Category Archives: Spirituality + Invisible World

Feeling the hard feelings

I’ve been taking another whack at breaking down my phone/media addiction lately. I’m rarely without a book or a podcast or a show on in the background or a video game to play or several all at once.

I think I’ve managed to cut it down to one at a time, at least, and I’m rebuilding my old ability to endure silence and practice stillness. I’ve gone on long walks in silence—no headphones, no reading while I walk—and from time to time managed patches of time without a phone or screen in reach, just reading or journaling or sitting and thinking.

And I’m starting to see why I avoid it. There’s a looming sadness that I hadn’t let myself notice. I think I’m happy on the surface and happy at my core, but there are thick strata of loneliness and failure and existential dread in the middle, and I’m glad I’ve stopped ignoring them.

It’s not easy, but it feels healthy to sit quietly and just think and feel whatever I think and feel. I have an intuition that all the bad feelings will be in there until I feel them, and it may take a while to get through it all, but at least now I’m making progress instead of continuing to hide it.

Part of it is the huge changes in the world and closer to home over the last few years—politics and pandemic and the resulting loss of close community and regular feasts with friends. I’m coming to recognize that I miss life as it was, and while my life is good and will likely get better, it won’t go back to how it was.

Part of it is the inevitable reckoning as I approach 40 and see how far I have yet to go to realize my dreams and mission. I realize for all my thinking and talking about books, it’s been forever since I published one of my own. Years in, my program of writing courses has reached thousands and helped many but not broken even. I fear my publishing company may be holding my authors back as much as it helps them. My kids are growing up, and as much time as I spend with them, I’m not sure it’s enough.

And finally, part of it is a growing awareness that I don’t know how to get where I’m going. Our efforts to buy a homestead for rich hospitality seem stymied by the market. I can’t crack the nut of how to get my businesses properly profitable for me and my authors. I’ve got at least eight books burning and burning inside me, and yet I face powerful avoidance every time I sit down to write.

I’m finding I deeply crave a less individualistic culture, where I’m surrounded by traditions and supports, where there are apprenticeships and communal Sabbaths and norms of hospitality and known prayers to pray. It seems I’m tired of making all this up as I go.

I’m not going to try to wrap this all up with too tidy a bow—it’s real sadness and I’m really feeling it, and I’m still in the middle of it—but three things help.

One is that, while there are difficult realities there, I know my read on them and the resulting emotions fluctuate, and I’m pretty sure I’m just in a downswing right now. I’ve been here before, and it does get better.

Second, I’m finding this is undercutting my confidence in planning and effort. I’ve had it up to about here with planning and effort, and I’m increasingly ready to slow down, listen, find the heart of God, and do the one right next thing that is needed instead of all the scattershot things I can think of in hopes that one of them works. That seems like a healthy direction.

Third, and strongest, is that I don’t ultimately depend on any of this going right. I desperately want it to, but if it all falls apart, I’m still with God, already and forever.

If space isn’t empty

I’m reading Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky and hit a great connection with Perelandra.

Both of them build a great sense that space isn’t empty.

It flips my defaults in a way I love.

Reading Perelandra left me with a profound sense of the rich fullness of the cosmos, the space between the worlds swamped in life-giving energy, Earth tucked away in a quiet little pocket cut off (or shielded?) from the blinding overflow.

Shards of Earth takes the idea of the void that stares back and pretty brilliantly literalizes it. When you travel through un-space (which allows interstellar travel), you find yourself completely, utterly, chillingly alone.

And then, even worse, you find you’re not alone.

It’s cthonic and eerie, shades of Cthulhu, gigantic unknowable presence(s?) in the deep.

As I’ve soaked in the two effects together, it all feels very Genesis 1.

The chaotic deep, far older than time and space.

The ancient Spirit of God hovering.

The “and there was light.”

Reading: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis

I recently re-read the Space Trilogy (aka Cosmic Trilogy) by C. S. Lewis, consisting of Out of the Silent PlanetPerelandra, and That Hideous Strength.

My rather vague memories of my last reading some years back consisted mainly of the following.

  • Out of the Silent Planet is notable for its coherent sci-fi account of a world in which there are multiple intelligent alien species, all ruled by the Christian God, and yet Jesus still incarnated as a human on Earth, not any of the other intelligent species on other planets.
  • Perelandra is a deep exploration of the temptation of Eve (though in the book it’s a parallel situation Lewis specifically distinguishes from Eve’s temptation on Earth). What I found most notable was how much groundwork the tempter has to lay before the idea of disobedience is even a concept she can conceive enough to discuss and consider it.
  • That Hideous Strength — Beyond the rather brilliant concept of ‘macrobes’ (a humanist/scientific term for newly-theorized organisms that are, in the end, just demons), I mainly remember this as containing some of the downright creepiest scenes I’ve ever read. I hate horror and some of the final scenes were honestly too much for me back when I read them. It’s extremely skillful—Lewis’s insight into the nature of evil is on masterful display as those who have given themselves over to pride, anti-truth, lust for power, etc. experience their endgame—but this is a subject where the mastery makes it even harder to take. I was determined (and curious) to revisit those half-remembered scenes on this re-read, but I was definitely reading the book like a kid watching a scary movie between his fingers.

Some highlights on this read-through:

  • Out of the Silent Planet I was impressed with how thoroughly Lewis “humanized” (person-ized?) the aliens, to the extent that the human antagonists start feeling alien—certainly monstrous—when they come back on the scene. Also sets up a solid start to what you might call the hyper-objectivity the eldila and oyeresu (analogous to or maybe synonymous with ruling angelic powers) carry with them. Every time they appear, there’s a strong sense of a deeper reality that casts an unflinching light on the humans’ perceptions and narratives, and fundamentally and inescapably reframes the situation.
  • Perelandra — One thing that stood out this time was the way Lewis highlights the strange reality that individual callings matter. I was deeply struck by the scene(s) where Ransom wrestles with the absurdity of the fact that he, just a regular guy, has been chosen to battle the tempter in this new Eden. On the one hand it feels inevitable to him that he must win by some kind of divine intervention, because how could something this big actually depend on his puny efforts? On the other hand, he has to face with mounting dread the reality that maybe he is the divine intervention, and if he doesn’t step up and win the struggle, it won’t be won. It’s a stark reality to sit with, and reminded me sharply of an article I love called Shut Up and Do The Impossible.
  • That Hideous Strength — The scary scenes at the end are still highly disturbing, but didn’t hit me quite as hard this time around. What surprised me, though, was how much creepier I found the whole book. The insidious (and ultimately demonic) organization NICE is so freaking unsettling. Maybe at this point in my life I’m more attuned to the subtler threats of toxic bureaucracy and organizational maneuvering. It’s amazing how incisive Lewis is in this portrayal. Every single person in NICE, each in their own distinct way, continuously offloads responsibility while fighting for status and undercutting everyone around them, including their allies. Logres, the small band of  people resisting NICE, is exactly the opposite. The members are just as distinct, but they’re each willing in their own ways to question their own motives, trust one another’s, and take on sacrificial risks. It was particularly striking how NICE members are perpetually keeping things vague and subtextual, while their make things more specific. It’s a masterful study of authority handled rightly and wrongly. Authority is a subject near to my heart, but I’ll have to write about that one another time.

Some thoughts on prayer and if/when/why it works

My interaction with God has been a little anemic lately. On reflection, I’m finding some patterns that are probably at the root of this. Here’s what most of my conversation with God looks like lately:

  • vague spontaneous thanks for generally nice things
  • vague spontaneous requests for fairly specific (but unlikely) last-minute interventions, without much expectation or follow-up
  • vague requests for insight or guidance or help, without much time spent waiting/watching/listening for an answer
  • most critically, a tendency to ask for things that will get me out of having to care or engage

Now that I’m starting to pay attention, I’m remembering what I’ve learned in the past. God seems much more responsive, and more consciously present to me, when my communication with him is basically the opposite of those patterns. Specifically, I want to get back to communication with God that is:

  • Specific, not vague. My rule of thumb on this one: if God does what I’m asking, will I be able to tell? Similarly, when thanking God, I find it helpful to try to thank him for something I’ve never thanked him for before (even if it’s just a new phrasing/angle on a longstanding gratitude).
  • Intentional, not (just) spontaneous. Spontaneous is actually great, but it needs to be built on a history of real, focused communication. I tried this today by setting aside some time to talk with God about my to-do list, outstanding projects, daughters, wife, friends, and a few other issues that came to mind in the process. It was pretty abbreviated in form, but I’m already feeling the difference between proactively asking for God’s help with the things I care about and randomly winging a prayer his way if something looks like it’s about to go south.
  • Listening, not just asking. When I think about it, it’s so dumb when I ask God for guidance and then pay zero attention to what happens next. I’m trying to start acting like I think he might respond if I ask him something, and pause for a moment to see if I experience any noteworthy shifts in my attention and desires, new thoughts or ideas, or a new gut sense of what’s the wise or foolish way to proceed.
  • Willing to engage with pain, discomfort, effort, and sacrifice. This is the huge one. I typically haven’t been a fan of the aphorism that God helps those who help themselves (which, as far as I can tell, has no discernible connection to most actual Christian theology). That said, I’m realizing that there’s a profound difference between asking God to help me enter into beneficial sacrificial effort and asking God to help me dodge it.

To expand that last one a little, I’m realizing that a lot-a-lot of the times I ask God to help, it’s basically me trying to get out of having to do anything. Please calm my girls down (so that I don’t have to get up from my dumb phone game). Please make sure that panhandler gets something to eat (so that I don’t have to, because I really don’t feel like making eye contact this time). That sort of thing.

But that’s contrary to the whole heart of what I believe God’s doing in the world. The entire point is that Jesus (who was showing us exactly what God is like and how he works) entered straight into the center of the messy, dangerous, painful, complicated guts of the broken world, depending fiercely on God to give him everything he needed to get through it. He was the one who entered so deeply into the pain and depended so fully on God that he made it straight through death and out the other side, blazing the trail for the rest of us.

So if I’m following Jesus on the trail he has blazed, I should be walking straight into the heart of the pain and complication, exactly where I won’t be able to handle it, asking as I go that God keep giving me the strength to dig deeper in, the love I need for the people I meet there, the provision they (and I) still need even after I’ve given the shirt off my back, the forgiveness that lets me unjustly take the blame and stay quiet, the peace I need to enter the chaos without freaking out and giving up.

In sum, I should only be asking God to show up if I’m willing to be the body he shows up in.


PS – There’s a risk, after that glorious crescendo of self-sacrifice, to feel like you should go out and give everything you own and save everyone you see and take up every cause immediately all the way on the spot. Going back to the “listening” point, I’ve found great balance to this urge in the practice of asking God which people/needs/causes I should be serving and caring about at any given moment.

This lets me take on the ones that he directs me to and freely not worry about the rest, trusting that other people also serve him and he knows what will be the best, most beautiful, and most freeing way for each of us to join him.