger community of voices. These stories reflect an active and ongoing conversation, each of them tied to one another. They didn’t all get along. They disagreed, they had spirited debates. But they all shared a similar passion, and, as I have been discovering through these stories, a similar interest in critiquing the present shape of the world they had been handed and thus inhabited. They have become models for me in doing just this in the world I have been handed and am called to inhabit.

In many ways Exeter would be a symblic bookend anchoring the journey ahead of me leading towards Oxford. Oxford too would become a place where this community of voices comes most alive for me in both spirit and consciousness.

Also, it’s here that I finally solved the puzzle of what an English flapjack is. Yes, I know I could have googled it. And no, it’s not a pancake like it is in America, which was my only previous association with the name. Also yes, it’s quite delicious, cheap (you’re always most conscious of your spiralling budget on the latter end of a trip, right?), and often (or always?) gluten free, Glad I tried it once before I left.

Before leaving Exeter I stop at Sainsbury’s for a budget lunch option. Pro-tip (which I am absolutely not- it’s the tip I got from the pros): the grab (or take) and go meal options, which are everywhere precisely because this grocer is everywhere, are your go to option for $5 dollar (or a fiver) breakfast/lunch options. They are fresh, good, and come with an extensive enough variety to not become tired or repetitive. Burrito in hand (or in my bag), with a side of crisps and sparkly water of course, I begin the rest of my trek to Salsibury Station, where I will be catching a shuttle over to Stonehenge.

Here I will look out my train window to the north and begin to imagine what my limited time has relegated to a potential future part 2 of this pilgrimage. I have already started putting the pieces together as I’ve gone along in fact, including some things that rerouted plans caused me to miss, and as well the unoffical completing of my literary tour of the British Isles. The tour to Canterbury and Dover Castle would be one thing I’d love to do on the other side of London, but the central starting point for me would be to complete my tour of the King Arthur landscape, simply from a different starting point: Glastonbury, the legendary isle of Avalon where we find the end of Arthur’s tale. It’s here where you find the famed countryside of Camelot. Symbolically however, this is an entry point into Wales, where the impassioned debate over Arthur’s true origins still persists. My journey, should I be able to return, would begin here, before moving up into Wales with its own rich history relating to these old stories (this is also where we find other locations of Susan Coopers novels), from Wales to Birmingham, to complete my tour of Tolkien, and from Birmingham to the Lake District to complete my pilgrimage through my childhood stories with a visit to Beatrix Potter’s hometown and inspiraiton. From there I would cross the waters to Ireland to fully connect the two lines of my family tree.

But thus is the restless mind of wanderlust. Here I am, my imagination being pulled back from that norther view and future planning, suddenly realizing I am now in Salisbury. At which point I panic, because I can’t remember which end of the car I left my luggage on. With the doors opening, I of course choose the wrong end, only to run like a madman to the other, promptly grabbing the wrong bag. More panic ensues, and a mad dash back inside the car, where I hand the now startled and frazzled owner their bag and grab the right one.

Gotta love train travel. Yelling into the void for the train to wait isn’t going to keep those doors from shutting.

Stonehenge

Of the handful of sites which have existed in my minds eye ever since I was a kid, this would be near the top. Nothing broke open my imagination like the story of these stones, most recently occupying the heart of one of my favorite series from my favorite authors (the Bright Empire series by Stephen Lawhead). I loved the way they symbolized that ongoing conversation about the relationship between the spiritual and material natures of this world which we occupy. The enduring mystery that historicists love to claim they’ve gotten close to solving in their desire to reduce it to material terms, and the work of others in preserving the myth that gives the place its sacred grounding. Here reality, and the clash of these particular worldviews, gets broken wide open, at least for me. I haven’t even boarded the final shuttle and I can already feel the excitment and anticipation of a good 43 years worth of fascination coming to a head.

The “it’s just a pile of rocks” people be damned (apoologies for the crassness). To view it that way is to fail to see the simple power of occupying a space: a grave, a monument, the endless plaques preserving the history of London as a living thing. In truth, everything can be reduced to “a pile of rocks” in this approach. Here, in this moment, this is about why this space, this place, matters to the larger Story.

In preparation, although I have been consuming material on the place since I was likely 7 years of age, I chose Aubrey Burl’s Stonhenge: A Complete History. It’s a wonderfully balanced book (unlike Ken Follet’s horid recent work of historical fiction), seeking to uphold the mystery while allowing history to bring the tangible earth of this site into detail. What stuck out for me is the ways in which each successive layer of a still active site for Druids today, keeps reaching backwards, as though seeking after an eternal Truth to explain its existence. This would become more clear as my shuttle drops me off at the entrance and I make my way through that first clear obstacle which is the visitor center. (by all means, take advantage of the museum and purchase that souvenir- I admit, I bought a shirt- but for me it was a stark reminder of the ways tourism can mark these sacred sites in particular ways). 

I was given the advice before I left to make sure and walk the path up to the stones rather than taking the bus. The way the stones gradually come into view, the way you can wander through the fields amongst the sheep, the way it gives you a sense of the larger landscape to which these stones belong, is all part of the integrity of that experience. It’s a way of allowing the stones, which are now fenced off, to regain their presence in what becomes an ever present and ever more aware sacred story.

Once you reach the stones, the site itself is designed as a labyrinth, with the circle gradually bringing you closer and closer to the monument as you go around (gimmicky photo-ops included if you want). Here its about seeing the meaning of each new angle, with each stone holding its own significance. The final stage of the labyrinth brings you pretty close to the stones, you just can’t touch them or wander the inner circle (although there are select tours that do take you into the inner circle prior to the visitor centers opening hours, nearby Amesbury does have similar neolithic stones which you can wander through and touch for free). Still, being this close to the Stonehenge circle was, for me, a surreal, likely once in a lifetime, experience.

“Belief is the sense organ of faith, as your eyes are the sense organ of sight.” (Stephen Lawhead)

For Lawhead, one of central themes that runs through his stories, each inspired by the different corners of this vast, ancient andscape and its perserving of an old, eternal Story, is this conception of the human journey as one that seeks to find the necessary intersection between spiritual truth and earthly kings. He is especially attuned to the conversation that exists between Christianity and the enduring symbols of a celitic age that draw us into history’s witness to this deep undercurrent of belief. This is something that captured my young mind, as someone who has always wrestled with the nature of the metaphysical. This invitation to embark on the necessary adventure with the characters of his books, themselves being pulled from long held traditions, in a way that seeks a broadening of our world, not a narrowing of it. That seeks to understand how this tangible witness fits with the narratives we use and employ to explain it. Lawhead, occupying the same space and the same streets that Lewis and Tolkien once travelled touches on this fervent need to find a narrative that can make sense of all the world’s stories. In my later years, this would form the necessary crisis point that found me at my own intersection concerning this very quesiton. In many ways, this pilgrimage is acting as the culmination of a decades long attempt to flesh this out, following words that were handed to me in the form of a quest: the invitation to remember a world long buried by the narrowing practices of my adult self.

As it is with all of these encounters, every space seems to capture the very same tension when it comes to our need to interpret them. The very thing that inspired these literary voices across the isles to wonder about the facts of the figurative “adult world” we have been handed, motivates the need to tell the stories of these places again and again which seek to reenchant it. As Burl suggests in his book, “today, all that is left is the wreckage.” The ruins, for as difficult as that might be to imagine standing next to it. Ruins that must then be interpreted.

Ruins that beg the necessary questions that continue to hold the mystery intact: why did they build it?

There is no way through this question that doesn’t bring us to the simple observation of the site’s “sacred” presence. Whatever the answer to that is, the reason we are standing there looking at these stones today is because they bear witness to that essential story. That’s the great irony of historians whom seek to reduce this site to “mere stones,” which they can then methodically explain away. Such an explanation leaves us with a portrait of a thing that had no real reason to be preserveed. It likewise hands us a narrative in which the modern world, with all of it’s accomplishments and creations will have no reason to be sought or remembered. A world devoid of history where all such questions begin to fade, and with it any sense that what we are seeking through the witness of history is the mystery itself.

We can spend all of our time seeking to explain the how, but, as Burl demonstrates, the question that remains on the otherside of all this unearthing is why. Thats where our true quest begins. To unearth that question is to find that intersection between the transcendent spirit and the earthly kings. This is, in fact, what brought these stones back into view after endless years of neglect, was the rediscovery of the sites sacred importance.

“It has ever been thus. The way is hard and narrow, it is true. But it is a path beaten smooth by the countless others who have gone before us. And good news! We do not have to walk it alone. God Himself is with us and has blessed us with friends for the journey.” (The Fatal Tree, Bright Empire Series)

“God has always worked through the small, the insignificant, the powerless- it seems to be sewn into the very fabric of the universe.” (The Spirit Well, The Bright Empire Series)

It’s a wonder for me to consider that the ground I am standing on was travelled by those who moved these stones. By those who’s continued rites brought these stones to life, revealing a world shaped by unseen exisetences. By those who continued to preserve its power to reveal the Story against great odds. This is, in many respects, what we might call one of those liminal spaces, where God indwells creation in all of it’s sordid and often bloodied witness. And where this indwelling can be found, we find the necessary communion with one another.

I do not embark on this pilgrimage alone. I remember the words of Agatha Christie, which I talked about in my previous blog, as she embarks on that train in an effort to go it alone, following the world shattering nature of the affair and eventual divorce from her husband. I talked about how this act, in the light of her larger story (and the Story that drew her to grow in her understanding of the world), actually worked to reveal the simple truth that none of us move through this world alone, regardless of a tendency to convince ourselves that we do.

And the most powerful thing, in my mind, about the fact of this communion, the same communion all of these literary voices shared with one another, is the ways in which these sacred spaces, for as insignificant as I feel standing next to these massive stones, are precisely where we are called to see that the mystery finds its indwelling, its truest expression, in the continued partcipation of these seemingly insignficant lives in these acts of communion with one another. The cosmic Story these stones are telling ultimately call us back into the world of the everyday. This is where we find the collision between the Empire and the sacred gaining its revelance.

This is, in fact, the story of the ancient Druids that stood at this site all those yearas ago. Where the sheer force of the Empire deems them the enemy, the sacred work continues to happen through the small and the insignficant acts of communion. This, for me, feels like good news.

David Suchet, whom helped bring Agatha Christie’s iconic detective, Hercule Poirot, to life on the small screen from 1989 to 2013, wrote a recently released book called Travels With Agatha Christie, in which he, along with his wife Sheila, retrace the steps of her early promotional tour for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 (which became known as the Empire Mission Tour).  As Suchet suggests, “Agatha used her own life in her novels, and it leaps off the page,” and this particular moment in Agatha’s life becomes a window into the world she once occupied and a way into understanding some of the key events shaping her life within that world at the time.

All along the way, with his own journey finding the same world a century later, Suchet provides a contrast between these two vantage points, both as a means of bringing a full bodied view of Christie to the surface with all of it’s wanted complexities, but also as a grander witness to the ways in which story endures and is perserved through the passage of time.

For perspective, “By the time Agatha was on this expedition, the British Empire covered around 35.5 million square Kilometers across the world, roughly a quarter of the earth’s total land area.” This was “just following the First World War,” Agatha being 31, married, and the mother of two,” having just published her second book (The Secret Adversary). 

What’s at once admirable and revealing about Suchet’s approach here is, he never uses the contrast of these “worlds apart” perspectives, this visible gap that exists between the world he is now encountering through hearing the stories of those whom “the Empire had tried to exclude” and the world Chrstie would have known back in 1922, to diminish the validity of her story. Rather, he uses it to capture a more nuanced conversation about the ways in which we discover the important figures of our childhood and our culture.

By getting to know Christie, and indeed Christie’s text, “in her world,” we can begin to appreciate who she was and why she told these stories. It becomes a unique point of analysis to locate her stories in the midst of a modern world now beginning to be thrown into question in the aftermath of the war. War permeates so much of Christie’s stories. As she is embarking on this Empire Mission Tour, signs are all around her depicting an already crumbling Empire. One of the more fascinating aspects of her life and her stories is that this is the reality in which her notoriety really begins to take off all around the world (as Suchet says, her books are second in sales only to the Bible). In many ways, her stories stand in the gap between the shifting tides of two world Empires, Britain on one side, America on the other, bearing witness to a global literary legacy that retains its roots in England defined through a sort of prophettic restlessnes with modernism itself. In a very personal way, this disilluisonment with the world emerges in her later stories as well, following a devastating affair and divorce, the thing that sparks what then becomes an enduring love for train travel (deciding to head out on the Orient Express, a life long dream, in order to seek a fresh start of outside of the public eye)

Agatha is defined as a woman with a hidden exuberance and quirky personality, passionate and pious, someone whom carved a deep love for the sea, for travel for the natural world, and for people. Who’s personal story quietly transformed the world of her encounters as a strong, independent woman and spirit, translating her own feminist concerns into a simple act of doing and being who she is in the face of so much uncertainty (read up on her surfing exploits, you won’t regret it). In his most apt descriptive, Suchet describes her as being “very sensitive to the world,” translating that to her deep felt need for drawing out real and honest characters through her stories.

“One must do things by oneself sometimes. Either I cling to everything that’s safe and that I know, or else I develop more initiative, do things on my own.” (Agatha Christie)

I talked about some of the ways my choice to switch from the car to the train ultimately ended up sacrificing and/or throwing into chaos certain parts of my trip in my previous blog in this space. One of the very real things I gained, an experience I wouldn’t otherwise have had, was the chance to enter into Christie’s story via the mode of transport she most loved. The simple joy of travelling this particular route along the coast up to Torquay, her place of birth and her continued home, is magical. A ride in which every turn brings a different seaside village or ocean vantage point into view.

Hearing her story, I spent some time thinking about my own solo trip, a product of our present life situation in which certain responsibilities have limited my wife and I from being able to travel together the way we have for most our married life. I feel the anxiety of that once powerful push against this idea of getting creative with our plans, with this concept of venturing out on my own bringing deep feelings of uncertainty. I feel the tension she describes, in making sense of how such points of initiative fit with the fact that none of us are ever truly doing anything “on our own.” This revelation from Christie is not so much a wanted grasp of a sought after individualism, but an invitation to keep the world that is shaping her in view, in times when life threatens to bury it. To hold fast to that simple need to be a participant in this thing we call life. For Christie, the bigger the world became, the more meaningful home becomes.

Torquay is her home, of which she describes it as “my home, off and on, nearly all my life.” It sits at the heart of what has been coined the English Riviera. This is a place where the waters carry a rich bluish tinge and the streets a golden hue, where the emergence of the sun, which I got to witness from my deck as the clouds finally cleared, giving way to its setting, reveals a once hidden space that before didn’t exist. Dig a little deeper and you find the long standing economic struggles that seperates the town from the enchantment of its High Street, This remains the modern shape of the town, and I found it equally interesting to read through the present state of its politics and the ambitious plans for revitalization that is reimagining and reshaping the immediate future of the area. But to gain a glimpse into Christie’s world, the immediate interest is in walking what is called the Agatha Christie mile.

I could recount my own experiences here of walking in her footsteps, but this was my guide, and it does a wonderful job of bringing these spaces alive. For me, I booked a seaside room at the Imperial Hotel overlooking Beacon Cove, the place where she once thrilled over the simple act of bathing in the sea. For my part, arriving at that train station and stepping off on to the same platform, walking down the same streets, imagining the area that once was her home, seeing the plant collection that inspired her more fun, maccabre sensibilities, strolling the same shorelines that continue to define her conception of “home,” it led me to think more deeply about what it means to love the homes that we have inherited. This is the thing Agatha Christie modeled, this practice of expanding our view of the world, an act that this pilgrimage was opening up for me in this very moment, while simitaneously allowing that to shape our participation in the homes we have inherited. And what lies behind that is the similar revelation which shapes all of the literary voices of my childhood: the powerful role that story plays in binding these two things together.

Christie never got to see the world that Suchet is encountering in his travels today. In some ways it’s quite a different space. In many ways it’s very much the same. It’s the fact that Christie lived her life in the world that was right in front of her that felt so poignant to me. It’s a reminder that, for all the ways in which the modern world sells its myth of progress, this problematic way of measuring our present based on scapegoating the past and the valourization of an illusioned future only serves to bury the world that is right in front of us, disconnecting us from the real invitation. This is what Suchet intuitively picks up on in “minding the gap” between Christie’s travels and his own, something that Christie’s own journey observes through the acts of writing and creating it inspired: this modern myth can only ever condemn the world we are called to inhabit. To inhabit the world that is right in front us, as Christie so modeled, is to learn how to love it.

The evening sun is setting as I drag my now weathered luggage up the cobblestone streets of York back to York Station. I am heading, briefly, back to London, this time taking a different route on a train that is both running and on time. Here the landscape, still visible in the slow descent of the night shadows, winds its way backwards, from the open fields of the Yorkshire hills to the populated centers of the London suburbs. My destination: the sleeper train to Penzance, where I will be exploring the grounds of Arthurian lore and walking in the footsteps of Agatha Christie.

It’s worth pausing here for a second to fill in an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to weaving together the story of my travels up to this point. Before things went awry with my train to York (see my previous post), and in fact precisely on route from Moreton on Marsh to Birmingham where I was catching my connecting train to York, I made a decision to pivot from my previously laid plans. I had a rented (or sorry, hired) a car for my time in Cornwall, a decision that had been met with a heavy word of caution by many of the different voices in my online UK/England travel groups. The words “don’t do it” were probably the single most common word of advice I got in the months leading up to this trip. The combination of likely getting saddled with a stick shift despite asking for an automatic, having to learn the rules of the roads and its endless roundabouts, of those forecasted hour long drives turning into a 3 hour white knuckle “drive 30 below the speed limit” reality, of the scenery getting hidden by the endless hedgerows; all of this added up to a singular conclusions: hiring a car made it the wrong way to go.

Despite the fact that I drive a school bus for a living and was proficient at driving manual, those opinions had left me with these persistant nagging feelings of uncertainty ever since I booked the vehicle. Now, in this moment, with my feet on the ground, and having seen the roads up close and personal, it wasn’t so much that I feared the drive (that part I felt was slightly overblown), rather it was the fact that I now spent most of my trip getting comfortable with and learning the rules of the train system, I started to think I could easily navigate the coming days by cancelling my car and switching to train travel instead, although it did require a few intentional sacrifices:

The cons:

• getting from Penzance to Tintagel, the location of that Arthurian history, meant planning around the extra time needed to accomodate an hour train ride and the additional hour and 15 long bus ride to get there,
• the freedom to traverse the trails of Coleridge and a planned visit to where site where Watership Down was written (a stop along the way from Stonehenge to Oxford) had to be taken off the list

The pros:

• saves money
• removes the anxiety

The biggest hit felt to be missing out on Watership Down, one of those locations that felt particularly important to my journey when it came to the literary side of England, but I did welcome the notion of simplifying the trip and easing some of those nagging anxieties.

But of course, as things go, just as soon as I make this decision I find myself facing my first real challenge when it comes to the realibility of train travel (once again, see my previous post on Yorkshire). I now find myself replacing one nagging anxiety with another.

For now, one of my biggest worries- making it to my costly sleeper train- could be set aside. The familiar sites of London were coming back into view, and I was an easy tube ride away from Kings Cross to Paddington station, where I would find my accomodations for the night. I had taken a sleeper train three times before, twice in Italy, once in Ukraine, where we crossed the border into Poland. This would be the first time I experienced a sleeper train without interruptions. In Italy we opted for the cheaper seats rather than the bunks, which was basically one endless revolving door, and in Poland, while we had beds, the border crossing ensured that actual sleep would be hard to come by. 

This was probably one of the best sleeps I had during my trip. There’s something about the gentle movement of the train and the absence of interruptions that equalled a kind of serenity, crackin the curtain open from time to time to let the passing countryside lull me back into my dreams. And the simple joy of falling asleep in one place, and waking up in another. That can’t be beat.

I arrived in Penzance at 7:00 a.m. The sun is shining, I can hear the gentle sounds of the Atlantic pushing in against the seawall across the concrete parking lot currently obscuring it from my view. Having uprooted my initial plans to make my way to the rental place, I had left this morning open to last minute decisions. The first order of business was getting a picture of St. Micheals Mount at low tide, which I had timed out perfectly. This is when the water clears, revealing the golden granite pathway to the island hidden underneath. It’s a magical sight, and if i had the time to actually visit the island I absolutely would have, with its historic castle and church, visible from the shore, beckoning with its promise of a perfect detour.

The second order of business was deciding whether to stay in Penazance or head over to St. Ives, where I could find some breakfast, before ultimately making the long trek over to Tintagel castle. This, however, is where things started to go wrong.

Beginning with a delayed train going to Bodman Parkway, which is where you transfer to the bus heading to Tintagel.

This mattered to my plans, because this single bus operates on 2 hour intervals (or a bit over, in fact). Meaning, when you miss one you have to wait over 2 hours for the next one. Suddenly the lack of a car was having a direct impact, as the fact of missing that early bus connection meant a choice between a very quick turn around at Tintagal or a very late arrival at Torquay, which is where I was spending the night.

I had three choices in this moment.

Option 1: Cancel my plans to Tintagel, and reroute myself either to some extended time in St. Ives and/or the old medieval center of Exeter, which was on route to Torquay.

Option 2: Go with the quick turn around at Tintagel

Option 3: Head straight to Bodmin Parkway and hire a cab from there

I did check my cancelled hired car to see if a rental was still available: it wasn’t.

The only thing I knew was that Penzance was clearly a port city, and while I am sure it’s a worthwhile place to explore with the right amount of time, here it felt more like a point of transit. Whatever my decision, I needed to get back to the train station and be on my way.

I decided to look into hiring a cab. I tried one of the local companies. They informed me they had no availability. I then happened upon a third party site that suggested it had found me a cab at a cost. That cost being 70 pounds one way. In a rash decision I decide to make the booking for a return trip as well, eating the cost purely so that I could gain what I deemed to be likely a once in a lifetime investment exploring Tintagel castle. After all, that was my primary reason for making this trek to Cornwall.

I make the booking online, which involved paying with my credit card, only to find out that they take the payment first and then work on finding you a hired car. So now I was stuck with this pending transaction and no guaranteed cab.

If you’ve ever been in this kind of situation in a place that’s still relatively foreign to you, it’s not a great feeling. Months of planning suddenly all crashing down in a single moment. What i thought would be simple was anything but, and it felt like the clock was ticking on both a wasted day and burning a potentially hefty price tag.

In any case, knowing that I needed to do something, I got back on the next train heading to Bodmin Parkway, knowing that I would either be stuck there in a middle of nowhere station wasting 2 hours, or I would hear back from this booking along the way. What really becomes aware in this moment is that I am travelling back in the same direction I had just come from. I might be wrong, but I don’t think the sleeper train has a choice of getting off at additional stops. It doesn’t have the same sliding doors as the other cabs, and it requires the attendant unlocking and opening the doors for you to get off. Nevertheless, I started to think about how getting off at St. Ives or Bodman Parkway on the way down would have been a much better plan. given my pivot away from a car rental.

As it was, there was nothing I could do about it in the moment, and it was at the precise moment I passed through St. Erth, where St. Ives comes into view, that I took a breath.

While it would have been a nice place to grab breakfast, I would get my seaside town experience in Torquay, and simply seeing it from the train satisfied my wanted curioustiy about this colourful, touristy, beach retreat (which is not really my thing anyways). If engaging a planned pilgrimage was going to teach me anything, it would be learning how to take the experiences that are right in front of me for what they are and what they have to say. That breath felt like a good time to begin some breathe prayers. We sould see how the rest of the day shakes up, but for this moment: exhale.

I am reminded now that I am treading the grounds of Arthurian lore, an awe inspiring thought for someone who has long been captivated by these old stories. And if my accompanying audiobook, Malcolm Guite’s Galahad and the Grail, and my great courses choice of King Arthur: History and Legend by scholar Dorsey Armstrong, were any indication, all such quests are bound to face adversity. Equally so, all such quests are bound to encounter their maidens, which, according to Armstrong, was not about the romance but rather about marking the start of a necessary adventure, one which can authenticate ones kinghthood. The maidens in this sense can occupy any number of different roles. In fact, this is why these stories feature knights making seemingly endlessly dumb decisions that leave them embarking on puzzling ventures and often completely unnecessary journeies with little more reason than “just because” (as Armstrong puts it). It would seem I’ve got this covered with my decision to leave such plans to the last moment and falling prey to a $270 Canadian credit card charge (that’s what went my statement officially said) in my efforts to make it to the grounds of King Arthur’s castle. Just knight me now.

Deep breathes. As I continue to watch the landscape transform in front of me, I simitaneously begin to appreciate having that extra hour of sleep that brought me to Penzance, regardless of now retracing my steps, and the opportunity to experience this full journey in the daylight.

I arrive at Bodmin Parkway. Still no word back from my hired car. Just the looming charge still staring me in the face from a third party site that may or may not be legit. As I walk off the train with nowhere to go but sit and wait, I see a cab waiting at the station. It’s not tracking me down, but as I approach I recognize the name on the side. It’s the initial local cab company I contacted, whom had informed me there was no availability. Recognizing the name, I decide to stop and ask, just to ensure they weren’t there for me. No, he says, but upon briefing him on my present situation he says he remembers me. He was the one I had been dialguing with earlier. He asks if he could see my third party site. He shakes his head. “I’ve been driving for many years,” he tells me. “I’ve never in my life heard of this site.”

My heart begins to sink again with the recognition that this is looking to be one of those inevitable regrets I would be taking with me to my grave.

More deep breathes. These breathing exercises are beginning to wear thin by now.

The driver of the hired car can see my sense of defeat. That’s when he tells me to hold on for a second as he picks up his phone. A minute later he tells me he’s tracked down a local driver of a small business in town. A reputable and trustworthy small business who is able to be here in five minutes. It might be the case that I end up eating the costs of this failed third party venture, but he would get me to Tintagel for a flat price of 50 pounds.

Here was my figurative maiden helping the plot progress to the next chapter. The driver indeed shows up 4 minutes later, and I’m standing at the foot of Tintagel Castle in 30, now with a good four hours to explore the grounds and the town before catching the (3 pounds) bus back to Bodmin.

About halfway to Tintagel I also (finally) get a message, after my repeated attempts to contact them using the only modes provided- the online message service and email, that my now expired booking was being refunded because “they couldn’t fill the request.”

Deep breathes again, as I consider the very same roads I would have been travelling in my rental car.

Yep, lots of hedgerows.

Later, on the bus route back to Bodmin, which extends a half hour ride to a full hour and 20 via a meandering route through the areas different towns, the landscape would be much more visible and tranquil. What started in chaos ultimately resulted in a quick transfer from the train to a hired car, and later on a perfectly timed bus and train ride to Torquay where I will end my evening. For now though, a meeting with Merlin awaits.

A highlight of my trip by far: reaching the top of those towering cliffs overlooking the Atlantic, the shores of Ireland sitting hidden off in the distance, the statue of Merlin standing with it’s back turned, looking out towards the castle ruins and the coastal town, sword in hand. It is an arresting and truly majestic scene, one that, with the aid of the Great Courses book in hand, resonates with its deep rooted history. Here I am invited to imagine the once imposing castle walls, now visible in remnants, standing atop these cliffs, built here as they once were because of it’s connection to the Arthurian legends. As a growing body of evidence seems to be supporting amidst a still hotly debated mash-up of working theories, it’s here in these grounds that the historical figures gave rise to the legend that we know today, working its way Eastward and, eventually, back westward, being woven into the fabric of the lands ancient formation and the cultures that drive it as it goes.

What we know for a fact is, somewhere in the 4^th and 5^th centuries, which Armstrong defines as the true (and only) dark ages in the history of Britain, a moment in time where history seems to legitimately stop and disappear from sight, some unexpected force led seemingly by a singular dramatic figure did the impossible, both leading an unimaginable resistance against the much more powerful forces invading from the North and now sweeping it’s way across Britain. And leading them not to be destroyed but rather to retreat and flee. It would be soon after this that the name Arthur begins to make its way through royal lineages for unknown reasons, giving good credence to the preservation of what becomes an oral heritage of a true historical account. An oral heritage that gets preserved in these centuries now through the layers that are built over top, hence handing us the significance of Tintagel, a place marked by the convictions of those whom existed in prxominity to these centuries that this space and this figure were hugely important to their existence and their perseverance.

The legends of Arthur that we know today are a product of centuries of constant movement, from Britain (or as some might argue, from Scotland) to Wales, from the Netherlands to Germany, and on to Scandinavia and Italy before ultimately swinging back again into England primed and ready to be re-appropriated as a freshly anointed origins story and myth for the emerging Empire. Thus it becomes, as these things so often do, a fusion of the many cultures and stories it encounters on its journey through these different lands, each giving it a unique spin and addition as it converses with, a phrase I’ve often repeated along this journey, all the world’s stories. One can’t help but find in the story of this development a sense of this shared experience across these lands, a story powerful enough to connect these different cultures to a larger, sacred Truth enfolding the whole, and indeed the story, at its beating heart, has always served this very purpose.

As such stories do, the reigning image here, as one stands at the edge of these looming cliffs, is one of towers and ruins. In this contrast we find the shape of this movement through history, where the transient reality of Empire clashes with the enduring reality of these sacred spaces, in this case reaching back into the lands ancient celtic roots. As I learned in Bath, it’s always the eradication of the sacred spaces that the Empire’s constructed temples save for last. Standing here in this space, letting Guite’s masterful work of poetry wash over me in its eclectic prose, I am drawn to seek that sacred source, the Truth that stands above this movement, beckoning us to look for those liminal spaces that remain. I feel like this is one of those spaces.

This is the power of Story. It roots us in this sense of Truth. It finds a way to make sense of all the world’s stories. It leads us to look over that great expanse of ocean, and then to turn with the sheer force of that great Wizard towards the story of the lands now spilling out before us. An invitation to then participate in the Story to which this belongs, to wield the magic of that great mystery that is the chaos of the deep waters into a force that can then transform these now divided lands.

Towers and ruins.

It’s in the ruins of these lands that we are invited to dig deeper and reach further to recover the power of those old stories to remind us of the adventure we have been invited to embark on, adventures we might call a life, a life that then binds us to the stories that echo the mystery flowing outwards from that dramatic shoreline. Where all such stories seek to find that Story which can  reveal the necessary sacred truths that lie at the heart of the magic that once enchanted these lands.

This, it would seem, has always been an inherent part of the human experience. The need for Story. The need to tell our stories as we embark on such foolish and seemingly futile adventures as imagining a transformed world. It’s here where we authenticate our true identity as children of our maker rather than being relegated to slaves of the Empire. It’s here where our quest seeks the grail, that mysterious sacred presence that evades, in the lore, all but one. A mystical force that, as Armstrong helps explore, seems to have its roots in every culture, with every effort to locate its origins beyond its emergence in the Arthurian legend in the eleventh century, leading us to dig deeper and reach further.

To work ones way back down from the summit, to follow in the direction of Merlin’s unbroken gaze, is to chose to step into the journey, to embark on the quest. This is the way one must travel, across the awaiting rivers and hills and fields, however foolish the journey might appear. For me, this journey will be bringing me to the English Riveria, to walk the footsteps of one of the great mystery writers in England’s history, and perhaps all of history.