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Some notes from my academic personal statement.

The best way I’ve found lately to kill time and avoid writing my final papers for school is to type away at a document called “Academic Personal Statement In Process.” If I want to know what I think about something, I’ve found it’s much easier to make something that I can react to, an opinion that could be mine, and then to see how it feels once I try it on. Is this how you think through things too?

It’s been a challenging puzzle to articulate an Academic Personal Statement, even “In Process.” When you study theology, when you study religion from the inside of itself, there are some natural obstacles. It’s like studying the whale from inside the whale’s stomach, but someone might look at you there and say, “hey, the whale isn’t real.” and you have to say, “no, I know, or, like, what do you mean by real though? it’s real, in a sense, in some meaningful sense, right?” And then the person shakes their head and continues on, and you’re back to wondering: “putting aside the whale, am I even real? and why?”

Because theological questions, in my experience usually do boil down to “what’s the point of life” or “what is there to do with life” or “how should a person be” or a similarly broad and naive concern.

Not naive because it’s not important, that’s not what the word means, of course. Naivete is a way of being that usually applies to me when I’m dealing with something actually pretty important; money, love, and politics, for example, three areas of life I consistently reveal myself to be naive. So, “naive” not as simple, but as a less self-conscious version of precocious. Naive in that it shows how little you understand your own limitations. Theology as the study of religion from the inside is very much about not understanding your limitations, putting your limitations down, and wondering what it would be like if those limitations were picked up by something else and carried to a place you would not otherwise have found.

So far, what I’ve learned about myself writing this personal statement, is that I don’t feel like I am studying religion so much as I’m using religion to study life. I’m beginning to see “faith and practice” as a kind of methodology for inquiring into those big, broad, naive concerns rather than as being the content of inquiry itself. This has at least a handful of interesting consequences.

First: when I understand religion and faith as a methodology, it helps me understand what to do with it even if I cannot say the Apostle’s Creed without simply lying. That has been a tension I didn’t have a fix for for a very long time. How firm does a belief have to be for it to be fruitful? Is there value in doing the practice of the worship anyway?

This idea isn’t so far off from what Catherine Mowry LaCugna suggests when she says that true theological work must be doxological, must be done through prayer and in worship. It’s only a difference of stance, a difference of whether or not you think this move is accessible to the non-believer. I guess it also asks whether or not you think the believer and the non-believer are all that different to begin with.

When you’re a painter, I assume, you learn to paint from the masters, from studying the masters, even if you never intend to paint in a strictly classical style. I assume one must look at a painter like Renoir or Cassatt and think, “How’d they do that? What steps got them there?” and then, through re-creation, try to learn something about the heart of painting, about the heart of seeing. The artist should create something new, something Cassatt wouldn’t ever have thought of, but that is only possible to create having studied Cassatt. This is how I feel about studying Catholicism from the inside. There’s impressive work that has been done here using delicate, finely tuned tools; if I learn how “the masters” used these tools for their own ends, what might I do with them?

Second: I can begin to disambiguate the ways that I feel like a Catholic, a Quaker, a Universalist, an anti-theist, a Humanist, and like someone deeply invested in catholicity, and that disambiguation is meaningful. I have interest in and appreciation for a wide variety of faiths, not all Christian, but I have history and experience with only one, really, two if you count Humanism, three if you count astrology which is a cosmology more than a religion. That these means of being religious, these varieties of religious orientation, might be considered methodological choices makes it easier for me to see them as different ways to engage with the same core questions, different ways that most likely have very different advantages for working with those questions.

Paul Tillich says in The Theology of Culture, “You cannot reject religion with ultimate seriousness, because ultimate seriousness, or the state of being ultimately concerned, is itself religion. Religion is the substance, the ground, and the depth of [humanity’s] spiritual life. This is the religious aspect of the human spirit.” The state of being ultimately concerned is one we cannot release ourselves from even if we try, so we ought to be intentional about where and how we direct that concern. These religions, these practices, are ways to direct humanity’s ultimate concern, but so are Consumerism, Domination, Racism, and Classism. Most people don’t choose those religions intentionally, but I have started to wonder if they don’t naturally fill any gaps we leave empty in our hearts and in our days.

Does this imply I think people are intentionally deluding themselves when they call themselves a Christian or a Buddhist or an Atheist? Am I diminishing religious beliefs and schemas to some kind “opt-in/opt-out social club” or to a tool in a toolbox? No, or I don’t mean for to.

Re: LaCugna’s argument that theology and religious studies should be worshipful, I think these methods work best probably when they’re “worked” by people who hold strong belief. When the person doing the scholarship, the doxological work, isn’t faking it to themselves or to anyone else, they can get much closer to those big questions like “what’s the point of life” and “how should a person be”. In that sense, I might be acknowledging significant personal limitations to my work in this field unless I find a way to undergo a spiritual conversion. Alternatively, I might just be naming the same journey that everyone must go on, whether they know they do or not, a journey to the point where you make a choice of some kind. Maybe I’m just acknowledging that religious belief must always involve at least one free choice, one instance of free will: do you choose to see the whale? Do you let the whale swallow you whole?

The reason I wanted to spend some time picking at the ideas that I’m exploring in my academic personal statement, aside from wanting to use you all as a captive audience who can’t help but encourage my improving the statement, is that it underlies more or less all of my writing.

One of the ways I’m going to be able to keep this project going, keep writing for real people (i.e. not academics), is by doing more writing about my studies here. Hopefully that is of interest! It won’t preclude astrology and the Enneagram, because those are two areas of interest that also can’t help but work their ways into my academic work, but I wanted to give fair warning.

Next week we’re back on a more Enneagram-focused blog, that “9 things I’ve learned working with the Enneagram for 9 years” post—assuming as my first true listicle that it will go wildly viral—so watch for that in your inbox / on the Substack app!

Some things to read:

1. I could’ve saved you some time and instead of reading my blog you could’ve read this by Annie Dillard. Or, you know, you could do both.

2. This blog by Beatrice Marovich, an interesting non-religious theologian in the field, about how America demands you carry your religious passport with you wherever you go.

3. I’m going to be referencing a lot of Octavia Butler in the coming months, so if you haven’t read Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents or her Lilith’s Brood trilogy, you should visit your local library and get to it!

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Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.

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How’d I even start to learn about the Enneagram and why did it stick?

When my friend Kate first told me about the Enneagram, this “personality test” that a guy at her last summer internship made the interns take, I was surprised I hadn’t ever heard of it.

At the time, I was a newly minted “Learning and Development” professional and I’d devoured all the literature I could find on DiSC, MBTI, StrengthsFinder, etc. I was the person at the bar who was going to talk your ear off about the nuances of the MBTI stacked styles of perception and judgement, even though, when pressed, I’d have to admit that my type didn’t really fit me all that well. I was, honestly, annoying.

The Enneagram type that Kate had gotten on the test at her internship didn’t totally resonate with her and the type I got only resonated slightly more, but that didn’t feel unusual. There had always been a bit of stretching required to make the other personality systems make sense, so I figured that was all it was. Since I’d never had a salary before that summer and I was determined to spend as much of that money as I could, I logged onto Jeff Bezos’s bookstore and ordered a stack of books about the Enneagram. One that I came across was The Christian Enneagram by Richard Rohr, which sent a chill of recognition through me.

I knew Rohr as the most palatable Catholic writer out there. Ever since my mom first came across him, I’d been signed up for his newsletter. In college, when I was out late drinking at some gross North Campus house party, getting the Richard Rohr newsletter in my inbox meant that I’d probably pushed it too far and needed to go home. I didn’t read his stuff obsessively, but I liked it and I saw him as a “serious writer” who wrote about “serious things” like religion and sobriety and the contemplative life. I was surprised to see that he’d written a book about what I thought was a silly personality test. I dropped it in my cart.

These days, The Christian Enneagram isn’t the book I’d recommend to any Enneagram beginners. It’s more of a “significant relic” in the history of the Enneagram than it is a meaningful learning resource, veering into some racist profiling and other 90s personality “wellness” writing that smacks of essentialism. Still, looking past those bits, reading through his type descriptions, I began to feel more and more of those thrills of recognition. The test had clearly mistyped Kate and myself, but we were in this book, described in other types. The system could still name us correctly. I began sending pictures of relevant sections to my most active group chat, telling them what I thought their types were with the excitement of any convert.

After the first books came the rest, truly any book I could find about the Enneagram. This was in 2017, before the recent rush of Enneagram books put out by mainstream publishers. Many of the books I collected early on were put together by small presses or self-published by the authors. There were a couple podcasts, again primarily directed at Christian audiences, that I listened to on repeat. Interviews with people of different types talking about how they moved through the world.

For the first six months or so of my hyperfixation I believed I was a Three, until one of these podcasts featured a Type Five who nailed my inner dynamics exactly. While this almost sent me into a tailspin, I righted the plane and just went back through all the books again, this time with my new insight into myself. And, again, meaning continued opening up in front of me. That detour was necessary for me to understand the things about myself that ultimately showed I was a Five.

It’s not lost on me that I found the Enneagram (or it found me) when I was twenty-two years old. I wanted to figure myself out and did not know at all how to begin. Looking back, I barely know how to write about that time, because it feels so absurd and dreamlike in retrospect. But, for some reason that feels almost fated, I had the Enneagram in my back pocket through it all. Earnestly, ridiculously, truthfully, I believe it would have been a much messier time for me without it.

Early on in my working with the Enneagram, I came across people who questioned whether or not it was actually helpful to “type” people. They asked the fair question of: “Does this introduce false limitations? Does this end up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy? Is this damaging?” Even early on, I could tell that it wasn’t damaging, or that it didn’t have to be. It took more time for me to realize the ways that it could be, or at least could be less helpful.

If you stop at the “diagnosis” of your type, then, yes, the Enneagram is not a helpful tool. Even worse, if you stop after taking a test to figure out your type and then you just use that result as an excuse for your annoying and bad behavior, then, yes, the Enneagram can be damaging. But I would argue these are examples of a damaging or useless habit that is likely already playing out in some form or another. These are examples of how any person might be doing their best to limit themselves, they just happen to have the Enneagram with which to do it.

I know this is true, because I’ve got countless case studies of friends and family who have taken on the Enneagram as real work, as something more meaningful than a funny way to roast each other. Over the years, I slowly pushed the Enneagram outward onto pretty much anyone who wanted to spend more than thirty minutes with me. That includes my friends, my family (one day I’ll write about the weeks in 2020 when I forced my family to complete an Enneagram curriculum so we could meet on Zoom every few days to discuss our types and internal dynamics…), and, eventually, friends of friends and even the people my friends go on dates with.1

Yes, at face value, there’s some humor in finding your type and seeing your most annoying tendencies spelled out so clearly right there in front of you. You definitely have to be able to laugh at yourself a little to work with the Enneagram. But it is, in my experience, relatively rare for it to stop there.

If it wasn’t such a good tool, I’d be a little embarrassed by my tendency to evangelize. I’m not embarrassed though, because I don’t kid myself; I don’t take credit for how easy it is to share with people. It’s the nature of the system, to spread through experience. Until you experience its resonance, you can’t really conceptualize your way into it. You have to see it, to notice the absurd similarities between yourself and a random person of the same type, or listen to someone talk about their shadow side, recognizing how their patterns vividly match those of your mother or father or ex. At some point, you feel the accuracy deeply and you feel the value of that.

All of this is why I don’t call it a personality test anymore. The Enneagram is a system, one that needs better historical understanding (the best evidence points to origins that combine roots in Sufi mysticism, Spanish Christian mystics, and a smattering of hermetic traditions), but a system. It is a wisdom tradition at its core.

Does that mean you can’t use it to make your sales team more efficient? Probably not. It would likely be effective, helping your sales team know themselves and build empathy for other ways to be. Of course, meditation and yoga might also be useful for your sales team and your corporate development goals, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a little grotesque to use them that way.

Instead, I like to use the Enneagram as a home base. I like to use it to connect with other people and to help communicate about who I am and how I move through the world. I use it to stay conscious of my own sense of myself, to notice when I might be spinning out and not realizing that I am. I use it to try to be present to my friends and family. And, more and more, I use it to better understand the theology I’m learning in school.

We’ll put a pin that last one for now, but, basically, I have always found the Enneagram to be a useful way of distinguishing between the surface of a person and the deeper parts, the parts that might be in contact with something transcendent. If that’s the case, then it might also be a way to better understand where we all come together, where we are all less different from each other and more connected. Rather than a label that separates, I see the Enneagram Type as a first step on a path toward less separation, which feels deeply, theologically necessary these days.

In my recent survey, I was asked to talk more about the Enneagram, so I thought I’d start this week by talking about my early connection with the system. Next week, I want to break things down a little bit more and talk about how working with it over the last nine years has helped me in life.

Does this interest you? Have you worked with the Enneagram yourself? How has knowing your type been useful for you?

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Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.

In any case, if you enjoy this post, giving it a ♡ and/or commenting is helpful. It tells Substack I’m worth reading and it tells me what you think about my writing (especially if you comment and tell me what you think about my writing).

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My best friends are gods.

I’m writing this week from the Acela NE regional on its way from Philadelphia to New York at about 6:20AM on Sunday. My friends Maggie and Mia are visiting the city from Paris and I’m making a day trip. Blogging from the train makes me feel like I’m living a different life, not in a “what if I were a Business Bitch consultant reviewing the deck before her Big Presentation” way, but in a “what if the air outside were too polluted to breathe and we all lived in traveling communes based on rail lines” way. I’ve never seen Snowpiercer, and I don’t know anything about it, but I think it takes place on a train kind of like this. In that kind of world, the people on my train matter a lot more to me than in my real life.

Yesterday, the first good day of weather this year, I walked around Philadelphia in shorts. Kelsey and I tried going to a few little shoppy shops, but so did everyone else in South Philly, so we ended up just taking our coffee to a bench in the park where we sat for a while and chatted, mostly about polyamory and about friendship. Neither of us try to be polyamorous, but we do both think a lot about what it takes to have friends and, from my vantage point outside the Poly Community™, those seem to be very similar puzzles to try and solve. I can’t say that Kelsey and I solved either puzzle, but the conversation was valuable all the same.

I mentioned here last week that I’m writing my God, Christ, Holy Spirit final essay this semester about friendship as means of knowing the divine. I still have a lot more to figure out in my framing, but every conversation I have about the topic makes me feel more certain that there’s something theologically fertile here. Allow me to riff on this for a bit…

There’s the surface metaphor, which is that to know what it is to be a friend is a way of cultivating care and love for creation,1 for the world around you. If you’re invested in people and can conceptualize caring about anyone who you aren’t blood related to, you’re more likely to be able to expand that care to other parts of creation to which you are even less connected. So as a simple practice of loving kindness, friendship seems to be a useful training ground for being a person in the world.

But even more deeply, I think friendship does interesting things for us theologically.

We usually expect good theology to explain something about the makeup of the world, about its metaphysics. Friendship is a relationship that exists between a choice and a miracle, that is both created and that creates itself.2 You probably know from your own friendships that you can’t take full responsibility for how the dynamics within unfold, but that you can take some responsibility. You co-create the experience, sometimes explicitly (“Hey, I want to spend more time with you, it’s been a while.”) and sometimes implicitly (Wow, they’ve been really unreachable since they started their new job. I guess I’ll give them space…). The choices you make for yourself, without even thinking of that friend, have consequences for them and for the unit that the two of you are together.

Now apply the analogy to your understanding of God.

Obviously, with a traditional (i.e. classical Western European) sense of God, this doesn’t quite work. That man is not your friend. That man is an old white guy in the clouds who knows if you’re going to hell, but won’t tell you. That old guy is sorry that your entire family fell off the viewing platform at the Grand Canyon, but he promises He has a plan 🫶🏼

This, among many other reasons, is why I’m drawn more and more to a process-relational philosophy and cosmology. I’m still not great at the elevator pitch for this, but the basic difference between a process-relational world and one that is not is that a process-relational philosophy sees everything as being defined by its process of becoming rather than its underlying substance. Annoying as that distinction may seem if you aren’t a theo-philosophy dork, it has significant consequences, not least of which is that the process-relational philosophy probably more accurately describes what you experience, while the more substantialist philosophy describes an experience that sounds… nice?3

I’m going to do some oversimplifying, because my train is almost to Penn Station.

A substantialist philosophy will say that, at core, God is fundamental Goodness and Power and One and many other supreme traits. This naturally prompts you to raise your hand and ask your Sunday school teacher, “Why does God allow bad things to happen if God is supreme Goodness?” and your teacher has to say, “Well, God wants us to have free will, and also God has a bigger plan, and God knows more than you.” And then you say, “Okay, fair, but I’m still really sad about my entire family falling off the viewing platform at the Grand Canyon, is that really fundamentally good?” And your Sunday school teacher has to say, “Um, yes, since God is fundamentally Good and all powerful, there must be a reason that it is Good for your family to fall off the viewing platform at the Grand Canyon.” Not very satisfying and, frankly, suspicious.

A process-relational philosophy will also say that God is perfect harmony and Goodness, two fluctuating processes of becoming. When you raise your hand and ask why God allows bad things to happen, your teacher replies: “Good question: the truth is, most things aren’t bad or good, but we know that many things have very bad impacts; for example, it hurt terribly when your entire family fell off the viewing platform at the Grand Canyon, right?” You would likely nod along, grateful at least that someone said it. Your teacher then might say something like, “Still, I wonder if there is anything we can do that might help, that might bring about some kind of good.” And you work with your teacher to bring about some systemic change, requiring public parks to undergo improvements on a frequent basis using tax dollars that come from the wealthy. And the feeling of being cared for by that teacher also makes you feel good. It doesn’t replace your lost family, but it feels good.

We can now see how this is kind of like how there are some relationships that are called friendships, but that don’t feel like friendships and there are some relationships that are called friendships that consistently and repeatedly show themselves to be friendships. They don’t feel like friendships because they are called friendships, they are called friendships because they feel like friendships.

Thanks for reading this second Sunday of Lent. I know there are some logical gaps here, so please feel free to poke holes and tell me where they are! I didn’t take as long as I might have otherwise, because I wanted to send this out before I went to get breakfast with my friends. Kind of the ultimate “show don’t tell” when you think about it…

More to come soon!

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Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.

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Oops, pretend I sent this yesterday.

We’re dealing with kind of a classic situation over here in Apt 3 at the corner of [redacted] and [redacted], namely that I decided to take my ADHD meds yesterday, even though it was a Sunday, because I wanted to be sure I used my time productively before the snow started to fall. I knew I’d want to enter a mini-hibernation as soon as there was at least a two inch layer of icy white fluff muting the city outside.

Instead, I used my chemically induced focus to give myself my second tattoo of the year, to build my (first ever, yikes) headboard, and to clip my cats’ nails.

I did manage to do some school reading, by which I mean I had the artificial voice of Gwyneth Paltrow read to me about conceptions of virginity from late antiquity while I stabbed ink into my skin. This is for my final paper for my Mariology class, which is focused on using a process theology lens to reconsider Mary’s perpetual virginity. I don’t have a much clearer argument just yet, but once I do you will hear about it.

The other book I’ve been spending time with for school has been Spiritual Friendship by St. Aelred of Rievaulx. Again, for a final essay, though this one is about the “practice” of friendship and how it can operate ascetically as a way to connect you with the divine. St. Aelred in the Episcopalian tradition is the patron saint of LGBTQ+ people. In Catholicism, where we do not (openly) celebrate queers, he is just the patron saint of friendship.

If you’ve read any of Plato’s dialogues, you’re familiar with Spiritual Friendship’s format. In the work, Aelred plays a fictionalized version of himself, answering younger monks’ questions about the nature of Friendship. There are many interesting components of Aelred’s treatise, including when he names the three kinds of friendship (carnal, worldly, spiritual) and the three kinds of kisses (physical, spiritual, intellectual). Today, I wanted to share specifically what he says when one of those young monks, Walter, suggests that Friendship might be too lofty a goal to reach—it is, after all, hard work. Walter argues that he can “almost endorse the view of those who claim that friendship should be guarded against as a burden full of care and anxiety, not free from fear but subject to many sorrows.”

Honestly, Walter makes a fair point.

At this point in the dialogue, Aelred has already explained the trials of friendship, namely that to move from a worldly friendship to one that is truly “spiritual” you have to be mutually invested in one another and, perhaps more importantly, you must be deeply invested in your own uprightness. The role of a friend, according to Aelred, is to live the good and honest and charitable life that you hope to witness and benefit from in return, but not in exchange. No, for Aelred, the good life that we experience through friendship is selflessly self-sustaining. It’s circular in the sense that what we give out is almost instantaneously returned and in greater measure than it was given. The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.

That sounds pretty good, to get more than you give, but it’s more complex than that, as you probably know. Sometimes (maybe even frequently, if you’re a recovering people pleaser like me) you give and you give, pouring yourself into a friendship, and you find yourself depleted. You risk the exchange and after handing over everything you have, you find nothing coming back your way. With empty arms, you stand and wait, hoping maybe you’ll get something back when your friend has more capacity or that you’ll figure out a way to recuperate what you’ve lost on your own. It’s not an uncommon experience, familiar enough that Walter’s suggestion is in response to this experience, to this risk. If you can’t guarantee mutuality, or even something close, why risk it?

Because a life containing friendship is the only life worth living, according to Aelred. To live in isolation, far from the potential harms that other people might cause through their clumsy attempts at love, is not a human life. But Aelred pushes farther than just rejecting the impulse to self-isolate.

“Those who claim that their lives should be such as to console no one and to be a burden or the occasion of grief to no one, who derive no joy from others’ success and inflict no bitterness on others with their own perversity, I would call not human beings but beasts,” he says. “They have only one goal: neither to love nor to be loved by anyone.”

Aelred believes, and I believe, that a determination to not cause harm and to not be a burden is akin to opting out of friendship. It is akin to opting out of love. I haven’t always believed this, but after some failed friendships that ended too soon and some failed friendships that lasted too long, I see it as an unshakeable truth.

Aelred saw himself as building himself on a foundation of friendship, intimately connected with the rest of the men who lived with him in religious community: arguing with each other, mourning with each other, working together to make ends meet, and worshipping an eternal Trinity together. In all the difficult ways possible, they depended upon one another. You and I don’t have to go that far to be in deep community and friendship these days (though, sometimes, running off to a monastery in the woods has a certain appeal…). Instead, we can build our lives on a foundation of friendships that play out in the world. This is not to say that it’s easy, just that it’s worth it.

Friendship is a risk, one of the best risks to take, one that you really must take. If you don’t, you’ll end up living in darkness, for, as Aelred says quoting Cicero: “those who banish friendship from life seem to pluck the sun from the universe, for we have no better, no more delightful blessing from God.”

I’m interested in how these friendships we create in and amongst the hardest features of modern life can maintain their integrity. How can they stay strong, not in a “morally upright” sense, but in the sense that integral friendships, if they are as Aelred describes, seem to require stronger foundations to stand upon than we see all that often in the world today. Do you agree? What keeps your strongest friendships strong? What weakens them?

Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.

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Happy Lent, I’m going Catholic-mode this year.

Growing up, Lent was a funny religious moment of the year. Though I come from a family who did attend the Holy Days of Obligation, we didn’t go much harder than that in general. No fasting that I can remember and only loose commitment to meatless Fridays (though my dad seized the opportunity to pick up fried catfish on occasion). Mostly it was a time where I got to pick something to be performatively virtuous about (forgoing candy, for example, despite living in a house where we almost never had candy) and pretend to be mysteriously pious at elementary school with my smudged forehead on Ash Wednesday.

This year, following the lead of Sarah Coakley and her belief in the power of ascetic practices, I’m going to take it a little more seriously. I doubt I’ll make it to an Ash Wednesday service today, but I am fasting, will fast on Good Friday, and will observe a simpler diet on Fridays.

I’m also going to do something I’ve never done before, something I had never even considered doing growing up. This Lent, I’m going to read from the Bible.

Outside of my classwork, I’m workshopping a paper on the Song of Songs and queer love relationships, so I’ll take the season to work my way through that book, practice some Lectio Divina (meditating on words), and see what comes up. I’ll share some of that here, I’m sure.

Finally, I’m going to show up for myself in this place, with y’all. Avoidance is a favorite tactic when I have goals that I really care about and somehow since last summer I’ve let this work fall prey to that. There are a lot of reasons, but none of them are all that good, so I won’t bore you.

However, I am (once again) pointing out my lapses and announcing my commitment because: (1) I’m associating that commitment to Lent, to a religious commitment, and (2) I have a question (or three…) for you.

Take this 2-min survey 🫶🏼

Is two emails a week too much? I’m definitely going to start it up, but I want to give you a way to opt out of these second emails. If you are not interested, you should definitely respond to the survey, because I will filter you out of those emails based on your response. If you are interested, I’d still love if you could fill out the survey, but it’s less important.

The plan is to let my Sunday email be more personal and journalistic, a response to what I’ve been reflecting on and experiencing in my spiritual practices each week. If that’s not of interest to you, my feelings won’t be hurt. But if you are interested, I hope those blogs will be especially conversational. I’d love to get responses and continue the conversation in our inboxes. Of course, you can be a passive voyeur, that’s one of my favorite things to do, but if you feel inspired to weigh in, I’ll be grateful.

To kick us off with something a little more interesting than my navel-gazing ramble, I wanted to share a quote I came across recently from the theologian Paul Tillich in Theology of Culture.

Religion is the aspect of depth in the totality of the human spirit … You cannot reject religion with ultimate seriousness, because ultimate seriousness, or the state of being ultimately concerned, is itself religion. Religion is the substance, the ground, and the depth of man’s spiritual life. This is the religious aspect of the human spirit. (pgs. 7-8)

This hit me, because it speaks to why I have been feeling more and more like the accurate way to describe my basic stance is “religious but not spiritual” as opposed to the much more common and (in my opinion) overhyped spiritual-but-not-religious (SBNR).

I am not “not spiritual” and I’m certainly not anti-spiritual, but I think spirituality is something much harder to get at than we portray. While we often associate spirituality today with an openness to God, to god, to goddess, to Spirit, to crystals and astrology and signs from the Universe, I think these are, more often than not, oversimplified symbols than they are markers of spiritual experience or depth. I think spirituality is something different. To be spiritual, by my definition, is to be in conversation with the fruits of religion.

Crucially, I do not think this must be organized religion, which is why I appreciate Tillich’s definition of the religious so much. Spirituality is a fruit of allowing oneself to be religiously sincere about life, about almost any part of life. Far more artists who take their work seriously, treating it with “ultimate concern,” seem to me to be in touch with the spiritual than do many “very online Christians” who can quote scripture or describe the Catechism but who don’t find ways to be rooted in the world beyond their comfort zones. This is a problem.

Finding the means to be earnest, to be ultimately concerned and not (only) jaded or harsh is an urgent need today. And it can’t be achieved just by deciding to do it, it cannot be casually developed. This pseudo-depth is the kind of spiritual bypass that is frequently on offer by “spiritual types” who want you to buy something from them. This is a brittle way. No, the kind of religious concern and depth that I’m talking about builds like a strong relationship, slowly and with intention.

Without a means to develop this deep stance in ourselves I don’t know how we can be sustained through the hardest times. I don’t know how we bridge gaps if we don’t have shared experiences of depth, of earnest connection.

Many examples of organized religion are great ways to develop a relationship with the spiritual and they often offer specific benefits (in-built community, mentorship, tradition), but they aren’t the only way. Its important to understand this, because it does not seem realistic to expect these fraught institutions to shoulder the burden of demonstrating the value of “being religious” today. They work for some, but the Church (and its organizational foils everywhere) has done too much damage to be the one and only fountain of grace today. So, where is grace for the rest of us?

We’ll call this a taster for how the next forty days or so will be and how things will feel going forward after Easter now that I’ll be back in my consistent schedule. Next week I’ll move past the hypothetical and try to share some interesting examples of this kind of depth and religious stance I’m talking about, specifically examples that have less of the baggage of traditional organized religion.

P.S. If you expressed interest in Sunday reflections above, the first post will go out this week! Look out for it in your inbox <3

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Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.

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Real quick thought about the Holy Spirit.

I’m in Colorado Springs at the moment for a trip that, seemingly, will either be three days or three weeks depending on snow.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we never saw Fred Tally-Foos again.

The bartender at the PHL Chase Lounge (brag) told me I looked like Luigi (brag) and no she did not mean the hot, alleged hero of the people, she meant the hotter of the two famous plumbers (brag) and she’s not wrong I guess? I wasn’t wearing my glasses when she said it, if that matters. You decide.

Because of this travel and because I am still getting back into the swing of things, this is a quick little blog I’m shooting off, riffing on some of what I talked about last week.

First, to clarify, I took Sarah Coakley’s commitment to “desire as an experience of divinity” farther and more to a more expansive place than I now think she does. Not that she doesn’t go to interesting places with the concept, but I think she’d be a little more traditional in her differentiating of “graceful” or “fallen” experiences of desire. My suggestion that all experiences of desire are inherently divine-inspired is built on her ideas, but not replicating them. Much more to work on understanding here I guess.

Second, one of the other really interesting ideas she works out is an argument for the Trinity specifically, a purpose for divinity that is seen as “one in three, three in one.” Basically, without the Holy Spirit, there might be a privileged dyad between the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit is the means of incorporating us into that exchange. The Spirit does this, Coakley suggests, by joining us into relationship with the Father and Son when we engage in contemplative prayer or some other method of transcendence. She suggests that we are in fact ceding the moment to the Holy Spirit, that the Holy Spirit connects to God through us. I see this connecting with similar ideas from queer theology, specifically those by Marcella Althaus-Reid and her suggestion that certain trinitarian approaches offer “a Queer way to re-discover God, by active observation of God’s polyamorous relationships as in the figure of the Trinity.”

In either reading, that of Coakley’s transcendent contemplation or Althaus-Reid’s suggestion that the Trinity is a model of queer, boundary-breaking love, the Holy Spirit can be seen as that which invites (guides) the pray-er into the fold.

Experientially, this rings true to me. If you’re going to entertain a trinitarian model of the divine, the expansive, always-there quality of the Spirit has long been associated with a grassroots kind of worship for a reason. I’ll have to hold on getting into this more deeply until next week, but for now just consider how people who are “taken by the Spirit” might come from all walks and all classes of life. It’s an entry point that, more than the Father or the Son, tends to feel accessible, reachable, to even the least “trained” or “elite” worshippers.

Have you ever felt the Spirit? What about the Father or the Son? I feel obligated to note that, according to Christian orthodoxy, if you’ve met one, you’ve met them all. All in one, one in all, etc. Still, I’m curious, what face, what voice have you known in the divine? Who feels out of reach and who do you feel is most near?

Thanks again for reading! I’ll be back with a lengthier, more researched letter next week, but for now I’m stuck in Colorado and making cow sounds with my niece. Duty calls.

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Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.

In any case, if you enjoy this post, giving it a ♡ and/or commenting is helpful. It tells Substack I’m worth reading and it tells me what you think about my writing (especially if you comment and tell me what you think about my writing).

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It’s probably meaningful in some way that the newsletter I broke off on last year, the one that I didn’t send, that almost died a death of inertia, is my 100th newsletter. But, here we are, resisting the inertia.

Happy 2026 and happy 100th Ask Good Questions! I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen here this year, but I am working on consistency again. I’m prioritizing my priorities. Of course, perfection is the enemy of doing anything at all, so I’ve let myself get a few weeks into the year without sending this first newsletter. Still, however bumpy the process is, I’m getting back to that weekly frequency I held for a while. I was proud of that and I made some meaningful connections, with new and old friends. Thanks for sticking around.

Desire, I want to turn into you: theological edition.

I’ve started my second semester of school this week. I’ve got two courses this spring: (1) God, Christ, Holy Spirit and (2) Mary, 1500 - Present, each taking up three hours one evening every week. I was talking with a friend about how nice it has been to develop some depth in a single subject, to allow myself to specialize. This isn’t how I’d ever felt about learning when I was 18-22 years old, allergic to structured majors and required courses. I still have that allergy, but it’s not as life threatening as it once was. I do understand now the appeal of building a bench of writers and topics that you can trace throughout a concentrated subject.

I’ve also begun to realize that I really can’t do all the things I want to do. Duh, of course. Still, as obvious as this is, I spread myself too thin last semester, even though I spent most of my time in my apartment. Somehow, even though I was physically locked in, I was losing attention for a long list of reasons that were all legitimate, but that overall did not need my attention specifically. So, I am making a meta goal this year to be more disappointing to people. Not exactly “be more selfish,” though this impulse does have a certain spiritual connection to the late-Millennial/early-Gen Z attitude of “you don’t owe anyone anything.” I do owe many people many things, but I see this year as as good a time as any to test whether or not putting the vast majority of my resources toward my own interests and wants will lead to any kind of change (positive or negative) in my life.

I hosted my friends Kinsey and Max in Philly before and after New Year’s, and, unsurprisingly, once Max got here we gave each other hand poke tattoos. I started doing this to myself (badly) back in 2019, though my interest has waned and waxed through the years. In that time Max has been my most consistent tattoo recipient, getting at least as many as I’ve done to myself and maybe more. Since Max was here and since Kinsey was going to have fomo if she left right before we did tattoos, she pushed her scheduled departure back. Max and Kinsey exchanged little squiggles (they drew them, I tattooed) and I gave myself a take on the Amazing Bone from the William Steig book of the same name. Then, before Max left the next day, he and I gave each other spiral tattoos. This was the first hand poke that I’d gotten in return from Max and I think he did a great job—jury is out if the less aggressive (less painful) method that we landed on this round will have staying power, but I am optimistic. Ultimately these tattoos are less about the art and more about some kind of connection. Blood brothers vibes I guess?1 Yikes.

One of the ridiculous goals I set for myself after that flurry of tattooing was to give myself a tattoo every week of 2026. In my defense, the Amazing Bone tattoo that I did was very small and warped my sense of what that would really mean. So, after completing my second tattoo (big ol’ circle), I’m deciding that instead I’ll do at least one tattoo per month and each tattoo will push my skills a little farther. Worst case scenario, I’ll have some sketchy little illustrations on me that will cover up very easily. Best case, I begin my tattoo bartering career. Win-win, or at least a “not lose-win.”

A non sequitur: I’ve been assigned a book for class that I started reading last year: God, Sexuality, and the Self: An essay ‘on the trinity’ by Sarah Coakley. Sarah Coakley is an Anglican priest and academic, one of the more creative and significant theologians working today. She does a lot of work on the history and value of Christian contemplative practice which is much less derivative of non-Christian religious practices than you might think if you only experience them via Instagram. Unsurprisingly, the concept of meditation and inner stillness is one that seems to have roots in the foundations of most cultures globally. In this book, she’s arguing (among other things) that contemplative and ascetic modes of prayer are theologically rich ways of “doing” systematic theology. Basically, she argues that developing these kinds of wordless, self-emptying, deepening practices are effective, necessary ways to approach and “redeem” a long list of otherwise harmful or sinful impulses.2

All of this more practical theorizing is built on top of the less actionable, but maybe more important, assertion she makes that Desire is an ontologically central principle of the Trinity, that is, of God.3 By this logic, Desire is knotted up deeply inside God. By this logic, Desire is part of what God is.

She goes on to build out “a vision of God’s trinitarian nature as both the source and goal of human desires,” suggesting that, when engaged with contemplatively and ascetically, our experience of Desire (which is often torturous, ask any Buddhist) can grant us a line of connection to the divine. This is possible because the divine’s manifestation of Desire can be felt in a slantwise way through our own experience of Desire. This is an apophatic connection, a connection that can’t be put into words and doesn’t necessarily benefit from the attempt. Coakley goes on to say, “Desire, on this view, is the constellating category of selfhood, the ineradicable root of the human longing for God.”

If this sounds like annoying religious waffling, that’s fair, it kind of is. Sarah Coakley is not the most approachable writer, though I think there’s a lot in her work for anyone interested in spirituality. What I take her to mean here is that Desire, even sexual Desire, even Desire that you might feel is “pointed” at the wrong things, the wrong people, the wrong experiences, is a way of connecting with and understanding God. Now, I think I imagine a different God than Coakley does, one that is probably not exactly Trinitarian, one that is not strictly Christian, but that is still animating and universal. But whether you like to think of Coakley’s God or my God or any other God, the idea that the uncomfortable longing, desiring, hungry, barren wanting that we all know better than we wish might be turned on its head and understood as the divine is significant. In Coakley’s Trinitarian language (remember, God and Spirit are the same and distinct), “the Spirit is that which propels the one who prays towards union with the Divine, but whose tug is felt analogously also in every erotic propulsion towards union, even at the human level.”

Coakley goes on to make an interesting point about how countercultural it has become to “sublimate” desire, specifically in the context of sex. She doesn’t make this point in a finger wagging, “why is everyone f*cking so much??” way, rather, she implies that we don’t have many good models for reasonable abstention any more. She points specifically to the ways that repressed sexuality of the clergy (Catholic or otherwise) has often been diagnosed as the cause of Church sexual abuse. While I don’t know a lot about this, it feels like a good read on the situation. Coakley, though, argues that we shouldn’t then conclude that all denial of desire is “monstrous.” It’s central to her theology that there is value in the ascetic—not in all ways and at all times, but in significant ways and at key times. Some kind of beauty in the struggle.

This part of her theology makes me think of other countercultural modes of being and how we can resist another often insidious expression of desire: overconsumption. The hunger for more, more, and more.

This ascetic train of thought brings up straight-edge punks and their resistance to alcohol or drugs, brings me really to any form of sobriety in an inebriated world. I think about BDSM and the ways people experiment with negation and denial, with anything from edging to chastity hardware. I think about nonviolence and the beliefs and practices that enable people to refuse to take the bait of murderous systems, even when it would be expedient to simply fight fire with fire. And all of this makes me think of the pause between stimulus and reaction, the pause that practitioners of all kinds of mindfulness (secular and otherwise) seek. Coakley’s arguments seem to have connective tissue to these forms of attraction and abstention, though I don’t believe she references any of them directly. I haven’t read the entire book yet, so I’ll find out and share as I learn more.

Thanks again for reading, I’m excited to be back! If you have any questions about God/Christianity/theology/anything, please let me know! I probably don’t know the answer, but I enjoy pondering the questions.

Some things to read:

1. Sarah Coakley’s book is available here, but you can also read a good piece of hers about prayer and contemplation here for free.

2. If you’ve never read official Catholic publications from the Vatican, they are a trip. Here’s a recent one I read for class about how people “should” talk about Mary and how they “should not.” Humans are incredibly odd animals.

3. This Note right here:

   

4. Do you work for an evil company? Are you actually so good though, despite that?

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Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.

In any case, if you enjoy this post, giving it a ♡ and/or commenting is helpful. It tells Substack I’m worth reading and it tells me what you think about my writing (especially if you comment and tell me what you think about my writing).

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A blog about sin, the social kind. I am sorry 🫶🏼

I have to write a short essay response for the unit on “Sin and Grace” in my theology class that’s due today, so y’all are gonna get some thoughts from the rough draft. Take this as something of a trigger warning: I think my use of the word “sin” doesn’t evoke too much fire and brimstone and gnashing of teeth, but I didn’t grow up in an Evangelical church and never much considered hell until I read Dante Alighieri in college.

I enjoyed the reading from our textbook on sin. Listening to it in the uncanny valley version of Gwyneth Paltrow’s voice, I found myself appreciating the complexity with which the author wrote. Not exactly radical, but more realistic and aware of systems then I might have feared a chapter on “Sin” would be. When I finished, I looked up the theologian, Roger Haight. I learned that he’d been censored and banned from teaching when he was alive. Unsurprising. Most of the theologians I like have been censored, censured, and banned from teaching at least for some part of their career.

The obvious thing to say about sin is that, as a weaponized concept, it’s done more harm than good and we probably can articulate anything it names well using other language, without the baggage. Also, everything you’ve ever been told about it is probably fundamentally “wrong.” As wrong as one can be about a concept of religious dogma that’s become a shared metaphor in common language. This is the theme of my studies so far. Anything about religion that you’ve been told by a man with certainty in his voice is both an oversimplification of doctrine and usually just one side of an open debate.

Still, I’m nothing if not interested in the antiquated, so let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about sin.

I don’t think I had ever really given it much thought, lucky as I was to grow up in a Catholic family that was more focused on the social justice demands of the church than Hell and to attend a Catholic church that leaned more philosophical in the homilies than punitive. I remember as a teen having given myself the internal rule that if they ever preached against “the homosexual sin” I would stand up and walk out dramatically. I never got the chance to test if I’d have done it because they just didn’t talk about sin all that much. Or, they did, but it was sin in the form of not feeding the hungry, of acting violently toward others, and of betraying truth. They talked about what Haight describes as social sin.

Social sin is another way of describing the sin you’re born into, or “original sin.” Haight doesn’t especially like the term original sin, at least for the purposes of his chapter in our textbook, as it’s fraught with all kinds of misogyny and misplaced historical ugliness. But it does describe pretty well the trap of privilege and the harm that comes simply from the “power tier” of society into which we’re born. Haight says, “The sinful aspect of social involvement can be drawn out by a consideration of the phenomenon of social guilt—not guilt for society of the past of which one was not a part, but responsibility for the present and future sin of society.”

Haight goes on to acknowledge that people won’t like to hear this, that no one likes to admit guilt for something they did not “do,” but we should know by now that guilt is more complex than that. I’m not responsible for all that white men have done before me, but I am responsible for fixing it now. Why? Because as much as I wish it hadn’t been that way, things are generally much easier for me because of those “sins of the past.” It doesn’t matter much that you wish you could shed your privilege (your “original sin”), but it does matter what you do with it now.

For what it’s worth, this freedom to choose to act in ways that appear to be against one’s own interests in support of others and the greater social fabric is what Haight calls “grace.” Basically, this is the product of using your free will to act outside of the mechanical life you’re caught in. It’s what happens when you jump the tracks and roll in some other direction than that which social sin would lead you down. You can’t be perfect in this, of course, and Haight acknowledges that. He says we can “react against various aspects of social sin; human freedom can transcend society at any given point and become countercultural. But no one can escape all the aspects of one’s social existence and participation.” For example, you can’t just go live in the woods and disengage. Fleeing the harm you cause (or the harm you didn’t cause but see) could easily be seen as a sin of denying your responsibility.

It’s not sinful to get an abortion, it’s not sinful to masturbate, it’s not sinful to leave a marriage when it’s time to leave a marriage. My opinions, but I think they’re right and easily defensible. There are probably situations where these things might “be sinful” by my definition, which is that sins happen when you move farther away from God, that is, when you reject grace, that is, when you dehumanize and objectify the living world we’ve got right here. I can’t think of very many situations where it would be “sinful” to do those things, but I’m open to the possibility. However, I don’t think it’s very useful to spend time finding the fringe situation where masturbating leads to dehumanization. It is much more useful to talk about the sin we see when we put people in cages, ravage the planet, and hoard wealth. These are very effective ways to reject the grace of connection with others. These are very effective ways to shut yourself off into your own private hell, right here and now.

This idea deserves its own blog (or more), but I also think it’s a boring waste of time to evaluate whether other people are sinning. We certainly don’t need more policing, religious or otherwise. Instead, we cultivate those places in life that systematize grace and get us heading in the direction of the brilliantly humane, the divinely transcendent. We wake ourselves and our friends up from the kind of sleep that keeps us moving toward greater isolation. We do whatever it takes to wake ourselves up so that we can do the same for those around us. It’s scary to be awake and to see just how much social sin is baked into the every day, but it’s necessary. That’s where the language of sin and grace is most useful, I think, as tools that help us build better ways of helping each other, that help us know each other and respect each other.

Thanks for reading! Still figuring out this school/work/blog cadence, all subs are free for at least as long as it takes to do that.

Some things to read/listen to:

1. This blog about the trans activists who have made inroads with the Vatican. It did make me misty-eyed. When the Pope can respect people’s gender, no one else has any excuse for misgendering, this seems obvious!

2. It’s the ten year anniversary of one of the best pop albums of all time. This, for me, is spiritual. Carly Rae is both earnest and likable, a hard thing to stick the landing on.

3. Me and every single other person on The Internet™ have been talking about how they enjoy this album by Audrey Hobert. I endorse. This is now a music blog.

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Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.

In any case, if you enjoy this post, giving it a ♡ and/or commenting is helpful. It tells Substack I’m worth reading and it tells me what you think about my writing (especially if you comment and tell me what you think about my writing).

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I paused paid subscriptions again for the foreseeable future—turns out it is a challenge to balance school and work and life and writing. I’ll figure it out, but, in the meantime, this newsletter is going to be figuring itself out. Thanks for sticking around!

Where I’ve been lately…

I started a Masters in Theological Studies this fall. The first day of each of the three classes I’m taking were handled differently from each other.

My History of the Church course began with a classic participatory prayer, the kind where the prayer leader says some nice words and then asks if anyone would like to share prayers for anyone or anything that’s close to their heart. When I logged into my Systematic Theology course, I learned about the Divine Office, also called the Liturgy of the Hours or Opus dei. This was less jarring in that it was less participatory, but also jarring because when you have two classes of three beginning with prayers, the assurance you got from the admissions counselor that there are a few non-Christians in each cohort starts to feel hollow. Finally, logging into the class I was least excited about, Biblical Studies, I expected the worst without really knowing what that would be. Group confession? Five Hail Marys and an Our Father? Instead, we had no prayer, but we did have a survey to fill out so our professor could get to know us.

The survey included questions about our favorite music and our favorite books, but also asked if we had any religious trauma we wanted our professor to know about. We were encouraged to share any bad experiences with Christianity, the Bible, or anything else (there’s an awful lot of sexual violence in the Bible…) that would help her make the class meaningful and effective for us. She also assured us she would never expect anyone to pray in class, though she did make the option available shortly after to participate in Lectio divina which, for the unfamiliar, is a form of prayer on a given scripture or other written work.

I hadn’t done “Christian prayer” for many years before this. I think I would have previously said that praying was the part of Christianity or religion or spirituality that I was most connected with still, because it’s harmless and it’s meditative and it’s noncommittal. It doesn’t force you to align with anything but yourself and with whatever it is you think is divine. But when asked to do it live, to do it with others, to pray with a community like I theoretically have wanted for a while, it felt absurd.

Why am I getting a masters in theology at a Catholic university? This is the kind of question I have for myself after I’ve spent the day reading about the unnamed second wife in Judges. I read about her husband giving her to the town to be brutalized and killed before he chopped her up into twelve symbolic pieces. I write a reflection on this passage, wondering what it might have meant to the men who wrote it and wondering what someone is supposed to do with it today. I ask myself this question: Why am I getting a masters in theology at a Catholic university?

When I mention it to people, the silence after it comes out of my mouth feels endless. People are typically just expecting me to continue talking. I am capable of explaining it, but still, I stumble. I mumble a little joke (“Jump scare!”) and then I move the conversation along. I don’t know how to say I’m loving the program, I’m finding it bizarre and absurd, that I’m learning about Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and realizing I’ve been really uneducated on those subjects before. I could say something about that, about how, for some reason I don’t really understand, I’m excited to do my readings and to finish my assignments and I haven’t really felt that way about school before. Why am I getting a masters in theology at a Catholic university?

After the first time I ran into this self-disclosure dilemma on a date, the first time I had to clunkily confess to a man that I was studying theology, I added a note to my dating profile: part time graduate student in theology, but not in a weird way I promise lol. No one has yet commented on it, but I also haven’t had time since August to go on a date. Too much reading to do, too many evenings taken up by classes. I’ve also spent a lot less time with friends since August. Why am I getting a masters in theology at a Catholic university?

“Why” is a difficult question, better asked in pieces. The first piece is something like: “How’d this happen?” The second piece is: “To what end?” What’s the point, what’s the utility, of studying the systems and theories of something so wildly imperfect and illogical as faith, especially when it is presented in such a sectarian way?

How’d this happen? To anyone who’s read this blog for long, it’s probably not that surprising. I love this shit, as you know.

I write around god and worship and spirit and even sometimes God. All of that. I did my zine earlier this year about Mary, the theotokos, the mother of god. What’s missing in that explanation is the other stuff, the stuff that I put into my personal statement for scholarships and such. It’s stuff about attempting a Masters in Public Policy so I could understand society and people and finding the classes boring, obvious, or shallow. I’m not getting on a soapbox against policy scholarship, but I’m starting to accept that I don’t care enough about that. I thought my questions belonged there when they simply didn’t. I was bored.

What I really am interested in is the soul. I always have been. I’ve tried directing that interest toward other more marketable applications, saying that I’m interested in “interpersonal dynamics” and “people management” and “organizational culture” and while those interests aren’t entirely untrue, they are, for me, the shallower manifestation of what is essentially an interest in the soul.

So I sought out an academic space where the soul is a real thing, where there are debates about the soul and about the limitations of our knowing, where the soul’s care is seen as an urgent and essential need. I could have done this in other ways, but I wanted to start where I was, from within my tradition. I decided to start in a Catholic context.

To what end? The simplest I can say it, I think, is that understanding transcendence feels like an urgent task. Whether or not that “transcendence” has outgrown the structures that we have historically used to engage with it is up for debate, but I think the necessity of the transcendent is less debatable. We need to be thinking bigger than ourselves and our immediate needs. One way to do that is to look in the direction of the transcendent.

I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, but I am excited to spend the next year or so learning about how conceptions of divinity and actions in support of justice intersect. I’m excited to start learning Greek and Hebrew and to try to understand the intellectual roots of the ideals that are still weaponized against the majority of people in the world. Something happened between the days when small communities of equals met together in house churches throughout the Roman Empire, shared the bread and wine, and envisaged Heaven on Earth and these days, days when Christianity has become the Roman Empire and the only Heaven to speak of comes after you die.

In the short term, I’m doing some early reading for a proposal on the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin. As part of this, you can expect some of my upcoming emails to be oriented toward unpacking his beliefs around evolution, the Cosmic Christ, and how life gropes its way forward toward the Omega Point. If that sounds obnoxious and painfully liturgical, it’s worth noting that his philosophies are often really not all that different from those of Olamina’s GOD = CHANGE philosophy in The Parable of the Sower. Lots more to come on that.

I suppose I might have preferred to study in a context that is not so sectarian, though I’m not sure I know of a program that offers a truly interfaith and interreligious kind of theological education. I’m doing my best to fill in gaps where I can and to go for greater complication and nuance rather than simplification wherever possible. But I also am reminded of how I’ve learned traditional astrology, an approach that I learned from my friend Larry. There is value in meeting a tradition and learning it first on its own historically specific terms. You can always complicate it and expand it and bring it into your context eventually, but the benefits of deep study within the scope of the subject’s place in history are real. That familiarity is useful, a skill that you need if you want to be able to speak fluently with others in the tradition, however different their aims with the tradition might be.

Long term, I like to hope that this learning I’m doing will help me make a good mark on my world, that this deeper understanding of faith will support a movement toward transcendence. I like to hope that “religion” is not a human concept that’s too antiquated, too ossified to be useful any more. I like to hope lots of things and so far my studies have supported those hopes. That’s probably the best way to explain why I’m still in this program.

To end this ramble on some positive and optimistic notes: since the initial jarring experience of praying in class, I’ve been excited to see how much real theology in the Catholic church is rooted in love. Not “love the sinner, hate the sin” love, but a deep, unifying, primordial love. A love that animates the world. As much as this doesn’t track to the reality of American Christian politics, to the weird cultural ecosystem of popular Christianity, or to whatever it is that Ch*rlie K*rk’s organization does, the best Christian thinkers of recent and modern times are interested in and committed to a theology that values love, that values life, and that values what we experience here and now. In some way, I’d like to contribute to that project.

Like I said up top, this has taken me a while to get down, edited, and sent; I’ve paused all payments and am going to be figuring out what I can reasonably accomplish here going forward. I miss writing this blog and am not ready to put it in the desk drawer just yet. Thank you, as always, for reading.

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Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.

In any case, if you enjoy this post, giving it a ♡ and/or commenting is helpful. It tells Substack I’m worth reading and it tells me what you think about my writing (especially if you comment and tell me what you think about my writing).

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Everything is born at some point.

My friend Margaret asked if cats can have birth charts. I said, “Yes, everything does.” And then we went ahead and played with her cats and gave her baby Lorne our “pizza bones.”1 But… what’s it really mean for everything to have a birth chart?

To address the technical and (more) simple side of this question: Your cat has a chart and you appear in their chart. You have a chart and your cat appears in your chart. Your cat can be understood somehow in relation to your Sixth House (pets/animals smaller than a cow) or maybe your Fifth House (children, idk, some of y’all are intense), and you can be understood somehow in relation to your cat’s Fourth House (parent, again, for the intense among us) or maybe Sixth House (in addition to pets, this house represents those who have dominion over us, which surely my cat Oliver feels about me sometimes). Since I’m not the fun kind of astrologer who does much with personality in the chart, I can’t say whether your cat being a Leo means she wants you to make her an Instagram account, but we could, say, get an idea of when an important pet might enter your life or when you ought to be extra diligent about that annual vet visit. Obviously, ymmv with these bits of astrological intel, but they’re theoretically sound.

To go a bit deeper and touch on some ideas I’m sure I’ve talked about before: the astrological tradition sees “a moment of birth” as being applicable to just about anything you might be interested in better understanding. This is poetically fertile, obviously. A person and their life can be read in a chart just the same as my pet cat or the city of Baghdad or your marriage or the question, “Will the Phillies disappoint me this year?” There’s a chart that can be drawn up for each of these equally important topics. We can look at the chart of anything that has a beginning which is to say we can look at the chart of anything, any animal, vegetable, mineral, or idea.

The magic of a birth, the beginning of the relationship between that soul and the world around it is easy to see as beautiful. A new center of gravity emerges. We all must shift slightly to make room. It’s easy to conceive of this with a new baby person, to get a smile out of your niece and go, “Oh! Yes, you’re significant. You’re the start of something.” Harder, maybe, to do so for some other animals, or for the initiation of a relationship, or for a question you want to know the answer to (i.e. “Will the Phillies disappoint me this year?”.

It’s sometimes a challenge to know when a beginning occurs. Noticing what you think constitutes a beginning is telling in itself and probably has some bearing on how you would interpret a chart. But the question remains: what’s the start of something? The question is complicated enough that it’s been used by certain persons on the political right as an intentionally fuzzy defense against abortion access. It’s not simple (though I don’t think it’s all that relevant to abortion access) to identify when we’ve started moving irrevocably forward and toward any given outcome. When, really, is the beginning?

First, we might consider what a “root” chart really represents. Yes, it’s the initiation chart, the chart that comes into existence when a baby breathes their first breath, when a marriage starts, or when you first consider a question that you want to answer (blah blah blah… Phillies?). But what’s it represent?

Dorotheus of Sidon said sometime in the first century CE: “the stars … indicate for the people what will affect them from the time of the native’s birth until his separation from the world, if God wills.” A timeline, if you can read it, he says, which is pretty much the orthodox perspective. I’d push on that a bit and ask, “Okay, so it’s a timeline, but why does the timeline start right now? Why not one chart at the beginning of time that explains everything forever?” It only makes sense if we can act as if “the start of something” is also a branching point, a point of departure. Humor me, please; I think astrological charts are questions (assertions), though they’re questions that contain the answers (responses).

A baby born is both the question, “what will this life be?” and the answer, just the same as any relationship you begin contains its best moments and its worst all at once. What I’m trying clunkily to say is that we can think about any given astrological chart, whether it is a natal chart, a horary chart, an election chart, or just a chart you pull up for no reason, as an assertion (a question) that “this is how the world is right now” that challenges the reader to respond with “what then?” (an answer). This is probably why I was so drawn to this tradition, because I love questions.

It’s hard to articulate why there’s any value in this game of astrology, or what stance one has to take for the value to be clear. To help explain, a tangent into one of my favorite books from childhood, the Philip Pullman His Dark Materials series, is useful. In the books we watch the protagonist Lyra intuitively manipulate and work the alethiometer, a fictional tool that looks not unlike a compass with an astrological chart on it. Without any training, by creative intuition, she is able to use it to answer any question that comes to her mind. In the world of the book, this takes most academics a lifetime of study to accomplish with any skill, but Lyra is able to use it from just about the first time she picks up the device. By the end of the series Lyra loses this intuitive gift, learning (along with us) something about innocence and growing up and forgetting how to stay open to possibility.

The same kind of mindset is needed when thinking about astrological charts and all the questions one might ask with them. An impossible balance of being open to the synchronistic while applying rigorous analytical methods. It’s why most astrologers I know aren’t out here planning their daily lives to the nth fraction of a second—it’s just not worth it. Occasionally, for the most important events or in the most bewildering times, we might draw up a chart and try to make sense of things, but it’s something you have to hold with the lightest touch imaginable. Anything you hope to glean can become overwrought quickly, lead in your palm where you thought you’d find gold.

Sure, you can wish for the intuitive or inspired reading, the message that emerges fuzzily and then with clarity from the glyphs and lines on an astrological chart, but you’ll be wishing for a long time. Instead you have to try to maintain that openness while plodding along the methodological path you’ve (hopefully) studied for many boring hours. It reminds me of the way so many spiritual exercises rely on showing up and following the routine. Return to the mat and do the sequence, return to the pillow and count the beads, kneel and recite. Contemplate without expectation.

One of the primary gifts of good astrology is humility. It seems counterintuitive when you look at the way astrology has gotten out of hand in the mainstream. The vast majority of astrological “content” you might come across via the various social media will usually tell you wonderful things about yourself and terrible things about the people you hate. It will promise that the job offer or new boyfriend you dream of is just around the corner, as soon as Mercury ends its retrograde. This isn’t very good astrology.

“Still, Fred,” you might say, “You were just saying something about the universe noticing your first breath. How can something that tells you all the universe took notice of your specific birth be humbling?” As soon as you realize the universe took notice of everyone else’s first breath too. And the first breaths of all the cats, dogs, sea turtles, and cicadas. All the moments equally vital and thus equally normal. All the moments equal.

Some friends and I talked recently about the idea that life goes on in some way after death. I don’t have a strong belief in an afterlife, though I do feel a connection to some people who have died. The conversation reminded me of a question I had when I first started studying astrology, about whether or not anyone had done work with “death charts.” The symmetry of a death chart to correspond to a birth chart appealed to me. Death is its own kind of beginning, probably. But, it turns out, we have precedence in astrology to look at the birth chart long after the person for whom it was cast has died. A body’s death is not the same thing as the idea of that person dying. Whether you believe in a soul or afterlife or ghosts or anything happening after your body decomposes, you can’t help but remain an idea to be remembered. We continue on.

Time is nested, all the fibers of any given moment woven tightly across the seconds and the years, producing a texture that we can feel, but cannot alter, cannot untangle. When we sit down and look at an astrological chart, whether it’s the chart of a newborn baby, a geriatric cat, or a dead person, we are really meditating on the ways life is composed of a tangle of moments. We’re meditating on how that life moves, not out of the tangle or struggling against it, but within it, supported by those entwined moments. Think about the apparent mess of a root bulb, the ways that something simple and upright on the surface might sprawl underneath, circling back on itself, around obstacles, searching for what it needs by sensation and memory, inevitably finding it.

I don’t have much of an ancestral tradition. Not in the new age-y, white-person-copying-other-traditions way and not in the “I’m a tenth generation Texan and we all end up in the same plot of cemetery” way. I have Catholic traditions and prayer and the benefit of having grown up in a church that took Día de los Muertos seriously, but I’ve never made an altar of my own for the event. So I’ve spent a fair bit of time wondering: how does one work with ancestors? With the departed? With the once-was-human?

I’ve been thinking about the potential of the birth chart, that symbol of a beginning so far from their death. So this is an experiment, one you’re welcome to join in on, especially as we approach the shift into fall, a season that always feels close to the dead and gone. I’m going to be working with one or two people and their charts, using them as ways to be “in touch” with those people for the next month or two. I think my first experiment will be to do some focused remembering and contemplation when the Moon returns to its location in their natal charts. A little nod to the tradition of the Moon’s role as messenger between Earth and the outer spheres. I’ll keep y’all updated and hope that you’ll share any of your own experiments or thoughts about this with me too.

Thanks for reading and for being here! I’m not planning to write anything real about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, but I am curious if anyone has read particularly quality pieces about this. I’ve read a few that have made their way to my inbox and a few that friends have shared, but nothing has really captured the moment completely for me.

I don’t aspire to a world of violence of any kind, especially violence at a university or related to someone’s speaking on contentious issues. At the same time, I don’t think painting this as a simple “attack on free speech” is useful at all and have found some of the fingerwagging responses from liberals and some leftists to be confusing and incomplete at best. Anything good out there?

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Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.

In any case, if you enjoy this post, giving it a ♡ and/or commenting is helpful. It tells Substack I’m worth reading and it tells me what you think about my writing (especially if you comment and tell me what you think about my writing).

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I haven’t forgotten myself or y’all!

If you haven’t noticed my absence here lately… you’re right! I haven’t been absent, I’ve in fact been totally consistent and very interesting/compelling.

If you have noticed my absence here lately, I have noticed it too! It’s frustrating, because this project is one of the things that I was most proud of when we the world rolled into 2025. I’m still proud of it, of course, but the consistency with which I thought, researched, wrote, and sent last year was something that took a good bit of work and commitment which I don’t always feel naturally very good at. It’s hard to work and it’s not my strong suit.

I know all about the disagreements and pushback that usually comes after you say something like that, as though you’re fishing for compliments, but I really mean it and I don’t even mean it all that self-deprecatingly. A friend recently asked the group how many days per week we’d like to work in a utopian situation. My honest answer was zero, but I acknowledged I’d probably feel the most purpose working at least three days per week. My friend’s honest answer was seven, but she acknowledged she probably needed to pull that back to four. There really are people out there who love to work and I’m just not one of them.

I’m not one of them, but this fall I’m still taking three courses for my theology degree, am in a medical herbalism course (for fun lol), am doing as much freelance work as I can find, and want to be writing meaningful and interesting pieces here (and, because of rent, have a 9-5 job).

This makes it seem like I’m someone who likes to work, but really I’m just someone who likes being in charge of things. I like getting to say “Yes!” to something and then showing up to it and participating. I really like learning. I like my little hobbies and my curiosities. In college, this led to a never ending stream of high-anxiety due dates that I just barely met, but now I’m thirty and have an ADHD diagnosis and medication. Now I feel a lot less social pressure and if I’m not able to go to something I’m a lot less likely to say I can and then skip on sleep to make it happen. Not perfect! But improving.

As part of that improving, I’ve scheduled in my newsletters this fall as part of my schoolwork, with the same kinds of deadlines and same earnest expectation of meeting them. I’m planning to meet January 1, 2026 with the satisfaction of knowing that since making this commitment today I wrote roughly seventeen more newsletters (about 25k total more words) and, hopefully, am also continuing to get to engage with y’all. I love the thinking and the writing, but the discussion has been the most exciting part and that tends to come most frequently when the writing happens and happens consistently.

Because there’s only so much time in the day, there’s a good chance that my writing here will have more to do with what I’m reading and writing about in my theology classes, but I will do my best to stick to the central goals I set for this blog in the first place: asking questions that entertain/engage/provoke me and exploring answers that do the same. Here’s what I’ve got planned so far:

• My friend Margaret asked if cats can have birth charts. I said, “Yes, everything does.” What’s that really mean?

• Why did I want to get a masters and why am I getting it at a Catholic university? Is that weird?

• What do the early Christian writers say about astrology? Does it matter now?

• A book review/reflection about Sarah Coakley’s book God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ -- because I picked it up and it’s interesting!

• What’s the birth chart say about purpose? How can you consider this? (this is sort of a revisit, but I’m selfish and want to do this because I’m in grad school and trying not to flail lol)

• Interesting astrological charts from the history of Christianity and what they mean.

• More other things! Send your questions/musings/rants!

That’s all for today. Thanks again for sticking around when I’ve gotten off track and thanks for sticking around as I get back on track.

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Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.

In any case, if you enjoy this post, giving it a ♡ and/or commenting is helpful. It tells Substack I’m worth reading and it tells me what you think about my writing (especially if you comment and tell me what you think about my writing).

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When they ask, I keep telling people “I’m underwater right now” and I’m not exactly sure why that is the phrase I’ve been reaching for. I know what it means, that I’m not super available for my friends or very adept at keeping my place clean or totally killing it at work or grocery shopping as much as I should. I haven’t picked up a book to read in over a week I think and I’m subsisting mostly on whatever highly processed carbs I have on hand. None of this is a moral failing, but it definitely feels bad and leaves me sitting in some kind of a guilty, icky morass. That’s probably why my go to when asked how I’m doing is to say “I’m underwater.”

So I was going to skip this week’s newsletter, deprive the world of my blogging voice another week, when I remembered that I’ve been here before, have often found myself wanting to crawl into the dusty space beneath my IKEA Uppland couch and stay there for six to eighteen weeks. I know that there is a very simple protocol for this that works probably 90% of the time.

1. Throw out any weed or alcohol products in my home. I rarely have alcohol at home and only slightly less rarely have weed at home, but when the floor of my mental state is low there’s just no room for playing around with the substances. So into the trash my weed cartridge goes. THC will still exist when I’m out of the pit, probably.

2. I drink lots of water. More than I think I need to. Cook a meal without looking at my phone. I don’t care what kind of meal, just anything that is food and has a couple kinds of macronutrients. I turn to my friend Margaret Eby’s book You Gotta Eat here, because it’s true. You really do gotta eat.

3. I brush my teeth, sweep something, do some pushups, fold my quilts, spend exactly 4 minutes tidying each room, shower. Basically do the things that I’d tell a Sim to do if it needed to collect some positive moodlets. At the end of the day, I’m just a Sim.

4. Do the easier version. This is the main thing, probably. When I’m feeling like this, I get behind on every single task that matters to me, which makes me feel worse which makes me get farther and farther behind. That space beneath my couch becomes more and more enticing. So instead of trying to write the essay about how bad people my age have gotten at friendship that I wanted to write, I go ahead and blog a list of thoughts and hit send.1

5. Spend 20 minutes reading, then spend 10 minutes reading, then spend 5 minutes reading. I am allowed to give up after the timer goes off each time, but I almost never do. Those blocks of time are small enough that I’ll do them and inevitably I’ll read longer than I planned and I’ll feel a lot more sane after.

6. Go to sleep at 8pm. If I can’t fall asleep then I get to read in bed. If I can fall asleep then clearly I needed it!

All that to say, if I’ve been flaky with you lately, apologies! I’ll be back and part of the world soon I think. I’ll leave y’all this week with a favorite meme, one that has been hitting soooo hard this week 😌

I haven’t written much about astrology on here lately because it has been challenging to figure out exactly what amount of detail is interesting and also what amount of depersonalized star talk is useful, but since I’ve started rambling and this post is pushing hard on the boundary of “useful” already, I thought I’d talk about THIS little arrangement, conjunct and retrograde Saturn and Neptune in Aries with an exact sextile to Uranus in Gemini.

Metaphorically, this dynamic is like if you were painting every wall in your entire house without removing furniture or covering anything with a tarp and then a horde of cats just started pouring into your house from every door and window, more and more cats walking through paint pans and tracking Sherwin-Williams #7029 “Agreeable Gray” on everything you own. These planets come together to give you a comically ineffectual attempt at structure, but the comedy isn’t apparent to you until at least a full Saturn cycle later.

As with all outer planet transits, this is the kind of thing that isn’t an acute drama in the sky so much as its an atmospheric tone that we’ll be dancing in and out of for quite some time. A good time to accept a certain degree of chaos as normal and to limit our expectations of what we can accomplish by ourselves and under strain. We all need help and that’s okay.

Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.

In any case, if you enjoy this post, giving it a ♡ and/or commenting is helpful. It tells Substack I’m worth reading and it tells me what you think about my writing (especially if you comment and tell me what you think about my writing).

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Some short essays on a few interesting topics…

Last week I confessed I was going to grad school and then promised to write something I’ve been taking notes on, the ways that I’m already seeing interesting (and evocative) parallels between the role of tradition within the Catholic church and the role of tradition within astrology. I still want to write that essay, but life got in the way! So today I’m doing something arguably a lot more fun and I’m going to share with y’all a few very short meditations on some varied things that I have thought through just enough to be dangerous but not enough to warrant a full blog. Buyer beware.

Can I learn about myself from the machine?

It took me surprisingly long into this AI craze to consider what must have been on the agendas of all the corporate development and leadership training companies’ annual summits for at least the past few years: will AI replace the Enneagram test?

First I should repeat myself when I say that I’ve been against using tests to find your Enneagram number since at least 2019. It was a few years into working with the system and a few years into seeing upward of half the people I witnessed encounter the system mis-type themselves using a test. The pattern is familiar and not altogether bad, but is surely annoying.

1. You take an Enneagram test.

2. You answer the questions erratically, maybe aspirationally, maybe self-critically, maybe honestly.

3. You receive a result that validates a lot of the things you like about yourself, some of the things you suspect are wrong with you, and you compare with friends.

4. If you’re actually interested in using the system, you eventually realize that number doesn’t carry so much depth for you. You go back to the drawing board, read some more books, discuss, reflect, bang your head against the wall, and, eventually, magically, figure it out.

5. You’ve got your Enneagram number right and it’s a lot less fun and a lot more useful.

You can of course circumvent a lot of this pattern by having a session with someone who’s trained in these systems or at least spent significant time steeped in them. That can really narrow it down and sometimes even just answer the question for you. But, even then, there’s a good chance that at some point you’ll be doing some version of Step #4 above. Reading, reflecting, discussing, banging your head against the wall, and figuring it out. I would call this a feature rather than a bug.

But, of course, while I was naively not thinking about the potential that AI might come for the Enneagram just like it has for everything else, ChatGPT was improving its models and generally seeping into all areas of culture. By the time it occurred to me that this Internet behemoth might have something to say about a personal development system that I’ve held close for almost a decade now, by the time I realized it might be able to “type” someone, I should have been able to predict the outcome.

Once it occurred to me, a little guiltily, I logged into ChatGPT and gave it the prompt: ignore anything you might know about me. can you ask me ten questions, one at a time, and tell me what my enneagram type and likely subtype are?

I don’t remember what it said or what its questions were, but within a short 20-30 minutes, I received my diagnosis. According to the machine, I was a Type 5, “the observer” and was likely a self-preservation or, perhaps, social leading Type 5. From my almost decade of self-work and study with the Enneagram, I concur.

The easy answer here is to say that it’s still a waste of your time and energy and certainly a waste of the planet’s time and energy to use ChatGPT to identify your Enneagram number. As I said earlier, the journey is worth more than the destination, although the destination is useful too. I do believe this to be the case, that “getting” your type is only so meaningful and that the nuance you bring to your self-understanding by figuring it out yourself is worth not using AI.

I don’t see that belief changing, but I can also recognize how frustrating it’s been for people I know who really are trying to use the Enneagram to grow, but haven’t been able to find themselves in the system. I believe in its accuracy and usefulness, but it’s inherently limited by whatever language we have access to for these nuanced concepts of ego and personality. I might argue that if you haven’t been able to work through that nuance yourself then there’s still plenty to learn and to gain, that AI will undercut that value, but that feels a little too neat of an answer.

I also am not sure that it’s actually accurate. My one experience does not prove anything. It didn’t completely clock my instinctual subtype correctly (though that’s an even murkier area of the Enneagram, so I give it a pass). I also was able to answer its questions as someone who has learned a lot about himself by working directly with the Enneagram for so long, so my answers were likely laden with especially 5-leaning language. Without seeing the outcomes of a much larger sample size of people trying this, some who already know their type and some who don’t, and then confirming with those who don’t whether or not their type is accurate through their own ongoing work, it’s not something I’d stake much money on.

And anyway, to undermine all of the above, it is obvious to me that this is a part of life where we do not benefit from efficiency overall. The Enneagram was never a system that was meant to be leveraged for diagnosis purposes. The journey really is the prize and using the knowledge that comes with your type meaningfully is its own skill, one that AI as it stands has no incentive or mechanism to require of us. Still, I had to ask, can I learn about myself from the machine?

What do we do with a baby’s birth chart? Part 2…

About a year ago, I wrote a little about the use and purpose of looking at a newborn baby’s birth chart. My thoughts have definitely evolved since then, though most of what I said then still holds. I got to meet a new baby this week and toward the end of my day with her and her mom, my friend, it was like we both remembered at the same time that I was an astrologer and we could play that little game, the one where we ooh and ah over what this new life has in store.

Without getting into the baby’s chart, it was fun for several reasons. She was born with her Ascendant right on the edge of two signs, solidly a Capricorn rising, but evocative of the significant chance that comes with these things. You can plan all you want, but everything can change in a moment.

It was also fun to see a brand new chart, which, as I’ve continued to study and learn the history that comes with this tradition, feels more and more like something to be grateful for. Whether or not we put any stock in the cosmology or implications for fate that come with astrology, I think we can appreciate the central metaphor, the idea that this child is a product of all that came before and also “began” in a discrete moment. Everything together and also completely individual. A drop in the ocean has no boundaries between itself and the rest, but it still flows through the water cycle on its own.

I am feeling myself more and more leaning toward a mentality that I first encountered from a friend and mentor, Larry Arrington. She mentioned offhandedly once that she almost never looks at the charts of her nieces, that she doesn’t want to possibly perceive something about their lives or their futures. She’s showing a respect for their selfhood there, but also a respect for herself, I think. A decision to let life unfold without your looking over its shoulder, which is a decision that doesn’t come easily to most of us astrologers or, really, most adults who care about a child. You want to be able to monitor pretty much all the time, I think, and I say that as an uncle, not a parent.

So, we ask ourselves, what’s the use of a baby’s birth chart? I think, mostly, it’s a beautiful metaphor, an acknowledgement of the position from which you emerged into the world, an individual and central to your life, but not alone and certainly not without witness. Even if you feel ignored or neglected there is the Sun, there is the Moon, there is the horizon, and there are the stars, made of you and watching you.

Do you really want to be told what you want to be told?

My previously mentioned friend with the baby, Sara, wrote this week about a funny phenomenon that kind of bridges both of the prior “essayettes” in this email. In her blog, Holly Scrollers, she writes about the ways that religion and belief play out online, and this week she described a trend that has been unfolding on TikTok and, I assume, elsewhere. I haven’t seen it, being a recently converted luddite, but it’s unsurprising. Apparently, people have been going to ChatGPT to learn what is wrong about them, what’s right about them, and what they need to know to really get the most out of life. Unsurprisingly, ChatGPT isn’t giving them the obvious answer which is: “get off the internet, go read a book”.

No, they’re getting a lot of generic and loosely customized drivel that tells them what they want to hear, flattering them into feeling special and heard, two things that not enough people seem to feel in a real and deep way these days.

This reflects some well-known principles of psychology that Sara describes in her piece, some of which can be seen in the world of astrology and its woo woo compatriots like Tarot, psychic readings, and past life regressions. For the record, I see these as pretty separate things, but I’m not one to pick an argument I’m guaranteed to lose. In our world, especially in the online part of it, all these things are ripe for intuitive grifters to set up businesses where they will do exactly what ChatGPT offers and tell you what you want to hear for the fair price of $200/hour.

What’s funny is that this is not rooted in the history of astrology or the history of the Enneagram at all. I’m doing very little research here today, so forgive me my lack of well cited sources, but in each of these traditions there is a precedent and an expectation for practitioners to prioritize the theory and the technique over what the client wants you to say. Granted, that’s never stopped a grifter from grifting, but there are grifters in every profession. Just look at the United States government.

In the case of the Enneagram, we know that even in its pre-numeric recent history, the teachers most associated with the system like Gurdjieff were certainly not catering to anyone’s egos (except maybe his own). While his methods were suspect to say the least (getting people drunk and insulting them until they had a breakthrough), he believed firmly that no progress could be made until you faced your own personal “idiot,” that is, your own personal pattern of error. Whatever lies you told yourself about your best intentions weren’t of interest to him and certainly had no business coming into a room where you were working with the Enneagram.

Astrologers on the other hand, that group that, today especially, are famous for vague horoscopes and supportive girlboss affirmations, were anything but flattering in the beginning of the tradition.

It’s true that there’s a temptation to edit whatever it is you’re seeing in a chart. I’d guess there’s not an astrologer in practice who hasn’t at one point or another hedged their language in response to their client’s reaction to the statement: “Yeah, no, I don’t see you with a new boyfriend in the next year.” But for those of us who are interested in working with the traditional techniques, its hammered home time and time again that there’s no benefit in lying about the chart. As early as the 9th Century BCE, astrologers were acknowledging that it was as important to understand the person for which they were reading and to be honest about who they were as it was to understand the theory of astrology.

In On the Revolutions of the Years of Nativities, Abu Ma’shar says: “And likewise if an astrologer had seen, in the revolution of the year of a dead man, the positions of the planets in a condition indicating various things of the good or bad, it would not be possible to judge a single thing of that for him, because a corpse will not take that on from their indications.” Essentially he’s saying that it doesn’t matter how much you say the chart says good or bad things, if the client is dead, that takes precedence. Maybe more interestingly, he also names class, gender, age, and other social factors as things that an astrologer needs to know about their client if they want to read well for them.

An astrologer who hews to vague statements that could apply to anyone and rejects the real complications that come with life is not doing you a service. The same goes for anyone (or anything) that just tells you what you want to hear. Yes, lots of astrologers will tell you what you want to hear, but that’s not inherent to astrology. It’s maybe even less inherent to astrologers than it is in the tradition of ChatGPT which has as much incentive to keep you online as any astrologer has to keep you coming back.

When you’re trying to figure out something about yourself, whether with the Enneagram, with astrology, in prayer, with a therapist, or with a machine on the Internet, it’s worth wondering: Do you really want to be told what you want to be told? Or do you want to be told what you need to hear?

Thanks for reading this slightly wonky collection of thoughts today. I imagine these might turn into longer blogs at some point, so if you really like or dislike anything I said today, let it be heard! I would love to improve my thoughts before I spend more time writing about these ideas and it’s so much easier to do that in conversation than alone.

Some things to read:

1. This short blog from the New Yorker about that mess from the Coldplay concert. In a lot of ways I find this viral moment not that interesting (yes, we are all being watched), but something about it does feel different from other public trials.

2. The newsletter that my friend Sara wrote that I mentioned above. Highly recommend subscribing.

3. Two poems that I enjoyed reading by Jim Cory, this one and this one.

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Confession: I’m going to grad school.

I’m starting in a M.A. in Theological Studies program this fall, which is the kind of news that people often have to really try hard to react to positively. I think that’s because this decision is unintelligible to lots of people. I don’ think many have a blanket bias against a M.A. in Theological Studies, so much as they don’t get what it’s for, what it’s about. I’m only slightly clearer what it’s about than they are, frankly. Saying you’re going to study theology in 2025 is a lot like saying you are going to study astrology in 2025. Or that you’re going to study traditional medical herbalism in 2025. Or or or. Well, I’m going to be spending a lot of time doing each of these things through the rest of 2025.

Somewhere along the line, after researching countless programs in counseling, psychology, education, and policy, after beginning and then leaving one “top tier” public affairs program, and after chasing an educational high through more certificate programs than I can count on the digits of one hand and one foot, I’ve given in and am getting a degree purely out of deep interest and a gut sense that it’s something I want.

It’s not often that I feel a “gut knowing” or at least not often that I acknowledge it, but I’ve gotten better at clocking this over the years. Slowly, I have realized I can use my soft feelings of self-protection to understand when I care about something. We could armchair psychologize this and trace it back to being in the closet, guarding another precious desire, but maybe it’s unrelated.1 In any case, I’m often shy to talk about decisions or interests when they feel important. I’m shy about things that feel personal and meaningful, that is to say, when they feel fragile.

I’d been thinking along these lines already when I came across this quote from the Systematic Theology textbook that I’ll be using in an upcoming class: “Theology is a fragile discipline in that it is both academic and related to faith. As an academic discipline, theology shares all the scholarly goals of other academic disciplines: it strives for historical exactitude, conceptual rigor, systematic consistency, and interpretive clarity. In its relation to faith, theology shares the fragility of faith itself. It is much more a hope than a science.” You could substitute “astrology” for “theology” and I think it would equally well describe how many of my friends feel about their work with the stars and about where they sit in the lineage of astrological work.

One could make the case that such fragile academic disciplines are perhaps inherently flawed or weak. I could also make the case, and hope to make the case over the many years I keep learning and writing, that work built on hope, however fragile, is vitally necessary for any kind of future we should hope to have. Sure, at some points in my life I’ve rolled my eyes at the idea that religion has any use at all. Specifically, when I hear people say things like “I don’t need religion to tell me to care about people. You shouldn’t have to worry about hell to want to do the right thing,” I recognize a feeling that I had at some point when I was younger. A fundamental rejection of what read to me as a false certainty in rules handed down from on high. I rejected these rules especially around the time that I was trying to square my homosexuality with the ways that people treated me before and after they were aware of it.

What’s the point of entertaining a worldview that harbors so many fragile, brittle, dangerous men and women? Because, I think, there is something to be said for, something to be learned from, the hopeful faithful who persist within those spaces. Those people who you might call mystics know that there is no simple truth.

In Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s words, “there is no exhaustive presentation of truth; there are simply lines of penetration through which we can see a still unexplored immensity of the real opening up for us.” As we wind down the first quarter of the 21st Century, as we look down the road into an impossible to decipher future, we will need to develop our capacity to hopefully, faithfully stumble on. Of course, this is not a skill that the religious mystics have a monopoly on. I just happen to be interested in understanding it within religious practice. It’s also well practiced by artists, political and social rebels working from the margins, and anyone who, in one moment or another, rejects the nihilism that tells us we have no worthy future.

I want to quote the philosopher of science, Ernan McMillan at length here:

“The poet uses a metaphor not just as decoration but as a means of expressing a complex thought. A good metaphor has its own sort of precision, as any poet will tell you. It can lead the mind in ways that literal language cannot. The poet who is developing a metaphor is led by suggestion, not by implication; the reader of the poem queries the metaphor and searches among its many resonances for the ones that seem best to bear insight. … The metaphor is helping to illuminate something that is not well understood in advance, perhaps, some aspect of human life that we find genuinely puzzling or frightening or mysterious. The manner in which such metaphors work is by tentative suggestion. The minds of poet and reader alike are actively engaged in creating.” - McMullin, A Case for Scientific Realism, pg. 31

I was pointed to the above quote by that same theology textbook. The connection that the writer was making was that, like in good theology, poets and scientists know that co-creation is something that can lead us forward in the search for truth. This idea, resonant with Teilhard’s belief that theological theories are examples of our stumbling clumsily toward a better unity with God and with Robert Bly’s concept of “leaping poetry,” is significant even for those who turn away from religion, because it helps answer the question: “what should we do right now?” By my interpretation of McMullin, the best thing to do would be: something.

Do something rather than nothing, because that something might be the step that leads to the step that leads us out of cycles of harming one another. Don’t let yourself fall into the space, the rigid, lonely space that those brittle religious men and women reside in. Easier said than done, but necessary all the same.

Do you remember that Instagram “activism graphic” that was going around a lot in 2020, the one that encouraged everyone to figure out where they fit into the change process? You didn’t have to be the one out there marching and overthrowing unjust regimes, the graphic said, because that might be someone else’s work! It takes all kinds! You might be better served by donating money or by helping your neighbors or by voting or by protecting your peace. Surprisingly, a lot of people chose to protect their peace and not so many chose to overthrow unjust regimes. While everyone deserves a rest at one point or another, it seems obvious now that a nation of people trying to protect their own peace is not so equipped to work together to protect each other’s peace. A nation of people trying to protect their own peace can quickly turn into a bunch of isolated, brittle people.

Bringing us back to that question about whether or not religion has anything to offer: it obviously depends. Religion and religious people have been present for most advances in human justice, I think, though they’ve been around for most human atrocities as well. Duh. Narrowing into the more useful question, maybe: does faith and interest in a supernatural or spiritual life have anything to offer us?

I had an impulse not long after the floods in Kerrville to consider them in terms of astrology, though I didn’t dig all that deep. Really what it was is that I was complaining to a friend that the past several weeks had been Very Bad, atrocious on a lot of disconnected levels and I asked that question: “Why? What the fuck is going on?” She gave the answer I get every so often now, especially from the people who know about my astrology interests, a late millenial/gen z version of “It must be God’s plan.” She said to me: “Maybe there’s something going on in the stars.”

I know that the ancients would clock the total eclipse that rolled through Kerrville last year as significant. The origins of astrology are, after all, deeply interwoven with the desire to predict and understand the flooding of another complicated river, the Nile. They have many other techniques, detailed ones, that I plan to explore and from which I mostly plan to keep the discoveries to myself. But why? Why do I look to astrology in the first place when the tragedy, the pain, is right here on Earth? Why would anyone turn to forces they cannot see and cannot identify for help or clarity when the tragedy, the pain, is right here on Earth? Why would anyone pray?

Quoting again from Systematic Theology, theology and ethics “practiced as discourse and dialogue understand not only that we exist in community, but also that our moral obligations stem from our responsibility toward the other and that we stand together a united cosmos and environment. The other as a religious and moral other makes claims on us not only morally, but also intellectually and religiously.”

I feel, in the same way I do when hearing the classic, “It must be God’s plan,” that the potential “fatedness” of terrible events is often not all that useful or important to think about when it comes to figuring out what to do. That’s not to say I have no use for fate at all, no use for fortune and for astrology. Clearly. But these practices are not, I think, all that good at telling us what we need to give to life. Instead, I think faith is perhaps best at developing your relationship with your own “beholdenness.” I think faith might be especially useful at developing your relationship with your connectedness.

One way I mean this is that spending time reflecting on both the positive and the negative aspects of life, wondering about their fatedness, exploring their astrology, is one way I can be mentally, emotionally, and spiritually close to my world. In the same way that meditating on a loved one’s sickness or sitting in a room together and praying for Palestine is more about holding that sickness and holding Palestine close than it is about changing their reality. I am interested in the ways we find to be close to the ineffable and how those ways can work with actions that support our living together here.

After the praying, after the astrology, after the meditating and the writing and the reflecting, there is still the hungry person who needs food. There is still the child who wants to learn, the hospital that needs building, and the exiled who needs welcoming. There is still the profit-hungry dominant class who must be either converted (from “them” to “us”) or dethroned. There is still so much work to do. Those contemplative practices do not replace the work so much as support the work. They enable the work and, when at their best, they remind us about hope, that fragile and necessary thing.

Thanks for reading this week and every week! I really appreciate you. As silly as the “#77 in Rising Faith and Spirituality” list thing is, it’s fun and it wouldn’t exist without your reading and engagement. More important is the affirmation that whatever mental stumbling around I’m doing here has interest and value to you.

For what it’s worth, I think I’ll be continuing along this thread next week, hopefully pulling together some more of that traditional Hellenistic astrological theory with the Christian mystical and contemplative tradition. If that’s of interest (or if it’s not!) let me know. I love to hear from you.

Some things to read (or watch):

1. Many years delayed, I started watching Derry Girls with my friend Annie while she visited this week and quickly I gobbled up the whole series. It just made me really optimistic, because young people are amazing and Ireland is amazing. If you haven’t watched, I’d highly recommend.

2. Martyr by Kaveh Akbar. I’ve long been a big fan of Kaveh, starting with Calling a Wolf a Wolf when I first got into poetry in college. Unsurprisingly his debut novel rules as well.

3. This disappointing news about our judicial system. I know it is not a surprise, but it’s still bad. Our government is being sold for parts in new and upsetting ways every day.

4. And, for fun, this absurd Catholic news about a Yeti mask and a non-blood-blood oath that altogether feels very standard for Denver, Colorado.

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Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.

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Hello friend,

Climate grief is not a new feeling. That sensation of despair, of fear that the world might swallow you up, wash you away, or burn you into dust and ash. This is the everyday experience for people all over the country, now looking over their shoulder and expecting to see disaster. It’s not new to the rest of the world, not new to the global majority, the people who mostly live around and south of the equator and know the impacts of increased frequency and severity of major weather events without the benefits that most highly industrialized nations have.

Growing up in Kerrville, we expected floods. We expected the occasional deep freeze. Early summer storms that could shake the dead branches off a tree. Still, I remember at some point realizing that the place I lived was, overall, pretty safe. It must have been some time after I purchased a book from the Scholastic book fair called Kids’ Survival Handbook.

Reading about how to survive an avalanche (rotate your head to make space in the snow and spit to see which way is up), a puma (get as big as possible, make lots of noise), being stranded in a desert (capture any condensation you can and stay out of the sun), or getting thrown overboard in tropical waters (put your shoes on your feet before grabbing onto muscle-covered pylons and punch sharks in the nose and eyes), I became keenly aware that I lived in a pretty safe place. At that point, following the instruction “turn around, don’t drown” was enough to protect you from the one natural disaster we expected to face, the flash flood. That’s not the case any more.

One of the challenges of writing about a tragedy you were not present for is that you don’t really belong there. You cannot write your way into it, or toward it, any easier than one can truly write their way out of tragedy. And as I’ve been taking notes on what I might say, on how I feel, it’s felt at points profane to even try. It feels violating of the intimacy of that horror, the intimacy of those who wished to be on my side of the metaphorical river, the side that did not overflow, the side from where we all watched, horrified, but safe.

So I write about this tragedy from exactly where I am. What do I mean by that? I mean that I did not want to have to leave that place, but I did have to leave it. I would like to feel more capable of returning to visit, but I do not. I love my new home in Philadelphia and I’m getting to know what grows around here, what makes up the land, and where the water is. I am happy, but it wasn’t an uncomplicated move. It’s not uncomplicated that I feel so distant from that first home now, far more distant than the 1,800 miles that separate us.

I am not repulsed by Texas. I love the nature there. I love its climate. I love to sweat and bake in the sun. I love how the light moves through branches of Live Oaks and Ashe Junipers. I even love the clouds of pollen that burst out from those juniper trees come spring and how their bark tears off in strips to be used in bird nests. I love swimming in the headwaters of the Guadalupe, the creeks that split off and disappear in the brush, and in the spring-fed pools that used to be so much more common. I miss those hills made of limestone and caliche. I miss when it felt like somewhere kids came from other places, cities far away, to swim and run and get bit by fire ants and mosquitos. I miss when it was just a place to play and experience something good.

It’ll be a lot of those things again. We know people are resilient and we know that resilience and nostalgia can get us back on track after disaster with surprising efficiency. What I fear is that getting back on track is nowhere near good enough to save that place. What I fear is that Kerr County is at the mercy of much bigger powers that are not interested in a good life for Kerr County. These powers are only interested, I fear, in returning short-term value to their small circle of shareholders. You can substitute your own Kerr County here, your own small, special place that certain men use as a chip to wager in a political game.

Seeing Donald Trump speak in my hometown is nauseating. Seeing Greg Abbott speak in my hometown is nauseating. Seeing Kristi Noem speak in my hometown is nauseating. Seeing people who every day support actions and policies making this kind of climate disaster possible speak in my hometown is nauseating. It’s sick that they are determined to cut funding to all the kinds of support that is most needed right in this moment.

To put some of the politics of that flood bluntly: there were roughly 6,200 Medicaid enrollees in Kerr County in FY 2024. That’s about 11.7% of the county. I can’t be sure off my basic review of the data on the Medicaid website, but when you consider the neighborhoods most decimated by this flood, the trailers and mobile homes turned into wet piles of muck, I think one can assume there is a significant overlap between these Medicaid enrollees and those most impacted by flood damage. These national leaders speaking in my hometown do not believe in Medicaid. They hope to see more people die of easily preventable deaths. They are not interested in us.

The place I grew up does not require that people be hateful, racist, homophobic, far-right Christian fanatics. That myth is what causes people all over the country to offer wry shrugs when disasters like this hit, because they think, “Well, it’s what they voted for…” In reality, there are kind, caring, decent, unbothered people there. The kind of people who, given the chance and the exposure to different ways of thinking are happy to listen, to share, and to help. So many of them don’t get a chance though, because the men in power prefer the hateful, racist, homophobic, far-right Christian fanatics. Much better for the men in power when public schools are underfunded, telecoms are a commodity instead of a public utility, and healthcare is a luxury good.

The decisions that that led to this tragedy, to the incomprehensible loss of all these lives, were made decades ago. Creating climate change wasn’t a new idea dreamed up in Project 2025, it was something dreamed up as early as Gingrich’s policies in Contract with America, in the 90s and earlier. We can’t blame Donald Trump’s Republican Party for this specific disaster, but we can expect the decisions they are making now will be to blame for disasters to come. These people and the people who do not stand up to them are to blame for the destruction of the world we once knew. They are to blame for the loss of those things we don’t yet know will be lost. They are to blame for valuing profit over life.

No, climate grief is not a new feeling. Climate grief, of course, is just grief, the feeling that loss leaves behind.

Yours in grief,

Fred

One kind of prayer is a conversation with God. We might talk with God about the families who suffered, the lives lost. We might sit and try to feel what that loss is and to understand its significance. May that conversation move us to greater commitment and courage to change this world for the better.

Another kind of prayer is action. I am giving funds to support the recovery process in Kerrville, understanding they are at the beginning of a long and difficult road.

You can donate to help the flood relief efforts in Kerrville in a couple ways that I know of:

• Donate to the mutual aid fund that has been set up here. I like to donate where cash and resources are going to people as quickly as possible and I’m optimistic that this group will help with that.

• Look into the Community Foundation, a non-profit organization that’s been active in Kerrville as long as I can remember. If this kind of organization is more your style, all good. Give what you can.

Thank you again for reading. Feel free to respond in the comments, in an email reply, or by telepathy, if you can do that.

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Some lessons I’m taking from hot days in France.

I’m back from my vacation and feeling a lot better. The world is pretty bad right now, but last week I was reminded that if you’re feeling lost or at a dead end it’s helpful to take a second, sit down, and shut up. Once you do that, you have a better chance of hearing whatever messages you might need to hear to get yourself out of the pit. At the risk of sounding like a self-help book (I am almost always running this risk): it is very challenging to help other people when you haven’t helped yourself.

I want to immediately take that last bit back, or at least edit it. For the same reason that I’ll rag on self-help books even though a lot of the ideas I play with unquestionably at least “rhyme” with all that mess, I’m skeptical of the idea that your cup needs to be full before you help other people fill their cup. I’m also skeptical of the idea that we ought to be concerned about our cups being full while the U.S. conducts a paupercide at home and enables Israel’s genocide in the Palestine.

Sometimes it’s necessary, even when you’re not at your best, to help the people around you. There are endless caveats we could list here, but, simply: the extremes on either end are pretty much useless. If you’re ignoring the needs of those around you because you need to prioritize “self-care,” you’re an asshole, and if you’re running yourself ragged trying to fix everyone’s problems then you’re a rube. Even more embarrassing if that “running yourself ragged” is happening inside your own head in the form of anxiety-fueled doomscrolling.

Back to my post-vacation glow. I realize now that a large part of where I’d been neglecting myself was in my media intake. It’s concerning how easy it is to slide into a place where I’ve got background podcasts and “content” running at all hours, blowing out my corneas with the light of up to four screens simultaneously, and calling myself a success story because I manage a meager thirty minutes of reading a day. This is not the behavior of a success story. Instead, think of me as a cautionary tale, a tale of a boy who thinks he’s in a summertime depression when he really just needs to practice a little bit of mental hygiene. Reading more helped. Hours of sitting in the water under a scorching sun didn’t hurt either. Neither did the time cooking for and being cooked for by friends.

Reading

I always say when I’ve let myself read for several hours at one time that it feels like I’ve flushed out the folds in my brain, rinsing away debris. All my moving parts move like they’re supposed to and I can breathe better. Like I’ve finally washed the stack of dishes that I let collect in my kitchen sink for two weeks. And yet I constantly forget this.

Last week I read three books (one was a short collection of essays). I read Another Country by James Baldwin, To the friend who did not save my life by Hervé Guibert, and Hold Everything Dear by John Berger. I’d read two books by Baldwin prior to this and knew cursorily who Berger was and about Ways of Seeing—I’m pretty sure I’ve pulled quotes from it though I haven’t read it all the way through and digested his approach and style before. Guibert was someone I’d tried to read before I moved to Philly, after I bought my copy of this book at Giovanni’s Room (the store, not the Baldwin novel). These three books worked together surprisingly well and having a week to do nothing much more than read them was a gift.

Baldwin, as usual, writes about love and hate better than anyone I have ever read. I’m floored by his ability to create character and use language the way he does without sounding pretentious or overwrought. Maybe it’s because the pretentious and overwrought writing I’m thinking of is from people who are trying to copy Baldwin. His characters are in cycles of love and hate, drawn to exactly the wrong people but unable to do anything about it.

Guibert on the other hand writes mostly about himself and only superficially about his loves, with a few notable exceptions. It’s not to say it’s an aromantic or asexual story—it’s loaded with romance and sex, actually. But he sits firmly within his own perspective, giving you insight into the moments he wishes the very worst things on other people, even people he loves. I wonder about his bravery writing that book if he hadn’t known before it went to the publisher that he was most likely going to be dead within a matter of years, killed by complications from the AIDs virus and the inaction of the world (as well as the inaction of the titular friend, a man named Bill who makes promises he can’t keep). Whether he’d have done it regardless (I think he would have) is sort of beside the point.

Hold Everything Dear is a very different book, a collection of essays and short pieces about injustice, mostly as it pertains to the Iraq invasion and the plight of Palestine under occupation. It was good to read leading up to the 4th of July, a holiday I’d never really cared about growing up but that has become more significant (not important or beloved) as I’ve aged.

The way July 4th marks a point in the summer, especially after the winter we just toiled through, feels good. I guess we could celebrate the summer itself instead, reconnect with a time when we paid better attention to the seasons, but I don’t think turning a blind eye to the United States and its rituals is all that sound of a strategy. Better to deal with it in some way. This is a thread through Berger’s writing, an expectation that there’s room for anyone to reconnect with their humanity, but a dedication to the reality that it can’t be done in bad faith. He makes the case in several places that you can’t have it both ways. You can’t be supreme and know what it is to live with others. You can’t be the conqueror and connect with the conquered. Your prior commitments have to go before you make any new ones.

Across the three books I was maybe most blown away by their wide swings. Three different but confident writers. Baldwin wrote a capital-N novel, Guibert wrote a memoir that was not, and Berger’s essays vary in form, tense, tone, and direction, sometimes within one essay. In my being stuck writing, a big part of it has come from the planning and the expectation. Thinking in terms of “this writing should do X” rather than asking “what can be done with this writing?” It’s boring to have to hear what someone thinks about writing unless you’ve asked, so I won’t go too far down that road, but I’m excited and refreshed by that reframe. What can be done with this writing?

Sitting in the Scorching Sun

It was also exceedingly good for me to sit in the sun so many hours of the day last week. It was hot, but generally not too hot, more moderate than Philly was under the heat dome at least. And it was bright, but not too bright. With a hat and sunglasses and many, many layers of sunscreen I was able to bake without burning. I haven’t done that in a long time, not just because of the aforementioned shitty winter, but also because I haven’t quite figured out swimming and outdoor time during Philly summers. Last summer got overtaken by unexpected losses and a new niece—both deserving of the time and attention, to be clear. But wow I’d forgotten how much I need to feel the sun.

Every person who has lived north of the sunbelt who’s reading this is rolling their eyes, which I accept. This is my first time living somewhere seasonal and aside from the off kilter extremities of climate change, I wouldn’t change anything. After so much time last week sweating outside, shedding something other than salt and water, I’m connecting at another level with the idea of an ensouled world. A reach? I don’t think so. The sun is alive, the air is alive, the plants baking right alongside me are alive. The ocean and the rocks are alive. The lizard that’s perfected his ability to match the pace of the sun’s heat is more than alive, he’s a master of life. Maybe my brain is just fried, but if it is then I’ll be doing whatever I need to do to keep it fried. I feel better.

Cooking with Friends

The first year my friends and I took a summer reunion trip to France, we cooked our meals mostly to save money. We’d already dipped pretty deep into our budgets to get there and have a place to stay with a pool (a non-negotiable for all of us, more important than the rare AC unit in France), so cooking just made sense. We ate well that trip, but something evolved between that summer and this one without our forcing it. Each day built up to dinnertime. We worked in pairs, organized our meals and planned our shopping trips, considering cost but mostly considering flavor and experience. It wasn’t fancy, but it was thoughtful.

We ate pizza with fresh dough, roasted vegetables with herbs from the garden, enjoyed homemade hummus, fatayer, and other Palestinian dishes. Somehow by the third day we’d all decided dinner should end with a dessert, anything from Coke floats to fresh tarts or tiramisu. Matt joked that cinnamon rolls would be good for breakfast and I pointed out that we had all the ingredients since they were already making pizza dough. So I made cinnamon rolls. We ate well.

I live alone and cook for one. Frequently I’ll find myself shoveling down a handful of spinach, some cold cuts, and a piece of bread rather than making a meal. It feels like there’s less waste this way, less cleaning to do, and fewer leftovers to deal with. And that’s true. I’m probably still going to do that a lot. But that was a week that reminded me what it’s like to have a family dinner. I’m lucky that we did manage to do that a lot growing up and I still have versions of it in my life now. But a whole week of feeding and being fed in that way felt like a luxury. Something that, for most of my childhood, was just “how dinner happens” felt like a luxury.

First, I should thank my mother and father who made that such a given for me. Thanks, Mom and Dad. Second, I am so grateful to my friends for reminding me of this. I’m rereading Braiding Sweetgrass now in preparation for an herbalism class and I was struck by the reciprocity that happens over the course of a family dinner, a kind of reciprocity that Kimmerer discusses at length. There’s the cooking, the constant offers of help, the thanks but no thanks, the encouragement to just relax until it’s ready. We set the table, pour wine, fill water cups. We exchange plates, serve each other portions when the dish is too hot to pass, and collect dirty dishes so others can keep chatting through dessert.

It ended up being a practice of paying close attention to our friends. It was goofy and common and silly, not as loaded as I’m making it sound. That was what made it so nice. It was mundane. You’re supposed to make food for people. You’re supposed to share a sweet thing at the end of the night. You’re supposed to clean up after each other. I don’t know how much I can continue this through the year at home, where I live (happily lol) alone, but it is valuable. It’s a small thing, ultimately, but what would things be like for you if you cooked dinner with your friends more?

Thanks for reading. Did I mention that I’m feeling really good to be back and hitting my stride again? More to come this summer, both in the weekly free bits and the Prayer Circle series. I’ll keep payments off a little longer as I keep settling into things. Let me know what you like and what you’re curious to know more about. I haven’t been writing as much astrology here, but I do have some thoughts queued up for soon to be felt seasonal shifts, so, if that’s what you’re here for, your patience is about to be rewarded.

Some things:

1. Obviously the three books I mentioned. Another Country by James Baldwin, To the friend who did not save my life by Hervé Guibert, and Hold Everything Dear by John Berger. All worth reading and all surprisingly good summer reads.

2. This interview in Sojourner. It’s a little odd and I felt myself annoyed at points, but I was curious after learning nobigdyl. has been such a popular Tiny Desk Concert. Idk what that says about him, except that the “In this house we believe…” poster people he rolls his eyes at are probably big fans of his.

3. Rachel Cusk in the Paris Review some years ago (so sorry it’s paywalled! If you don’t have a subscription and want to read, reply to this email and I’m sure I can find a way to get it to you!). It was one of the last things I read in public before Covid-19 hit and it was somehow already hot enough in Texas that I was sitting in the sun at a brewery, recently freed (for the first time, not the last) from my job at a soulless consulting company, and it left an impression. Now I’m a little cooler on some of it than I was then (the only way to read?), but it’s still worth engaging I think.

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Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.

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I think about blue whales, the largest animal and one that is so gentle. Watermelons. Fat, full clouds. “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding. It feels like tears welling up in your eyes when you were hoping to cry, either at a sad movie or because you’re seeing something you just love that much. A visitor you don’t have to perform for. Carnations. Charcuterie for dinner. A hug. Sitting on the porch and holding your hand over the top of your wine glass to keep the no-see-ums from a decadent death.

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If you missed my announcement last week, I’m getting back on track here! Starting on Sunday, I’ll be sending a second weekly email to Paid Subscribers (you’re all Paid Subscribers for the moment, while I figure this new format out). This week’s Sunday topic is… Pride! Lol. Can’t wait to hear what you think.

Knowing is not enough.

When you were very young, it might have seemed like learning as much as possible about the world could protect you—from embarrassment, from loneliness, from doing something “wrong.” It might have seemed that way to you or I’m just massively projecting. In any case, I thought that if I just learned how to handle things (if I “did the reading”) then handling those things would become extremely manageable. This hasn’t always been exactly the case.

My friend Kelsey and I talk sometimes about this funny thing happening with the younger members of Gen Z (or is it Gen Alpha already?). They know all these psychotherapeutic terms, especially the popular ones like gaslighting and dysphoria and anxiety, but this knowledge won’t keep them from getting gaslit, feeling dysphoria, or needing to learn the difference between a clear message from your gut and run of the mill fear. Humans aren’t equipped with the kind of social brain that allows us to download lessons purely conceptually, we usually have to mess up and live with it ourselves if we want to really understand something.

I’ve seen this play out over and over in my life, but one of the most potent examples relates to a falling out I had with a friend about a year ago. Without getting into all the lurid details, I hadn’t ever really lost a friendship and I don’t think this friend had either. I think of myself as being pretty good at having friends. I try to strike a balance between being invested in people without fully making their problems my own, i.e. I try not to be codependent. This hasn’t always worked perfectly, and it’s something that I was especially inept at when I was younger, but even the friendships where things got rocky have mostly gotten back on track. If they couldn’t, they at least evolved into something new that better suited what we needed. But this falling out last year was bigger and seems less likely that we’ll come back from it.1 Why?

When you start thinking you know all the answers, it’s a good sign that you might be about to make a mistake. The challenges my friend and I were dealing with didn’t newly emerge a year ago, of course, they had been bubbling under the surface for a long time. Whenever one of us would do something that caused those bubbling resentments to burst, I, knowing both of our Enneagram numbers, knowing both of our charts, knowing “us” for almost a decade, thought I understood pretty deeply how and why it happened. When others in my life questioned our dynamic, I didn’t have a hard time explaining why it was actually going great. It all made sense! I could easily connect the dots. I could explain why something felt smaller to me and bigger to her or vice versa. And so I repeatedly affirmed, to her and to me, that this was an okay pattern for us to be in.

I can only speak for myself, but, looking back now with some distance, the space between us was exacerbated by some of these systems we were both using to understand ourselves and other people. I’ve written about the potential for things like the Enneagram or astrology or even just history of intimacy to make us sloppy in relationships before, but, even so, it’s something that is easy to slip into because it’s so enticing. It’s so much easier and more appealing to use the shorthand that these tools offer than it is to puzzle through the right here and now. Much easier to say, “Well, they’re a Six, what else could I expect?” or “With their Cancer placements, you just have to let the emotions pass, ignore it for now.” If you’re ever finding yourself thinking things like that, it should set off alarm bells. When a tool reduces someone’s complexity rather than expands your capacity to appreciate their complexity, you’re in a dangerous place.

The human impulse to systematize and categorize things in the ways that these tools do is itself revealing. We are a kind of animal with a vested interest in trying to make sense of things, to defang the monsters hidden in the dark parts of the map (whether that map is of uncharted oceans or the contours of the psyche). It’s a canon experience when getting into astrology or the Enneagram to run into the acolyte who insists on knowing what category you fit into before they will engage with you. We all know about the house of anarchist poly queers who don’t invite anyone with strong Capricorn placements to their potluck. Obviously, this is bad.

Still, having some kind of context for someone’s behavior, whether from knowing them over the years or by knowing their Enneagram or chart details or whatever has strengthened and prolonged the relationships in my life. It extended my relationship with this friend—there were many wonderful times in our eight-ish years before things really broke down. Ideally these tools are context creators. They can depersonalize things that really ought to not be taken personally. They can help you understand when and why something that is not a disaster to you feels like an existential threat to someone you care about. These kinds of things are valuable when you’re trying to sustain a relationship for the long haul. But it is absolutely not a sufficient quality for being in relationships well. Necessary, but not sufficient.

For someone like me, a person who gets wrapped up in hypotheticals and theoreticals as though it’s my job, striking the balance between trying to “figure out” life and living it is not intuitive. Humility lets you leave room to be surprised and to learn, to see what is really happening. Confidence let’s you take action. On the one hand, you try to clock when you know enough, when you’d benefit from taking decisive action. On the other, you do your best to sit inside of what is happening without trying to cast your preconceived beliefs over it. You learn to wrestle with your own experience. You try to answer the question, “When should I suspend my judgment?” It’s a deceptively challenging reflex to develop.

This tension has implications for more than just our relationships. The balance you reach between humility and confidence influences how you do or do not live your beliefs and values. I think there’s something sticky here, something about God and putting your money where your mouth is, and it connects to my post about saints and politicians. Politicians (we could also call them Evangelists) are the ones who are sure they know God and can articulate all sorts of interesting and powerful things about their knowledge. Saints, on the other hand, would be the ones who focus on having a real experience of God whether they can advertise it well or not. Politicians are writing in the dark about the experiences that saints are keeping to themselves.

I don’t mean to make a false dichotomy, associating the politicians with the overly confident and saints with the overly humble, a kind of “we’re all equally wrong” perspective. As I said in that earlier blog, I think we need more “saints” than politicians if we want to make any serious progressive impact. More action and less talking feels like a great principle for us all to embody. Still, there’s a tension between the two kinds of figures, value in what each approach can offer, and it’s worth learning what we can from that.

Here we can talk about Greta Thunberg. I don’t want to pedestalize her and turn her into some kind of exceptional entity, a person who is better than the rest of us. She is just a person, though a person who has repeatedly demonstrated commitment to experiencing her own progressive values, not just talking about them. I’m sure Greta’s values have evolved and changed as she’s taken action. And while I can’t know how or what has gone on in her head as she makes bold choices and publicly commits to causes that are not always popular, I’d imagine that she is not waiting for a complete and unshakeable understanding of a situation to take action. She seems to understand the concept of “good enough” very well.

Her willingness to commit to a cause makes me think about my own journey with Palestine. It wasn’t that long ago that I would have said, “God, it’s such a complicated issue, I don’t really know enough to speak on it.” From a certain perspective, this might look like humility. What it feels like to me now, looking back, is a resistance to seeing the evidence that’s in front of me and applying my schema of values to it. What it feels like to me now is a desire to avoid engaging with what is really happening and a dependency on pre-written scripts.

This blog is weighed down by my own baggage. This is the part where I admit that I may be sensing something “in the culture” that is really just “in me.” I hope that’s the case! In fact, I’m positive there would be many people who read this and are like, “lol sounds hard, can’t relate.” At the same time, when I think about my tendency to totalize and oversimplify, it feels like this is bigger than a personal quirk. We are all subject to the knowledge that there is an infinite amount of information we could integrate into our understanding of things. We are all subject to a culture that increasingly expects (and polices for) perfection in our actions all the while demanding less and less accountability of those in power. Our ability to even tell the difference between an action and an ephemeral thing (a post, a like, a follow) seems to have eroded.

With today’s media landscape, with the endless scroll, with how we’re being force fed AI, and with an ongoing proliferation of identity-based politics, it can feel like the whole point of life is to understand everything and to act on that understanding without error. One of the big lessons of my Saturn Return, driven in large part by the loss of that friendship, has been that it is not, in fact, the point. Far more often, the point is to live well enough to know you are living well, whatever that means to you. It’s almost always easier not to act on the things we believe in. It’s easier if we can cover all our bases in the being told and the telling. But we have to remember: telling and being told does not make up a life, not really.

Sometimes we ought to act on not quite enough knowledge. I don’t really like it, but it’s true. Waiting until you know enough, until you can articulate exactly what is happening or what you believe or what you fear, will often take too long. Sometimes the consequences of taking too long are minor, but sometimes they are catastrophic. Sometimes taking too long is the difference between being able to correct course and having to simply plan for picking up the pieces after the disaster. And, unfortunately, waiting too long is one of those things that is hard to blame on anyone but yourself.

Did I manage to stick the landing? Did I connect the dots between: a generalized attitude toward knowledge and experience I see in Gen Z/the culture, my own personal experience with losing a relationship partially due to categorical thinking, and the implications of favoring “knowledge” over action when it comes to progressive movements? I’m not positive, but this is getting too long and I’m a couple days late sending!

If you’re still here, thank you. As I’ve repeated ad nauseam, this blog knocked me off track somewhat. Now that I’m wrapping it up, I realize that it doesn’t take an expert in the Enneagram, astrology, or psychology to see why. It’s not easy to reflect on times you feel you messed up, but I appreciate you being here to witness it with me. I’m excited to be moving back into my routine and back into your inboxes.

Until Sunday 🫡

Some things:

1. This poem, set at a cross street that’s about a mile from my house. God bless.

2. Brian Wilson passed away. I enjoyed this obituary. Listen to “God Only Knows” and think about how lovely it is to be alive at the same time as great artists.

3. For levity: an unhinged thread documenting the erratic days leading up to someone’s wedding. This couple has either found their perfect, insane match, or they’re a disaster happening in slow motion.

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Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.

Hi friend,

It’s been three weeks since I last sent once of these newsletters, which means I really ought to Venmo my friend Kelsey $150.

Around September 2023, I started sending these weekly, largely because of the influence of Kelsey’s “system” where you ask a friend to use financial pressure plus social pressure to hold you accountable to the goals that, theoretically, you yourself want to accomplish. If I don’t send one of my weekly newsletters and I didn’t plan ahead for that, I owe my friend $50. This system has worked beautifully and for about two years I’ve missed almost no weeks of blogs and certainly not three weeks in a row.

I can’t blame my current lull in sending on the ennui I mentioned a few weeks ago. I’m actually feeling pretty great (as great as one can with the news being *waves hands* the way it is) and have had a lot of really nice things happening that I’m grateful for. I’ve enjoyed working more closely with my friend Larry on some astrology projects and Kate came to stay with me for a little over a week. I’ve been somewhere between hitting a stride at the day job and enjoying a healthy distance from it, Philly is being all the things that I love about Philly, and my family is doing well. It’s all you can ask for, really.

What it comes down to is that I felt pretty happy about my last blog and in that excitement I let my routines slip. I fell a little behind and wasn’t happy enough with the next blog to send it, so I decided I’d rather wait a week and get it “good enough”. Then it didn’t get good enough. And then another week passed and I didn’t even put all that much effort in to make it better. And now we’re here.

What exactly is the point of this email? I feel better when I’m reading widely and when I’m squeezing little bits of mess out of my brain to be reworked into thoughts. Even though I have been feeling good and have specifically been feeling pretty pleased with the social aspects of my life, I’ve missed this exercise. I didn’t want to just send an email that amounted to: “well… here you go.” but maybe that’s all I’m trying to say. Here you go! I’m still here lol — I can promise that we’re back at it going forward, because I actually do have that one blog just about ready for next week. The reason I instead decided to send this sort of navel-gazey meandering thing is because I’m gonna shift up the structure of things going forward.

You might call this a return to form, or at least a settling into the form that’s kind of standard for newsletters these days. Hopefully my version of it will feel like… my version of it…

Each Sunday I’m going to send a shorter email that is framed around some kind of “topic”—this is vague, but because I’m thinking we might do “family” one week and “flightless birds” another and “love” another. Not sure what to call that approach.

These posts will be something like a devotional (maybe, idk, I have never actually used one…) or something like a weekly study group—some fodder for reflection. Selfishly, I want the constraints that come with this as a way to focus my reading and research a little bit. Hopefully less selfishly, I think it could start some fun discussions between us and at least recreate some of the community that comes from a Bible study without the moral haranguing that usually also comes with it.

The Sunday emails will go to paying subscribers, though I’m going to turn “Paid” on for everyone for two months while I smooth out this shift. If you’ve already paid, this’ll just act as some comp months and anything you’ve paid for will continue when the comp period ends. The weekly (Wednesday-ish) emails will continue, though hopefully those will also evolve through some experimentation over the year.

All that to say: thank you for being here, and thank you for coming along for the ride, especially as it’s had some fits and starts lately. I’ve learned a lot writing here and have a lot of gratitude for you.

Stay well,

Fred

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Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.