To me, something tragic and glorious characterizes this point of the summer season. I’ve begun to count my now-numbered days of sun-basking and lake-swimming, outdoor-grilling and patio-reading and sunset-watching-while-barefoot. Maybe you feel it, too? Autumn’s encroachment somehow baked into these days that feel more purely summery than any of June or July?

More and more I’ve begun to wonder whether that very autumnal promise is why late August feels so incomparably “summer.” Is it only through the fading and imminent death of summer that we can recognize summer for what it is?

I say again: is it only through the fading and imminent death of summer that we can recognize summer for what it is?

A second question lies at the heart of this first one—and it’s the question I want to examine in this essay. What if finitude is necessary for meaning?

Now, I’m no philosopher. What I am is a musicologist and a student of Christian theology. That means I’m going to turn this question over with the help of those wisdom-sources I know best: the musicians I listen to and the Christian Scriptures I love. It’s time to introduce our unlikely conversation partners: singer-songwriter Noah Kahan and Qoheleth, the “Teacher” from the Book of Ecclesiastes.

Enter: Noah Kahan.

Folk-pop artist Noah Kahan has in recent years become one of the best-loved musical artists among listeners of my generation. In 2022, Kahan catapulted to stardom with his acoustic anthem “Stick Season” (from an album of the same name), a smash-hit chronicling the sting of heartbreak, the haunting of memory, and the claustrophobic stasis of small-town America.

Since 2022, Kahan has become a staple on many-a Spotify Wrapped. And this past April, he released his first full-length album since Stick Season. The Great Divide resurrects many of Kahan’s trademark themes—memory, loss, stagnation, desire, his mental health journey—and an unnameable something permeates the entire album, a sort of “melancholic dream-haze” that makes me want to run down the dust-dry gravel road near my house at dusk, barefoot and probably crying.

The album opens with the buzzing of cicadas and a cascading, halting piano line. Pensive and earthy, the album’s first song, “The End of August,” sets the tone for the whole album—and it is this song that I’ll investigate here.

(And do listen as you read on, if you’d like.)

Bugs chirring, piano stumbling, Kahan then enters to sing the first verse:

Richie and Austen are often along for the ride
They don't say a lot, but they know every inch of this drive
If these trees started talkin', I bet you they'd only talk sh*t
'Cause we never do anythin' real, we just talk about it
Endin' of August, the bugs are just startin' to die
All the neighbors are votin' for someone who wins every time
And I thought gettin' older meant knowin' it's too late to try
And I tried gettin' sober, I swear I did bettеr this time

Familiarity and futility, all the way down. Here is a song-world where all is known and known for its immutability: Kahan’s “never do[ing] anythin’ real”; the bugs’ death at the “endin’ of August”; the neighbors’ pointless and predictable voting choices. To what end does Kahan set this half-sweet, half-stifling scene?

The chorus, soon to come, tells us why. But first, the piano kicks into a percussive, syncopated vamp as Kahan vocalizes on open vowels—a soup of sound and aching and restlessness. (Words hardly do this bit justice; just go listen to it—in the YouTube video above, it’s at the 2:00 mark. I swear, even writing about it, I’m itching to take off my shoes and find the nearest gravel road…)

Finally, the chorus arrives, and Kahan draws together the scene-setting of his first verse and the building agitation of his music:

Woah, everythin' you see out hеre will die
Oh, it's a matter of time
'Til it's fields of ice and reflector lights
'Til it's our town, mm

Singing at the (titular) end of August, I envision Kahan driving down a deserted New England road, summer at its ripest. And he sees right through the leaf-adorned oaks and rippling roadside tall-grasses that surround him. He sees them for what they soon will be: bare claws of bark stretching skyward and dead, gray ground. Here, already and always buried amid August verdancy, are January “fields of ice” and the “reflector lights” of vehicles driving home in five-o’clock twilight.

Enter: Qoheleth.

Noah Kahan’s eye for our world’s inexorable tilt toward decay resonates with the musings of someone else: Qoheleth (“Teacher” in Hebrew), the primary speaker of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes.

More than two millennia before Kahan waxed melancholic on Vermont summers, Qoheleth said this in Ecclesiastes 1:4-7:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Generations come and generations go,
     but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises and the sun sets,
     and hurries back to where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
     and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
     ever returning on its course.
All streams flow into the sea,
     yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
     there they return again.

In much the same way Kahan finds winter tucked amid an August eve, Qoheleth sees the circularity of the natural world as resting upon millions of “deaths.” The sun’s setting ends (it “dies”) so that it can rise again in a new day; the wind’s south blowing must halt to shift northward; the streams flow and flow again toward a never-full sea. See what Qoheleth is saying? The circularity of nature can only be preserved through cyclical points of termination, each a sort of death.

Ecclesiastes’ overarching sense of futility, however, garners strength not from the ceaseless cycles of death encoded in the natural world but rather from how humans experience these cycles. As Qoheleth says at the poem’s outset, “Generations come and generations go, / but the earth remains forever.” What Qoheleth is saying is that although the earth remains locked into cyclicality, we humans are destined to linearity in our own lives.

Elsewhere Qoheleth writes more brazenly. “For death is the destiny of everyone; / the living should take this to heart.”1

As people, our lives are bent dustward, Qoheleth proclaims, touched by the slow drip of decay-upon-decay. Moreover, while the natural world—the sun and winds and streams—operates in perpetual renewal, that renewal is only made possible through the constant death of the current state of things. There is even death baked into seemingly immortal nature, Qoheleth says.

It’s an idea that finds consonance with Kahan’s “End of August.”

Kahan, like Qoheleth, gazes at the natural world, seeing his own self reflected within nature: “Everythin’ you see out hеre will die / Oh, it’s a matter of time / ‘Til it’s fields of ice and reflector lights….”

Summer turns to winter. Rivers harden to ice. The chirring of crickets is replaced by the whistling of blizzard winds. We, too, seeing our finite selves within these moments of death, recognize that one day our ends will come. This is what it means to inhabit this earth.

What do both tell us?

“Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” Such is the central proclamation of Ecclesiastes. As Qoheleth searches out and tests humanity’s various pursuits—labor that lasts forever, fame, wealth, wisdom—this refrain of “everything is meaningless” echoes across all.

Having thoroughly lamented the sorry meaninglessness of life, Qoheleth puts forth his suggestion for us humans: “Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart…. Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun.”2 Worry not about the pursuit of power or legacy or grandness, Qoheleth says. Instead, enjoy the simple pleasures of life: food, drink, companionship of others.

The irony of this instruction is that as soon as we do that—as soon as we make merry, feast well, love others, treasure existence—this life becomes a whole lot less meaningless.

It is a microcosm of the great irony of the Book of Ecclesiastes. There is something profoundly meaning-full about coming face-to-face with the ultimate meaninglessness of much of our human pursuits. Maybe you’ve experienced it, too, if you’ve read Ecclesiastes? That curious catharsis and uplifting effect of encountering in such stark terms our human mortality?

It is as if we can only realize the meaning of our lives amid the awareness of its smallness, its transience, and—yes, in some paradoxical sense—its meaninglessness.

In “End of August,” Kahan arrives at a similar idea, singing in the second verse:

Late August angst and a pointless night
Oh, and the feelin' of being alive
For the first time in a long time

The “angst” of summer’s end and the apparent “pointlessness” of life in a town where nothing ever changes: Kahan ties these to “the feelin’ of being alive / for the first time in a long time.” Once more, the meaning of life, of summer, of anything for Kahan seems to only be understandable in the context of death and futility.

What can this mean?

As Kahan sings, “everythin’ you see you out here will die.” And as Qoheleth proclaims, “the same destiny overtakes all.”3 Can it be that finitude (and even its cousin, meaninglessness?) is necessary for meaning-making in life? Can it be that we only grasp the riches of summer through their late-August melting before our eyes?

Where do we go from here?

That’s the ultimate question.

Both Noah Kahan and the Book of Ecclesiastes have impressed upon us finitude’s mysterious relationship to dearness of life.

If we accept that truth, then first Qoheleth and Kahan urge us to embrace many of the “ends” and “deaths” that surround us each day. Don’t white-knuckle existence. Don’t chase immortality; see that pursuit for what it is: a “chasing after the wind.”4 Let summer die. Let “fields of ice” descend. This invitation doesn’t mean that experiencing finitude is comfortable. (Indeed, it can be, as we all know, excruciating to endure at times.) But see it for what it is: necessary.

But there’s another part of the story here. Yes, the awareness and experience of finitude is somehow necessary to make meaning in our lives, and yes, we ought to accept that reality. But I don’t think that’s the end of the story. There’s another invitation here, one that Kahan neglects to name and that Ecclesiastes only momentarily hints toward. Listen to what Qoheleth says:

I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.5

Hear this: God has set eternity in the human heart.

As people, we are finite. We cannot “fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” Our lives are tinged by meaninglessness, we chase after the wind, we die. That’s the first part of the story.

But here’s the second part: Qoheleth calls this a “burden God has laid on the human race.” Why a burden? Because God has created us to long for eternity. The reason why finitude stings and why we at times struggle against it is because each of us possesses a desire to partake in the infinite. We long to live forever. Don’t miss what Qoheleth is saying: this is a good thing. A gift of God, even.

“What if finitude is necessary for meaning?” I asked at this essay’s outset. According to Noah Kahan and Ecclesiastes, it is indeed.

Perhaps, then, this second truth answers the yet-untouched why of this question: “Why is finitude necessary for meaning?”

And if I myself may enter this Kahan-Qoheleth dialogue at its moment of conclusion, I would say this: finitude is necessary for meaning not as an end in itself but as a signpost, a stepping-stone, a pointer to something else: the infinite.

We need finitude so that we can long for God—that animating force of infinity who has promised to clothe each of us with immortality.

Finitude divorced from the promise of infinity hardens into bleak, dry nihilism. Finitude married to that hope of infinity attained is the most meaningful thing imaginable.

When I became an Anglican two years ago, the number-one item on my “Why Convert to Anglicanism?” mental list was my inordinate love for the Book of Common Prayer.1

What’s not to love about the words that Christians have been employing in prayer for three centuries or more? It’s language that has legs: enduring, untiring, endlessly generative. When I worship with the prayer book, I can practically hear my voice harmonizing with the voices of my Anglican ancestors who have inhabited those same words for generations.

And don’t even get me started on traditional English hymns. Charles Wesley, Isaac Watts, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Hubert Parry: all these composers brilliantly pair juicy harmonies with sparkling melodies and lyrics of near-unplumbable theological depth.

The imaginative verve and intellectual richness of the liturgy (as I first encountered it in the Church of England and as I now practice it in America’s Episcopal Church) is why I am an Anglican.

But my own individual preference for the traditional “high-church” liturgy is not enough.2 I actively proselytize my friends in other Christian traditions, urging them to see the merits of my style of worship. Why? Because in my opinion, it is clearly the best way: historically grounded, biblically based, devotionally stirring, and intellectually engaging.

And—what’s more—I feel justified in advancing these value-claims because over the course of my life, I have tried the whole gamut. At different points in my life, I’ve regularly attended a Lutheran country church, a nondenominational megachurch, a itty-bitty Disciples of Christ congregation, a charismatic Vineyard church, a Church of England chapel within a Cambridge college, and a fairly “high” Episcopal seminary. Suffice it to say that (as far as white Protestantism goes) I’ve experienced a fair bit of everything.

My liturgical preferences have been formed through extensive experience, study, and prayerful discernment. But all my liturgical likings being thus established and so boldly proclaimed, I have one more thing to share: I just spent the past two months working full-time at an evangelical low-church parish, and I am glad I did.

And furthermore, over the course of this essay, I aim to proselytize a bit more. I want to convince you, dear reader, of the importance of liturgical aisle-crossing in the name of Christian brotherhood and sisterhood.

But first, a bit of background. I worked where this summer?

As part of my Master of Divinity degree curriculum, I must complete an internship placement. Going into this summer, I knew I wanted to intern within the Church of England: for me, the place where my Anglicanism all began. But I also knew I wanted to challenge—even frustrate—myself, which (to make a long story short) is how I ended up at a “low” evangelical Anglican parish church in London.

Doctrinally, the church is Anglican. But in terms of liturgy (or worship) the church represents a contemporary branch of the Church of England.

To give you an idea of what I mean, the church ripped out all its pews decades ago, replacing them with moveable chairs. Its main Sunday morning service puts organ-accompanied hymns to the wayside, centering instead the drum kit, electric guitars, and today’s hottest Christian hits. And the service essentially adheres to the stock-standard evangelical liturgical order of singing —> long sermon —> more singing (albeit with some fragments of Anglican liturgy scattered throughout).

In terms of both musical selections and spoken liturgy, the church champions the near-polar opposite of my preferred way of worshipping.

But here’s the kicker: in spite of its significant differences from what I’d choose for myself, I’m deeply glad that I was able to experience and indeed contribute to the day-to-day rhythms of this church’s liturgy.

And although I occasionally found my eyebrows raising at the chopped-up Anglican prayer-book liturgy, or at the song lyrics that I felt didn’t compare to the complexity of a Wesleyan hymn, far more often did I find myself profoundly appreciating this church’s way of worshipping and its resonance among congregants. Indeed, I found that I loved it for what it was (beautiful, authentic worship) and whom it was for (God).

It’s no secret that we live in a world increasingly intolerant of difference, and I don’t think we Christians are exempt from this tendency. I’ll speak for myself: I am supremely guilty of looking down on other traditions and their chosen modes of worship. Rarely is it sufficient for me to simply declare myself a prayer-book Anglican and leave it at that. I constantly feel the itch to define myself through negation, to establish my identity primarily through my derision at everything that I am not.

And while I don’t think it’s bad to mark real difference (I won’t pretend all churches are deep-down doing the exact same thing), there is an ever-thinning line between naming something as different and naming it as worse.

Why cross the liturgical aisle? First of all, to practice spiritual humility.

Now, I understand that engaging in an unfamiliar style of worship can be disorienting and even frightening. It is strange to witness others worshipping in ways that feel foreign or seem “wrong.”

I also won’t ignore the fact that liturgical difference oftentimes goes hand-in-hand with doctrinal difference. When I attend Catholic Mass, I encounter a different doctrine of the Eucharist in tandem with the Agnus Dei I pray. When I worship in a nondenominational church, I encounter a different conception of church hierarchy alongside the fog-machine haze (and the Chris Tomlin bridges I sing approximately a thousand times).

This marriage of doctrinal and liturgical difference sometimes seems to put a chasm between “me” and “them” that feels insurmountable. But here’s the thing: to enter a space of difference neither requires nor entails perfect agreement. What it does require, however, is curiosity and humility: two virtues that I hold to be indispensable for today’s Christian.

Criticism is far easier done from the realm of the abstract. It is more difficult to do from the realm of the particular—from the space of human lives and tears and sweat and physical walls and, yes, sometimes even fog machines.

Now, I’m not claiming that criticism is a bad thing. My time in the academy has convinced me of the necessity of thoughtful, well-researched critique. But therein lies the key: criticism done from a place of aloof contempt is just plain poor criticism. True criticism requires closeness: a willingness to set aside one’s preconceptions and to explore the object of critique. And what results from that, I think, is usually more constructive, challenging, and even encouraging than any sort of unfounded blanket criticism.

To set aside our tools of totalizing critique and of derisive judgement, then, we must enter into the realm of the particular with both curiosity and humility.

We must, in short, cross the liturgical aisle.

And why else should we cross the aisle? To remind ourselves that God always outstrips our expectations of him.

I, for one, am habitually guilty of thinking that God “should” be this-and-that way or “should” behave in this-and-that manner. Our human impulse to squeeze God into some graspable, manageable box is an understandable one—but it is poisonous nevertheless.

In Isaiah 55:8-9, the prophet reminds us that God can never be understood in purely human terms. Only human error (pride!) would contend that God is otherwise.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes in one of his most beloved poems that “Christ plays in ten thousand places.” And while in the context of the poem (“As Kingfishers Catch Fire”) the phrase pertains especially to each creature’s unique reflection of God, certain implications come to bear here, too.

If Christ is to be found in ten-thousand places, then his presence infuses the pristine orderliness of “high” liturgy alongside the spontaneity of a “low” worship flow. Moreover, if Christ does not merely occupy but rather plays in each place, I trust he delights in them. Fog machines alongside Agnus Deis. Wesley hymns alongside Chris Tomlin bridges.

And so we cross the liturgical aisle to realize anew the gaiety of God: his cheeky unwillingness to “play” only in the places we deem acceptable. God is here and there and—indeed!—everywhere genuine, Christ-directed worship occurs.

God is even at play in the places we might personally find cheesy or dull or even a bit cringey. And I’ll venture this: we don’t cross the liturgical aisle to somehow find that “other” way of worshipping less cheesy or dull or cringey. No, we cross the liturgical aisle to realize that our perception of others’ way of worshipping (as cheesy, dull, cringey, etc.) does not render that way of worshipping subpar in God’s eyes.

Liturgical exploration, then, is both a decentering of the self and a recentering of the truth that God always outstrips our feeble expectations of him.

To conclude, this is my challenge to you, reader.

Cross the liturgical aisle. Explore a way of worshipping that feels unfamiliar or even weird to you. If you have a friend who belongs to a different tradition, ask to tag along to a service, or simply attend one on your own.

When I—a high-church Anglican—decided to spend the summer working in a “low” evangelical church, I won’t pretend I possessed from the outset all these lofty ideals of humbling myself and expanding my conception of God through liturgical experimentation. But I did possess, I think, a seed of curiosity and the desire to make myself slightly uncomfortable. And now, having left London behind last week, I am very grateful for a summer spent inhabiting and appreciating a liturgy that I wouldn’t ordinarily seek out myself.

I believe that this type of liturgical aisle-crossing is one way (however small) of creating bridges, of forging informed and persisting connections within a Church that at times feels terribly fractured. It is one way of actualizing that oneness to which I believe we as the Church are collectively called: unity within difference, fellowship amid dissent, and love over judgement.

Here I have compiled but a brief sampling of the hyper-niche playlists that are circulating on Spotify these days. Each phrase listed above is the exact title of a playlist that someone created—pulling together an anthology of songs that all evoke longing, or a compulsion to sing at the highest possible decibel, or the power to catwalk like a Versace model, or (apparently) a sense of sailor identity rendering one bold enough to challenge God himself.

The intensity of these playlists’ nicheness reveals something, I think: there is a certain artfulness involved in creating a good playlist. It requires skill to piece together songs from different genres, eras, and artists that cohere enough to form a specified unit.

Playlist-making is, moreover, a unique mode of creativity: it’s artistically inexhaustible (you can make a playlist about anything!), endlessly expansive (you can always add another song to a playlist!), and accessible to anyone (or at least anyone with a subscription to a music streaming platform).

As for me, I love creating playlists—and it is my aim in this essay to ponder the spiritual merit of playlist-making.

Why? Because although the technological tools of our modern day are often spiritually poisonous, they are rarely exclusively or irredeemably so. And also because I want to explore what devotional potential lies inside this activity that many of us perform regularly and from a state of spiritual inattention.

Here’s my question: How can playlist-making be a spiritual practice? Put another way, how can playlist-making be a way of connecting with, loving, and serving God and God’s people?

There are (probably) numberless ways in which playlist-creation can prove devotionally potent. I’ll look at three here…

1. Playlist-making is a practice of commemoration.

The ritualized recollection of the past is central to the Christian faith.

As Christians, our liturgical calendar is chock-full of times for commemoration and celebration of our collective history. We observe the Stations of the Cross during Holy Week, meditating on each of Jesus’ final moments. We carry candles against December darkness and sing “Silent Night” on Christmas Eve, honoring our Messiah’s Bethlehem birth two millennia ago. We wear red to recall the fiery outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost Sunday.

Jesus’ own life would’ve been marked with the keeping of Jewish feasts and festivals. The Feast of Weeks, for instance, celebrates God’s giving of the Torah to the Israelites at Sinai. The Feast of Tabernacles remembers the Israelites’ forty years spent desert-wandering. Jesus even passed the evening before his betrayal and death by commemorating the Passover.

Suffice it to say that moments of sustained, intentional “looking backward” are baked into the Christian faith and into the life of the one we follow, Jesus.

And! This very commemorative impulse can lie behind the art of playlist-making.

If you aren’t convinced, allow me to welcome the insight of my roommate and dear friend Ellie Grace (whose expertise I cited in another recent post), who boasts a wildly impressive Apple Music archive. For the past EIGHT years (!!!), Ellie Grace has diligently made monthly playlists and filled them—day by day throughout the month—with the songs she has discovered, loved, and encountered in a formative way.

Across these eight years, Ellie Grace’s monthly playlists have become something of a catalogue of her life. Or perhaps, rather, a catalogue of the soundtrack of her life. Her playlists are an aural archive of her graduation from high school, her entire experience as an undergraduate, her move across the country to study at Yale, and each moment in between. They bear the marks of her griefs, her joys, her losses, her victories. It is all there.

I do something similar, although not to a degree half as impressive as Ellie Grace’s. For the past four years, I’ve created my playlists seasonally. Each year and season (spring, summer, etc.) receives its own musical record.

And I stock each playlist with those tunes that I’ve come across and put on repeat, as well as with what I’ll call “flashbulb songs”: those tunes that I perhaps wouldn’t always crank on my morning commute but that transport me back to a specific moment in time. Like the Wesley hymn that made me weep in a certain Easter morning service. Or the teen-heartthrob ballad my freshman-year roommate had set as her alarm each morning. Or—if we want to get really specific—the flamenco hit “Bamboléo,” which I (genuinely) heard twenty times on end at a college rowing garden party in Cambridge last summer.

From Ellie Grace’s musical “monthing” of her life to my seasonal archives of the songs I’ve loved (or, perhaps, been forced to listen to twenty times in the course of an evening), the gathering of these songs into a discrete, time-bounded unit is one way of documenting the various epochs of our lives. And if the process of playlist-making is history writing, then the practice of re-listening to a playlist after that time has passed can become a space of spiritually generative commemoration.

How, you ask? Listening to old playlists taps into the same power at the heart of Christian liturgical celebration: it makes the past palpably present. And when the past becomes present, a number of things happen.

The first is quite simple: we experience gratitude. We behold the goodness of the past, a goodness so effusive it spills into the present, and we thank God.

But another thing happens in this “present-izing” of the past. We remind ourselves (our present selves, that is) that we are not islands; our own selves do not exist purely within the confines of the present moment. The pointed remembrance of the past clues us into the reality that we are who we are because of who we have been.

As an example, I’m writing this on a morning train to Oxford (where I’m visiting my friend Elizabeth, a DPhil student in French Literature). Three years ago, while I was yet an undergraduate in Iowa, I spent two terms on exchange study at Oxford. Those six months in Oxford altered the course of my life and set me down my current path: I am quite certain I wouldn’t be spending this summer in London or pursuing an MDiv right now if not for the people and ideas I came across in Oxford.

And so, of course, I’ve pulled out my Spotify and queued up my Oxford 2023 playlist as soundtrack for my train journey, listening to such hits as The Gray Havens’ “Take This Slowly” and Dexy Midnight Runners’ “Come on Eileen” (and, I must admit, Fergie’s “London Bridge”). And, sappy as it sounds, this musical commemoration of my time at Oxford feels like a spiritual practice: I am positively welling up with gratitude and with a rich sense of connectedness not only to who I was three years ago but (far more!) to the God who I believe has guided me to Oxford and beyond.

In sum, playlist-making and old-playlist-listening can be devotionally stirring as they urge us to look back in God-directed gratitude and as they disrupt our self-island-forming tendencies.

2. Playlist-making is a uniquely interconnected act of creativity.

Although some may balk at giving playlist-making a home on a shortlist of “the arts,” I’ll be the first to make a case for its belonging there. This is especially the case for “themed” playlists (as compared to the more “seasonal” playlists we’ve just discussed).

To make a playlist is to engage in curation. It is to cobble together a musical collage, finding pieces that fit to form a single musical entity that is somehow more than the sum of its parts.

Take as an example one of the actual Spotify playlist titles I compiled in my introduction. “pov: you’re a slytherin at hogwarts” evokes a brooding, enigmatic Slytherin vibe using dark, earthy, electronic pop songs from the past decade, none of which featured in any of the Harry Potter films. And this to some degree extends the Harry Potter narrative: listeners can imagine they’re a present-day Hogwarts student, a student who could hypothetically blast Arctic Monkeys and Billie Eilish in their AirPods as they trek to the dungeons for Potions class. For whomever made the playlist, this was undeniably a creative endeavor!

If we hold our human spaces of artistic creation to be a worshipful reflection of the ultimate force and source of divine creativity, then playlist-making is one way of being caught up in God’s ongoing creative work.

As a creative practice, playlist-making is consequently already something of a spiritual practice. It can, moreover, even be a unique way of mirroring God’s creativity. The curating and collaging practices that underlie playlist-making might reveal how God can create using “pre-existing” material: for instance, in the way God brings different people together, say, into a friendship group or workplace environment.1

But I also think playlist-making is unique in another way: it makes few claims to originality. For my part, I’ve never heard anybody who has made a playlist insist it to be an entirely original, never-before-seen product of their independent making. It’d be silly to pretend otherwise: playlist-making predicates itself on loving engagement with others’ already-existing creative work.

And in this way, playlist-making as a creative practice undermines the (false) ideal of the lonesome, reclusive, genius artist which has reigned supreme since the time of the Romantics. We all know the vision: the tortured man sequestered in his chambers, scorning all contact with the outer world as he writes his magnum opus with bloodshot eyes and quivering hands.

This ideal, while alluring in its dramatic single-mindedness, nevertheless completely ignores the fact that no artist is truly a lone unit or an isolated actor.

And—let’s be real—no art is really all that original. We’re all reusing the same old tropes. But as people (myself included) we all want to believe that we’re inimitable, purely innovative, singularly special. It’s all just pride dressed up as artistic originality.

But playlist-making, on the other hand, never purports to be original. When we make a playlist, we boldly champion our creativity’s connectedness with that of our fellow human’s.

That means that as Christians, playlist-making can be spiritually edifying in a twofold manner. First, by being creative, we join in on God’s initial and ongoing creative work. And second, by engaging in a creativity so obviously tied to that of others, we acknowledge our perpetual reliance upon one another and humble ourselves.

3. Playlist-making can be a profoundly loving and even vulnerable site of caring for others.

I turn at last to the spiritual potential of creating a playlist not for oneself (as an expression of commemoration and/or creativity) but for another person.

“I made you a mixtape”: is this not the prototypical declaration of love in any ‘80s film? And if playlists are but the mixtape of the twenty-first century, isn’t “I made you a playlist” directly translatable to “I care for you”? I don’t think I need to overstate my case for playlist-making as a spiritual practice in its capacity for one person to see and bless another.

When Jesus extended that simple (and yet all-too-impossible) command to “love one other as I have loved you,” I like to imagine how Jesus might’ve loved others today, in 2026. And I’d be willing to wager that Jesus would’ve made playlists for his friends. Maybe each of his disciples received a personalized playlist: perhaps Simon & Garfunkel’s “I Am a Rock” would’ve featured on Peter’s playlist—and James Taylor’s “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” for that beloved disciple, John.

In all seriousness, there is deep, deep care involved in creating a playlist for someone else. And this care can be profoundly vulnerable from the giver’s perspective: Here, you say. Listen to the songs I’ve cherished and danced to and wept to. I love them, and they made me think of you.

While it is loving to give playlists, it is also a practice of Christian hospitality to graciously receive them. My friend Cyrus recently made a nearly four-hour-long playlist for me and sent it out of the blue. I was touched by the time he spent combing through his own musical collection, crafting something meant just for me, just because.

I spent several days basking in this musical gift. And then—I couldn’t help myself—I returned the favor.

And so, by way of conclusion, I sincerely hope my half-silly, fully-serious musings have emboldened you, dear reader, to go and make a playlist.

Remember your past joyfully—with gratitude for its goodness and with attention to its blessed entanglements with your present self. Cultivate a creativity that is un-innovative and anti-independent, and so teach yourself of our constant reliance upon one another creatively. And, finally, send a playlist to someone you love; give them a piece of your heart in the form of musical collage.

Oh, speaking of—I think this is for you!

(This playlist is a gift for you, reader. It’s a selection of songs that I love and that encapsulate something of the spirit of my Substack. To listen on Spotify, you can click on the playlist embedded above or you can follow this link.)

Desperately aiming to scrape together enough cash to fund my move to the UK for a master’s program that October, I spent my post-graduation summer juggling a truly inordinate number of work opportunities.

And—oh, would you look at that?—I’ve actually got some photo evidence to prove it.

Count along with me, will you?

1. I worked as a barista and server at a restaurant in my college town.

2. On Sunday mornings, I played hymns for a tiny congregation at a Disciples of Christ church the town over from mine.

3. I picked up late-night shifts as an UberEats driver, delivering hungry Americans their midnight fast-food orders.

4. My mother, who is a Christian author, hired me to be her research assistant as she began work on her most recent book.

5. I hopped onto Zoom calls with a revolving door of strangers in Korea and helped them improve their speaking and writing in English.

6. Finally—and perhaps most excruciatingly—I spent the longest weekend of my life working in a food truck at a country music festival in the middle-of-nowhere North Dakota.

So, amid this summer of six jobs, I had to keep reminding myself of one question: What is this work all for?

It was that question that carried me through never-ending double shifts at the restaurant, when I’d been on my feet for twelve hours. It was that question that kept me afloat in the food truck, getting splattered with hot fryer grease at one o’clock in the morning.

It was that question that gave meaning to it all. It infused hope into the late nights and dull days. And it added depth to the good moments. It made them more than simply fun or pleasant but a shining piece in the puzzle of a grand landscape.

What is this work all for?

In this essay, I want to examine how this question emerges within and animates a certain passage from John’s Gospel. Take a look. This is John 6:25-29 (NIV):

²⁵ When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”

²⁶ Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. ²⁷ Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.”

²⁸ Then they asked him, “What must we do to do the works God requires?”

²⁹ Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”

This passage is often called the “preface” to Jesus’ “Bread of Life discourse.” That means this passage is usually interpreted in light of what immediately follows it: those famed verses where Jesus declares himself to be the Bread of Life, that food which provides exclusive and eternal satiation. As a result, most readers interpret the verses we’ve just read as Jesus’ “opening argument.” He’s priming his disciples and the crowd for the point he really wants to make later on.

But in this essay, I want to advance a slightly different reading of this preface passage. I want to take it on its own terms, to see if it might not only be able to tell us something about Jesus as our Bread of Life—but also about our own selves (our own working selves) in Christ.

And ultimately, I want to see how this passage speaks to that ever-pressing question: What is this work all for?

Let’s dig into the text.

We begin in verse 25, where a horde of people have pursued Jesus to the far side of the Sea of Galilee. The day prior, Jesus performed an astonishing miracle: he fed a crowd of 5,000 people with five loaves of bread and two fish. And afterward, he made a moonlight sea-crossing via his preferred mode of transport: walking on water.

The next morning, when the crowd realizes Jesus is gone, they track him to the other side of the lake and ambush him there. Why? Jesus tells us in verse 26: because they are hungry. This crowd has witnessed an incredible miracle, and they are hungry for more. Jesus says, “You are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.”

What Jesus is doing here is calling this crowd into a different hunger—a higher hunger. These people have encountered miraculous abundance and divine provision, but Jesus is about to offer them something more than food: a radical invitation to discipleship.

Here’s what Jesus says: “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” See what he’s doing? He’s tying the crowd’s hunger and this miraculous feeding they’ve just witnessed to a call, a command.

But what is this “food” Jesus refers to?

I think that “food” means two different things here. And we must consider both of those things to truly understand the meaning of our work as people and as Christ-followers.

First, in the context of Jesus’ Bread of Life discourse, the food is Jesus: he is the eternal, unspoiling, never-ending bread. He is the five loaves broken and fed to thousands. And as Jesus proclaims, we as people are to “work for” that food.

But if Jesus is the food, we don’t work for him to somehow earn his nearness or approval. No, we work for him. We are in his service. Get the difference? Jesus isn’t the “payment” we are working to receive; he’s our “employer.”

But “food” isn’t exclusively a metaphor for Jesus here. Second, food also refers to just that: food. The actual, tangible outcomes of our labor. We all work, whether we are students or scientists, pastors or consultants, UberEats drivers or food-truck workers. And we all work for something. Literally, our food.

And Jesus calls us to not work for food that spoils but for food that endures to eternal life. What can he mean by this?

Let me make an American cultural reference here... I’m not sure if any of you’ve ever seen photos of those McDonald’s orders that people have kept in boxes since the ‘90s or early 2000s? Over the span of thirty years, the food has not decayed even a little bit, and it’s horrifying.

Is this what Jesus is talking about when he speaks about food that endures to eternal life?

No, no, no.

As a matter of fact, Jesus is calling us to produce fruits of our work that stick around even longer than a McDonald’s hamburger. Talk about a tall order. So is Jesus telling each of us to write the next Odyssey, or compose the next Beethoven’s Ninth, or make the next groundbreaking scientific discovery? Is Jesus asking each of us to leave an unforgettable legacy on this earth?

I don’t think he is. And this is precisely where these two distinct meanings of that word “food” converge: we work for “food” (as in the fruits of our work) that endures by working for “food” (as in Jesus Christ himself).

What Jesus is revealing to us here is that our work as people matters, and it matters deeply. Each of us is working for food, working for something—but the only guarantor of that something’s ability to endure is not its popularity. It’s not how notable, or innovative, or money-making it is. These are all human standards of “enduring work.” Instead, Jesus is flipping on its head this output-based model of work. And he is inviting us to realize that the only work that endures is work that is done for him.

The point, then, is not what we do for work, but what we work for. Who we work for.

It makes no difference whether your work is going to revolutionize the entire city of London, or whether you’re not even sure if your work matters at all. All of our work endures because it is done in service to the God who cares as much about the work of King Charles as he does the grocery store till worker.

Are you with me? So far, Jesus has issued this profound invitation to work for food that endures by demoting in significance the “what” or “output” of our work. He isn’t asking us to do away with those things, but he’s teaching us to consider them in relation to the far-more-important “why” or “who” of our work.

And as this passage continues, Jesus elaborates upon this idea. He has extended his invitation. And the crowd seems to be listening.

They respond with a question:

“What must we do to do the works God requires?”

They echo back the same word Jesus used for work: ergazomai in Greek, which means very simply to do work or to labor. The crowd is asking for clarification on the kind of labor God wants from them. They’re curious about the “how” of this working for food that endures. And maybe you are, too: how, exactly, does one work for Christ?

“What must we do to do the works God requires?” they say.

Jesus’ response? “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he sent.”

A little perplexing, perhaps? The work we are to do for God is to think something? How can this be?

But if we take a look at the Greek again here, things become more clear. The word Jesus uses for “believe” is translated pisteuō in Greek. It means far more than to simply accept something as true. No, pisteuō means to have faith, to trust, to rely. It’s active, and it’s ongoing.

What Jesus is calling the crowd—and calling each of us—to here is far more than intellectual assent to the truth-claims of Christianity or the messianic identity of Jesus. He is calling us to a lifelong posture of radical openness and reliance upon Christ. An enacted belief, if you will.

And where’s the playground for this enacted belief? Where do we perform that pisteuō, that “work of God”? Our WORK!

Work is the place where each of us can practice that dynamic, ongoing belief in Christ. And what an incredible opportunity that is: we don’t need to wait till Sunday morning or Friday evening to really enact in our lives that living faith.

The average person spends roughly one-third of their life at work. One-third of your life! Even if you don’t work a job—or don’t work a typical 40-hour work week—still consider how much of your life that’d be even if it were one-fifth or even one-tenth of your precious, fleeting life. Consider also that work that never makes it onto a weekly timesheet: household chores, cooking, cleaning, personal financial management, cutting the grass, making doctor’s appointments, and the list goes on.

Work in its many forms is an unavoidable and substantial part of each of our lives. It is so substantial that Jesus took time to speak to his followers about what work means and who it should be completed in service to.

Perhaps the final question you may be asking is this:

How does work of enacted belief actually look?

If we’re supposed to serve God and proclaim our trust in him with every ounce of work we perform, does that mean we should fill our offices with Bible-verse posters? Does it mean we should take a minute at the end of every sales call to pray aloud for our clients? Does it mean we should cut the grass in our lawns into the shape of a cross?

Maybe. But not necessarily.

I’m of the opinion that enacted belief, while it can be that explicitly faithful, really doesn’t have to be. There’s a quote often attributed to Martin Luther that goes like this:

The maid who sweeps her kitchen is doing the will of God just as much as the monk who prays—not because she may sing a Christian hymn as she sweeps but because God loves clean floors. The Christian shoemaker does his Christian duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftsmanship.

Work done well—with artistry, care, and a keen sense of duty—is work that proclaims belief in a God who gave us work to do well. Work done well—free from obsession with output, fame, or success—is work that proclaims belief in the God for whom we labor. And, as we’ve explored, this is the work that endures to eternal life. This is the “work of God” that Jesus urges us to perform.

As you, dear reader, go about the rest of your day and perhaps prepare for tomorrow morning’s alarm that will begin another workday, I want to invite you to ask yourself one question. It is the same question that became my mantra, if you’ll remember, over that fateful summer of six jobs.

What is this work all for?

What, or for whom, are you working? What is the purpose of your labor? How can you work for food that endures? What beliefs are you enacting in your own work?

Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life. The work of God is this: to believe in the one he sent.

This essay is closely adapted from a sermon I delivered at Kensington’s St Barnabas Church on June 28, 2026.

At six o’clock sharp, I clocked out of another day at my summer internship in an Anglican parish church in Kensington. By 6:05 p.m., an idea had (providentially?!) burrowed itself into my mind—and I found myself scrolling through Les Misérables showtimes on my phone as I climbed the stairs to my bedroom in the vicarage.

By 6:07 p.m., tickets had been purchased. £52 gone in a span of mere minutes, casualties of my “once-in-a-lifetime, say-no-to-nothing London summer.”

I then proceeded to cook and scarf down a whole bowl of Sainsbury’s chicken-bacon tortelloni before 6:32 p.m. (and yes, I ate the entire package… I’m convinced that that “two-person serving size” label is a poisonous lie). And by 6:35 p.m., I was bounding down the vicarage steps and turning onto Kensington High Street.

Bus. Tube. West End, at last. All before 7:20 p.m.

I made it into my seat (balcony, dead-last row) with two minutes to spare, hastily finger-combing my gnarled hair as the curtain rose in London’s Sondheim Theatre.

Here’s my great shame.

I’d never seen Les Mis before. Not on stage, not on the screen, and not even on the page (that poor masterpiece of Victor Hugo’s has languished on my personal library’s shelves for many moons now….) And to make matters even more grim, I’d also never listened to the musical’s soundtrack.

This fact was a source of not insignificant shame for me—especially when I began at divinity school, finding myself surrounded by a mass of folks who: (a) are massively geeky, oftentimes in the musical theater department; (b) have a knack for finding nuggets of theological truth EVERYWHERE; and (c) were gobsmacked to learn that I had lived twenty-four years without encountering the bona-fide theological tract that is Les Misérables.

And when I say theological tract, I mean it. Without revealing any spoilers, the show is positively bursting with Christian motifs and characters. Praying and prayers feature in many musical numbers, one of the central themes is the transformative force of grace, and the entire plot hinges upon the actions of one bishop.

(Seriously. If you’ve never seen Les Mis, please go see it. This one thing I beg of you.)

The show was fantastic. I nearly cried on about twelve different occasions, but each time I held it together—until the last song (“Finale”), when a dying character sings their last words:

And remember
The truth that once was spoken
To love another person
Is to see the face of God

Cue my weeping. I sobbed right there in the last row, over the company’s final chorus, through the curtain call, and even as I walked out the door and onto the fluorescent-lit, crowded street beyond.

“To love another person is to see the face of God.”

How could such a provocation not induce hysterics?!

Is it true? Is it heretical? Perhaps both?

I want to muse here on what Les Mis’ final claim might mean for our Christian lives—in the ways we each encounter God and practice our faiths. And, as I’ll contend, this idea invites us all into a more robust, gritty, tenacious mode of interacting with our fellow humans and (at the same time!) with God.

Let’s begin.

A good place to start is probably acknowledging the fact that God the Father does not have a face. As a matter of fact, that portrait of God that reigns supreme today (old man, white beard, need I say more?) is not how God has been conceived across much of Christian history.

Now, I’m no art historian, but there seems to be a traceable lineage between our modern-day “creaky old white man God” and the artistic depictions of God that began to really spring up around the time of the Renaissance.

One of the most famous examples is Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, painted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Here, a very muscular-looking, silver-fox God (with a curly-hair routine I’d kill to get ahold of) extends a finger to electrify with life one lackadaisical Adam. The two look similar—they are nearly mirror images of one another. And I think that’s the claim embedded (consciously or not) in the painting: that God made Adam to look like him.

This sort of depiction of God raises the question: did God create humanity in his image, or have we humans created him in our image? That’s why I think that these humanizing portrayals of God, while artistically glorious, can very quickly become theologically problematic.

Okay, fine. Let’s let them be artistically glorious for a few moments more. Look at these two below, and spend a bit more time with the Michelangelo, if you’d like. I’ll put my theologian hat back on in a minute.

Ahem. Back to the theology, please.

Prior to the artistic popularization of this human-looking God (which, while it cropped up in the Middle Ages, really took root in the sixteenth century), Christianity generally took issue with rendering God in this way.

At the heart of Jesus’ incarnation is the idea that God became man; this, of course, entails that the Father is not already or innately man-like. God is far, far more than any human could be. And that’s why art that portrays God as your run-of-the-mill old man risks falsely shaping people’s conceptions of God.

Here’s how: if two creatures share a similar physical appearance, we’d assume that they also share mental and emotional characteristics. We’d expect, for example, a monkey and an ape to behave more similarly to each other than, say, a monkey and a goldfish.

In the same way, if God looks like a man in the sky, we’d also suppose him to act like a man in the sky. We’d presume him to be human-like in his behavior and nature: understandable, graspable, vulnerable, occasionally prone to jealous tirades and unjust punishments. Not, by my view, a God worth worshipping.

Before the Renaissance, however, God wasn’t typically represented as human-like in art. Much art from the early and medieval churches depicted God as a floating hand, reaching down from the sky. (If you’re curious, it’s a recognized Judeo-Christian artistic motif very creatively dubbed Manus Dei, or Hand of God.)

The floating hand is human-inflected, I’d say, but it does a better job of preserving God’s physical nature as fundamentally distinct from humanity’s.

Later on in the sixteenth century, Protestant Reformers like John Calvin would push back against this artistic humanization of God. And in 1667, the Russian Orthodox Church formally prohibited any representation of the Father as a man. Nevertheless, if I may add a touch of historiographical gloss and wrap up this (probably somewhat shoddy) dabbling into art history, I think the damage was already done.

In the West, our art had indelibly shaped our cultural perception of God; God the Father now looked like a human in our collective imagination. And perhaps you’ve had a different experience, but this is certainly how I unconsciously conceived of God as a child (and even, I’ll admit, today).

And so, to recall those final words of Les Mis in light of this foray into art history, the question is raised: what does it mean to see the face of God?

If God the Father isn’t human, could he even have a face?

That’s the first question. And no, I don’t think he does—at least not a human face.

But I’m not sure if that’s the right question to be asking. Perhaps the better question is this: if God did have a face, what would it look like?

Les Mis would have us believe that God’s “face” is made most clear in that of our fellow human, in the acts of offering and receiving love.

And in fact, Jesus may have said the very same thing. Not in the Gospels, but in the agrapha: a term for the scattered sayings of Jesus that didn’t make it into one of the four canonical Gospels. Among early Christ-followers, these words of Jesus circulated (often orally or in non-canonical texts) in the decades following his life and resurrection.

Now, don’t quote me (or Jesus, rather) on this, but Clement of Alexandria, an early church father, records in his work Stromata this supposed saying of Jesus’: “Have you seen your brother? You have seen your God.”

Let’s imagine Jesus actually said this, as I like to believe he did. What would that entail, this radical proclamation that we see God most apparently through the face of our fellow human?

It’d obliterate any notion of this “bearded-white-man-in-the-sky God.” But not on the mere basis of his possessing a face. No, this vision of God cannot stand because it implies a human-like God “out there,” someone far above the chaos of humanity—including the chaos of human relationship.

Instead, the God that Jesus invites us to know is not an aloof God who we can only encounter through withdrawal from the world. Rather, Jesus urges us to seek God through a pointed and often messy attention to the people around us.

Imago Dei.

Imago Dei means “image of God.” And it’s the Judeo-Christian concept (rooted in Genesis 1:26-27) that as humans, we have been created to somehow reflect the nature of our creator.

What Les Mis and Jesus press us to realize is a vision of imago Dei that is not necessarily physical. As people, we don’t look like God in our faces and bodies.

But perhaps the true end of imago Dei is not that each individual can see God’s image by looking really, really deeply at their own selves. What if imago Dei is ultimately an invitation to look to one another?

What if only in looking at and reaching out to another person in love can we truly see the face of God?

2023. A dead-still March night in London. It is three o’clock in the morning, and I have wrapped myself in a borrowed Airbnb blanket, guarding against the air’s early-spring bite. I stand on a whitewashed Chelsea doorstep, blowing kisses to six of my sorority sisters, who pile bleary-eyed into an airport-bound Uber.

These girls are my best friends. And they are returning to Iowa at the end of their weeklong spring break, which they’ve spent with me in England. As for myself, I’m not going anywhere. I’m midway through my time as a Visiting Student at Oxford University.

2023. This is the first time in my life I’ve lived abroad, the first time I’ve ventured beyond those Iowan cornstalks over which I spent the past several years craning my neck, praying for a glimpse of something beyond them. Now, at last, I’d caught that glimpse.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.

I count each girl as she disappears into the Uber. Its engine revs, and the car seems to tiptoe away down the row of towering townhomes, so as not to wake the slumbering street.

I hoist myself onto my own tiptoes, waving until the car snakes a corner and vanishes.

A moment passes. Automatically, I turn to re-enter our Airbnb, to hopefully nab a few more hours of sleep before my mid-morning train out of London.

But something stops me. I whirl back around, facing the street, and plop myself down on the stoop. I feel… well, what do I feel? A feeling not quite explainable.

I pull the edges of the blanket so that it tightens across my back. I sit, numbly. I wipe away the band of rogue tears that have stumbled their way down my cheek. The air seems too still. I wish it would rain.

What do I feel? Loneliness, certainly: I am, in this moment, acutely aware of my aloneness in this vast, vast city, and in this country thousands of miles from all prior familiarity. And there’s also a bit of grief: I realize several months must pass before I see any of these friends again, and I love them each dearly.

But loneliness and grief—however keenly felt—are not what anchor me to this doorstep. Something else is keeping me here. Even now as I recollect this moment, I don’t think I can at all capture the experience in words. But what I can say is this: I feel a certain sting, a peculiar tug—the symptom of whatever it is I’m feeling.

Crooked glasses, shabby blanket, reddening eyes, a slumping stoop: by all accounts, this moment remains profoundly unextraordinary. And yet it lives on so vividly in my memory: I still feel the weight of that motionless air. I still feel those steps’ peeling plaster beneath my palms.

Why this moment? Why this place?

I can hardly say why. All I can say is that in that very unremarkable moment, I felt—really felt—my humanity. And it made me feel wholly and inexorably alive.

A Holy Sting?

The only phrase I have for this experience is a holy sting. Maybe you’ve felt it? That aching sense of your own humanity, your own alive-ness—made palpable by a certain twinge of loss or estrangement.

I’ve felt this holy sting in more places than London side-streets and in more contexts than farewells. Sometimes, I see a sunset so grand it actually hurts a bit—perhaps as I come to terms with its inescapable fading from the sky. Most times I listen to Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, I actually feel somehow crushed: is it because I hope, futilely, for my favorite moments to resound forever? At times, I’ll hug my mother and become overwhelmed by a rush of love that is inexplicably shot through with a bit of pain.

Have you experienced the holy sting, too? And yes, when I say holy, I mean holy. There seems to be something sacred about this feeling—oddly, I even wonder if the hurt is something of a gift. I think we’re meant to feel the sting.

One of my favorite musical groups lately, the Irish indie-folk band Kingfishr (best known for their lilting anthem “Killeagh”), released a new single called “The Sun Will Never Settle” a couple of weeks ago. My first listen caught me on a morning walk through Holland Park in London, and I closed my eyes for a moment, shutting out the canopy of chestnut trees overhead, as I listened to its first verse:

My heart it has been broken
By who I cannot tell
By what I loved and what I lost
And what I did as well
If leaving you was easy well it wouldn't mean a thing
If you want to know what life's about you have to feel the sting

I opened my eyes and found myself caught on that last line: “If you want to know what life’s about, you have to feel the sting.” The sting, yes—made holy, I think, by its nearness to the human heart! What a claim to make, Kingfishr: that we actually cannot know what we are living for unless we encounter and indeed embrace the sting.

Kingfishr go on to describe that sting. They sing of the pangs of “the lonely nights” and “the tears you cannot fight” and “howling through the morning even though you know you’re right.” And they continue: despite the “changing” of the world, they sing, “The sun will never settle on the love I have for you.”

What is curious is that Kingfishr directly link these experiences of pain to the love they cherish for another person. Kingfishr seem to be claiming that to know what life is about—and to know what love is about—one must accept that sting of their humanity and mortality.

From my experience, Kingfishr’s point stands. I don’t think I had ever loved those six friends as much as I did on that doorstep at three o’clock in the morning. Relatedly, I encountered in that same moment a profound sense of my life as an ineffable gift. I can’t completely explain why, but I’d be willing to bet it’s got something to do with that holy sting.

The Problem and the Invitation

So far, I’ve explored how in our lives we come across pieces of beauty colored by pain, or moments of pain tinted with an inexplicable beauty. And I’ve proposed, in harmony with Kingfishr, that this “holy sting” experience can be a curious blessing.

Here’s the problem: in this age, it is supremely difficult to feel (much less embrace!) that sting. We are collectively terrible at productively lobbying emotions that are not only complex but also negative to some degree. The holy sting is both.

I’ll speak for myself. I hate to play that all-too-easy technological blame game, but it’s warranted: whenever I experience an overwhelming emotion, my instinct is to numb it or bury it. And my preferred instrument for enacting such aims? That dreaded iPhone! Why wrestle with such weighty existentialism when I could simply turn instead to an endless supply of content made for my immediate and unthinking consumption?

Maybe you’ve experienced a similar struggle. I think that for many of us, we’ve unconsciously developed soothing devices that kick in whenever we experience discomfort.

But what if those moments of discomfort—of small griefs, of feeling keenly our fragile humanity—are actually places of precipice? And what if our impulse to assuage the holy sting pulls us back from that precipice, robbing us of the opportunity to revel in our precious mortality?

“If you want to know what life’s about, you have to feel the sting,” Kingfishr proclaim, and I must agree. Perhaps the reason why I still remember so clearly that moment of farewell from nearly three years ago is that I actually stopped and felt the sting.

Dwelling in the holy sting showed me something strange and marvelous. It impressed upon me a sense of magic, of beauty, and of the purely divine gift of life—a life so precious it aches.

And so I’d like to conclude with an invitation, because I wonder if the holy sting might show you something, too. I’m not sure I can speak for what that something is—much less how and when you might encounter the sting. I wish I could offer definitions and how-to guides, but I don’t think I can.

What I can offer you, dear reader, is an invitation: the next time you experience the pricklings of that holy sting, don’t numb it. Embrace it. Let it instill in you a sense of the sacred and the true and the beautiful. As Kingfishr remind us, that’s what life’s all about.

The 23-year-old pop princess Olivia Rodrigo has built her musical career on capturing the essential angst of young womanhood. Anguished, moody, and explosive, Rodrigo’s biggest chart-toppers (“Drivers License,” “Good 4 U,” and “Vampire”) give voice to the woes of heartbreak, jealousy, and regret.

Her most recent release is no exception.

Just over a week ago, Rodrigo released “The Cure” (stylized “the cure”) as a single from her upcoming album You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. “It’s my favorite song on the album and one of my favorite songs I’ve ever made,” Rodrigo wrote on Instagram.

What’s “The Cure” about? Rodrigo shared in an interview with iHeartRadio that the song addresses the way romantic love is ultimately unable to heal one’s personal wounds. “When you’re younger, you think falling in love with someone will fix all of your problems,” Rodrigo explains. “And then I think when you face love in reality, you realize that that’s not the truth.”

The song explicitly names some of these “problems” in its verses. Rodrigo sings of her insecurity and low self-esteem in the first verse: “All the pretty girls in the foreground of my mind / I thought I’d done enough, but they keep moving the line.”

The second verse offers an intimate glimpse into her loneliness and anxiety: “And all the nights I spent fighting bad thoughts in my room / Feeling so alone, might as well be on the moon.” And jealousy takes center stage in the final verse (quoting the clean version here): “Used to play a game in my head when I’d date a guy / Tally up the girls ‘til it hurts and I start to cry.”

Rodrigo concludes her assessment of each problem with a mournful mantra: “I thought I found the antidote this time … I thought I found the antidote with you.”

What is the effect (or, perhaps, the cause) of these wounds? And what does Rodrigo seek an antidote for? She tells us in the chorus:

But my head is full of poison, and my heart is full of doubt
I got toxins in my bloodstream, you tried hard to suck ‘em out
And it feels like medication, and it’s good for me, I’m sure
But it don’t matter how your love feels anymore
It’ll never be the cure

Rodrigo longs for the cure for her poisoned head, doubt-wracked heart, and toxin-polluted bloodstream. Yet she realizes that while romantic love acts as “medication,” it can only offer temporary relief from her pain, never a lasting fix.

It is, in my opinion, a quite profound message—and one that pushes back against Hollywood-glamorized visions of the “happily ever after” that love is said to promise.

Rodrigo has called the song the “thesis statement” of her entire album. You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love? Indeed, Rodrigo says. Some wounds can be papered over by romantic love. But that real, bone-deep cure is elusive—and it lies elsewhere.

The first time I heard “The Cure,” I immediately shot off a text to my roommate/best friend/brilliant scholar, Ellie Grace.

From my first listen, I found myself struck by the song’s potential to resonate within a Christian devotional context. And even if it’s not exactly a full-fledged theological treatise, “The Cure” certainly has a few things to say about humanity in relation to God. I’ll discuss two of them here.

The Fall and The Cure?

To begin, “The Cure” speaks to the reality of human experience as infected by a certain poison.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, Genesis 3 recounts that age-old story of a garden, a serpent, a fateful bite of that forbidden fruit, and an exile. Historically, many Christian thinkers have interpreted this story as humanity’s “Fall”: its descent from moral perfection into depravity. In the fourth century, St. Augustine crystalized these stories into his doctrine of “original sin,” the claim that humanity inherits a broken nature and guilty soul from Adam and Eve.

To be frank, I’m not entirely sure what to make of these grand doctrines of humanity’s fallenness and moral depravity. Sometimes, they seem like self-fulfilling prophecies—or like a way to dodge responsibility for our own personal, active participation in sin.

My scholar/bestie/unlucky correspondent Ellie Grace—when we “hung out and analyzed Rodrigo’s theological treatise” a few days later—shared thoughts similar to mine. “Those big-name doctrines like ‘original sin’ feel so impersonal, so distant,” she told me. “The idea that we as people are collectively and inherently bad makes me uneasy sometimes.”

“But, then again,” she continued, “I feel such a kinship with the Psalmist who writes, ‘There is no one who does good. No, not one.’ Or with Paul when he says, ‘I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.’”

Ellie Grace got to the heart of things. Regardless of whether you hold to a literal, historical Fall or a more allegorical, less Augustinian reading of the Genesis story, we can all agree that we live in a world saturated with evil: genocide, war, oppression, disease, greed, and the list goes on.

I think we can also agree that evil does not only exist on a cosmic scale within our world. Each of us must also acknowledge the evil that permeates our own selves.

We each possess, as Rodrigo sings, heads full of poison and hearts full of doubt. We are each prideful, each selfish, each greedy, each hateful.

And that evil has effects. It harms us, giving rise to many of those wounds that Rodrigo details. It makes us insecure, lonely, anxious, jealous. The evil that we nurture in each of our own hearts, while promising us control, significance, and happiness, in reality provides the opposite. Like Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 , we all experience exile as a result of the world’s evil: cosmic and immanent, societal and individual.

The Insufficiency of Eros

The love that Rodrigo sings of in “The Cure” is eros: the Greek term for erotic, romantic love. And the central claim of Rodrigo’s song is that eros is insufficient. It cannot cure her torment.

“I’m unraveled,” Rodrigo wails, over and over again, in the prelude to the bridge. Her voice splinters into numerous iterations of the phrase on different pitches, like echoes in the cave of her ever-fracturing brokenness.

This refrain continues echoing as Rodrigo sings the bridge:

Why can’t you come stitch me up? (I’m unraveled)
Why can’t it ever be enough? (I’m unraveled)
Why can’t you come stitch me up? (I’m unraveled)
Why can’t it ever be enough? (I’m unraveled)
It’s not enough

Theologically, Rodrigo’s central recognition of the “not-enough-ness” of eros speaks to the necessity of love rightly ordered.

Augustine (back again!) outlines this concept in On Christian Doctrine, where he suggests that “disordered love” is the root of human misery. God ought to be our ultimate and utmost object of love, he tells us.

Now, Augustine isn’t saying that we shouldn’t love others (including romantic partners) deeply. But he is saying that our love cannot stagnate there. The difference lies, Augustine writes, in “use” vs. “enjoyment.”

“To enjoy a thing is to rest with satisfaction in it for its own sake,” he explains. To use something, by contrast, is to engage it as a sort of “signpost,” or a means toward something else.

Having created this distinction, Augustine argues we each should enjoy God: resting in God, loving God for God’s own sake. Conversely, we should use people, Augustine writes. We can (we should!) love people, but we must love them in ultimate reference (and deference) to God.

While I’m not entirely keen about this particular terminology of “using” people, I do agree with Augustine’s essential point here. And his theories of enjoyment vs. use in matters of love seem to map onto “The Cure.”

The problem with “enjoying” people is that when we place that sort of weight—the weight of perpetual rest, abiding, and trust—on another person, it not only guarantees our own disappointment. It also places a massive amount of pressure on that person. What one person could ever shoulder that burden? No, eros cannot provide us supreme, infinite, unfailing love. As Rodrigo recognizes, it can never be the cure.

And at the same time, what is curious is that when we order our love rightly, when we don’t force others to bear the weight of our full “enjoyment,” we’re actually equipped to love them better. Eros can be all it’s made to be—in all its passionate, fiery splendor—when it doesn’t have to be everything.

So although Rodrigo doesn’t go so far as to cite Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine, her concession that love is “not enough” reveals her awareness of eros’s inability to provide a place of true “enjoyment.”

Finding “The Cure”?

No cure is found, much less named, at the end of Rodrigo’s newest single. This is understandable: Rodrigo’s musical calling cards of angst and romantic turmoil hardly lend themselves to such an ending.

This is okay. The fact stands—even within the world of Rodrigo’s song—that, exactly because eros cannot be “the cure” she yearns for, this cure exists elsewhere.

The cure is out there, Rodrigo tells us. It will re-ravel her unraveled psyche. It will pull those toxins from her bloodstream, purge her heart of doubt, flush that poison from her brain. It will wipe out forever that nagging sense of wrongness that plagues Rodrigo and each of us—call it original sin, call it Fallenness, call it evil.

At the song’s conclusion, the musical accompaniment thins out. Twice Rodrigo sings, “It’ll never be the cure,” before her final line: “It’ll never be…”

Rodrigo omits “the cure” from the song’s last words. And as listeners, I think we are meant to feel—really feel—those two words’ absence. A string-heavy instrumental outro ensues, a space in which Rodrigo invites each of us to fill in that blank. What is “the cure”?

In the end, Olivia Rodrigo provokes each of us (with, by the way, a song that is not only theologically generative but also viscerally catchy!) to contemplate where we seek cures and where The Cure may be found.

As for me, I’ll place my hope in another kind of love: agape, that unconditional, infinite love of God. I believe it will always be the cure.

As summer careens into town, one need hardly step outside to witness the hot promise of July borne in on May winds. I can see it all outside my window: prairie grasses undulating in tan-green technicolor, a family of airborne robins tipping sideways amid sporadic gusts, maple tree branches flailing like loose limbs on a dance floor.

It’s more than I can observe if I actually do step outside: beyond my window, all I often see is the dark snarls of my own hair zig-zagging across my field of vision. Then, I feel it, too. Gravel dust, when stirred up, speckles my arms. Sometimes a rogue late-spring blossom smacks my face.

And, of course, I feel the wind itself—caressing, jostling, edging its way past me. While I’ve always found wind half-irritating, I’ve also found it half-enchanting. Why is it here? Where has it come from?

Wind rippling through the tall grass on my Iowa farm this morning.

I know the scientific reasons for wind: solar heating creates differences in air pressure, forcing cold, high-pressure streams into the warmer, low-pressure regions. Et cetera. I’m not a scientist, so I’m not going to torture you with some poorly researched explanations of what wind is.

What I am is a divinity school student, which means that I inevitably spend the better part of most days thinking about God. And today—on the morning of this Pentecost Sunday—I sat in the prickling grass of a wind-whipped May and attempted to pray.

I couldn’t string more than four words together, so captivated I was by the music of the wind in the ash trees in my front yard.

In that moment, the wind smacked me with another sort of late-spring blossom, with an idea in the form of a question: How might prayer be like wind, and wind like prayer?

The English poet George Herbert may have been getting at the edge of this question in his famed poem “Prayer (I).” Among the collection of noun-phrases Herbert uses to describe prayer (“the soul in paraphrase,” “a kind of tune, which all things hear and fear,” “church-bells beyond the stars heard”) one has always stuck out as a favorite of mine: “God’s breath in man returning to his birth.”

God’s breath, twirling Garden-exiled humanity around and back to that first dust-awakening exhale. God’s breath, reminding each person of their first breath in this life and of humanity’s shared genesis. Dust disturbed, lifelessness enlivened.

God’s breath: a sort of wind? I’d say so.

The modus operandi of wind is to churn, to shake, to birth new movement among staid tree-limbs and human-limbs alike.

What if prayer is the same? An outer, Other force mysteriously agitating the stasis-stuck, offering animation that is at once a new shoot of life and a return to that ancient Garden.

So if we accept this paradigm of windy prayer, a number of implications arise. I’ll address three here.

First, if prayer is like wind, prayer ought to be considered an act of profound grace and of divine initiative.

I typically conceive of prayer as a product and a process of my own action—my own muscling through to say something worth saying to God.

But if we’re to view prayer as akin to wind, a different picture emerges. We are the trees whose branches dance in the wind—and the prayer that stirs us comes from someplace beyond us.

See the difference? It’s a matter of where to place prayer’s origin: does prayer arise in our selves, or in God?

C. S. Lewis (like me) contends in favor of the latter in Mere Christianity:

An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him… God is the thing to which he is praying—the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on—the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal.

What Lewis is saying is that we tend to over-focus on God as the recipient of our prayers, at the expense of considering God as the means by which we pray and even the reason why we can pray in the first place.

Wind illustrates this same concept. Nobody would claim a tree’s wind-jostled branches move on their own. No, they are stirred by something beyond themselves. That doesn’t make the tree’s movement any less its own, but the tree nevertheless receives its animation from that outer force.

In the same way, prayer does not emerge from our own effort. The ability and the desire to pray always stem from beyond us. I’d call that a gift of grace.

Second, this paradigm of prayer as windy makes our ideas of what prayer “is” a whole lot more expansive.

As a student and researcher, I am constantly pressed by my professors to define the terms I set forth. Definitions are an academic’s most powerful tool, the very means by which an argument is shaped and defended.

And yet I’ve never quite been able to define prayer in a way that feels sufficient. What is it?

When I was a child and teenager, I mainly conceived of prayer as the means by which I presented my laundry list of wants before God. Later on, after I went off to college, I began to think of prayer more as a conversation between myself and God: I could say anything to God, and I didn’t necessarily need to ask for anything.

However you, dear reader, define prayer, I’d say it’s safe to assume that many of Christianity’s conceptions of prayer are highly logocentric. Words reign supreme, and our communication with God is only as valuable as it can be encapsulated in those twenty-six letters of our alphabet.

But prayer—prayer of the windy variety, I mean—offers a different picture.

Wind is soundless motion. Yes, yes, wind gives rise to sound, but those whistlings and rustlings are byproducts, symptoms of the motion that precedes them.

What if prayer is the same? What if the spoken words of our prayer are something of a outgrowth, symbolizing the communion already ongoing?

That sage Anne Shirley (protagonist of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables) describes this idea with her characteristic whimsy:

Why must people kneel down to pray? If I really wanted to pray I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d go out into a great big field all alone or in the deep, deep woods and I’d look up into the sky—up—up—up—into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I’d just feel a prayer.

To “just feel a prayer” means, to me, to experience that sense of animation, of communion, of being seen and being held. Words may spring from that feeling, yet prayer nevertheless begins, like wind, in soundless motion.

Third, prayer as windy becomes a practice of perpetual movement.

My last point may seem quite obvious considering the points I’ve already made. Yes, wind is motion. And yes, wind moves us. But consider this idea in the context of Christian devotion.

We’ve established that (windy) prayer originates from God and is a gift of grace. Moreover, the idea of prayer as windy means we can define prayer in a far more expansive, less logocentric manner. But what does any of that mean to us?

It means that prayer doesn’t just keep us where we are. It moves us to new places and to new iterations of our selves. Prayer is teleological—it is end-directed.

St. Augustine in his “Letter 130” advises that our prayer should always be that of the Psalmist’s: “One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in His temple.”

As Augustine argues, prayer should move us toward the house of the Lord. Prayer is a practice of dwelling that urges us on toward the place of Dwelling.

Prayer makes us curious, causing us to long “to find the place where all the beauty came from” (as C. S. Lewis puts it in Till We Have Faces).

In the life of Christian devotion, this means that prayer ought to disturb us, much as wind disturbs tree-limbs. It ought to move us in those ways that only God can decide.

The aspen tree in my backyard, captured this afternoon. Listen to the wind in the leaves!

Indeed, this vision of “windy prayer” that I’ve set forth here takes its cue from a scene far beyond one windswept Iowan May. The Book of Acts tells us that on the day of Pentecost, the apostles heard “a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind” and encountered firsthand the ever-living Spirit of God (Acts 2:2 KJV).

On this Pentecost Sunday, wind carries in that gift of God’s pneuma—his animating breath that (as George Herbert tells us) returns humanity to its birth, to unending, unbreaking communion with God.

May that Spirit, too, animate and enliven our prayers. May our prayers be a whisper of that Holy Wind.