Tomorrow is the regular weekly column, this time on Travel as Spirituality.

A Couple of Random Notes

For those seeking alternatives to a Christianity rooted in male-dominated imagery and leadership, I came across this essay by Lanta Davis, The Witness of Women is Written on the Walls. The link should work and provide you with free access. If not, let me know, and I’ll send you a copy. Lanta is the author of a new book that suggests spiritual formation happens best in what we behold, view, contemplate, and imagine. Davis is part of a new movement to celebrate imagination as central to the faith.

New York City’s Holy Trinity Lutheran Church invited me to lead worship and deliver a message this past Sunday while Pastor Tim Weisseman was on vacation. I reflected on the theme of brokenness and drew on Kintsugi philosophy, which I have previously written about. Click here for the congregation’s online worship if you are interested. The congregation currently worships in their downstairs hall while a major renovation is underway upstairs.

Look, I’m on TV

Process Theologian, fellow fan of Jung, and friend, Sheri Kling, invited me to be on her podcast, The Sacred Everywhere. We have a relaxed conversation about all things spiritual, Carl Jung, and my new video series. Check it out if you like. Just click the photo below.

You can view our conversation here

You can follow her Substack

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But the Odyssey is not simply a single story about a man’s quest to return home; it is the story, the epic mythological quest of humanity. As Joseph Campbell reminded us in his Hero with a Thousand Faces and Maureen Murdock in The Heroine’s Journey, these ancient tales are foundational to our souls.

We can see the writings of Shakespeare, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Alice Walker through this paradigm. You could add the stories of Buddha, Moses, and Jesus to the list. The pattern of a call to adventure, the challenges along the way, reconciliation, and the return home with something new to offer is the human search for the soul.

During a recent whirlwind summer vacation tour of the New England states (plus Montreal), I stumbled upon another hero’s journey in a small town in Vermont. On the bookshelf at the Grafton Inn, I found a copy of Daisy Turner’s Kin: An African American Saga. Like Homer’s Odyssey, this story is rooted in oral tradition, this time told through the eyes of Daisy, a daughter recalling the epic of her parents’ and grandparents’ quest to find a home. Within this heavily researched and footnoted text lies an amazing tale that parallels, and at times rivals, The Odyssey.

The story begins off the coast of Africa in the early 1800s, when an English captain’s wife is the sole survivor of a shipwreck. Brought to shore and nursed back to health by women in a remote African village, she soon bears a son with a member of a royal tribal family. That son becomes an esteemed and learned figure, later deceived into boarding a slave-trading ship, where he navigates the seas aboard an aptly named boat, the Fenix (aka Phoenix). From there, he is sold into slavery and relocated to Virginia, where, in time, he is favored by his relatively benevolent master, marries a Cherokee woman, and together they raise a family. One of those sons rises like his father, eventually escapes from bondage, and joins the Union Army in the Civil War. In the postwar years, he, too, marries and raises a family, eventually moving to Grafton, Vermont, and overcoming racism through his intellect, physical prowess, and leadership skills. His name is Alec Turner, and in time, he becomes a beloved member of the Grafton community.

Daisy Turner, one of Alec’s daughters, narrates this tale, along with her own heroic adventures, such as being the first African American to file and win a court case in Massachusetts in the early 1900s. No small achievement as a black woman facing an all-white, all-male jury in 1927. Author and folklorist Jane Beck recorded multiple conversations with the 100-year-old Daisy, and followed up with research, DNA testing, and detailed fact-finding to authenticate this epic. The book is a bit cumbersome at times as the research details can get in the way of the story, but the central thread is the Odyssey for a new era.

My summary doesn’t do justice to this hero’s journey, which includes many delightful and harrowing encounters along the way, not unlike Odysseus. In some ways, it’s a kind of Forest Gump tale about the history of slavery, freedom, and human ingenuity. How this hasn’t been made into a movie or a Netflix series surprises me. Oprah, Jordan Peele, or Shonda Rhimes, are you reading this? There’s a movie waiting to be made.

Homer’s telling of the Odyssey is not simply a tale of a single man setting out on a quest, encountering obstacles, and returning home with newfound wisdom; it is our story. This pattern holds for the young boy or girl starting a new school year. They will encounter their own versions of the Cyclops, temptations, and shipwrecks. The return home after that year will leave them changed, for better or worse, or, more likely, a combination of both. This is also our life story through the years of youth, middle age, and seniority. Hopefully, we come to view this life as an epic tale connected to the other great stories of Homer, John Milton, Toni Morrison, or Gabriel García Márquez. And in our latter years, may we look back to see where we have come and the maturity we have gained by fighting those battles and learning from our own flaws and hubris.

Achieving this successfully demands both courage and humility. Currently, public role models demonstrating this balance are scarce, though a few notable individuals come to mind, like Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Tom Hanks, Oprah, and the late Mary Oliver. After recently attending a Brandi Carlile concert and starting her memoir, I feel inspired by how she poetically shares her personal journey with wisdom and honesty. Is she a representative of a new generation living into the hero’s journey?

We live in a culture where challenges seem like obstacles to be avoided. But the characters in all the great tales did not run from challenges; they went into them. Crosses were meant to be entered fully, only to emerge on the other side…changed. The number of times Christopher Nolan’s film presents a choice between running from the obstacle and going through it is uncanny, and, to me, it is the most significant aspect of the film. Odysseus errs along the way (as we all do) but prevails in the end and returns home because he faced the whirlpool, went down to Hades, and gave himself over to the open ocean. All these metaphorical challenges should remind us that whether your name is Alec Turner, James Hazelwood, or (fill in your name here), we are all on a quest. Arriving home might be the goal, but it is how we travel the journey that makes all the difference.

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is an author, photographer and storyteller. He lives in Rhode Island. www.jameshazelwoodphoto.com

This article could also have been titled, “Men and Friendship.”

I recently joined my merry prankster friends for our annual bike ride in Minnesota. We’ve known each other for 45 years.

Men and friendship are a good but rare thing.

This is a report from the field, not a complaint. I’ve watched it my whole adult life: men reach sixty with a resume, mortgage, tools in the shed, and no one to call at night. We had friends once, part of youth’s territory—dorms, jobs, leagues, army. But as we move through life, our focus shifts to work, and if we find friends there, well, great, but do those friends move beyond the job cycle?

In Minnesota, eight of us, in unflattering spandex, argued about the route. We met as college kids working at a church camp north of Los Angeles in the late 1970s. Now, we have aching backs, surgeries to discuss, and adult children. We ride, complain about the heat, eat big lunches, and around the third day, someone finally comes clean with a burden they’ve been carrying since we last met.

I used to think that last part was the spiritual one. The honest conversation on the side of the road. I’ve changed my mind. Bike riding isn’t just a container for a spirituality of friendship; it’s the whole of friendship that is spiritual.

Salt, and the People Who Remember Us

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses three types of friendship: utility (based on benefits), pleasure (based on enjoyment), and good (based on love for the person himself). This shows how seriously the ancients valued friendship. I covered this in my book Weird Wisdom for the Second Half of Life. However, I overlooked the most important point Aristotle makes: friends, he says, must first eat salt together. He means literally that sharing meals and time are required to truly know each other. Some translations say ‘consuming a bushel of salt,’ about a year’s worth of meals, before calling someone a friend.

Forty-five years is a good deal of salt.

He also says a friend is another self. Not a mirror, not an accessory, not a helpful resource. Another self. Aristotle thought a person could not see his own life clearly or contemplate his own actions from any useful distance, and that a friend solved this problem by standing where you cannot. You learn who you are by watching someone who is both you and not you live in front of you.

Sappho, centuries earlier, on an Aegean island, explored similar themes from a different perspective. Only fragments of her work have survived. In one fragment, she predicts someone will remember us across time. In another, she gently consoles a woman leaving by recounting their shared memories of the flowers, garlands, and soft beds—as if offering tangible mementos for her journey.

On the one hand, Aristotle says a friend lets you see yourself. On the other, Sappho says a friend carries you. If both are true, and I think they are, the friend is the one who holds the memories and experiences with you. When my memory of my own twenties goes awry, and it does, Mark or Kurt recall it as it is. When I misremember myself as braver than I was, Rick is right there with the correction, delivered with real affection and zero mercy.

The Third Rider

Centuries later, after these Greek thinkers, Aelred of Rievaulx served as abbot of an English monastery with several hundred monks. These monks had taken vows of silence and chastity, deliberately avoiding close attachments. The monastic tradition was cautious about friendships. Thomas à Kempis would later explicitly warn against forming particular bonds. He was concerned that favoring one brother over others could bring political complications into what was meant to be a monastic paradise.

Aelred went in an entirely different direction. His 12th-century book Spiritual Friendship opened with a picturesque scene of him sitting quietly with a companion. He says, in a Zen-like manner, “here we are, you and I, and Christ makes a third between us.”

A third. Not a supervisor, not a chaperone. A third friend in the room.

Later in the book, Aelred does something that could be quite heretical yet is wonderful today. He takes the famous line from the First Letter of John, God is love, and swaps a word. God is friendship.

The whole argument of the book rests on this phrase. Friendship is the very substance of God, showing up between two people who have known each other a long time.

Which means my Minnesota gang could be a gaggle of monks living out a vow of mutual friendship with that third rider pulling along in the middle of the pack.

Half, and Then the Whole

In the Buddhist tradition, we have something quite similar. There is a short exchange in the Pali canon in which Ananda, the Buddha’s cousin and ever-present companion, who is a bit of an enthusiast, comes to the Buddha with what he clearly believes is an excellent insight. He says: this admirable friendship, this companionship with good people, seems to be half of the holy life. The Buddha tells him no. “Do not say that, Ananda. Admirable friendship is not half of the holy life. It is the whole of it.”

The term in Pali is kalyana-mitta, the admirable or beautiful friend. It is a technical term in the tradition, not a sentimental one. The beautiful friend is the one whose company changes what you become and who you are.

Aelred says God is friendship. The Buddha says friendship is the holy life. Two distinct traditions, arriving at the same conclusion.

For years, I told people that friendship was a doorway into the spiritual life, that God could be found at picnics, tailgates, and ballgames. But I can now see that I was keeping God on one side of the door and my friends on the other.

Aelred pushes it further, God is friendship. The Buddha claims true friendship as the totality of the holy life. Aristotle and Sappho pushed friendship to a mutuality I had missed.

On one of our riding days in Minnesota, somewhere on a county road with the corn up on both sides, one of the guys pulled alongside me. We exchanged tales of lost and unfulfilled dreams along with the celebrations we’d experienced. We rode. He talked. We laughed. You could say, we were praying as we rode.

More to Come, (after vacation)

James Hazelwood is a writer and photographer living in New England.

Every summer, our grandsons spend a week at the day camp hosted by my wife’s congregation. This year, one of their projects focused on generosity. Each child decorated a jar with construction paper, markers, and enough glitter to coat half the house. Their assignment was to fill the jar with spare change during the week. On Friday, every coin would be collected in a kiddie-pool-sized offering plate to help feed hungry people in our community.

On Friday morning’s drive to camp, I decided to stir the pot.

“You know,” I said, “instead of giving all that money away, we could keep it. We could go get ice cream.”

I told myself I was creating a teachable moment, a brief Socratic conversation about generosity. But another part of me had already decided what flavor I wanted.

My youngest grandson didn’t hesitate.

“Opa, no! That’s for hungry people.”

“Besides,” the older one interjected, “we can get ice cream on our own.”

Kids these days!

We usually think of money as an object. Coins. Bills. Numbers on a bank statement. These are illusions that suggest a thing, when in fact money is not a noun. Money should be a verb. We don’t have money because it is currency. A word that comes from the Latin currere, meaning “to run,” as in A River Runs Through It. A currency is something that flows. The word evokes movement. Currency is on the move, like a stream.

Electricity is useful when it flows as a current. A battery stores energy, but nothing happens until a circuit is completed and current flows.

Money behaves in similar ways.

Money has potential, but its power lies in movement as it flows from customer to merchant or from donor to charity. Our entire economic system depends on countless invisible currents flowing through society. When those currents stop, economies slide into recession. The current is no longer flowing. Is this why we use terms like cash flow, income stream, and liquidity? Our financial vocabulary assumes movement.

This flow reminds us that money is really about connection.

And like electricity, we never actually see the current. We only witness its effects.

Most of us were taught that civilization began with barter, then coins, and eventually paper money and electronic banking. Anthropologist David Graeber argues that credit and social obligation came first. Long before people exchanged coins, they kept records of who owed what to whom. Money began not as a thing but as a relationship.

Coins appeared later. The first may have been struck in ancient Mesopotamia as far back as four thousand years ago, with standardized coins in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) by the seventh century BCE, and paper money emerging in China around a thousand years ago. In short order, people realized they could borrow or lend this currency to others, based on trust. This might be why the word credit evolved from its root, credo, meaning “I believe.” Ah, you might see where I’m going with this essay.

Credit has evolved from trade routes across Africa’s savannas to shipping across oceans to the modern computer transfer of vast sums of money. The typical American now carries a statement of their creditworthiness in a wallet or purse. My own bank, The Washington Trust Company, has a statement of faith in its very name.

Today, as physical cash gives way to credit cards, smartphones, and digital transfers, money is becoming increasingly abstract. Perhaps we are simply returning to where it began. For most of history, money has been built on trust, relationships, and shared agreements.

Which is another way of saying that money is symbolic.

A paycheck is never just a paycheck. It represents security, status, sacrifice, freedom, identity, or love. Learning what a coworker earns can evoke emotions beyond the number itself. Financial decisions are rarely just about math. They touch something much deeper.

“Money is a descendant of those things early peoples deemed treasure, mana, fetish, what was perceived to have magical or talismanic properties, or was suitable as an offering to the gods or God,” writes Kathleen Martin in The Book of Symbols (2018). Ancient coins often featured a god, goddess, or animal on one side. This practice evolved into depicting images of political rulers, for example, the Roman emperor Julius Caesar, who was thought to possess divine qualities.

We have not outgrown this. Even today, money seems to make things happen. It’s not the money itself but the mutually agreed-upon value it represents, whether that be an evening meal, a college education, or the construction of a new home. Psychologist James Hillman argued that money carries enormous psychological projections. In our soul’s treasury, he writes, are “deposits of mythical fantasies and imaginal possibilities” (James Hillman, Soul and Money, Spring Publ., 1982, 37).

Morgan Housel makes a similar observation from a different angle: each of us develops our understanding of money through our life experiences. Our financial habits are shaped less by spreadsheets than by childhood memories, family stories, periods of abundance, and moments of scarcity. (The Psychology of Money, Harriman House, 2020)

Have you ever heard the phrase, “It’s not about the money”? Hmmm, it usually is, but it’s also about more than money.

All of this ties back to my credo. Whether we like it or not, everyone has faith. By this, I mean we trust in the divine, the one that makes all things possible... yes, money. In the US, our currency bears the phrase “In God We Trust.” Am I alone in finding that interesting?

Jesus of Nazareth seems curious about money as well. Nearly half his parables address the topic. When asked about paying taxes, he responded, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” (Mark 12:17). He answered a question with a question, playing Aikido with those intent on trapping him, like a modern-day TV debate specialist. Elsewhere, he is considerably less diplomatic.

And then there is that scene in John’s gospel in which Jesus expresses righteous indignation at the economic injustice of the moneychangers.

Notice that none of this condemns money itself. Instead, there seems to be concern about direction or flow. Where is the current taking us now? Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Money reveals allegiance because it goes somewhere.

So, if money is a current, where does it flow?

Most of us direct it in four basic directions.

We save it.

We spend it.

We owe it.

And we give it.

Giving it away feels like a different flow. We’re not expecting anything in return. OK, maybe gratitude or a thank-you note. We give not for repayment but to foster relationships. Every offering, donation, and act of kindness shows money becoming something greater. Compassion, Well-being, Love.

My grandson wasn’t focused on his purchasing power. He saw hungry people. He’s never worried about a mortgage or bills. Perhaps with life experience, his anxiety about money may grow. But he might also learn to enjoy the ride on the current of generosity.

Money always flows. Hopefully, the currency moves in ways that generate life.

Here’s the link to this week’s video

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is an author and photographer living in Rhode Island.

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I looked at the calendar, my watch, checked the alignment of the evening stars, just to make sure. Thanks to the summer rains, the gardens at our house here in Rhode Island look like Springtime, not August. But, here we are, and here we are again with a monthly edition of Unfinished Thoughts for Paid Subscribers of the Notebooks Newsletter.

Age & Youth

Brandi Carlile is playing in our home these days. Her new album is filled with reflections on the human condition from loves lost to anthems of rebllion in these days of empire, along with those poetic imaginings that describe our lives as these dleigightful and messy challenges. For me her song, A War with Time, speaks to me. Not all of it, but this piece from the chorus:

I’m living in a war with time

I could still rеach out and touch you

And I wish I didn’t know the things I know

My own internal wanderings pull at the weight of time. James Hillman and others wrote about Age and Youth as the two forces of senex and puer. The wise old man and the exuberant youthful boy in tension or dialogue with the bitter, recalcitrant old man and the irresponsible, avoidant child. You can change the genders to fit your experience.

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“Brilliant, and true,” I thought.

First, the video I do have, you can view below. It’s my submission for a class on how to produce vertical videos for news organizations. Yes, I’m honing my journalistic skills. The video has nothing to do with spirituality, unless you consider recycling a spiritual practice. I’ll be back next week with a video that ties more directly to Everyday Spirituality

But the larger point Susan made rings true. Being a curious person, one who seeks to learn new things or how to improve old practices, is without a doubt an expression of everyday spirituality.

The school of developmental psychology, founded by Erik Erikson, presents a theory that humans move through a series of phases or stages of life by facing a series of identity crises at the meeting point of our inner selves and the surrounding culture. How we move through those phases is critical to our maturing as people.

Erikson’s development theory is based on the epigenetic principle that each stage occurs in sequence, with a tension to resolve before moving on. These moments of transition are pivotal. Obviously, no one does this perfectly, and the stages are more fluid in the lived experience than any chart can capture. But the basic idea is sound. We move forward cultivating hope and wisdom, while carrying the load of disappointments and conflicts.

You’ll note that learning, growth, wonder, and curiosity are essential throughout a person’s life. The alternative is stagnation and calcification. Just think about two hypothetical retirees. One concludes their time of paid employment, moves to a warm-weather state, and plays golf every day with their spouse. They choose not to interact with neighbors, eat the same foods they have for decades, watch the same TV programs, and never travel. In contrast, the other retiree moves to a new location, joins a bowling league with the goal of meeting new friends, volunteers at a local history museum as a docent, and travels annually to new places. Obviously, these are caricatures and overly simplistic, but you get the idea.

The eighth and final stage is Integrity versus Despair, where your “old grumpy person” truly resides. Erikson defined integrity as accepting one’s unique life cycle as something that had to be and cannot be replaced, a beautiful yet challenging idea. It involves making peace with missed opportunities, harm done and received, and life’s everyday chaos. Despair rejects that peace, showing through contempt, chronic complaints, bitterness toward the young, and the feeling that time has run out and nothing can be fixed. These two stages are closely linked because generativity provides a strong foundation for integrity. Those who spent their middle age caring for something beyond themselves leave a legacy beyond personal gain.

All of this is to point out that learning is a vehicle, maybe the vehicle for maturing as a human being. And in my mind, that leads to spiritual maturity and wisdom.

Be curious, my friends.

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James Hazelwood is a writer and photographer learning new things in this new phase of life. www.jameshazelwoodphoto.com

Step One - Idea Generation

This step is 100% human, meaning it’s me or me in conversation with another human. Typically, I ruminate on several topics I’m interested in exploring. I should note that at this stage I’m just interested in writing about what I want to write about, rather than considering what you want me to write about. Does that make sense? I’m past the stage in life where I feel a desire to impress people or become an influencer. My ideas emerge from what I’m reading, what I’m observing, the music I’m listening to, the conversations I’m having, and the flutter of the world around all of us. Of all the steps, this one is the most human, nuanced, and evasive.

Step Two - First Draft aka Scribbling Nonsense

I next move to a first draft. This is largely about letting the flow of ideas emerge. Sometimes this is on a keyboard, but more than half the time it’s pen and paper in a notebook. The sentences are whacky, weird, and incomplete, largely void of punctuation. I’m just trying to get ideas, concepts, topics, and names on paper. This stage forms the foundation of what will emerge. It’s 100% human process.

Step Three - Research

Here’s where I begin to make use of a variety of tools. Often, the first step is good old-fashioned books from my library, the Ocean State Library system, or online academic libraries. (Through my adjunct professor status, I have online access to research journals, periodicals, and texts.) Next, I move to the internet for more research. I’ll use a search engine to find articles, blogs, and other sources. If you want to count this as the beginning of my AI use, so note that. Why? Because AI makes the search engine work. Next, I move to the use of AI tools, specifically Claude and Duck.ai. Here, I ask questions like: Who has written about the intersection of Soren Kierkegaard and Carl Jung? or Give me a list of five resources exploring Christian contemplative thought and its impact on mental health. In other words, I’m using these AI tools to help me discover resources I may not know about. Another way I occasionally use AI is by asking for a summary of a long paper, like a dissertation.

Step Four - Serious Writing

Now I’m taking what I’ve learned and asking myself one question: “How does this apply to daily life, and how can I put it in plain English?” Hmmm, I guess that would be two questions. Then I start writing. I want to be clear. I’m writing. I’m not asking an AI engine to write sentences for me. Now, I will be honest and say I have found sentences from essays, articles, and summaries that I find compelling. I’ve have borrowed those sentences or the concepts from AI-generated text as the basis for something I will rewrite. If it’s an exact quote, I note the citation. On Substack, that’s often with a link to the source.

This writing stage is both fun and challenging. If you read the introduction to my Everyday Spirituality book, you’ll recall the haunting ghost of Mrs. McKinley, my 7th grade teacher. I loved writing as a kid, then bumped into 7th grade, and that soured me for, oh about 40 years. But, with lots of therapy and PBJ sandwiches, I conquered that cyclops. Writing continues to be a both/and process for me. It’s a love/hate experience. But, for some reason, I enjoy the ride.

Step Five - Editing

Once I’ve got a written piece, I begin the editing process. This involves rereading and rewriting. I use a tool called Grammarly. It’s AI-powered and helps me restructure sentences and correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation. ProwritingAid is used by many fiction writers. Grammarly tends to dominate non-fiction and has a big footprint in the business world. If you use a word processor, there is likely a version of this resource baked into the software. Then, of course, there is everyone’s favorite tool on their phones, namely autocorrect, which as my brother says, is reaking havoc in the world.

I will work through a piece several times, using both my eyes and the available grammar checks, before ending up with a final piece. I’m always aiming for something between 800 and 1500 words. Lately, I’ve been moving toward the shorter end of that spectrum as people’s attention spans shrink. Soon, I’ll just post a paragraph. :)

So there you have it. That’s my process. Now run this essay through Substack’s new AI detection filter and see what it says. What percentage is AI? Hmmm, 45%, 13%, 98%? Well, that’s intriguing, because I wrote this entire piece 100% myself, a bit as a way to test how the system works.

But, I also wrote this piece cause I wanted to achieve a few goals:

Is there AI slop out on the internet? You betcha! Can you tell what it looks like? Hmmm, often yes, but not always. Are the detection tools accurate? They can be but they can also make mistakes. Can you use AI in a self-corrosive way? Of course. Human beings are lazy, if we can find a way around a challenge, we will. We are also amazingly creative. I’m thinking of Star Trek and the Kobayashi Maru puzzle, that James Kirk solves by, well, was it cheating or creative strategy? WHich was it for you?

So there you have it. Now see you in the next essay, coming Wednesday.

James Hazelwood is a writer and photographer, living in Rhode Island.

Mud has been on my mind lately. It started when I read a slim book by Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, titled No Mud, No Lotus. If you’re unfamiliar, Thich Nhat Hanh was one of the most influential Buddhist teachers of the 20th century. He was a Buddhist monk exiled from Vietnam during the war, the founder of Plum Village in France, and an advocate for engaged Buddhism—an approach that actively addresses real-world suffering rather than remaining detached. His central metaphor in this book is simple: the lotus flower, celebrated in Buddhist art for its beauty and purity, doesn’t grow in clean water. It requires mud, decay, and darkness pressing around it before it seeks the light. His underlying message is that we can’t eliminate suffering and expect happiness to follow in the empty space. Suffering, he suggests, is the very soil in which growth occurs.

I made a short 6-minute video introducing the idea. Here it is.

Then, over dinner one night, as I described the No Mud No Lotus video I had been producing, my wife reminded me of a piece she had written on Kazoh Kitamori’s Theology of the Pain of God. Kitamori is a name you have probably never heard. He was a Japanese Lutheran theologian who, writing in 1946 in a country reduced to ash and grief after World War II and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, built an entire theology around a single verse in Jeremiah, in which God’s heart is described as being in pain over the ancient Hebrew people.

From that verse, Kitamori spins out a bold claim. The heart of the gospel, he says, is not that God swoops in to make our pain disappear. It’s that God himself suffers. The cross is not a magic trick that erases suffering from a distance. It is the place where God’s love and God’s wrath collide, producing something we can only call pain, God’s own pain, given for us.

As we look around our world and across the landscape of these times of war, economic dislocation, and attempts to undermine democracy, I confess that at times I feel the angst of it all. I wonder where this will lead. Clearly, we live in a time of pain, or at the very least a time of murky mud. I’m wondering how Kitamori and Nhat Hanh might help us. Both authors focus on the aftermath of war. Neither offers an easy solution nor a quick escape from suffering. Instead, both emphasize, in their own ways, that suffering isn’t an obstacle to healing; rather, it is the foundation from which healing arises.

Where they differ, I think, is where things get genuinely interesting. Thich Nhat Hanh needs no God to make his case. Suffering transforms through mindful attention, practice, and learning to sit with the mud without drowning in it or pretending it isn’t there. Kitamori, on the other hand, locates pain within God’s own heart. For him, redemption isn’t something we practice our way into. It’s something given to us by a deeply compassionate God who hurts. One tradition asks us to become skillful gardeners of our own suffering. The other tells us we have a gardener who suffers alongside us.

I don’t have this all figured out yet, not by a long shot. I’ll admit that some mornings I’ve sat and can’t decide whether I am a Buddhist, a Lutheran, or simply confused. But I have a hunch that somewhere between the mud that makes the lotus and the pain that lives in the heart of God, there is something true about how healing works.

So, this is an invitation, as much as anything.

Let’s go digging in the mud for clams or lotus flowers. Those are the gems where the interesting things are buried. I’m interested in your ideas, stories, and perspectives. You can reply to this email or post in the Substack app.

More to Come

I spent about 30 of the last 40 years in therapy with several Jungian analysts. Ha, reading that sentence makes me think of the book “We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy--And the World’s Getting Worse” By James Hillman

Sheesh, Jim, all that therapy and you still act confused.

I finally graduated about 3 years ago, but I’m thinking a restart might be in order.

Of all the conversations, dreams, and guided active imaginations, one brief exchange stands out above the rest. My analyst listened as I described a particularly challenging person in my life. After listening intently and asking a few questions, he said, “You know, Jim, most people are doing the best they can with what they have and who they are.”

Needless to say, this was not the therapeutic wisdom I expected. Yet he was right. More often than not, when I face dilemmas involving people, that little exchange comes to mind. Whether it’s a reminder to be compassionate and kind to others or a moment of grace to give myself a break, the wisdom in that exchange lingers.

At the heart of this series, revisiting Everyday Spirituality is the obvious truth that we are all human, and to be human is to be vulnerable and broken. Yes, there are other aspects of our existential condition, but brokenness sits at the center.

To get at this idea in a more tactile way, I undertook a brief practice, a hobby of the Japanese practice of Kintsugi, and I made a short video about it. See below or click here.

Kintsugi is a Japanese technique for mending broken pottery with lacquer (or epoxy) mixed with gold, silver, or platinum dust. Rather than hiding cracks, it highlights them as part of the object’s beauty. Originating in Japan in the late 15th century, the stories about its origins vary. One tale involves the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, who was displeased when a damaged tea bowl returned from China, repaired with unsightly metal staples. Japanese artisans supposedly developed a better method, turning the cracks into a feature rather than a flaw. Another story tells of a servant who accidentally dropped a teacup during a diplomatic tea ceremony. Before risking his life, he offered to repair it, returning with a gold-veined cup that appeared more beautiful because of its imperfections. Whether true or not, these stories illustrate why kintsugi has become a powerful metaphor for resilience: the break is not hidden but celebrated.

The philosophy behind it draws on wabi-sabi, the aesthetic that finds beauty in imperfection, transience, and age, and treats damage and repair as part of an object’s history rather than as flaws to be erased.

Another way to put it is that we find beauty in the brokenness. The Kintsugi technique does not merely repair but makes the cup or bowl even more beautiful than before the damage.

The theologian Makoto Fujimura suggests that this describes the human condition as the sacred moves to make a new creation of us. Drawing parallels with the Christ narratives, he suggests that honoring the brokenness makes it integral to the new creation. The new humanity, if you will, is whispered at the margins of our life experience. We move through our pain into a new place, a new way of being in the world.

Fujimura frames it like this: The Kintsugi maker (God) searches for broken pots, not to fix them, though mending is in order, but initially to behold their potential and admire their beauty. I find this a delightfully refreshing perspective on God, as one who seeks the broken pots out of a desire to behold their, our?, beauty.

We might think of this quote in more contemporary phrasing as accepting ourselves — our flaws, our darkness, our contradictions... that is the hardest thing a human being can do.

As the poet songwriter Leonard Cohen once said, the cracks are where the light shines through.

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is an author, photographer and storyteller. Like all of us, he’s a broken man hoping the beauty shines through anyway.

If you’d like more on Kintsugi check out this video as well.

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The storm brought much-needed rain to our parched, drought-stricken New England summer. Then, 24 hours later, we settled in for two days of wet weather, with 5 more inches. Temperatures dropped to 64. Last week, we sweltered in the mid-90s. “Even the weather is captured by the cultural complex of extremes,” I thought. (video below)

In classical depth psychology, a complex is a cluster of feelings and memories organized around a wound. It gets activated by a specific situation and hijacks your response before your better judgment can get a word in. You know you’ve touched a complex when you find yourself overreacting to a minor comment as though your life depended on it. The last time you lost your cool, well, that’s a complex bursting forth.

Thomas Singer and Samuel Kimbles took Carl Jung’s idea about individuals and asked what happens when we apply it to groups. Jung spent a career mapping the personal complex, that stubborn cluster of memory and emotion that hijacks a person’s behavior without asking permission first. Singer and Kimbles wondered if nations carry the same kind of luggage. They called the result a cultural complex, defined as an emotionally charged gathering of ideas and images that cluster around an archetypal core. In plain English: a cultural complex works the same way a personal one does, except the patient is an entire nation.

It has a history and old injuries that were never properly examined. Nobody set the country down for fifty years of Tuesday afternoons on a couch. So the wound just waits, like a splinter under the skin, until something touches it.

Watch what happens at a football game when a player kneels during the anthem. The reaction is almost never actually about the player’s knee. It is about a flag that has absorbed a century of unexamined feeling, war dead, and immigrant hope, and Jim Crow and Iwo Jima all folded into one piece of cloth, and when that cloth gets touched wrong, the response arrives before anyone has time to think. That is the complex talking, not the citizen. Singer and Kimbles would say the symbol has been activated. I would say it looks a lot like a man snapping at his wife over a dish left in the sink, when what he is really furious about runs deeper. Same wiring, bigger flag.

That is the trouble with a cultural complex. It does not ask you to think. It grabs you and beckons you to salute, or else.

That aspect of American civil religion baffles me. How can a symbol meant to signify “we are together” almost instantly become a message of “agree with me and hate the others”? This isn’t patriotism; it’s a complex emotional reaction. Singer’s entire effort has been to help us see that a country can be as unconscious and reactive as a person on a therapy couch.

Reinhold Niebuhr articulated a similar idea fifty years before Singer coined the term. In The Irony of American History, Niebuhr’s central point was that America was not uniquely evil; rather, the issue was almost the opposite. He argued that our greatest threat isn’t enemies but our belief in our innocence. A nation convinced of its inherent goodness might justify almost any action as virtuous. An unexamined wound doesn’t remain silent; it seeks someone to blame.

In stormy times, the whole task of life and faith is to discern which things deserve our devotion. For me, that’s not an uncritical process. Discerning who we are and who we have been as a nation is the ultimate act of patriotism. I’m struck by how we are increasingly moving into two camps. One heralds all the virtues of our 250 years, while the other sees only a horrific and brutal history. The truth is, we have been a heroic and inventive nation while simultaneously enslaving people and demonizing others. Both can be true. Both are true realities of the uniquely American experience.

Years ago, I faced a challenge in a congregation I served about the proper place for the US flag in worship. Many meetings were dominated by ideas, opinions, and mostly strong emotions. Members from different perspectives passionately shared their views on whether the flag should be in that space. At the time, I lacked the tools to grasp the underlying forces at play. Now, I recognize it as a manifestation of complex emotions triggered in people, almost as if they could not control themselves. That small debate offers a glimpse of the larger discussion still to come. If I had to revisit that experience, I’d lead the congregation through a more thoughtful approach centered around a spiritual trek into our individual and collective complexes.

In the storms of our current crisis of democracy, we are all circling a question. What to do with our own national unexamined grief? Yes, grief lies beneath this national identity. Like a parent who lost a child and never said goodbye, or a middle-aged worker experiencing the injustice of economic dislocation. Grief over losses of many kinds lies beneath our collective complex. There’s a blue and purple bruise hanging over it all.

We live in times when claiming any word can be fraught with discomfort or outrage. Patriotism and Christianity are two examples for me. These words can be tied to forces of cruelty and ignorance. But they are also connected to liberation and graciousness. Yes, there may have been times when embracing these words was easier, but those are not our current times. We live in a storm, and what’s required is to give those words new meaning.

The rain last Saturday night broke the drought. It also dropped the temperature by thirty degrees in a day, which felt less like relief than a small violence. That’s what a real storm does. It doesn’t ask permission, and it doesn’t clean up after itself.

We cannot simply opt out of patriotism, nor can we take an easy path with it. The goal isn’t to defend or dismiss the flag, but to reflect on it as you would an old wound, asking what it’s protecting and what it fears. This process is slower and less satisfying than choosing a side. But sorting through is what love actually asks of us, in a marriage and in a country. Some nights, it looks like standing in the rain with the person you married, soaked through, fireworks echoing around, and staying anyway.

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is a writer, photographer, and storyteller living in Rhode Island. This Substack is published weekly (mostly) on Wednesdays, and focuses on culture, politics, religion, and the inner lives that shape them.

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Unfinished thoughts will collect some random notes on projects and ideas, kind of behind the scenes in my brain. (A frightening prospect) I’ll include what I’m reading and watching as part of it. But mostly, I plan to collect shorter musings that don’t seem to fit into the now-weekly format of my Wednesday newsletter.

Feel free to upgrade to a paid subscription to support my work. I truly appreciate your generosity. The first edition is free to everyone…enjoy.

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Frederick Buechner turns 100

On July 11, the sage from Exeter, New Hampshire, would have turned 100. I submitted a short reflection for this milestone, and it’ll be included in the Buechner Review. I’ll let you see it first here:

When I was a seminary student, a friend casually handed me The Alphabet of Grace. I opened it and heard a voice I had never heard in the classroom. Here was a man writing about an ordinary morning of breakfast with children or the city street outside his window as if it were scripture. For Buechner, it was scripture. He was not explaining faith so much as noticing it. He paid attention to the world with a reverence I thought was reserved for ancient texts. The alphabet of grace, he insisted, was written everywhere, if you had eyes to see it. That was the window he opened for me, the window between everyday life and faith. He showed me that an ordinary, unremarkable, grocery-list life was itself a kind of holy text. I spent decades in the church, eventually becoming a bishop, bearing the responsibilities of the institution and its associated doctrines. Yet beneath it all, the voice I first heard at twenty-three continued to sustain me. Buechner’s writings over the years encouraged me to listen intently, be vulnerable, and embrace the beauty of the broken.

The rest of the Buechner 100 Review will appear on July 11. You can preview it here.

The Sin of Optimization & Efficiency

The word “sin” has kind of fallen out of favor. People who grew up in oppressive homes dominated by an unhealthy spirituality might have experienced the word as punishment, criticism, perhaps even abuse or trauma. But its original meaning connects to some things in modern life. Essentially, the word means missing the mark, as an archer aiming an arrow but missing the target.

I’ve been wondering if the way we are missing the point of life these days might be due to our obsession with productivity, optimization and efficiency. Senator Chris Murphy gave a great commencement address in which he critiqued efficiency as the idol of our time.

I can’t help but wonder if our hyper drive to succeed is taking us away from ourselves and our souls. We might get more done, but is this any way to live?

Creativity and Making Meaning

Last month, I worked on an essay I never published, though I may in the future. The premise grew out of a line from a book I was reading, Art & Fear, by the painter David Bayles and the photographer Ted Orland. While humming along through the chapters, I suddenly came across this line. “The meaning of the world is made, not found.” Buried in the middle of a paragraph about Hamlet, I read those words maybe 17 times. They lit upon me like a revelation, as if a chorus of bodhisattvas or angels, or both, had begun singing a magical tune.

Since then, I’ve been diving into the idea that the meaning of life isn’t something to be found but something we make. Or, more precisely, maybe it’s in the making that we find meaning. I’m not sure, but I think I’m on to something.

Carl Jung, or was it Joseph Campbell, one of those mythmaking dudes, wrote about building your own mythology, a narrative around your life. Mine is made up of life events, quirky movies, a Herman Hesse novel, songs from the 1970s, and the poetry of Mary Oliver, Basho, and Rainer Maria Rilke, plus some great meals along the way.

I’ve spent much of my life searching for the meaning of life, as if it were something out there. But maybe the search has been misdirected or ill-informed. Maybe meaning is found in the making of… essays & books, photographs, journals with poor line drawings, and leading communities on travels and discovery.

There’s an essay here, maybe something more, but I’m still basking in the glow of that heavenly chorus and processing the synapses firing in my brain.

Watching, Reading, and Listening

Sports

Following the World Cup has been a delight, though I have to admit I haven’t had the stamina or the attention to sit in front of a TV for 90 minutes. The highlight reels have been a joy. The same goes for the beauty of the WNBA. Yes, I’m thrilled for the Knicks, but I gotta tell you, women’s basketball is so much more fun to watch. The passing game alone is a dance of beauty.

Trash, yes Trash!

This small book by a Montreal garbage collector and part-time philosopher is highly recommended. ‘Trash! A Garbageman’s Story’ is a memoir by Simon Paré-Poupart, a French-Canadian who has spent 20 years working in waste management in Montreal. It provides a candid, street-level view of the city’s blue-collar work scene and critiques the widespread overconsumption and wastefulness of contemporary society.

Robert Plant

Led Zeppelin never caught my attention in the 1970s. Maybe I was jealous of that frontman, able to romp all over the stage shirtless. But in the last 20 years, Robert Plant has continued to create unique music. Last November, Lisa and I traveled to the Schubert Theatre in Boston to hear his band, Saving Grace. What a night. Along with his work with Allison Krauss, Plant revisits musical genres from blues to Appalachia to rock ‘n’ roll with a freshness I haven’t often found. Along the way, he gave voice to a depth of soul at the heart of the human experience. OK, his early lyrics, like many 22-year-olds, focused on love lost and lust, but in recent times, he’s voiced notes of grace and wonder. Also, how can a 78-year-old man be so cool? He reinvented the old blues/Zeppelin tune Ramble On during an appearance on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show this past May. Enjoy!

More to Come

Unfinished Thoughts will appear monthly for paid supporters only, starting next month. The weekly, mostly weekly, Notebooks of James Hazelwood (Wednesdays) will continue for all subscribers.

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James Hazelwood is a writer, photographer and storyteller. He now makes dinner and takes out the garbage on Tuesday nights. www.jameshazelwoodphoto.com

Like a lot of teenagers, I grew up on a steady diet of grilled cheese sandwiches and chocolate milkshakes. My vegetarian aunt and a rotating cast of health-conscious girlfriends were convinced I wouldn’t see thirty.

Tonight in our house, I made dinner. Check it out in the video below or click here.

Today I love food. And the longer I sit with that love, the more I’m convinced it’s not a hobby. It’s a spiritual practice hiding in plain sight.

I enjoy a full range of tastes—sweet, bitter, sour, salty, and umami, the five flavors our tongue detects. Is there anything better than biting into a juicy orange, eating roasted chicken with rosemary, or just indulging in mint chocolate chip ice cream? Not all creatures enjoy this; cats can’t taste sweet, and neither can most birds except hummingbirds. This might explain why housecats lurk beneath feeders, perhaps plotting revenge.

I do not doubt that the experience of taste is a profoundly spiritual encounter with God’s holy creation. The late Eugene Peterson said it better than I can: wonder is the only adequate launching pad for exploring a spirituality of creation, the quality that keeps us open-eyed, expectant, and alive to a life that always exceeds our calculations. We find wonder in many places, but taste, to me, the most delightful of our five senses, is in a category all its own. How can you not believe the holy is present while you’re savoring some of the bounty of God’s creation?

All the major religions of the world have something to say about food, which tells you something. The Hebrew Bible reads like a spice rack left open: cinnamon and myrrh in Exodus, dill and cumin in Isaiah, the wandering Israelites pining so hard for Egyptian cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic that you can practically hear their stomachs growl across three thousand years. Isaac asks his son Jacob for a savory dish before he passes on the family blessing. The risen Jesus eats breakfast fish with his disciples, because apparently, resurrection doesn’t cancel breakfast.

All this attention to taste and food is making me hungry. How about you? Maybe we should pause and eat something.

Breaking bread together is an act of holiness. Not just in a Buddhist center or a Christian cathedral. Did you know that when you sit down and eat a meal with another person, you are engaging in a spiritual discipline? It’s true. One act connects you to ancient traditions of hospitality, thanksgiving, and the goodness of the earth.

Christians have a sacrament for this, Holy Communion, our way of saying God is present not just in the bread but in, with, and under the whole meal and everything happening around it. The baby screaming in the corner. The old widow with wrinkled hands. The tattooed guy kneeling next to the banker in the blue blazer. The whole thing. I’ll push this further than some of my fellow theologians are comfortable with. I don’t think the holy stays parked at the altar. I think it shows up...

- around the Thanksgiving table

- in the dugout eating a hot dog

- during coffee with a friend

- at the company picnic

- across the table at the farmer’s market

- on the playground with kids

- in the college cafeteria

- with screaming toddlers at breakfast

Every one of those is a moment where the holy breaks in, whether anybody bothers to notice or not.

Leah Chase, the chef who fed Freedom Riders and reshaped American history out of a gumbo pot at Dooky Chase’s in New Orleans, understood this without needing a seminary degree. “You have to be in love with that pot,” she said. “You have to put all your love in that pot.” And, more plainly still: “Food builds big bridges. If you can eat with someone, you can learn from them, and when you learn from someone, you can make big changes.” That’s not a recipe tip. That’s theology with a wooden spoon in its hand.

According to a Harvard Business Review survey, only about ten percent of us love to cook, and forty-five percent flat out hate it. The rest of us are stuck in the lukewarm middle. I drift between loving it and tolerating it, depending on the season, mostly enthusiastic in summer and fading fast by February. My wife, fortunately, lives solidly in the loves-it camp. I won’t try to talk you out of whichever camp you’re in. But cooking, whether it delights you or merely gets endured, is a natural expression of everyday spirituality.

The three monotheistic religions, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, all carry dietary rules with deep roots, and all three lean hard into food as gift and hospitality as grace. Traditional African religions place a high value on welcoming the stranger. In Buddhism, Hinduism, and the spiritual traditions of the Indian subcontinent, hospitality and almsgiving are themselves acts of devotion. The Lord’s Prayer asks for daily bread, and Martin Luther, who never left a phrase unexamined, explained in his Small Catechism that daily bread really means everything that supports the body: food, clothing, shelter, good government, good weather, faithful neighbors, the whole catalog of what keeps a person upright and well. Bread, in the end, is code for everything.

Chef José Andrés, who has spent decades feeding people in the aftermath of earthquakes, hurricanes, and wars, put words to this same impulse: “We all are Citizens of the World. What’s good for you, must be good for all. If you are lost, share a plate of food with a stranger... you will find who you are.” Feed the stranger, and you might just find yourself and your spirituality all at the same time.

None of this needs to be solemn, by the way. Anthony Bourdain, who spent a career insisting that food was never supposed to be a chore, put it this way: “I always feel a little guilty when I hear people complaining about the stuff they do in the kitchen. I’m like, what’s the matter with you? It’s food! It’s supposed to be fun!” He’s right, and so is Leah Chase, who insisted that everyone can cook if they try and put a little love into it. Somewhere between Bourdain’s mischief and Chase’s love affair with the pot, you get the whole picture. Cooking is serious enough to count as devotion and light enough to remain a pleasure.

So here’s the invitation. Next time you taste something good, pause for half a beat before the second bite and notice what’s happening: sunlight, soil, somebody’s labor, somebody’s love, arriving all at once on your tongue. Next time you cook, even if you’re squarely in that lukewarm forty-five percent, remember you’re joining a long line that runs through ancient, sacred meals and Leah Chase’s gumbo pot. Every culture, every scripture, every grandmother who ever fed a stranger has been telling us the same thing in a thousand languages. The holy isn’t hiding from your dinner table. It’s sitting right there, waiting for you to pass the salt.

Now, what’s for dinner? See what I made here.

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is a writer, photographer, and increasingly responsible for half the meals at home. www.jameshazelwoodphoto.com

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I consider the thank-you one of our smallest daily liturgies. We treat it as a transaction, almost an automatic reflex. The gratitude goes out, and the matter is closed.

This week’s video can be viewed here

This might be a common exchange at cash registers and around dinner tables. But anyone who has practiced gratitude knows a stranger truth. The one most changed by the thank-you is seldom the one who receives it, though the thank-you can be appreciated. The one offering gratitude is most affected. This is my hunch. When we give thanks, we are altered. The alteration is the point.

Pema Chödrön, an American Buddhist nun whose writings have quietly supported many through difficult times, emphasizes that practice isn’t about fixing the world or improving circumstances. Instead, it’s about facing life as it is, without defenses. She uses the term ‘maitri,’ meaning loving-kindness, to describe the warmth we first extend to ourselves and then to others. Gratitude is also part of this family of practices. It doesn’t depend on life being perfect; it simply involves recognizing what already sustains us.

The phrase ‘sustains us’ more accurately captures the Buddhist concept of gratitude than our typical greeting-card expression. Interdependence teaches us that nothing exists in isolation: the bread on the table embodies the rain, the fields, a stranger’s effort, and an unbroken chain of human labor. Giving thanks in this context is not mere politeness; it’s an acknowledgment of reality. It’s a recognition of how deeply we are supported by things we did not create and can never fully repay.

People who are aware of being carried tend to be humbler. Here’s how it works, as far as I can tell. The ungrateful self is grasping, always convinced it is owed more and constantly comparing what it has with what it thinks it deserves. Gratitude interrupts this cycle. For a moment, the self ceases to be the center of everything and becomes a receiver, a guest. The small king of our desires is temporarily dethroned. Although uncomfortable, this also offers a form of freedom. We cannot feel grateful and entitled at the same time.

Many traditions have recognized this, integrating gratitude into daily practice. The observant Jew begins the day with Modeh Ani, expressing thanks before any other activity, before thoughts or grievances form. Christians call their main meal the Eucharist, from the Greek word for thanksgiving, to rehearse gratitude as a core act. Muslims incorporate praise and thanks to God, using phrases like alhamdulillah, meaning ‘praise and thanks be to God,’ into everyday speech. Meister Eckhart, the 13^th-century Dominican mystic, said that if “thank you” is the only prayer you ever utter, it suffices. Despite their many differences, these traditions share a common emphasis on gratitude.

Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Roman Catholic Benedictine monk with years of dialogue with Buddhist teachers, clearly expressed this reversal. “It is not happiness that makes us grateful,” he said. “It is gratefulness that makes us happy.” Consider that carefully. Most of us live in the opposite direction, waiting until life provides something to be grateful for before feeling grateful. The contemplatives, however, turn this around—practicing gratitude first, with happiness as the natural consequence.

Recently, scientists have caught up with monasteries. Researchers encouraging people to keep gratitude journals, listing things they did not have to earn, report clear improvements in well-being, sleep, and feelings of warmth in relationships. Studies show that gratitude works.

What I find most helpful in Chödrön’s writing is her refusal to confine gratitude to days when all is well. She focuses on the moment when everything falters. Even then, she emphasizes the importance of staying open rather than shutting down. Gratitude in these moments isn’t denial; it doesn’t deny the loss. Instead, it rejects the idea that loss is the only reality. Expressing thanks, even in darkness, for the hand still holding ours is one of the bravest acts, and it transforms the person who chooses to do it.

I keep restarting a practice of gratitude. I’m trying to offer thoughtful, sincere thank-yous instead of quick ones. While the world hasn’t changed, just read the news, my perspective shifts, albeit slightly. I’m less a creditor and more a guest in unarranged circumstances. This practice isn’t about changing the world but transforming myself, as gratitude subtly influences us when expressed.

More to come,

James Hazelwood is a writer and photographer. His book, Everyday Spirituality, didn’t win any prizes, but a few people thought it was pretty good.

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As we make our way into this series, each week I’ll bring you both a video as well as a written reflection on the subject matter. While the video and the essay will dance together, each is distinct. The videos are intended to be accessible to a broader audience, those less inclined to dive into the written word. The written reflection provides a little more substance and hopefully delivers it in a tone that is thoughtful.

All of this work reflects an update on my book, Everyday Spirituality. There are places where my thinking has evolved (i.e. I’ve changed my mind), and other aspects that require further investigation. You either read or watch or both.

The Breath We Hold in Common

A song and a word. When I first heard the hymn “Breathe on me Breath of God,” I was a young man attending a worship service before my embrace of the faith of Yehshua, that wandering Rabbi from Galilee. On that same Sunday, I heard these words from John’s story of Jesus ‘ life: “Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” ²² When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

In a rather irreverent moment, my friend seated next to me leaned over and said, “Wasn’t the guy just in the tomb for three days? His breath must have smelled awful.” I busted up laughing, much to the displeasure of the rather stoic Minnesota Lutherans around us.

That memory remains with me to this day. Every time I hear the hymn “Breathe on me Breath of God,” a small cross crosses my face.

And yet, breathing is a central defining element of spirituality in all the religions of this world.

Sit with a Greek Orthodox monk reciting the Jesus Prayer, repeating “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me’ with each breath. Join a Hindu practicing pranayama, a Buddhist meditating on breath, a Sufi murmuring dhikr, a Catholic using rosary beads, or a Jewish swaying in prayer. Strip away the theology and doctrine, and what remains is similar, namely a slow, deliberate, repetitive breath below resting rate.

For most of human history, breath has defined the spiritual practices of people around the globe. We now have instruments to measure it, and the measurements are remarkable.

In 2001, Luciano Bernardi and his team published a study in the British Medical Journal. They observed healthy adults while the participants recited the Latin Ave Maria and a yoga mantra. Both activities slowed breathing to six cycles per minute. Rhythmic breathing boosted heart rate variability and baroreflex sensitivity. This helped stabilize blood pressure. The researchers found that these religious recitations yield health benefits.

Six breaths a minute is a target for slow breathing practices. A healthy adult breathes 12-20 times a minute, but slow breathing cuts this in half. Research shows that breathing at five to six breaths per minute synchronizes heart rate and breathing, making the heart work better. This type of breathing strengthens the nervous system and helps it switch between rest and effort. It also lowers stress and anxiety by increasing parasympathetic activity, which controls rest and digestion. Studies have shown that slow breathing lowers cortisol, improves attention, and reduces symptoms of PTSD and stress.

None of this requires belief. The nervous system does not check your creed before it calms down. But the convergence raises a question that science alone cannot answer.

It is tempting to read these findings reductively, as though the mystics were merely primitive biofeedback technicians who happened to dress their nervous systems in religious language. That reading is too thin. The traditions were never only after a lower cortisol level. They were after God, or emptiness, or union, or the quieting of the self just enough to hear something beyond it. What the research suggests is more interesting than reduction. The body was always part of the prayer, never merely its vehicle.

The Hebrew ruach, the Greek pneuma, the Sanskrit prana, and the Latin spiritus are all words that express both breath and spirit. In tradition after tradition, the same word carries breath, wind, and spirit together, refusing to separate them. The ancients did not distinguish between a spiritual practice and a physiological one. They breathed slowly because it drew them toward the divine, and it happens that drawing toward the divine, in this particular bodily idiom, also steadies the heart and quiets the alarm systems of a frightened animal.

Perhaps the deeper finding is that these practices endured because they worked on both the soul and body, allowing practitioners to feel the difference even without instruments. Monks, yogis, and worshippers with beads spoke from personal experience, and only now have we developed machines sensitive enough to confirm that.

Slow rhythmic prayerful breathing. It is a small, humble doorway, available to anyone, requiring no equipment or orthodoxy. The great spiritual traditions left us this gift. Science has merely allowed us to legitimize and verify what was always there all along.

Try it. Two small breaths in, and one long out. You might feel better, and in time closer to the Great Spirit that surrounds us all.

Next Week…Gratitude

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is an author, photographer and teacher. His book, Everyday Spirituality, forms the basis for this new series, now streaming on Netflix, ahead, I mean, YouTube.

That spirit of attending to the world around us served as the driving force behind my book, Everyday Spirituality. Struggling with all the traditional ways of engaging in spiritual practices, I needed a different approach.

That book spoke to many other people seeking a new way to connect with the sacred in life. Still to this day, that book represents my best work.

But it needs a new vehicle for its message. In an age of short attention spans, increasing use of video and a whole new segment of the population seeking something beyond the chaos of our modern world, I thought it might be time to bring the message to a new format. (wow, that’s a long sentence)

So I’m launching a new version, or rather a new interpretation of the ideas in the book.

Begininng today, I’m introducing a new video series on Everyday Spirituality. I’m taking the ideas and translating them to a new format. One that I hope communicates the concepts but in a way consistent with video. Each week I’ll bring a focus to one of the 27 ways we all can practice Everyday Spirituality.

Click the image below to watch the introductory episode. Or Click here

More to come next week

James Hazelwood is a storyteller using words and images to convey meaning in an unstable time. He is the author of several books including Everyday Spirituality.

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But one story stands out to everyone. Victor’s profile features his description of gardening, particularly a compost pile that captured his imagination. In fact, the process of turning dead leaves and discarded plants into rich, nourishing soil became the metaphor he needed. It’s an example of how each of us needs to find a symbol or a new story that connects our inner experience with an outer reality. When that happens, tremendous healing can occur.

Victor’s Story

“These two ladies. They came in and started talkin’ bout gardening. I thought, man, I ain’t doing no gardening. ..But, then I started workin’ in the compost and seeing what change happens. I thought, this is me.” Victor’s road to redemption through compost and strawberries.

When the women walked into the supermax with their gardening program, Victor Fabian had already decided they would not last.

“I thought these were going to be like little old ladies tryin’ to be do-gooders,” he says now. “And it was a joke.” He and the other men figured they would laugh the program right out of the building. After twenty-five and a half years inside, Victor had seen plenty of well-meaning programs come and go.

Kate Lacouture and Vera Bowen — later joined by Emily Cotter — had come from Garden Time with a different idea. They had built a program specifically for men like Victor, men who had served long sentences and didn’t qualify for the other reentry tracks. Where the system had run out of categories, they showed up with seeds.

“They stuck it out,” Victor says. The strawberries went in. So did the berries and the vegetables. Victor, who had initially signed up mostly to eat something fresh, found himself drawn into the whole operation, including planting, watering, and especially composting.

The compost is where the story turns.

“I got into the compost, and the compost basically gave me insight that was incredible,” he says. “It was like I couldn’t even believe I had that inside of me.”

He began to see himself in the pile. “I kinda related to dirt,… the feeling of the human mind being incarcerated, having the upbringing of so much negative impact.” Then he watched what came out the other side of the composting process. The results were Strawberries. Herbs. Vegetables. “I seen all this good produce that came from the compost. I just felt like that was the full potential I was able to reach inside of me.”

He settles on a word that feels almost sacred: inoculate. “So it was kind of like, I don’t know, like, inoculate or something.” This realization deeply affected Victor. He saw dirt transform into healthy, life-giving soil that produced fruits and vegetables to nourish both his and others’ bodies and souls, as if his inoculation offered protection from disease or encouragement for growth, all through his experience with composting.

Victor was released in 2024. Amos House took him in and gave him room to set down what he calls “the anxieties I was carrying.” From there, he entered job training at Garden Time and worked there until he could open his own commercial cleaning business, STR8 Clean. The Rhode Island Freedom Collective recently recognized and celebrated Victor for launching his own cleaning business, Str8ght Clean. His dedication, hard work, and commitment to building a better future are an inspiration to our community.”

But the cleaning business is only part of the work. The rest is the branching out from the compost and the seeds planted in him.

“I came over here, and I tried to reach my full potential as a service,” he says. “Having those different branches — branches of good fruits, of good deeds, of good actions.” He helps people prep for job interviews. He cuts hair. He talks to kids about the choices that pulled him down when he was young, hoping a few will take the right turn he took left.

“The seeds we plant right now are basically what’s going to come to fruition,” he says.

Kate, Vera, and Emily did the same thing for him. They didn’t lecture the men in supermax. They brought soil and seeds and stayed long enough for something to grow.

What grew, in the end, was Victor, an inspiration to the community.

The rest of the profiles can be viewed online here

What’s Next?

Just before the pandemic, I wrote and published a book, Everyday Spirituality. It is without a doubt my best work, and continuing sales seem to reflect that others value it as well. This summer, I’m working on a video version of the book. Not simply reading the book, but developing a whole new understanding, more like a reinterpretation of Everyday Spirituality. Look for the introductory episode next week.

More to Come

James Hazelwood is a storyteller focusing on the pursuit of meaning in a somewhat upside-down world.

The Pledge was written in 1892, largely credited to Baptist minister Francis Bellamy. Its original version read: “I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands—one Nation indivisible—with liberty and justice for all.” Notably, it made no mention of God. When Franklin Roosevelt signed the U.S. Flag Code into law in 1942 to standardize the wording, it still omitted any reference to God. It wasn’t until 1954 that the phrase including ‘under God’ was added, a change rooted less in theology than in Cold War influences.

Around 1952, the Knights of Columbus and other groups began lobbying to add “under God” to the Pledge. In February 1954, Pastor George M. Docherty of Washington’s New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, with President Eisenhower present, advocated this change during a Lincoln’s birthday sermon, arguing the original Pledge was too generic and could be recited by Soviet schoolchildren. Adding God created a boundary that godless communists could not cross. Congress approved the change within six months, and Eisenhower signed it, praising the “spiritual weapons” securing America’s strength. This led to “In God We Trust” appearing on all currency in 1955 and becoming the national motto in 1956, replacing E pluribus unum—“out of many, one.”

In 1950s America, this change caused little controversy. Embedding God in patriotism was widely accepted. The God was non-specific, a national deity blessing the flag without challenging religious loyalties. Even then, there were limits: Congress rejected an amendment declaring submission to “Jesus Christ,” seeing it too extreme. America wanted God on coins and pledges, not a specific God with explicit demands.

In The American Religion, Harold Bloom asserts that Americans who practice as Baptists, Methodists, Mormons, or atheists aren’t practicing traditional Christianity but a form of Gnosticism centered on self-discovery. According to Bloom, Gnosticism holds that the true self is a divine spark, independent of institutions or creeds, existing before Creation and seeking direct union with God. Bloom emphasizes that key moments in American religion are revivals and the writings of Emerson and James, not church councils or confessions. He argues that Americans are convinced of their separateness from Creation, describing a culture ‘furiously searching for the spirit,” but the spirit they seek is ultimately themselves.

Bloom is a frustrating writer with an arrogant style, quick to criticize, and often mistaken about traditions. His portrayals of “Baptist” and “Mormon” are imaginative yet selective. His core idea remains valid: if American religion focuses on the individual self with personal access to the divine, then a God aligned with national symbols is predictable. “Under God” resonated during the Cold War as it depicted a deity supporting national pride, serving as a mascot that magnifies the inner spirit into a nation. Bloom’s post-Christian America doesn’t need to choose between worshiping God or the nation because, in the American Religion, those acts have subtly merged.

But, what do we mean when we use the word God?

Perhaps ‘God’ is best understood not through dense theological terms but through simple, everyday language. Rather than relying on scholarly concepts like omnipotence (all-powerful), immutability (unchanging), and aseity (existing on its own), let’s frame the idea around small prepositions: God is with us, for us, and among us. This is the heart of Rob Bell’s book, What We Talk About When We Talk About God. In the book, he seeks to make the word “God” feel meaningful again.

Bell leans into the preposition “ahead.” God is ahead of us. Note the forward-leaning emphasis. He pictures a God who is always pushing creation forward, calling us out of tired old certainties toward a kinder, more alive way of living. Or, as one of my seminary professors described it, God is not pushing us into the future but, in the future, pulling us toward Godself.

There may be a fair critique of this approach as a “detheologizing” of faith, draining the meaning from ideas like Jesus, sin, and salvation. But Bell shows the same trust in personal growth and wonder that Bloom describes. Is this getting at what is meant in the Pledge of Allegiance, “One nation under God”? A God who-is-ahead is caring and morally serious, a huge step up from the bland national mascot America adopted in 1954. Even so, this is still a very American God, one who resists any middleman and keeps reassuring us that the path we’re already on is the right one. The problem, as you can see, is how easily these ideas of God can be manipulated.

God becomes a divine figure who exists to justify our desires. Each individual can conjure up a deity that blesses consumerism, military might, or simply the internal pleasant feeling as I pursue my happiness.

The Pledge story reveals how a generic, demand-free God becomes intertwined with national identity during a time of fear, and how easily people recite the words because others do. Beneath our differences, Americans worship a God who ultimately reflects the self, a God that can be readily used for the tribe’s purposes without resistance. Even among the well-intentioned, a generous reinterpretation of God can still keep the focus on the self, blessing our momentum instead of challenging it.

Christian Nationalism, in this context, is not an external influence on American faith but a natural extension of it. When the ‘under God” phrase in the pledge reflects a sense of national chosenness rather than divine sovereignty, the progression from “God blesses America” to “America is God’s instrument” is seamless…and dangerous.

When we recite the pledge or note the divine reference on our money, what are we saying? What is the nature of this deity we hold so close? Perhaps my secretive questioning 50 years ago merits a broader conversation. When you read those references to God, what comes to mind for you?

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is an author and photographer living in New England’s smallest state. He tells stories about culture, religion, politics, and the best coffee houses. www.jameshazelwoodphoto.com. (All photos are by me unless otherwise noted)

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Jesus, as a cloud surfer, seems to be the historic artistic depiction. Come on, there’s got to be more to this event.

Depth psychology and contemplative theology uncover that the Ascension isn’t an escape from earthly life but a transformation of divine presence within human consciousness. It’s not about Jesus leaving; it’s about him being present everywhere and always, in ways we’re still discovering.

Edward Edinger, that rather sober and stoic Jungian analyst, viewed Christ’s entire life as a blueprint for our own human maturation, sometimes called individuation, which is Carl Jung’s concept of a lifelong journey toward wholeness. For Edinger, the Ascension signifies the completion of this cycle. Jesus embodies the totality of God in human form. The Crucifixion broke the harmful inflation where one perceives oneself as divine. Always a dangerous trajectory. The Resurrection is about resilience in the face of powers beyond our control. The Ascension, then, is a reuniting of the disparate parts of ourselves.

The Ascension of Jesus can be viewed as a broadening of the incarnation. What had been localized in one charismatic figure becomes democratized throughout the community. The disciples must stop looking for God solely in their teacher and discover that same fire kindling within themselves. This is collective maturation, which is a terrifying, exhilarating move from spiritual childhood to spiritual adulthood. Obviously, humanity is still working on this project.

Jung considered this progression essential to Christianity’s strength. He described the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit as a “broadening process of incarnation.” If Jesus had stayed physically present, always available to resolve every dilemma and answer every question, his followers would have remained immature. The Ascension encourages the community to undertake the challenging task of discernment and embrace the unsettling freedom of living without the Master’s direct physical presence.

What happened in Christ’s life happens always and everywhere. We all face our crucifixions, like those shattering moments when our carefully constructed identities collapse. We all hunger for resurrection, for meaning restored after devastating loss. And we all must eventually live through our own ascension, the moment when we can no longer locate the sacred solely in external authorities, such as gurus, traditions, or institutions.

But this psychological reading might lead us into mere metaphor. Eugene Peterson spent his career resisting interpretations that treat Scripture as an allegory for inner development. For Peterson, spiritual theology must be “very specifically focused in Jesus as the Christ, Jesus born, crucified, raised”—not Jesus as an abstraction. The Ascension isn’t just about our journey; it’s about what God has done in Christ to reconcile the world.

Peterson taught that in Christ’s ascent, the Spirit takes us into the humanity of Jesus, bringing us with him—all our humanity—to the Father. This keeps the Ascension tethered to actual history, to the doctrine of the Trinity, and to the particular Jewish man from Nazareth who walked dusty roads and died a criminal’s death.

Author Frederick Buechner approached the mystery with his gift for earthy lyricism. For Buechner, the Incarnation’s shocking claim is that God enters fully into matter that “all ground is holy ground because God not only made it but walked on it, ate and slept and worked and died on it.” The Ascension might seem to contradict this, suggesting the spirit’s escape from flesh. But Buechner saw it differently. Christ doesn’t abandon his humanity when he ascends; he takes it with him, transformed yet still fundamentally embodied. And he doesn’t remove himself from earthly concerns—he distributes his presence more widely through the Spirit.

The community is now his body. The Ascension is God’s ultimate vote of confidence in embodied existence, the commissioning of ordinary believers to extraordinary work.

Amy-Jill Levine, the Orthodox Jewish scholar who teaches the New Testament, adds crucial context here. The early Jewish hope wasn’t for individual souls to escape to heaven but for God to restore creation—to raise bodies and renew the earth itself. Through this lens, the Ascension validates embodied existence rather than negating it. Christ’s glorified body becomes the first fruits of a general resurrection and the renewal of all creation.

Levine’s scholarship also corrects the notion that Jesus transcends his Jewishness to become universal. Jesus lived, taught, argued, and died as a Jew. His ascension doesn’t erase that but fulfills the Jewish hope that God’s glory would one day fill the whole earth. The particular Jewish Jesus becomes universally available through the Spirit without losing any of his historical specificity.

The Ascension represents the withdrawal from dependence on an external savior to the discovery of Christ’s presence within the community and the human soul. The Ascension is God’s affirmation of embodied life. It’s not escape but transformation, not abandonment but a new mode of presence.

Perhaps the Ascension is best understood as a hinge connecting Easter to Pentecost, resurrection to the birth of the Church, the particular to the universal. The disciples stand gazing upward, and the angel’s rebuke: “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” The Ascension isn’t an invitation to escape by staring at clouds. It’s a commission to turn back toward the world, to become Christ’s body in the ordinary mess of human community.

The upward journey, it turns out, sends us downward. And that paradox might be the only holiday gift worth celebrating, even without the bunny or the turkey or the man in the red suit.

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is a photographer and writer, scratching his head through conflicting forces in a world busy being born.

The writer Derek Thompson recently offered what he called a unified theory of the Tragic Twenties (as in the 2020s.) His diagnosis is worth sitting with:

Thompson’s diagnosis is accurate and sobering. But diagnosis is not a cure. I suggest three things that might help.

I. Life Is Difficult

That is the opening sentence of M. Scott Peck’s 1978 book The Road Less Traveled, a work that managed to land Buddhist insight about the nature of suffering in the middle of American individualism’s relentless cheerfulness. Peck’s argument was deceptively simple: because we refuse to accept that life is genuinely hard, we are perpetually ambushed by its difficulty. Our denial of suffering does not spare us from it. It only leaves us less equipped to bear it.

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung made a similar observation when he wrote that “neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” What he meant is that when we refuse to meet our pain honestly, it does not disappear. It goes underground and finds other, more destructive, ways to surface. A grief-phobic culture is not a happy culture. It is an anxious one.

I have officiated at enough funerals to know how poorly we handle this grief. I once stood beside a seventy-five-year-old mother, grieving at her forty-seven-year-old son’s wake, when a visitor leaned in and said, “At least you still have two other children.” The impulse behind such words is not cruelty. It is discomfort, the same discomfort that underlies every forced smile, every hyper positivity post, every cultural message insisting that you should be happy, always, or else something is wrong with you. After all, we are the country built on the pursuit of happiness.

Ironically, I suggest that the first step toward a pursuit of, let’s call it contentment, is to embrace that life is difficult, life is hard, life endures suffering.

II. Community Helps

We are not built for solitude. Even those of us who tend toward introversion, who recharge in quiet alone time, still need other people. We simply prefer them in smaller numbers and at lower levels of intensity.

The sociologist Robert Bellah warned in Habits of the Heart that American individualism, taken to its logical conclusion, produces a kind of radical isolation that hollows out the self. Without communities of memory, without people who know our stories and hold us accountable to something larger than our preferences, we lose the thread of meaning. Thompson’s diagnosis confirms what Bellah feared: the self-isolation of modern life has not made us freer. It has made us more adrift.

For years, I have carried a variation of James Carville’s famous political shorthand. The insight that cut through the noise of the 1992 campaign was “It’s the economy, stupid.” My version is “It’s community, stupid.”

Despite its many faults, religion can foster a sense of community. The healthiest religious communities I know embody two key values: they are welcoming and actively serve others. (Spoiler alert for what’s coming) Healthy faith communities are places where people feel they belong and where they help others.

Community can also be found in music ensembles, neighborhood groups, reading circles, recovery programs, or anywhere else people show up regularly and begin to know each other’s names. The problem today is that many of the mid-twentieth-century structures that hosted this kind of belonging, the Grange halls, the bowling leagues, the civic clubs, have declined or disappeared. Some of them needed to go. But the need they met did not disappear with them.

My mother, now ninety-one, relocated to a new community fourteen years ago. She adopted a rule: visit each interest group and club at least once, then select the ones that truly suit her. This kind of intentionality does not come easily; it requires effort. Nevertheless, it is precisely the kind of determination the present moment calls for. The community you seek will not come to you; you must go out and find it.

Dorothy Day, who spent her life building exactly this kind of community at the Catholic Worker houses of hospitality, said it with characteristic plainness in The Long Loneliness: “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.” She was not speaking of sentiment. She was speaking of a practice, daily and concrete, chosen again and again, especially when it is inconvenient.

III. You Gotta Serve Somebody

Bob Dylan was onto something in the song with this title. The title captures a truth that social science has now documented with some rigor: service to others is among the most reliable routes to personal meaning and well-being.

The psychologist Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps and went on to write Man’s Search for Meaning, argued that the deepest human drive is not pleasure, not power, but meaning. And meaning, he found, is discovered not through self-satisfaction but through self-giving. “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances,” Frankl wrote, “but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” I would suggest that much of the meaning in life involves serving others.

No one claims a cruise vacation is life-changing. However, many return from a week spent building Habitat for Humanity homes, teaching reading, or sitting with the dying and report how impactful the time was.

For years, my wife and I led groups to a remote mountain town in Honduras, where we spent a week building a church for a community in Yuscaran. We slept in rustic cabins, ate together, and worked alongside people whose language most of us barely spoke. On the last day, the conversation always returned to the same point. A teenager once voiced what everyone in the room was thinking: “We came here thinking we were going to help people, and it turned out we were the ones who got helped.” Every head nodded in agreement.

The Good Samaritan in Jesus’s parable is not the one who felt moved by compassion while safely on his way. He is the one who got off his donkey. The hero of the story is the one who served. The research bears this out: volunteering regularly is associated with lower rates of depression, greater life satisfaction, and even longer life expectancy. Serving others does not diminish us. It is, paradoxically, among the most effective things we can do for ourselves.

A Choice

The age of despair is real. Derek Thompson named it, and the data confirms it. The faces around us reflect it. But despair, for all its weight, is not the last word available to us.

Carl Jung believed the second half of life was an invitation to move from building the Self to building the Soul. That requires a maturity that comes, in part, from honestly facing life and seeking a more generative posture. We, as a culture, are in what might be understood as a collective second half. The old structures are not coming back. The question is whether we will build something better in their place or simply scroll until we forget the question was ever asked.

We have a choice. We can wallow, or we can get off our donkeys.

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is a writer and photographer living in New England’s smallest state, where he is seeking community and service amid difficult times. www.jameshazelwood.net He is the author of Weird Wisdom for the Second Half of Life, from which this article draws.

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One cloudy February afternoon, some friends and I took the number 64 bus from central Rome into the suburbs. I’d read about the Catacomb of Domitilla in an art history travel guidebook. The bus dropped us off in a modern neighborhood. After several wrong turns, each blocked by construction detours, we found our way down through layers of Roman tufa into underground chambers where early Christians buried their dead. The ceilings were low, and the air was cool and damp, heavy with centuries. And there, painted on the curved ceiling of a burial chamber, was an image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, carrying a lamb on his shoulders and surrounded by twelve disciples, in a fresco that also depicted the Last Supper.

This painting revealed something older than the Gospel of John, older than Luke’s parables. The young man in the fresco stood in a perfect Greco-Roman contrapposto, with his weight on one leg, mimicking a pose familiar from classical sculpture. His tunic was simple and almost archaic. The way he carried that ram did not resemble Jesus comforting the lost sheep. Instead, it resembled Hermes Criophorus, the ram-bearer, the Greek deity who guides souls to the underworld.

The Christians who commissioned this third-century fresco weren’t trying to hide their pagan borrowing. They were doing something far more interesting. They were speaking a visual language their neighbors could understand, translating the radical claims of their upstart religion into the grammar of images that Romans already knew how to read.

The Borrowed Image

The Good Shepherd motif was widespread in early Christian art, especially in funerary contexts, yet it had deep roots in Greco-Roman culture. The kriophoros, a figure carrying a ram, appeared in Greek sculpture as early as 500-450 BCE, often depicting Hermes. In Greek contexts, this shepherd symbolized protection, guidance, and the promise of safe passage.

Early Christians adapted the existing image of Hermes Criophorus, transforming the ram-bearing god into Christ, who protects the dead and leads them to eternity. The theological shift was profound, yet the visual vocabulary remained strikingly similar. Same contrapposto stance. Same lamb draped over the shoulders. Same young, beardless face. Same promise of safe passage through death.

Standing in that catacomb, I grasped what art historians call “syncretism”, the deliberate adaptation and reinterpretation of images from different traditions. The pagan depictions of shepherds on sarcophagi represented humanitas or philanthropia, virtues valued by both pagan and Christian groups. Early Christians didn’t create an entirely new visual language. Instead, they repurposed existing symbols of care, guidance, and transition from Roman funerary art to reflect their own cosmology.

But the borrowing went deeper than mere aesthetics. To understand why early Christians turned to Hermes when they wanted to depict Christ, we need to understand who Hermes was in the Greek imagination.

Hermes Psychopompos

Hermes served as a psychopomp, a deity who guided the souls of the deceased to the afterlife. His role wasn’t to judge the dead, but simply to accompany them on their journey. Hermes escorted souls to the River Styx (no, not the 1970s Rock band), where Charon would ferry them across into Hades. He was the divine companion at the moment of greatest vulnerability and fear.

The word itself—psychopompos—means “soul-guide.” In Jungian psychology, the psychopomp represents a mediator between the unconscious and conscious realms, often appearing in dreams as a wise figure or a helpful animal. This is where the resonance with Christian theology becomes almost uncanny. Jesus, too, claims in the Gospel of John to be a shepherd who knows his sheep, calls them by name, lays down his life for them, and leads them to eternal pastures.

Both figures occupy liminal space, the threshold between life and death, between the known world and the unknown. Hermes was understood as a god of boundaries, and his association with the underworld reflected his role as guardian of the boundary between life and death. In Christian theology, Jesus performs a similar function, becoming the one who descends into death and emerges alive, and promising his followers that where he goes, they can follow.

The structural similarities: divine son (Hermes is Zeus’s son, Jesus is God’s son), shepherd imagery, psychopomp function, and boundary-crosser between realms. It’s as if early Christians looked at the available mythological vocabulary and thought, “Yes, this Hermes figure is the closest approximation we have for what we’re trying to say about Christ.”

The Demigod Pattern

There’s another layer worth exploring, namely, the pattern of the divine demigod, the offspring of a god and a mortal. This is standard fare in Greek mythology. Examples include Heracles, Perseus, and Achilles, all born of divine fathers and mortal mothers. Their dual nature gave them access to both worlds. They could walk among mortals and also traffic with the divine.

Jesus fits this pattern as well. Son of God, born of a mortal woman. Divine nature, human flesh. The early church councils would spend centuries articulating the precise mechanics of this relationship. The Nicene creed (C.E. 325) states as ‘fully God and fully human, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father,’ yet the underlying structure echoes the Greek demigod tradition.

Jung called this the archetype of the Divine Child, the miraculous birth, the one who mediates between heaven and earth. It’s a pattern that recurs across cultures, not because one tradition borrowed from another in a simple, linear way, but because it speaks to something persistent in the human soul, namely, our hunger for a bridge between the transcendent and the earthly, between what we experience and what we intuit must lie beyond it.

The early Christians weren’t naïve about this. They knew they were working within existing patterns. Paul explicitly references Greek religion in his speech at the Areopagus in Acts 17, pointing to the altar to an unknown god and declaring that what the Greeks worship in ignorance, he proclaims to them in truth. It’s a rhetorical move that acknowledges continuity even as it claims superiority. We’re talking about the same God you dimly perceive, but now we’re naming him clearly.

Why the Image Faded

It might surprise the current churchgoer that by the fifth century, the Good Shepherd image had largely disappeared from Christian art. I say this because the image is still widely used in US American Protestantism, even though most modern people don’t own sheep. Yet Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church and The Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd are popular names for congregations founded in the late 20th century. Additionally, every year, in the weeks following Easter, a Sunday is dedicated to the imagery of God as Shepherd, including a reading of Psalm 23, “the Lord is my Shepherd.” But the fifth-century Church emphasized Christ’s majesty in response to various doctrinal controversies. The humble shepherd seemed inadequate to convey Christ’s divine power. Instead, Christ enthroned, Christ triumphant, and Christ as Pantokrator became the preferred images. The vulnerable, boundary-crossing shepherd gave way to the imperial ruler. Ah, the wonders of Christendom.

Something was lost in that transition. The early church’s willingness to work with ambiguous, liminal imagery that could be understood by both people within Christianity and those outside gave way to a desire for clear doctrinal content. The thinking went that it was better to show Christ as king and teacher than to risk the Good Shepherd being misread as just another Hermes.

But religion works not by inventing entirely new languages but by taking the deep grammar of human myth-making, the patterns Jung called archetypes, and inflecting them in new directions. The shepherd who guides souls and the divine child born of god and mortal are patterns because they map onto persistent human experiences of transcendence, vulnerability, and transformation.

The Christians didn’t steal Hermes’s image. They recognized that the language of the psychopomp, the soul-guide who accompanies us through the valley of the shadow of death, was already embedded in human religious imagination. They simply claimed that in Jesus, this archetypal pattern had been made flesh in a new and definitive way.

Walking out of the Catacomb of Domitilla in February, I reflected on how modern viewers often overlook how religious images borrow from and transform shared archetypes. We prefer clear distinctions: Christian versus pagan, never blending. But the Good Shepherd fresco shows sacred language in borrowed forms. Early Christians had no problem depicting Jesus in the imagery of Greek gods, recognizing that Hermes and Jesus both address our need for guidance through death and act as boundary-crossers who show the way.

In that sense, Jesus as the Good Shepherd now makes sense to me.