What do you call, though, the genre of books that is intelligent, well-read people talking about things that interest them? When the topic is specific, it’s typically a scholarly study of some sort, but that just repeats our society’s captivation to specific knowledge over general knowledge. I love a good monograph as much as anything else, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I suppose literary criticism comes close, maybe some memoir reaches in this direction, but even those are a defined fields with too narrow of a lane for what I’m trying to grasp. I want a shelf dedicated to the kinds of books that explore the meditations of people who live rich inner lives, read widely, live with vitality and intentionality, and write about the many relationships they have and connections they make with both the world around them and the ideas that fascinate them.

Take Helen Luke, for example: A well-read Jungian analyst with a lot of life experience. While her training as an analyst is a primary lens through which she works, it would be reductive to think of her as just a Jungian literary critic. Many of her essays are broader meditations on our circumstances of life and common humanity-- she draws upon her experiences and her own inner life and in the process creates space for a reader to encounter themselves within her thoughts. I read most her books straight through about a decade ago, but I still enjoy dipping in and out of them (they make great purse books!) and if you’ve never read her, I always recommend her essays Eowyn and Orual. Maybe we can call such explorations wisdom essays? I’m tempted by the label, but I’m hesitant with it, too, because I’m concerned that it weights them too heavily into the cerebral. One of the great strengths of this genre, done well, is stance of epistemological humility. Helen Luke, I believe, paved the way for this, with the warmth of her personal voice coupled with the academic rigor of her Jungian training. Her writing showed that the authors of wisdom essays need above all to be faithful to their own phenomenological experience, to offer it humbly as fodder for others’ growth.

When Surely Some Revelation Is At Hand: Poetry-Magic-Imagination first came across my radar a few months ago, I was intrigued. A synopsis of the book hinted at something similar to Helen Luke, only instead of Jungian analysis as an interpretive lens, promised to offer his lived experience of Sophia. Do I want to read musings about literature and philosophy from someone with such a perspective? Why yes, I most certainly do. Ideas don’t ever seem to be genuinely encountered in the abstract-- when human beings wrestle with angels, we want the sprained hips to go with it. So yes, please give me more of this genre-- people who have digested the big ideas and live through them long enough to show if there is truly sustenance there. Essays about wisdom, framed by the peculiarities of individual lives. Wisdom essays, but perhaps more intriguingly, sophiological essays.

If you’ve heard the term Sophiology but haven’t read any original source material, chances are good that you have some substantial misunderstandings. I know that I absolutely did, until my friend sent me Bulgakov’s The Bride of the Lamb-- I was wary of the bogeyman of the flattened “fourth feminine hypostasis of God” accusation of heresy, and was peripherally aware of the disparaging way internet theologians dismissed the idea as being a category of new age nonsense. I mentioned finishing it last fall, and I ended up not writing much about it simply because I was afraid I’d get caught up in trying to explain something I was still thinking about.

The trouble with explaining Sophia is that it’s the wrong mode. When you’re introducing two of your friends to each other, you don’t go, “So, hey, Roger, this is Susan. Let me explain her a little bit. She’s super intelligent and I think she’s utterly captivating, but of course, I don’t worship her because she’s not God, even though talking with her puts me into a certain mood...” You’d sound like a nutjob, and both Susan and Roger would likely go get some bean dip. Without you.

Sophia-- both divine and creaturely, a theologically crucial distinction-- is met in the mode of relationship and encounter. To relate to Sophia is to acknowledge the consciousness, the personhood, the particularity potentialized and being realized in all of existence. The hypostasization, or becoming, of creation, if you will. When we reach for words to describe a mystical spirituality, an enchanted cosmos, a post-pagan Platonism, a Christian animism-- these are all things for which relating to Sophia provides vocabulary. In moving the wisdom essay into the sophiological territory, Martin grounds wisdom where she is meant to be found: in relationship.

Sophiology, then, is an attempt to describe the nature of that relating, the interactive field present between Person and Person, Person and person, and person and person. You don’t examine or explain Sophia. You get to know Her. And like all relationships that are Good and Beautiful and True, knowing Her helps you know the One who made Her. Which is why a book like Surely Some Revelation is At Hand, written by a person like Michael Martin who has made it his life’s work to know Sophia, is an invaluable introduction to a way of being in the world that feels both entirely natural to life and at the same time entirely orthogonal to the way most other people go about it.

If I’m losing you already, remember that both J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis themselves-- admired orthodox Christians par excellence-- had profound respect for Owen Barfield, who was himself a sincere anthroposophist in direct communication with Rudolph Steiner. One of the fascinating connections that Martin reveals in Surely Some Revelation is At Hand is that anthroposophy shares a heritage and vocabulary with Sophiology; an observation which helps me frame my own long-term respect and fascination with both anthroposophy and its kissing cousin, Swedenborgianism. Can you even be a homeschooling parent without looking into Waldorf philosophy? I don’t know, but I do know you can’t live in eastern Pennsylvania and not cross paths with the New Church.

Back to the book. In Surely Some Revelation is At Hand, Martin offers us a glimpse of how embodied Sophiology works: through the lived experience and practice of a contemplative, creative life. Poetry, yes, and magic and imagination, too. If, like me, you have been trying to figure out how magic really works in our world, without retreat into overly intellectual definitions of metaphor and analogy, the book is a great place to start. We do not really understand our own imaginations, I think, and we most certainly take them for granted. As Martin says in his introduction, “The language of the poets and mystics partakes of the quality off magic-- and I mean that literally. But theirs is a good magic, intended not to enslave the hearer or reader but to liberate him.” The imagination is the medium through which we interact with magic, though that doesn’t mean it’s all just pretend.

The thing about living imaginally, magically, poetically, is that it resists simple definition. To live in such a mode is to sing, full-throated about both the death of the pagan god Pan and the death of Christ, and trust the song to find the fullness of its meaning in the heart of the hearer. One of Michael Martin’s gifts is that he is able to describe this mode in intellectual terms that bypass the rational resistance of the modern mind. He’s not describing the way to think like a neo-pagan, he’s modeling what enchanted life looks like from a particular perspective. Look at this delightful bit:

“The word “Pan” not only means “all,” it also means “he who feeds.” Thus the understanding of Christ as the Great Pan discloses the sacramental dimensions of the Crucifixion, connected as it is to the story of the Holy Grail as well as the Eucharist. Christ, then, is “the Great One Who Feeds.” In this conceptual movement, in its breathing fluidity, we enter into a poetic metaphysics.

Some will ask, “Are you saying Christ is Pan, or that Pan is Christ?” This is the wrong question… In a poetic metaphysics, plasticity overshadows concepts, which can now mean one thing, now another.”

It’s entrancing. In just a few sentences, Martin has introduced us to a Pan I never thought to meet, and shown us how to let the great faun dance us to Christ. It’s a wisdom essay that has pushed just a little farther, into encounter.

Don’t let me give the you the false impression that everything Martin says in this book is easy. This is a very particular book, and the personhood of its author shines through on every page. I liked that, though-- one of the hallmarks of wishy-washy spirituality is its overly anodyne agreeableness, and that’s notably absent in these pages. Instead, Martin gives us a series of poetic visions, take them or leave them-- of Dionsyian revel and Eucharist, of Dylan Thomas as a Christian Druid, of fairies as necessary to the rewilding of the Christian faith and astrology as necessary to the return of the New Middle Ages. Ir’s a series of images that is exciting and invigorating and challenging, and above all, beautiful.

It’s also very Western in etymology, which is doubly interesting, as I came across the quote from Carl Jung a few months ago that said something to the effect of how important it would be for all of us, as inheritors of the western tradition, to not try to circumvent the struggle with western civilization by trying to find the right answers outside of it. Like it or not, we’re all of us here products of western civilization, and coming to grips with that means not simply accepting or rejecting it, but integrating it. Speaking from my own experience in the Orthodox Church, I think that sometimes people come to it expecting to side-step the intellectual and religious tensions we’ve inherited, particularly in America, and Orthodoxy can look like a tempting, simple solution.

I think we are overly accustomed these days to have everything framed to us in false antinomies, and every good we think we find is subsequently positioned as against a bad of some sort. Less usual is demonstrating how good can also move in that orthogonal vector, and instead of opposing something different from itself, unfold into a fuller goodness than was previously understood. What I mean by this, in part, is that so many of the wide topics Martin addresses in this book have been dismissed as unworthy simply because they don’t fit into the strictly rational or classical ways of interacting with the world-- but we don’t actually need to choose one as good and the other as evil. Perhaps we can be both intellectual and magical, unironically. Perhaps the way we relate to one another prepares us to relate also to Sophia, wholeheartedly and without cynicism.

There was so much about this book that I liked that halfway through reading it I sent a copy to a friend (the same friend who sent me Bulgakov) so that she could read it with me. An unexpected gem for me was the chapter on romanticism, a movement that has been thoroughly scorned by many modern thinkers as something best left to one’s slightly shameful adolescent interests. Not so for Martin! We are treated, instead, to a discussion of Romanticism as a flawed expression (are any human expressions not flawed?) of a legitimate human hunger, a tradition with a place right beside the poets of the Celtic twilight. It was good for me to welcome the Romantics back into my heart, to learn a new way to relate to them with less judgment and more curiosity.

Yes, I think we can call this genre of books wisdom essays, and I imagine that as more writers become familiar with the vocabulary of Sophia, that bookshelf will begin to fill with more sophiological essays as well, and we will know them by the way they lead us into encounter with others, with God, and with creation around us. Surely Some Revelation is At Hand: Poetry-Magic-Imagination is an excellent place to start such a collection.

Alright, so tell me. Who here has read any of the Sophiologists? How about Barfield, Steiner or Swedenborg?

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Last month, I experienced eucatastrophe.

Yes, I’m aware of how hyperbolic that sounds, but it is finally the best and most appropriate word I could find for the avalanche of feeling rolling around in my heart. Do words come easily for other writers? There is a threshold of feeling beyond which I simply cannot express, and I keep reaching for words that communicate the unspeakable realities I have encountered. I fail and fail and fail. It’s embarrassing.

My dear cousin, my moonchild friend who charged me a quarter every time I wanted to be in her club, called me up a few weeks ago on a Saturday morning, squealing into the phone with uncontained delight at the surprise she had in store for me. She was at a Comic-Con showing her art and had discovered that our shared childhood treasure— the work that inspired her to draw, and me to dream and write a little— was there, in the flesh.

“Get over here!” she crowed. “We have to go meet Wendy and Richard Pini!”

Cue the record scratch and rewind a little bit. When I was about five or six I liked being read to, especially by my dad. The trouble was that my dad wasn’t much of a reader himself and found kids’ books boring. So he’d change the words or embellish the story or even just accidentally zone out in the middle of a page, which had a tendency to infuriate little me and sour the reading experience. He would have kind of rather watched Predator “together,” even if it meant I was hiding behind the couch.

One day my mom was out shopping at Waldenbooks (do you remember those?) and came upon something that surprised her. It was like a comic book, but bigger and different and colorful, and it had a cool title. She was granted the lucky thought that perhaps her husband would enjoy reading this ElfQuest aloud to their little daughter. No, ElfQuest is not a children’s book. We’ll get to that.

But for the next year I perched on the arm of the recliner every time my dad had a moment to spare. There wasn’t much time, honestly-- as a young country doctor, he was working 90+ hour weeks, plus rehabbing our turn-of-the-century house into something livable-- but bless him, he made space to start me out on a quest that would become a unifying note throughout the rest of my life. He read it to me first, and then I reread it over and over again over the course of decades. I entered the Quest as a child-contemporary of such characters as Dart and Newstar, and I dug out my mom’s halter tops and bandanas and my own clip-on hoops to dress as Nightfall for first grade “book character day”-- yes, I suspect it totally scandalized Mrs. Young, but to her credit, she rolled with it.

ElfQuest was not a children’s book, but it was exactly the story I needed as an emotionally and imaginatively intense child. It gave form to the swirling mix of perception and intuition that warred in my head, helped make sense of my mom and dad who were grieving the recent losses of their own mother and father respectively. As I grew, the story grew with me, and I came of age with Cutter and Skywise, struggling to find the Way and to learn how to dream better dreams, wrestling with my own shortcomings and returning once again...

Ugh. See, again I fail. The words aren’t enough. Because ElfQuest is more than a story; it is life and it is death; it is love and loss and war and peace; it is alienation and homecoming. You can hold it in your hands, but you cannot contain it within the confines of a single heart. All great books change you, but not all change you in the same way; many of our great classics are works of ideas made flesh that operate on our rational minds through the vehicle of story. Rarer are the works that create for us entire new worlds, peopled with characters who are as intimate to us as our own brothers and sisters. It’s terribly difficult to talk about family publicly!

So to say that I was excited to meet Wendy and Richard would be a most profound understatement. How do you meet someone who has given you such a gift? How can a single encounter hold all of that? True human encounter always bursts with potential energy, desiring nothing more than the kinetic transformation of ourselves and each other into greater and higher fullness. Meeting Wendy and Richard was like going to your best friend’s cousin’s birthday party, revealing unguessed aspects of an already precious loved one.

This is the eucatastrophe: It is a great wonder to be met with friendliness and hospitality by the powerful imaginations that made worlds one has had so much joy in visiting and playing within. It’s a revelation of the apocalyptic unity of the human race. Let me try this another way.

I know a woman, whether in the body or out of the body I’m still not sure, but she had a vision, and she doesn’t really talk about it because people already think she’s weird enough. In it she saw that one single human mind, in all its smallness and insignificance, can imagine an entire cosmos, an entire history, in the single tick of the secondhand of the clock. Then it was like she was pulled back and zoomed out, and she saw that at this moment in time, there were billions of human imaginations creating untold billions of universes every second, universes that multiplied and filled to fullness and burst like bubbles without ever being spoken into word. And she saw that this had been the case for untold thousands of years, and she marveled, Truly they are like unto little gods, and they wield unthinking an awe-full power over one another. Truly it would be better for them to perish in the depths of the sea than that they should wield this terrible power to one another’s destruction. But what if they used this power out of love? What if they offered their universes as freely given gifts? What contagions of goodness could they send out into the void?

We don’t usually get to meet the people who help sculpt our interiority. Many of our beloved authors and artists and musicians are not contemporaneous with us; most of the others are separated from us by means of unbridgeable space. One of our great human flaws, and what I believe is the great weakness and temptation of hagiography, is to stratify one another, so that we think that by the sheer variety of their giftedness, certain human beings become a different kind of thing from the rest of humanity.

It’s so delightful, because in rereading the entirety of the series over the past month, I see this theme also addressed within its pages. The characters in ElfQuest are given many diverse gifts, some of which are truly mind-boggling in their scope. It would be simple to isolate certain characters as saintly, as ascended beyond the rest who still struggle, but the Pinis consistently resist this temptation and push into the tension of immortality that we usually cognitively contort ourselves to avoid. To put it in “in-universe” words, walking up to the ElfQuest table was like encountering a High One and discovering the generosity and personalism of Timmain instead, an encounter not with an abstract idea but with splendid real people. This is how you meet those who help shape you-- by encountering them as delightful and real human beings, and allowing that encounter to reposition you into a more real relationship with everyone else.

I said before that ElfQuest is about life and death. It’s also about the contradictions and revelations that come with being both mortal and immortal, and in this way, ElfQuest packages some very deep and pressing spiritual issues within its story-pocket-universe-- because as human beings, this is the essence of our own spiritual conundrum. All the evidence of our material senses tells us we are mortal dust, and yet we find our own hearts are incapable of believing this and living meaningfully. I’m not claiming that everyone has to be a particular strain of deist to accomplish a form of this; Viktor Frankl’s concept of meaning is big enough to transcend the limitations of the kind of self-contained, solipsistic mortality that I think inevitably leads to existential despair. ElfQuest doesn’t offer facile answers, either-- but it does aim the questions further up and farther out, stretching our imaginations so that they stop artificially constraining the cosmos we live and move and breathe in.

Most of the elfin characters do not wrestle with internal corruption. Those that do are stagnating characters whose belief in their inevitably superior place in hierarchy collapses into the hubris of pride and violence against others. Instead, most character growth is driven by a lack of fullness, which is a delicate trick to pull off believably, as our own human experience is marked by a different kind of shadow side than elves possess. Eternity-as-spiral implies that there is no end-point of growth, but rather deeper and fuller experience of reality; as Dr. Timothy Patitsas has said, this actually gives each of us a definition of “sin” that changes us retroactively-- because as we move closer to infinite goodness and truth, the more our previous iterations of self appear lacking and flawed. And conditioned as we are by the senseless repeated conflicts of human generations, it’s hard for us to imagine what continued growth looks like outside of our confined experience.

The elves in ElfQuest offer a compelling vision of what this kind of personal and spiritual growth looks like. How can we picture personal development within a community that really and truly serves and scaffolds us? Not individuality swallowed up by the group, nor individuality positioned as constant opposition. If we can imagine this possible cosmos, can we find a way to realize it? This is story working in its most powerful register, by envisioning possibility and passing it from one heart to another.

Elves are not a direct allegory for humans, and they never pretend to be-- that’s one of the rules of the ElfQuest universe. Elves are not humans-- they are far more beautiful in their quotidian movements than we are yet in our most fervid striving. But we can imagine such beauty, and in contemplating it, we can learn important truths about ourselves-- the first lesson of which is that we must gaze unflinchingly on our own envy and acknowledge it in order to wriggle out from under its controlling thumb. We must first learn to be humble in the presence of beauty, in the presence of eternity; we must allow ourselves to be very small before we can become a microcosm of the macrocosm, part of the infinitely fractalizing cosmic fabric. Our hearts so long for eternity that our reflex is to grasp for it greedily, to demand it, rather than to first desire to be worthy of it.

Consider these ways the beautiful elves show us our own instinctive ugliness: The grand majority of elves do not murder, physically or spiritually, and the grand majority of elves share a reverence of childhood that creates optimal conditions for the growth and development of elf children. Despite our willingness to agree in principle, we daily wound each other physically and slay each other spiritually, and constantly witness adults demand their own rights and disregard the fragile needs of children.

In moralistic cultures, we often focus attention on behavior modification far downstream of first causes. That’s one of Jesus’s provocative teachings: murder and adultery, the corruptions of our incensive and desiderative powers, start in the heart far earlier than they manifest in behavior. It’s also present in a lot of human child-rearing practices that generally seek behavior modification before they tend to internal growth and development. ElfQuest postulates that a people can leapfrog in development by refusing these corruptions: by trying to avoid actively hurting one another, by repairing whenever possible, by granting children the space to grow into the adult problems they will face. The “morality” of the elves begins far upstream from behavior, and starts with a fundamental disposition of care and regard for one another. That human beings still lack these in the face of centuries is both appalling and true; that such simple changes are possible is proven attainable by countless salt-of-the-earth nobodies who manage to choose better ways in the face of adversity. That’s worth thinking about.

Now, at this point, I’ve got to tell you that many of my schoolfriends were a bit scandalized by the sexuality in ElfQuest, and some couldn’t get past the sex to see that ElfQuest was not celebrating human hedonism, but instead was portraying a vision of sex-positivity that could be possible for a people who operated beyond the constraints of a corrupted eros. It’s not even a bit scandalous within the rules of the story-pocket-universe: elves encounter one another with care and regard, scrupulously protect childhood from degradation, and lack the logistical constraints of mortality. They have accomplished what I’ve elsewhere described as no longer using their sexuality to hurt others with desire (eros) or will (thymos).

So, to go back to where I began, meeting Wendy and Richard was also a form of self-discovery, as it reveals to me how much my imagination was prepared to wrestle with these grand schemas of thought by first encountering them in the World of Two Moons. Could I have written anything here without them? I don’t think so. I’m just grateful to have met them in this life, and I could have listened to them talk about their storytelling philosophy for hours. In the short time I spent with them, I could see Cutter and Skywise winking at me through their eyes.

As I’ve said before, ElfQuest isn’t a children’s story, but it’s not NOT a children’s story, either. The hero’s journey doesn’t belong only to adults, and when it’s told exceptionally well, it doesn’t need to be age-exclusive, even if there is sex and violence. The concept of children’s literature is itself a very modern concept, and it’s liable to a lot of unnecessary digressions about what makes literature “suitable” for a child. There’s always some moral panic about the moral characters of authors, or what constitutes appropriate framing for various age cohorts. All of that moral hair-splitting inevitably misses the point that when a reader encounters a story-pocket-universe, regardless of age or preparedness, that encounter is outside the sphere of control of anyone else-- author, parent, teacher, or friend. Reading will never stop being dangerous and subversive because there are universes that multiply and fill to fullness and burst like bubbles every second of every day across all of space and time. And when such treasures are shared, what contagions of goodness they send out into the void!

As I’ve struggled with writing this piece, I’ve gradually realized that I’m not going to be able to say it all in one place, and it would be beyond foolish to try. I’d like to give you at least one more, from the perspective of a writer and crafter, on what ElfQuest can teach us about art and storytelling. Wendy and Richard were kind enough to share their worldbuilding rules with me, and I’d love to tell you about them.

But I also have to admit, it’s hard to dive into more specific literary criticism with this corpus, because despite being around for almost five decades, it’s still considered a cult classic. I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve met in the wild who have read even a portion of it-- so any attempt I make to offer detailed analysis of character or story arc will necessarily offer spoilers. I really do believe that ElfQuest is a largely undiscovered classic of contemporary fantasy literature, and it absolutely has yet to find the totality of its audience. I want to show you more, but in the meantime, I’ll be waiting for everyone in the Holt.

In addition to another ElfQuest essay, I’ve got a review in the pipeline of Michael Martin’s new release, Surely Some Revelation Is At Hand: Poetry, Magic, Imagination. And, of course, I’ve got the upcoming launch of my new children’s book, The Hidden Hosannah! Please follow me and share widely, so that the good news reaches everyone it is meant to.

Thank you for the gift of your attention in this crowded internet-fairyland!

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Nick: I was raised a strict Objectivist until I was twelve. There’s no shortage of “isms” in the contemporary online content-creation universe, but the younger folks might not have heard of that one. Briefly, it’s Rand’s own term for her savagely individualistic ethos-aesthetic.

Laura: Oh, boy. I’ve met lots of people who had an Ayn Rand phase, but never one who had a childhood marinated in it! Can you tell me more? What was it like?

Nick: Sure.

If I’m not careful here, I will write a book. In short, this is how it was; my mother was the oldest daughter of a U.S. Marine from Illinois, a Purple Heart recipient during WWII for wounds taken fighting in the Pacific. That man, my grandfather, settled in the small-town Deep South after the war, started a very successful small business, and raised a classic American family under strict discipline like you’d expect from a Midwestern Marine combat vet. Each of his kids give you a different story about that man, and none of them are lies; combining those stories, I find a picture of a man who was intelligent, loyal to the death to his friends and family, and difficult in the way that only a strictly principled and emotionally remote person can be.

Mom (may her memory be eternal) was like him. A young woman in the sixties, she hated rural Southern life and always spoke about wanting to find people who were “interested in learning things.” She discovered Rand in college, and constructed out of Rand’s philosophy and Boomer bootstrap optimism a worldview where human achievement was near-infinite in potential and the highest ideal of any individual’s life. She met my father in her first job as an engineer after college, and when I came along determined to raise me to be a prodigy. (Her words, not mine.)

It wasn’t long after that that my parents’ marriage failed, and unpaid tax bills led to my family’s homelessness. Turns out the IRS is unimpressed with ideas about the immorality of income taxes. Years of misadventure passed here that are beyond the scope of this piece, but evidently at the lowest point of our troubles Mom experienced a conversion event that I suspect to be an honest-to-God miracle. She wound up becoming as strict an adherent to Reformed Calvinist Christianity as she ever was to Rand’s philosophy. The two worldviews are surprisingly compatible.

She died last year in her mid-70s, after a second life where she reinvented herself as a natural health and childraising expert. (I will note that I’m an only child.) She left behind a cadre of thousands of devoted followers who lived by her ideas on alternative medicine. She had several other failed marriages, but lived alone when cancer caught up with her. She had no assets, but fortunately (as in Rand’s case) Medicare paid for her end-of-life care.

One of the last things I recall her saying, as we sat on her porch, was that the theme of her life had been loneliness.

If you’re seeing a through-line here between my upbringing and the disdain I have for guruism and adherence to axiomatic philosophies in place of caring for specific humans, you’ve got the picture.

Laura: Wow. That’s an amazing family history. It sounds like if there ever were personalities big enough to fill out Ayn Rand’s principles, your mom at least had a fighting chance! (May her memory be eternal!) I really relate to her hunger for maximizing human potential, for seeing the greatness people are capable of.

I can definitely see philosophical through-lines running through this, especially with how people with strong, forceful personalities can come to identify themselves with their own beliefs and thought-processes. I know people like this -- it can become impossible to disagree with them without them treating that disagreement as an attack on the whole person, or at least the whole belief system. This kind of identification of the self with belief system seems to lead to a particular kind of philosophical bullying, almost, where a difference of opinion or perspective becomes impossible without conflict.

But wow. To be raised as an Objectivist... I’m picturing you being reared on Ayn Rand anecdotes instead of fairy tales and Bible stories...

Nick: Thanks. You’re not wrong about Mom. The world is less for her absence. You’re right about the fairy tales, too, which I loved. As I was settling Mom’s estate, I ran across some correspondence between her and her Reformed pastor, where she lamented letting me read myths and Tolkien and stuff, blaming it for my conversion to Orthodoxy as a grown man. She was, of course, completely correct.

You just can’t get away from the connection between aesthetics -- can I just say “beauty”? I like the word more -- and the beliefs of your heart, whether or not you’re conscious of them. Rand knew this, and she lived and died by it.

There’s an apocryphal story about Rand that I encountered somewhere in that sphere -- I’m not sure where I first ran across it, though it’s said to have appeared in her Journal in 1965. Notorious for applications of her moral philosophy to every aspect of life, Rand was a sharp critic of music, art, and architecture. Like I hinted at earlier, I really think her appeal arises from the way she champions a certain ideal of classical, vanishing beauty at a time when that aesthetic is not what we see being built around us.

Rand’s interests weren’t limited to architecture or science. According to the story, Rand presented a careful, logical argument using her Objectivist principles identifying one particular style of music as objectively, optimally good. She coined the term “tiddlywink” for it, a hilariously undignified name which I understood at the time to refer to some form of polka.1 Even as a kid, I could see pretty clearly that the proper moral to this story is not “Tiddlywink is the Objectively Correct Music And Also Totally A Real Word,” but rather, “Ayn Rand is fond of polka.” The journal article2 on her musical history makes it clear where she developed this taste -- music of that sort was part of her childhood in St. Petersburg, Russia, with her father frequently taking her to a local park to enjoy free big band music.

A genuinely pleasant scene to imagine, occurring as it did right before the chaos of the October Revolution.

Laura: The timing makes it particularly poignant, and probably had at least a little bit to do with its powerful emotional resonance for her.

So Rand was committing the error of universalization, right? She was taking a personal preference-- maybe even something she loved for good reason-- and she was turning it into a categorical thing for the rest of humanity. And part of the reason why this is so en pointe is because Ayn Rand made such a huge deal out of everything being rational. Essentially, she backed herself into a corner where she couldn’t just like something personally, it had to be based on some kind of grand philosophical principle.

You’ve made a fascinating connection between this error of Rand’s and our internet-as-fairyland, particularly in the hollow hill we sometimes call the Orthosphere. Tell us about it.

Nick: Okay, that story about Rand’s musical taste lives rent-free in my head, and has given me a semantic tag for a phenomenon I’ve seen among shade-tree philosophers (and actual, qualified philosophers, more troublingly) in several media spheres. The place in which I’ve encountered it most, and the one which affects me most right at the time of this writing, is the traditional Christian content creation gang currently active in the mid-2020s.

I don’t want to criticize anyone publicly -- who am I? I also don’t want to artificially limit my critique of a troublingly widespread phenomenon. So, I will say only that I believe this sort of thing to be widespread and excessively magnified online by the effects of algorithmic individuality. I’m writing here as an American who is an Orthodox Christian convert from another Christian tradition, and I’m confident that the vast majority of other people falling into that category have seen examples of the Rand phenomenon.

The phenomenon I mean is this: A content creator, thought-leader, or (God help us) influencer has some idiosyncratic and unique experience that is meaningful to them, similarly to Rand’s music in the park. Without necessarily intending to do so, they confidently generalize this experience into a statement about the Way Things Are. That over-generalized feeling, often fueled by the potent liquor of childhood memory, morphs into a universally descriptive or even (God help us some more) prescriptive rule about how humans behave or should behave.

Laura: Yes, I know exactly what you’re referring to. Every little thing becomes linked to an objective “best way” or “right way.” And that gets super tricky when the person talking is starting to sort everything under Christian categories the way they define them. This is how we get things labeled as “good Christian art” or “the greatest canon of books.”

Ayn Rand was a harbinger of this posture, I think, because Objectivism so thoroughly prioritizes the abstract over the relational. It’s all about conforming to the right ideas which will then produce the right outcome, and love has absolutely nothing to do with anything at all.

So when we live in this abstract internet fairyland, where ideas take precedence over people, it seems to follow right away that we start to define our religious selves by conformity to ideas. If you believe the right things, you will experience the right outcome. How do you even love someone on the internet, anyway? Something real and relational has to happen, first, otherwise we’re just feeling affection for a projected image we carry on the backs of our eyeballs.

One of the ways this has rubbed you the wrong way is the reason we connected on Substack: When I wrote my essay On Reading C.S. Lewis Mythically, you immediately saw how this kind of difference in perspective could be calcified into something unhelpful or even destructive. I believe you led with, “Hot damn!”, which was delightful. It obviously struck a chord...

Nick: We really need to do another piece about the fairyland thing, because it’s amazing. Yes. We eat from the fairies’ feast, and then the Internet makes us dance until we die.

There’s an awful lot of this sort of nonsense -- I mean the emphasis on abstract principles as over against actual people, where the principle attaches strings to us and makes us dance -- going around on Christian circles with talk of gender roles. I’m thinking here especially of the association of men with order and women with life or chaos. I have heard this kind of talk in church groups, Laura -- even though it seems to stay mostly in the men-only group chat, interestingly enough. Guys who favor podcasts which talk about symbolism a lot go straight from discussing a spat with their wife over furniture to framing femininity in terms of Tiamat, ancient Babylonian symbol of oceanic chaos.

I may be going out on a limb here, but I would respectfully suggest that in most cases, comparing one’s romantic partner to Leviathan is a misstep.

Figure 2: The Ancient of Days vs. Leviathan. It is not a subtle metaphor.3

Also, about the “men : women / order : chaos” analogy, anyone who has ever spent time around a college men’s dorm has some grounds to doubt this association. But I digress. Most importantly, the overgeneralization of a personal preference or a formative experience into a law of nature has got to stop. You guys! Stop it.

At best, that sort of thing is silly idealization that sets one up for being disappointed in actual reality, a dangerous snare since God made reality but you invented your idealized version of it yourself. Most commonly, it’s obnoxious and marginalizing to folks who don’t share those preferences. In its worst instances, it verges on a backdoor Gnosticism. That term might sound a little melodramatic, but I haven’t been able to escape a creepy sense of “this guy or girl believes they have secret knowledge that explains the troubles around them” even in some face-to-face chats at coffee hour lately.

Laura: Backdoor Gnosticism. I like that. It fits right in with how the internet-as-fairyland works, with its way of privileging access to certain kinds of information and rewarding people for the performance of their second sight. In this case, symbolic literacy can almost become a kind of practical magic one can wield against others...

We really need the principle of economy here, don’t we? Because when we couple economy, or oikonomia, with the concept of theologoumena-- that a theological opinion can be likely true but not rise to the level of dogma-- suddenly we have a lot of space for thinking about theological and spiritual and even symbolic things from different perspectives. Something can be good and true and beautiful without being exclusively so. One can like tiddlywink and southern rock and electronic dance music without betraying some greater cosmic principle of rightness.

But I don’t want to just knock symbolic thinking. For many people, regaining a symbolic framework for reality can really help paganize the imagination so that it can finally be appropriately baptized (as I wrote in Technologies for Defeating Demons). But with that analogy, it’s also essential not to get stuck there. Otherwise we get into that problem with identifying with a belief system as a self, and become inclined to use the whole force of our personality in defense against anything different. This is why it’s so important to funnel real spiritual hunger through the hinterlands of content into the county of real, embodied relationships.

Tie this back into Ayn Rand for me, because I love this angle. I, too, was once a teenager who read Ayn Rand, after all! And the way you name it as a pathway to Gnosticism is really important.

Nick: That “second sight” take hits hard. We humans are wired to notice coincidences -- if we see the same idea presented from several different sources, we are super inclined to take it as being significant, or even supernatural. The trouble is, the ‘fairyland’ can (in fact, is designed to) manufacture that experience on demand, imbuing us with an unearned certainty about our opinions concerning the Meaning of Things. And your point about belief-system-as-self is essential, and deserves more attention. If I can’t bear someone critically examining my opinions about metaphysics or theology without experiencing it as a personal attack, I am crippled like the paralytic in the Gospel.

Like Rand’s appeal to the architectural and technical aesthetics of early-1900s capitalism, trad-Christian gesturing at symbolism in everything as understood by an idealized Medieval Christian society (for instance) is doing something sneaky. It’s importing the nostalgically imagined aesthetic of a bygone world we don’t inhabit, one which the speaker and the audience know only through their imagination.

By this invocation, the approach (Objectivist, symbolic, other; pick your aesthetic) gains a powerful appeal to folks searching for meaning -- especially young folks, who have survived fewer actual experiences. Lived experience has a way of grouchily resisting forced categorization. Orthodox Christians are taught by Church tradition, quite properly, to use their imaginations very cautiously in their spiritual lives. Like most pieces of valid spiritual advice, this principle proves itself durable in the contemporary media ecosystem. If you find yourself falling in line with some podcaster, for instance, who critiques some phenomenon of modernity by unfavorably comparing it to 1930s America, or Byzantium, or the ways of the ancient Hellenes, that is imagination, and it’s exactly as good an idea as developing an attachment to a pretty girl whom you’ve never actually met.

Despite the tragic appeal of vanishing grandeur, we American Orthodox owe it to our creed and our own self-knowledge to resist this sort of idealization, while still recognizing that the appeal is effective because something is missing and because the world truly does contain meaning. We have no lasting city. We are looking for a city that is to come.

Laura: Oh, yes. This has come up in context with my work on Charlotte Mason, and how she talks about imagination, and it comes up a lot in our book Patterns for Life. We interact with stories-- even historical ones-- through our imaginations. This is why it helps us to really think through what a healthy imagination is, what it looks like and how it behaves.

I’ve said elsewhere that a misuse of the imagination has far less to do with reading Harry Potter and far more to do with allowing the media machine to give form to one’s thinking.

And I think you’re right. Generic gnosticism is almost necessarily predicated by this category of misuse, this switching of locus from real relationship with others to mediated relationship through ideas. I’ll be thinking about this for a while...

How long have you been sitting on this, anyway? What should we do about it all?

Nick: Lord, that’s a good question. I suppose I was inoculated against this kind of thing from my youth up, for the reasons I said, but these concerns have been nagging at me since I started enjoying the world of Orthodox-adjacent podcasts four or five years ago. Just like you and Dr. Shaw, I want stories to be the technologies we use against the demons. But the trouble with weaponized technology in a war is that both sides may use it. Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was a potent weapon for ill, fueled by the refined nuclear material of modernity’s decaying beauty. I get the horrors when I think of people doing something similar using our ancient, winsome creed to power their ideological engines.

As far as what we might do, I’ll level with you; my inspiration for doing this piece was that I thought of a funny name and wanted to use it for something.

I want to propose “the Ayn Rand Polka” as a term for the snare I’ve described here -- using philosophical/theological proofs to show that your preferred arrangements are the optimal, definitely God-ordained situation. Especially in the context of an unfavorable comparison to some idealized past or other, exotic culture with better optics.

Henceforth, let it be known: this sort of silliness shall be termed “doing the Ayn Rand Polka” (an informal fallacy like the No True Scotsman) and calling it out will be a hobby of mine. I hope the availability of this term helps people prone to follow self-proclaimed spiritual teachers (or even ordained and qualified teachers who are stepping outside the lane of their expertise) in the process of noticing that they are allowed to politely ignore those gurus’ opinions.

Laura: So now we have a game to play when we see people dancing close to this error! We just need a good meme to stick it on.

Seriously, though, a lot of the problem is that human beings take themselves too seriously. Friends will tell you that when opinion talk gets too heavy, I’m liable to break into song. Nothing even remotely tiddlywink, but rather that great classic by .38 Special, Hold On Loosely:

Nick: I love me some Southern rock, but I can’t think of any lines that work here. I’m a Simple Man. I’ll bring in a couple pieces of classic poetry instead:

And also (particularly applicable to aggressive online discourse):

Anyway. I hope that calling out this kind of thing helps those prone to perform guruism to check twice and three times before they confidently assert How Things Are.

Laura: Not likely, I think. Fairyland rewards confident unambiguity, at least until the mark strides confidently into the ruins of a red cap’s castle.

Nick: That is terrifyingly true -- another potent feature of online discourse that I’ve always subtly felt, but you’ve put to words. I feel the pull of the confidently unambiguous speaker as strongly as anyone. Is it just some part of us trying to return to our childhood, where we could ask our mother or father about something, they would tell us, and then the matter would be settled? So charming and proper in little children, so dangerous in grown women and men.

It reminds me of the quote from the great Fr. Alexander Schmemann, who understood the dangers of idealization better than anyone else I’ve read. Little children, keep yourself from gurus.

Laura: That’s an interesting through-line— the line from fairyland deception of the self, to strong personality forcefully trying to convince others of the objective rightness of his or her opinions, all the way to this idea of guruism. Without humility (and maybe a bit more levity!) we run the risk of getting high on our own supply. May God preserve us all from guruism, both in the self and others!

Nick: Yup. Amen.

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Nicholas Marshall is a professor of chemistry, writer, tree enthusiast, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu instructor. He and his family live in South Carolina, USA. He can be reached at nicholas.mclane.marshall@gmail.com.

In Icons, Not Instruments, I mention what I call the fallacy of the group: treating statistical generalizations about populations as if they tell you something meaningful about the particular human standing in front of you. I’d like to spend some time today unpacking that and showing how our tendency to universalize is a common and persistent barrier to encountering others in reality and developing true and authentic relationships with them. It’s not even a new phenomenon, as you’ll see.

Have you guys read any Kant at all? Not deeply, just the introductory stuff about the categorical imperative? To shoehorn a world into a grain of sand, one of the really cool things Kant does with his categorical imperative is that to show that it works, he first states it, but then he turns it inside out and upside down and holds it up to a mirror to show that it works from a bunch of different perspectives. These different angles are what he called the “three formulations” of the categorical imperative:

The trick is to see that Kant is actually saying the same thing three times, in three different ways. It would be super easy here to get stuck on Kant and just yap about the categorical imperative (because one of the fun things to do with it is figure out more formulations), but I’d rather do something much smaller and particular. I hope you don’t mind.

You see, my “fallacy of the group” is one formulation of a different basic premise. It’s extrapolated from the core, foundational idea that each human being is particular. We could structure it this way:

Now, I could continue writing this essay as a great big abstract examination of these ideas, and it would probably be cool enough. But I’ve got something more fun in mind: a story from a particular human being. You see, Nicholas Marshall has a unique perspective on this double error…

Nick: I am excited about the storytelling part, (after all, that’s why writing exists, right?) but I want to take a second here to appreciate what you’ve brought to the conversation. First, the grounding in Kant is fascinating; my only exposure to him is the brief summary I got in an undergrad intro-to-philosophy class. It was a great class, but it didn’t prepare me at all to discuss that giant figure. Wearing my ignorance on my sleeve, I’ll add this; it’s unclear to me how the categorical imperative #2, which seems to me to be self-evidently essential and beautiful, is a third version of the other two. I love #2, but I’m squinting suspiciously at #1 and #3 in the way a mathematician treats a plausible-sounding but potentially catastrophic axiom.

Laura: I wish I could send you back in time to Dr. Ferreira’s ethics class! I can’t reproduce what he did, but he chalk-and-blackboard walked us through the relationships. In the meantime, I still like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: especially section nine on the unity of the formulations. But enough of Kant! No more Kant! It’s too easy to get stuck on just one of his sentences. Moving on!

Nick: I wish I could remember the names of my undergrad philosophy professors. They were both excellent, and whatever sins they may have committed, they didn’t deserve to have to put up with my mouthy 18-year-old self. Anyway. Your own point #2 genuinely startled me! You’ve hit upon a bit of philosophical misprision that 100% lies behind my motivation to write on this topic, but that I didn’t spell out at all until we started this discussion.

There’s this phenomenon I’ve noticed in the world of online Orthodox discourse that (to use the technical term) bugs me. For an example, I’m personally acquainted with an Orthodox philosopher who specializes in arguing for philosophical realism over nominalism, and makes the case that realism is unavoidably affirmed in the ecumenical Church councils. Very well; his argument is reasonable, and I’ve found his engagement with ancient philosophy from a Christian perspective to be super fun as well as educational for me. I’m a fan of his online content. Unfortunately, I can’t help concluding that in some cases he and others who invoke the nominalism / realism dichotomy (whether or not they know they’re doing that) commit a basic logical fallacy.

I hadn’t heard of these terms before encountering this philosopher’s work, so I’ll recap it myself. Please correct any inaccuracies if you see them, I’m not a philosopher myself. Realism asserts that when we identify “genera” in the world -- types of things -- those identifications point to true, extant structures of reality; think Plato’s Forms. That is, a cat is a different type of thing from a beetle. Contrariwise, nominalism argues that those terms are only terms, and that we apply them to make sense of the matter-in-motion of which the universe is composed. Okay. I understand how a traditional Christian of any flavor might find the latter idea unpalatable.

Laura: Well, perhaps metaphysical nominalism is unpalatable that way. But I have an idea about where you’re going with this...

Nick: Haha. Yeah, I’m not sneaking up on it very much, especially in the context of your intro where you talked about the fallacy of the group. The formal fallacy I noticed comes in when somebody points to any assertion that a certain thing is merely a social construct / arbitrary label / ‘just your opinion, man,’ and says “Ah ha, that’s just nominalism!” (Or “postmodernism,” which was the boogeyman in my childhood that preachers invoked when they decided something was bad.) The philosopher I mentioned, for instance, claims that to say “gender is a social construct” is nominalism, as is “LGBTQ.” He doesn’t address the fairly-well-defined distinction between sex and gender, nor does he specify what about that acronym is nominalist.

The abstract form of this fallacy goes like this: “Some S are P. Therefore, all P are S.” Or, more specifically, “Principle X is proven, and it states that some S are P. So, if you are saying that any P is non-S, you must be wrong.” I think the right name of the fallacy is an illicit conversion, but I should ask a logician.

Laura: Ooooh. Now you’re giving me traumatic flashbacks to my syllogism days. Venn diagram for the interested!

Figure 1: Some things in the set of “Things which have the quality of being S, P, or both” are in the overlappy area in the middle. But not all of them.

Nick: I love syllogisms. They’re more mathy than a lot of actual math classes. Just to be clear, the categories I’m discussing here are something like this:

S = “things we noticed in the world that are useful, important, or lovely”

P = “absolute, metaphysical truths that are objectively real”

We still haven’t gotten to the story part, but I figured it would be good to illustrate the error I’m seeing here. What I’m going to do is pick several areas with clear, absolute rules in which I am a little knowledgeable, and call attention to some concepts in those areas which are clearly...just names.

For instance, the Sicilian Defense in chess, or a hydrogen atom in chemistry. The idea is that these terms refer to recurring, useful patterns which emerge as a consequence of the absolute rules of the system (those rules, of course, being properly real and not nominal) but they do not exist in the ultimate sense. Nowhere in the laws of physics is the object hydrogen atom defined.

Laura: Hold up. A hydrogen atom is a single proton with a single electron. It is, technically, scientifically defined...?

Nick: Okay, that was a little bit bait, haha. Yes! The idea is that “with” is doing a lot of work in the definition you used. A hydrogen atom is a pattern formed under the real laws of physics of this universe, which contains protons and electrons. (And of course protons are patterns of three quarks, but I don’t want to exaggerate my knowledge there. I’m literally a guy who makes crystals and rubber for a living).

But a proton and electron recombining into an atom (which process, the physicists tell us, initiated the existence of the first light in the universe, before which there was only the chaos of unbound plasma -- I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried!) is just as much a pattern as the moves 1.e4 d5 are in a game of chess. Maybe more so.

It is tempting to suspect that it’s patterns all the way down, and what you ultimately arrive at is the pre-eternal Son of God playing with the matter He created, like G.K. Chesterton would have said. “Do it again!” And is this nominalism or realism? I’m honestly not sure. It feels Platonic to me, but you would know better than I. Regardless, it just isn’t that hard to point out a category of things that are very “thingy,” but don’t have an absolute existence.

Laura: I think you’ve independently arrived at something Sir Karl Popper did a great job of showing: how one can be a metaphysical realist and still hold to a form of nominalism for methodology-- which actually becomes really important in the philosophy of science and any sort of clear thinking that requires we define our terms. Popper called the kind of ideas you are talking about-- those that arise from thinking, but have a reality of their own-- “world 3 objects.”

In any case, being able to hold to realism while accessing the useful aspects of nominalism has been really helpful for me. It’s allowed me to articulate for myself the difference between models and reality, and also parse in my own thinking how science-thinking and humanities-thinking often set themselves at loggerheads with each other unintentionally, through ill-defined terms. This kind of mixed-up method leads to just the sort of fallacy you’re getting to, especially with regards to how culture and theology relate to each other...

Nick: Yes. I haven’t read Popper in the original, but I love him solely for the strength of the classical Popperian “let’s see if we can disprove this hypothesis” approach. That mental discipline is so potent that most working scientists don’t try to practice it because it’s too hard. In truth, that practice comprises the asceticism of the scientific world.

Laura: “Asceticism of the scientific world.” I love this. I’m stealing it, with attribution of course. But we’re up in the clouds. How does this connect to the fairyland of internet Orthodoxy?

Nick: Ha! We super are. That’s the trouble with talking to people who know interesting things.

The connection here to our topic is pretty obvious; just because (say) Orthodox Christians believe that some concepts are real (God, humanity, etc.) doesn’t mean that if we say “Boys wearing pants and girls wearing skirts is just a societal gender construct” we are affirming some sort of anti-Christian philosophical relativism -- I guess you would say metaphysical nominalism?

Laura: Right. It’s a kind of mental positioning that can’t see outside of itself, and justifies its self-reference with an appeal to theology. Metaphysical nominalism would be the position that a reality independent of a mind’s experience of it doesn’t really exist. Here’s the hair we are splitting: We’re saying that as Christians, it’s possible to believe in a reality outside of one’s head (realism), but that at the same time, we can use and work with constructs that absolutely do not have independent reality for themselves. So, nominalism without being metaphysical about it; nominalism as a tool.

Without this distinction, you find that in defense of realism, people assign a whole lot of concrete absolutism to concepts that are much more malleable in our experiential reality. In other words, in defense of realism, people tend to collapse models into reality, and then get stuck when the models don’t have the power to account for outliers.

Nick: That’s exactly it, and there are a lot of determined, smart Christian folk out there who are driving their metaphysical / theological cart and horse backwards with good intentions.

I think this fallacy appears in public religious discourse far more than people realize, and you named it when we first started talking about this topic (unlooked-for by me) in your point 3(a) -- or, rather, you identified the converse set which demonstrates the failure of the fallacy. “Some words are just useful terms for a pattern.” I suppose that a writer with a biology degree and a publication titled Patterns for Life is bound to have a certain practical appreciation for the limited usefulness of identified patterns.

Laura: I write a lot for myself, just to think things through, and one of the concepts I keep coming back to is that distinction between model (or pattern) and reality. We make mental models to serve a particular purpose, and we get ourselves in trouble when we use a model intended for one thing in order to think about something else. This is how we mix up categories, as when we make scientific claims about theology or vice versa, or when we start to treat our own personal experience/phenomenology as if it has the same status as universal truth, simply because we ourselves are trying to situate ourselves there out of perceived fidelity to Truth, Beauty and Goodness.

Which is where we get to the fun part! Let’s look at a quote:

Nick, when you shared this quote with me, I laughed out loud. Like many people, I encountered Ayn Rand as a teenager, and boy, did she make a lot of sense to my teenage brain. In particular, I found her celebration of excellence to be a breath of fresh air. But as anyone who tries to live out her principles eventually realizes, I discovered that it doesn’t lead to a joyful existence. Tell me about your background with her.

Nick: “A joyful existence.” That’s heartbreakingly true, Laura. Rand holds up certain beautiful things produced by civilizations she admires and says “Look at this. It’s beautiful, and the world is tearing it down and putting garbage in its place.” And she’s right about that, and an idealistic teenager in love with beauty and truth ends up willing to run through a wall for her.

Okay, it’s really time for the story part now.

I was raised a strict Objectivist until I was twelve.

Haha! I couldn’t resist the cliffhanger. If you, like me, are hooked, be sure to check back in a few days for Part Two!

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Nicholas Marshall is a professor of chemistry, writer, tree enthusiast, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu instructor. He and his family live in South Carolina, USA. He can be reached at nicholas.mclane.marshall@gmail.com.

It was one of those dreams, where a crystal voice of clarity breaks through the fog and density, rapping you on the skull and demanding that you pay attention.

You have everything you need, it repeated. Then with a smile I could hear, it added, You’re just tired.

You’re right, I responded. I am tired! I’m tired! And I continued to exclaim about how tired I was until I woke from that particular nap.

I’ve been trying to write this particular update for a few weeks two months now, attempting to ease back into a sustainable use of Substack. But people, I’ve got to be honest: every time I’m signing on lately, I’m getting fed a bunch of really heavy stuff. Everything is so serious: education, religion, current events. Even the pretty nature accounts I follow are laced with an apocalyptic doom: Save the bees… or else! I love bees. I want to save them all! But it all reminds me of how I came home from school in first grade hysterical about the rain forests, and my poor mother had to figure out how to talk me off the edge of the cliff.

I still care very much about the rain forests, forests in general actually, but unfortunately it’s all far outside my sphere of influence. All of this stuff is, because I’m a genuine, class-A nobody. And the stuff that is within my own sphere of influence? Damn if it doesn’t get heavy enough on its own. If I am tempted to squander the energy of my caring on things outside my sphere, I’m left with far too little to make good actions within it. I’m willing to bet you have the same problem. So I’m guessing I’m not the only person who logs onto Substack, sighs at the gravity of it all, then switches over to Reddit to laugh at animals being derps and chuckle at silly comments.

The internet is fairyland, and that metaphor is life-changing. With this model, I can admit to you that I love fairyland-- that I take little trips here when my day-to-day gets a little heavy, that when I’m careful with it, it offers me joys and delights. And also that sometimes I get snared in things unseelie and come back to life with a little bit of spacey enchantment clinging like cobwebs to my head.

When I first started writing “for real”-- after Sasha and the Dragon was accepted for publication and I realized I might actually be able to do this thing-- I made myself a promise. I promised that I would not contribute to the noise. I would not write publicly just to churn out content, or pretend that my pen was a goose that would lay me golden eggs. Fairyland is everything but quiet, and King Solomon had it pegged when he noted a few millenia ago that there is nothing new under the sun. I’m not going to write on everything I get a craving to write about because cravings must always be encountered with the space and time of discernment.

How do we integrate all of these impulses, so many of which pull us in opposite directions, stretched out on the rack of conflicting desires? So often it feels like the hunger for sincerity and growth is at odds with the longing for release and happiness, but this I know is a false dichotomy. The true work is the hard work of holding both at the same time, to greater reality and intensity, as much as it can be borne. To stand at the abyss and drink a cup of tea.

Do you know George MacDonald’s fairytale The Light Princess? It’s a story about how light-heartedness without gravity is stunted growth, and how love as a state of being needs weight and self-sacrifice in order to bring life.

It’s a beautiful and moving story, to be sure. But I’ve always felt that MacDonald only told half of the story, or at the very least he didn’t spell everything out for us. Yes, certainly, we need gravitas, sincerity, emotional weight-- all of these faces of the diamond. But we also need levity and lightheartedness, because without those things our Christian joy is a lie. Be of good cheer, Christ tells us. Wash your faces when you fast. Don’t be mopey, I’ve already won the war. And later, St. Paul rolls his eyes at our Pharisaical gravity and admonishes us that if Christ isn’t risen, we’re a bunch of idiots.

You see, the mistake is in thinking that gravity and levity, sadness and joy, are poles on the same spectrum. So if you’re grieving, you can’t be happy; if you’re laughing, you can’t be serious. In reality these things are two different spectra. One’s sadness and gravity is not actually linked to one’s joy and levity, and in fact, one can be intensely both at the same time. At least that has been my lived experience. It was such a relief to find Kamizierz Dabrowski (have you seen my recent release over at Patterns for Life? I dig into Dabrowski a little bit in a talk I gave at last year’s Orthodoxy and Education conference)-- even more than Jung, Dabrowski articulated how intensity of personal experience is not of necessity neurotic, but rather, that intensity and inner conflict is the prime mechanism for internal growth. Need as sidequest for the summer? Dabrowski’s a fun one.

We need both our gravity and our levity-- in heaps and spades-- to really grow. Nurturing one at the expense of the other just doesn’t work well.

How do you nurture both in your own lived experience? One of the ways I do this is by adjusting my reading. In times of greater gravity, I lean on those works that bring me joy, and in times of greater leisure I pursue the more serious. Thus it is that recently, I’m returning to books that have soothed my heart, and it is these works that I will be writing about this summer, exploring the ways story can integrate both gravity and levity in ways that heal our own fractured experiences.

The very first book that comes to mind that injects me with healing electricity is The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder. This is a book of ecstasy, of the dimensionality that becomes possible in the intersection of gravity and levity.

When you ask me what my five desert island books are, I can usually narrow it down to thirty or forty contenders (Does a series count as one book? Do you bring a book you love so much you have it memorized? What’s more important on a desert island: characters or ideas?), but The Solitaire Mystery is my automatic number two, right after the obligatory Bible. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read it.

This spring, I had the most profound joy of reading it aloud to my kids for the first time, and the even more mind-obliterating delight of watching them react to the story in the same way I do. There were moments in this read aloud that I read a passage, set the book down on the table, and we all just sat there in silent contemplation; often enough, I had tears streaming down my cheeks. (My kids are used to this by now, and they wait patiently until I can clear the lump from my throat and continue reading...)

What in the world makes this book so special?

Well, I already told you a little bit about why I love Gaarder. Last time I mentioned The Orange Girl and Sophie’s World, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t also recommend his other works. The Christmas Mystery, for example, is a philosophical book about liturgical time travel! You’d think that loving an author so much, I’d have all his titles under my belt-- but the truth is that the rarefied air of just one of his novels can keep me flying for quite a long time. To binge read all of that glory just wouldn’t be right for me.

So why is this one my favorite? Sophie’s World is more well known, and a great book, but it’s primarily about the world of philosophical ideas. The Solitaire Mystery is all about what it means to live life with the heart of a philosopher, to be rooted in an unshakeable sense of awe and wonder that permeates every layer of our lives. It’s a book about being awake in a world of sleepers; about being a joker in a pack of cards.

I hesitate to tell you too much about it, because it begs to be experienced for itself. I will tell you that it is a delightfully layered story within a story within a story within a story, that it treats in destiny and family curses, and that you will never, ever look at a pack of cards casually ever again. The Solitaire Mystery touches on the mysteries of both creation and subcreation, on the driving powers of the human imagination and the human heart, and what it means to live life fully awake and crystal-clear sober.

Perhaps more than anything, The Solitaire Mystery is a fairytale, in the best possible senses of the word. It is accessible at almost all ages (I admit that my five-year old slid down to the carpet for his Lego set pretty quickly, but I also must note that he played quietly). It has layers of meaning to unpack, all wrapped up in a story with a clear message and trajectory, that can be encountered and re-encountered to deeper benefit. It’s not preachy at all, though it talks about some pretty convicting themes and invites the reader into acts of moral courage. And most importantly, it is so full of magic that that magic can’t help but immediately spill out into your lived life.

The high you get from works like this is so much better than drugs, I swear it. Drugs and booze just mimic the chemicals that make you feel a certain way, an overloud jangling and clattering of nerves and synapses devoid of meaning, signifying nothing. They are the cravings of the idiot, full of sound and fury.

When you find the way to see reality, though, to behold the cosmos in this particular way that turns a meaningless maze, that rat race made real, into a glorious labyrinth to endlessly explore, you tap into all the true reasons why this bodily feeling exists for us to experience.

But, you know, after the ecstasy, the laundry.1 And we’ll be laughing while we fold!

Housekeeping

Here’s what’s coming up on dephilosophize me this summer:

• A four or five part long-form write up on a particular creative work that has been part of my life since I was six. I just had the amazing opportunity to meet and speak with the authors, and I’m rereading the series with some insider knowledge that is blowing my mind.

• A series of shorter, focused pieces on other books and media (yes, I’m going to include MLP:FiM) that I’ve recently thought about that have contributed to integrating sincerity and joy in my own embodied life. They make me happy.

• A unique think-piece, co-written with one of my readers, on a particular danger of fairyland we’ve been emailing back and forth about. What started out as a simple exchange has continued to evolve into something really interesting, and I can’t wait to share it with you.

In addition, we missed the deadline to launch my new children’s book in the Paschal season, but that’s alright! It’s in layout now and looks fantastic, plus we’ve started the administrative work on developing the Kickstarter launch. I can’t wait for you to see it!

Finally, the biggest reason I haven’t been writing here as much is because I’ve been devoting more attention to my magical/spiritual realism series. I have two books nearly complete, and am hard at work on the third.

Thank you so much for your ear. I hope this little corner of fairyland helps you find both gravity and levity, and I wish you all the most glorious midsummer.

Warmly,

Laura

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Welcome to all my new subscribers! I’m glad you’re here. Friends who have been here a while know this already, but part of my household’s Lenten fasting practice is serious digital abstinence. Our family’s habit goes back over a decade, and is not the same for every fasting period! As I’ve explained before, on the eve of a fast, we all sit down together and talk about ways that our screens and digital experiences are affecting us, and we each commit to a particular realistic reduction. Sometimes this looks like a complete screen fast, but more often than not, we simply try to refocus our screen use into activities that foster family relationships.

I’ll be honest, I need a screen fast for myself. Just in the past week, I’ve had essays make me cry in despair and notes make me irritable and even outright angry. That’s not why I’m here. All this to say that I won’t be around here much the next few weeks!

But that’s a good thing in the long run, because I’m hoping to have my next children’s book ready to launch by Pascha! Here’s a sneak peek of the cover:

In the meantime, I’m also reading a few books that Fred Durbin recommended, so I’m sure I’ll have something to say about those at some point, both also being reinventions of the western genre, and thus something to tumble about with all these thoughts about an enchanted Americana.

You also may recall that late last year I was working on a presentation about caregiving for an ailing parent, particularly while homeschooling (as that has been my experience). That project has been backburnered for the time being, simply because in living out the reality again, I just can’t sustain the right energy to work on the project. The text is nearly complete, though, awaiting the acceptable season.

I wish you all good strength for Lent, and I’ll leave you with a few of my latest thoughts-- the kinds of spooks that haunt me on the eve of a fast.

Most people know Jostein Gaarder for his curious and lovely Sophie’s World. It was my first introduction, too, and was directly responsible for my philosophy minor and several odd screen names I used in the early 00’s. As much as I loved Sophie, it was Gaarder’s other books that ended up making me a devoted fan. I have read The Solitaire Mystery more times than I can count, and the quote above is from his fairytale love story, The Orange Girl.

Jostein Gaarder reliably conjures for me that delightful feeling of getting high off of philosophy-- that ecstatic bliss of standing at the edge of the abyss and breaking out into song and dance. This high is pretty different from getting high and talking about philosophy. Or, rather, thinking that you’re talking about philosophy, but mostly just saying something incomprehensible like, “It’s all one, man! The eye in the bushes is watching!”

The latter is a rocket ship that can never get off the ground-- for the briefest instant, you’re in the stars, but you find you can never recapture that elusive feeling sober. The best you get is deja vu at a whiff of patchouli. The high of great sobriety, in contrast, brings with it a gentleness, a finesse, a lightness of perception that involves becoming aware of ever more exquisite levels of details, ever more profound comprehension of expansion.

But in order to get that high off of philosophy, you pretty much also have to pitch a tent on the brink of the abyss. The ecstasy of creation is accompanied by outrage at its violating violence; the bliss of its beauty by terror in the face of its annihilation. Awareness, yes, but also awareness of contingency, fragility, and lack of anything but the barest whiff of agency. This might be why Kirillov is my favorite Dostoevsky character, even though he claims to be a consistent atheist.

But I get it. Because, you see, no matter how great your faith, it can only take you to the edge of the abyss and maybe hold your hand there. Death still means taking that step out into the void. And however we experience the reality of memento mori, whether it is in the frigid wind of the abyss or in the cold breath off the freshly dug grave of a loved one, that given moment is one of profound urgency.

The ecstasy of Gaarder is balanced for me by what Dr. Mark Epstein articulated in The Trauma of Everyday Life, a poetic and practical synthesis of Buddhist psychology: Everything is burning. In the grand scheme of things, on the timeline of the universe, everything I care about is already broken, everyone I love has already lived and died. We are each a blink.

Which brings me to that quote above. I reread it last week and was delighted by its resonances both with Cherokee teachings and with some of Origen’s own musings. I was taught by my friend that the Cherokee belief is that we are each, in the timeless moment before birth, were given a choice as to whether to accept this particular life to incarnate. Our presence here indicates that we chose the life, sufferings and joys together. Origen pondered something similar, though his teaching on the preexistence of souls was ultimately rejected by the church-- likely because he inferred that the quality of material existence one was born in indicated one’s spiritual bent. I think it’s pretty easy to see the spiritual danger in such a belief-- that someone born into suffering might deserve such a life because of the quality of their soul doesn’t sound Christ-like at all.

But the Cherokee belief is a little different. It asks you to think. What is there to learn from this life? What joys can I be thankful for? What sufferings can grow my compassion?

As Gaarder points out repeatedly, an individual’s existence is positively miraculous. Think of how many human beings had to survive and have children-- at exactly the right time-- for you to be here! One untimely accident in 967 BC, one extra case of the plague in 1348, and you’re dust that never comes together. There is an undeniable fairytale quality to our existence, and whether or not you really believe it, it’s fascinating to ask: What did I want to experience in this life?

As much as I love the fairytale framing, I think that we must be careful with the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves. Storytelling can be tricky. We can concoct a mesmerizing thread of meaning, cast ourselves as main character in situations where we might just be sidelined extras. The story we tell ourselves can become a mask of beautiful, logical words that ends up hiding us from the raw experience of being fully alive, instead offering a blanket of dissociation to protect us from the teeth-rattling intensity of it all.

Even the best stories we write about ourselves are just not sufficient to the task of annihilating the abyss. We can dance on the edge, but we can’t leap across.

For this, we need Pascha. Not a big old supernatural perception thing, where we’re granted epistemological certainty that flings a rainbow bridge across the depths and escorts us safely across. I’m not going to tell you that the experience of Pascha will miraculously cure you of existential wrestling. Though I’ve had plenty of supernatural experiences, in a strange twist of fate, almost none of them have been religious since I became Orthodox. I’ve come to believe this is for a reason. Too often supernatural experience, especially the kind that leads you to epistemological certainty, is just a hair’s breadth away from forcing you to question your sanity-- sometimes for good reason.

No, we don’t need cemented belief; we don’t need a removal of doubt or an anesthetic for our pain. As I’ve said before, healing doesn’t mean that things get fixed back to the way they were before they got broken. The locusts will eat the years.

What we really need is an actual bridge built across the abyss, regardless of our ability to perceive it, which is precisely what Christ says He has built for us. And just like in the stories, there will come a time when we will each of us lift a foot and place it out in empty space. Can you trust the Man when He says your foot will land on something solid?

Participating in Pascha helps you, bit by bit, to see than you can. Every moment spent in the kairos of liturgical time, every repetition that restructures the firing of your material synapses, every time your heart thumps in time with the demand for the gates to be lifted up, the Spirit of God whispers that what we can perceive now is only a fraction of the fullness of reality that awaits.

Catch you on the flip side.

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If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll remember that last year I read both Sergius Bulgakov’s Bride of the Lamb and Vladimir Solovyov’s Lectures on Godmanhood. Though I appreciated both deeply, I didn’t write much about either because I didn’t want to inadvertently contribute to misunderstandings or mischaracterizations of either man’s writing. The most important observation that I wanted to pass along was that I found both Bulgakov and Solovyov to be thorough, careful thinkers. It’s easier to dismiss a mystic when they sound a little untethered (I am avoiding using the popular phrase “woo” simply because I think it’s far too derogatory to use without causing unnecessary offense)-- it’s far more difficult to dismiss a mystic who takes the time to patiently work out the foundations and implications of the vision. What the ecstasy really means for those of us doing the laundry, if you will.

Solovyov had a model for the spiritual life that I think is tremendously useful, especially once we learn how to orient ourselves within it. To start with, we have to understand that he understood world religions as generally reaching for the same ultimate truth, with greater or lesser degrees of success. And when it comes to Christ and Christianity, Solovyov says this:1

In Solovyov’s model of religious thought, all human beings begin their religious experience with a kind of pre-personal enchanted paganism, which is evident throughout history in the largely animistic models of the natural world, in which nature itself intersects with the symbolic and the supernatural in many different ways.

As a person or society differentiates from this consciousness, Solvoyov believed that they move into one of two options: the positive philosophical path, exemplified by Platonic idealism, or the negative way, as exemplified by the Buddhist path of ethical nihilism. Each path presents its own challenges, and the societies that are founded on these different ways often have great difficulty in understanding one another. At this point, Solovyov begins to map religious thought onto the development of personality, which perhaps not incidentally dovetails nicely with Dabrowski’s model of personality development, in which personal differentiation is effected by experiences of dissatisfaction and remodeling, or “positive disintegration.” He spends quite a bit of time here, which is pretty appropriate considering it’s a common place to get stuck, religiously speaking.

His ultimate point is that neither idealism nor nihilism ultimately satisfies. After sufficient experience in either (or both!) of these two modes, Solovyov believed that a person would begin to seek an outside existential force, and so encounter divinity in the form of the Law. The Law tells us that God is transcendent and that our duty is to submit to this, which is an easy and even comfortable answer in the face of the enormity of transcendence. But Solovyov immediately qualifies this by saying that “… the religion of the law is not the normal, true religion, but only a necessary transition to another, non-external relation or bond with the divine beginning.” In other words, the Law needs the Prophets in order to effect its transformation, and of course as Christians, we see that the Prophets point us in the direction of Christ Himself.

If we picture Solovyov’s model as an island in the middle of the ocean, here’s how it would look: The ocean surrounding the island is enchanted paganism. On the island are two entwined trees, reaching up to heaven: Platonic idealism and Buddhist nihilism. Out of the top of the trees emerges Jacob’s ladder of Law and Prophets, and Christ Himself stands at the top of the ladder, with His feet on the top rung, connecting humanity and divinity in His own person.

It’s a cool model, isn’t it? But it presupposes something pretty big, something that is no longer self-evident. It assumes that we all start out imaginally as pagans. But we know that’s not the case, not at all.

As secular materialists, we’re not even out in the water. We’re landlocked, with no idea how to build a boat that will even keep us afloat in the water, let alone carry us across to the island.

Here’s where Martin Shaw and his Christian mythopoetics come in: Shaw is a master shipwright who can help you learn how to build a boat. Not a one-size-fits-all vessel, but a rowboat for the ones who need to work it or a sailboat for the ones who need to feel the power of the wind. At least in this model, I don’t think Shaw is the guy you’d go to for a motorboat or a luxury yacht— he’s dreamed about the Lord, you see, and he won’t sell you on a false form of cheapened grace.

I’m not telling you to jettison your Christian faith to run for the hills, dancing for the sacred oaks. But I am suggesting that enchanted paganism is an important developmental stage in religious thought, one that deepens and fractalizes our experiences of both idealism and nihilism, all of these things working together to deeply till the soil of our soul. These are preparations that allow the roots of the Christian faith to take deeply, with a harvest that bears lasting fruit.

Of course, you can’t stay in the boat, or you’ll just get lost at sea-- and you might want to be careful about what kind of boat you choose to use, too. That’s why Shaw’s vessels, blessed and sprinkled with holy water, promise to be seaworthy.

And once you get to the island, you’ll want to be careful not to get stuck in the trees, or you’ll starve to death through excess rationalism or existential despair. You must keep climbing until you meet the Truth As Person and allow yourself to be transformed through the encounter.

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Let’s have the talk. You know, the one about what’s happening with young male converts and online Orthodoxy.

You know who I mean. The guy in his twenties or thirties who shows up having consumed hours of Pageau, probably some Jordan Peterson, maybe some deeper (and darker) online masculinity content. He knows the symbolic reading of Genesis, he’s read about hierarchy and cosmic Christianity and traditional gender roles. He’s intellectually sophisticated, genuinely seeking something beyond materialism, has a beard, and... is sometimes kind of difficult.

He struggles with female readers and talks a lot about head coverings. He wants the parish to be more “traditional” in ways that map suspiciously onto online talking points. He’s frustrated that Sunday coffee hour isn’t a symposium on patristic cosmology. He talks a lot about what Orthodoxy should be and seems less interested in what it is—which is mostly ordinary people living ordinary lives in the presence of God.

This is a real pastoral challenge we’re facing, and I don’t think dismissing these guys as “orthobros” is enough. I believe that most of them are genuinely seeking, and many will enter the catechumenate and become faithful members of the Body. But they need help getting from online consumption to embodied practice, and they need help leaving behind the toxic parts of what they picked up online. This isn’t an intellectual exercise for me, either. Manosphere content has been shared (privately) at my home parish.

This is where Shaw’s work has the potential to be a powerful bridge.

If you read my last essay, I talked about how the mythopoetic men’s movement that Shaw inherited was organized around a “we men” collective identity—men gathering to address shared masculine wounding, to retrieve lost authentic masculinity. Even when it wasn’t explicitly reactionary, it created structures that were organized around masculine identity.

Unfortunately, that kind of framing maps really well onto manosphere content. Both are organized around masculine grievance, both locate the problem in modernity/feminism, both offer retrieval of traditional masculine authority as the solution. If you’ve read any of my other work on Nuclear Eros, you’ll know that I repeatedly insist that this kind of framing errs when it turns the particular into the universal. The living, actionable issues that need to be addressed are not “modernity” or “manosphere” or “feminism” but the individual, particular relationships each of us has with other human beings-- other icons of Christ.

Shaw is working this way in Liturgies. He takes the mythopoetic method—story, symbol, psyche-nature integration—and opens it out of the “we men” framework entirely. He shows how these tools work for anyone humble enough to receive them. Each individual chapter is not focused narrowly on masculine initiation, but instead demonstrates how to use story and myth to contemplate the universal human experiences of suffering and cross-carrying and maturity and transformation.

More importantly, Shaw demonstrates how the cosmic and the ordinary are already interpenetrating. We don’t need wilderness retreat or special masculine ritual to encounter the sacred. The Sign of the Cross makes “the daily luminous.” The gift of creation is available in our backyards. The mystery is here, in the particulars of liturgical practice, not somewhere else requiring special symbolic knowledge to access.

This matters for our orthobro problem because it offers a way forward that isn’t just correction.

See, when these guys show up frustrated with parish “normalcy,” what they’re often expressing is real spiritual hunger dressed in problematic frameworks. They are hungry for cosmic Christianity. They do want meaning beyond materialism. They’ve correctly identified that modern secularism has hollowed out reality.

The problem is they think the answer is retrieval—going back to traditional structures, reclaiming masculine authority, fixing what modernity broke. That’s the framework they picked up online, whether from legitimate mythopoetics or manosphere or both.

Shaw has the street cred to offer transformation instead of retrieval. Claiming Bly as his mentor in the introduction, he makes his lineage clear. He’s done the wilderness work, he’s lived the tenets of the movement, and when he found that he still wanted more, a voice spoke to him in a dream. He has moved past “let’s go back to when men were men,” into “let’s be changed into the image of God through the actual practices the Church offers.” Not to reclaim cosmic Christianity from the feminized modern world, but to discover how the daily is already luminous through participation in the divine life.

So here’s what I think we can do with this:

When a young guy shows up who’s clearly been formed more by online content than embodied practice, instead of just correcting what’s wrong with his attitudes (though yes, that’s necessary, it’s usually not our job but that of our priest), we can offer him a better story.

We can hand him Shaw. We can say: “You’re hungry for mythopoetic encounter with reality—here’s what that looks like when it’s actually baptized. When it’s oriented toward theosis instead of gender essentialism. When it’s open to the whole human experience instead of organized around gender wounds.”

We can help him see that what he’s looking for—cosmic Christianity—is already present in what he’s dismissing as ordinary. The annoying kids at Liturgy. The lady who always brings cheese to fasting coffee hours. The guys who talk football instead of St. Maximus. The regular people he’s perhaps struggling to love.

Shaw writes that stories are “technologies for defeating demons.” The demons these guys are fighting include the ones they picked up online—distorted views of women, resentment dressed as tradition, intellectual pride, the need to be special or initiated into secret knowledge.

A story that shows transformation happening through ordinary practice, through humility, through the actual mysteries the Church offers everyone—that’s a technology for defeating those particular demons.

But we can’t just hand them this new book and call it good. We have to find a way to engage with where they are instead of just correcting where they’re wrong. Perhaps we can do this by allowing Shaw to translate their legitimate spiritual hunger out of the language of online frameworks and into the vernacular of lived, embodied experience.

And no matter who is pointing them out, it’s good for us to keep our eyes open to real problems in parish life, in how we’ve sometimes reduced Orthodoxy to ethnic tradition or therapeutic niceness or social club. The cosmic vision is real, and there is a place for the symbolic reading of reality in the Orthodox life. No one is wrong to want that.

But we also know that the devil is a wily guy, good at taking our best intentions and turning them against us. We can look for the right things in the wrong ways—through content consumption or masculine identity consolidation instead of through liturgical practice and cross-carrying.

Shaw’s gift is showing a third way: Not secularized therapeutic Orthodoxy, not reactionary masculine retrieval, but mythopoetic encounter with God through the actual ordinary means of creative liturgical life.

I don’t think Shaw is a magic bullet. Some guys are too invested in their online identities to be reached-- they are held captive by one of the many malign forces of fairyland. Some will need firmer correction than a book recommendation, and need their spiritual fathers to tell them directly: “Your attitude is sinful and you need to repent.”

But for the ones who are genuinely seeking? For the ones who have real spiritual hunger underneath the problematic frameworks? For the ones who might actually be willing to be transformed instead of just validated?

Shaw promises to be a real bridge from where they are to where they need to be: From online consumption to embodied practice. From masculine retrieval to human transformation. From “we men” to “we who carry crosses”-- which is to say, everyone who follows Christ.

And that might be exactly what our parishes need right now.

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The Mythopoetic Problem

First off, let me say that I feel really honored to have been sent this early copy of Martin Shaw’s new book, Liturgies of the Wild. I can happily say without qualification that it’s a lovely read, very intelligent and full of meaning and most definitely worth your time. But if you’re reading this, you probably expect to hear something like that, right? I mean, this was my first official experience reading Shaw’s published work, but he’s been in my periphery now for quite a while. People far wiser and more renowned than I have acknowledged his work as a great gift, a presentation of truly original talent.

So, on one hand, I’m not going to tell you anything you don’t already anticipate. What I can give you, here, is a window into my experience with this book, and the journey I went through as I turned its pages. Because-- I’ll be honest-- in the first few chapters, I realized that there was going to be a process. Want to walk through it with me?

You see, it’s undeniable that Dr. Martin Shaw is the inheritor of the mythopoetic movement; he even claims on his website to be developing a “Christian mythopoetics,” which lies at the heart of what this particular project hopes to enact. That movement and I have never quite meshed-- when we’ve been at the same party, we’ve always kind of looked at each other from across the room with not a little bit of side eye.

Most recently, I sympathized with Norah Vincent in her fascinating memoir Self-Made Man, and I thought her experience at a mythopoetic men’s retreat was heart-breakingly realistic. She found the storytelling and symbolism to be moving and beautiful, the men she met to be genuinely desirous of relationship and encounter, but ultimately she could not shake the suspicion that the movement was lacking something, and to identify that lack would be to reveal the feared spectre of impotence lurking deep in the background. She never found what she was looking for.

I’ve tried to read Iron John two or three times, but it’s never grabbed me-- likely because, being a woman, I’m not its intended audience. I can see, however, that some people (men, most likely) may find it helpful, may find some sort of hook in its narrative that they can latch their own lifestory onto, drag it out into the open, and start the hard work of growing through it. I’m not opposed to the mythopoetic movement, but every time I’ve tried to read pieces of Bly’s work, I get a pretty visceral response that its material is not for me, that it reflects a misunderstanding or mischaracterization of my own experiences. I’ve identified four main areas where I think this mismatch is happening.

The Limits of Iron John

First, I’m coming to think that while archetypal symbolism is rich, useful, and fascinating, it’s an error to think of archetypes as having stable, universal content that can be mapped onto everyone’s individual experiences in ways that will predictably solve problems and engender personal growth. Sure, that might happen, but it’s not guaranteed to work like that, or in any predictable way, really. To interact with archetypes this way is to flatten the symbolic into formula, squash metaphor into allegory.

This category error is where the Freudian roots of the mythopoetic movement show how they limit its usefulness, particularly in how they calcify into a stage-based development that follows a linear progression.

Now, the mythopoetic movement isn’t purely Freudian, obviously-- it draws heavily upon Jungian archetypes and Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. But if the concepts and words are Jungian and Campbellian, the grammar of thought is unmistakeably Freudian. What is individualized, paradoxical, less sex specific, and curious about suffering in the Jungian/Campbellian becomes collectively prescriptive, literalized, gender-essentialist, and oriented towards developing adjustment to society in the Freudian. Instead of a broad structural pattern open to interpretation, we get an explicitly gendered archetypal system. If you’ve read Patterns for Life, you already know how I feel about systems, and if you’ve read any of my work on Nuclear Eros, you know how I feel about gender essentialism.

Iron John centers the Oedipal wound in a broad way, and pushes its readers into framing the mechanics of their growth through it, largely by examining emotional repression and retrieving authenticity that was left somewhere in memory. This is not wrong per se—it’s obviously true that bad parenting causes grave wounds that need to be aired in order to be healed. But the precise way in which it’s written is just not a universal way of experiencing intrapersonal growth. There are more than one kind of bad father or bad mother, and bad parenting in general is not easily reduced to an extension of the gender wars, though we as a society keep trying to do so in all manner of ways.

Plus, as a wise woman once explained to me regarding my own mother’s experience with chronic depression, knowing what went wrong in the past is not at all the same skill set as knowing how to move forward in the future.

You see, if you experience mythic storytelling as living, ambiguous, and above all, particular, the flattening of archetypal symbolism can end up writing everything with the grammar of dyadic conflict.

I think this is how we’ve come to find our experience described as tension between the civilized self and the self as barbarian, between modern and pre-modern human experience. While it is true that our contemporary society has challenges that are unique to history, it’s also true that many of our troubles are the same old troubles of yesteryear, just with different faces. The troubling assumption is that modernity has catastrophically severed us from an authentic self that can only be found in the past. The old mythopoetic movement can’t seem to escape this polarity.

Finally, the mythopoetic movement places strong emphasis on group identity and transmission-based mentorship within the group. While the mechanics of both have an undeniable resonance, I don’t see them as the ultimate expression of human communion. Rather, I think they are swinging the pendulum too far in the opposite direction.

I guess you could say that my criticism of the mythopoetic movement in general is that it’s a universalized oppositional response to a particular set of circumstances. It’s an antithesis, where what we’re really hungry for is synthesis.

Do you know Hegel? Thesis—antithesis—synthesis? In this model, the antithesis that elevates the wild as authentic and the domestic as corrupt is in opposition to the original progressive thesis of barbaric depravity vs. civilized society. We’ve got a false dichotomy set up for us, and we need a way out.

That’s the background of my wrestling with the mythopoetic movement, which left me with a slew of questions when I picked up Liturgies of the Wild: Would Shaw avoid these problems, or would he just dress them up them in different garb? Would Shaw be able to evolve the mythopoetic method of story, symbol, and psyche-nature integration out of its gendered, Freudian, nostalgic historical, group-oriented mode? Or was he just going to slap some Jesus onto it and call it good now? Would Shaw be able to heave this curious artifact out of the 20^th century and into the bright and critical gaze of the post-post-modern 2020’s?

Because I do believe we’re currently in a synthesis-forming stage (with this, at least) in our collective unconscious hive-mind, and-- spoiler alert and glory to God-- I think Dr. Shaw has decisively shown himself as part of this movement. His work prior to his conversion to Orthodox Christianity seems to have done a lot of heavy lifting, but ultimately, the baptism of his imagination has allowed him to shatter the glass box that contained mythopoetic storytelling and lug it out into its cosmic level of power.

When Story Containers Crack

Okay. Let’s pause there. I want back up and come at this from a different angle, a story-way that shows what I’m talking about. Because Martin Shaw’s storytelling, while mythopoetic, is not overtly psychological. He’s ringing the bells of the subconscious through fairytale, and there’s a reason why this works, but it’s not an benignly omnipotent force. It has some real limitations and dangers. I like to think of stories as “containers,” both in the psychological and conceptual meanings. They hold things together for our imaginations to encounter. A good story is a container big enough to hold multiple, often ambiguous meanings, and so allow people from different walks of life to find different pieces of resonance within them. Shaw is a master of this.

But there’s a hard ceiling on Shaw’s pre-baptized storytelling, one I’d like to look at through the lens of Battlestar Galactica from twenty years ago. It’s a prime specimen of modern symbolic storytelling, one that turns Jungian archetype and Campbell’s Hero’s Journey into an explicitly mythopoetic religion, and by doing so, starkly illuminates the borders of its explanatory power. We need to look at the container itself, and not just what the container holds for us.

In BSG, the Colonial pantheon functions not as deified spirits with personalities, but as psychic energies, like Jungian archetypes that engage the practitioner in primarily energetic/psychological ways. In the practiced religion, there’s an acknowledged energetic dimension that is interacted with through prophecy, oracle, vision and dream all as symbolic encounters, and the sacred texts function as living documents that require interpretation through experience. Both the individual characters and the starships themselves are engaged with journey as odyssey through encounter with this energetic realm.

It’s an incredibly compelling framework, with multiple characters on different vectors of growth, development, and collapse. Because it’s so good for so long, you can’t look away when it starts to become unbearably painful. And I’m sure I’m not the only person who Clockwork-Oranged my eyeballs open to find out how it all ended.

You see, the show’s ending—”this has all happened before and will happen again”—is where the mythic framework collapses into the dark underbelly of unbaptized, pagan myth. Cyclical renewal, even in its most genuinely mythic and archetypal pagan sense, is not ultimately a force of Good, but instead a precisely engineered cosmic dualism. The shadow side of it is that depending on where you’re standing, you can see that cyclical renewal looks an awful lot like eternal recurrence without the possibility of transcendence. Joseph Campbell’s return and the cyclical renewal of the universe utterly crumbles into Nietzsche’s abyss.

I think that while the show’s writers were working within the mythopoetic framework, the story itself got too big and started pushing beyond it, toward something that even myth itself can’t ultimately accommodate. The mythic container cracked under the weight of what was emerging. (Side note: This is all evident even without getting into the fascinating syncretic stew that gave birth to Mormonism, which can be argued to be a mythopoetic form of Protestant Christianity that is aggressively anti-nihilistic in addition, and also a thematic element in the show. But that’s way beyond the scope of what we’re talking about here.)

BSG dramatizes what happens when you build a narrative universe from syncretic mythological fragments (Mormon, Greek, Campbellian, Jungian)—it works compellingly as long as the story container holds. But when the story pushes toward its ultimate questions, the seams show, and underneath is not integrated transcendent meaning but nihilistic void. This is the true limit and danger of mythopoetic storytelling.

Mythopoetic frameworks—whether in Bly’s writing, the popular scifi understanding of the theology of Mormonism, or the story of Battlestar Galactica— all share the same vulnerability: they assemble meaning from mythological raw material, but the assembly itself may not bear the weight of genuine existential encounter. The containers are too small; the grammar is borrowed. They may be asymptotically true, but ultimately cannot scratch the itch for the limit itself, Truth as Person. Without being baptized, mythological thinking dances right up to the edge of the abyss and threatens to strand you there.

The energetic realm of archetypal, mythopoetic symbolism can hold a lot of different meanings for us. But without roots in a more profound, expansive, and as of yet mostly unknowable spiritual reality, it can only end in despair.

Epistrophe: The Spiraling of Baptized Story

Which is why it’s really very interesting that Shaw has become an Orthodox Christian. Liturgies of the Wild demonstrates how that experience of conversion has cracked open his story containers and caused them to do that neat thing creation seems to do in the presence of the holy: spiralize and fractalize throughout multiple layers of reality that we didn’t even know were there. Epistrophe, Shaw calls it, “a turning about, seemingly concerning the past but not much to do with old times at all” (p 104). This is time as viewed from above it. Shaw’s story containers have unfolded into new dimensions.

One of the ways that Shaw demonstrates this spiraling is in the structure of the chapters themselves, which move between meditation, personal story, and mythic story in non-linear ways, hinting at connection and revelation without making those connections and revelations explicit. Shaw tells his stories with faith and trust in the people who are listening, that they will encounter the stories in the way that is necessary to them, regardless of any evidentiary message. Shaw’s Christian mythopoetics is not just for the men’s retreat anymore-- he has succeeded in opening the method to anyone with a humble heart and an open ear.

Another main theme of the book is how the mythopoetic realm itself is inextricably linked to the act of dreaming. In fact, the genesis of this book is Shaw’s own dream-encounter at the end of a vigil, a mystical experience in physical reality that unfolds into private dream-space with words that command him to re-encounter the faith of his youth.

This initiatory dream is the crack in his previously sufficient container. Once it has been dreamed, he must follow the quest to where it leads-- abandoning the limits of his previous framework and growing into something new. A paradigm shift.

“Dreams are shifting inner-mythologies,” he says (156), and this reminds me instantly of a study I read last year (forgive me, I cannot for the life of me find the source), which seemed to show that the dream-life of analysands appears to conform to the style of psychotherapy with which they are being analyzed. What the study indicates is that we can and do manufacture coherence to our own dreamlives through paying attention to them and allowing this sense of inner mythology to emerge. Especially after reading Liturgies of the Wild, I expect that if Christian mythopoetics grows as a movement, it will engender a fresh form of dreaming among the people who practice it. I know that might sound a little too New Age for some, but Shaw calls on the story of Joseph and reminds us that “to ignore dreams completely is unbiblical and cuts us off” from our own deep inner story (177). Wise words.

Perhaps part of our mistake is in thinking of dreaming as only a private endeavor. In one of the most striking metaphors in the book, Shaw describes his experiences of Divine Liturgy as a kind of “Christian dreaming”-- a phrase so unutterably lovely I don’t know what more to say about it than to simply express my deep satisfaction with the comparison. One of the wonderful things this concept does is show how the experience of liturgy works energetically on the worshipers who enter into it, binding them all together on a very particular kind of plane. I’ve written elsewhere about the importance of distinguishing between the energetic and spiritual realms, and Shaw’s metaphor here helps explain what I mean: a dream can have spiritual meaning, but is not spiritual in and of itself-- we aren’t walking directly where angels tread. It’s an experience occurring somewhere other than lived physical reality, but that can also intersect with physical and spiritual existence.

This liturgical dreaming extends beyond the gathered assembly. Shaw calls the Sign of the Cross “an attention that makes the daily luminous” (118)—a gesture that carries the energy of liturgy into ordinary time. The daily and the cosmic are not separate realms requiring wilderness retreat to bridge them; they’re already interpenetrating, already spiraling together. We only need the power of attention to see it.

Elsewhere, Shaw refers to this new framing in this way: “Christianity is a dream in which the very best of us is encouraged to emerge” (163).

Hmm. That’s an interesting, revelatory way of saying it. Not wrong, not at all, but its phrasing reveals something very meta going on in Shaw’s book, hinted at with the word emerge, and the image this sentence gives of personal progress.

You see, the conversion story is, itself, a myth. It will be chanted in its liturgical form this coming Sunday in all Orthodox parishes across the world in the form of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Notice the movement in the story-- the son goes out into the world, experiences sin to its limits, suffers famine and poverty, and then mysteriously comes to his senses.

You might wonder if he had a dream.

But even more than this, I think the form of conversion story that Shaw is using has a particular heritage in Anglo-American Christianity. Ever since Wesley’s heart warmed within him, and the brothers hit the road encouraging revival among the people, the sharing of testimony and conversion has become its own kind of storytelling ritual, in which each individual person grafts his personal myth of transformation onto the Vine of Christ in dramatic, public ways. For those of us with histories in charismatic movements, there’s a specific flavor to this myth, where the spiritual inciting incident is followed by an emotionally intense experience of guilt, repentance and renewal. The true container of this story, however, continues to fractalize like frost growing on a windowpane-- for repentance never truly ends. And if we remain faithful, we learn this lesson over and over again in new ways.

You see, the Anglophone myth of conversion has its own limits, defined by its culture and time period. As Shaw travels further up and further in to the mystery, he will find that the Anglophone conversion myth is too small to describe his continued experience of transformation. And that will be reflected in his storytelling. He has inklings of this already, as in his chapter on prayer: “Prayer changes our relationships with pretty much everything” he says (116), and then he writes later of “paying the toll of being ordinary” (218) as part of the spiritual life’s dues—a glimpse of what the long obedience will require. The convert’s initial encounter with the numinous must necessarily settle into the dailiness of practice, the patient formation that happens in repetition rather than revelation. He’s in for a wonderful surprise—not because the luminous fades, but because the unfolding of story teaches us that the fullness we thought we wanted is smaller than we had imagined.

This book is about meaning in myth on so many different levels.

Threshold, Not Abyss

Shaw has exploded the mythopoetic movement out of the errors I identified in the beginning of the essay. He trusts his fairytale archetypes to work on his listeners regardless of their specific understanding-- he suggests interpreting ideas, but does not insist on them. He jettisons the primacy of linear time altogether, instead constantly inviting us into the holy space of spiralized liturgical time, broken out of its small containers and released into the wild. Instead of healthy adjustment to society and relationships, we’re invited to meet God and embark on a journey of theosis. Freud has been thanked for his historical contributions and asked to sit down.

Because Christ has transfigured time itself, Shaw is able to step out of the false dichotomy of barbarian vs. modern man and patiently hold space in the paradoxes and contradictions of our contemporary existence. He does so by telling us stories that are living, ambiguous, and above all, able to be metabolized by the reader as particular. “There is no-one-size-fits-all to a mythic life,” he reminds us (30). You don’t have to go into the wild to find yourself-- you can sit under a bush in your backyard in the middle of town and enter into something deep. The gift of creation is profligate and extravagantly given as long as we open our eyes to see it. Shaw’s new framing of the mythopoetic movement opens this up to those of us who encounter wilderness in our hearts, regardless of where we are.

And Dr. Shaw has rescued the mythopoetic movement from its “we men” collective framing around a shared masculine wounding, and instead opened it up to the broader human experience of suffering and cross-carrying. His chapters on death, passivity, limit, and evil have the ability to reach into the depths of many a wounded heart and offer a sweet balm, a hand up, or a witnessing eye. And his chapters on prayer, on praise, and on dream all weave a bridge between the old poetics of mythology and the new, baptized storytelling of the True Myth. His simultaneous shyness and boldness at praising his new Beloved reminds one very much of a young man newly in love.

In this transformed mythopoetics, elders do not initiate externally by performing an action onto younger people, passing on a specific thing that they lack. The initiators--the journey-beginners-- in this framework are the stories themselves. Shaw uses the metaphor of story as technology several times throughout the work, saying that stories are “an ancient technology that enables emotional literacy” (7), that they “assist in the growing of consciousness and the slow tempering of maturity” (31), and that they are “technologies for defeating demons” (96). These are not the simple framings of the mythopoetic movement of the 20^th century, and they acknowledge a far larger spiritual reality.

This way of opening up stories into expansive containers is refreshing and more than pleasantly surprising. The abyss of mythopoetics is being transfigured into a threshold of encounter.

Yes, Dr. Shaw has made a great beginning of transfiguring the mythopoetic movement for a Christian audience.

But it is only a beginning. Dr. Shaw is quite new to Orthodox Christianity, as he makes clear in the work. The enthusiasm and zeal of the new convert shines throughout the entire piece, and it is lovely to behold. I am personally excited to see how this continues to evolve, as Shaw continues in his “long obedience in the same direction” as Eugene Peterson and Nietzsche so memorably put it. I will pray for him, though, as I pray for all “young” Christians who are thrust into the spotlight of especially Ortho-celebrity-- because the attention of the masses is much like the hungry eye of Sauron, and its gaze is heavy. I don’t think we’re doing these people any favors with it, asking them to represent an ancient tradition with less than a handful of years of experience. I know how much struggle has been present in my own life and growth in the Church over the past two decades-- to think of having to live that in the public eye is harrowing indeed. But if Martin Shaw and others like him can persevere through the crucible, I’m confident that in twenty, thirty years, Christian mythopoetics-- this process of tumbling story together with spiritual truth and lived experience-- will become a serious discipline of creative liturgy through which communities of Christians can encounter and behold God, each other, and creation more deeply.

Wild Yeast

On a sensory level, I can’t end this essay without praising Martin Shaw’s craft. His prose is a joy to behold: the language is fresh and surprising and begs to be read aloud and felt in the mouth. The work as a whole succeeds throughout its multiple layers of meditation, personal story, and fairytale, laid out as a fractal within the mythic-frame of conversion story. It’s a pleasure to encounter.

I don’t know what you will find in Liturgies. There’s so much going on, your experience is likely to be completely different from mine. For myself, especially as a writer, I feel like I’ve found shards of mirror that help me see myself a bit better, and shards of lens that help me see others more clearly. I’m quite sure that Shaw has sprinkled a bit of wild yeast into the brew of my imagination. One piece of advice -- “...always pay attention to where in a story your attention vacates the scene: That’s the place to circle back and attend to,” I feel is a masterclass in storytelling in a bite-sized nugget.

I think we’re all desperately hungry for storytelling that transcends the containers we’ve become accustomed to. How could a story like Battlestar Galactica be retold with this new kind of spiralizing myth, that reaches further up and further in than anything the old mythic frameworks were capable of? I don’t know, but I think a discipline like Shaw’s Christian mythopoetics could help unlock the imaginations of a new wave of storytellers who are ready and willing to attempt the task.

Thanks for walking with me through my journey through Liturgies of the Wild. I’d love it if you let me know your own thoughts about the book when you encounter it for yourself.

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P.S.— Don’t miss these follow-up pieces: Technologies for Defeating Demons and The Shipwright and the Sacred Waters!

Thank you for reading! That you made it all the way down here in this attention economy is a real gift and blessing to me. If you enjoyed my work, would you please consider sharing it with your circle? I’m releasing a few projects this year, and I’d love to reach the people who might be interested in it.

But another thing is that there’s a real imagery mismatch between the Imbolc of the British Isles and the Imbolc that happens here, where I live. As often as not, we have snow cover and winter weather, the snowdrops won’t burst through for at least another few weeks, and if your ewes are lambing now, they’re going to be dead in the field. In fact, we were just up at the mountain and observed exactly that-- a dead early lamb, being circled by vultures. Early February, at least, truly does contain the energy of a great grey beast.

No, for our little ecosystem here, we need to lean harder into the symbolism of the candle in the darkness, the sweet anticipation that comes from knowing that the skeletal days are numbered. In this spirit, I leave a few white twinkle lights on the railing until about St. Valentine’s Day, when the days are finally long enough to no longer desire the warding of evening light. But before we get even there, we have St. Brigid’s Day, the Meeting of the Lord at the Temple/Candlemas, and the secular but enspirited Groundhog Day. As silly as Punxatawny Phil is, he captures well the liminal nature of February-- some years she’s an early spring, but in many others she insists we wait longer and pay closer attention. And in case you didn’t hear, we’ve got six more weeks of winter according to the little prophet.

And of course we have entered the Triodion now, and Lent looms before us whether or not we’re intellectually prepared. In many ways, we are in the season of anticipation for the Season of Anticipation. Great, grey beast, but also the sweetness of prophecy and the glimmering harbinger of light.

I’m still in the middle of writing my review of Martin Shaw’s Liturgies of the Wild, and I hope to have it for you later this week. In the meantime, I’d like to introduce a small vanity project I’ve been working on.

First, a story. My Baba, my maternal grandmother, died a few years before I was born. She was 49; a missed spot of lung cancer went untreated and spread viciously. There are even more layers to this tragedy, and in many ways, the shape of her absence was a very noticeable presence in my early life.

I understand that my Baba wrote poetry her whole life. I do not know to what extent this is true, except that as the cancer spread to her brain, she burned three decades worth of journals in a bonfire. The only fragment of poetry that survived is this couplet she wrote for my Deido as a 17 year-old high school student, inscribed on a photograph she gave him when he lied about his age and signed up for the Navy in 1944:

I had a heart, it was so true,
And now it goes from me to you.
Take good care of it, as I have done,
For now you have two, and I have none.

It may or may not be original; a quick search shows me that someone has claimed authorship of it, though it postdates my Baba’s usage by about a decade and a half. Regardless, the point of this story is that I grew up thinking of the woman as a silent poet, someone I wished I could talk to and compare life experiences with. My paternal grandmother, in contrast, was a prolific crafter and sometime painter, and has left me a treasure of creations by which to remember her much longer life (she lived to 98-- twice as old!).

Because of my grandmothers, I have made a concerted effort to curate my creative endeavors for my descendants. The worst that can happen, after all, is that I leave more than is desired-- and this excess can easily be returned to the dirt from which it came. The note that lays on top of the storage box gives this instruction explicitly, releasing its finders from the obligation of continued stewardship.

To that end, I’ve made myself a little vanity project. In keeping with my commitment to implementing the principles of the IndieWeb, this new little book I’ve made is something that I wanted for myself, and so made for myself:

A handful of copies are going into that storage box. For the possibility of a grandchild or great-grandchild who might get the itch to know a little more. I’m also giving a copy to my dad, who doesn’t read on the internet, but gets a tiny frisson of pride when I hand him a physical copy of my latest thing. He usually reads a couple dozen pages and tells me I have a good vocabulary.

Sparks and Sacrament is a lightly edited compilation of my Substack essays from the past year, which all seem to fugue around the main principle of relationship: navigating the Internet as Fairyland, wielding a Nuclear Eros, and living in an Enchanted Americana. The book also has sections containing my flash fiction (including a previously unpublished piece of flash that I sent around to some contests) and a smattering of short book reviews.

Blending personal essay, theological reflection, literary criticism, and original fiction, these pieces weave together Memorial Day parades and myrrh-streaming icons, westerns and powwows, Lolita and The Realm of the Elderlings. Sounds fun, doesn’t it?

You might be interested in a copy if you’d like:

• To share my essays with someone who doesn’t read Substack

• To underline, box, mark-up or draw in the margins of an essay

• To have an artifact of analog technology from a digital world

• To support an independent writer and get something cool in return

• To refresh to your outhouse reading basket

I’ll be offering Sparks and Sacrament for a limited time-- February and March. After that, I’m hoping I’ll be ready to share an even bigger project with you in time for Pascha: the release of my next children’s book. I just got out of a meeting with my illustrator, and I’m absolutely thrilled with her work. Those of you who liked Sasha and the Dragon will appreciate how Hidden Hosannah continues in the tradition of modern Orthodox fairytale.

See you later this week!

As I mentioned in one of my last essays, I felt inclined to reread Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko before tapping out some related thoughts. I’m very glad I did. The reread allowed me to perceive threads in my own journey over the past decade-- threads I intuited and lived by, but truly did not realize were running through like fluorescent ley lines in the development of my own thinking.

Should you read Ceremony? Yes. Especially if you’ve been following along with my thinking about American mythology, about how we might learn to relate rightly to this continent we inhabit, about the transformation from conquest to communion. This novel is essential reading, not just as literature but as medicine-- as ceremony-- itself.

The Albion Problem

I mentioned in another recent essay over at Patterns for Life that I’m reading The Haunted Wood, a history of children’s literature, and in just the first chapter I found another clue that unlocks a bit of the mystery of all this interconnectedness. You see, so much of our children’s literature—books I grew up reading, books you grew up reading—is inextricably linked with mythic Britannia. From the field guides to the fairy tales, so many of these imaginatively compelling works are rooted in an Albion of one kind or another.

There is nothing wrong with this, of course, except for the fact that I was born and raised and have lived all my life in America—Pennsylvania in particular—and my experience of Albion has been only through imagination.

What this means is that much of my reading life has lacked the real, tangible roots one might have if they could, say, take a countryside trip across the downs. I’ve got volumes of fairy stories on my shelves, organized by locale: Welsh, Norwegian, Japanese, Russian, Inuit. You can’t escape the fact that enchantment, almost more than anything else, is an extremely localized phenomenon. And if your own hills aren’t haunted, then your imagination surely is, and we’re finding out that that doesn’t bode well.

Listen. We American children learned to recognize enchantment in English hedgerows, in Scottish moors, in the fae-haunted woods of Celtic legend-- but our own American mythology never tasted right. We knew what hobbits ate for second breakfast but we ourselves never sampled paw paws or serviceberries. Narnia felt more real than the Appalachian mountains.

Is this imaginative colonization? Is it part of why Americans struggle to relate rightly to the land we walk upon? We’ve been trained to locate enchantment elsewhere, in borrowed landscapes, through other peoples’ haunted ground. Our literary imaginations have been geographically dislocated.

Mutts Need Roots

So where does that leave us?

Maybe like me, you’re 100% purebred American mutt. Of my great-grandparents, half were 20^th century immigrants and half traced their immigration back to the 1700s. The 20^th century immigrants assimilated hard, especially the Russian ones, forbidding the kids to speak anything but English and losing the old religion completely by my mother’s generation. That I made it back so quickly to Orthodoxy has absolutely nothing to do with my heritage, and everything to do with Providence.

And that’s really where the journey got serious, because to truly practice Orthodox Christianity is to get out of your head and back into your heart and body. As I gradually became accustomed to embodied faith, I felt an increasing longing for actual rootedness, toes plunged deep in humus not just through a LARPed natural lifestyle (I never could afford most of the aesthetics), but through an intimate relationship with the ground I walked upon, the town I lived in, and the exact natural world around me.

It dawned on me that a Western European had very little to offer me in this area.

Around this time—it would have been about fifteen years ago—I read Ceremony for the first time.1

Ceremony gave me a vision for what I was lacking—a vision of what true interconnection with the land here actually looked like according to the people who had loved it, people who had lived embodied, I-Thou relationships with the American continent, in all of its different biomes and habitats.

The novel follows Tayo, a Laguna Pueblo veteran of World War II, as he returns home from the war carrying wounds far deeper than the shell shock and alcoholism his doctors can name. He’s been separated not just from the land and from his people, but from the cosmic patterns that give life meaning. The war did this to him, but not just the war—the entire apparatus of Western conquest, with an arm across the Pacific, completing a circuit of violence that began right here, with the destruction of indigenous peoples and their relationships to this very ground. All inseparable.

What Tayo needs isn’t Western medicine, isn’t psychotherapy, isn’t the VA hospital. Those things tried to help, but ultimately only made it worse because Tayo’s plight is why the Orthodox Church refuses to elucidate any kind of just war theory: we recognize that regardless of justification, war and violence profoundly damage human souls. Full stop.

What Tayo needs to heal is ceremony—participation in patterns older than his personal trauma, patterns that are rooted in his home, his specific landscape, his specific mountains, his specific ecosystem.

Betonie, the Navajo medicine man who helps Tayo, understands and subtly instructs us that the ceremonies themselves are not just inert containers, but are living realities that must adapt to address new forms of destruction. You can’t simply heal modern wounds with an ancient ceremony that functions like an externally applied magic spell. But you also can’t invent new ceremonies from nothing, divorced from the land and the people who have lived in relationship with it for millennia. The healing must both emerge from within the tradition and evolve as a subcreated engine, interacting with present circumstances.

This is precisely what I was reaching for in “Procession, Prayer and Presence”—how the enchanted cosmos reveals itself through ceremonies that have existence beyond our willingness to believe in them, ceremonies that can hold all our mixed motives and complex psychology while still operating on multiple levels simultaneously. Betonie’s ceremony works exactly this way. It’s processional, in that Tayo literally walks through sacred landscape, it’s prayer through invoking powers and patterns beyond human control, and it’s profoundly communal--even when Tayo walks alone, he’s participating in something huge, correcting misalignment not just with other humans, but with the angelic realm and the living world around him.

The ceremony and the medicine aren’t isolated in church or clinic. They happen on the land itself. The spotted cattle that Tayo seeks are not just livestock—they, too, are participants in the ceremony, markers of this right relationship restored.

For all its promise of healing, Ceremony refuses to shy away from the gravity of the wounds the land itself suffered when its people were disinherited. This means that for me, in my real, embodied life, it would not be so simple to participate in this medicine just by reading some Native American books and imitating some Native American ideas. Those were Western European ways of thinking about these things, and not what the land itself was and is asking of me. Though it may have been a good place to start, the healing calls for deeper practice. Which brings me to the next fluorescent ley line.

Witchery

The book itself is what the title says it is: it is an ontological act of spiritual medicine that crosses all sorts of temporal and spatial boundaries in order to join the supplicants—both Tayo and the reader—to this larger, rooted tradition of interconnectedness. It reveals how our Western acts of war, up to and including World War II in the book, are a large part of our inherited disease and dysfunction.

Silko, through her elder Betonie, introduces the concept of “witchery”—a destructive force of spiritual decay that creates separation, that severs relationships, that feeds on violence and extraction. It is diabolic in the etymological sense-- it separates, cuts, pulls apart. This witchery isn’t just metaphorical. In the cosmology of the novel, it’s as real as the land, as real as the rain, as real as Tayo’s trauma. And by participating in the ceremony of the novel, the reader is given an opportunity to begin a liturgical, symbolic (putting together, the opposite of diabolic) redress.

The witchery in Ceremony is exactly what I’ve been naming as the demons of American mythology in my essays on Rango and The Country Under Heaven. My Cherokee friend taught me that in his tradition, these witches are known as Raven-Mockers-- those who acquire and then pervert legitimate spiritual power into a force that hurts individuals, communities, and ecosystems, becoming an inverted priesthood of separation rather than connection. When my friend first related this set of stories to me, I was chilled to the bone.

Remember how I wrote about the Mayor in Rango stealing water from Dirt to feed Las Vegas? That’s a kind of witchery—taking abundance from where it naturally lives to create artificial excess elsewhere. Remember Ovid Vesper confronting literal demons that embody the violence of American conquest? That’s a kind of witchery made flesh and given teeth and claws. My Cherokee friend taught me that all of us can manifest a spirit of bad energy with our uncontrolled malicious thoughts, but witchery goes beyond the incidental hurts of immature humans into intentional objectification, exploitation, and deliberate malice.

Silko is naming the same spiritual reality, but from within her own Laguna cosmology rather than Christian demonology or Cherokee mythology. Witchery thrives on everything that conquest mythology promotes: extraction instead of reciprocity, domination instead of relationship, vertical power instead of horizontal communion.

The witchery feeds on itself, becomes self-perpetuating. This is why American violence keeps cycling through new iterations—new frontiers, new enemies, new wars. The mythology itself is demonic in its deception, as I wrote before. It promises freedom and prosperity while delivering death and destruction-- spiritual and ecological.

The Grieving Land

On this read, I was struck by how much our society has failed the veterans of our recent war iterations in Iraq and Afghanistan—by how little we as a society have acknowledged the damage these wars have done to the specific souls of the specific image bearers who spent time down range. The veterans are not okay. And because they are not okay, we are also not okay, and our land itself is not okay. It is all connected, going backwards and forwards in time.

Tayo’s PTSD isn’t just a psychological condition or relational dysfunction-- it’s spiritual dislocation from the land. The jungle in the Pacific overlays the desert in his mind. He confuses his uncle’s death with the death of Japanese soldiers. He can’t tell where he is in space or time, and that’s why his journey back to rootedness involves interacting with mythology in a new creative, life-giving, particular way.

Remember what I wrote about Memorial Day? How the ceremony itself has existence beyond our willingness to believe in it, how it can hold our mixed motives and still offer something real? But I also noted the limitations—how we’ve inherited a “cult of the soldier” that glorifies sacrifice without acknowledging the spiritual cost. The Memorial Day parades, the thank-you-for-your-service gestures, the VA hospitals—these are all attempts at ceremony, but they lack the ontological depth to actually heal. They’re linear where they need to be cyclical, individual where they need to be communal, abstract where they need to be rooted in specificity.

What Tayo needs—what our veterans need, what we all need—is what Betonie provides: ceremonies that interact directly with the spiritual nature of the wound, that operate on multiple levels of reality simultaneously, that restore right relationship with land and community and the spiritual world.

Orthodox Christianity, with its understanding of spiritual combat, with its liturgical processions and weeping icons and cyclical time and sacramental worldview—surely has resources for this work.

But do we live them? Have we developed ceremonies rooted in this American landscape? Have we learned how to process through these mountains and rivers with prayers that emerge from relationship with this place? Or are we still just importing European forms, operating as though we’re in exile from some other homeland? Are we still just reading about change instead of changing ourselves?

Spiralized Time

One of the most important things Ceremony teaches is about the nature of time itself. The novel doesn’t move in straight lines. It circles back, loops around, interweaves past and present and mythic time, and in this way even transcends what we normally think of as a pagan conception of circular time. As St. Maximus the Confessor taught us, we are not just moving forwards in a single dimension of time, and neither are we condemned to eternal recurrence-- instead, time spirals towards the eternal life of the Holy Trinity, and we can learn how to participate in this kind of multi-dimensionality through liturgical practice.

This is breathtakingly in contrast to Manifest Destiny mythology that points ever upward and forward, conquering new frontiers, always moving on. Flattened, linear time is part of the witchery. It drives us to move away, to start anew, “biggerin’ and biggerin’” ourselves. It severs us from our ancestors, makes us believe we can escape the consequences of historical violence by just moving forward and creating ourselves. But only God creates ex nihilo.

Healing is not about moving forward, forgetting the past, getting over the pain. We are taught that Christ bears His wounds even in His resurrected body: This means our idea of healing itself is too small. Instead, we have to learn to see healing as something fractalized and spiral, something that joins our suffering to a great composition, like a phrase of countermelody within a symphony. There’s a reason Tolkien fell to musical imagery in the Silmarillion.

This is something Orthodox Christianity understands deeply. The Church year is cyclical and spiralized. feast days returning annually, and each time we celebrate them, we’re not just remembering past events—we’re participating in them, made present through the liturgy, adding to the event our own fractalized experience of it. The Eucharist collapses and explodes time, making us contemporaries with Christ, with all the saints, with all believers across all ages, in ever greater particular detail.

When I wrote about the myrrh-streaming icon visiting our parish, I was trying to articulate this: how the levels of reality interpenetrate one another when we pray, how we access patterns that transcend our immediate circumstances. The icon processes into the church, we pray intensely, and the community offers up its existence through multiple planes of being. This is what is actually happening regardless of whether or not we can perceive it.

This is the same temporal framework that Ceremony operates within. Tayo doesn’t overcome his trauma by leaving it behind. He heals by participating in ceremonies that make him contemporaneous with his ancestors, that connect him to patterns older than the war, older than colonization, patterns rooted in this specific land’s ways of giving and receiving life.

Ceremony and Reading

Something that I felt deeply on my first reread, but have come to experience more and more personally each time, is how Ceremony isn’t just describing ceremony in literary context, it’s actually performing it. The novel itself is ceremonial ontology.

Look at how Silko structures the book: Poetry interwoven with prose. Creation stories interrupting non-linear narrative. Past and present bleeding into each other. The form itself enacts the interpenetration of multiple levels of reality. When you read Ceremony, you’re not just learning about Tayo’s healing. You’re participating in it. Perhaps all true healing involves this kind of perichoresis—mutual indwelling-- with one another? That sounds hard, but right.

Silko teaches us that true medicine must be intensely specific about its ecosystem. She names plants, describes weather patterns, details the particular ways water moves through the landscape. She’s not talking abstractly about “the land”—she’s talking about a particular land, with particular mesas and arroyos. Ultimately, I sadly realized that her enchanted landscape was almost as abstract to me as Albion-- though I have hiked the foothills of the Huachucas, I cannot call them my home.

This specificity matters. Enchantment is localized. Relationship is particular. You can’t love “nature” in general—you have to love these trees, this watershed, these cycles of bloom and dormancy.

The ceremony teaches me that I must live it out through my own embodied existence. I must pray it with my own blood and my own water. I must be here, as intensely and purposefully as I possibly can be. I must be here now, so that I can be here always. To be one of the priesthood of believers is to embrace the-- dare I say shamanic?2-- roots of our spiritual inheritance.

I keep returning to this vision: groups of pilgrims chanting the Psalms and praying the Jesus Prayer while walking the Appalachian trail, making pilgrimage to American holy sites, developing rooted relationships with specific places that carry on for generations.

Ceremony helps me understand why this matters. It’s not just about having nice spiritual experiences or connecting with nature. It’s about healing wounds that go back centuries to those in the book of Genesis itself.

That’s why we needn’t wait for dramatic representation of pilgrimage and procession. We can all begin today, in our own small spheres of influence, with prayer and procession and presence, turning away from our digital-lives-as-fairylands and back to our own dirt.

The land is still waiting-- right there in the back yard. But learning to love it rightly isn’t about having the right feelings. It requires specificity in practice, in place, embodied repeatedly by particular people. It requires moving through our homes and landscapes with attention and reverence, showing up repeatedly, year after year, day after day, with prayer on every breath.

And it requires honesty about what we’ve inherited. We can’t develop rooted practices while pretending American land isn’t haunted by genocide, by slavery, by extraction, by all the manifestations of witchery that have wounded both people and place. The ceremonies must address these wounds, not paper over them.

This is why both Ceremony and The Country Under Heaven teach us that spiritual combat is necessary. You can’t just be nice to the land and hope that fixes things. You have to confront the demons, exorcise the witchery, engage in actual spiritual warfare against the forces that promote separation and violence-- and those forces run right down the center of every human heart.

But remember, this combat isn’t the rugged individualism of the lone gunman. It’s processional, communal, rooted in traditions that know how to fight these battles. Tayo doesn’t defeat the witchery alone—he participates in ceremonies given by his elders. Ovid Vesper doesn’t defeat demons through superior firepower—he’s transformed through prayer and pilgrimage.

The enchanted cosmos is real. It has never left us. These American landscapes are saturated with divine presence, with patterns of reciprocity, with the possibility of right relationship. But we have to develop the eyes to see it, the practices to participate in it, the ceremonies to restore what’s been broken. We have to first un-know before we can begin to know rightly.

May we learn to treat every drop of water as sacred, to walk these mountains with reverence. May we develop ceremonies that restore right relationship, that heal the veterans, that address the land’s grief. May we perceive the enchanted Americana that’s been here all along.

In Christ,

Laura

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P.S.— If this essay resonates with you, would you share it with your circle? And if you haven’t yet read Ceremony, I can’t recommend it strongly enough. It changed how I see this continent, how I understand healing, how I pray. It might do the same for you.

I have decided I will write to you one last time, a brief letter with a small vision of what is possible after you clear away the rubble. The only way to get a better peek is to walk further down the road.

Remember when I said that cause and effect don’t work the way we want them to in the spiritual life? You can do all of the “right” things, and end up suffering through a long and interminable dark night of the soul. Or, of course, you could be a prodigal son or a good thief, and be showered with blessings far beyond anything you’d ever imagined.

This is why we can’t argue that practicing sexual integrity and living chastely will result in deeper spirituality. The spiritual life doesn’t work that way.

So what is there for us to do? As I said last time, we attend to God and each other, we relate ever more deeply in ways that spiralize, and we embody our experience in the container of this small human life which was given to us for our salvation. We don’t do it because it gets us something, we do it because it is beautiful, and meet, and right.

Listen— we Orthodox Christians talk about icons as “windows into heaven.” When we venerate an icon, we’re not worshiping the wood and paint. We’re looking through the icon to the person it depicts, and through/within/alongside that person to God Himself.

Your body is an icon. You are an icon. So is everyone else.

In his lovely work Anam Cara, John O’Donohue wrote: “The face is the icon of the body, the place where the inner world of the person becomes manifest.” When you gaze into another person’s face—really gaze, with attention and reverence—you’re looking at an icon. You’re encountering the image of God in them.

Sexual immaturity treats bodies as objects—things to use, things to consume, things to evaluate based on how much pleasure they can provide you. But chastity treats bodies as icons—windows into the person’s soul, and through that soul, into the presence of God Himself.

This is why face-gazing is so intimate, so vulnerable. This is why the first thing we do when we feel shame is hide our face. The face reveals. It makes us present. And when sexual desire is disordered, we don’t want that kind of presence—we want fantasy, performance, the carefully curated image.

Chastity preserves particularity—your own, because you stop performing and become real, and the other person’s, because you stop reducing them to their usefulness and start seeing them as the unique thought of God that they are.

We cannot have communion—real communion, the kind that images and participates with the Trinity—without particularity. We can have community-- people gathered around shared interests, or maybe have a mob-- people unified by shared rage or fear. But we cannot have communion without distinct persons who remain themselves while giving themselves.

The Orthodox understanding of marriage is precisely this: two hypostases (distinct persons) becoming consubstantial (one) without losing their particularity, united in and by God as the third member of the union. It’s Trinitarian.

But you can’t maintain hypostatic integrity—you can’t remain a distinct person—while using the other person or being used by them. You can’t have the true union of consubstantiality built on objectification. The math doesn’t work. You end up with either codependent fusion, losing yourselves in each other, or transactional arrangement where you use each other while remaining existentially isolated.

Chastity protects the particularity that makes communion possible.

I’d like to leave you with something that both Dr. Philip Mamalakis and Dr. Timothy Patitsas have articulated beautifully, that every person—regardless of biological sex—is called to fulfill three vocations as an icon of Christ: Priest, king and prophet, universal human capacities that we all need to develop, that present themselves as different spiritual vectors depending on whether one is a man or a woman. I simply cannot do the model justice in this small space, and I encourage you to read The Ethics of Beauty. I promise it’s very accessible.

Let’s just build on what we’ve said before.

You can’t be a priest—connecting deeply to God and mediating His presence to others—if you’re constantly managing sexual shame or chasing the next hit of pleasure. Your prayer life will be shallow, distracted, riddled with the same thoughts on loop. You won’t be able to receive grace because you’ll be too busy either indulging or white-knuckling resistance.

You can’t be a king—providing structure, protection, leadership—if your will is chaotic and reactive. If your incensive power (thymos) is enslaved to rage or lust, you’ll either be tyrannical, using your power to dominate, or weak and unable to make decisions or just constantly seeking approval. Your leadership will be about your ego, not about serving others.

You can’t be a prophet—discerning truth, intuiting what’s hidden, revealing what needs to be seen—if you’re living in a fog of lies. Sexual chaos clouds everything. It makes you stupid. Not because sex itself is stupid, but because disordered sexuality requires so much mental energy to manage that you don’t have clarity for anything else.

This is what monastics are doing, by the way. Celibates are not missing out—they’re doing a specific kind of spiritual athletics that requires abstinence so they can fully develop these three vocations without the particular challenges and gifts of marriage.

And married people? They’re developing the same vocations, but in a different arena—learning priesthood, kingship, and prophecy in the context of loving one particular person across decades, and often, though not always, in the context of raising children.

Different forms, same principle: chastity (ordering desire) and meekness (ordering will) are the prerequisites for actually functioning as a human being is meant to function. Without them, you’re not pursuing your life’s calling—you’re just trying to manage your passions. And that’s a waste of a life.

Wendell Berry—not Orthodox, but a prophet nonetheless—wrote about husbandry in a way that completely illuminates what I’m trying to say here, describing husbandry as “the art of keeping tied all the strands in the living network that sustains us.” And he notes that “the husband, unlike the ‘manager’ or the would-be objective scientist, belongs inherently to the complexity and the mystery that is to be husbanded, and so the husbanding mind is both careful and humble.”1 (Emphasis mine.)

Careful and humble.

That’s what chastity is—husbandry of eros. Not managing it like an industrial process, chasing productivity, efficiency, and output, but stewarding it with reverence.

Our contemporary culture commodifies, optimizes, and quantifies sexuality, just like a machine. And then we’re baffled when it leaves us feeling empty, used, or like we’re using others. When the “freedom” of sexual liberation turns out to be just another kind of cage.

Because we’ve treated mystery as if it is a machine.

So if chastity clears all this ground—makes you real, expands your capacity for love, preserves particularity, enables your vocations, teaches you husbandry of mystery—what’s it all for?

Theosis.

Union with God. Becoming by grace what Christ is by nature. Participating in the divine life. Growing into the fullness of what a human being is supposed to be—which is so much more than a “good person who follows the rules.”

In his lovely little book O Death, Where is Thy Sting?, Father Alexander Schmemann wrote:

“In essence, my body is my relationship to the world, to others; it is my life as communion and as mutual relationship. Without exception, everything in the body, in the human organism, is created for this relationship, for this communion, for this coming out of oneself.”

Your body isn’t a machine you operate or a temptation you resist. It isn’t even primarily a vehicle for reproduction, though it’s certainly that too.

Your body IS relationship. It IS communion. It’s how you love, how you create, how you give yourself, how you encounter mystery, how you participate in the life of God.

When sexuality is disordered, relationship is disordered. When relationship is disordered, your capacity for communion—which is your capacity to be fully human—is damaged.

Chastity heals that. Not by suppressing your body, but by freeing it to be what it’s actually for.

And what it’s for is glory. Participation in the life of the Trinity. Becoming the kind of person who can stand in the presence of infinite love, the River of Fire, without being annihilated by it—because you’ve learned, slowly and painfully over years, how to love without consuming, how to desire without destroying, how to give yourself without losing yourself.

That’s what you’re being freed for.

Not just to be “good.” Not just to avoid sin. Not just to have a successful marriage or raise healthy kids, though those might be part of it.

You’re being freed to become fully alive. To become real. To participate in the divine life in ways that make “being good” look like kindergarten by comparison.

Listen, I don’t want you to think the goal is just white-knuckling through temptation for the rest of your life. I don’t want you to think that chastity is about restriction, deprivation, saying no to yourself over and over until you die.

Chastity is about saying yes to something so much bigger that the things you’re giving up start to look small by comparison. As I said last time, we begin by wrestling with the dragons in our own hearts first, and then those in our family systems and communities. I say to you that it is both stunning and miraculous how much repair and restoration can happen in a single generation committed to healing.

It won’t feel that way at first. At first it will feel like death—and in a sense, it is. You’re dying to the false self, the performing self, the enslaved self. You’re dying to the little hits of pleasure that kept you distracted from the ache for real love. You’re dying to the fantasy that you can steward nuclear-level power without maturity.

But on the other side of that death is actual resurrection. The same Life and Love that raised Christ from the dead, making you alive and full of love in ways you didn’t know were possible.

The ground shifts beneath your feet. Again and again.

But the house that is built on the Rock stands.

In Christ,

Laura

P.S.-- If this essay has you thinking, “Okay, already, but how?!” Talk to your priest, your spiritual director or even just a mature Christian you trust. You don’t have to do this alone, but you’re also not going to get the answers you need from the Internet. It’s fairyland, remember?

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Other essays in the series:

1. Beyond Divine Masculinity — and the essay that inspired it, The Most Harmful Spiritual Myth: Gendered Energy, by Alex at Left Brained Mystic

2. On Reading Lewis Mythically: Fiction, Theology, and the Lewis Question

3. The Scaffolding and the Cathedral: A Letter on Paradigm Shifts, Young Earth Creationism, and Gender Theology

4. Walking Around With Nuclear Codes: What Nuclear Energy and Eros Have in Common

5. Icons, Not Instruments: Chastity Makes Us Real

6. This is Not a Love Story: Lolita and the Corruption of Everything

7. Beyond Eye Bouncing: How Christians are Missing the Point on Pornography Recovery : A stand-alone piece I wrote a while ago explaining that how many people try to manage sexual temptation is based on flawed premises.

8. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t link to the curriculum I wrote for my own teens:

   • Sex Ed for Sane People

Dear Friend,

Isn’t it amazing when heaven subtly lines things up for you? Sets up a synchronicity that winks and says, “Yes, do pay attention! Something is happening here!” I just got handed a doozy, though it’s quite a dark mirror of what we’ve been speaking about so far.

You see, I’ve been avoiding Lolita for as long as I’ve been aware of it.

But-- I always check the Free Little Library to look for strays. And this summer, right after the first in a quiet string of synchronicity that had put the book back on my awareness, there it was. I pinched the 1965 paperback gingerly between thumb and forefinger and carried it home.

I cracked it open to look at the front matter, read a few lines, slammed it shut and stuck it on my Banished Books Shelf. You know, for the books you’ve accumulated that you feel like you should have for some reason or another, but you don’t really want to think about. That’s where Nabokov lived for the past six months.

The offending front matter? Praise from renowned 20^th century literary critic Lionel Trilling that read:

“In recent fiction no lover has thought of his beloved with so much tenderness, no woman has been so charmingly evoked, in such grace and delicacy, as Lolita; it is one of the few examples of rapture in modern writing…

I think that the real reason why Mr. Nabokov chose his outrageous subject matter is that he wanted to write a story about love.

Lolita is about love. Perhaps I shall be better understood if I put the statement in this form: Lolita is not about sex, but about love. Almost every page sets forth some explicit erotic emotion or some overt erotic action and still it is not about sex. It is about love. This makes it unique in my experience of contemporary novels...”

…

What the actual hell?!

It’s the most terrifying page in the entire book.

It took me exactly five pages into the story to realize that he was breathtakingly wrong. Lolita doesn’t celebrate perversion, it is not about love in any recognizable sense of the word, and it isn’t actually a controversial story. It is, rather, a complex depiction of how evil works in our current society. And when society was confronted with it, it wasn’t its “offensive material” that made it untouchable, it was that it is so clearly a reflection of our own cultural dysfunction. The voices protesting it saw in it a projection of their own disease, and they couldn’t cope. Puritans who protested the subject matter and critics who celebrated it were unwitting dupes who failed the moral test of the novel.

We read Dostoevsky now with the self and cultural reflection his work demands, but perhaps it was more difficult for his contemporary readers to do so, without the distance of time. Nabokov wrote this novel in the same tradition, writing a mask of intellectual, gorgeous prose for Humbert to hide behind. He tempted his readers to equate the beauty of Humbert’s prose to beauty in Humbert’s actions (or at least, motivations), calling out society’s worship of sophistication, the upper-middle-class’s obsession with appearances and respectability.

He did this through exposing systemic sexual corruption. Humbert is a walking nuclear bomb, murdering soul after soul after soul until he also murders a body.

Quick recap: Lolita is the first-person account of Humbert Humbert, a European intellectual who becomes obsessed with his landlady’s twelve-year-old daughter, Dolores Haze. He marries the mother to gain access to the child. When the mother dies, he kidnaps Dolores and sexually abuses her for years while traveling across America. He tells this story in decadent, eloquent, multilingual, sophisticated prose. And because the abuse of a child is such a horrific subject, it can be hard to see past its initial offense to the universal principle: Nabokov is showing us that all sexual corruption is predicated on the objectification of other human beings.

Everything is downstream of my first principle, that human beings cannot help but hurt one another with their powers. And if that principle remains unacknowledged, if one permits and celebrates the objectification of human beings, it is a clear path on which to march straight into hell. Nabokov shows us that Humbert is the logical end result of our corrupt beliefs about other human beings, and that we are not as far removed from it as we pretend to be.

Nabokov understood this crucial thing: predators don’t think of themselves as predators, evil people don’t see themselves as evil. Selfish people don’t worry about being selfish. Those embodying such corrupted ways of being construct elaborate justifications, aestheticize their crimes like Humbert, create entire solipsitic philosophical frameworks to avoid reality.

Humbert invents the concept of the “nymphet”—a pseudo-aesthetic category of girls between nine and fourteen who possess certain ineffable qualities, of which he is a special connosieur. He drinks his own Kool-Aid, indulging in pure rationalization designed to mystify child sexual abuse. Most dangerously, he is given enough eloquence to make it superficially compelling, or at least confusing.

To anyone with a functioning conscience, Humbert is straightforwardly evil, a point down the road of demonosis that should, in theory, be simple to recognize as corruption. I’ve lived with alcoholics before, and Humbert’s self-justifying lies makes those seem tame by comparison.

But I make the comparison for a reason. Both involve narcissistic personality structures where the entire world must be reinterpreted to protect the self from the implications of its own choices. (Sidenote: This is where I have to recommend Fr. Meletios Webber’s essential Steps of Transformation. It’s a handbook for applying the twelve steps to the spiritual life, a practical way of learning how to root out this kind of casual solipsistic thinking, even if you don’t struggle with substance abuse.) An alcoholic might say “I deserve this drink.” Humbert writes soliloquies about fate, aesthetics, European cultural sophistication, Dolores’s supposed complicity—building an entire cognitive structure with it. The underlying mechanism is identical: reality must be denied, responsibility deflected, the self kept innocent in its own eyes. It is, simply, the tailing end of the spectrum of selfishness.

So how did Trilling get it so catastrophically wrong?

I mean, I guess some readers experience cognitive capture with beautiful prose. Maybe they really can’t get past the quality of the technique and perceive the subject matter correctly. And when we picture the 1950’s, we typically call up the caricature of moral purity and social stability that we’ve been indoctrinated into, but the intellectual movements of the mid-20th century were far from being that reductive and simple.

And it’s also true that Lolita is a classic of unreliable narration. This isn’t just some bait-and-switch thriller where the good guy turns out to be the bad guy (oh, shock! Who saw that coming?!), this is a masterpiece. Humbert lies all of the time, and just like any liar, sometimes he slips. An attentive reader perceives this-- especially if you’ve earned your chops and know how to watch for them.

It can also be possible to falsely conflate “unreliable narrator” with “morally complex narrator whose perspective has validity.” Confronted with a well-developed personality utterly drenched with evil, we accidentally grant this corrupted personal development and sophistication with spiritual weight. This is why my third principle, separating personal growth and spiritual growth, is absolutely essential and so clarifying.

But you know what I think is bigger than all of this? I think Nabokov was calling out society’s complicity in sexual abuse, making it a systemic issue. I think male critics found Humbert’s rationalizations persuasive because those rationalizations flattered certain male fantasies about precocious girl-seductresses, and echoed the rationalizations they used every day in their routine sexual objectification of “females” in general.

And before I go any further: yes, friend, I know that women can be abusers and hurt others as well. If you’ve been listening to me at all these past few essays, I have said that eros and thymos can be and are used to hurt the self and others, regardless of one’s sex. This is a human problem. And I’m trusting that you are an intelligent human being who can hear me discuss the details of a classic work of fiction without turning it into a verbal political circus. In fact, I’d suggest that if you have such an impulse, it may be rooted in the same thing I’ve warned about: projection of personal issues onto categorical discussion. As my mama used to say to me, whenever I had an impulse to dislike something or argue about it, “Honey, what do your feelings say about you?”

Back to Lolita. Humbert’s not the only predator in the book. One, Gaston, has placed himself in the perfect social network of adoring acquaintances who practically serve him their boys on silver platters. Humbert’s interactions with Gaston illustrate that predators exist in networks, that they recognize each other as kindred, and that there are many variations on the same pathology. Later, the celebrated playwright Quilty appears, who has stalked one of his victims over the course of years, through such innocuous social connections as a visiting his dentist uncle. These are not isolated monsters, but are part of a system where predators operate through social, familial, and professional networks, which is the entire point. Respectability provides cover. The upper-middle-class world of tennis clubs and school plays is not protective; it’s a hunting ground. Larry Nassar played the same book, as did countless priests, pastors, and troop leaders.

One of Humbert’s strategies to convince us that he is not despicable is to regale us with stories (Are they true? Are they lies? Are they exaggerations? What does that even mean?) of Dolores’s own precocious sexuality, as well as stories about the precocious sexuality of other children. In Humbert’s eyes, in the eyes of 20^th century “sexologists,” even in Huxley’s Brave New World, we see this premise proposed and normalized, that “some children” develop sooner, become more open to sexual advance. To say this, to even think this, about another human being is to objectify them, to treat them as an object to observe, dissect and categorize rather than an icon to relate to. You simply cannot think about someone’s “sexuality” without doing it.

I’ve seen this in the real world, and I’m betting you have, too. I can think of a girl I knew growing up, who seemed to possess the precocious sexuality Humbert describes. As a child, she seemed able to wield a mysterious power. I caught up with her a few years ago, and I could clearly see now that her adult life hadn’t turned out to be enviable at all—what had looked like advantage was now easily identifiable as prior damage. The larger context of her story involved an incest situation in the extended family. What could be objectified as “precocious” likely emerged from this toxic soil: her seeming confidence was a wound manifesting as premature sexualization.

As long as one child is sexualized early or exploited, it’s like a virus that continues circulating in society. All you need to do to be complicit is to think objectifying thoughts about an icon. I just read an article on a popular news site about how the Stranger Things cast have all dealt with pervy comments and behavior from adult “fans” since season one. Oh, I’d never do a countdown to 18 for an actor, you might say to yourself. I say if you think your daughter’s fourth grade bully is a hussy, hon, you’re over halfway there.

Just look at the OF influencers who are making headlines on mainstream lifestyle websites-- there’s a real market niche that deliberately cultivates signifiers of youth, and it’s commercially strategic, targeting people whose desires align with Humbert’s while giving the cover of plausible deniability... because the woman is technically an adult.

This is a mushroom cloud of modern pathologies: global pornification, the economic incentive to exploit sexual dysfunction, the dissolution of shame as protective mechanism. Someone can earn extraordinary sums by aesthetically positioning herself at the boundary of taboo. This is profound disorder in both eros and economics. The performer cooperates in degrading desire (and his or her own human dignity), while consumers are habituated to sexualize markers of youth and vulnerability. All parties are harmed. The transactional nature doesn’t redeem it; it compounds the evil.

Orthodox anthropology and trauma research both affirm this. Wielding eros as a weapon creates cascading damage that ripples through families and communities. The abused child becomes more vulnerable to subsequent predators; the child who grows up with objectification normalized does not naturally perceive the iconicity in himself or others. This is what the Fathers understood as ancestral sin: not genetic guilt passed on by intercourse, but actual, spiritual transmission of damaged patterns, distorted relationships, and shriveling capacity for love across generations.

If this book were only about child abuse, it would be chilling enough. Instead, Nabokov draws back the curtain on how even trusted institutional structures like marriage can provide moral cover for toxic beliefs and sustained abuse. Charles Williams thought he could use the beloved as a ladder to God. Humbert dispenses with the spiritual pretenses but perfects the use of marriage as instrument. Same error, different costume.

Humbert’s first marriage is to Valeria, a woman he considers absolutely beneath him, and he goes on to objectify and abuse her for several years, ultimately profoundly damaging her even though she manages to escape him. It’s what he says about marriage, though, that reveals why this isn’t just a book about child abuse. Here, I’ll let you hear him in his own words:

“It occurred to me that regular hours, home-cooked meals, all the conventions of marriage, the prophylactic routine of its bedroom activities and, who knows, the eventual flowering of certain moral virtues, of certain spiritual substitutes, might help me, if not to purge myself of my degrading and dangerous desires, at least to keep them under pacific control.”

Here is the argument for marriage used as damage control. Can’t handle your nuclear codes? Stick ‘em in marriage, and everything will be fine. It’s a gross distortion and a lie that has led to marriages that have murdered souls. As I’ve said elsewhere, the sexual self is an intensifier of the usual self-- a selfish person will be selfish sexually, a self-hating person will hate, a vicious person will be vicious, and so on. Marriage understood in this corrupted sense, as a tool for someone’s moral or spiritual growth (or even just containment) calcifies a person’s sexual self into its crippled form.

Then Humbert does it again, with Charlotte, only this time with the explicit end of gaining access to her daughter, Dolores. His weaponized sexuality commences the relationship with Charlotte via rape, and Nabokov devastatingly depicts how Charlotte subsequently trauma-bonds to the man who has been her crush, the screen for her projection of limerence. But Charlotte is not merely a victim.

Charlotte Haze resents her own daughter, sees Dolores as competition for male attention, as a symbol of lost youth. Because Charlotte is trapped performing bourgeois femininity (book clubs, garden parties, “churchy” respectability), she can’t mother Dolores properly. She’s competing with her own child. That Charlotte had previously married a much older man is not an accident. Whenever there is such a mismatch in power dynamics, it almost always indicates prior family system damage. Charlotte went from her damaged family directly into marriage with an older man, and never developed an authentic sense of self. When Humbert arrives, she immediately positions herself as romantic lead and Dolores as obstacle. She basically hands her daughter to a pedophile because she’s only concerned with her own self-validation.

And to make matters worse, Charlotte’s religion is about social respectability rather than genuine spiritual transformation—religion as performance rather than metanoia. The people in her church community, it seems, do not like Humbert, but no one steps in to interfere. It would not be appropriate.

The structural failures multiply: Charlotte’s failure as a mother (rooted in her own damage), the culture’s reduction of women to sexual objects, social networks that provide predators with access, family systems with compromised boundaries, churches that refuse to police predatory behavior. Humbert exploits all of this. He’s not an aberration; he’s part of a system. Nabokov shows us that the problem isn’t just individual wickedness but entire cultures organized around disordered passions—what we mean by corporate sin or structural evil.

So what do we do when our institutions-- marriage, society, even language itself-- obscure evil?

We simply cannot avoid or postpone wrestling first with the dragons in our own hearts, and then those in our family systems and communities. The story, like any great moral novel, forces us to grapple with how we are fooled so easily by people we think are smart and beautiful, how we so easily agree with those who echo the voices ringing between our own ears, how we greatly desire certainty in leadership and easy fixes to complex problems.

The Orthodox tradition has always understood this. The opposite of theosis is, of course, demonosis. And the way to learn to tell the difference is to cultivate discernment and ruthless self-awareness. This is why, ultimately, I’ve written these missives to you.

Lolita was stressful to read. I’m glad to have read it, and I’m glad it’s over with. I encourage you to experience it yourself, if the time is right. It’s not really an immoral novel-- I suspect that the past controversy over it was more of a collective societal flinch at the surgical precision with which it depicted our culture’s malady. It is a hard book, though.

Nabokov tore down the scaffolding—the respectable marriage, the cultured prose, the social networks—to show the rot underneath. This what can happen when we mistake the scaffolding for the building.

I’ve got one more letter for you, ending this series with a vision of hope. Especially after reading and contemplating this story, I need it, and I suspect you do, too.

In Christ,

Laura

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P.S.— Thank you so much for being here. If you appreciate what you’ve read, would you consider sharing my work with your circle? I’ve got some big creative projects launching this year, and I’d like to make sure I’m reaching anyone who might be interested!

P.P.S— Here are some links to the other essays in this series:

1. Beyond Divine Masculinity — and the essay that inspired it, The Most Harmful Spiritual Myth: Gendered Energy, by Alex at Left Brained Mystic

2. On Reading Lewis Mythically: Fiction, Theology, and the Lewis Question

3. The Scaffolding and the Cathedral: A Letter on Paradigm Shifts, Young Earth Creationism, and Gender Theology

4. Walking Around With Nuclear Codes: What Nuclear Energy and Eros Have in Common

5. Icons, Not Instruments: Chastity Makes Us Real

6. Beyond Eye Bouncing: How Christians are Missing the Point on Pornography Recovery : A stand-alone piece I wrote a while ago explaining that how many people try to manage sexual temptation is based on flawed premises.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t link to the curriculum I wrote for my own teens:

• Sex Ed for Sane People

And from the days of John the Baptist until now
the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence,
and the violent take it by force.

Howdy y’all!

I hope you enjoyed my last essay about Rango and have spent some time meditating with me on this fundamental problem that our America has with the continent we inhabit. Have you asked yourself, “How can I relate well to this beautiful, wholesome, sacramental land upon which I trod?” Tell me, have you found any answers?

This is not a problem to be solved only with better policies or greener technology. It’s also a mythological problem; a story problem. It requires a transfiguration of the imagination. Rango does some mighty lifting for an animated family film, but it’s not the only revolutionary work I’ve encountered.

In this essay, I was first going to spend some time remembering how Leslie Marmon Silko’s book Ceremony was such a literary transformation for me, but as I picked up my dog-eared, underlined copy and paged through the first chapter, I realized that I want to reread it again before writing on it. Which is the right decision, because it allows me to spend more time here introducing you to how Frederic S. Durbin has chosen to reanimate a zombie genre.

No spoilers in this essay, I promise, just talk about grand narratives and themes.

Exorcising America’s Demons

The Country Under Heaven was published just last year and I truly believe it is going to be a classic among lovers of fantasy and spirituality, and also among those of us who want to start experiencing an American mythology that is as terrestrial as it is celestial, rooted both the earth beneath our feet and the heaven in our hearts.

Don’t believe me? Friends will tell you that I was calling K-Pop Demon Hunters by 5:00 p.m. on June 20^th. Order a copy now. You’re going to want to have been one of the early readers.

This is a magical realism Western—or maybe a fantasy Western—or maybe just a Western that takes spiritual realities seriously in the way that, say, Flannery O’Connor took them seriously. You can read it as a rollicking adventure story and it absolutely works on that level; I just ceremonially laid it on my oldest’s TBR stack especially for that reason. But because it’s a work of genius, it operates on multiple layers simultaneously, and the deeper you look, the more you find.

The protagonist’s name tells you everything you need to know to understand how much subtle work Durbin is doing in this novel: Ovid Vesper.

Ovid—as in the Roman poet of Metamorphoses, the great work about transformation, about gods and mortals and the fluid boundaries between categories.

Vesper—evening prayer, twilight, threshold time, the liminal hour when day transforms into night.

His very name signals transformation through prayer. Metamorphosis through sacred journey. This is a pilgrim, not a conqueror.

Ovid Vesper is not just a gunslinger, not just the fastest draw or the toughest fighter. He’s a traumatized veteran, a wounded healer, a prayerful pilgrim moving through the American West spiritually and violently. And what he encounters are monsters—literal, actual monsters—that embody the specters of American mythological violence.

The Purposes of Violence

If you read A Green and Ancient Light-- which you absolutely should, it’s a modern fairytale classic that makes a stellar read aloud, or just an up-till-2-I-bawled-like-a-baby solo experience-- you would already know that Fred Durbin is a powerhouse. He already embodies that elusive idea we Christian artists have been whispering about for years-- “How do you write a spiritually Christian story, how do you make it art, without just being a didactic old school marm?” Durbin has put in the time on the typewriter and the time on his knees to become a master at evoking what C.S. Lewis named as sehnsucht:

“...the longing for that unnameable something, the desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of, The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.” - from The Pilgrim’s Regress

This book will endure because Durbin knows how to takes the violence embedded in American history—the conquest, the displacement, the extraction, the racial oppression, all of it—and personify it, mythologically, as monsters. He makes visible what we understand intuitively, what we’re often systematically trained to ignore or rationalize or explain away.

The monsters in The Country Under Heaven aren’t random fantasy elements dropped in for excitement, to give the protagonist something to fight. They’re the ghosts of Manifest Destiny given flesh and teeth and claws. Each one represents something specific about American violence, about the ways we’ve devoured land and people as resources to exploit, obstacles to remove, problems to solve through superior force.

And because it’s fantasy, operating in this magical realism space, Durbin can address these realities without being didactic or preachy. He touches gently on incredibly heavy themes—genocide, fraud, slavery, ecological destruction, misogyny, the spiritual cost of empire, the shattering of a nation after a civil war. You feel the crushing weight in the person of Ovid Vesper, wandering this achingly beautiful country in search of answers to questions he doesn’t even know how to ask. The book manages to be gorgeous and fun and full of wonder at the same time it grapples with America’s deepest sins.

It doesn’t hurt, either, that Durbin’s craft is en pointe. He is a master of Ovid’s very western voice, speaking from so deep within his character that Ovid’s fully developed personality manifests like a magic picture popping out in 3D from the rich and luscious prose, the same prose that radiates with love for the heartbreaking landscape over which Vesper travels.

Spiritual Combat as Response to Historical Violence

Ovid Vesper is not a preacher. He’s not the kind of man to tell you what’s what, that’s how it is, with regards to faith. When he encounters the monsters, these demonic embodiments of American violence, it’s not what he says when he defeats them that shows his growing spiritual strength. It’s his quiet sense of conviction, his growing heart full of love. It’s in how he takes up his crosses and the manner in which he bears his suffering.

Ovid Vesper fights the demons through a pilgrimage of prayer and metanoia (another word for repentance and transformation). Not with superior firepower, brute force or technological advantage. Absolutely not with rugged individual heroism. Vesper encounters every side character with attention and humility, with a generous willingness to help right the wrongs in front of him. It’s not written there, but my heart could hear the Jesus Prayer breathed in rhythm with Vesper’s wandering footsteps.

The Country Under Heaven is American western as spiritual combat in the Orthodox Christian sense—and Durbin gets this, really gets it in a way that most western writers couldn’t even dream of. Prayer breathed during despair, pilgrimage as the body in motion through sacred landscape. Demons as real spiritual forces rather than psychological metaphors. The understanding that some battles can’t be won through physical means, that some victories require spiritual weapons.

Durbin is taking the language of spiritual warfare—which has been so badly misused, so often weaponized (pun intended) for culture war nonsense—and applying it to the actual work of confronting America’s violent mythology. This is so exciting because it offers a specifically Christian approach that’s different from both Rango’s playful subversion and Ceremony’s indigenous ceremonies. It says: we have resources in our own tradition for this work. We don’t have to appropriate indigenous practices. We have prayers. We have pilgrimage. We have fasting and vigil and the accumulated wisdom of saints who fought spiritual battles in literal deserts.

Ovid’s journey is processional: horizontal, not vertical. He’s not conquering territory or claiming land or establishing dominion. The West in this book becomes a teacher rather than a prize. A threshold space—that vesper time—where transformation happens through spiritual encounter rather than through conquest.

Ceremony and Sacrament in a Magical Land

Which brings us back to the land question that opened this essay.

“How can I relate well to this beautiful land?”

Well, we can’t continue the extractive, violent relationship that got us here. We can’t continue to ignore it, either, or pretend that our inheritance isn’t affecting us spiritually. We need a third way. A transfigured relationship that acknowledges our history without being imprisoned by it.

What might this look like? I’m still working this out in my own life, still praying through it, but I feel a real sense of inspiration from reworkings of the American myth. I have a vision of embodying our traditions, as in the blessing of waters—not just holy water in fonts, but rivers and lakes and wells, as we did just last week at Theophany. I see us walking in procession through American landscapes with icons and prayers. I see us marking time liturgically through seasons, connecting human rhythms to cosmic rhythms, chronos to kairos. Together, attending to the world at hand, relating to it well, and incarnating particular existence in our little points in spacetime, where all is infused with divine presence, as creation that participates in God’s life and His redemption that includes the whole cosmos, not just individual souls.

I have this dream that groups of pilgrims chant the Psalms and pray the Jesus Prayer while walking the Appalaichian trail, make pilgrimage to American holy sites (and they exist—the land is full of them, indigenous peoples have known this forever), develop rooted relationships with specific places that carry on for generations.

This is what these three stories, The Country Under Heaven in particular, are teaching me about what is possible.

Three New Western Heroes

Rango, The Chameleon: at first a poser, learning authentic identity through repeated failure and shame, through becoming himself through what his community needs rather than acting out what he thinks they should want.

Tayo, The Veteran: wounded warrior healed through ceremonial encounter with living land, through cyclical return rather than linear progress, through participating in patterns older than personal trauma. (Oh, I can’t wait to write more about this…)

Ovid Vesper, The Pilgrim: transformed through prayer and spiritual combat with America’s violent ghosts, through naming demons rather than pretending they don’t exist, for exorcising an inherited past.

Three heroes for a mythology of transformation rather than conquest.

None of them conquer the West. All of them are transformed by the West, shaped by encounter with landscape and community and the spiritual realities embedded in particular places.

Our Home Sweet Home

The land is still here, friends. Still beautiful. Still wholesome. Still mothering, still generous, still waiting for us to learn how to love it rightly. We just need to learn how to relate to it correctly.

We need stories that show us the way.

And maybe—God willing and the creek don’t rise—we’re starting to get them.

In Christ,

Laura

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P.S.— If you like what I’ve written here, would you please consider sharing with your circle? I’ve got several big projects in the pipeline for this year, and I’d love to make sure they are visible to anyone who might be interested. Thank you so much for your attention in this oversaturated attention economy!

I just finished what would have been my favorite book of 2025 if I had just read it a few weeks ago, and it ties into some thought work I’ve been gnawing on. I first wrote about it here, last spring, in an essay called Procession, Prayer and Presence: Communion with the Enchanted Ordinary. Shortly after that, I started working on a follow-up essay that I just never got around to polishing-- it’s a good thing, too, because this latest book I read, The Country Under Heaven by Frederic S. Durbin, masterfully plays with everything I’ve been rolling around in the ol’ brainpan. It definitely reminded me to get this old thing off the shelf and dust it off.

Go ahead and order a copy. I won’t get to it until the next essay, but you’re going to want to read it. It’s going to be a classic.

I think I’ve been haunted by westerns my whole life, though I can’t say I ever took a shine to them. I think my dad was obsessed with them, though. Back in the days of cable TV, he’d likely linger on any B-movie western with way too many commercials. Plus he was really into Star Trek in its many different forms, which is arguably at its heart a giant space western. Just the other week, he managed to find Cowboys & Aliens on Netflix, a combination I would never have thought to look for.

It’s always been there in his blood. I’ve got a black and white photo of my little dad on his little Schwinn, and it’s not hard to see the boy on his horse, bound for wide open spaces. It’s written right there in his eyes.

This is the guy who pulled a burnt pork chop out of the (very top layer) of the trash and chowed down, explaining to his flabbergasted family that it was real cowboy food.

Maybe I’ve been thinking about westerns my whole life? All I know is that something has been leading me closer and closer to marvelous places, liminal experiences, truly layered encounters with this very earth I trod upon.

We are sitting on this fabulous, life-giving, generous continent of vast abundance, and we can’t relate to it correctly. This is the crisis at the heart of the American experiment, and thus of American mythology, and it’s a crisis we still don’t fully acknowledge. Our inherited, historical experience of the past 300 years has been one of conquering the land, of subduing it, of reaping and raping it. It’s been violent. And because of this violence, we have a severe problem with entering into right relationship with the land. We have inherited a continent our ancestors violated, and we don’t know how to love it correctly.2

I wrote about this obliquely before, exploring how I’ve come to understand that liturgical procession allows us to cultivate a sense for the multilayered complexity of reality as it really is. We enact a horizontal movement in a sacred space, and make it a communal interpenetrating of layers rather than the vertical collapse of meaning into a single narrative that our culture is always pressuring us into.

You see, the American myth is fundamentally vertical: upward mobility, conquering heights, ascending over others. Manifest Destiny. The self-made man. The rugged individual taming the wilderness. All of it pointing up, up, up—at the expense of indigenous peoples, of women, of the land itself, of every relationship of reciprocity and care at every level.

And here’s where the chameleon comes in.

I just love Rango, that weird 2011 animated film about a pet lizard who accidentally becomes a desert town’s sheriff. It was the first western I was able to truly enjoy, though I admit it took me a couple viewings to get past my initial reactions. (For one thing, the textures in the animation give me an absolutely visceral reaction.) Luckily my oldest boys thought it fantastic, and since my general policy on screen time is to always make it communal, I ended up realizing that it was quietly doing something revolutionary within the western genre.

It was showing us one way to examine and transform the American myth from conquest to encounter, from vertical violence to horizontal community. And it does this while being genuinely fun, lifting up trope after trope, tossing them playfully in the air, and watching where they land.

The Vertical Myth We Inherited

The old American myth—the one embedded in classic westerns, in Manifest Destiny ideology, in the whole mythology of the frontier—is violent in ways we still don’t acknowledge fully. It was built on genocide. It treated the land as enemy territory to be subdued. And it was misogynistic in ways that continue to shape our culture.3

You get two basic types of women in westerns: the saloon whore (spicy bad ones and down-on-their-luck good ones who just need some help) and the churchy schoolteacher. Both need to be saved by a man. Neither one mediates wisdom about the land. Neither one has spiritual authority. Women are property or prizes, never guides, never sources of knowledge about how to live rightly in a place. Oh, but they can sling a rifle in a pinch, so they are absolutely empowered.

And the Native Americans? Either noble savages or bloodthirsty villains, always flattened into plot devices for white narratives, like the “wise Indian” who shows up to dispense cryptic wisdom before disappearing. The reduction of complex, diverse cultures into good guys or bad guys and the complete suppression of indigenous epistemologies—indigenous ways of knowing and relating to the land.

The West in traditional mythology was supposed to be this liminal space, this threshold where transformation could happen. But instead of becoming a place of genuine encounter and mutual transformation, the American West became a place of conquest and erasure. The contact zone became a killing field, and then we told ourselves and our children heroic stories about it.

You can see late manifestations of this problem in something like Walker, Texas Ranger (which I’ve seen quite a bit of thanks to my dad’s obsession)—a show that seemed to address the myths while actually reifying them. Sure, you got multicultural casting, but the fundamental structure remained: the hero still conquers, still operates through violence, still treats the land as backdrop. Pretended, controlled “progress” that left the mythology intact.

Rango’s Playful Subversion

And here’s ultimately why I came to love Rango: it celebrates Western mythology while simultaneously exposing what’s phony about it. It loves the genre enough to honor its conventions, and it’s smart enough to begin the work of transforming them.

The chameleon protagonist is perfect for this work: an adaptable creature, a performer, someone who changes to fit their environment. Rango achieves authenticity by his journey through performance, not despite it. He’s not the lone gunman with a fixed, essential identity. He learns who he is by adopting an artificial identity and carrying it to crisis, transforming into a real, particular individual embodied in a real, particular community.

This is already subversive. The traditional Western hero conquers through superior individual strength. Rango wins through wit, through community cooperation, through his repeated failures. He bears the shame of being willing to look foolish, to fail and then to try again.

Look at some of the supporting characters—each one corrects a trope from traditional westerns:

Beans isn’t the schoolteacher or the whore. She’s a wise woman figure. Her cataleptic episodes—those moments when she freezes completely—aren’t just played for laughs, they’re prophetic visions connecting her to the land’s memory. She sees right through Rango’s initial lies. She grounds the community. She represents what western mythology suppressed: feminine land-knowledge and spiritual authority.

Wounded Bird, the raven, appears only briefly, but his presence is crucial. Raven is a traditional trickster and wisdom figure in Native American cultures—a creator, a transformer, a keeper of hidden knowledge. The film acknowledges the “wise Indian” trope (he literally gives Rango crucial information about the water theft), but it does so in a way that honors indigenous knowledge while being honest about its own limitations. Wounded Bird’s arrow wound is intensely purposeful—he bears the violence of colonization but still carries essential wisdom. His intentionally brief appearance highlights the absence of Native voices in traditional westerns, making visible what the genre has erased.

Rattlesnake Jake could have been just another villain, but instead he’s death personified—and death turns out to be more honest than false promises of progress. His machine-gun rattle is modern, mechanized death contrasted with the natural rhythms of the desert. He respects authentic courage and despises pretense. When he finally acknowledges Rango’s transformation at the film’s end, it carries weight because Jake represents reality unadorned. He’s the honest antagonist as opposed to the Mayor’s falsehood and villainy.

And then there are the mariachi owls, functioning as a Greek chorus throughout the film. Their songs offer both entertainment and spiritual commentary. They bridge the gap between audience and mythic action, acknowledging the archetypal nature of what we’re watching. They’re guides who tell us this story operates on multiple levels, and they nod repeatedly at the unacknowledged multiculturism that has always been present in the southwest.

The film’s treatment of these characters shows us what’s possible when storytellers get the mythology right. Not window-dressing on the same violent structure, but actual transformation of the underlying patterns.

The Orthodox Desert

Even cooler for me was how Rango uses desert imagery in ways that really resonate.

The desert in Orthodox Christianity isn’t just a geographical location, but a manifestation of multi-layered spiritual geography. The early monastics fled to the Egyptian desert not to conquer it but to be purified, tested, and transformed, encountering God Himself in the space-full container of empty wilderness. It was a place of temptation, of stripping away the false self, of beholding reality and the Love that fashions it.

Rango’s journey follows this pattern. His car crash is an involuntary baptism—literally thrown from his comfortable cage into a harsh, unpredictable world. The film even uses water imagery throughout in ways that echo Christian baptismal theology and pay homage to western tropes.

Water in westerns appears as river crossings, saloon baths, and rain-- cleansing metaphors. But Rango takes this further. Water scarcity makes every single drop sacred, baptismally significant. The town’s relationship to water becomes a measure of their spiritual health. It’s not just gold the townspeople of Dirt are fighting for or hoarding-- it’s more precious than even that.

Rango walks through the desert as a kind of baptism by fire, drowns in his own lies, and emerges with truth. The final water restoration becomes a community baptism, a renewal that includes everyone, an apokatastasis, if you will, complete with the banishment of death/Rattlesnake Jake. Rango and the town of Dirt learn to live in right relationship with scarcity, treating water as a communal resource that requires shared stewardship.

Las Vegas: Where the Myth Became Commerce

And then there’s the Mayor.

The Mayor is fantastic as an antagonist because he represents the corruption of Western mythology itself. He uses Western imagery (that turtle shell as armor, the whole aesthetic of the desert pioneer) for thoroughly corrupt ends. He’s a false shepherd—he even talks like a preacher--and the film knows this biblical language matters.

His secret? He’s stealing water from Dirt to feed Las Vegas. He is, almost literally, sacrificing to Mammon.

Las Vegas becomes an icon of the vector of western mythology to commercialized spectacle. It’s the culmination of Manifest Destiny’s worst impulses: artificial abundance built on theft, neon excess contrasted with authentic scarcity, manufactured entertainment replacing genuine community. Cowboys and Indians as casino themes. The West as brand, not incarnate, embodied, participatory reality. This is what we’ve done to our amber waves, purple mountains and shining seas: we’ve built elaborate logistical systems that move resources from where they naturally live to where they can be monetized.

When the Mayor dies—crushed by his own false water tower—it is divine judgment. False shepherds destroyed by the very structures they built to exploit their flocks. Very satisfying.

What It Teaches Us

So what do we do with all this? Why does a 2011 animated movie about a chameleon matter for how we think about American mythology in 2026? And what does it have to do with The Country Under Heaven?

Rango shows us that transformation is possible-- not only for the individual chameleon, but for the genre itself. It strips away the political and historical corruptions and convolutions of the old western, and maps the myth on to the interior frontier—the landscape of the soul. Western imagery becomes archetypal rather than nationalistic, finds the ways westerns resonate with our own experiences of soul journey, and not as propagandistic justification for Manifest Destiny.

This is a grand opportunity for today’s storytellers. We can celebrate what’s good in our cultural mythologies while fearlessly exposing what’s false. We can offer each other new creative experiences—children’s movies, yes, but also novels and essays and songs—that help people reimagine their relationship to the land they inhabit.

Rango uses humor and animation to disarm defensive audiences. It’s fun enough that people don’t feel preached at, but it’s doing serious mythological work underneath the entertainment.

The Work

I opened by saying we’re sitting on land we can’t relate to correctly. The inheritance of three hundred years of conquest have broken something in us, and we cannot escape the sins of our fathers. We also can’t simply return to indigenous ways of relating to the land—those aren’t our traditions to appropriate. But we also can’t continue the extractive, violent relationship that got us here. We are all infected by the spectres of spiritual death and ecological catastrophe.

We need a third way. A transformed relationship that acknowledges our history without being imprisoned by it.

Rango is one model for this transformation—playful subversion leading to spiritual depth. But it’s just the beginning. In a few days, I’m going to tell you about The Country Under Heaven, and also a little bit about another beloved story, Ceremony. The latter is already considered a modern classic, for good reason, and I predict that the former will soon rank with it. Both are stories that offer us a vision of better ways to enter into relationship with our halcyon skies and enameled plains. I’ll tell you more next time.

Until then, may we learn to relate to the earth beneath our feet with reverence, to reject domination and embrace communion. May we begin to behold the sparkling of many-layered reality, and in the magical, mystical spirit of Theophany, treat every drop of water as sacred.

In Christ,

Laura

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P.S. — If you like my work, would you consider sharing with your circle? I’ve got three big project launches in the pipeline for this year, and I want to make sure they reach a wide audience!

Last time I wrote to you, I laid out why we have sexual ethics at all—that it’s about learning to steward nuclear-level powers without destroying yourself and everyone around you. I told you that chastity is about ordering desire rightly, and meekness is about ordering will rightly, and together they form the basis of your integrity as a real person.

I’ll be honest, I feel torn. I have so much more to say, but I’m truly afraid to say too much.

I held back last time because I didn’t want to overwhelm you with the whole vision before you understood the foundation. The crazy thing is that even though sexual ethics are essential, it’s really easy to forget that they aren’t really even the point.

Chastity doesn’t exist to make you a “good person.” It exists to clear the ground so you can actually begin the real task—the effort and unfolding of becoming fully alive, which is the glory of God.

Listen, I know how that sounds. Maybe you’re thinking: “Great, so now there’s MORE? I’m already struggling to not use porn and you’re telling me that’s just the entry-level stuff?”

Yes. Exactly. Don’t shoot the messenger. Stay with me, because this is where it gets so beautiful.

In Turning Venom Into Medicine, I wrote: “Love is ontological. It exists, and desires that we should also exist. It wants us to be real.”

Most of us are not really real. We’re performing—performing gender roles, purity, rebellion against purity, performing the sexual personas we think we’re supposed to have. And that’s just in the sexual aspect of the self. There are so many ways that we hide behind shame or bravado or carefully curated images, managing secrets and maintaining lies—lies we tell others, lies we tell ourselves. Lies we often come to believe.

Sexual chaos keeps you unreal. It has to, because if you were actually present to yourself and to the people you’re using (or being used by), you couldn’t do it. You have to stay in the fantasy, in the performance, in that strange dissociated space where bodies become objects and persons become categories. Chastity—real integrity, not just white-knuckling through temptation—is what happens when you stop performing and start becoming actual.

You just can’t get there while you’re enslaved to the passions. The lies are too thick, the performance too exhausting, the shame or pride or whatever you’re using to manage it all absolutely overwhelming. Chastity is what clears that space within the self. Not by making you good enough or pure enough, but by taking a leaf blower to your heart and then laying the foundation for you to be real.

People who are stuck in sexual chaos are perpetually tired. Not just physically (though that too), but spiritually exhausted. They’re constantly managing—managing urges, managing shame, managing the fallout from their last mistake, managing the fear of being found out. Stuck in reaction, there is no space for the agency of true action.

In Venom I used the metaphor of “the great battery.” When we love God first, with everything we have, we’re connecting to “the great fission/fusion, perpetual motion, infinitely charged battery of love.” And as we grow in love for Him, He enlarges our hearts so our capacity for love grows.

But when you’re enslaved to lust, you’re trying to draw from an empty well. You’re looking for love (or what you think is love, or what feels like it might fill the ache) in all these little tiny puddles—porn, hookups, fantasies, even inappropriate emotional affairs that never quite cross the line into physical intimacy. Even-- this is hardest to see-- through the performance of marriage. And every time you drink from those teeny tiny puddles, you get a little hit that feels like satisfaction, but you’re actually training your brain to crave less and less, to settle for smaller and smaller approximations of the real thing. C.S. Lewis famously used the image of a person choosing to lick the crumbs from the floor rather than sit at the festal table.

It’s like trying to power a city with your wireless phone charger or your Y2K solar radio battery. You’re burning through energy without actually building anything, without actually connecting to the source.

Chastity isn’t about restricting desire. It’s about plugging into the infinite source so your capacity for love can actually expand instead of being constantly drained.

When you’re chaste—when your desires are ordered toward love instead of consumption—suddenly you have energy for other things. You have attention for actual people. You have capacity for the slow, patient work of knowing someone deeply. You’re not constantly distracted by the next potential sexual encounter or the shame from the last one; you can perhaps begin the spiritually salvific work of relationship, which perhaps may include a marital relationship with another real person.

Your heart gets bigger. Not because you’ve suppressed desire, but because you’ve plugged it into the right current and now it can actually grow. You’ll be baffled at how you used to be content with sipping from puddles.

You may begin to think that love and chastity, then, are really only about personal growth and development. I’m going to give you a third principle now: Spiritual growth, development and maturity is a different process and phenomenon than personality growth, development and maturity. The trouble is that there is significant overlap with these processes, and we frequently encounter people who are pursuing both at the same time, usually at asynchronous levels. This means that just because someone is at a high level of personal development, it does not indicate an equivalent level of spiritual development. It doesn’t mean the person is “bad”-- in fact, personal growth generally leads to all sorts of benevolent behavior. People can become good humans without being spiritual, which is why this principle is essential-- it is a necessary description of how reality works.

When you allow these processes to be separate, suddenly we can understand how remarkably individual, brilliant, lovely human beings can be completely blind to the spiritual world, and also how a simple, nondescript, nameless monk can shine with uncreated light. These are obviously edge cases, but perhaps they will help you to paint a mental picture. This model can also help explain how therapeutic relationships can be helpful until all of a sudden they aren’t; good therapy may help with personal development, but as a discipline is generally ill-equipped for spiritual direction.

I suspect that when we think of maturity, growth and development, we tend to think of it in terms of personal development. This would be having to do with incarnating ourselves as a particular, unique thoughts of God, in developing a personality and living out the unique circumstances of a particular life. This process has generally observable cause and effect-- you can put in a specific kind of effort, and see some kind of change happen.

Growth, development, and maturity is the spiritual life is much harder to pin down. What even is the goal of the spiritual life? Well, to directly experience God. And this is tricky because this process is not as dependent on cause and effect as we’d like-- hence we have all sorts of spiritual writings on both showers of grace and dark nights of the soul. I suspect this is a big source of frustration we have with relationships with other people-- being spiritual creatures, with relationships that dip into the spiritual world to a greater or lesser extent, we do not experience cause and effect in relationships the way we would choose to. Individuals, I’ve found, are unpredictable!

One of the core arguments I make throughout my work is what I call “the fallacy of the group”—treating statistical generalizations about populations as if they tell you something meaningful about the particular human standing in front of you.

Sexual objectification is the ultimate fallacy of the group.

When you look at porn, you’re not seeing persons—you’re seeing bodies sorted into categories. Types. Genres. The particular human being who was photographed or filmed is completely irrelevant except insofar as they fit the fantasy. You’ve reduced them to a demographic, a use-case, a means to your orgasm.

And it doesn’t just happen with porn. It happens in how we scan rooms for “hotness.” It happens in how we evaluate potential partners based on whether they check boxes. It happens in marriages when spouses stop seeing each other as particular people and start seeing “husband” or “wife” as a role to be performed or as a debt to be paid.

It can get even murkier than this, though, when we objectify someone else spiritually. Charles Williams, for example, believed that the lover must use his beloved as a rung on a ladder to climb up to God, much as Dante spoke about Beatrice. This is one of the major flaws in his romantic theology, because another person is used as a means to an end. Chastity protects against instrumentalizing even spiritual experiences. The beloved isn’t a ladder to God, and the marriage relationship is not a tool you use for your spiritual life. The beloved is a person you learn to love as God loves them, which requires you to be mature enough not to objectify and consume them.

But Charles Williams didn’t get it all wrong with his romantic theology, and it’s worth looking at where he got it right to understand why it’s so compelling, especially in how it relates to our cultural fantasy of medieval courtly love.1

Williams believed that when you fall in love with someone, you’re given a vision of them as God sees them—glorified, perfected, not yet marred by sin. That moment of falling in love isn’t delusion or hormones (though it’s certainly those things, too, as reality is always multilayered)—it’s a genuine gift of grace, a window into the reality of who this person is meant to be. I think he’s right-- when we look at our beloved and see them as beautiful, as worthy of devotion, as somehow containing all the meaning in the universe—we’re not crazy. We’re seeing a new layer of reality, perhaps for the first time. We’re seeing them as icons, as windows into the divine.

But Williams went catastrophically wrong: He believed the lover should use the beloved as a rung on a ladder to climb up to God. The logic goes like this: “If this person is so beautiful, then God who made them must be even more beautiful, so I’ll use my experience of loving them to reach God.”

Do you see the problem? He turned the beloved into a means to an end.

And this vision of love reveals itself as far too small. Williams didn’t just theorize romantic theology, he practiced it. He conducted what he called “spiritual exercises” with female students that involved physical contact and the deliberate cultivation of spiritualized erotic energy. He was using them. Not just their bodies (though there was physical contact), but their persons—using their particularity, their vulnerability, their desire to serve God, as fuel for his own spiritual ambitions.

This is the exact opposite of chastity, dressed up in beautiful, romantic language. No wonder we’ve all been so confused-- the waters are getting muddied from every angle.

It’s true that when you see someone truly, when you’re given that vision of their glory, you’re encountering something real and sacred. But you can’t use a revelation. You can only receive it, venerate it, participate in it. Or, as Lisa and I like to say: Attend, relate and incarnate.

The beloved isn’t a ladder. The beloved is an icon—and you don’t climb icons. You stand before them in reverence. You let them make God present to you not by stepping on them to reach higher, but by honoring the image of God in them. Thinking of marriage as a ‘thing’ or ‘state’ that is merely instrumental to the spiritual life misses this point entirely.

This is why chastity matters so desperately in romantic love. Because the alternative to chastity isn’t just having sex with the wrong person at the wrong time or breaking the rules and making God mad.2 The alternative is treating persons as instruments—even spiritual instruments, even with what look like good intentions.

Williams thought he was pursuing holiness. He genuinely believed his “romantic theology” was elevating eros to its proper spiritual height. But he was doing the exact thing I warned about in the last letter—he was wielding immature power. His desiderative power (eros) and his incensive power (will) were both oriented toward his own spiritual advancement, and everyone else was material for that project.

Ultimately, that’s not love at all. It’s consumption dressed up in religious language.

Christ in His Church has a completely different vision. When you encounter the beloved as icon, you don’t use them to reach God. Instead, you discover that loving them well is itself participation in the divine life. Not “loving them to get to God,” but loving them because God is love, and when you love truly—which requires chastity and meekness, which requires that you order your desires and your will—you’re participating in what God is doing.

The beloved doesn’t point beyond themselves to something higher. The beloved, loved well, becomes a place where you encounter God directly—because God is everywhere present and fills all things, and He’s especially present in the exchange of self-giving love between persons.

This is why marriage is a sacrament. Not because the wedding ceremony has magic words, but because the lifelong practice of loving one particular person—with all their frustrating particularity, all their resistance to being used for your purposes—becomes the training ground where you learn what love actually is.

And this love, in its fullness? It’s Trinitarian. It’s Father, Son, and Holy Spirit giving themselves to each other eternally, perfectly, without consumption or instrumentalization or false hierarchy or any of the distortions we bring to it.

I keep coming back to Williams not to trash him (though his practices were genuinely harmful), but because his error is our error, just in more obviously problematic form.

We do this all the time. We use our spouses to make us feel valuable. We use sexual partners (even ones we’re married to) to medicate loneliness. We use our own bodies as tools for stress relief. We use fantasies about people to avoid the difficulty of actual relationship (hello, internet as fairyland). We use the appearance of a good marriage to gain social benefits.

We’re constantly turning persons— including ourselves — into means to ends.

The path out is the same for all of us: Acquire chastity, order our desires so they serve love instead of objectification and consumption, and see persons as icons instead of instruments. Prepare ourselves to participate in Trinitarian love instead of trying to use love as a ladder to reach something else. It’s slow work. It takes a lifetime, and then longer.

And unlike Williams’s spiritual exercises or marriage misunderstood, it actually leads somewhere real—not to your own glorification, but to the mutual glorification of distinct persons learning to give themselves to each other without dissolving, without consuming, without using.

This is communion; this is theosis. That’s what you’re being freed for.

Let’s stop there for now.

In Christ,

Laura

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P.S. — Remember, reading something intriguing on the internet isn’t a substitute for embodied practice of the spiritual life in the context of a real world sacramental community. I know it feels hard to find the spiritual fathers and mothers we crave, but Jesus has not abandoned us: “Lo, I am with you always, to the very end of the age”! Pray, and wait with the attention of young Samuel: “Speak, O Lord! Your servant is listening!”

P.P.S — Here’s a list of related essays in the series!

1. Beyond Divine Masculinity — and the essay that inspired it, The Most Harmful Spiritual Myth: Gendered Energy, by Alex at Left Brained Mystic

2. On Reading Lewis Mythically: Fiction, Theology, and the Lewis Question

3. The Scaffolding and the Cathedral: A Letter on Paradigm Shifts, Young Earth Creationism, and Gender Theology

4. Walking Around With Nuclear Codes: What Nuclear Energy and Eros Have in Common

5. Icons, Not Instruments: Chastity Makes Us Real

6. This is Not a Love Story: Lolita and the Corruption of Everything

7. Beyond Eye Bouncing: How Christians are Missing the Point on Pornography Recovery : A stand-alone piece I wrote a while ago explaining that how many people try to manage sexual temptation is based on flawed premises.

Last time I wrote to you about paradigm shifts, about how realizing the earth is billions of years old doesn’t destroy faith, and how abandoning complementarian frameworks actually strengthens our understanding of sexual differentiation. But I know what question comes next, because not only have I asked it myself, it was a driving reason behind why I needed to write my own sex ed curriculum for my teens:

“Okay, fine. I don’t need to perform gender archetypes. But what do I do with my body? If the cosmic polarity stuff is wrong, what is the actual reason for sexual ethics? Why bother?”

It’s a good question-- the right question to ask, really, because if you’re not asking it or wondering about it, you might just be following the rules because that’s what a certain kind of societal pressure tells you to do. And that kind of reasoning doesn’t hold up well to any kind of pressure.

The marvelous thing is that the Christian sexual ethic doesn’t need sociological or moralistic scaffolding. It can be arrived at through a much more elegant path—one that starts with something every human being already knows, whether they’re Christian or not.

Follow me! We’re going in...

Most sexual ethics teaching works through a kind of inductive reasoning, laying out particular rules and expecting you to accept that there’s a general principle.

Don’t have sex before marriage. Don’t look at porn. Don’t masturbate. Don’t commit adultery. Don’t engage in same-sex activity.

Why, though? Because… God says so? Because… something obscure about ritual purity? Because… don’t be damaged goods? That few have reasoned well beyond this is evident in how often people fall back on sociological arguments such as disease prevention or social stability.

Without the connective tissue, these rules feel arbitrary. Worse, they feel aimed at you—like you’re the problem that needs containing, like your sexual self is something monstrous. Young people especially can smell this a mile away: “You’re telling me not to do the thing I want to do, but you can’t tell me why except that I’ll go to hell.”

So they either white-knuckle their way through, performing purity while slowly dying inside, or they chuck the whole system and figure secular culture has a better answer.

But what if we flip the table and use deduction? What if we started with something universal instead? Something that doesn’t require you to already believe in God, biblical authority, or cosmic gender polarity? That might actually be compelling. Let’s try it.

The Church teaches us that every human being has two primary powers of the soul: the desiderative power (eros, wanting, desire, attraction) and the incensive power (thymos, will, assertion, anger). Or if you want to call them by the name of their corruption, lust and rage.

But pause there-- lust and rage are not synonymous with eros and thymos. Our desiderative and incensive powers are not bad or corrupted in and of themselves. They’re neutral, like nuclear energy. Nuclear energy can power a city or annihilate it. The power itself isn’t the problem—it’s what we do with it.

Here is the principle I think we can start with and reason out everything we need:

Human beings, in their immature state, primarily use their powers in ways that hurt other people.

That’s it. That’s the whole foundation.

Not “sex is dirty.” Not “your body is shameful.” Not “women are temptresses” or “men are predators.”

Just this: Immature humans hurt people with their desires and their will.

You already know this is true. You’ve experienced it; I’ve experienced it. Maybe someone used you for their sexual gratification and discarded you. Maybe you’ve done that to someone else. Maybe you’ve watched your anger damage a relationship. Maybe you’ve seen what unchecked rage does to families, communities, nations.

Eros without maturity uses people as objects for pleasure. Thymos without maturity uses people as obstacles to remove or threats to destroy.

This isn’t Christian moralism—it’s just observation of reality. Look around.

So if the problem is immaturity, what’s the solution?

Well, in short, growing up-- but more extensively, theosis. Becoming the kind of person who can steward these massive powers without destroying everything in sight. Becoming the kind of person who, like our Lord, can actively desire and will salvation and goodness for others.

In spiritual terms, we can call this “acquiring virtue”—specifically, the virtues of chastity (ordering desire rightly) and meekness (ordering will rightly).

Chastity isn’t “not having sex.” It’s desire that serves love instead of consuming it.

Meekness isn’t weakness. It’s strength under control—power that protects rather than dominates.

These aren’t about about performance or rule-following; rather, they are cultivated over a lifetime to increasing degrees of fullness. They’re about becoming a different kind of person—the kind who can be trusted with power. Put together, chastity and meekness form the basis of our integrity as real persons. This integrity is the foundation for the practice of the kind of spiritual life that is truly transformative and transfiguring.

Now watch how this principle makes sense: With this foundation, the specific ethics become obvious practical wisdom rather than arbitrary restrictions.

Why no sex before marriage? Because sexual intimacy creates profound vulnerability. Giving that vulnerability to someone who hasn’t made a lifelong covenant with you is like handing nuclear codes to someone who might ghost you next Tuesday. It’s not about being “damaged goods”—it’s about recognizing the weight of what you’re doing.

Why no porn? Because it trains you to use images of people as masturbatory aids—literally practicing consuming others for your own gratification. You’re actively un-training yourself in chastity. You’re teaching your brain that people are objects.

Why no adultery? Because you made a promise. Breaking it doesn’t just violate a rule—it shatters the person who trusted you. You’re using your spouse’s vulnerability against them. That’s not just immature eros; it’s weaponized thymos too.

Why the emphasis on lifelong monogamy? Because learning to love one particular person across decades is the training ground for spiritual maturity. It’s where you discover that desire isn’t just about acquisition—it’s about fidelity, attentiveness, self-gift. You can’t learn that by serial monogamy any more than you can learn patience by quitting every job after six months.

See? Not arbitrary. Not “God will smite you.” Not “you’ll be damaged.”

Just: If you want to become the kind of person who can steward desire and will without destroying yourself and others, here’s how humans learn to do that.

I know you might have specific scenarios running through your head right now, and I have not addressed so many different angles. What about this situation? What about that edge case?

Here’s what I’ll say: Sit with it. Roll it around. Play with it. The general principle holds.

When you think about this principle, though, I want you to avoid the temptation to argue against it with hypotheticals. I want you to hold this principle up to your own life, and the lives of people you know intimately, without trying to make anyone you care about the exception that proves the rule.

In order to live out our first principle well, it helps to have our second principle be the Orthodox concept of economy (or oikonomia). It might surprise you if you’re coming from a more legalistic Christian background, but it’s both very simple and extraordinarily powerful.

Economy is the recognition that particular people in particular circumstances may need pastoral guidance that looks different from the general rule.

Regardless of what a screaming mouth on a social media short might be trying to tell you, this is not moral relativism or “anything goes.” It’s the acknowledgment of reality: Spiritual formation happens through the guidance of wise spiritual fathers and mothers who know you, your struggles, your specific situation—and who can apply the general principles to your particular life in ways that lead to healing rather than destruction.

The point of economy is that you are freed from having to be the judge and jury of everyone else’s spiritual life.

You don’t need to police other people’s bedrooms. You don’t need to anxiously scan your community for who’s following the rules correctly. You don’t need to worry whether your neighbor’s particular situation means they’re “really” Christian or not.

Instead, what you need to do is trust the patterns God has given us through the Church and through spiritual direction, and focus your energy on ordering your own desires and will.

This is such a relief! Without economy, we get obsessed with other people’s sin. We become Pharisees, measuring everyone’s compliance with our understanding of the rules. We create toxic communities where people are afraid to be honest about their struggles because they’ll be judged, shamed, excluded. Or worse—we become so afraid of being judgmental that we abandon any kind of moral framework at all, and then we’re just adrift. Economy gives us a third way, a better way.

The Church holds the general wisdom, leading us to good stewardship of desire and will. Your spiritual father or mother helps you apply that wisdom to your actual life, with all its complications and particularities. And you focus on your own formation, trusting that others are doing the same with their own guides.

It’s the difference between living in a surveillance state and living in a community of fellow travelers who are all working out their salvation with fear and trembling. Together, not in isolation.

The Christian sexual ethic isn’t the arbitrary divine whim of “God said so.” Instead, it is accumulated human wisdom about how to steward the most powerful forces in human life without destroying yourself and everyone around you.

Practically, this all means that sexual ethics is about spiritual formation, not rule compliance. It’s about teaching our young people to have a vision of themselves with integrity, not to just avoiding getting in trouble by avoiding a checklist of sins. We lead by example, by trying to become people of a certain kind—people who can be trusted with desire and will because our own powers of self are generous and loving, even maybe someday kenotic.

We do this through the spiritual practices of prayer and the sacramental life, through proper asceticism and festal joy, and through our own particular relationships, including relationships with mature Christians who are able to serve as spiritual directors. And yes, it includes the practical guidelines about marriage, fidelity, and continence—not as arbitrary rules, but as the training regimen for someone learning to steward nuclear-level power.

I know this might feel insufficient if you were hoping for detailed rules about every possible scenario, but that’s by design. The point isn’t to follow the rules like an automaton, but to become a particular kind of person with truly authentic agency.

Here is the cathedral under the scaffolding: Without exhaustive rules, this approach is more demanding, not less. It’s actually easier to follow rules than to become virtuous. Rules tell you exactly where the line is so you can dance right up to it. Virtue asks you to become the kind of person who doesn’t want to dance near the line anymore.

That’s terrifying and liberating in equal measure.

The ground shifts beneath your feet. Again.

But the Rock holds.

In Christ,
Laura

P.S.— I’m glad this essay is being shared! Thank you so much! While you’re here, be sure to check out this list of related essays thinking about Nuclear Eros:

1. Beyond Divine Masculinity — and the essay that inspired it, The Most Harmful Spiritual Myth: Gendered Energy, by Alex at Left Brained Mystic

2. On Reading Lewis Mythically: Fiction, Theology, and the Lewis Question

3. The Scaffolding and the Cathedral: A Letter on Paradigm Shifts, Young Earth Creationism, and Gender Theology

4. Walking Around With Nuclear Codes: What Nuclear Energy and Eros Have in Common

5. Icons, Not Instruments: Chastity Makes Us Real

6. This is Not a Love Story: Lolita and the Corruption of Everything

7. Beyond Eye Bouncing: How Christians are Missing the Point on Pornography Recovery : A stand-alone piece I wrote a while ago explaining that how many people try to manage sexual temptation is based on flawed premises.

I invite you to poke around! I’ve also written about the internet as fairyland, and have spent some time thinking about an enchanted Americana…

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P.P.S. - If you want to go deeper on virtue and the powers of the soul, Timothy Patitsas’s work is excellent. He ‘stacks, too! And if you’re struggling with how to actually practice this, talk to your priest or spiritual father—this isn’t meant to be a solo journey.

Dear Friend,

When I was a young teen, my family briefly attended a church that was committed to a scientific young Earth. Within a few years, I was working on a bachelor’s in biology.

When I tell you that there was a mental bridge to cross there, you can believe it! My poor advisor, Dr. Towne-- him and his bees-- I remember once cornering him in his office and showering a hailstone of philosophical questions on him, and his kind response was not what I was expecting in the slightest. I was prepared for argument against some kind of Atheist Materialist Bogeyman, but what I got in response was more of a bewildered, “Why are you stuck there? I personally see absolutely no conflict between science and faith.” I don’t remember anything else he said to me that day, but I remember very much that he was both kind and brilliant and one of my favorite professors, and so I took him at his word.

Maybe you grew up believing the earth was 6,000 years old. Maybe you’ve got caught up in the lovely symbolism of medieval cosmology. Or maybe you’ve built your marriage, your sense of self, your understanding of holiness around the complementarian framework of “divine masculine” and “divine feminine,”-- and now you’re reading things (like what Alex and I have been saying) that have you flailing for solid ground.

It’s existentially threatening, even terrifying. Because it’s not just about fossils or heliocentrism or gender roles—it’s about everything. It’s about wanting very much to be faithful, to not get things wrong by believing in lies. If you were wrong about this, what else are you wrong about? Will your faith survive? Will your marriage? Will you?

Listen! Yes. Yes to all of it. But the path through requires something that feels like death first. I know, because I’ve walked versions of it myself. It requires a paradigm shift.

When you’re in YEC, what ends up happening is that this sole belief becomes a litmus test for real Christianity. It becomes elevated in importance over hundreds of other doctrinal points. And often the community incentivizes you to stick cotton wool in your ears, to malign the character of every scientific practitioner or thinker who doesn’t agree with the party line. You might even secretly worry that the atheists might be right about Christians being anti-intellectual.

When you’re in a complementarian gender essentialism, the same thing happens. This one belief becomes the same sort of litmus test, and you might find yourself performing a role that might not fit your actual personality. Or maybe you feel shame for not embodying the right gender characteristics. Moreover, you can’t figure out why following all the rules hasn’t fixed your problems and made you (and your spouse) holy.

When you’re in them, both feel like cages. And worse, like holy cages, ones you’re not allowed to question without risking your salvation.

What’s amazing, and really quite liberating, is how recent these frameworks are. They’re not truly ancient Christian teaching (though there are words and phrases that seem to hint at them)—they’re actually modern apologetics that calcified into casual dogma. It’s true, you can find quotes from the Fathers that seem to support straight-up misogyny, or actual anti-intellectualism. Spiritual writing over the centuries is often diverse and ambiguous, sometimes even self-contradictory, and this is not limited to Christian writers. But good spiritual teachings don’t sit still and calcify-- they roll around in the oyster, irritating the cushy surroundings until a pearl is created.

What we are wrestling with is not ancient Christian teaching.

YEC emerged in the early 20th century as a defensive response to Darwin. Well-meaning Christians thought: “We must defend biblical authority! The only way to do that is to insist Genesis is scientifically and chronologically literal!” It created a false dichotomy: either six 24-hour days OR atheistic materialism. Either young earth OR no God.

Gender essentialism has an even murkier lineage. Some of it seems to come from medieval planetary symbolism (which was poetic, not prescriptive). Some of it comes from 19th-century Romantic philosophy. A surprising amount comes from 20th-century occultism that got baptized through intellectual exchanges like that between Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis, and written into stories like Lewis’s Space Trilogy. Plus it’s all mixed up with responses to the various waves of sexual liberation that occurred in the past hundred years and change.

The point is: we aren’t struggling with the teachings of the Church Fathers. We are actually looking at the scaffolding we built to protect something precious—but then we mistook the scaffolding for the building itself. And the scaffolding is obscuring a piece of glorious architecture.

The scaffolding was put there for a reason: Both frameworks arose from genuine pastoral concern because people were trying to protect something real. YEC defenders wanted to protect God’s sovereignty, biblical authority, and creation’s purposefulness. Gender essentialists wanted to protect sexual morality, marriage as sacrament, and the significance of bodies.

These are worth protecting! But the irony is that the apologetic that was built actually weakens what we’re defending.

A god who can only create in six 24-hour days is smaller than the God who patiently unfolds a universe across deep time. A marriage that requires performing gender stereotypes is fragile and mechanical compared to one where two particular people learn Trinitarian love—giving and receiving, leading and following, acting and resting as each moment requires, because they’re both accessing the full range of human capacities.

The thing we fear losing? It’s actually more secure after the shift.

When I tried to believe YEC as a teenager, the cognitive dissonance was unbearable. It felt intellectually dishonest, it felt prideful, it bored and alienated people who I thought were interesting and thoughtful. And when I tried on gender essentialism as a young adult, I felt like I was performing a personality that wasn’t mine-- I was struggling with this force that wanted to reduce me to biological function and cultural stereotype. Spoiler alert-- it didn’t do jack squat for my marriage, either. The complexity of the universe was pressing up against the insufficient models I was using to evaluate it.

As I said before: To force this complexity into two boxes labeled “masculine energy” and “feminine energy” (codifying “complementarianism” as theology) is to commit “the fallacy of the group”—treating statistical generalizations about populations as if they tell you something meaningful about the particular human standing in front of you. The flip side of this fallacy is the “universalization of experience”—mapping our own personal experiences, especially about gender and sexuality, onto the other four billion living humans that share our sex.

Something else I’ve noticed: Most people using these frameworks are actually masking their own relationship problems. The marriage that isn’t working? The emotional distance from her father? The fraught relationship with his mother or daughter? These are particular, specific relational struggles that require particular, specific attention—vulnerability, communication, forgiveness, the hard work of actually knowing another person.

But it’s so much easier to say “men are just naturally less emotional” or “women need to embrace their feminine receptivity” than to admit: “I don’t know how to be emotionally present with my wife” or “My father and I have unresolved wounds that I’m projecting onto all men” or “My marriage is a disaster for a lot of reasons that have to do with my particular spouse and myself.”

We take our personal relational failures—often rooted in our families of origin—and universalize them into cosmic gender principles. Then we’re shocked when the cosmic principles don’t actually fix our marriages.

Both frameworks create unnecessary casualties. Kids leave the faith because they can’t reconcile geology with Genesis. Women believe they’re spiritually inferior to men. Men feel like failures because they’re naturally gentle and nurturing. Marriages look “right” on the outside but become spiritually poisonous inside.

What really breaks my heart is that the thing we’re trying to defend doesn’t actually need this defense. God’s creative power doesn’t require a young earth. Sexual differentiation’s significance doesn’t require cosmic gender polarity. The scaffolding is hiding a more glorious architecture.

So how do you make the shift?

First, you have to distinguish the model from the reality. This is something I spent a lot of time on in Turning Venom Into Medicine—we use models all the time to think about reality, but we commit idolatry when we mistake the model for reality itself.

The reality: God created everything and His creation is good. Scripture is true.

The model we question: Genesis must be read as a chronological, scientific account.

The better model: Genesis is theological revelation about who God is and what creation means—which is actually more profound than a timeline. It requires reading Genesis not as a science text, but as an entirely different genre, one that combines the architecture of myth with the revelation of God. It’s not reductive, but rather an expansive story that will continue to spiralize with every prayerful reading.

Similarly:

The reality: Male and female bodies matter. Sexual differentiation is significant. Marriage is a sacrament.

The model we question: Masculine and feminine are cosmic-level energies that determine personality, roles, and spiritual capacity.

The better model: Male and female are icons—one way (not the only way) that creation teaches us about distinct persons in communion. Marriage images the Trinity: two hypostases (distinct persons) becoming consubstantial (one) without dissolving particularity. There are legitimate spiritual reasons for complying with a rigorous sexual ethic that relies neither on morality nor on some adherence to a cosmic model.1

See the difference? You’re not losing the thing itself—you’re gaining a clearer vision of it.

After the YEC shift, I discovered that God is more glorious working across billions of years, that Scripture has more authority when read for its actual purpose (theological truth, not scientific textbook), and that Creation is more wondrous in its complex unfolding. I also figured out, many years later, that the Fathers already knew this-- St. Basil, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Augustine all read Genesis non-literally, for example.

After the gender shift, you will discover that you’re more yourself when not performing an archetype, that your marriage becomes more intimate when it’s about particular persons and not cosmic polarity, and that sexual morality makes more sense rooted in virtue, not stereotypes. You’ll be relieved to find that Orthodox Christianity already says this: the Trinity isn’t essentially gendered and the image of God belongs to both male and female equally.

The terror is that you’ll lose everything. The reality is that you’ll find what was there all along, obscured by the scaffolding. The real cathedral is glorious.

I’m writing this essay as a letter to the aether, as I imagined myself in the many different mental spaces I’ve inhabited over the past few decades. I know that what I’m saying might not reach you where you are right now. Maybe you’re still certain about what you believe, or maybe you’re stuck floundering in cognitive dissonance, and what I’m saying sounds like compromise or apostasy. That’s okay. When you’re ready, Orthodox Christianity will still be here—with the Fathers who read Genesis theologically, with the Trinity that isn’t gendered, with a vision of personhood that honors your particularity more than any archetype ever could.

Or maybe you’re in an existential crisis (I’ve been there, too), and you need someone to say: “You’re not losing your faith. You’re finding it.”

Either way, you’re not alone. And the terror you feel? It’s real—but so is the wonder on the other side.

The ground shifts beneath your feet. And then you discover you were standing on the Rock all along.

In Christ,
Laura

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P.S. — If you like what you’ve read here, would you consider sharing my work with your circle? I have two fiction projects forthcoming in the next year, and I’d like to know that I’m reaching all of the people who would want to hear about them!

P.P.S. Here’s a list of the related essays in this series:

1. Beyond Divine Masculinity — and the essay that inspired it, The Most Harmful Spiritual Myth: Gendered Energy, by Alex at Left Brained Mystic

2. On Reading Lewis Mythically: Fiction, Theology, and the Lewis Question

3. The Scaffolding and the Cathedral: A Letter on Paradigm Shifts, Young Earth Creationism, and Gender Theology

4. Walking Around With Nuclear Codes: What Nuclear Energy and Eros Have in Common

5. Icons, Not Instruments: Chastity Makes Us Real

6. This is Not a Love Story: Lolita and the Corruption of Everything

7. Beyond Eye Bouncing: How Christians are Missing the Point on Pornography Recovery : A stand-alone piece I wrote a while ago explaining that how many people try to manage sexual temptation is based on flawed premises.

Last week on Patterns for Life, I agreed with Left Brain Mystic Alex that “divine masculine and feminine” frameworks are harmful and that their projection of biological sex differences onto cosmic principles is a profound category error. I also talked about how Orthodox Christianity is free from the entrapment to these beliefs that are otherwise so common in the religious landscape.

Something that Alex talked about, but I didn’t have time to explore in my other essay, was this idea that these principles of gendered spirituality, especially as we understand them now, are largely esoteric and new age. If this is true, then how did they end up codified in mainstream Christian belief?

This was one of the light-bulb moments for me in Alex’s essay, because I think I know, and I hinted at this in my original restack of Alex’s essay: I think C.S. Lewis helped baptize it, specifically in his Space Trilogy.

I say this as someone who appreciates most of Lewis’s work. I have no beef with recognizing The Chronicles of Narnia as a timeless classic, especially after looking under the hood with Dr. Michael Ward’s phenomenal exposition in Planet Narnia. It’s also true that Lewis’s apologetics have opened doors for countless people, myself included.

There are things he’s said, though, that have caused me to scratch my head. The last time I reread That Hideous Strength was one of those times, especially since the Lewis I had read immediately prior was the masterpiece Till We Have Faces. I know That Hideous Strength is being celebrated right now as being particularly prescient about the state of technological oligarchy, and I agree that it’s interesting, but I’ll be completely frank with you. The character of Jane Studdock does absolutely nothing for me, and I’m just not impressed with any of the female characters in The Space Trilogy. Especially compared to the complexity of Orual. The difference is so stark, I’ve even privately remarked that Orual is the first woman Lewis wrote half-believably, and I’ve wondered if his relationship with Joy Davidson had anything to do with it.

Plus there’s all the gendered planetary symbolism, some of it quite explicit.

And this is where I want to pause and think out loud about the difference between fiction and theology, between literary device and doctrinal claim, and about what happens when readers (and entire movements) fail to make that distinction.

I say this as someone who writes both fiction and non-fiction, who moves constantly between what Lewis himself called writing “along the beam” (direct theological/philosophical exposition) and “across the beam” (imaginative literature that evokes rather than explains). One of the creative tensions I live with is wanting to use the full palette of human imagination in my fiction—including symbolism, myth, and even esoteric imagery—without being accused of teaching heresy every time a character says something theologically questionable.

Perhaps Lewis faced the same tension. And perhaps the problem isn’t primarily what Lewis wrote, but how we’ve read it.

The Space Trilogy As Literary Experiment

Dr. Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia demonstrates conclusively that Lewis used medieval planetary symbolism throughout his fiction. This wasn’t accidental or casual, it was deliberate craft, drawing on the rich imagery and vocabulary of medieval cosmology.

In the Space Trilogy, Lewis made this symbolism explicit and theological in ways he didn’t in Narnia: Ransom receives instruction about planetary governance, and Jane Studdock is taught about masculine and feminine principles, for example. The novels don’t just use planetary imagery as atmosphere, they explain it as cosmology.

But was Lewis making explicit theological claims, or was he conducting a literary experiment? Was he saying “this is how reality actually works,” or was he exploring “what if the medieval cosmos were literally true—what kind of story would that create?”

The distinction matters enormously.

It was Alex’s essay that finally gave me a clue to all of this: there’s a strong twentieth century occult history behind this idea of gendered spirituality, one that already drew upon medieval symbolism but took it to very different existential conclusions. And because of Dr. Sorina Higgins over at The Oddest Inkling, I know exactly how that connects to C.S. Lewis.

The Williams Connection

Charles Williams was Lewis’s close friend during the 1940s—the Inklings period when Lewis wrote the Space Trilogy. Williams was deeply involved in occult practices: Rosicrucian ritual, Hermetic mysticism, and what he called “Romantic Theology.” It wasn’t casual dabbling—Williams practiced ritualized exercises with female students that involved physical contact and spiritualized sexual energy.

Williams’s theology explicitly centered on divine masculine and feminine as fundamental cosmic principles. In both his fiction and non-fiction works, he articulated a vision where gender polarity is a force of creation, where masculine and feminine forces must be properly aligned for spiritual growth. (If you want to learn more about Charles Williams, I again have to send you over to The Oddest Inkling, plus tell you to keep an eye out for her forthcoming book. I can’t do it justice here.)

Their correspondence shows that Lewis was absolutely enchanted by Williams during this period. And when we read the Space Trilogy—particularly Jane Studdock’s arc in That Hideous Strength, where she must learn to embody feminine submission to masculine authority—I don’t think we’re reading the medieval Christianity we assume that C.S. Lewis refers to. I think we’re reading Williams’s Romantic Theology baptized with Christian language.

Do I think C.S. Lewis was promoting occult teaching? Absolutely not.

When I think it through, here’s where I think the parallel metaphors get murky. Medieval cosmology used gendered planetary associations as a participatory descriptive metaphor. It’s one thing to feel connected with the physical universe surrounding you, to notice the wheel of the stars and the change of the seasons, and to feel like one is a part of a greater whole and use poetic language to describe this ecstatic awareness. But modern occultism transformed this into a normative, prescriptive ontology—it began talking about masculine and feminine spiritual energies as things we needed to do or ways we needed to be. Some parts of modern psychology took this kind of normative thinking and ran with it, too.

A medieval Christian might observe that someone’s temperament was inclined to Mars, but an occultist would take it further and say that Mars channels a specific energy connected to the male biological sex, that defines both a person’s nature and their spiritual path.

I think all of this was probably quite clear and obvious to Lewis, but he wanted to play with the symbolism in his fiction in a way he couldn’t do in his non-fiction. And I think we’re making a mistake when we read his fiction in theological mode when it was rather written in mythic mode.

In mythic mode, you can have planets governed by angelic beings with gendered characteristics. You can explore what it would mean if cosmic masculine and feminine were real forces. You can put characters through arcs that embody these principles. This is legitimate literary exploration— taking an idea seriously enough to see what kind of story it generates.

The problem comes when readers—especially readers looking for theological authority—extract the mythic framework and treat it as doctrinal teaching.

Ironically, Lewis himself wrote extensively about how to read fiction well. In An Experiment in Criticism, he distinguishes between “using” a book (extracting information, finding confirmation for what we already believe) and “receiving” it (entering the imaginative world on its own terms, letting it show us something we couldn’t see before).

Lewis warned against treating imaginative literature as a vehicle for extracting propositions. He knew that fiction works differently than exposition; that it operates through image, symbol, and resonance rather than argument and claim.

Yet this is precisely what I think happens with the Space Trilogy. Readers can use it as a source of theological propositions about gender when Lewis was instead inviting them to contemplate it as mythic exploration of medieval cosmology, flavored with the intense symbolism of one of his admired friends.

The Tell: Compare Lewis’s Fiction to His Theology

If we want to know whether Lewis actually believed in cosmic masculine/feminine as theological reality or was experimenting with it in a literary way, we should look at his non-fiction.

In Mere Christianity, Lewis talks about gender in terms of social roles and biological complementarity. He doesn’t invoke cosmic principles or planetary forces. He’s quite conventional, especially for his time, and even disappointingly so by modern standards, but he’s not doing what Williams does—he’s not making gender into metaphysics.

In The Four Loves, Lewis discusses masculine and feminine in cultural and psychological terms, not cosmic ones. He acknowledges differences in how men and women typically approach relationship (also conventional for when he was writing), but he’s describing patterns, not prescribing essences.

In his literary criticism and scholarly work, Lewis treats medieval planetary symbolism as exactly that— medieval symbolism, useful for understanding Dante and Milton, not cosmic reality that modern people should organize their lives around.

The gendered cosmology appears almost exclusively in his fiction. This suggests it was a literary device, not a theological commitment. But because we treat Lewis as a theology authority even when he is a fiction writer conducting experiments, we can mistakenly scaffold an entire anthropology on what may have been his mythic imagination at play.

Where Tolkien Saw More Clearly

J.R.R. Tolkien pulled away from Lewis during the Williams period, and while he was diplomatically vague about why, the timing matters. Tolkien didn’t like Williams’s theology and worried about his influence on Lewis.

Significantly, Tolkien’s own fiction is notably free of gendered cosmology. Middle-earth has powerful women and men, but they don’t “embody” cosmic principles. The Valar have masculine and feminine forms, but these are presentations, not essences. When Éowyn defies gender expectations by riding to war, the narrative celebrates her courage— it doesn’t suggest she’s violating her cosmic feminine nature.

Tolkien understood something important: You can use gendered imagery and even medieval cosmology in your fiction without claiming cosmic gender is metaphysically real. You can have queens and warriors and wise women without suggesting they’re channeling divine feminine energy.

Perhaps Tolkien recognized that Lewis was playing with fire— that readers wouldn’t maintain the distinction between literary device and theological claim. Or perhaps Tolkien simply had better instincts about which medieval elements were safe to imaginatively embrace and which ones carried occult freight that even literary distance couldn’t fully neutralize.

Maybe another problem is the way we interact with authority in our culture. People desperately want authoritative voices to solve theological questions definitively. Lewis became that authority in the late twentieth century— his apologetics were so effective, his Narnia so beloved, that readers assumed everything he wrote carried equal theological weight.

So when Lewis imaginatively explored gendered cosmology in the Space Trilogy, readers didn’t receive it as mythic experiment— they extracted it as doctrine. They used his literary authority to justify complementarian theology that Lewis himself never articulated in his actual theological writing.

This might be how an occult idea entered Christian consciousness: not through direct teaching, but through imaginative literature being read in theological mode. Williams’s Romantic Theology, which was genuinely rooted in Hermetic esotericism, entered modern Christian thought through Lewis’s fiction being treated as Lewis’s theology.

My Own Tension As a Writer

I write fiction that uses religious imagery, explores spiritual themes, and sometimes puts theologically questionable statements in characters’ mouths. I write about the enchanted cosmos, about reality having layers, about the spiritual world intersecting the material in ways that sometimes look more like folklore than theology. I draw on Orthodox Christian tradition, but also on fairy tales, mythology, and yes, sometimes esoteric imagery that has power precisely because it’s vivid and resonant.

It’s one of the perennial challenges of being both an artist and a Christian. I think we all recognize that we are working with terribly powerful tools, and we recognize that when those tools are misused, souls hang in the balance. Maybe part of the answer to this tension lies in talking more about modes of reading, and making sure we can distinguish between mythos and theology, engaging with each when it’s right to do so.

In any case, the possible connection between The Space Trilogy and twentieth century esotericism is fascinating, and helps me root out more of the harmful gender stereotypes that keep trying to pass themselves off as archetypes! I'd love to hear your thoughts - especially if you've wrestled with these same questions as a reader or writer.

Happy New Year, everyone!

P.S. — For a list of related essays, look here!

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At least, that’s my personal theory for why the holidays seem to be prime time for wrestling with family system struggles, personal loneliness, and the absurdity of materiality. Of course Christmas unearths grief— it’s the darkest time of the year, the land around us is falling asleep, the holiday itself is a liturgical repetition that can’t help but emphasize the elements that change from year to year. And we’re being asked to get ready to be festive and joyous at the exact moment when all we want to do is go back to bed and sleep til spring.

My mom wrestled with depression her entire adult life, but she loved Christmas. I loved the December glimpses of who she was underneath the smothering weight of her struggle. Most of my Christmas decorations were hers first.

I wrote this poem the second Christmas after she died, when my hands still shook when they unwrapped her treasures, when I struggled to find the enthusiasm I needed to make Christmas magic for my little ones. I continue to return to this poem every year as something my soul needs to declare to itself— and I’m sharing it now as a virtual hug to everyone who is wrestling with grief this season.

Why I Decorate For Christmas

I hang small mirrors on the tree
Check each wire and extension cord
Pause; and try to hear the Lord
Within this plastic mystery…

A shrine of all her Christmas things
Dusted, broken, held and glued
A ghost of love reviewed
Caroled echoes given wings

Etiolated, starving for light
She reached out in darkness
Marked all her own weakness
Spindly stem, leaflets white

The dark of winter caught her—
Inner shadows cast
Shades of Christmas past
No model for her daughter

The act of faith a mystery
Happiness was slippery
The child-dream of it glittering
Splashed on the walls
          the shelves
          the doors

Shouting aloud her hymnary,
Denying it was bravery
to prophesy the victory
Of light; Reprieve found
          in moments
          hungered for

Noël is our new magic:
Yesteryears were overwritten
Her suffering was hidden when His
Joy suffused the tragic

Hark—I hear my mother sing—
Gloria in excelsis Deo.
Let her sweetest wish be so
Incarnate in each garland string

So I hurl tinsel and Santas and strings of lights
With all the violence of my soul
Wrest delight from the North Pole
In honor of my mother’s fight

Oh, Ancient of Days,
She saturates my Christmas home;
Church bells in my bones
Love is birthed in many ways

May the remaining days of this fast be fruitful and joyous for you and yours.

-Laura

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