“Mirren was a lifelong book obsessive, who never felt she had quite enough books, who could really only feel secure with half a dozen unread paperbacks propped up by her bedside table, three libary cards, two Kindles, and an emergency set of Douglas Adams in the bathroom, in the case the lock broke.” (The Secret Christmas Library, Jenny Colgan)”

“But his power of reading began to diminish. He became restless and irritable. Something kept gnawing at his heart. There was a sore spot in it. The spot grew larger and larger, and by degrees the centre of his consciousness came to a soreness;” (The Gifts of the Child Christ, George MacDonald)

The above confession made by Colgan’s main character (Mirren) comes in the first pages of chapter 1 of her book The Secret Christmas Library, and my immediate reaction was that I felt seen. This describes the way I live my life (and the reality of how books occupy ever space of my home, my car, my work, my jacket pockets). This fear that at any point in any place I might find myself caught in a moment without a book is real.

Those who don’t get it will roll their eyes. Those who do know the battle is real. To be lost in this world without a story is to be stranded without a means of making sense of things. This is bigger than the pages of a book, and indeed the unfolding journey of Mirren in Colgan’s Christmas mystery witnesses to this truth.

The calendar year is quickly coming to a close, and I’ve been turning my attention to both reflection and anticipation. Looking back at my reading year it struck me how immersed I’ve been in these waning months in both that question of why story matters, certainly fueled by the sobering realities facing our cinematic landscape with the recent news of mergers, and in reading stories about why it matters. It is the sacred call of Mary Midgley’s The Myths We Live By, the science behind Storr’s The Science of Storytelling, the interest of Jason Baxter in his exploration of the Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, shaped as it is by the books that he was abosrbed in. It’s even embedded in the why of Tolkien and Lewis’ own embrace of mythmaking (Loconte’s The War for Middle Earth, Hendrix’s The Mythmakers). It’s been found to the central lens through which we understand the different parts of scripture (Numbers: A Commentary, Johnson’s Understanding Biblical Law).

As 2025 comes to a close this essential truth seems to be prevalant: story matters.

I found the early months of 2025 sweeping me towards the subject of rivers and oceans. Heading into 2026 it feels like I’m now tumbling head first into that which water awkaens in me: the myths the waters hold and preserve. Thus I’ve been building this into my 2026 plans as  my starting point, shaped as it is by a couple interweaving componants:

1. Books about story
2. Books about scripture as story
3. Books about the art of letter writing

On the first front I’ve got a collection of related books with a shared emphasis on why reading matters. As the above quote from George MacDonald evokes, there is a restlessness not simply to finding ourselves lost without a story, but to understanding why story matters. Here I’ve lined up Shannon Reed’s Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out, which is described as a book exploring the simply joy of storytelling.

Along with that I’ve got Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading, which looks at Mangan’s own childhood draw to stories and the page. Broadening out beyond memoir, she also wrote Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives which gives this examination of her childhood a broader application. The Keeper of Stories. To round that out is also Mac Barnett’s Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children.

What is perhaps the driving force of this collection, Hwang Bo-Reum’s Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books, and Kaitlin Curtice’s Everything Is a Story: Reclaiming the Power of Stories to Heal and Shape Our Lives (which felt like a good pairing with Frederic Brussat’s Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life)

On the second front, I am diving into the Gospel according to Mark in 2026, along with continuing on with my foray into the Old Testament narratives. Here David Rhoads Mark As Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel is helping to shape that connection, along with Jeannine K. Brown’s The Gospels as Stories: A Narrative Approach to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and on the OT front, David L Petersons Genesis: A Commentary

The third componant (letter writing) might feel like an odd addition to this whole endeavor, but I’ll see if I can explain. As mentioned, a big part of what has shaped the waning months of this year has been the news of the merger with Netflix and Warner Brothers. Without getting lost in the weeds of why that matters to an entire Tradition of storytelling, one that is been a vital part of my own life ever since my first time gracing the screen as a young kid, suffice to say it has sparked discussion of things that I can preserve or, in to use what has been my word of the year, reclaim. In a world and in an age, looking ahead to my 50th year, where life seems more and more to be shaped by loss, are there things I can do to recenter myself on why such things mattered in the first place.

It was a recommendation to pair Virginia Evans The Correspondent, a novel that celebrates letter writing, with Syme’s Letter Writer: A Guide to Modern Correspondence About (Almost) Every Imaginable Subject of Daily Life that got me thinking. Described as reclaiming the lost art of letter writing by way of a cultural history, it brings to light one simple example of putting pen to paper and resurrecting a long lost tradition, a practice that can translate to any area of life. If the world I find at 50 is seeming less and less familiar, perhaps there is a way to live adjecent to the way of the world around me.

In thinking about bringing these books into the fold as an interconnecting piece of that larger discussion regarding lives as story, I also came across a book by Elana Zaiman called The Forever Letter: Writing What We Believe For Those We Love. A book inspired by the Jewish Tradition of the ethical will. Given that much of 2025 was given to trying to “tell my story” in the form of a long standing project to put my story to page, a self reflective process that has found a good deal of progress since January. It felt like this could be a good thing to pair with that exercise.

As it is every year, this is a starting point. Soon I’ll be turning my attention to my annual new years resolution practice called Rosebud, and part of that exercise is building on the year that preceded it, noting the strengths and weaknesses and forming that into a sense of needed attention or focus. The most exciting part of that exercise is that it is simply a place to begin. Where things go from there remain a mystery, but as a number of authors and voices have reminded me in 2025, mystery is the necessary means to reminding ourselves that Truth exists and Truth can be known, a simple statement of faith that frees us to emody the present.

The first movie I ever saw on the big screen was Lady and the Tramp. What added to the allure of this family affair, which reflected a spontaneous outing with my parents, my brother, my aunt, uncle and cousins to a since closed downtown Winnipeg movie theater, is the fact that we were expressly told that we wer not to tell my grandparents about our afternoon out on the town. This was to be our secret.

You see, at the time my grandparents looked at the theater as being “of the devil.” That place where all manners of temptations coexisted and cohabitated, threatening to lure us away from God.

Funny how it ultimatley became a place where I have rediscovered and met God  over my life time.

From that very first experience with the lights and the sounds and the people and the magic, all packed away in the safety of my childhood memories, my imagination was captured. Here was moving picture telling a story using an artform wholly unfamiliar to me in the moment, beckoning me into the mystery. Giving me a way to make sense of the world I was existing within.

It sounds cliche. It sounds hyperbolic and melodramatic. And maybe its all those things. But it’s also true.

While books remain my first love, this was something categorically different. Rather than sending me inside my own head this brought me out of it. Yes, even as a young child encountering this classic animated tale I was enchanted. Some might say this was still in the glory days of Disney storytelling.

What I have found myself thinking about over the last number of days is why that is. What is it about this moment that reshaped how I conceptualized the power of story? What is it about the express power of film to evoke this in me the way that it did.

I’ve been thinking about this while sitting in the aftershocks of the recent headlines regarding Netflix’s aquistion of Warner Brothers. If you aren’t familiar, or just want a good conversation and anaylsis of the situaiton and the broader issues at hand, I highly recommend listening to the latest episode of Next Best Picture (Episode 469). It’s marked, so you don’t need to listen to all three hours, you can fast forward to near the end. Suffice to say however that this has felt like a singular moment which has robbed me of nearly 50 years of this love of the movies. Conjuring up memories of visiting WB sturdios in the late 90’s when it was still a part of that vibrant era.

To be sure, this is just a feeling. Although what is reason but feelings being expressed. But it is this awarness of how quickly the world we know can be pulled out from under us at the blink of an eye. Where the innocence of wonder and hope and faith and trust starts to give away. Of how the world I’ve occupied and been formed by and that handed me my sense of place and identity starts to feel strange and foreign and false, something seemingly not my own.

And how all of that translates as loss.

This isn’t a singular moment either. I’ve been feeling this in many aspects of my life as of late. Loss that evokes grief in a social media landscape that not only fails to recognize it as grief but leaves no space for it. Ridicules it. Calls it irrational.

I know for me, and for many of the stories I’m seeing that bea similar feelings and sentiments, this particular moment is bigger than just a transaction. It’s more than the popular and abused rhetoric such as “things change” and “adapt or die” would imply, phrases that fail to recognize the simple truth that change is never benign. It matters because so much of me is bound up in this stuff. Thus why something that can seem and feel insignficant on the surface can awaken these feelings of being left lost and alone in this increasinbly foreign world. A cast off of this cruel thing we call life. A forgotten relic of an age that pretended life was significant and yet revealed itself to have always been about adaptation. Making our lives just a necessary step towards this thing that gets romanticized as illusions of progress.

Strong feelings to pull from this, I know. But as I often say, every conversation matters because life matters, and this is all the stuff of life. When you have spent so much of your life carving out space for this thing called cinema and everything that surrounds it, when this as been such a massive part of your daily routines and community dialogue and anticipation. This becomes a very real part of who a person is.

It’s interesting that this moment, this first encounter with the sights and sounds of the moving picture, was birthed from a small act of rebellion. And not even one of my own. An act of rebellion by my parents as they were navigating the very real changes of their own time. They were the ones saying, once upon a time, maybe the ways in which we experience this world should look a little different than yours. All while quietly navigating the carefully crafted parameters of their decision to bring their imagined world into existence through us, their children.

I wonder if this is what all acts of rebellion utlimately look like. In some ways the world we inherit as kids is the world our parents reimagined for us. Until of course we reach the point of our own rebellion, as all grown up children inevitably do. And then we start that cycle all over again from our own vantage point.

That’s one side of the equation. But what about the other? What about the world of my grandparents? What about the world they were losing? It’s funny how that’s the world that I found myself most compelled to uncover and understand as I got older. And the older I get the closer I seem to come to feeling a kind of affinity with the other side of the equation. And yet they aren’t here for me to share that space with. Which perhaps is what can make this process feel so alone.

There is something that seemed to strike me in fleshing that out though. That’s the simple notion that what seems to get deconstructed in this process is any notion that this cycle is about heading somewhere particular or better. At least in terms of the world we are building. This might be what drives us in our acts of rebellion, this innate belief in the illusion of this promise of progress, but what its actually about is our ability to make sense of the spaces we occupy in the here and now, in the present, in light of our past. Our here and now will always be met with an act of rebellion, but that rebellion isn’t working to disqualify it in terms of bringing about a superior future. Rather, this brings us to a greater awareness of that thing that draws all of history foward at the same stim- Truth. The things we build in this world will always change, Truth does not. And if this affords me any comfort, any sense of coherency, it is that the potential (and in truth, its been happening now for a while already) dismantling of the space that I held to be sacred is not synonymous with the Truth these spaces allowed me to seek.

If this love of cinema was shaped first by an act of rebellion, the other facet that lingers in these recent ruminations for me is its connection to that space that ultimately became sacred- the theater. There can be many spaces one holds to be sacred, but one of the most beautiful things for me about my relationship to the movies was that it was caught up in this movement. This intentional act of of displaceing myself, of going from one space to another in an expectation of encountering the transcendent. This was the investment.

All this said, there are still moments to be found. There are still filmmakers making art. There are still experiences there to cherish. For me Chloe Zhao is one of those filmmakers with the rare ability to remind me of why I love cinema, a truism that held fast in my recent viewing of Hamnet.

I experience that love all the time, but to be reminded that it’s there is what makes her work transcendent 

I fell in love with the novel. In the early going I confess I was wrestling with how the internal dialogue that shapes those early sections was translating to a quick moving plot on screen. Not necessarily in a bad way, simply in a way that left me trying to unpack the nature of this adaptation. It’s when we come to the initial big moments though that the subtle threads she was weaving start to come together, and the final 45 minutes truly soar to some exceptional heights, not least of which comes on the shoulders of Jesse Buckley and Paul Mescal and its captivating score.

This is a story about the ways art can make sense of life’s tragedies. Similarly, it is about how such experiences give life to our art. This is a deeply hopeful film about faith conquering doubt and life conquering death, but it’s also a film about the things that bind us. The things that enslave us.

Perhaps it’s this present moment and it’s especially charged emotions, but there was a moment in which I found myself in tears, and suddenly it hit me that I was sitting in a company of tears, all of us impacted by this story at the same time from the vantage point of our own stories. And I realized that in this moment that this was a metaphor for all the ways I was grieving this latest news about Netflix and WB, and that feeling of having 50 years of this love for the form stolen right out from under me. To begin to see the years ahead inevitably shaped by this sense of loss was met with a reminder that this moment matters.

And so I cried some more, remembering why I cherish this space and this experience. Being once again made aware of the Truth this space is unveiling in my need to learn how to see the unchanging nature of God more clearly.

I have found myself coming back to this book many times over the years, but always by way of portions or summaries or external dialgoues about her ideas and her thesis. That it felt due time to finally sit down and read it front to back was an afterthought to the stars finally aligning. This wasn’t on my radar to read this month (December, 2025), but it nevertheless found its way into the line up.

Here Midgley has an aim or a target. We might call it science, but its more so a particular formulation of science into a worldview. But I think her target reaches even further, bringing in the whole enlightenment enterprise as part of a necessary critique. She even gives it an embodied form- the new atheists. Whom she cites repeatedly within the context of the larger problem. Of course its always dangerous to reduce any work to a singular idea or concept, but given her interests I do think its fair. These thinkers (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett) all have their own voices but are birthed in the same soil and breathe the same air. If someone percieves there to be a problem (an observation I am in agreement with), it is those core Enlightenment ideals that provides the way into naming it. That these particular examples of “representative voices” are evoked is simply because, as she intuits, we are still living in their shadows. I don’t think its unfair to call out their well established presuppositions as having certain implications when it comes to our understanding of knowledge and science and truth and myth, and in her most upfront and biting critique, the phrase that still stands out for me is that if what they presuppose is true, “it would not (be) a very convenient arrangment for the rest of life.” This feels apt I think to where many of us find ourselves on what is arguably the other side of our needed efforts to deconstruct the world the new atheists handed us.  

As Midgley points out, such a view of the world is based on a conception of science that cannot accord with the way reality, or our interpretation of reality actually works as an experiential act. This notion, that we are all necessary interpreters of the world science hands us, roots knowledge, or logos, within a conceptual framework that includes science but is not reducible to it. A world reduced to a subject of function or utility can say nothing about itself, and in fact acts as a defeater of subsequent attempts to speak in terms that reach beyond the parameters of function and utility.

We know this inutitively, as to see the world in terms that reach beyond the subject of function and utility is in fact a quality of that function and utility. To observe human function is to recognize that we actively resist reductionist pictures of the world we occupy. And for good reason. And part of what Midgley is arguing is that even someone like Dawkin’s knows this to be true. It’s why his efforts to root knowledge in science inevitably keep being betrayed by the invading force of his value systems. And yet his, and much of the reasoning tthat we find birthed from this same soil and breathing this same air, is built on a foundaiton that has certain implications that must hold it to account if it indeed wants to be rational.

The problem is, the great allure of redefining knowledge in terms of science as, in Midgley’s own summarization, “a storage cupboard” of objective facts, is that it hands us the illusion of control. And that control is found when we reduce the world to facts. That it also hands us the subsequent need to uphold illusions of value and meaning in the process is the part we ignore.

More importantly, a proper defintion of knowledge hands us a narrative of human and natural history that undermines the exceptionalism of our modern enterprise, namely through the fact that it reveals a historical reality where myth coexists with science. This betrays the motivations of this enlightenment foundation. Indeed, science, a qualitative part of what it means to be human, has been a necessary part of every human society in history. Thus when the enlightnment reconstitutes the idea of knowledge as scientific facts, it can then wieve a narrative that sees the modern world as more evolved, more aware, more intelligent than the world it sets itself over and against (the world of superstitions). And therefore better and more necessary.

Defining knoweldge through the language and lens of participation critiques the modern world precisely by exposing the lie that knowledge=facts. As though human evolution is all about trading the meaning making parts of our humanity (the old brain) for the vastly superior functionalism of the new brain (see Jeff Hawkins’ A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence). And yet, treating science as a worldview would lead us exactly to where someone like Hawkin’s is going with the data.

Midgley pushes further to speak of enlightenment morality as a social contract that upholds the rights of the individual in ways that demand us versus them pardigms. This of course exposes the foundation of a scientific worldview that needs this notion of primitive to enlightened to uphold our notions of progress. This has only become muddled in light of globalism, something that has thrown our conceptions of responsiblity to one another into chaos. When values and ideals are held captive to the notion of social constructs, how can it be possible to say that oppression is inherently bad in all places and all ways in all of life. And yet the enlightenment ideal of the unity of all defined as the liberty of the individual must say this, even as the natural world that we occupy pushes back. That this is a tension that always by its nature exists within a culture not between different cultures is one of Midgley’s more astute points.

On eft neglected aspect of this whole discussion is the simple observation that reasoning is powered by feeling and all feeling is rooted in reason, and yet we occupy space in a culture that elevates thought, or a kind of thought that has to do with data and information, as the primary source of objective truth. Which of course sidelines and deligitimizes the role of subjective truth. As though data is what frees us and all else must bend to it in order to be true and rational. Thus the contractual language is the scientific language and the unity language is the language of feeling (hence: irrational), and yet the enlightenment uses the latter to justify the former.

If Midgely sees a way out of this it is through understanding how so much of this traverses the dominant scientific language of our time. Where atomism dominated so did certain conceptions of a mechanical world full of meat machines. Where physics as replaced it comes opportunities to reimagine the world using a different metaphor. And in some ways to reenchant it by reaching back into one of its most formative tools- myth. Here we move from reductionism to complexity, or a sort of science that is not demanding a unified theory of everything but rather recognizes that different ways of knowing are all participating in the same conversation, which is what is knowledge (or true knowledge) and how is it that we know anything at all. Here science is but one part of a larger conversation, and even within science are the different sciences that inform the discipline within its different areas of concern. She uses the illustration later in the book of a map, which I think is helpful. We can have 20 different maps all speaking of the same observed and experienced reality or world, but all categorically different perspectives. This is how knowledge works.

Most imporantly, it is on this front that we find the freedom to locate knowledge outside of oursevles. That we are free to see values as occupying its own space, even as part of the same conversation. In fact, as Midgley points out, it is only within the different disciplines that value can be truly established. Humanism, for example, or the natural sciences, are the only places where values can be imposed on its subject from the outside. Which becomes an interesting discussion where myth is involved. Because such an acknolwedgment must at once recognize that it is the human subject affording this value, and yet it is also being pulled from the outside. Such is the nature of the discipline. Here Midgely points out that it is simply not the case, as the enlightenment has been want to believe, that we can move from a world of belief in God to a world in which the God is made human. Here science masquerades as ideology and value systems. Not just an age where we use science, but an age where we are guided by science. Since all human socities have engaged in science, it is the “guided” part that distinguishes the modern age. It wants to root all of the things science can’t be or do in science, while similtaneously defining science as the essential “human” accomlishment that raises us to the role God once occupied. It is “we” who have made the world better because of science. And it is the we that must be better than “them” in the myth of progress

This is my own aside, but it is interesting that the Christian story does in fact speak of a historical moment in which God is made human. The key difference is that this movement comes from the outside. It roots all value making in the notion that where all things exist in relationship, all relationship is rooted in Truth. It is that Truth that has the authority to afford the subject of this natural world value. As her final chapters unpack and point out, all else leaves us captive to the wildness of nature, forever attempting to reconcile evil as good and good as evil within the contexts and paramters of our social concern. Such becomes the illusive ebb and flow of our moral constructs, leaving us enslaved to irrational justifications of the natural world.

And really, this is the central problem. As Midgley points out, the scientific worldview represents knowledge as “building” information rather than as interaction with the world. It takes out that relationship componant which allows complexity to have a kind of agency in the conversation, and instead reduces the world to that which we can control. Hence why such a worldview is really about the progress of technology. Because in the end this is what intelligence becomes when we bind ourselves to such a myth (properly defined, not as a story that isn’t true, but as a story that brings to light the truths we are being shaped by). One such facinating insight the book provides is this concept of science looking both ways. If we can see science as the central human function that informs our relating to the world, captured as it is through all the varied disciplines it embodies, this allows us to look both ways, towards nature and towards God. Here Midgley is using God more as a metaphor, but I think she also gets at why “religion” is one of those necessary disciplines. It is as much a part of the world as anything else. Where we root that becomes a further discussion, but what’s important to note is that in both directions we are looking away from outselves and towards the whole. Defining one depends on our ability to define both. Even more so, how we define one dictates how we define the other. Which is why the stories, the myths, we tell are the ones we live by, precisely because they reflect what we really understand to be true about this world, this reality.

1 The beginning of the good news (Gospel) of Jesus Christ. (Mark 1:1)

The beginning.

The beginning of what?

The beginning of the Gospel, or the good news.

So what is the good news.

The good news isn’t simply something Jesus says, it is something Jesus does. Something Jesus accomplishes. It is the good news of Jesus.

Its worth posing the question: does this notion of the word beginning apply in light of the accomplishment, or does Mark describing the beginning of the story leading up to the accomplishment.

This may sound like a strange question and strange distinction to evoke. And yet, I would suggest that possible strangeness I think comes from a failure think about what precisely it is that Jesus accomplishes.

What precisley is the good news.

As my pastor suggested, Mark is notoriously light on details here and heavy on the narrative flow and design. Unlike the other Gospel writers he jumps in mid-stream. Is it possible though that beginning doesn’t relate to the beginning of Jesus’ story, at least not exclusively, but to the beginning of the new creation Jesus brings about.

Which would mean that this is both a proclomation to Mark’s original hearers that this new creation reality has not only arrived in Jesus, and also an invitation to live in to that reality. Just as Mark quotes a passage from Isaiah (40 in efforts to locate Jesus within the story of Israel, those words of Jesus to prepare the way for the Day of the Lord, an expectation and anticipation that would have brought with it an imagination regarding the renewal of all things, so are we invited in to this practice of expectation and anticipation. Something the Baptizer describes as practice of repentance.

We do so however in the reality of a single resurrection that arrives in the middle of history, effectively bringing this long expected and anticipated reality into view. This is then the beginning that Mark is proclaiming. God has begun the great act of making all things new. The kingdom of God has arrived. Beckoning us to to contemplate what precisely how that good news manifests in our own context. How it gives us an answer to the darkness we still occupy and the light that seeks to invade it.

As Brian Zahnd puts it in his Advent devotional, The Anticipated Christ, discussing Isaiah 35:1-10.

“Someday it will be said, “Here is your God” and on that day all that is wrong will be set right. But for now all we can do is wait.”

But, as Zahnd notes, as we wait we discern what God is doing. And that begins with God entering into history definitvely in Christ. In this sense “God is alwaays about to act and God is always acting.” Both things that are said in light of Isaiah’s stark and overriding proclomation “Behold, I am about to do a new thing.” (Isaiah 43) That new thing being making a way in the wilderness.

This is the beginning.

The beginning of the good news (Gospel) of Jesus Christ.

God in Jesus has made a way in the wilderness. Has carved a river in the desert. This is where the great expected and anticiapted Day of the Lord both arrives and begins. And lest we forget, there is no ending to Mark… we are all still occupying this space in the beginning of this story. We wait in Advent for Jesus. But we particpate in a world in which Jesus has made that way clear and true.

I have three books that I am using to shape my journey through Advent this season

The Grand Miracle: Daily Reflections For the Season of Advent (a collection of writings from different authors interacting with the likes of George Macdonald, Lewis, Tolkien, Sayers, Davidman)

The anticipated Christ: A Journey Through Advent and Christmas (Brian Zahnd)

Light Upon Light: A Literary Guide to Prayer For Advent, Christmas and Epiphany (Sarah Arthur)

Along with this I have our Advent services, which, as it does every year, starts a journey through one of the Gospels which will carry on through to the Easter season. This year we are working through the Gospel according to Mark.

Reflecting on the first day of Advent, the morning began with a piece from Diana Pavlac Glyer in The Grand Miracle reflecting on a quote from C.S. Lewis,

We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us. (C.S. Lewis, Chiefly on Prayer)

Glyer reflects on making space in the Christmas season to be interrupted by the divine. To allow that presence to catch us off guard and to find us as we are, not in our carefully curated practices and celebrations but in our honest representations. She wonders about what this advent season requires of us, ruminating on the simple idea of simply being present. Present enough for God to break in, an act that can then inform our response- to move from being present to presenting ourselves to this God as we are.

As my pastor called us to do this morning, this fits with this notion of waiting for or anticipating this breaking in. In a broader sense we await Jesus’ return, the day in which all is made new. For this time, we find ourselves in the darkness of this inbetween space awaiting those foretastes of the world to come. Those moments when the light illuminates the darkness and reminds us of what it is we hope for.

One of the great practices we as Christians can engage as we wait is the continued prayer, come Lord Jesus, come. As our pastor noted however, to stop and reflect on what this prayer actually conjures up in us is to find ourselves face to face with all of the tensions and struggles and  confusion and questions and uncertainties and doubts that come with it. What does it mean to prayer for Jesus to come? And how does this prayer unsettle our grip on the world that is? The lives we’ve built. The dreams we’ve made. The experiences we cherish. The things we value. How does this longing for the world to come fit into this picture?

That’s a tough thing to confront. And yet its precisely the “as we are” picture Glyer is getting at. For Jesus to come is for God to break in. It’s one thing to present some decorated version of ourselves that entertains the feel good notions of the seasons festivities. It’s quite another thing for that to catch us off guard. When it finds us clinging to those things we don’t want God to disrupt.

And yet, such an encouter has the power to open our eyes to a much greater reality. As Zahnd puts it in his devotional, this (the Christmas story)  is “not really an encyclopedia of God-facts or a journal of divine jurisprudence, it is primarily the epic story of God’s ultimate triumph over evil.” Zhand points out that this story is not concerned with handing us some fleshed out account of the origin of evil, rather it is giving us a way into the central point of the story- evil has arrived and must be contended with. In fact, the judgment made in the beginning of the story is the same judgment that we find in the world to come- a judgment on evil. Not as moral action, but as an enslaving force that has invaded this world. It is the serpent that is cursed, which subsequently leads to a cursed land (creation). A land that cries out amdist the human story as the blood spilt on the ground illuminates the crisis.

But there is hope. Hope in the form of a seed. One day, the seed of the woman will bring about the crushing of the serpents head. This, the story says, will bring about the hoped for reality, the thing we are waiting and longing for- new creation.

A liberated creation.

As Sarah Arthur guides readers through in Light Upon Light, the words of a poem by Aurelius Prudentius ring out into this waiting space,

Of the father’s love begotten, ere the worlds began to be. He is Alpha and Omega, He the source, the ending He, of the things that are, that have been, and that future years shall see, evermore and evermore.

Or to echo the accompanying Psalm- The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it. (Psalm 24)

And the refrain taken from Christina Rossetti (Later Life)

Remain; these days are short, but now the nights, intense and long, hang out their utmost lights; Such starry nights are long, yet not too long; Frost nips the weak, while strengthening still the strong, against that day when Spring sets all to rights

In his book A Philosophy of Belonging, scholar James Greenaway explores the idea of home.

He notes two ways of looking at the idea of home:

1. Home as an enclosure against the world, or an enclosure in which we retreat from the world

2. Home as a threshhold into the world, or a place in which we are able to step out into the world.

It could very well be that home requires holding both of these ideas together, and even in tension. In this sense he borrows language from his homeland (Ireland) in speaking of home in terms of the concept of “metaxu,” or an inbetween/liminal space in which these two truths are able to be accessed. For Greenaway, home is essential to this core human need to belong. This is what these two ideas of home give birth to when seen in relationship to our participation in this space.

He describes belonging like this series of outwardly concentric circles where we keep expanding our “sphere of belonging” further and further outwards from the center. Or to use the essential divisions in his book, presence on one hand (enclosure) and communion on the other (threshhold).

I’ve been thinking about this on the first Sunday of Advent. What does it mean to be at home in this world and to simltaneously find ourselves longing for another. At the heart of Advent is this notion of waiting. In a tradition sense Advent is born from this notion of waiting in this inbetween space between a world into which Jesus has come and the world in which Jesus promises to return. It is, in this sense, about the ways in which the story of Israel, caught up as it becomes into the story of the Christ-child, informs our own anticipation of a second advent today. We are entering into a patterned way of life and way of being.

And what is the dominant motif that informs the story of Israel? Exile. This sense in which we find this conversation between home on one side (Jerusalem) and the world on the other (an Israel that has been assimilated into the nations). That Jesus’ home becomes the threshhold of the spirits movement into the world sits at the heart of our own way of seeing the places in which we live. To belong somwhere is to always be standing on the threshhold of that anticipated movement of the spirit out into the world. We do not contain the Christ-child into our enclosures, for as relevant and as necessary as our built traditions are to our sense of belonging somewhere. To do so is to miss Jesus altogether, and thus to have our protected and preserved sense of belonging uprooted by the world breaking in from the outiside. To see this enclosure as a threshhold is to see the way in which Jesus is at work in the world.

This, I think is an important aspect of the Christmas celebration. In creating and building a home in our enclosed section of the world around Jesus, we can then learn what it means to anticipate Christ’s act of bringing heaven (His home) to earth.

“Science attacks values. Not directly, since science is no judge of them and must ignore them; but it subverts every one of the mythical ontogenies upon which the animist tradition, from the Australian aborigines to the dialectical materialists, has based morality: values, duties, rights prohibitions… True knowledge is ignorant of values, but it has to be grounded on a value judgement, or rather on an axiomatic value… in order to establish the norm for knowledge, the objectivity principle defines a value; that value is objective knowledge itself… The ethic of knowledge that created the modern world is the only ethic compatible with it, the only one capable, once understood and accepted, of guiding its evolution.”

• Jacques Monod (molecular biologist)

In dialogue with Monod and his conceptions of the modern world and its science, or more readily the nature of knowledge it puts forth, Mary Midgley in her famed book The Myths We Live By offers this critique;

“Not suprisingly, Monod was for a time the favorite author of many scientists. Since what he meant by ‘knowledge’ was exclusively scientific knowledge, his ruling impled that the only value judgements that remained would be ones about whether a proposition in science was true or not

This, however, would not have been a very convenient arrangment for the rest of life. The clash remained, and, as usual, the truth about it was more complicated than it looked… What makes science into something much grander and more interesting than (an immense storage cupbboard of objective facts) is the huge, ever-changing imaginative structure of ideas by which scientists contrive to connect, understand and interpret these facts…. Lovers of physical science can be happy to see it as it is, as one great department of human thought among others which all cooperate in our efforts at understanding the world… We are accustomed to think of myths as the opposite of science. But in fact they are a central part of it: the part that decides its significance in our lives.” (p 4,5)

Myths are not “untrue stories.” Myths are stories rooted in history that seek to name that which is true about the world we observe and experience.

This idea remains just as intuitive 20 years later as the concept of modernity (or modernism), framed as it is against the grand promises of the enlightenemnt, continues to be dragged into the spotlight where it has drawn all manners of observation and criticism regarding the world it has handed us in the wake of its oingoing deconstructing of the age of myth.

As Midgley points out, such a reductionist view of the world is based on a conception of science that cannot accord with the way reality, or our interpretation of reality actually works. This notion, that we are all necessary interpreters of the world science hands us roots this notion of knowledge, or logos, within a conceptual framework that includes science but is not reducible to it. A world reduced to a subject of function or utility can say nothing about itself, and in fact acts as a defeater of subsequent attempts to speak in terms that reach beyond the parameters of function and utility.

We know this inutitively, as to see the world in terms that reach beyond the subject of function and utility is a quality of that function and utility. To observe human function is to recognize that we actively resist reductionist pictures of the world we occupy.

The problem is, the great allure of redefining knowledge in terms of science as a storage cupboard of objective facts is that it hands us the illusion of control. And that control comes when we reduce the world to facts. That it also hands us the subsequent need to uphold illusions of value and meaning in the process is the part we ignore.

More importantly, a proper defintion of knowledge hands us a narrative of human and natural history that undermines the exceptionalism of our modern enterprise, namely through the fact that it reveals a historical reality where myth coexists with science. Indeed, science, a qualitative part of what it means to be human, has been a necessary part of every human society in history. Thus when the enlightnment reconstitutes the idea of knowledge as scientific facts, it hands us a narrative that sees the modern world as more evolved, more aware, more intelligent than the world it sets itself over and against (the world of superstitions). Defining knoweldge through the language and lens of participation critiques the modern world precisely by exposing the lie that knowledge=facts. As though human evolution is all about trading the meaning making parts of our humanity (the old brain) for the vastly superior functionalism of the new brain (see Jeff Hawkins’ A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence).

Another way to put that (in Hawkins’ terms): trading the abstract for the concrete.

The enlightenment has taught us to see that information is true intelligence,  while the distraction of the abstractions that bind us to the old brain nature (with all of its appeal to emotional truth) become the thing the new brain is actively working to replace and repress. In Hawkin’s imagery, the new brain is effectively wrapped over top of the old brain for a reason- a veritable symbol and justification of the enlightenment as simply the necessary and natural trajectory towards the central defining facet of this progression- technological advancement. This is, after all, the only thing that scientific facts can hand us.

And yet, as Midgley suggests, this has proved to be a less than convenient arrangment for the rest of life.  A world that, the more and more it gets defined in purely scientific terms, finds itself further and further distanced from its ability to even define what a life actually is. 

The answer? If Midgley’s thesis holds true, the answer is found, at least in part, in a necessary reenchanting of the world and the human enterprise that inhabits it. The reclamation of that essential part of our humanity that knows through actual, embodied participation in the world. Knowledge that doesn’t seek to control the world but seeks to understand it. This is what it means to obtain knowledge. But this requires us to begin with this one central conceipt- all of us are bound to myths, whether we realize it or not. Myths are necessary to seek any true understanding of this world, precisely because it gives us the necessary language to define it.

The next part of that conversation then becomes the recognition that these myths are represented through narrative, through story. It is the story that we tell about this world, the very world that science hands us, which informs what we see and understand to be true about it. And what is true about the world is what shapes the ways we live in the world. This is the thing the enlightenment deconstructed, and it left a meaning crisis in its wake. A crisis that has been met by people looking for a better story (the whole environmentalist movement is an example).

For me, on the eve of Advent, this is where I find myself reengaging the myth, or the story, of Christianity. I am reminded as we enter what is deemed the beginning of the liturgical year, of the ways this story seeks to explain the world I observe and experience, as all myths do. It is that explanation that I find so persusasive. As Tolkien once said, in a world full of stories (in other words, a world shaped by myth), it is the true myth that makes sense of all the worlds stories. That, it feels to me, is the greatest explanatory power, a myth that doesn’t shut us off from an embodied existence, but one that frees us to enter into the world with all of its abstractions. We do this precisely because it affords us a coherent center for which to make sense of this human need for myth or story- Christ. A place where spirit and flesh meet as an emodied union.

Paul Schrader’s latest film Oh Canada tells the story of a dying artist (a film Director) with a considerate legacy looking back on his life in an attempt to distguish which parts or versions of that legacy, if any, reflect the actual truth of who he is. Behind this film is Schrader’s own legacy, giving a fascinating layer to the on-screen story as he seemingly uses it to flesh out the uncertainties and perhaps disillusionment with his own legacy and career.

If I gleaned something from subsequent interviews with him on press tour for this film earlier this year, it would be that his own wrestling relates directly to how he sees the way in which his art appears to reflect a disconnect with his actual lived life. Almost as though these two things are at once inseperable but also seem to exist forever in tension, and almost seemingly irreconcilable on the surface. Especially when filtered through that illusive thing that is our memory.

Here the presence he holds in the consciousness of the aging generation is set in conversation with the new and emergent one, a fact that, when turned inwards, seems to push such wrestling into the realm of the exisential crisis. And yet what results is something hopeful. A semblance of coherency within the disonnance that suggests somehow and in someway these versions of himself matter. Perhaps, even, they matter precisely because, as legacy and life would suggest, we are never the true authors.

In Daniel Day Lewis’ latest character study, Anemone, which is directed by his son Ronan Day-Lewis in one of the most profound and impressive debuts in recent memory, tells the story of two aging and estranged brothers who’s sudden reconnecting becomes a means of exploring those larger connections which bind a life to generational patterns and cycles of the past. Here the film, incoporating a highly visual approach to the storytelling, asks us to examine the shape of our own lives within the complex interplay between our choices and our need for such choices to be shaped into narrative trajectories. This, it seems, is what affords us the measure of a life, even if it tells the story of failure and regret.

Part of what Anemone is, in my subective interpretation of course, seeking after is this suggestion that we are all a product of these lived spaces. And these lived spaces exist in relationship to that which it desperately seeks and desires beyond ourselves. Here the visual nature of the film alludes to the transcendent nature of this journey, rooting legacy not in accomplishments or successes, but in our awareness of the tension.

In Joachim Trier’s latest, Sentimental Value, it is the lingering presence of a single house that functions as a window into the story of the estranged family whom occupies it. Inside this home are the captive memories of muted joys, held and misunderstood secrets, and buried struggles which continue to echo far beyond its walls. Outside of this are the threads that, when pulled on and followed, lead one back to these shared and formative spaces which inform how it is that we are occupying the present, often in search of what prompted one to pull on that thread to begin with.

An aged filmmaker also occupies the heart of the story in Sentimental Value, in this case it is the father, who’s potential final film comes with a pointed and intentional request for one of his duaghters to play the lead. On the surface the film’s mystery revolves around the question of why, a question that brings us through all of the interconnecting characters/family members that surround them. On a broader level, this mystery plays out into the thematic nature of the film within a film motif. The question regarding who is the one speaking in the film bleeds into the subsequent question of to whom is the film speaking to. It is only through answering these questions that we can begin to unpack the why of this particular story. Here it becomes clear: the narration matters.

One of the most dynamic and powerful aspects of Sentimental Value is the way the process of these characters seeking answers to these questions about the film within the film ultimately becomes part of our own process watching Sentimental Value. Even more so as the film seeks truth beyond the confines of the screen in drawing out the portrait of a life. The particular shape of these individuals quietly gives way to something more universal, and it is when we find oursleves in that story that the full weight of it comes crashing down all at once. Where it ultimatley leads us to is that uncomfortable and unsettling and often uncertain question- who is telling our story and what’s it about. That is the real question that legacy or memory seeks an answer.

All three films have left their mark on me over the course of 2025. I loved Schraders honest grappling with such questions. There is something comforting, even hopeful, about the idea that all possible answers are necessarily complicated and even, by their nature, obscured.

There was something extremely affecting about the ways in which Daniel Day Lewis’ character in Anemone finds in our stories that necessary need for reconciliation. To be reconciled to our stories is to be reconciled to one another, to this world, and to God.

In Sentimental Value, it was the daughter whom I connected to most deeply, especially where I was reminded that so often these questions leave us without the means to communicate what it is precisely that we seek or feel or experience. Where our stories need words but words do not suffice or aren’t available. Where we are not capable. Sentimental Value reminded me of why art matters to this end. It gives sense to those spaces where we cannot act on our own. It becomes a way of telling our stories, precisely because art exists external to us- it can tell our stories because it exists in relationship to us. Even more, it can bridge those gaps where reconciliation is needed. It can speak on our behalf by saying what we can’t.

Here there was something about the buried darkness the daughter carries, having occupied similar spaces myself in the past regarding the depth of depression and the deep rooted tendency to retreat and cut onesself off from all the chaos, and even contemplate conceptions of imagined endings. And how into all that story, art, can be a powerful healer. Stories that are at once not our own, but that become our own. Stories that allow us the ability to see beyond ourselves and towards the great Other. The Divi

I recently posted a rough draft of a personal project I have been working on for many years, which is simply an attempt to write my story. Why? For myself. So I can make sense of my story as it stands. Come to terms with it.

A therapeutic exercise.

In any case, I decided to upload the introduction of this rought draft to hold myself accountable. Because now something is somehwere where it can be contended with.

This was the other part of that, I suppose technically titled chapter 1. The story of the world I was born into.

Chapter 1

They say being born could be a traumatic experience.

Emphasis on the could.

And they being the scientists who have attempted to study it and throw out their competing theories. Although to be fair, when you actually imagine the data being weaved into a story told from the POV of the infant, it’s definitely most likely traumatic. If not the for the infant than for those of us who are imagining it.

The heavy compression of the birth canal. The plates of our malleable, softened skulls squishing together and overlapping like a mouse squeezing through those tiny spaces in your porous home, only to rearrange oneself into a recognizable shape once we reach the outside.

Bet you didn’t know you were once a shape shifter. Nobody chooses that on the list of superpowers when asked which one they would rather have.

The sensory overload that comes from moving so abruptly from the darkness of the womb to the light of the outside world. The shock of the sudden surge of oxygen meeting the lungs. Our organs kicking into gear and  promptly ridding us of a body full of toxins.

All triggered by that calculated surge of hormones telling us to get out of that womb and into the world before we end up bursting straight out of the shell Alien style, because we are now ready to breathe on our own.

Deep breathes. That’s the first thing our bodies engage outside of the womb.

Recent science has also told us that every birth begins with a flash of light. Not only that, but everything that breathes similarly contains an aura, although its uncertain whether these two things are connected. That’s right, although we don’t realize it and can’t see it (or most of us can’t), we actually glow in the dark. And not in a heat sensitive manner either.

Another super power. Who knew.

They say being born is a traumatic experience.

What nobody told me was just how difficult this world my body was so desperate to fight its way into would actually end up being. I know this is reductive, but I wonder if part of the act of living is one long process of figuring out how to reconcile the trauma of that birthing process with what we find on the other side of that darkness. Because to be honest, even on my best days this who imaginative exercise from the POV of my infant self feels like a microcosm for how the rest of life actually seems to work. The birthing process just repeated over and over again as we struggle through life’s ebb and flow.  

That’s a bit broad though. The world I was born into can also be described in more specific terms:

I was born in the year 1976 in the late evening hours on the fourth day of August at St Boniface hospital in Winnipeg, Manitoba. From my vantage point, any awareness I have of actually being alive begins somewhere around age 5, and yet, as is the case with all people, even those who can remember their birthing process (I actually know a few people who supposedly can) the world I was born into remains a significant and necessary part of who I would become.  

I was born on the hottest day of the year. 31 degrees Celsius before humidity to be precise. But hey, it could have been worse. Part of my family came from England (my moms side, my dad’s side came from Ireland), and apparently 1976 was crowned the hottest summer ever in Britain back in 2013. If I had been born there it would have been 36 degrees

Speaking of that, 1976 was also the year Britain voted to stay in Europe. Oh how times have changed.

It’s funny. I actually encounter headlines all the time that seem to indicate 1976 was a uniquely pivotal and transitional year in the scope of world history. I think I’ve always just assumed that I’m picking up on that because, of course, it’s the year I came into existence. I mean, like everyone we are the star of our own story, and there’s a decent chance everyone thinks this about the year they were born. Maybe there’s some truth to that. And yet, even if that’s the case, being born in this particular year set in motion the stuff that would eventually come to define the world I would inherit and thus the world that would define me and shape me.  

Like the birth of Apple Inc. along with the first super computer. Given that I graduated High School the year the internet became a thing (1994), effectively rendering me a Xennial (someone who knows what it is to grow up in  a world without the internet and to come of age in a world with it), this feels relevant.

It was also the year VHS was invented, effectively solidifying me as part of the Blockbuster generation. Or more so a kid trained in the delicate art of the “collection.” Subsequently, it solidified me as part of the only generation who knows what it’s like to spend all our money on VHS, upgrade to DVD, then to Blu-ray, only to now be paying for monthly subscriptions so that we can access the things we either own or ended up tossing in the trash the last time we moved and purged.

But wait, physical media is having a come back. Why did I toss all of that stuff out again? Dang it.

Most important about the year 1976 is that I inherited my deep love and affection for the movies.  This was the year of Rocky Balboa (I would run up those steps in 2010),Taxi Driver and Freaky Friday (had to throw that one in the mix), marking an age of cinema that was celebrated by grand single screen cathedrals and an era where heading out to a movie was always a prestige event (at relatively affordable pricing too). Some of my most cherished memories revolve around this part of my life where, as a young kid drawn to the power of a good story, I would venture out to the once populated Winnipeg downtown streets and join the line ups waiting and hoping to get their ticket for that evenings showing. The smells of the city streets meeting with the tantalizing allure of popcorn as we stood under the muted lights and oversized movie posters. Or a bit later frequenting the video story as the place to be on Friday and Saturday nights, wasting the hours away browsing through the many titles just waiting to be discovered on those nights when you weren’t heading out to the theater.

Understanding the simple joys of that discovery as an art form in and of itself. The thrill of taking a chance on a title you’d never heard of.

Yes, I know there exists a very real phenomenon of romanticizing the past, but there is a sense in which my generation stands uniquely qualified to speak with some degree of authority on the matter: we lived both worlds. And there is simply no way to speak of the past without genuinely reflecting on that which I miss so dearly about it.  What made those things special simply aren’t a part of the general ethos of society today, and one could even make the argument that science tells us the loss of certain elements of this era has had a negative effect on society as a whole.

American evangelicalism had also invaded Canada at the time of my birth, effectively rooting me in all the wonders of that once lucrative Christian music scene. This was a time to be alive in this corner of the world for sure, translating into endless festival fever, led by the infamous Cornerstone located in the suburbs of Chicago and run by the Resurrection (or Rez) Band, and it was the age of the basement band and the good old home recording.

It was also the year U2 became a thing, effectively handing my generation our voice when we eventually became disillusioned with that version of corporate Christianity in our early twenties.

Good old 1976.

We made it to Mars.

The notion of dog ownership was beginning to become legalized around the world.  

America made it to their bicentennial with Jimmy Carter at the helm.

There were historical shifts in the Republic of China and South Africa which would reshape the politics of that area forever, effectively standing as a genuine crossroads between the world before and the world after that still remain embedded in geopolitics today.

The Soviet Union was on its way to dissolution

The Gulf War was on the horizon (I have vivid memories of our home at Sharon Bay of planting myself in front of that old t.v. in our spare bedroom to watch the ongoing live news footage unfold in real time, looming thoughts about the impending end of the world and all).

This is the world I inherited.

And yet that cold hard data can be narrowed even more to my particular slice of this corner of the world- Winnipeg, Manitoba. As the Simpsons puts it, I was born in Winnipeg, what’s your excuse? A notorious punchline perhaps, but I do think the much better question would be, “I was born in Winnipeg, what’s your story?” I digress.

This, as it happens, is mine.

My story begins in a Winnipeg era once governed by Stephen Juba back in 1976. Still considered the greatest mayor of our eclectic existence as a modest sized  mid-west Canadian city. That year my hometown was navigating  what was known then as the Winnipeg Act, a series of policies and reforms and plans that would go on to shape the emerging city of my youth and become the true blueprint of its future.  The meetings happening outside that hospital room in a downtown district then absent of its present skyline, were imagining and giving shape to the city I would inherent. It would dictate and make possible merging suburbs, including the North End where I have spent most of my adult years. It would draw up plans for incorporated districts, ambitious skyscrapers, and of course our most famous meeting place- The Forks.

It was called the Chicago of the North, the burgeoning and aspirational city that never came to be despite the decisions of the time to preserve our now cherished exchange district with its turn of the century bindings and old market charm (they say this might be one of the lucky outcomes of the cities failure to live up to its ambitions back then). Winnipeg would begin its slow march from a modest 578,000 to now approaching a million. Fun fact: the biggest surge in population in Winnipeg outside of its establishing years of  1881 and 1911 occurred between the years of 1971-1976. Hence the Winnipeg Act. It was now seen officially as a city that was growing. The city that never was was now coming to be on its own terms and, perhaps in a different way, and it’s then fresh and vibrant downtown would become my personal playground in the years to come.

A pivotal year indeed. This is the year I was born. On the hottest day of the year in the city of Winnipeg sitting on the cusp of the biggest transition in its history in the face of a global reality facing some of its most significant transitions in modern history, handing me a world that would shape who I was to become.

Here my own memories begin to catch up with my story, taking another 5 years to emerge.

I’ve been spending so much time on my project as of late. The attempt to finally write “the story of my life,” which I’ve made a conserted effort to make some progress on in 2025. Sadly I’ve been neglecting this space because of that.

Thus I figured I’d give myself a needed push and force myself to put the draft of a potential introduction somehwere where it can perculate. I’ve found myself going over the same sections again and again, always making changes and edits, which is a never ending excercise.

Thus this is a place to start. A chance to move on to a different section.

A Story of a Life

I’d like to tell you a story. My story. The story of a Life. Or more precisely, I’d like to tell you my story. The story of a mostly failed attempt to make sense of a life.

As I write this, I am approaching 50 years of living my story.

50 years. Somehow I blinked and inadvertently found myself in unfamiliar territory staring back at a reflection I don’t quite recognize and grappling with a world I no longer understand.

And if I was wondering where that leaves me in answering the question “am I officially old yet,” the giant billboard I drove by the other day advertising the 55 plus “seniors home” made this abundantly clear. When the next decade includes paying off your mortgage, qualifying for discounts, and potential qualified retirement, you know there are far less years ahead then lie behind in the ever present wake that is this veritable fever dream now tumbling me headfirst towards official “seniorhood”.

What have I gleaned from all this time spent occupying this body I somewhat reluctantly call my own? I’d say there’s little I’m confident about in this world. Even less that I’m certain about. However, I have found a single, simple idea keeps imposing itself on me over and over again over the years, if taking slightly different variations and iterations through the ensuing decades. An idea that feels necessary to any attempt to begin to try and wrestle down this thing I might call a life.

That idea is simply this;
Life and death are fundamentally different things.

Cue, in my experience, the ever dependable side eyes and raised eyebrows and general looks of befuddlement and puzzlement.

Huh? Can you repeat that? I’m not quite understanding.

Bear with me now, as this will appear to get a little heavy and dark, but, and trust this is my intent, at least in my mind, this is going somewhere other than functioning as a general punchline for my notorious ability to confuse and confound. Such is the nature of my story, or at least the nature of any worthwhile beginning. As I heard it put once, all good stories must begin in the dark.

How about we go with “all necessary stories.” For me my story is, quite literally, a life and death matter after all. I wouldn’t be here without it.

Now back to the matter at hand. As I was saying;
Life and death are fundamentally different things.

Simple? Obvious? None of the above? Perhaps it should be surprising to note that my fervent commitment to this single, simple idea has brought me more grief over the past 10 years or so than I’ve experienced over the preceding 40. However, at this point in my life I am no longer surprised, I have learned to expect it in fact, and even to invite it. In truth, I find the idea difficult to communicate, impossible to explain. And I find it to be an idea that seems to consistently evoke strong reactions, resistance and emotions across a wide range of people, beliefs and personalities.

It gets even worse when I speak of life and death as not only being qualitatively different things, but reflecting antithetical realities.  Nothing gets a certain subset of people more riled up than the appearance of an imposing binary after all. I am part of a world that has quietly (or not so quietly) grown suspicious of binaries, even when unaware that these suspicions exist. Rightly so to certain degrees I suppose. That could (and should… yes, I do should on myself a lot, as my counselor would say) occupy its own conversational thread all on its own. And yet, to lose the language of binaries entirely means to reduce the conception of a life to mere utility.

Here’s the thing. Without these binaries we cannot move to say anything at all about what that utilitarian picture reveals, because to speak beyond the terms of utility, which defines the world according to the measured outcomes of a purely functional reality, means assuming the position of an interpreter. And any and all interpretation aims towards the formulation of true beliefs.

The working assumption here, albeit I believe a justified one from my point of view, is that our particular convictions, the things that allow us to live in this world as meaning making and/or meaning sensing creatures, matter to our pursuit of knowledge. And knowledge, albeit a term that should have (there I go again) its own needed definitions and conversation as well, is what allows us to make sense of a life not just in practical terms, but in “logical” terms

In other words, the point of any utilitarian observation is to bring us not to our observation of a functional, material reality; that would in fact be bringing us nowhere at all. The point of any utilitarian observation is to bring us to a proper logos, or to proper knowledge of a world in which we find these essential observations.

It should be stated, and restated, by and large the idea of certainty is a fallacy. True beliefs are not the same thing as certain knowledge. To borrow from a surface level online definition, true beliefs are “states of mind where a person holds an idea or proposition to be true in a way that corresponds to reality.” Note the differentiation there between reality (what we observe and experience in a demonstrable sense) and the corresponding belief that one forms based on this encounter with reality. True beliefs are not certain knowledge, rather such things require us to name that which a given perspective holds to be true on logical and reasoned grounds (our convictions). And the formulation of these beliefs is what sets us in relationship to a world in which people have different convictions than our own Hence why binaries matter.

Which is another way of saying, a life cannot be lived apart from such a binary, if by binary we mean the relationship between different interpretations of the same shared (observed and experienced) reality.

What we hold to be true is that which informs our unrestrained and uninhibited participation in this world. In other words, true beliefs must always be qualified as an act of faith. Not faith in the common westernized notion of “blind belief,” but faith in the sense of allegiance and trust. Knowledge in this sense comes through these acts of participation in the world we observe and experience. And it is this participation that is enabled by such binaries, and indeed makes these necessary binaries aware. They are, to put it bluntly, as necessary to a lived life as breathing.

Anything less leaves us stranded and lost in the uncertain space of this existence without a way backwards or forwards or even into the conversation. As someone in my life once said, to reduce a life to its utility is to reduce a life to its futility. A life reduced to its utility is a life that functions without an end, or that isn’t honest about its ends. It remains the shell of an uninterpreted life which is cut off from the logos that enables it to be known, and ineed to be rational. It is a life that exists without any proper sense of attained coherency or justification. It leaves us enslaved to the constructs that utilitarian approaches uphold and make authoritative.

Or perhaps more to the point, to reduce a life to its utility leaves us distanced from the necessary conversations that allow a life to be truly known. And if that is the case, it is equally true to say that it  leaves us with no way to distinguish a life from a death.

Now, this should come with a necessary clarifying point. When people hear the word death they typically jump straight to the narrow and truncated conception of death as non-existence. They think of that oft named only true certainty in life apart from taxes: which is the simple fact that we are all going to die

That’s just the stuff of life, as they say.

To be clear, that’s not precisely what I mean by evoking the word death, at least not exclusively. What I mean by Death, which I am now capitalizing here with intention, is a kind of reality. A capitalized form of the word that encompasses the way things are. A state of reality. A way of explaining and defining that reality in all of its uncertain terms. Death includes but is not limited to the following: suffering, decay, oppression, disorder, violence.

In this capitalized form of the word, Death is a way of qualifying all that Life, also capitalized with intention, is compelled to respond to, intuitively so, from its own distinct vantage point. It is that vantage point that is able to say, we find Death in this world, and we also find Life. It is to be able to say, this is what I experience as qualitatively wrong in the world and to live requires me to act (not just exist) in response to such things.

Thus rather than reducing this existence to such trite statements as “that’s just life” or “that’s the stuff of life,”  to me the only real and true coherency available is found in our ability to actually name that which Life acts against. There is a reason a life reacts when certain things are imposed on it. Life is, properly rendered, most clarified in the trenches of our participation, precisely because, when examined honestly, this participation allows us to name and thus to know and recognize that which belongs to the category of Death.

Or in other words, it defines the finite form of our existence.  

In even more words yet: it comprehends this finite form through the lens or language of loss.

There is a reason I am beginning my story here. To see and to name Death is to recognize that essential defining trait of Death: finiteness, or loss. To then see and name Life as a qualitatively different thing than Death is to name that which is present, not lost. But, and I think this is a crucial point, the present isn’t simply defined as that which exists in “the now.” It is more than this simple statement of fact. It is, in fact, to name a kind of reality in a qualitative sense. The present isn’t simply contained to what is, it is qualified as the nature of being. It is a qualitative element of this world that functions in accordance with the nature of a life. For Life to cease to be would not primarily mean that it ceases to be present, but that it ceases to be what a Life is. Thus its possible for existence, or reality, to be something without the presence of Life.

To this end, it should be simple enough then to say that Death is what robs the present of its essential, qualitative nature. It is not simply that a life exists, it is that it exists in a particular way, acting as it does against the forces of Death. This is as fundamental to our need to oppose such things as suffering. It is as fundamental to our need to fight against the ravages and dangers of decay and disorder and violence and disease as it is to our need to define the present over and against that which robs the present of its unique “presence.”   

Here it deserves to be repeated: loss is more than non-existence. Rather, loss reflects how it is we experience and name Death in this world in ways that are differentiated from our experience of a Life. Loss comes in many ways, shapes and forms, but all of these shapes and forms ultimately just reveal precisely how it is that Death acts contrary to and ultimately defeats a Life. To see it in any other terms is to not be honest about (or aware of) how this reality works. More importantly, all of these shapes and forms ultimately reveal the true nature of what Life is. There are those who will react strongly against such terms, but it is possible here to suggest that the simple presence of Life reflects a necessary reliance on the language of the eternal and the infinite, as this is the only way to distinguish a Life from the finite nature of Death. Even someone like Einstien understood this by looking at the shape of reality (see the book I Am Part of Infinity).

Perhaps this is why people react against this idea so strongly. If the narrative we bind ourselves effectively states that in the end “Death wins,” or if it concedes that “Death is necessary to a Life,” far better to romanticize and normalize Death than to grapple with the idea that our observation and experience of a “lived” Life actively betrays this conviction. That’s the true irony. In a way such narratives are evoking the very same fear  based response that they often accuses appeals to the infinite or the eternal of using as a crutch. Such narratives move to accept the thing Life is inherently afraid of, but do so by reformulating it into an illusion which seeks to disguise the thing we are ultimately afraid of. It becomes a way of convincing ourselves we are still on the winning side of the equation and that somehow and in someway all of this still makes some sense despite of the fact that we are, categorically, not on the winning side of that equation.

This is the sort of approach that believes popularized phrases such as “less suffering is better than more suffering” can actually be logically coherent when framed within a Life that effectively works to oppose suffering in a qualitative sense. What that phrasing actually means is, “I don’t believe this world can exist without suffering, therefore I don’t need to logically justify the grounds by which I move to say some of this suffering is unqualified for a lived Life.”

Which just goes to show, such phrases and rhetoric deeply misconstrue and misunderstand the real issue. The real issue that this poses to the conception of a Life is both a qualitative and a logical one. Life, properly named, opposes Death precisely because it is qualitatively defined as a thing that causes “suffering” in a way that inhibits a lived Life. It might be true to say that a world without suffering is not possible, but that doesn’t change the logical problem of such an observation when set against how it is that we live in this world. It doesn’t change the fact that the way in which we live in this world reveals that Life and Death are qualitatively different things

Views that assume Life opposes “oppression” when oppression is a natural and inherent part of Death. Views that strive to eradicate disease when Life cannot be differentiated from decay. Views that fight for order when the disorder that Death inhabits is deemed part of the proper order of things. It is easy to see how such cognitive dissonance can and must be reduced to its utility in order to be entertained. The problem is, while this approach has become common in the modern West where such utilitarian philosophies run amok, very few people actually live as though this is true, if any. This is as easy to observe in the world as the screen I am typing these words on. When we romanticize or normalize or delegitimize or disqualify the particular nature of Death on the basis of rejecting such a binary, we are in fact defining a Life in a qualitatively different way than our actual lived lives bear witness to. Which is why all of this so easily collapses into one big existential crisis.

This one thing I know: life and death are fundamentally different things.

I would also want to be clear on this front. To recognize that Life and Death are fundamentally different things doesn’t mean living as though Death is not a qualitative part of this reality that we observe and experience. Quite the opposite. Our ability to differentiate between these things is the only way to truly attend for a reality in which it is very much “a thing.” It is in fact what allows a Life to respond in ways that are rational and coherent and in line with its own nature, precisely because it can name and thus recognize what Death is.

Yes, the living can grow, change, learn. The living can incorporate all manners of practices that help us deal with the reality of Death. We can incorporate tools that allow us to reconstitute it within the fabric of a Life in ways that awaken us to the promise of newness and hope.  But we do so only because we experience Death as an intrusion into that which is true, good and beautiful. That is the necessary foundation that allows it to be logical. To romanticize such things, as the world seemingly is want to do, is to mistakenly see these things as “just life.” This makes our attempts to then act in ways that are opposed to suffering and oppression and violence and disorder, the things that a Life strives to live against, irrational and incoherent. Nothing more than a means of making us feel better about a reality that is fundamentally otherwise. It is to bind ourselves to an illusion, a lie. To name Death for what it actually is- DEATH- is in fact to say that suffering and oppression and violence and disorder are things that Life must by defined against.

Welcome to the necessary binary.

In fact, I would go so far as to say I have the same reaction to people who philosophize Death away in such a fashion as many have towards Christians who sanitize Death away with “everything happens for a reason” type sentiments. I’ve had enough encounters with Death over my lifetime to know that non-existence isn’t the true fear. The true fear is the way Death transforms our understanding of a Life. The way it throws the nature of a Life into question.

It’s no wonder then that one of the longstanding critiques of Western society is that it has no real, coherent definition of a Life. All the scientific advancements it claims has elevated it beyond the prison of our primitive past has been left unable to define this most basic and fundamental part of existence. Why? Because it has made Life synonymous with Death. Such a world, one reduced to its utility, can never actually arrive at a proper definition of Life, because Life is antithetical to Death.

At one of the most crucial intersections of my story I found myself coming face to face with this reality. It wouldn’t be until much later that this would truly begin to make sense on the level of its logical implications, perhaps most definitively when I read Robert Rosen’s book Life Itself, a book that notes the issue and tries to recast it, problematically in my opinion, within an appeal to complexity (which in my opinion is an ineffective catch-all response that was popularized by the Positivists in the crowd to deflect from rather than engage the problem head on). It is something I knew to be intuitively wrong with the modern worlds senses and modes of reason very early on. But for the moment I digress. Back to the central point;

This one thing I know to be necessary to my ability to entertain any of this: Death is not Life. Death is in fact antithetical to Life.

An idea that has brought me more grief in my lifetime than anything else.

An idea that has brought me face to face with one of its most prominent features: loss.

As I approach my 50^th year, one of the most visceral experiences I have of this overriding sense of loss that continues to invade my life has me reaching all the way back to my childhood. Perhaps our first encounter with loss is that familiar notion of a loss of childhood innocence, and it is that sense, that awareness that has been creeping its way back into my adult senses as of late. I have found myself wondering, something I’ve been doing a lot of lately, whether this loss of innocence that we experience growing up into adulthood doesn’t really become fully aware until we start to feel and sense the loss of adulthood as well. We talk a lot about change being the one constant in Life, but what happens when we wake up one day in an largely unfamiliar world that has seemingly abandoned us to that stark and very real sense of irrelevance, left to wrestle with a Life that seems to now be held captive the past. It’s one thing to lose this sense of childhood innocence when you are told by the influencers that be that you have your whole Life ahead of you, whatever that means. It’s quite another to make sense of this Life when most of it lies behind you, whatever one means by that.

When all this change reveals a different world than the one you once believed to be true. When that trust that you had in the forward movement of a Life is suddenly exposed for what it was all along- the forward movement of a Death. When a world you’ve inadvertently been taught to reduce to a matter of utility and function that can be manipulated towards unnamed and uncertain ends has now in fact been reduced to those same material ends. When it feels like that gradual process of Death that invades a Life has been slowly eating away at that persistent and defying sense of innocence that we had forgotten still existed.

Disenchantment.

Disillusionment.

Give it whatever label one wants, the result can be the same: a growing and inevitable cynicism and rejection of all the world’s constructs.

And perhaps the worst outcome of all: what happens when we are left with a Life that is now held together by that slippery and illusive thing we call memory. Memory that only serves to capture that inevitable tension between what is real and what is not. Memory that leaves us uncertain about whether we can even tell the difference, or if we were ever able to tell the difference even while we were living it in the present.

Uncertain about whether we would want to tell the difference even if we could.

Because to do so would reveal the ways in which Death wins. Death always wins. And not in the sense of “ceasing to be present.” That could be argued in some respects to be a grace note in a given reality. But wins in the sense that it reveals our lived Lives to be built on illusions, not reality.

As it is, the subject of memory will come to play an incredibly important role in my story, shaping me within one of my key points of crisis and onwards into a kind of reclamation of some key facets of my life which I had to learn how to reclaim and hold on to, often with a sense of real defiance and persistence towards my own cynicism. In many ways this was a move towards reenchantment, but in a way that exposed one of Death’s greatest magic tricks: convincing me that this enchantment, this sense of wonder about a Life, no longer existed. Or worse, that the only way to gain these things was through the art of successful manipulation. Turns out Death hadn’t defeated it after all. That will be an equally important part of my story.

A story of a “mostly” failed attempt to make sense of a life.

Forgive me again if all of this appears dark or self indulgent or hyperbolic . In truth, I’m used to the responses such thought exercises tend to evoke. It comes with the territory when you are someone who appears incapable of ordinary conversation. Who has a knack for turning any given outing into a targeted existential crisis within minutes. To be fully honest, these tendencies and thoughts have always been a part of my essential fabric of being ever since I was a young child. I remember the first time I picked up Charlotte’s Web at around 8 years old and being struck by these sorts of paradigm shaping questions regarding the nature of a Life and the nature of a Death. I remember feeling the desperate need to wrestle this darkness down into something I could make sense of. This tendency remains. Having recently finished a book by Donna Freitas called Wishful Thinking, whom confesses a similar love/hate tendency towards finding herself forever mired in that perpetual existential tension and state of cynicism that questions everything and is given to restlessness, I can’t help but think that however else I make sense of my story this observation feels like an integral part of it. Indeed, knowing there are others like me, and encountering such voices along my journey helps to remind me that my own need to be able to tell my story from this vantage point need not feel defeating or overtly dramatic. Not to me anyways. They are, if nothing else, what make me feel alive. It reflects my single greatest desire: to know what’s true. They are reflections of a story that seeks to understand a Life precisely because it demands this sort of wrestling, however incomplete that process remains.

Another such writer is Paul Kingsnorth, someone who’s own lifelong wrestling ultimately led to an unexpected re-enchanting of the world he once saw as suspect. And while there are certain key differences regarding the trajectory of some of our conclusions, I have always felt a deep connection to the particular shape of his journey that is anchored in the idea of necessary narratives. In his most recent book titled Against the Machine, he quotes the famed mythicist Joseph Campbell, saying the following,

“Schism in the soul, schism in the body’s social will not be resolved by any scheme to return to the good old days (archaism) or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism). Or even by the most realistic hard headed work to weld together again the disintegrated elements (presentism). Only birth can conquer death. The birth not of the old thing again, but of something new.”

Kingsnorth summarizes this by saying, in Campbell’s view “there is nothing we can do but be crucified and resurrected.” This is what it is to alive.

The most crucial point here being, crucifixion, or the Powers of Death, only makes sense within the language of resurrection. Apart from that there is only Death. Such a sense of loss as a general truism regarding Death only makes sense in light of Life if the lost thing itself is being reborn. Which is why even those who resist religious conviction fight so hard to recast Death in the language of the eternal at seemingly every corner. We see this in such approaches where the “I” becomes absolved into the whole of history. Where the dust that we are made from is spun as the same stuff that makes the stars. We see this in sentiments like “we live on in our kids,” or in constructed conceptions such as “legacy.” In our modern context we see this running rampant through the language of “environmentalism,” and even in more spiritual approaches that evoke the common “energy” that runs through the universe.  

And yet for as much as this reveals an essential truth about the schism, it also proves itself to be anchored in an empty and largely incoherent narrative. Apart from our ability to name Death as antithetical to Life nothing else can make logical sense.

Which brings me to my story. Perhaps in wrestling this particular story down it might become possible to reclaim some of that long lost innocence from the grips of Death. Perhaps it might be possible to hand myself a renewed ability to properly name a Life. The risk is there of course, but this simple idea nevertheless remains a necessary starting point for engaging that conversation.

Every story begins somewhere. Rarely does it start at the beginning. The human brain just doesn’t work that way. Rather, true beginnings are generally found at that necessary point of a given crisis. That’s where we find the dramatic tension. Those intersections which suggest and help clarify that something hangs in the balance. Thus why I begin my story with the above reflections.

For me, as I alluded to above, the moment when this intuition comes most alive likely locates me in my late 20’s when everything I once thought to be true was legitimately thrown into question. My optimism. My faith. My hope. My joy. My trust. My identity. My trust in the many constructs that uphold our sense of being (such as our constructed concepts of the self). My place in this world.

I will detail that moment to be sure, much of it bringing me to a stark and vital call to remember, an invitation to see the things I was wrestling with from a different vantage point and put my present vantage point to the test. It was a moment in which I was forced to confront my own tightly guarded definitions of Death and Life, regardless of where it brought me.

I will tell that part of my story eventually.

But for it to truly make sense it needs the context of the years that brought me to that point. To understand what I was in danger of losing in this particular moment of my life requires knowing what had been building up to this point. Just keep in mind that as humans we don’t translate our stories beginning at birth and moving towards death. I get that. In many ways that just underscores everything I’ve been talking about above. What we know are stories about qualitative aspects of reality What draws us into the stories we tell and the stories we read and encounter is the promise that this tension, this binary if you will, leads to something true. To knowledge. To logos.

And so, with the above tension in play, my story begins with this sentence: I wasn’t always a child. At some point I grew up and that child was lost.

But before I grew up, before I became lost, I was born. Or so I’ve been told.