I wrote and reflected on my experience with Rowan William’s Discovering Christianity: A Guide For the Curious, Henry Cloud’s Why I Believe: A Psychologist’s Thoughts on Suffering, Miracles, Science, and Faith, and Christopher Beha’s Why I Am Not An Atheist here. Thus I figured I would focus on my other reads in this end of the month reflection:

In looking back on my reading journey through the month of March, it feels like a great place to begin, or to summarize, that journey is with Hwang Bo-Reum’s quirky, niche but fantastic Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books. Whether Bo-Reum’s walk through the why and how of her reading life would make sense to those for whom reading is not a lifestyle or obsession it’s difficult to know, but as someone who belongs in that camp this was very much an exercise in the art of being seen and understood. Only someone like that can truly get those quirky habits that we use and abuse in order to keep the fires burning.

Which is interesting too, because Bo-Reum is someone who sees the world very differently than I do and with who has had very different experiences when it comes to the shared reads that do surface over the course of the book. In many ways that’s the point though. It would be difficult to make it through Every Day I Read without encountering one of it’s dominant themes- reading together across our differences.

Or reading in conversation.

In terms of the why, Bo-Reum reminded me as well that we read not simply to understand the world, but to know the world. This is the power of story. Martin Shaw unpacks something of the same conviction in his addictive and captivating 2026 release, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us. Although this could add into that mix the stories we “hear.” Thinking back to January and my encounter with Kaitlin Curtice’s Everything Is a Story, Shaw likewise argues much the same thing- we know the world through narrative, precisely because the world takes a narrative shape. The narratives we tell and the narratives we live connect us to the narratives that hold this world together. This is the shape both the world and our lives take, which we can call myth. However, a big part of Shaw’s thesis is that we’ve lost the art and definition of myth-telling. Modernism has diluted it, reduced it to it’s own superficially applied dichotomies regarding what is real and what is not. Here myths no longer afford us a window into the truth of things, but rather flutter around like empty metaphors without an anchor.

The solution? Liturgy. The way to reclaim myth proper is to understand the basic human need for liturgical practice. This is what frames the narratives of the world and our lives as a matter of participation.

For me, I allign with participationist philosophy/theology. A leading voice in this area is Susan Grove Eastman, someone whom I know from her work in Romans and Paul, but remained woefully under-read when it came to her body of work Thus I finally checked off the essential Paul and the Person: Reframing Paul’s Anthropology, a book that uses the language (our modern language) of our present scientific age as a way of fleshing out Paul in his own world. She is not modernizing Paul, rather she recognizes that as products of our own place and time (all of us), we have a particular language. Thus there are two in-roads into reading someone like Paul within his own language (place and time)- study and learn his language, or explain it and flesh it out using our own. In many ways these two actions go together, which is what Eastman is so good at balancing. As a scholar she specializes in research and knowledge of Paul’s world, but one of the things that sets her apart is her desire to apply this scholarship to a proper communication with our own world and our own language. To ask who Paul was in his world is to equally ask why and how it matters to our own. And that requires giving people the necessary tools to have that conversation.

What flows from this is the notion that in Paul’s anthropology all things exist in relationship, and that personhood then, bound as it is to the difficult subject of transformation, can only be undertood within the arena of this web of relationships. And not just between persons, but between the multi-faceted narratives that shape the world at large. For Paul, as Eastman argues, we cannot reduce discussions of personhood to neat and tidy portraits of individuals and our measures of morality, which is the stuff that allows our constrcuted societies to persist in the face of chaos. For Paul, his anthropology belongs to the cosmic story, the cosmic narrative in which we find the co-existing forces of this world, life and death, representing the story’s essential tension. Paul calls this, in the language of his world, the co-existing Powers or realities, one defined by Sin and Death and the other Christ. What Eastman helps articulate is how this way of seeing the world fits with our own language of personhood within the realms of cosmology and biology and neuro-science. By using this language to describe Paul’s world, it becomes possible to see how these narratives in fact do share an essential ethos across this cultural divide when it comes to how we experience this world.

More important however, is the simple observation that to truly know this story, regardless of our language, it requires participation in this cosmic narrative.

Here’s where things get really interesting though, as even where we partcipate in the same world and the same story, it nevertheless remains equally true, as it was for Paul in his own day, that we attach this cosmic narrative to different named conceptions of that observed and experienced tension. I’m thinking of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, a book I read this month in preparation for the release of the film adpatation. Weir, a confessing Positivist, writes a story that takes that narrative and it’s tensions and interprets it through the lens of his particular materialist framework. It’s a reminder of how part of the inevitable dance (interesting to note here how the film adapation imagines Weir’s story as a dance- see the recent filmspotting podcast espide/review for a great assessment of this idea) when it comes to the “everything is a story” mantra, or the notion that we are all shaped and made by our myths, is the simple fact that our shared narratives can express themselves through very different stories. Stories that bear the weight of the why questions, and which contront us with the reality of natural and logical implications. 

In Weir’s case, he imagines the observed tensions of the cosmic narrative, embodied as it is through this apocalytpic imagination and scenario, as the dueling forces of the enlightenment view of human progress versus the old order of natures’s cruel indifference. This is not an interpretation I personally adhere to, but it does function as a compelling reminder of how it is that our myths shape and form us in particular ways. I could also throw in my experience with the book Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion by Wendy Suzuki as well. As someone with a life long struggle with anxiety (or an anxiety disorder), it struck me once again how we can observe and experience the same thing in so many ways, rooted in the same narrative and the same tensions, and yet weave very different stories from it. If Weir’s Positivist allegiances undergird his own mythic shape, Suzuki takes a slightly different variant of that road by reducing those tensions to the incongruencies that persist between modern progress and the old brain. This becomes the grounds, set against a modern epidemic of anxiety disorders, for tricking and manipulating an old brain to see the new world progress has handed us through that old world lens. If once we needed anxiety to protect against old world threats, it is now run amuck in a world where percievably such threats have been long eradicated, leaving our brains to create threats out of everything. Thus, this becomes the story she tells about this shared coscmic reality and its tensions.

In the same way, although occupying completely different genres, the buzzy Theo of Golden by Allen Levi is a book that finds it’s way into the shared narrative and tensions by moving from the simplicty of it’s particulars (a stranger comes to a town and begins to converse with people on a bench in a park, beckoning us towards unpacking the mystery of who and what this stranger is) up into the cosmic (unlike Weir’s taking the cosmic and fleshing it out in the particularities of the mechanicistic expressions of its science). As such it tells a much different kind of story, one that sees this relationship between those two interconnected perspectives as being a window into meaning and responsiveness amidst the tensions.

Catherine Conybeare’s 2025 liberative and revealing book, Augustine the African, becomes an equally interesting example of this same exercise. Conybeare isn’t the first to broach the subject of Augustine’s long buried African roots and language in the soil of the West’s Protestant interests (see Thomas Oden), but, at least in my estimation, she is the first to give it such a robust examination in light of a biographical take on Augustine’s life as a whole. As someone who has a complicated relationship with Protestantism and the West, I found myself equal parts frustrated with the ways in which my upbringing weaved a very different story of this engimantic and important figure than one might find from his historical context, and as well thrilled to be confronted by someone who was complex and flawed and mired in his own polemics and conflicts and tensions. Especially when it came to his own troubled relationship with his African roots. In many ways this sheds a whole new light on what was a tortured soul. One thing that I really connected with was Augustine’s innate awareness of the tensions this world represents. He was someone who was haunted by the why quesions, and whom refused to engage any converation or relationship on superficial grounds. Every conversation for him bore the weight of the world and the implications of it’s competing stories. I felt a little less alone in this regard, even as Augustine’s growing isolation was also a trigger.

On an even more nerdy level, there was surprising overlap too with the book This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong by Mark Cooper-Jones. As someone who identifies as a maphead (thanks Ken Jennings, for giving us a name), I am always searching for new books about maps- the quirkier the better. I read this in tandem with  The Library of Lost Maps: An Archive of a World in Progress, a book I haven’t yet finished, but in Mark Cooper-Jones’ super fun and very British romp through different historical moments shaped directly by their maps (a shout out to the audio form in all of its wonderful irreverance), they give example after example of how the stories we tell, defined as they are against our shared narratives, can hand us very different worldviews, all with a whole array of implications reaching from the particulars of a context to the cosmic portrait. The creation of maps are in many ways a great analogy for how the whole of life works, and if you have never considered how behind every point of view lies a map that has given it life and context, this is an easy and accessible and entertaining option for entering into that conversation.

Speaking of maps (sort of), my token traelogue for the month (I try to read at last one) was Craig Mod’s Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir. More specifically, a walking memoir of his “transformative 300-mile walk along Japan’s ancient pilgrimage routes.” Here, this specific journey through a landscape left forgotten and declining and disappearing against the face of progress, leads the writer to reflect on his own past history in a similarly fading American town, a past long buried by his relocation to Japan, using these images to illuminate the shape of history as it tells of both the natural and human experience of tme and experience. In time things become other things, but in doing so this simple fact throws our stories into question. It creates this tension and then wonders about the meaning of it all.

I actually started a different book initially, titled On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor, but abandoned it after finding his particular “story” to be less than charitable with the world he was assessing and interpreting. Mod on the other hand steps into a world marked by a noted syncretism, with a keen mix of irreverance and respect and curiousity. He doesn’t mute or reduce the necessary conversation between the cosmic and the particular, he steps straight into it, leading to laugh out loud and joy filled moments and challenging and heartbreaking realities Any voice that can connect “poo tag” with our wrestling with the gods with a straight face is worth a read.

From the big picture cosmic narrative (the ciruclar nature of the letter’s sunroom ponderings and reflections in The Vision of Ephesians: The Task of the Church and the Glory of God by N.T. Wright) to the particulars of a given time and place (a biting assessment of the relationship between Christian and Secular education in our modern landscape in Of Prophets, Priests, and Poets: Christian Formation at the Gates of Hell by Brian J. Walsh), my reading journey in March has reminded me that the liturgies of the wild, so to speak, cry out for our participation. Sometimes the most intuitive and aware way into reclaiming the power of myth to this end is the children’s story. There is something about the simplicity of this form that helps reawaken wonder within the complicated grown up spaces. To this end, Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm by Charlie Mackesy was a powerful reminder that this matters, therefore you matter, leading us as readers to consider that the reason  we tell better narratives of ourselves is so that we can adequately tell better narratives of the world. And also the 2026 release of The Unlikely Tale of Chase and Finnegan by Jasmine Warga, proved to be a wonderful throwback to the classic tales of a bygone era, following the simple story of a cheetah and a dog in a way that poses profound questions about loss, belonging, fear and (found) family.

Lastly, although not technically a children’s book, it certainly could be treated as such, and wouldn’t be out of place at all alongside Beatrice Potter, Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton breaks open the boundaries of the memoir and reimagines it’s possibilities through the unexpected relationship betweeen a struggling woman bearing the pressures of modern life as a big city professional and a baby hare, bred from the natural and wild spaces and in need of her help. As would be expected, it turns out the “help” is more of a reciprocal need in this case, and Dalton uses this simple and affecting bond between two unlikely “lives” to quietly delve into the more cosmically aware tensions that life and death (or the Powers) present.

“I don’t know what faith means anymore.”

This is how the conversation begins in the new book, Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian by Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman.

The words come from Wiman, posing a statment (as a question) to Volf based on the following observation:

“I fear those big words- faith, grace, sin, redemption, love- which make us so sad.”

The sadness comes from how slippery these words are. He describes them as demanding our attention, but also impossible to pin down. Even at times (or most of the time) outright and maddingly allusive and stubbornly deceptive.

In response, Volf reflects on how, regardless of where we find ourselves, making sense of what we believe forces us to contend with the big words that give that belief it’s shape and character. When it comes to matters of worldview, they are the only way into a conversation about life, about the shape of this world. This is not something any of us can escape. Rather, we must wrestle with it. On that front, Volf makes a striking concession;

“As I have aged I have come to believe that my faith matters much less than I thought it did when I was younger.”

By this he means it is actually about God’s faith in us. Or in other words, it is actually about what our worldview, God or otherwise, says about us and about this world, this reality that we occupy. The root of despair in this sense then, is in fact the notion of a disinterested world, which also consequently lies at the root of all doubt and all cynicism. Even simple recognition of this truth matters, because the fruit is then the free embrace of an essential mystery. The same mystery we find ourselves lost in, even as it gives us life. This is true even if that lostness leaves us feeling like we are at arms length from that thing we might call Truth (or Life).

Or to be more stated and forward- that thing we might call Love.

Volf goes on to state something even more striking:

“God is the biggest of the big words.”

It’s in this sense that however big these words might be, words that are necessarily mired in the messiness of our human endeavors, our systems and our relationships, all such words play a part in getting at what we mean by God. All such words matter precisely because they are seeking to understand reality as it is. In this way, to simply say “I believe in God,” or to say “I don’t believe in God,” is never enough. God isn’t something we add in to the equation, as though it is another thing that exists alonside other “things.” To state that God exists is to beg the greater questions concerning the nature of Reality itself. What does this word mean is a quesiton that more aptly applies to one’s concern for uncovering the true nature and shape of this Reality. This is precisely why the real work happens when we dig underneath and begin to wrestle with all of the big words that can help us to flesh this out against our questions and our wrestlings with the mystery. 

However daunting it might be to ask, what precisely do I mean by God, it is in fact our willingness to ask, what do I mean by faith (as an example of one of those big words) that becomes the necessary window into our awareness of whatever it is we are accepting and rejecting.

Here he brings an important concern regarding our wrestling to the surface, which is simply this- are these big words creating big and spacious places or are they handing us narrowed and restrictive views of this world? Here is where we can begin to understand an essential truism of our humanity- any loss of meaning is usually tied to the baggage that we carry forward from our lived lives, and it is precisely that very same thing that pushes us to disengage from the hard work of fleshing out what these words mean. We disengage  in order to protect against that aforementioned sadness. This, it could be said, is where we trade meaning for dogmatism. As Wiman goes on to say in a responsive letter, citing Abraham Joshua Heschel,

One of the fatal errors of conceptual theology has been the seperation of the acts of religious existence from the statements about it. Ideas of faith must not be studied in total seperation from the moments of faith.”

In other words, faith is a participatory word, as all words are. To know what this word means is to participate in the world that they compel us towards. As Wiman says, “To conceive of God without the world and without human perceptions is not only impossible but, in much theology, actively destructive.” Here he surmises once againt that “exist may be too strong a word to use (even) for an electron. I take God’s existence to be much the same, though for God “exist” is too weak a word.”

In attempting to flesh this out further, Volf wonders in response about the basic idea that everything we do, all motives, goals and strivings, whatever good we might find in such things, are also necessarily nonbeneficent. “Always partly harming both others and my own self.” Good, bad, beauty, ugliness, Volf suggests that it’s impossible for human agency to clearly note where exactly one ends and the other begins. Author Grace Hamman states something similar in her book Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for a Whole and Holy Life, noting how viritue contains this puzzling quality in which we seek them for the good that they can reveal and make known in this world and in our lives, and yet they are always situated in lockstep with vice.

This is the paradox of participation. And if it is true that all things exist in relationship, this is also why participation requires something external to itself to participate in. To say all things exist in relationship isn’t to say two things therefore exist, it is to say that this thing we call relationship exists. It is a transcendent reality by its nature, one that is revealed through a life of participation, but which similtanousely reveals the one who is participating in this world. Or one could say, Reality is, by it’s nature, relational. And in the terms of this book, participation can then be said to be drawn by the glimmerings that this existant (and extant) relationally defined capital “R” Reality reflects into the world. Glimmerings of something true, of something we would then call and determine to be sacred.

As Volf inisists, this is something that cannot be a matter of our own creation. It cannot be something that our desperate attempts to conjure it into awareness or to locate it by way of proofs or our constructed systems, can conjure and capture in and of itself. Any such “God,” or any such capital “R” Reality, indeed could never logically exist in such terms. Rather, what we seek is the same thing we all desire-Truth. And the closer this Truth is aligned with the lived-in spaces of our lives, the more important and the more meaningful those big words become.

I’m only partly through the first section of the book, and it has been captivating my imagination. In fact, it’s been the perfect compliment to three other books that have been walking with me on my journey through the month of March, bringing to light some of the questions they have been inspiring me to ask for myself. Namely, why do I believe in God, and more importantly how precisely do I define and grapple with the biggest word of all.

The first of these books was the 2025 release Why I Believe: A Psychologist’s Thoughts on Suffering, Miracles, Science, and Faith by Henry Cloud. I imagine that anyone who grew up in the world of evangelical Chrisianity in the 80’s and 90’s will know this name. I confess, for me it was a blast from the past, as the last time I heard this name was nearly 25 years ago. Thus I was deeply curious to see, what is essentially his own reckoning with the past 50 years of his life and work, what this book might conjure up for me as someone who’s own journey led him out of that once familiar world.

What was fascinating to me was the way Cloud structures the book. The latter half becomes a greatest hits of the well tread apologetics that run rampant through evangelicalism. I’ve come to be less and less a fan of these arguments over the years (and consequently less a fan of the atheism that stands as its central sparring partner). But before getting to any of these classic “arguments” for the faith, he blankets the first half of the book with story after story of “supernatural” or spiritual experiences. Stories that become windows into more and more stories. Stories that, if one wanted to be truly rational, you can’t just turn away from and dismiss. Stories with tangible, identifiable, and verifiable, components in the scope of their recounting for those who stand in proximity to them. Stories that contain the common markers of convictions born not from “I can’t explain this by science, therefore God.” but rather the deep insistance that “this important thing happened, and I must attend for it.”

Which sparked this thought in me. It feels true to me to say that, at a base level my experience and observation of this world reveals a Reality where such stories are both common and widespread through history and across the world. What is also true though is that these stories are also largely defined in ways that don’t really fit with common wholesale dismisives like “in your head” or “cultural influence,” or “superstition,” or “fear of death.” 

This is what I have found to be the case on my own journey. There is a whole world of acedemia and popular level authors that once saturated my point of view, from the likes of Erhman to Pinker and Harris and the many grassroots level scholars upon who’s work these popular level personas are pulling from, which have all manners of ways, often rhetorical, of keeping the universal witness to these stories out of view and out of the discussion. To do so however requires us to make irrational leaps in our reasoning. To pull from convenient dismissives, usually rooted in the also very real array of questionable stories and experiences that we find littering the mix.

The simple truth for me though is, given the nature what these stories are outside of the potentially corrupted forms, narratives that do not attend for this nature and choose not to take the stories seriously based on wholesale dismissives, stories that the people involved (including Cloud) would have direct proximity to, do not feel compelling. They would need to posit, to use Cloud’s book as an example, that he and those wihtin the book are actively making these details up. The stories however do not exhibit this quality. Not only that, but to attempt to diqualify them on that basis brings up a whole other slate of issues that are even more problematic. And it should be said here, this isn’t isolated to Cloud’s stories. This is something I have found to be largely true across comparitive religions and spiritual beliefs.

Now, I know firsthand how easy it is to be convinced that this is not the case, even to the point of ignoring and dismissing the stories I have direct proximity to in my own life. When I am angry at Christianity, hurt and betrayed and disillusioned by deceptions, the anti-religious stance, or the even the softened agnostic-atheist that sometimes emerges when that battle gets tired, is both affirming and energizing, even in its admitted isolation. Which is also why it should be said, regardless of what I am saying above, it still won’t (and shouldn’t, and can’t) function as a so called “proof” argument. Anything can be explained away. Rather, what this is, in my eyes, is good reason to take it seriously when I found myself being forced to examine my biases, to look again with a fresh set of eyes at the evidence my observation and experience of this world was presenting to me on my journey.

However, if what I say above is true, and these experiences take on a shape and form that we have to take seriously in order to be truly rational about what they are, what remains equally the case is that this reality also reveals a world where such stories and experiences capture very real differences in ones beliefs, ones theologies, ones grappling with and defining of those big words. Meaning, if these experiences appear to be universally true as a witness with a particular shape and form, what different people and different cultures conclude from them represents a collision corse of seeming contradictions. Including, of course, when it comes to the biggest word of all.

But here’s the thing. This isn’t so much a problem for the biggest word. Logically speaking, Reality must exist regardless of our knowledge of it. And if we are to make a subsequent move, which we all do, in working to give this word definition and thus meaning, the simple facts of these stories are compelling enough in their own right to, at the very least, suggests we can’t simply look away and pretend as though they aren’t there. Not if we seek to be rational creatures. Rather, the fact that these things exist and yet we also find all of these vast disagreements in our conclusions becomes a point in which we can then engage the necessary wrestling. It is where one can say with Winan, I don’t know what faith means anymore, and yet I also know I need that word. Why does this matter? Because it’s the only way to begin to attend for these differences. For me that’s what I find compelling. In this case, as an example, it prevents me from simply dismissing Cloud’s book as a reflection of a world I no longer agree with, as a collection of theologies I might be tempted to simply roll my eyes at or remain cynical towards. It is the stories, the very stories he spends half his book with as a starting point, that determines the shape of the Reality we are both wrestling with in our own ways. If this is the case, there is freedom to disagree about how we define the big words lying underneath.

The second book was Discovering Christianity: A Guide for the Curious by Rowan Williams. A very different experience, in that by and large Williams would sit slightly closer to some of my own grapplings with those big words, coming from the world of Eastern Orthodoxy.

As oppposed to engaging apologetics, William’s steers around both Cloud’s emphasis on the stories of people and his subsequent arguments for faith, instead seeking an emphais on the nature of the mystery itself, on the wrestling as a compelling aspect of our participation and, for him, the God he finds it reveals within the realm of history and Tradition.

Here he demonstrates his own strengths and weaknesses, and at times I think he santizes some of the important dynamics of the larger discussion a bit too much, in moments out of necessity perhaps, at other times out of leariness of other approaches he remains cycnical towards (as do I). I suppose one way to describe his book is to say, rather than ask whether these things might provide the curious with proofs for God, instead he seeks to explore whether the whole thing we call Christianity can make sense simply as as a story in and of itself. Does it give life clarity or not. It’s a fair and important question, and for me, one I find interesting on my own journey of discovery. The more distance I get from the world of evangelical Christianity, the more I find myself coming back to one of it’s more classic arguments, albeit one which sits just outside of the common apologetic form within the modernism that dominates much of that Christian framework- that of the argument from desire. Something that Williams does an excellent job of unpacking in his own way in his book Passions of the Soul.

Here I find myself leaning into it’s more recent rennasainace, arguably one that seems to be breaking open the boundaries of it’s early seeded forms. At it’s root, the argument from desire, which is closely related to theologies of the imagination, or even something like John O’ Donahue’s argument from Beauty (in his book Beauty, one of my all time favorites), is intuitively and intentionally interested in making sense of the way we live our lives. Try as it might, the old modernist allegaiances to material explanations, however out of fashion they are coming to be even in the most skeptical of secularist circles, might be able to hand us information, but it meets a wall when it comes to epxlaining the broader realm of the liaving, to borrow a phrase from the book The Sacred and the Profane.

The third book, 2026’s Why I am Not an Atheist by Christopher R Beha, is in my opinion the best of the three, partly because a big element of my own journey is my interest in the philosophical grounds for belief. I am someone given to the abstract rather than the concrete, perpetually restless when it comes to seeking out the why rather than the what. And Beha, whether you believe in God or not, offers an incredibly impressive summary of that philosphical history, moving to weave it into his own journey from a time of being formed by Bertland Russell to discovery of a world that begins to take on a different shape through the minds and eyes of the great philosophers. 

If my movement towards belief in God is anchored first in my observations about the nature of this Reality we occupy (and share), which is both relational in its quality and defined by a witness to widespread and definable experiences in a way that does not fit the parameters of materialist worldviews, and secondly attending for the way we live our lives within the shape of this Reality, with the subject of desire being one of the most compelling dynamics of the realm of the living, the third would be the power of philosophy to move us from the what to the why. Not all philsoophy, in it’s expression, moves towards belief in God, at least in the sense of reudcing such a question to a matter of “existence,” but I do think all philosophy is actively trying to fill in a gap that both the lived life and the observed nature of this Reality demands we attend for. I have a deep affinity for Kierkegaard in particular (see Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death, or Either/Or), but in truth I have not found a coherent philosophical argument that isn’t pulling from the logic that necessarily presses against the restraints of rationalism. When it comes down to it, for me it is Logic that most often gets missed and ignored in views that seek to punt matters of “God,” taken in the way I argue for above, to the side. And to dial that down even further, it is the logical implications of given arguments that tend to be most ignored above all. It is in this sense I have come to believe that there are only two essential Realities sitting in conversation- a truly materilaist worldview, and everything else (see David Bentley Hart’s magesterial All Things Are Full of God’s). Or at least these are the onwo views that I think can be argued for with a sense of logical coherency,. But here ihe thing- this is only the case when we are willing to contend for the logical implications of either or of these views.

I could say much more, but this was an attempt to dial things down to a kind of root of my belief. I could speak to why and how I arrive at the particularities of belief in the Christian narrative, but that would in many ways be a secondary argument that flows from the biggest question. Not isolated, and certainly inter-dependent, but nevertheless it’s own set of questions and wrestlings. For the time being, this is what I find in the glimmerings of this world, even where I am inclined to resist it on my best days.

Watching, conversing and writing about film has been a hobby of mine for a long while. Ever since I first graced the screens, which was a re-release of Lady and the Tramp back in the 80’s, I have been drawn to the allure of this mode of storytelling. This unique artform.

Over the years this has taken on different shapes and identities, notably when discourse started to shift towards online film communities, in an age where suddenly everyone was becoming a film critic. Which of course led to it’s own sort of hiearchal devleopments via blogspaces and sites and named brands and subscriber based identities.

One thing I have noted about this breave new world full of “film critics” is the tendency for many of these voices to exhbiit a deep felt need to capture and preserve the unique or original and subsequently unbiased thought. To pen a review amongst the endless many that can emerge from outside of the larger conversation. To write their thoughts apart from reading any other reviews, ratings, or trailers. This is something I see represented a lot in the online sphere, to the point where it has become a virtue.

I don’t have the same skills or presence as many of these writers. My hobby has seen my participation ebb and flow through different communities, but always as a participant. I do however spend a lot of time writing, thinking, reflecting when it comes to film. And on that front there are two distinct ways in which I tend to operate differently from others. First, I write mainly about the conversations I am seeing and hearing. I am not concerned about bias’ or having my thoughts stand on their own. I am primarily concerned with capturing and observing and reflecting on the larger conversations and what that says.

Second, if someone has taken the time to write their thoughts, I genuinely take the time to read them. I have a number of people I follow, all people who also do this as a hobby, and it is a value of mine, even if they never know it or realize it, to invest my time in reading what they have to say. And whenever I am speaking about a film, pondering a film, it is always in relationship to the larger conversation that flows from that. Rather than seek that pure, unbiased thought, what I write is interacting with that collective experience.

Which brings me to the topic at hand- the buzzy new film Project Hail Mary, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. A movie that has been in the headlines for a good while now prior to its wide release this weekend (March 19th), utilizing a slow rollout featuring multiple early screenings, which subsequently drummed up some exceptional buzz. Maybe too much, as the allusion to perfection is a hard expectation to live up to, but neverthless proving not to be a deterant at the box office thus far, given an 80 million domestic opening and an added 60 million globally (for a $140 million opening weekend).

What makes Project Hail Mary a bit unique is the fact that it is an Amazon-MGM film, being recognized as their first legitimate box office hit, and it just happens to be an original film. This comes at a time when the WB merger has been the key topic of conversation, especially when it comes to the relationship between streamer and theatrical. Once you bring in Universal’s recent announcement about doubling down on their commitment to theaters (setting aside their contract with Netflix), this can be seen as good news.

I do want to be clear, however. Any time we are talking about an “event” type movie, original or not, we must also be asking the question of how this is contributing to the whole. In a healthy theatrical environment, the success of Project Hail Mary (and given how things tend to go with headlines these days, it’s $200 million dollar budget could be the click-bait articles need to be talking about how it’s a box office failure next week) is marked by the success of (to throw a few current titles out for measure) the smaller budget Canadian films Undertone and Maya and Amar, the Korean indie The King’s Warden, the popular level horror film Ready or Not 2, the mid budget romance Reminders of Him, Stewarts debut The Chronology of Water, and original animated films GOAT and Hoppers.

There is another facet of this conversation surrounding Project Hail Mary that interests me however. In an age where it’s near impossible to know when and why a film is going to be successful (citing the old mantra “make good films and they will come” simply isn’t a consisent truism), it’s always worthwhile unpacking a cultural moment, which I think this film qualifies as. Sure, there’s the fact that the film’s source material has a significant following, aided by the arguable appearance of an adaptation that treats the source material with the respect certain auidiences might demand (relatively speaking of course)

I think there’s more lurking behind the surface though. It doesn’t take much perusing of the larger conversation to note a common motif in people’s reactions to this film. One word that seems to rise above the rest is “hopeful.” It’s a movie being released in the seemingly most dire of moments, paricularly in America but also on a global level, which dares to imagine that people are good and things are going to be alright. And in many respects it would seem people want that story right now. Perhaps need that story. 

It’s worth noting as well that this is not an accident. If you have listened to interviews with the author, who also serves as producer on the film, this is what he set out to do with the source material. Having previously written a story with an unlikeable protagonist that he describes as not being recieved well, he set out to craft a character readers could and would root for. Flawed yes, but only in a humanizing sense, not in a qualifying sense. You can see this in the repeated refrains that emerge within both book and film where the protagonist, who’s once potential of an illustrious career in the sciences has resulted in a modestly payed teaching role, struggles with his feelings of fear and self doubt even in the face of of other’s belief in him. It’s a feel good story through and through, giving people someone to root for. Someone who, in many respects, might remind us of ourselves.

The author, Andy Weir, is someone with a great interest in the sciences, even as he continues to direct that towards his creative works. When it comes to the stories he writes, he has spoken publicly about seeing the world from the perpsective of a positivist (defined as a philosophical system that rejects metephysical authority in favour of a sturdied empiracal rationionalism, and noted by it’s unwavering belief in the myth of progress, a narrative that upholds commitments to humanity’s goodness and it’s ability to control and bring about a better world). From this lens, his stories reflect a belief that we are presently in the best of all possible world’s given the relative placement within the historical timeline. Meaning, he appeals to those like Pinker whom argue that while people are naturally given to despair, when we look at our history we have never lived in a less violent, more prosperous time (not withstanding actually defining those terms).

How does this play out in Project Hail Mary? We have the everyman’s quirky quasi-hero who defies the odds by appealing to humanity’s greatest traits and bringing about hope for the future, all while being surrounded by people who believe fervently in this humanistic endeavor, and all in the name of humanity’s greatest achievement- science- of course.

In other words, the quintessential story of modernism. The enlightenment blueprint.

Here’s where I would throw my own observations into the mix. It doesn’t surpise me that this narrative is appealing to the masses. In many ways it could be argued that this prototype is appealing to one of storytelling’s greatest draws- nostalgia. Not unlike the recent Train Dreams, this is a story that on the surface seems to be and appears to be speaking to an imagined “better” future, but really what it is doing is pulling from that common mythic foundation that once promised us the greatest of all possible worlds made in our own image.

And, much lke Train Dreams, embedded in this is that subtle allegiance to America’s place as both the pinacale of this story and its preservation. As the feeling goes, when America loses it’s way, the world self destructs, at least from this point of view. Yes, there’s a bit of irony to the fact that Gosling has never looked or felt more Canadian on screen, but the fact that the hero of this story, surrounded by a global presence taking on a worldwide threat, is the token American. The fact that this same story could be told from any other national POV and have a different hero at it’s center might feel and seem obvious, but I would argue that it is something many nviewers have missed. And it matters to where we find the hope being represented in this film.

I read the book for the first time this past month in preparation for seeing the film. One of the things I noted in my review was my frustration with the fact that the book stays so firmly on the surface of it’s premise. Instead of using the science as a way to dig underneath the bigger questions regarding the motivations of it’s characters and the why of their actions and their struggles and the subsequent questions of meaning this evokes, it trades that for a heavy emphasis on expostion and, reduces it’s world to it’s mechanics, a world it can control and thus save. Very little (to no) time is spent actually fleshing out the necessary existential crisis (token positivist tendency by the way).

The movie in many ways corrects this. Where the book’s exposition overtook the narrative, here the characters themselves are brought to the forefront, filling in the gaps with an emotional intelligence instead of simply the head knowledge represented in the book. It’s a welcome change for me personally, and one that actually functions in a somewhat antiethical way to the arc in the novel, although given what I’ve found in much of the online discourse I think people are equally  unaware of the implications. For me this represents something of a curious cognitive disonnance.

This simple change in the arc stems from where we locate the central character’s growth and transformation. If the book imagines the hope stemming from the protagonist’s solving of the puzzle which is the physical laws in question (which coincidentally is described as having superior knowledge to the alien species that informs the relational component of the story, something which visually translates through a particular striking scene involving the American “teacher” for the subtle but glaring assumptions it does make), lingering in the subtext of the film is this quiet  concession that such knowledge alone isn’t enough to make sense of the state of the living world. Here we see a different “myth” breaking through the walls of it’s modernist rhetoric, leading the viewer to see the true hope in the narrative patterns driving the protagonist’s choices. These patterns express themselves in the language of sacrifice. More importantly though, such a myth is not rooted in the human accomplishment. Rather, it is a pattern that life, or the living, is responding to. It’s a story and reality that breaks in from the outside.

For me, the true revelation that Project Hail Mary “apocalypses” into our midst, which might actually be acting in spite of it’s own intentions, is not the glory of the human enterprise, it is not trusting in the myth of progress, it’s not the need to champion american exceptionalism, nor is it the materiliasm that undergirds the virtues of our species capacity to “survive” against all odds. The true revelation arrives as a message that actually critiques these things as being built on a false and wrong foundation. It gives allegiance to a different way of seeing, being and participating in the world. It reveals a pattern that makes sense not of how we survive or how we can control and master this physical world, but of how we respond to the counter-intuitive nature of the lived in world that we actually find. How we participate in it by way of patterns that can both name the problem and transform it according to a greater Truth.

What struck me walking out of the film, especially having spent some time immersed in that larger conversation, is that even where we are taught a different narrative through the systems of this world, this contrary pattern can’t help but emerge as it’s own voice of critique and redemption. Reminds me of Tolkien and Lewis’ approach to the True myth that makes sense of all the world’s stories. For them this is what compelled them ultimately towards the story of Christ. Somehow and in someway, this patterned way of living, this breaking in of the sacrificial narrative, put all the pieces in place for understanding the mythic shape of history itself. It gave them a way of understanding the Darknness and the Light, precisely because it makes sense of what we find in the realm of the living. It makes sense of what we resist, and what ultimately provides our way forwad out of the mess. That Christ plays this out on a cosmic level is simply the touchpoint of history’s own intuition.

If we see this as a story seeking to reclaim the forgotten allure of the Enlightenment narrative in a time of crisis, we will only be left chasing after this story’s repeated illusion. It might feel hopeful, but that hope can never be rooted in anything true. If we see this as that universal pattern breaking into our present, that hope suddenly has a Life of it’s own. It can genuinely say, despite the cycles of history bearing itself out in the throes our present moment, there are patterns pointing us to a greater Truth.

“Not until we refuse to indulge our curiousity about what is wrong with others are we free to take a genuine interest in them as people loved by God… Too many times we confuse religious gossip with spiritual concern.” (A Year With Jesus, Eugene Peterson)

The way Peterson frames our focus on uncovering “what is wrong with others” as curiousity, but then immediately contrasts that with a contrary idea he calls “genuine interest” should awaken our senses to the fact that this “indulging” in the first case is engaging a false sense of curiousity.

Both represent a form of knowledge about the other, but they are driven by different motivating factors and different claims on the truth of who that person is. And indeed, what this world is.

Which had me thinking. The reason this matters is because each of us holds the power to tell another’s story in a particular way, whether we recognize it or not. This is basic to any living person. It is what we do by participating in the world, which is what a life is by defintion (our partipcation in this world). Everything that we do is telling that story in a particular way.

In fact, one could say none of us are more or less than who we are in the eyes of others. This might sound like an uncomortable thought, but I genuinely believe it to be true about the way this life works. We live in a world, at least those of us in the West, where we have been sold this notion of the self made individual, the atonomous person. And yet this represents a falsehood. Pull back the curtain on this narrative and what you find is that we are all products of the world we embody. On a grander level, we are never more or less than what the world’s systems see us to be.

And I think this is intuitive. This is the reason why any system built on the idea of the self made, autonomous individual can only ever lead to the same reality- enslavement to those systems. Enslavement to the stories others are telling of us.

Or to use the biblical language, the “Powers.”

We attach what is determined to be the highest order-happiness- to the measures we have been handed, and then we are simitaneously taught all of the ways in which these measures make us successes or failures. What makes this narrative so inherently powerful is that it accords precisely with the world we observe and experience in the different facets of our lives. It is, by all reasonable assessment, the way reality works.

The sad thing is the way the simple truth of this reality quietly disguises itself as something else. We work so hard to create these bubbles that then convince us that these measures don’t actually exist. We sink ourselves into our ambitions and our accomplishments, we go on our way doing what we do, building our lives and this thing we call “our identity” on perceived successes that are in fact sustained by these measures. The very measures that at once lift up our created circles precisely by upholding that which it necessarily excludes. We have become so conditioned to the idea of globalization (which is a whole other discussion) that it feels like we have convinced ourselves somehow and in someway we have superseded this basic tribal nature. In fact, these “bubbles” shape every facet of our western framework.

This is something I have spent a lifetime wrestling with and against. This is, as I have come to know intimately, the cycles that we find life to follow. The moment you find a place to belong is the same moment you become enslaved to these constructed measures.

And none of our constructs are immune. We find this in the different relationships that come in and out of our lives, our family systems, in our work, in the communities our hobbies and passions bring us into contact with. I know this to be true because it has followed me through every facet of my life. I found it in the music world, in the youth pastor world, in the world of social services, in the school system. I’ve found it in the ongoing evolution of those hobby spaces, from those earlier years of building a “zine,” to the later forays into podcast communities.

In truth, some of the worst places to experience this reality is in Christian community and the church. Which is it’s own curious thing. Perhaps that’s why, coming back around to Peterson’s observations above, there is something in the way he frames his words that stands out as especially striking to me. In the first instance the emphasis is on us. The way “I” see another. In this case it, which ultimately can be defined as “the other” in the equation, becomes about what we do or don’t do well. In the second instance the “we” in the equation (those with ears to hear) is being tasked with one simple change in our pov- seeing what God sees. In this case, the other is freed from being enslaved to our sightlines altogether.

This becomes the true grounds for our curiousity. But perhaps unsurprisingly it requires (of us) stripping away the authority of the systems that otherwise dictate what we see. It invites us towards the rejection of all constructs (personal, social, political, biological) as authoratative, and the embrace of a different kind of authority. And here is the thing that really hit me when I considered this- simply seeing someone in the light of their perceived strengths instead of what we perceive to be “what is wrong” isn’t enough. Why? Because such ways of thining still enslave us (and them) to the system’s measure of what is “loved.” Any embrace of one based on this measure will always mean the rejection of another. That is the nature of the cycle. It’s just a matter of whether we are on the inside or outside of any given circle, which is precisely why we build them in this system in the first place- it’s usually an invitation to create these bubbles which can hand us confident illusions of a successful life.

This is the way the world works.

In contrast, the only true antidote to the problem is laying claim to an external authority that can speak the truth from the outside, from outside of the boundaries of this world’s constructs. We are never more or less than who we are in the eyes of others, and as Peterson observes, the power that flows from finding ourselves in the eyes of the Holy Other is the only true liberative force. 

Having recently finished the (excellent and profound) book Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the fox, the Horse and the Storm by Charlie Mackery, I find myself equally struck by how this is, at it’s heart, the real message of that story. It could be boiled down to this- we learn to be kind to ourselves, precisely because this is the only way this kindness can extend to others. Our curiousity about “what is wrong with others” is only ever a window into the fact that we are accutely aware of what these measures say is wrong with us if  and when we aren’t on the “inside” of our constructed bubbles. And we get that from the systems (Powers) of this world.

One final observation. One thing I have learned over my lifetime as well is that part of seeing this (for myself) is understanding that two things can be true at the same time. In a sense this is what the Christian narrative means for me personally. It affords me the ability to see two equally true co-existing realities, but also gives me the means to name them both. Yes, this is who we are in the world’s systems. I know this only too well. And yes, this is who I am in the eyes of God.

That’s the tension. It becomes a question of which reality I am occupying. at any given moment. And the truth is, this is the real struggle that life represents. The world is constantly challenging this contrasting and co-existing reality. And yet, there is something incredibly profound about those moments in which we get glimpses (or to borrow a word from a book I am presently reading, glimmers, in Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian by Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman) of the truth of this Other reality. I know this feeling of liberation only too well too. Which is precisley what leaves me so perpetutally restless.

As Wiman says in that aformentioned book Glimmerings, perhaps this restlesness is the gift. 

As I mentioned earlier, remembering my life is, in part, actively travelling the roads back through the different neighborhoods and houses I have called home over the years.

Our first moves (“our” being my family), from Manitoba avenue in the north end, over the iconic Redwood bridge, which crosses our city’s main water line, the Red River, to Avaco Drive; and then to Eade Crescent shortly after in North Kildonan, exist in a flurry of scattered pictures and moments, Eade crescent remains a bit more vivid if only because this is where coming of school age afforded me a better and more acute sense of recognizable patterns and routines. Even then, it’s possible for me to sit with any one of those scattered pictures and moments and find myself transported back to a young kid taking shape, emerging from shadows as something resemlbling an embodied life. Something more than simple snapshots of a five year old kid trudging across a field to his kindegarten class (what makes this image, likely my earliest memory, stand out all these years later I have no idea).

What I remember the most about our brief time living on Avaco Drive is perhaps the quintessential childhood stuff. Favorite past times like climibing with my brothers on to the top of our roof and jumping off, out of sight of our parents of course. Or encountering the older neighborhood bullies, whom once intercepted me and my younger brother pushing eachother in our recently aquired stranded grocery store cart to the park down the street. Effectively grabbing the cart and stranding my brother in a massive (to us at the time) puddle (and subsequently getting an ear full from my mother in the process). I remember some of our early halloween nights, and in the summer playing on our slip and slide with the girl who lived across the backlane. In fact, it was on one of our last evenings at this house, a warm, sunny, summers day. that we were doing precisely this as we said goodbye to our neighbourhood friends.

Eade Crescent would be where I spent most of those early years (Grades 1-3) at John De Graffe School, walking to and from school around the Bay and across the field. Running home at lunch time to sit in font of that old t.v. and catch yet another episode of the old animated Spiderman television show. Whittling away mornings and evenings and long summer breaks playing marbles- my first true foray into the idea of the “collection”- in the school yard, and getting swindled in some very unforutnate trades at the same time. Having to play the obligatory games of “these are the Daves I know, I know,” given that I was one of four in my classroom. I still remember that long, wooden ruler that hung on the wall of the principles office, ready to be used on anyone who got out of line. The sort of image that stays stuck in your brain for a lifetime. I remember the iconic babysitter from the time, whom would make her way down the stairs, which stemmed down from the doorway, and situate herself in front of the t.v. where she would watch wrestling all night, making us boys go to bed early and warning us about disrupting her space.

In what could very well have been an incident with untold life long consequences, one sunny summer evening the three of us boys were out back playing around with a bat and ball. The house actually opened up on to the field behind us, so it was as though we had our very own acreage. I had just wandered over to where my younger brother was dialing up a pitch to my older sibling, and unaware had bent down to look at something. As I stood up, it happened to be at the precise time my older brother was dialing up a massive swing of the bat. My head caught the backwards momentum, the force knocking the world straight into circles. I’m not sure how long the world kept spinning, but without a doubt what I was experiencing was a significant concusssion of a young brain. Sometimes I wonder, if they did a brain scan today if they might see the remnants of some kind of damage.

If there is a single individual who stands out from this point in my life it would be a fellow named Andy, a guy whom I would cross paths with over the years in some unexpected ways given that our friendship never really suvrived the transition into junior high. In fact, it was Andy who would be the first to part ways, moving out of the neighborhood before I ultimatley ended up transitioning to the priavte school (Calvin Christian) down the road in Grade 4.

My connection with Andy actually begins with the Church we shared as kids, the iconic and historic Calvary Temple, which remains a relevant fixsture in Winnipeg’s downtown core to this day. Being the same age we would find ourselves in the same sunday school class, although I never truly connected who he was until our paths crossed at John De Graffe. He was “that guy” from church who I saw on occasion and whom had been over at our place once or twice when our parents were visiting. Now I knew him more personally by face and name, and we spent that brief forging a schoolyard relationship.

After he left John De Graffe, we didn’t really cross paths again until we found ourselves attending the same school in Grade 10 (M.B.C.I). At this juncture in our lives the thing that brought us together was music, him a learned bass player, me just beginning to take my foray into drumming seriously. This “connection” played out as well into our then new church life, as another mutual classmate named Tim, a singer/guitar player, led worship at the youth group we were now attending.

Eventually, as the years went on, following graduation the very fluid nature of the church world found our paths constantly diverging and reconnnecting. At one point, in a comic moment, one of those “reconnecting” moments found us sharing our place of work- an organization called Foods System Management. The job was simple. We had a warehouse full of food and products that would eventually go out to different schools in the city. We received weekly shipments which we then used to restock the shelves. My job,as the senior worker in the building, was taking care of the freezer area, and when a vacancy opened up in the wharehouse, suddenly Andy came into the picture, bringing with him yet another mutual classmate from our highschool years- Jeremy.

Looking back now, I can see the eventual trainwreck that was coming a good ways down the track. Although I was the senior worker, I was not the one that should have been responsible for these two big and boisterous personalities. Having the three of us largely left alone in the buidling was difficult to corral and keep in order, and all three of us knew it. It didn’t help that they also didn’t like our boss (I wasn’t the biggest fan either, but I had a lot more on the line than they did).

In any case, on one particular morning we were receiving a weekly shipment, which meant one of us had to be positioned at the bottom of the conveyer belt, another at the top helping to transfer goods on to a roller, and the third at the end of the rollers stacking the recieved goods on to a wooden platform.

I was at the top receiving goods from the conveyer belt and transferring them to the rollers.

Being the one with the longest tenure, I had done this many times over. It’s a simple procedure that relied on creating a rhythm. If the person at the bottom is going too fast, the person at the top can’t keep up and/or the rollers get jammed up. I had explained this to my two “co-workers,” but being prone to finding antics behind every corner, instead of heeding instructions they decided to have a little fun, the one loading the belt far too quickly while the other snickered and watched awaiting the anticipated fiasco it would create at my juncture.

There was only so much I could do until things started to clog up, pushing products off the belt and on to the floor, the inevitable fits of laughter ensuing from my co-workers now getting louder on either end. This wasn’t the worst thing in the world… until it came to the big pails of cooking oil. Once that toppled, then the fun really started.

Andy suddenly snapped to attention as I was busy trying to get the pail standing upright, the lid having popped off and oil spilling out onto the floors. As I was attempting to attend to the oil, more and more of the goods just kept falling off the belt and on to the floor behind me. Now the oil was beginning to spread everywhere, making it impossible to stand and get either Jeremy or the conveyer to stop. At one point I ultimately end up flat on my back, lying full bodied in the liquid.

Next thing I know Andy’s now on his back as well. We both try to make our way over to eachother but neither of us could stand up. So there we both were, lying helplless in a gigantic puddle of oil as more and more packages just kept tumbling off the belt. Jeremy finally finishes, and comes back up to the warehouse where, the oil now having spread across the entire space, he also promptly ends up on his back.

So there we were, the three of us, simply lying there staring at each other like we had been scripted in to an old I Love Lucy episode. At some point one of us started laughing. What else was there to do. And then the three of us are laughing. At the same time, the receptionist from the lower level had decided she need to bring us some paperwork, and despite our best efforts at momentary protestations ends up coming straight through the door.

Needless to say, that boss none of us liked wasn’t happy. Attempts to clean up the mess on our own time took forever. Stuff really hit the fan when the monthly inventory ended up so out of whack the following week that the bosses punitive measure of forcing us three to come back in on our own time on a Saturday to redo it led to my two friends ultimatley choosing to not show up and never come back.

That was a long day doing inventory on my own.

There’s a second story, perhaps a bit more serious and arguably more relevant and important, but nevertheless still with the same level of dramatics.

I can’t remember where we were precisely, but somehow I ended up getting a ride home with Andy and Jeremy from some event we were both at as young adults (as I mentioned, the church world can tend to be small). During the ride they had been having some discussions regarding their newfound charismatic convictions about the role of faith and healing in the Christian life. It was known that I had a long standing chronic ear condition stemming from when I was six months old, which had ultimately left me fully deaf in my right ear and partially deaf in my left. In my right, the chronic infection had eaten away at my ear drum and the bones inside my ear, leaving me with only the  mastoid (the big one at the base).

Once they dropped me off, I had gone into my house and was already in my room getting ready for bed when I heard a knock on the door. My room is on the main floor right next to the front entrance. Everyone else is sleeping in their rooms upstairs as it is past midnight. I go to the door and it’s my friends. They ask… actually it was more like a demand, to come into my room so that they can pray for me to receive the gift of tongues, as they were certain that the reason why my ears had never been healed is because I didn’t have enough faith. Receiving the gfit of tongues would be a sign of that necessary faith.

I didn’t consent. I didn’t agree. I also didn’t have the ability to resist. Next thing I know we are in my room, I am sitting on my bed, and the two of them are towering over me with a list of intent and aggressive instructions. I was to settle on a syllable. Once I had that syllable, I was supposed to turn that over repeatedly on my tongue. As i did this they were then going to pray. They would then begin to pray over me in their tongues until, on their word, I would take over. At that point I would recieve the gift.   

What is kind of funny about this whole ordeal is that the two of them were so eager to get to their “speaking in tongues” part that they payed no attention to the fact that I hadn’t actually started the process. They didn’t even give me the opportunity, had I wanted, to turn a chosen syllabel over on my own tongue. And in fact, at this point in the charade I was far too concerned with their own very loud syllables waking up my parents to think about any inner “promptings.” Things got more intense when they started jumping down in a holy frenzy.

The tongues never did come. My hearing never returned. My friends were visibly dejected, although not without the capacity to leave me with a final word- one day, they hoped, I would have enough faith.

Perhaps in a different way, replaying this whole scene likewise brings back memories of my parents dragging me down as a young kid (6, 7 years old, maybe a bit older?) to the front of the church one Sunday morning to have the pastor anoint me with oil and pray his own words of healing. I still remember the terror I felt in that moment, grasping at the railings in desperation and crying/screaming loud enough for everyone to hear me multiple buildings over. I even remember the Pastor’s face, looking at me with a sense of deep and troubled concern, as though something was wrong with me beyond just my ears. I don’t know. Mabye he thought I was possessed by a demon or something. All I can say with a fair degree of certainty that these memories would become part of the demons which would haunt me going forward. Perhaps just not in the way anyone intended.

Speaking of my ears. Perhaps the most significant memory of my time at John De Graffe, those years between Grade 1 and Grade 3, was my first major surgery- a mastoidectonomy. Where they dig a separate canal into your ear so as to allow it to properly drain and avoid future infections. It was my first experience of being put under with anaesthesia. Still one of the oddest experiences I think one can have in their lifetime (at least from my perspective). That feeling of sinking deeper and deeper away from reality, where faces and voices counting backwards from 10 slowly become distanced and more and more narrowed until the world appears like a pinhole in the fabric of space and time, and no matter how much you try to grasp at that hole in the distance you can’t reach it. It’s unnerving. I can still smell and taste the anaesthesia lingering in the backdrop of those memories.

Coming back into consciousness might be even more unsettling in some ways, as there is no way to actually prepare for the shock to the system. Before you can say “no, leave me be, I just want to go back to sleep,” hands are grabbing and forcing you into a sitting position, all so that you can promptly throw up into a bucket that has managed to show up suddenly out of nowwhere. In my case, this is also when I first notice the massive bandage around my head and imagine that they’ve actually lobotamized a part of my brain.

Recovery includes not having to go to school, drinking ginger ail (because back then it was a cure all), getting a care package of cards and gifts from my whole class, and eventually follow up appointments with my quirky, older Jewish ear doctor named Dr. Brodovski, who would always emphasize my name by flipping the A and the I around (so, DIVAD), marked by the routine breakfast or lunch with my mom at the old cafeteria in the medical arts building downtown. My go to was the cinnamon bun, as they were not only big, they would toast them on the grill and then butter them. Perfection.

Actually, another significant part of this time in my life would be my love of action figures, a segway that works well here given that another ritual built into my surgery days was getting a new action figure before heading in. If marbles was my entry point into the art of the “collection,” collecting action figures became my first full fledged hobby.

Along with subsequently getting swindled by some really terrible trades yet again. The monetary worth that could have been in my possession had I been aware.

Although if I am being honest, it never really occurred to me that a collection should sit on the shelf. I don’t think that ever would have made sense to me. For me, these figures were intended to be used. They were there for me to create worlds I could then get lost in. This wasn’t limited to just action figures either, although i spent many days and evenings on my own, often twirling around in cirlces, an action figure in both hands, sometimes for an hour straight. I know this confused my parents, but there was something about being caught up in that state of motion that transported me to another place. By spinning around in a circle, and yes, I get the irony here, the world would somehow stand still, the only thing in view then being the characters I was holding in front of me. Everything else would blur out of focus.

In a more visceral and physical fashion, that same spirit of play would apply itself to my brothers and I making a habit, especially when friends came over, of turning our basement and furniture into our playground, typically choosing a gigantic fort, often times with an enacted drama where we would be running away from home, usually on a raft, being chased by our parents. Or else carting the furniture out on to our front lawn where we would make a train and embark on a journey to whereever our little hearts desired.

More innocent times, to be sure. Although for me, deeper wrestlings were already well on their way to taking root as I muddled my way through the different experiences of growing up into this world. My chronic nightmares were still alive and well, the stories I was reading getting more and more nuanced and complex. It would be at Eade Crescent that I first encountered E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, a book that would open me up to deeper questions about this thing we call existence. Equally so the likes of Rolad Dahl, Beatrice Potter, A.A. Milne. It was also at Eade Crescent that my mom read Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe around the supper table. A stepping stone into L’Engle and Susan Cooper. It was also around this time that I was deep into John Bibee’s The Spirit Flyer series and local Winnipeg author John White’s famed fantasy series, The Archives of Anthropos. As someone who always found himself struggling to fit in at school, at home (comes with the territory of being the middle child and the only one without the name John/Jane I suppose), and in the world, this was where I could begin to make sense of things. The thoughts in my head. The polarizing experiences I was finding in the world. The thoughts and feelings I was having that were often met with misunderstanding and confusion to those on the outside.

Switching from John De Graffe to Calvin Christian after finishing grade 3 was of course marked by an eventual move from Eade Crescent to Morning Meade, a slightly bigger bay further north in the area of North Kildonan. Another “transition.” But of course, as with any turn in ones journey we bring the formative stuff of the past with us as we go. I’ve been mulling over what would be the key thing from this time in my life that begins to frame my story moving forward. I think the biggest thing these memories make alive for me is that, for whatever reason, the restlessness I know more concretely today has always been a part of me. Yes, I had experienced this as that young, 5 year old kid floating in and out of dreams and reality back on Manitoba avenue, but here it takes on a new shape- recontextualization. Here i begin to take that experience and formulate it into a childhood, as one drawn to wonder amidst the figurative struggles. One always seeking something true outside of myself, but also one who always had this sense that I was largely left to do this alone, peering through the cracks of the constructs and expectations that surrounded me. Being in the midst of this reality but often finding myself in that figurative twirling, moving in and out of these “worlds” at a moments noitce.

Yes, that sounds hyperbolic, I know. But this is the story these memories bring back. These are the words I have to describe it. This is, I think what becomes important for fleshing out the next chapter of my life.

Got a life, and it’s my first time living
Got eyes, but that don’t mean I have vision
Some days just getting through is winning
Some days you just say good riddance

Got a heart, but it’s my first time feeling
Got a floor that used to be my ceiling
Some people have a way of reaching
All the parts you have a hard time seeing

Funny how life’s a coin with two sides
Breaks you and loves you at the same damn time

• Songs I’d Rather Not Sing (The Fray)

“For we cannot do anything against the Truth, but only for the Truth.”

• 2 Corinthians 13:8

Days off mean giving space to sitting with my thoughts

Been thinking about this question this morning- what is knowledge. How do we know what is true.

Is knowledge facts? Data points? Information?
Or is knowledge something other? Does knowing something need another category to give it proper definition?

And if it is something other, how do we attain this knowledge? Or more to the point, how do we attain this knowledge in a way that matters? That can make sense of this thing we call Reality, or Life?

As the lyrics cited above suggest, it seems intuitive to say that sight reduced to its purely material (biological) function can be applied in a way that even someone who sees in the biological sense is capable of not actually seeing a true thing at all. It’s not a stretch to say we think of a biological brain in the same way. We “think” in these terms all the time.

It’s a question N.T Wright brings to the table in his book The Vision of Ephesians, unpacking Paul’s grand prayer at the end of chapter 1 for his readers to “know.” A prayer that follows 1:3-14, which is best heard as a single thought (with no breaks), expressing a “combined, glorious shout of praise.” (page 17) A brief section that works to  ncorportate the “whole” of the story into that grander vision.

To that end, here Paul isnt speaking about propositions, but rather actual experience of capital R “Reality.” In fact, a direct phrasing in this passage connects this to “the eyes of the heart,” the seat of a persons knowledge in the ANE. As 1:18 states, this is what enables knowing, and such knowledge is what enables hope. Or in the three fold focus of the prayer, this is what brings us to the interconnecting themes of hope-inheretence-power, which work to bind the bigger picture together. Which, as Wright helps flesh out, flow from the three central texts the prayer is evoking and pulling from- Psalm 110, Isaiah 11, Psalm 8. Wright makes the further point that part of this grand vision is the way it uses these textual references to attach the narrative of Jesus to the Temple imagery that dominated the Judean context. In this sense, it is not a picture of us excaping this reality to go somewhere else, but of God taking residence in this creation. The concept of “filling the earth,” which IS the temple, and further filling us (being “in Christ”) through the indwelling of the Spirit as image bearers placed within the temple. In this imagery we find the movement of the story. It is about the space beging prepared for God to come down and dwell within. This is what the sacrificial imagery was all about-purifying the space from the pollution of Sin and Death so that God might be made known through this presence in the temple (and in the larger narrative, creaiton and in the lives of God’s image bearers).

Similar to how the above lyrics lean into the language of living and feeling in describing a world that is otherwise incoherent. We indwell this life in the same way. To know God is to participate in this Reality, the question being whether we do so in hope (the victory of God over the enslaving Powers of Sin and Death), inheretance (the promise of new creation), and Power (the rule of God through the outpouring of the Spirit). Without this, what we have is a world that lifts you up and breaks you down and leaves you stranded inside its grand illusion of a life.

Sometimes feeling like winning
Sometimes feeling like saying good riddance

This is the heart of Paul’s vision in the letter to the Ephesians, which is actually a letter, as Wright points out, which was meant not for a single community but to be circled and cycled through the different communities and the generations that would follow;

“I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheretence among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greateness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.”

(Ephesians 1:17-19)

If, as Wright suggests, we think of the Pauline letters as rooms in a house, Galatians becomes the kitchen where the important things are getting practically fleshed out in relationship to Jesus, the Judean and Gentile communities, and the Church, Romans is the formal dining room where everything is eventually properly layed out in specific fashion as part of a fully cooked and orchestrated meal of ideas and convictions, the letters to the Corinthians are the bedrooms and living rooms where discourse and infighting and regular patterns of living happen inbetween, and Ephesians would be that room tucked away at the back of the house looking out and away across the sea (perhaps with an after dinner drink), reflecting on the entire journey.

In working on my life story over the past couple years, one thread that opened up is the fight that has followed me all my life, to know that what I believe is in fact true. Behind this of course is the idea of fear, but for me it has never been a fear that what I believe isn’t true, as though I need to protect some dogma. Rather, in a paradoxical sense it is a fear that my life (my choices, my repsonses) doesn’t reflect what I believe to be true. It is about whether there is integrity between my actual partcipation in this world and the knowledge I am naming as true. For this relationship to reflect something rational and logically coherent.

Which of course requires knowledge of what is true, but examining that inherent need imbedded in me, a need that has often found me on the outside and isolated from the different collective circles in my efforts to “critique” all social constructs (and indeed my perpetual rejection of all social constructs, like the good cynic must always engage). I have come to realize that the only way to really know something is to live it. All else are disconnected facts and data that cannot say anything at all about this world we are embodying. To this end i have come to adopt what is called participationist philosophy/theology. When it comes to what we know, we don’t live in a world reduced to information, we live in a world where knowledge is an embodied practice

And if there is a way to understanding why this need has haunted me all my life, it is in the notion that life itself hinges upon this reality. Regardless of how we play with different ideas, a life sees truly only through the sort of belief that enables participation.

Which is really the tension. We stake our lives on what we believe we know, and yet the only way into such knowledge is to live it. Thus is the conundrum, made all the more maddening by the fact that we must participate in a word that lifts up and destroys as it goes. Thus, as Wright fleshes out in his book, why the best word for faith is trust. A trusting allegiance defined through participatory language that always must be risking something. We can call that something “a life.”

To push that further- such knowledge means participating in a given story about Reality. Thats what a life reveals, is a story. The same life that can only be truly understood through that storied lens. And for me, I have always felt driven to seek a story that makes sense of the world i am participating in. Anything else is to render it lost.

And to be honest, the older I get the harder that participation becomes.

A final thought to this end. In the second Corinthians passage quoted above, one might be tempted to read Truth in propositional terms. And yet this would miss the point. The Truth being referenced is participatory. As the larger passage suggests, the Truth is the claim that Jesus Christ is in you through His participation in the flesh, thus handing us a particular Reality we are then enabled to “live” into. That is the call the letter is reminding its readers of. Which is precisely what unfolds within that grander vision of Ephesians Wright is exploring as well;

“Paul expounds what is true of the Messiah in biblical and Judean thought, in order that he may urge his readers to realize that if they are in the Messiah then all this belongs to them as well.” (page 32)

What is true for the Messiah will be true for those participation “in Christ.”

This is intuitive, I think, to how any and all knowledge works. This is in fact what Martin Shaw’s recent book Liturgies of the Wild is all about as well, a book I recently finished (and loved). In a world that has largely redefined what it means to know in the reductionist terms of “information,” humanity’s need for an embodied story pushes forward. Perhaps the reason that can seem fearful (at least to me) is because it’s a much more difficult thing to control. In fact, unlike a world reduced to information it can’t be controlled. One might say thats what affords belief it’s power

*as mentioned elsewhere in this space, these installments are my intention to get a very rough draft of a personal project I have been working on for a numbers of years (writing my life story) off the word d and somewhere where it could hold me accountable to doing something with it.

At this point I am jumping ahead in the timeline, as the period between 2000 and 2003 plays a significant role in shaping what I could (and will) call the two sides of my life. If there is a whole lot of life lived in-between that aformentioned experience frommy  Grade 5 year, it would be this later period where it begins to take on new and fresh meaning in the scope of my story.

Having just graduated with my degree in Youth Leadership from a local college/seminary (Providence College), my church, the church that had played in a significant role in my formation from the time I joined is humble beginnings as a house church at 18, was also in the midst of it’s own crisis. It’s worth mentioning that not only was this church birthed from a similar conflict, one that once left my then graduating self lost and confused before handing me what would become a new found identity, it would be sometihng I can say I helped build from the ground up.

It could be argued that this (then) present conflict paralleled a larger sense of disatisfaction and deconstruction that was reaching well beyond the walls of this specific church body, embodied in what could fairly be described as a mass exodus of many in my generation from the church culture we had inhereted from the 80’s and 90’s. What’s notable about this exodus is that it was far from uniform. On one side were those leaving what had become labeled a post-modern, watered down Christianity, for the then burgeoning and, at the time, emergent neo-reformed circles taking North America by storm. This movement was marketed as a demand for more intelligent, more bookish, more “biblical,” more robust credal expressions of the Church driven by a need to reclaim and thus preserve the hallmarks of historic orthodox theology.

Meanwhile, on the other side stood those for whom the whole post-modern climate had pushed them towards a different sort of “critique” of the same problem.  Rather than seeking to reclaim orthodoxy, they were seeking to abandon the whole enterprise altogether,

These two sides did not get along

And neither did the two central pastors at my church.

Where did this leave me? Thinking back on it, there definitely was a degree to which I found myself trying to figure things out for myself, and largely without a whole lot of support. Equally so while my once coherent world was once again being pulled out from under me. For the nearly 8 years prior to this stuff all coming to a head, my identity had been rooted in my connection to a place that had been defined by these people. They were my world, as they were that Church. And like the shifting tides, I often found a tendency, probably out of desperation to hold on to some sense of coherency while silently grieving a still undefined and unclarified loss, to double down in defence of whichever side was being attacked in a given moment. Which isolated me more than anything. I think a part of me believed, or at least hoped, that we were somehow, at the heart of it all, fighting for the same thing, and that somehow something of what had helped the world to make sense might be preserved. Instead, the more people began to leave and disappear, the more alone I felt.

Or perhaps better put, the more alone I became (sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between feelings and truth). In this case there was, without a doubt, a tangible and physical change when it came to the space itself. And given the degree to which my own sense of self was attached to this place, I was becoming more and more unfamiliar and uncertain in the process of my own handle on truth and identity as well.

And for that matter, who God was.

As I’ve heard it put by some, it led to a kind of homelessness.

There were other factors at play too, all playing an equal role in my feeling lost at this particular moment of my life. I’ll speak more about these things later, but 10 years of pursuing a career in music had come to an abrupt end. A part catalyist for that shift- my investment in the youth ministry at my church- had culminated in a quiet, unspoken rejection by the powers that be. Both brothers had now moved out of my parents home, leaving me unable to clarify where my own home was. I had lost my dog Ginger, my best friend. One of the pastors at my church who had been a vital mentor through the choas of these moments in my life had become a casualty of the exodus.

On top of this, everything I had been taught to believe was being called into question at the same time.

I no longer recognized the world that I had been formed within. I no longer knew who I was.

I no longer knew what was true.

I would press this even further and say it more concretely- everything felt like a lie.

Shifting for a brief moment of time into the world of neo-reformed zelousness, led as it was by its patron saint John Piper, had only served to create more uncertainty and more confusion. Whatever bookishness it had promised me ultimately revealed itself to be more about gatekeeping than actual honest inquiry. The post-modern liberalism on the other end of the spectrum felt equally problematic, being more obsessed with targeted (and often angry) deconstruction than coherent, rational conversation. And to stay where I was, in what was a highly competitive church environment seeking to reinforce the fortress and stop the bleeding, seemed to be constantly telling me, with it’s type A level vigour, that who I was was inevitably not good enough to belong to this circle, leaving me on the outside of all three of these spaces.

And so I quietly left the whole enterprise- Christianity, the world- life- behind. I went through the motions, but internally I was becoming more and more the hardened cynic. I shoved my degree in my pocket, slowly left the ministries I had been serving with (namely youth and music), and got a job at a government agency involved with social services relating to high risk youth, dipping in and out of delivering papers on the side (later bringing in a short stint with my childhood hero, Scholastic Book Fairs).

It was around this time, now about 27 years of age, that I eventually moved out of my parents house and into a shared split level house with a friend. Which is really where I hit my lowest point, my existential crisis coming to a boiling point. Sadly affecting my friend in the process.

Usually when we speak of such crisis points we are also speaking of notable transitions. This might be seen as points of no return. It can be points of revelation or points of change and redirection. This was true for me. The reason I see this as my lowest point is because it was the moment my life took an unexpected turn, bringing me back full circle to that pivotal Grade 5 moment where I found myself confronting a whole new manifestation of those fears.

My parents had decided to go away, and they asked me to house sit/dog sit. I agreed. Looking back, I do wonder whether this was a moment that I leaned into with intention precisely because it afforded me space to disappear into. When you can’t handle life, even living with a roomate becomes too much to navigate. When you’re in a dark spot, that isolation and aloneness becomes something that we desperately seek and crave.

It was late one evening sitting alone in front of my parent’s computer, after having hashed out yet another conversation with my older brother online (our relationship had come to be defined by these kinds of cyclical conversations for a while now, ever since he had disappeared from the picture at 16 (for me, 14) years of age. To be honest his physical absence had been in play ever since elementary school found our lives incidentally parting ways). Having come to define myself as an atheist, which is really a term that emerges from and justifies ones rejection of their religious upbringing, thus being somewhat redundant, this particular convo. although arguably reflecting nothing out of the norm, had led me to present myself with a challenge. I had been asking people within the online atheist communities I was engaging, whether there was a genuine answer to this simple question- why should I not kill myself.

An important caveat here- this is not to say I was necessarily suicidal. This was a hypothetical exercise. I don’t think I cared either way. Whatever was driving me was based on a singular concern, which was a haunted need to know the integrity of my belief. Meaning, knowing that my choices and actions and the way I lived my life lined up with what I genuintely thought to be true about reality and this world. Why was that so important? I’m not sure. I might suggest, as I’ve hinted at through my story up to this point, that this was ingrained in me as a young kid pouring myself into books. The more stories I encountered the more questions it raised about reality and the world. As a young kid i felt, and inuitively understood, that such questions could not be detached from the way I lived my life. All I knew was that it seemed to matter what I believed to be true if my convictions were going to be rational, coherent and revelant.

The question about suicide sseemed to be a microcosm of this greater concern, and one which poked at some of our most tightly held assumptions and values. If one was to simply say no, you should not end your life., the next question would be, why not? What is it that prevents me from doing so? A cognitive/biological resistance? An ideological one? An emotional one? If there are good rational reasons to do so, why do I choose not to? And why would I call this necessary? My hope was to be able to get underneath the limits I was seeing (and feeling) to exist within the entire rational enterprise, at least when it came to confronting what people were willing to accept within the atheistic framework I had taken on for myself. After all, if we ridicule religious communities for apparently being unwilling to face reality and instead holding on to comfortable illusions in response, our atheism should not be doing the exact the same thing if we want to take it seriously.

I never got a real, genuine answer to my question, and so I concluded that people simply didn’t like the answer atheism rationally demanded from us in its necessary logical process.

Great, now I’ve isolated myself in these cricles too. Turns out atheists didn’t like being challenged any more than the christians.

I honestly don’t remember what precisely triggered the following move, but it emerged from this particular conversation on that particular night that I had with my brother. I also wouldn’t say this was a completely serious endeavor, although it was rooted in a weird sort of appeal to seek that aformentioned integrity. The question of God lingered in the background of my past life. So why not play to it’s relevance? Playing off something my brother had said, I reached into my backpack of cliches and pulled out a tried and true trope. I prayed to God right there in the darkness of that empty house and said, hey God, here’s my challenge. Let’s see if you can move a chess piece. If you are real, give me something, anything, that you know would make me believe.

After all, as every good atheist knows, the problem of divine hiddenness is one of the most damning realities for religion, right?

And then I went to sleep.

And I got up.

Nothing.

Not that I was really considering it. Not that I was expecting anything. My mind was still on the rational problem of my question, not the spiritual crisis problem. For me that was a silly game. The challenge I had conjured up in the moment as part had been a momentary expression of my cyncism.

I continued on with my day. This was a day when I happened to be going to meet with someone who was associated with my church. After all, when it comes to such shifts in ones worldview it’s not like you are able to completely change the shape of your world. You co-exist within it. This is when I happened upon someone whom I did not know. As it turns out, this individual, who did not know me or my struggles, had been praying the evening prior and had felt prompted to write down some words. She wasn’t sure if they were meant for anything, but she wrote them down. In this moment she felt like they were meant for me. And so she gave them to me.

They recounted the words of my prayer from the previous night.

More than that, they tasked me with the act of remembering, recalling the events on my bike from Grade 5. I came to call this my letter from God. And this started a journey through comparative religions and eventually back to Christianity, albeit a Christianity that looked a lot different than the one I had left behind.

It also did something that, for me, was quite profound- it broke the chains of what I would now call a present manifestation of that aforementioned fear. A fear rooted in this haunting need to get things right. For my beliefs to be truly rational and logical, and for my life to be willing to match the implications of whatever that truth demanded. I will get further into this with my story as well, but part of what was being uncovered in these moments was also a fear of being midusnderstood, something that I have come to see as intimately connected to that need to get things right.

These years of my life were captured by patterns of conversations, encounters, relationships, social circles, work environments, all meeting this same seemingly insurmountable wall when it came to my need to challenge what I perceived as constructs and conventions and gaps in the world’s reasoning and logic. Perhaps most aware in the area of assumptions regarding personhood and conceptions of the self. As I have come to learn over my now near 50 years of life, we can fight and fight to convince ourselves that we are a self-made individual, which is the assumption most social and societal constructs are built on, but we are never more or less than the person we are in someone else’s story. Thus, to feel misunderstood is one of the most frightening feelings there is, precisely because it’s the thing that holds your entire life in its grip. It is shaping and telling our story. As the old adage goes, to know and be known. One of the truest cliches regarding the nature of the human experience.

Side note- I read a few helpful books regarding how to write your life story as an amateur, and one of the common refrains I came across was the freedom these authors gave to both tell your story as you see it, but also to understand that your story is similtaneously telling the story of the many “others” whom find roles on your stage and in your play. There is no easy answer to this end, simply the freedom to recognize the push and pull and to let go of the fear of gettting it wrong. After all, “as you see it,” can more aptly be described as one’s wrestling with the different versions of “you” the world has defined and created.

One of the interesting things that surfaced for me in reflecting on this important transition in my life is the way it calls forward the thoughts in my first chapter on the importance of distinguishing between what is life and what is death. As I suggested, the minute we lose the ability to define Death (capitalized with intention), we lose the ability to define Life.

And I don’t use these words in the sense of simple existence and non-existence. I don’t think fear of death in the sense of “non-existence,” which is how it is commonly used, is ever the point. Assumptions that we fear that kind of death are always a mask for the true fears running underneath. Instead, I use these words in the broader sense of two different kinds of reality. Death embodies decay, suffering, oppression, division, chaos. Life embodies transformation, order, freedom, unity.

One of the great inconsistencies that I engaged in my atheism was the fact that I found it deemed it to be rational and acceptable to play fast and loose with these categories of Life and Death. Doing so might have the appearance of coherency, and even intellectual integrity, but beyond not being logically coherent, such an approach has a hard time making sense of our actual experience of this world. In the living I find it is the exact opposite- we assume these to be hard and fast categories embedded within reality. The sort of willfull ignorance required to play fast and loose with our definitions is in fact masking a real cognitive dissonance. A cognitive disonnance which, in my opinion, is built on modern resistance to binaries and polarities. Pull back the curtain on how this world works and you find these binaries at work all over the place.

In many ways, over the course of telling my story I will keep coming back to where I started on this basic observation- the need to constantly be defining, in changing contexts and cirucmstance, Life and Death as distinguishable from one another was ingrained in me from my very youngest years. Without that nothing else can possibly make sense. It is what drew me to the power of story in the first place. It is what drew me to the necessary place of the imagination. It is what frames my longing for ongoing discussion and debate and critique, for the pursuit of the rational in partnership with what I have come to know as the spirit.

And yes, it is what makes sense of my deeply felt need to be understood.

On that level, I don’t know if that chronic restlessness is a curse or a blessing. It certainly has the power to create enemies and form rifts. And yet I have also found likeminded souls along the way, people with shared language and shared concern whom could not be understood without it. Some of which I know personally, others which remain encounters from a distance, be it writers, filmmakers, thinkers, philosophers. Which helps me feel a little less crazy at the very least. On my brightest days, a little less alone.

Or as I once hear it said from the famed avante garde filmmaker, Alejandro Jodorowsky, “We all exist in our own personal reality of craziness.” It’s simply a matter of learning to see that others share that reality with us.

Anyone taking a jaunt through the hallways and rooms of our home, the first thing that is likely to jump out is the sheer amount of attention our walls and shelves give to New York City. If asked, the reason for this visible presence woulld take the shape of a story. More specifically, the story of our relationship and our marriage. NYC has held an important place for us through the years on numerous levels, and remains an integral part of our journey.

Why do I mention this? Because I was thinking about my relationship to America as of late, in this present climate. In truth, NYC is far from alone in its respresentation on the walls and shelves of our home. That same tour would take you from the north shore of Duluth and the Mississippi waters to the coastal walkways of Savannah and the highway stretching the Pacific shores. You’d walk past Gordon Ramsey’s restaurant in L.A, the museums and bars of Nashville, the full stretch of the Smokey Mountains, Elvis’ home in Memphis, the canals of Olkahoma and the Greenwood District in Tulsa, the largest boot in the world in Red Wing, the riverwalk in Chicago, the arch in St. Louis, the old wood chipper in Fargo, the old route 66, MLK in Alabama, the historic Cheers bar in Boston, and the many national parks inbetween.

Not to mention the many many memories we have of our endless trips to Minneapolis.

All of which is to say, I have always loved spending time in America. I also can’t ever remember a time when all of these memories have been mired in so much tension. These days I find myself responding more and more frequently and more and more viscerally to American stories in books and film. While it’s been an intentional choice not to travel south of the border these past few years, it also hasn’t been a struggle to enforce.

What makes it worse is that these feelings, for as much as I know they are shared by many, are extremely hard to communicate. Because for me, in truth it reaches further than Trump and the rise of the American political “right.” It reaches further than appeals to “Christian nationalism.” For me, what the present moment has unearthed is something I think I have felt intuitively for a long while but have simply become more and more aware of as the years go on- a striking disillusionment with and cynicsm over the entire western enterprise.

To be clear, I don’t think this is reducible to “America.” However, America does carry a very specific represenation when it comes to the rhetoric that holds that western narrative in play. In fact, I would say that sits at the heart of the present shift in focus and attention that we are seeing across Europe and Canada over the past few months, responding to the ways in which America has presented itself in common speech as the reigning authority in matters of global politics by distancing ourelves and reimagining our relationships in different directions. As the analysis tends to go, there is a sense in which some people believe the problem is all the countries comprising Nato that have been failing to take responsibility for its seat at the table, making it necassary for America to hold us all to account. In this narrative the rest of us have been taking advantage of America’s wealth and might, and the time has come to start carrying our load.

Let me be clear about why this narrative bothers me. It’s not because the “truth hurts,” as I have heard plenty of americans suggest. Rather, it’s because the assumptions that lie behind this narrative are, for me, a massive part of naming the larger problem when it comes to that “western enterprise.” Let me clear about this as well- these assumptions underlie both sides, left and right, when it comes to American politics. The assumption is simply this: western progress, western democracy, western liberal (in the truer sense of the word) ideals, call it whatever you want, is the answer to the world’s problems.

And there is no way to get to America without first assuming and accepting that this particular lens does indeed reflect the truth of things. The fact that both sides of their political divide see America as the great protecter of this enterprise, the model after which the rest of the world should and must aspire, the great experiment that gives it life in the world at large, is simply betraying the issue that was already present long before America came on to the scene. As a heightened manifestion in its American expression to be sure, but nevertheless already present.

Thus what I find is, when I hear from the american right it’s typically about protecting what is often coined as the great American project or ideal. When I hear from the left, it’s usually the concession that America has somehow neglected or failed in it’s annointed role as the protector of these ideals. Two different ways of building off the same assumptions, both leading me to dig underneath to ask not whether I think either of these things are true about American history and American power (spoiler: I think such assumptions are incredibly ignorant of global history and how Empires work), but whether I think the larger narrative that this arises from is anchored in something true.

So here is where things come tumbling back inwards for me. What if we don’t see this enterprise as the answer? What if we see it as part of the problem? What if we don’t agree with this narrative? What if I question the history it tells? What if I don’t share those values?

As the British neuroscientist Ian McGilchrist says in his celebrated book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, sometimes for some of us to exist here in the West is to feel like a left brained person caught in a right brained (constructed) world (you’ll have to read the book to get the full nuances of his reclamation of that common right/left brain trope).

Which is to say, it can be a lonely place to exist.

Here’s where I might get even a little more bolder. There is no shortage of writers and thinkers echoing some of my sentiments above, but at a grassroots level i might summarize the problem in the following fashion. And I am borrowing somewhat from a recent episode with Rick Steeves, the famous travel writer whom was reflecting on what he has learned from getting to know other countries outside of America’s borders over the years. The ideal of America sounds great when someone is facing oppression, be it in the form of government or social poltical and economic realities. It’s not so great when one has to actually grapple with the so called “liberty” on the other side of this equation.

Which presents an interesting in-road into some of the nuances of this discussion. There is a reigning sentiment throughout the West right now that for as messed up as we see America to be at the moment, that somewhere and somehow the rest of us still have a western ideal to fall back on. One that gets expressed from the vantage point of not being considered the “present Empire,” but that quietly pulls from the echos of our storied history of colonization. The rest of us, as the narrative goes, have that semblance of baseline social structures in place which are the true lifeblood of that western democracy and protect us from the crazy. In some sense this is true. What it fails to see though are the cracks in the larger narrative itself. That’s where the attention really needs to be drawn towards, as that’s where the language of Empire arises from. From that vantage point, I find myself leaning into a book I read last year called My Roman History: A Memoir, in which a historian reflects on her move to Rome to make sense of it’s transition in a time when it had to find it’s identity without the label of Empire or the seat of the Pope. In other words, without the things that afforded it it’s place of superiority in the early growth of that western expansion.

This observation has stuck with me. At one point she observes, as Robert Kaplan also does in The Revenge of Geography, a book also about western expansion, that Empires do the most damage in those periods of time when they have already died but are still living as though they are very much alive (the walking dead imagery abounds here). As both state in their own way, the best thing a fallen Empire can do is come to see itself on the same level as everyone else. And yet rarely, if never, do Empires do this. To a degree we can see this in Britain, but like Rome and now America, they once dug their heels in just as hard. Some of the greatest attrocities inherent to western colonization were birthed from this reality.

There is a larger arc that emerges in this discussion however. And that has to do with all of the Empires that have birthed, given rise to, and seeded the whole Western enterpirse. This is where the particular shape of this resistance comes into play, as it is unique to this moment of history. In many ways, it’s near impossible to break through the conception of America precisely because, as a collective West, we are still convinced that the Western ideal hangs in the balance of that relationship. That’s what really holds us captive. Dig behind that and you have the often unstated, unrealized but wholly apparent assumption that we are somehow on the right side of history as part of the West. Dig further and that’s what holds up this unspoken notion embedded in our narrative that we are, in fact, better than the rest. Morally superior, technologically superior, telling a more enlightened story and upholding the great human endeavor for control through our accomplishments. If not stated overtly, it is what colours so much of what our narrative hands us. To challenge that? To speak about a very real sense of disillusionment with that western enterprise? That western narrative? To find onesself questioning its promises and its validity? That is the thing that becomes impossible.

Thus, that’s what has been on my mind as of late as I muddle my way through books like The Romans: A 2,000 Year History by Edward Watts, Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It by Samuel McDonald, Capitalism: A Global History by Sven Beckert, How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations by Carl Fray, to name a few. No answers, perhaps just the feelings of disillusionment as I ponder my past and present relationship to this idea called America. Once upon a time I was free to travel those roads through places that I assumed were just like the rest of us. What I feel these days is a loss of innocence, but a loss that reaches beyond those borders, even as they simitaneously keep coming back to it over and over again.

Send Help (Sam Raimi)- The anticipated return of Raimi to what he does best, which is full on unfiltered horror/thriller mode. Don’t sleep on McAdams however, who seems charged up here to give Raimi some competition on that front. Whatever commentary it leaves slightly uncooked and underutilized it more than makes up for in entertainment value

Pike River (Robert Sarkies)- The talented New Zealand filmmaker, who’s last film was in 2006, returns with this story about a real life mining disaster that, in Sarkies’ own words on the Point of View podcast, emerges with a naturally embedded inherent ready-made drama. This allows him to step back and give his focus to drawing out a patient, immersive human drama that works to place us as viewers within the naturally existing tension while bringing the distinct voices whom lived through the trauma, a group of women left to fight against the powers for the lives and memories of their partners, to the forefront.

Dracula (Luc Besson)- A pitch perfect balance between camp and substance, doing a lot with a relatively low budget. Especially in the way it moves between these grand sequences to the more intimate and contained setting of the castle. Melding that grand mythos with its particular take on the character allows this to find something suprisingly human underneath the vampire motif, giving us a take on the famed figure that reaches for something more transcendent and redemptive, both as a love story and as religious reflection

La Grazia (Paolo Sorrentino)- A political film for our times. following a leader reaching the end of his term and grappling with the many different interconnecting elements of his legacy and story. Introspective, but also relentless in its interogation as it wrestles with bigger moral and existential questions. Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino (the Young Pope, The Hand of God, The Great Beauty) tells a story that brings some of the natural crisis of those questions to the surface, wondering about the ways in which, although we like to believe that something like progress exists, that belief tends to exist solely to satisfy our own need for power and control. Which begs another question; why do we seek control. I think the underlying answer in this film is that our need to seek control (read: the Western narrative) within the chaos betrays our real and true need for meaning. Or in other words, truth. Truth that exist outside of and beyond the wars and muddied and incoherent and inconsistent terrain of our constructed political machines. The sort of meaning that finds us when we are freed from our need to give the societal constructions an authority it doesn’t otherwise have, constructions which give us the illusion of this being about something more than our present sense of superiority. That it frames this within the story of a single leader grappling with the honest questions when all the pretenses that the public light demands and evokes is part of what makes this one powerful.

Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie (Matt Johnson)- Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson returns following the success of Blackberry with this quirky, ridiculously fun comedy that stands as one of the best films of the slate in these early months of 2026. Made all the better going in blind and seeing it with a crowd.

GOAT (Tyree Dillihay)- Whoever came up with the idea to pair the character of a goat with the acronym GOAT was probably sitting there thinking wait, no one else has done this yet? It’s so obvious and on the nose that it works, especially because the film takes the themes that underly that seriously. This is a grassroots level script that isn’t afraid to dig into some of the weightier motifs, using a memorable cast to flesh that out. There’s nothing overtly inventive here, but the lack of gimmicks and cheap tricks make it a refreshing early animated entry

Crime 101 (Bart Layton)- A much different film than the trailer sells it to be, and I loved the old school detective crime drama vibe. What surprised me the most was how invested I was in the characters. Car chases, moral dilemmas, commentary on the system, and solid pacing, all packaged in a decent amount of movie at 2 and a half hours. Reminded me of why theaters matter to these mid-budget, mid-level projects.

Wuthering Heights (Emerald Fennell)- Opinions will (and have, and do) vary on this much publicized adaptation by Fennell. A Director that I am not fond of and still, after seeing this film, am not on board with. Grant that I have never read the book and knew little about the story going in, but I found the story to be frustatingly devoid of commentary or meaning. It’s like a ship set out to sail without an anchor, but perfectly content to just be there, pulling us back and forth with the waves of its full cast of equally deplorable characters doing ugly things for no apparent reason, characters whom shift with the tides on the drop of a dime seemingly just to move the plot forward. It’s not just that I actively disliked this one, it’s that I desperately wanted it to end sitting through the experience, and felt worse for having endured it. There’s a commentary buried underneath, but cloaked in this adaptation it rings hollow and empty. It looks pretty though, I’ll give it that, and it’s definitely more accessible than Saltburn.

How to Make a Killing (John Patton Ford)- Not as good as Emily the Criminal, which had the benefit of being the American Director’s debut, but if you liked that film you should have a good time with this one. It’s got the same sort of flavour, just a bit more polished and obviously constructed, which I would say are the things that keep it from rising to the same level. That and it trades Emily’s emphasis on character for a more honed focus on the story. A nice third act twist on a narrative level helped to ensure that the journey retained some of its urgency.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (Gore Verbinksi)- Rango meets Pirates meets Mouse Hunt meets The Ring. Which is to say, if you mashed together all the film of Verbinksi’s career this is what would likely pop out. Sometimes bizarre, abundantly quirky, unapologetically unconventional, it’s content to exist in its own mind and world, evoking the madness that its apocalyptic type premise (of a world seemingly descending into and being consumed by its own sense of crazy) needs. That “all in” quality is what sells this, and to be sure the theatrical landscape is a far more interesting place with this occupying the screens.

Alberta Number One (Alexander Carson)- Canadian Director Alexander Carson has drawn up a love letter to the prairies that somehow manages to conjure up some empathy and understanding for our often “side-eyed with nervous uncertainty” province. To it’s credit it’s not afraid to give a well rounded critique in the process. That it asks us to consider other layers to this picture is the journey we as viewers are being asked to go on, and it proves worthwhile.

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (Baz Luhrmann)- From the Director who gave us the somewhat divisive biopic Elvis in 2022, a film that I was much higher on than some others (it was among my top films of that year and an experience I deeply resonated with) comes an impressive concert film that functions equally as a probing documentary into what, as the real life footage helps to underscore, remains one of America’s most tragic and revealing life’s and stories Elvis is a microcosm for so much of that American ethos, and as such is one of the most captivating inroads into understanding that cultural (and political) reality. Or more so, the sort of thing that it produces. Luhrmann deftly and expertly brings together a mix of old footage in a way that not only makes for a thrilling and captivating on-screen experience, but sheds new light on a familiar and iconic figure. Easily drawing us under his spell, leaving us to wonder about and wrestle with where we find ourselves once we come back to reality.

In the Blink of an Eye (Andrew Stanton)- Life Itself. That’s the film that kept coming to mind for me as I watched this new anticipated film, a live action debut from Stanton whom is known for his animated fare. Why? Partly because it shares that past, present, future interconnecting timeline. More so because it shares that unabashed sentimentality that drives critics nuts. For what it’s worth, my embrace and love of Life Itself set me at odds with the overall critical consensus, and I don’t know that I would go to battle for this film quite to the same degree. I don’t think the film is technically as strong and its themes a bit more superficially drawn. But I did appreciate what it was doing towards a similar degree, and I found myself williing to give myself over to the emotional journey of it’s delicate dance between matters and themes of life and death and meaning. You can see it fighting to capture some of those famed Wall-E sensibilities and reflections with it’s sci-fi premise, and for the moments where that breaks through it is enough to keep the film afloat.

My February Reads:

1. Onesself in Another: Participation and Personhood by Susan Grove Eastman (Kobo e-book)
   A long time coming but my first Eastman book (although I was familiar with her writings through interviews and articles on her work on Paul). Eastman is a proponant of participationist theology/philosophy, which is the position I hold to myself, and while this isn’t an easy read, I’d stop short of calling it inaccessible. It’s simply a book that demands time and study, which for me was extremely rewarding.
2. The Art of Asking Better Questions: Persuing Stronger Relationships, Healthier Leadership, and Deeper Faith by J.R. Briggs (audiobook)
   Highly quotable and a super easy and quick read. It’s divided between the theoretical and the practical, of which I lean far more in the direction of the former in terms of my interest. Thankfully Briggs gives time upfront (the first half of the book) to exploring the what and why of our questions.

3. Sea of Memories by Fiona Valpy (Kindle e-book)
Sentimental, but in all the right ways. I love how it begins so contained and then breaks wide open into a more sweeping narrative. Mostly I was immersed in its setting, which went a long ways in helping the characters to come alive as well. Blends history, war, relationship, seaside France and Parisian setting, family and art into an examination of its inter-generational discussion

4. The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark’s Gospel by Helen K. Bond (Kobo e-book)
   If you are interested in the idea of the Gospels as biography and why it matters to our understanding of these writings, this, if I might be so bold, should be considered the place to begin. A definitive work to that end, and richly researched. As it argues, the best way to understand what are complex and Jewish compositions is to narrow in on the world that they emerged within, the world of Greco-Roman hellenized biographies. This allows us to see the form the authors chose to communicate those distinctly Jewish concerns, and also to see how they set themselves apart in a way that forces a necessary conversation.
5. Scion of the Fox (The Realms of the Ancient, Book 1) by S.M. Beiko (physical)
   A whole new way to look at and imagine Winnipeg. A nice way of affording our city a kind of mythos. It’s a bit messy, but there’s a lot of worldbuilding that makes it fun, expecially if you are a local (and this is a local author), and very definitely when it hits the fast and fury of the third act.
6. We Did Ok, Kid: A Memoir (audiobook)
   I thought I knew Hopkins going in. Turns out I knew very little. I loved getting to know the reknown British actor, and I really fell for his story, caught as he was between the contrasting dynamic of the faith of one caregiver and the athiesm of another. With a particular spiritual experience anchoring the space inbetween, he navigates the struggles of success and alcoholism with a calculated pragmatism that is constantly being humbled as he goes. A calculated world that, for him in the scope of his story, keeps being unveiled as something far more. Enough so that the words of its title, the mantra “I’m okay, we are okay,” becomes a repeated refrain, which the book is then able to speak over him in the twighlight years of his aged life.
7. The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life by Frederick Buechner (Kindle e-book)
   Classic Buechner, which you either appreciate or you don’t. A quiet and unrestrained meandering through thoughts and wonderings and observations, always finding its way to a necessary point of revelation. In this case anchored in his stated interest in learning how to stop and pay attention to life along the way.
8. Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May (Kobo e-book)
   The book begins in November with the onset of fall and ends in March with the coming Spring. I tried to stick with the seasons, but i admit I got restless (ironically) enough to fast track the final section. i wasn’t getting on its wave length enough to really absorb what the author was looking to do. Part of that was the tendency to scatter her thoughts. I did like the idea though, and there was enough here to anchor its essential concept- the importance of wintering both in nature and as humans- in something interesting. Winter, literally and metaphorically, as something we learn to embody rather than resist so as to bring about an understanding of real (and eternal) transformation.
9. Remain by Nicholas Sparks and M. Night Shyamalan (physical)
   Notable for exceeding my expectations. Not that it is a brilliant literary work, but that it’s a fun chemistry to unpack with the two voices. What I really appreciated was how tightly focused it is on a thematic level. Which compliments a simple sttory structure that follows a cast of characters seeking to unravel a mystery. Doesn’t require a whole lot from the reader, and sometimes that’s exactly what one needs from a particular book.
   
   10. Abiding in Amen: Prayer in a Secular Age by Wesley W. Ellis (Kobo digital)
   I have always struggled with the idea of prayer. At least in part because I’m not very good at it. It causes anxiety and confusion and uncertainty. Which is why I find myself returning to the topic from time to time Ellis’ study on the idea of prayer stands out for the way he pushes through to the root of some of this anxiety, namely the tendency to see prayer as a discipline. This exploration takes us through a robust examination of secularity as well, a term that needs reimagining in its own right so as to see see how prayer enters that fray as part of a larger and needed conversation.
   
   11. Redeeming Eden: How Women in the Bible Advance the Story of Salvation by Ingrid Faro and Joyce Koo Dalrymple (Kobo digital)
   A much buzzed about book from 2025. A book I read in tandem with the one listed below (The Girl Who Baptized Herself), which to me created a fascinating juxtaposition of shared concerns arrived at and addressed from two very different vantage points. For Faro and Dalrymple, the problem of the systemic oppression of women within the history of Christianity’s development is addressed by seeking to reclaim the texts that cultural realities have distorted through their weaponization. I have to think that anyone coming to this book honestly, regardless of their feelings on the scriptures, would need to take their work seriously, as they do an incredible job of showing the grounds of the story the scriptures are telling to be one in which women are being raised up and centered as a driving force of its redemptive arc.
   
   12. The Girl Who Baptized Herself: How a Lost Scripture About a Saint Named Thecla Reveals the Power of Knowing Our Worth by Meggan Watterson (audiobook)
   Like Redeeming Eden, Watterson seeks to address the problem of social and systemic oppression within the patriarchal influences of Christian history. Her way into that discussion, unlike Faro and Dalrymple, is to argue for the reclamation of the lost scriptures which she sees as being demonized by the patriarchy that controlled the act of canonization. From this vantage point she sees the truth of Christianity running underneath what were the competing forces of the texts that anchor the canon, texts that support patriarchy, and the buried voices that reflect a resistance to this dominant power. Most specifically she seeks to bring the scriptures about Thecla to the surface as an example. While I found many of her assumptions and her readings of history to be questionable and reductive, I think much of what she writes brings an important complimentary piece to the larger discussion that Faro and Dalrypmle are engaging. I have to wonder if Watterson’s own thesis could be strengthened by taking into account the evidence they bring to light in Redeeming Eden, giving more credibility to her desire to break from some of the tendencies to see “the canon” as a tightly guarded entity which, usually through doctines of inerrancy, refuses to engage something like the story of Thecla as part of a world behind the text engaged in the nuances of its own conversations and struggles and disagreements.
   
   13. The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (physical)
   Probably the most buzzed about ficiton book from 2025. Which is always dangerous going in with lofty expectations. I can see why people loved it. It’s unique. It’s different. It inspires an embrace of a lost art in a world where physical and tangible and embodied acts of living have become antithetical to the shape of modern society. I don’t know that I loved it so much as I appreciated it, although I think there is an element here of trying to get into the particular rhythms of its unique structure. Finding its story within the series of letters that frame its chapters. There were moments where I got there, and that’s where I found msyelf enjoying it the most. Where I could feel the urgency and impassioned nature of the discourse through snail mail breaking open motivations and desires and emotions. But as soon as I found that flow I found myself becoming aware of the structure once again, which would pull me out. Overall though I enjoyed it.
   
   14. Moonlight Express: Around the Woirld by Night Train by Monisha Rajesh (audiobook)
   A good compliment to Pamela Mulloy’s Off the Tracks: A meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel, and Dan Richards Overnight: Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark. In some ways an amalgamation of the two. I was most enchanted with Rajesh’s reflective process of boots on the ground explorations of night trains around the world in the first half. It’s in the second half where her lens becomes most clear and active, revealing someone who sees and understands the world we are observing on this journey very differently than me. Which of course is perfectly fine in its own right- trying on different lenses should be a basic part of how we navigate this world. But as with most reflections, there comes a point when, if a lens simply doesn’t make sense for you in its interpretation of the world we share and are looking at together, it kind of hits a bit of an obstacle And its in the second half that she starts to build further on a foundation that I simply felt distanced from. I can see the world shes seeing from that train window, but not her assessment of it. In the case of both Mulloy and Richards, my experience was quite different, thus I got a lot more from it