I sang to you this morning when I took the dogs out. Good morning Mom. Happy birthday. It was 5 am. I was alone. But I know you heard me.

Two things are true at the same time.

The first thing that is true is that I have never stopped missing you for a single moment; I will never think about death the same way again, but death is the only doorway to joining you, wherever you may be and whoever you may be.

The second thing that is true is that I have never said goodbye. When you were dying and you said to me, one of the last things you ever said to me, “I don’t want to say goodbye to you,” I promised you I never would.

The first year you were gone, I learned about spooky action at a distance; that from a scientific perspective, once two items have been joined together, they can never be truly separated. Even when an entire planet is between them, if one item tilts to the right… so does the other. You and I were joined together, Mom, and it’s not spooky at all, but I still tilt with you, and I feel you tilt with me, and it is beautiful and I cherish it.

The second thing that is true is that I feel I know you better, and understand you more deeply, than I ever did before. The second thing that is true is that I believe you see me and understand me now, more deeply than you ever did before.

The Antidote to Fear (and Grief?)

In the last year of your life, when you were really suffering and often out of your mind, you said to me, one night, in the hospital, “No one knows this, but I am scared all the time. I pretend to be brave but I am scared all. The. Time.”

Later you told me you didn’t know why you said that, but I know truth when I hear it. What I wish I could have said to you then, but I didn’t understand it then, was “That’s okay, Mom. We’re all scared, all the time. Being scared is part of being alive. It’s like breathing.”

I probably would not have told you about how the amygdala fires whenever it is stimulated, and it fires in one of two directions: to the right, towards fear; to the left, towards curiosity. I probably would not have told you that the only antidote to fear is curiosity, I wonder what is happening, I wonder why, I wonder what is next, I wonder what would happen if I tried this. That’s the sort of thing I talked about with Dad (and still do).

But here’s something I would say to you, except that I don’t need to say it to you, because you taught it to me.

Things have changed, since you left. You’ve been gone a long time! You died just seven years after my wedding; Steve and I are going to have our 20^th this year.

Lately, I have been thinking about Pure Energy. When you were alive, you were a human, so you were imperfect; I know. You hate that. But it’s true. You didn’t know everything; you had your blind spots. I’m not going to go into them, because they don’t matter now. This is what does:

Your blind spots are gone. Wherever you are — and I’m super curious, super super super curious — you can see. This is what I believe. I don’t particularly think you’re sitting on a cloud in heaven strumming on a harp, it’s possible that you are just energy zipping through the air. You have to be energy zipping through the air because you were energy when you were alive, and energy, once created, can never be destroyed. We cremated your body (honestly, no one knew what to do; we spent an hour picking out your casket until Aunt Linda said, “Your mom never wanted her body to go underground,” at which point we alley-ooped to cremation) — so whatever your physical form was, it is long, long, long, long gone. There’s an urn buried in a park in Decatur, but I think Darrie is the only one who goes there. Sometimes, when she does, she sends me a picture. Like this one. And it makes me happy.

But the part of you that wasn’t a body, the part of you that was pure energy, your kronos, your soul self, well. Scientifically speaking, as well as in my faith, you are out there, zipping around, and I actually have a name for you. You know what the name is, of course.

Pure Energy Mom.

Pure Energy Mom is all the best parts of you; Pure Energy Mom is all the love, all the laughter, the endless compassion and humor and kindness and wisdom and compassion. Pure Energy Mom is “what is the loving thing to do” and “Funky Flunky Flake” and talking to a scared person in the middle of the night, when the tigers come.

Pure Energy Mom is every wonderful thing about you, but without the body, without the blind spots. Pure Energy Mom doesn’t think that my self worth is predicated on my weight, although she does want me to nourish myself and treat my body well, and I am up to date on all my cancer screenings and doctor’s visits.

Pure Energy Mom doesn’t care how much money I make, but she does agree that it is important to be present in the world, to try and bend toward the light, to help in whatever way I can.

Pure Energy Mom doesn’t think I need to be any different than I am; Pure Energy Mom believes only that I am more deeply fulfilled when I am being my best version of my self. So I’m active (if not skinny) and I try to eat vegetables as much as I can, and I play outside with my friends because I always liked to play outside, and I write and write and write because that is always who I’ve been, and I keep learning things, because curiosity is the antidote to fear, and I try to think about how my great passion — storytelling — can help the world’s great need — better stories.

I haven’t been doing the substack this last year, but as pure energy, you know what I’ve been doing. You know what is in the works. I think you’re excited about it. I think I am too.

These are tough times, since you left. But the times are changing.

And I keep getting curious about that, and I keep trying new things, with new people, and I keep listening and listening and listening, and that is what I want to say to you today.

I love you.

I miss you.

I know you’re here.

I promised you I would never say goodbye, and have you noticed, Mom? I never did. I did not say goodbye, but I’ve gone so far, and I’m moving still. It’s all just pure energy now; pure energy and pure love, and bending towards the light, from opposite sides of the planet, for now.

Fifty-plus years ago, when life looked like this, Mom and Dad went to a dinner party, and for dessert, the hostess served this absolutely amazing pie; a dark chocolate ganache over a silky custard filling, and a light cream top. Dad absolutely loved it, and Mom asked for the recipe.

“Oh, no,” the hostess said. “You don’t want this recipe. This is the hardest pie I’ve ever made.” She said to share the recipe would be a hate crime against hostesses, but Mom was young, and filled with energy and hope and optimism, and Mom was Mom, so it became the family tradition: Black Bottom Pie, every holiday.

Or, as Steve has come to call it, the Crying Pie, because, well, because of what happened when I tried to make it, on my own, the last Thanksgiving of Mom’s life, ten years ago.

Abundance and Joy

Once Marc and I were older, Mom usually worked at the hospital long past the dinner hour, eating cheese toast at 9 pm. But Thanksgiving was always like a swan dive back into my childhood, table filled with an overflowing abundance of family, and chaos, and Thanksgiving dishes. Every single year included:

• Two platters of turkey (set up high because one year my dog Boo ran off with an entire thigh, his first and only time snatching food and he went all in, props to Boo);

• Sweet potato casserole with both brown sugar pecan and marshmallow topping because that was Mom’s way of loving, who has to choose;

• Green bean/cheese casserole, made by me in such gerrymandered proportions that Dad would periodically hold up a single bean as he ate and shout I found one!;

• Homemade braided saffron bread, sometimes dense as biscuits, sometimes high as clouds, Mom never paid much attention to the age of her yeast;

• Creamed corn with just a little bit of bacon even though Aunt Linda had been frying it all day, because everyone who walked through the kitchen grabbed a piece;

• “Swiss Soup”, a dish made of canned fruits and jello, which gave me real Southern church street cred when I brought it to an early Warren Wilson potluck;

• Stuffing, two huge pans of it, that only Dad ever ate because so much competition;

• Squash casserole because Dad begged for “please one thing on the table with no cheese or marshmallows,”

It was a glorious spread, so bounteous that one year, as we began to serve ourselves from the buffet, I moved my eyes up and down the row and shrieked like a horror movie.

We had forgotten to make macaroni and cheese, which I say only because can you imagine how full I already felt, that I didn’t need the macaroni. It didn’t matter that Mom only cooked once a year; the love I got from all those meals nourishes me even now.

But the highlight of it all, the signature dish, the dish that inspired a Children’s Sermon one year from Steve, was the pie. The pie had become Mom’s signature achievement, the hallmark of every family occasion, the first question asked by everyone who had been to a holiday before: “Is your Mom doing the pie?”

That g*d*mn pie.

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Do Not Try This At Home

If a cooking blog tried to publish the recipe for Black Bottom Pie today, the comments section would cause the author to delete their account. For instance, it requires a chocolate ganache and custard be prepared at the exact same time, both elements being stirred constantly over low heat while adding different ingredients at different time, one takes about seven minutes to make, the other about twenty five, but they have to finish at the exact same time, at which point you combine one-third of the hot custard mix into the chocolate mixture.

Physically impossible, to do alone, so for the last twenty years, I had become Mom’s sous chef, her pastry assistant. Every Thanksgiving we huddled for hours over burners and twelve different measuring implements, coming back in at various intervals of chilling and setting and blending until we could finally put the second-to-last layer in place, and go to bed on Wednesday night confident that the hardest part of Thanksgiving was done. The pie was always the hard part, and Thanksgiving would be all the fun.

But in 2013, nothing would be fun at all. There was not a huge family gathering, because Mom was in the final stages of her illness. She could barely stand, her mental state was as fragile as wet tissue paper, and it was just the four of us in Asheville, me and Steve and Dad and Mom, trying to pretend we were grateful. On Wednesday morning, Dad and Steve and I puttered around in the kitchen making conversation, and then I went into the bedroom to see if Mom was able to get up. She was lying flat on the bed, staring at the ceiling, and she scowled at me when I cheerfully said good morning.

“I was just lying here listening to you,” she said. “And it was like I was already gone. You’d already moved on without me.”

It was all terrible, but I was still going to make pie.

All You Need…

It was my first year taking the lead role on pie making. Steve was Steve was playing the part previously played by me, stirring when told, and periodically doing math when I shrieked, what is double five and three-eighths, because I had forgotten to check it in advance and if I didn’t act in the next ten seconds the cream would curdle. Mom was sitting at the kitchen bar, and I was trying to make it all seem fun, I was trying to make everything seem fun, everything is fine, but it wasn’t fine and all three of us in the kitchen knew it.

I’d made it through the custard-ganache stage intact; at least I thought I had. The final stage before you could rest on Wednesday night was to combine the second two-thirds of the custard mix, which had set for a precise amount of time, with a sort of meringue-style layer, with two-thirds of the egg whites from six hours ago, use a hand blender tilted at 37 degrees, I’m only kind of kidding. This was the last step, the part where you pull back the curtain and hope a rabbit is standing there. If the custard has set, and the meringue has risen, you blend them together into a soft, creamy, silky, light pudding.

I whipped up my meringue okay, but when I pulled my custard out it… sloshed. It sloshed. Custards are not supposed to slosh. I swear, I had stirred until it coated the back of a wooden spoon, the way Mom taught me, but it looked like a bowl of chicken broth. I tried to blend the meringue in, but the meringue somehow vanished, and all I had left was...water.

I stared with horror into the bowl. “Oh no.”

After all this work, I had nothing but vaguely custard-colored water. Steve, a first time sous chef, did not understand what the pie was supposed to look like, he did not know this was an unmitigated disaster, but Mom knew.

She was unsteady on her feet, as she crossed the kitchen to peer into the bowl. She had to hold the edge of the oven to stand up. Her eyes flickered as she looked up at me.

I was crying, and she always wanted to make it better, when my heart was broken. She always wanted to fix it. But she was too weak, and she couldn’t make the pie herself anymore.

“You never know,” Mom said. “Pour it into the pie tins and let it set.”

I knew the pie was beyond saving. “It is ruined,” I wept.

Everything was ruined. Everything was ruined, and I couldn’t even make a pie.

Mom insisted, “Let’s see what it looks like in the morning,” and I jammed the two bowls into the fridge, but went to bed angry and filled with despair.

All You Need… and Time

But it’s all fine, because of what happened on the last Thanksgiving of Mom’s life. I was despondent, I had given up, I thought the only reason Mom thought the pie would be okay was because of her dementia, but when I rolled open the kitchen door, well, you know how Jesus turned water into wine? Somehow, overnight, my water turned into pie.

And pie is always better than wine, if you ask me: Two perfectly creamy custards atop two perfectly proportioned chocolate ganache over one glorious Graham Cracker Crust. I was agog, I was aghast, but we had a perfect Black Bottom day.

The last pie Mom and I ever made together was a triumph, one of the last triumphs Mom had left. And it gave me a new story. It’s a story that I have been telling all year long, in different ways. It’s the story Steve used once in a Children’s Sermon, when he told the story of the “Crying Pie”.

“Sometimes you think everything is ruined,” he said to them. “But if you keep going, if you just give it time, everything will be okay.”

Ten years later, I can still make Black Bottom Pie, when called upon, most recently for my nephew, who wanted his girlfriend to experience the famous Castellani family pie. And here’s the thing, here’s the secret, here’s my trick, are you ready?

I always ruin it.

Honestly. Wrecking the Black Bottom Pie has become a ritual, a rite of passage. At some point during the process, I think oh, this is destroyed, but then I keep going, and now I have even come to expect it.

The year after Mom died, I snuck out to the movies and returned to a brick of custard-colored cement that laughed in the face of meringue. One year I forgot to set a timer for the graham cracker crust, and attempted to pass it off as Blackened Bottom Pie. Once I didn’t put enough custard in the ganache and Black Bottom Pie was No Bottom Pie.

But it’s always fine.

It’s the last story Mom taught me, and maybe the most important story I tell in my life today. When I stood there, destroyed, crying, at the very end of the best part of my life, when I thought everything was ruined…I was wrong.

The pie got better overnight. Other things took a little bit longer, but they got better too.

Nothing was ruined. The pie always comes out in the end. Crooked, blackened, scant of bottom, it’s still fine. It’s still pie and like life itself, pie is always a blessing.

I’ve said it before, I’ve written it before, this is the Thanksgiving version:

The abyss is inevitable.

If you make pie, you will cry.

At some point, you will think everything is ruined. But just keep going.

You’d be astonished what can change, with just a bit of time.

And Mom was wrong about one other thing.

We haven’t gone on without her, not one bit. She is still right here, right beside me, alive within me, every single day.

I wish you a wonderful Thanksgiving, whether it is the first year of something new, or the last year of something precious, because the truth is, every Thanksgiving is always both of those things, all at the same time.

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However, I feel bad for neglecting ya’ll. Family chat to the rescue!

The people on this text chain are my father, starting most days with a zen reflection; my sister in law (heart emoji, always supportive); my husband (missing his pulpit but never an opportunity); me (no substack in three weeks) and my younger brother (playing the role of younger brothers since time began).

Less than 100 words, go:

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P.S. And if you want to read some great 100 word stories that are ALWAYS this quick, here’s a link to Rudy’s!

Earlier this year, I almost quit.

Quit what? you might ask, to which I would shrug in a way that means, Can it be everything?

We’re living in a world where the President can gift himself a $230 million dollar bonus, and bulldoze the White House for fun, while the government shuts down because the people in power don’t want to pay for health care. Teachers don’t make enough money to buy the good yogurt at the grocery store but billionaires empty bank accounts to send celebrities to the edge of space so they can show us their set list.

We all have dreams, and we all work hard for our dreams, and most days, the dreams just don’t come true. I can handle the struggle — I live for the game — but it’s the indifference that is heartbreaking. When you pour your heart into what you love most in the world, and the world just… shrugs.

Sometimes all you can do is quit.

I Quit

I can’t even find a metaphor to describe how elusive it is, trying to make a life with your words and your ideas and your imagination. I don’t have to find a metaphor, actually, because you know exactly what it is. We’re all doing the same thing, trying to create a life that matters. We’re all looking and looking and looking for something that may not even exist at all. Like tracking Bigfoot through the Alaskan wilderness, if Bigfoot were both imaginary and also somehow a feral child that sometimes liked to wave at you from behind a tree and then run giggling out of your sight for weeks.

And sometimes you get so tired of the chasing, and you feel like you are never going to find what you’re looking for. In which case, and I say this sincerely: have you tried giving up?

That’s what I did, last January.

I remember this so clearly. I was hiking through the woods on a Saturday morning. Steve was a bit up ahead of me, and we were doing the usual poodle tango, where Huck charges forward, pulling so hard at the leash that his claws make divots in the dirt, desperate to get there as fast as possible wherever it is, while Lucy stops at every single blade of grass to inspect it, this is the most fascinating thing I have ever smelled in my entire life.

No one cares what you do, I said to myself, which is almost entirely true. Who would care? If my workshops faded away, if this substack just went silent, so what? Why was I fighting so hard, when I could just not?

And I thought, looking up at the trees, I give you permission to quit. And it was real permission. Sincere permission, to give up. To just stop. To just not try so hard any more.

It was an interesting experience.

I have been trying to teach myself to respond to every situation with curiosity, so for the first time, I allowed myself to get curious about quitting.

What would it feel like, I thought, with genuine open mindedness, what would it feel like if you just gave up?

I was curious. So I gave up. Right there, in that moment, standing beside Lucy, I gave up. I encourage you to do the same. If you’re exhausted, if you’re despondent, if you’re fed up and frustrated, I give you permission.

Quit. Quit the whole damn thing. Right now. Right this minute. Say it firmly. Mean it. I QUIT.

That’s what I did, that day. I am never going to try again, I said to myself. I’m going to let that mysterious Bigfoot run around in the woods all by itself for the rest of its life, and I’m not going to try to catch it anymore. You don’t care about me, world? FINE I don’t care about you either!!

We’re all chasing something. We all want something. What are you chasing?

What would it feel like if you gave up?

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After I Gave Up

The first thing I felt surprised me.

I felt sad. I felt so sad.

I thought, if I never wrote again, I would miss it. I wouldn’t miss the rejection, the frustration. I wouldn’t miss all the times I had big plans that came to nothing. But I’d miss the writing.

I’d miss what it feels like, when I’m in pursuit of a good idea, and I get a grasp on it, just for a minute. That feeling when I’m writing, and suddenly all my effort vanishes, all my awareness vanishes, I myself vanish, and I am just somehow living inside of this world, inside of a new idea, and it is pulling me along. It is that feeling of being pulled, of being connected to something bigger than me, and somehow a sentence will pour out, maybe just one sentence in a week or two, and I will think, with astonishment, who wrote that?

Because it doesn’t feel like it was me. It feels like it was magic. Like there was something inside of me that I never knew was there.

It’s the feeling we live for. Let me say it again.

It’s the feeling we live for.

For me, I get it with writing, but not only with writing. I get it with bike riding, when I catch a current in the forest and suddenly the effort is easy. I get it when I’m singing, especially singing with other people, especially singing loud with other people while dancing, when the notes and the music pull you out of this world and somewhere else. Steve gets it when he’s surfing a wave in his kayak, and he slips right into the flow, and it’s like he’s on a magic carpet, riding the wave, connected to the current. My mom got it when she leaned across a counseling room and grasped a person’s hand, and saw her words make their way into someone’s heart, and a light went on.

We all have that thing in our life, hopefully we all have so many things in our life, we were all designed to have so many things in our life, that give us that feeling. Loving a child, making a meal, marching in protest, knitting a sweater, building a table, solving a coding problem, coming up with a Halloween costume, fighting fascists for 96 years and counting.

It’s not the winning that matters. It’s not the winning that we play for. It’s the feeling that we get, when we’re in the game. I wouldn’t miss fame or fortune or public adoration or success or publishing contracts, because I don’t have any of those things, and maybe I never will. Maybe we’ll fight fascism for 95 years and they’ll still be bulldozing the White House.

Maybe nothing we do will make a difference to the rest of the world. Maybe we’ll stay invisible forever.

And then what?

It’s Just A Feeling

If you’re exhausted, I give you permission to quit. Winter is a legitimate season for a reason. Sometimes we need to rest. But after you’ve rested, after you’ve quit, after you’re restored — because you will be, winter is a season but so is spring — look around and say to yourself, what do I miss?

I think I will always miss writing. Every time I sit down to do this thing I love, there’s a possibility. That I’m going to get that feeling.

That feeling. That feeling when you connect, just for a minute, to that idea that’s bigger than you. That feeling when it doesn’t matter how small you are, because you realize you’re not small at all, or you are infinitesimally small, but it doesn’t matter, because the world is so much bigger than you ever imagined.

And maybe you’re in a current of protestors chanting what we believe in, and maybe you’re with five people you adore talking about the thing you have loved since you were a kid and learned what words could do, and maybe you just got your first loaf of bread to really rise, Paul Hollywood would be so proud, and maybe you’re Lucy and this is definitely the best leaf ever in the world, and that’s it. That’s it. That’s it.

I thought about never having that feeling again. And I thought to myself, that’s what I would miss.

And that’s more than enough to keep going.

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When I played soccer, the days leading up to a big game were torture. I was a goalkeeper for my high school team, and I’d lie in bed at night and fret about letting a ball go over my fingertips, or not getting out of my box in time to block a cross. The anxiety would build like water on a burner, hotter and hotter the closer we got to game time. I’d wake up on game morning unable to keep any food down, and during warmups, my hands would shake so badly that I started to panic I wouldn’t be able to catch a ball at all. When we did our pre-game circle chant my legs were trembling and it was hard to breathe, and I’d ponder the embarrassment of passing out on the field before the game started. I’d take my place on the goal line, the line where it was my job to let no balls pass, like I was a goalkeeping Gandalf, and I’d shift back and forth and wish that I could transport myself into the future when this game was long past, so scared I was of playing.

And then the game would start.

And then I was fine. As soon as the referee blew the whistle and the ball started moving, I locked in. I wasn’t scared any more, because I was playing the game, and I had control. I wasn’t scared of what might happen, I was focused on what was actually happening, and I was doing my job. I was charging out to grab the cross, hollering at my center back that this ball was mine, directing midfield where to stand on the corner kick, feeling the adrenaline and joy of the hard leather thumping into my palms, when I could curl my body around the ball and nothing bad can happen right now, I have the ball, apparently I was a really BOSSY goalkeeper, but the point is this:

I wasn’t ever scared once the game started.

And this is why I’m not scared now.

Game On

When Trump was elected for the second time, I was under the covers in bed, and inside my head was screaming, I cannot live through this again. And it was a true statement. We were just a few months after Helene, we barely had water back in our house; I had been grappling with panic attacks all year, ever since a drug reaction nearly sparked a heart attack; my brother in law had just died; and now this thing that I had barely survived the first time around, was coming around again?

I cannot live through this again. And in the night, in my grief and terror, a voice said calmly: then don’t.

I felt better after that. Because I thought to myself, yes, I get to decide how I’m going to navigate the next four years. And I’m going to do it differently than I did last time, because last time it just didn’t work.

So I decided that it was going to be different, and guess what? It has been. I admit. It is tricky to say this because by every account we can imagine, it has been as bad or worse than we feared. You don’t need me to detail it; we’re all living through it together. It’s awful.

And I’ve had some friends who seem puzzled, maybe even irritated, by my refusal to despair. Because that’s the plot twist. If you’ve been reading, you might notice. I’m not despairing. Run for your lives, you m——-er f—-ckers.

Because I’m not afraid of something that might happen in the future. I am playing hard with the game that is going on around us right this minute.

And I am playing to win.

What Soccer Taught Me

Playing soccer growing up taught me a million things that I still use every day. It taught me how to play a position on the field, to know my job. It taught me to pass the ball. It taught me to cherish my teammates. It taught me to keep playing even when I make a huge mistake and the ball goes right past my hands and I have to crawl into the back of the net to fish the soccer ball out just as the entire varsity football team for the opposing school is walking behind me, so twenty-five large adolescent boys hoot and holler and jeer at me for the mistakes I made.

It taught me that sometimes you can lose a game 12-1, as we did on that day, and still survive. It taught me that sometimes your team seems irredeemably outclassed, and all you need is a new coach, and a better attitude, and a few people to swap positions, and there you are in the finals, two years later, against the same team. Soccer taught me that losing games is inevitable, and getting your heart broken is unavoidable, and you will make terrible mistakes, but you will keep playing.

So if you’re wondering how to stop being so scared, when everything is so terrible, the answer is so simple.

Get in the game.

Though I haven’t played keeper in almost forty years, the truth still holds. You’re not scared when you’re in the game.

What game? You might ask. And the answer is simple. Any game at all. Pick a game, any game. Make it something where victory would make the world better. Steve has spent the last month creating a pollinator habitat in our front yard; he is making the world better. I am training for a half marathon, which is making me stronger, always a good thing. I’m writing this substack and working on some other exciting projects as well, every one of them answering the question I ask myself every day:

If our purpose here on earth is to tilt the world just a little bit more to the sunlight in times of shadows, well, the game is anything you can think of, anything you love, anything that will make the world just a little bit better.

So when I start to get scared lately, and there is lots of reason to be scared, the stakes are a lot higher than beating Westminster in the state finals, I just say to myself,

Game on.

And I get on the field and I start playing. You’re only afraid when you’re on the sidelines. If you’re scared, I understand. It is scary out there. But it is also an entire world filled with opportunities to get better, to move towards the light.

You might be anxious. You might be shaking. You might be scared. Your opponent might be a lot bigger and stronger than you are. You might think victory isn’t likely.

Doesn’t matter. Victory often isn’t likely, but you get on the field anyway. And then you discover, I think, that your life doesn’t change when you win.

Your life changes, the world transforms, when you just decide to play.

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So maybe you’re wondering, after four weeks of me carrying on about Mary Magdalene, what exactly is Castellani up to here? Is she trying to CONVERT me? Has she had a secret agenda all along?!?!

I don’t blame you for being suspicious, if you are. These days it can feel like pretty much everyone has an agenda, Christians especially. Christian is a pretty loaded term in the world these days, and a lot of the stories it brings to mind are terrifying, and cruel. It’s hard to change someone’s mind about Christianity, because that story is pretty locked in.

Don't worry. I’m not here to change your mind. But what I have been trying to do is open it— just a crack.

Just enough to let another story in.

Any other story at all.

This was never about Mary Magdalene.

This was always about us.

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Everything Is Falling Apart…

If there is anything we can all agree on right now, it’s that everything is terrible. Whether you are Democrat, Republican or Independent, polls indicate you think the world is moving in the wrong direction. We might disagree on why the world is falling apart (maybe some people think more fascism is actually called for?), but we all know everything is terrible.

Take a deep breath. Think of Mary Magdalene, the gospel that was buried for thousands of years.

What if it’s not the world that is broken?

What if it’s the story we’re not seeing clearly?

Don’t panic. I’m not going to try to convince you it’s excellent, what is happening out there right now. But… your story might not be true.

Some Stories We Tend To Get Wrong

If you’ve read me before, you know my belief: story is humanity’s greatest superpower. Our ability to look at a set of facts, and create meaning from them, and then use that meaning to drive us forward, well, that is the engine behind every great thing we’ve ever done.

“The government is at war with our citizens like it has never been before!”

This is not a true story. Watch the PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize, or read David Halberstam’s book The Children, or Taylor Branch’s trilogy about the Martin Luther King Jr. era. You’ll see federal troops sent to enforce basic rights, children blocked from school by governors, killers walking free. This is not a brand-new battle. Humanity’s tendency to fear and demonize those who are different than us is not original to this time, or this country. It is a story we have been working on since time began, and a story that is still unfolding.

“Climate change makes everything different, higher stakes, more at risk.”

The stakes of climate change are, indeed, incredibly high. But this has been true before. Think back to the Dust Bowl, in the 1930s. The prairies got over-farmed, drought set in, and the land died. Entire towns were buried in dust. Respiratory illnesses, pneumonia, asthma, suffocation…the suffering was immense. More than 2.5 million people had to evacuate middle America . Then: we changed practices. We paid farmers to rest soil, plant cover, terrace, and build shelterbelts. Science, policy, and stubborn care reduced the harm before the drought even ended.

The climate is always changing. The change can be devastating.

And healing can still be possible.

This is a big topic. Let’s make it real personal, for a minute.

One (Big) Story

Let’s take the story we tend to tell about obesity. You know the one: fat people are lazy, unpopular, weak. I have lived this story myself. I have believed this story myself, about myself, for my whole life. And let’s be honest: so have you.

For generations, studies show that people as young as six years old tend to tell mean stories about heavy people. In studies where kids rate photos of peers, obesity bias heavier children get the harsh labels.

But science is showing us… that is just a story. And research has shown us… we can change it.

When kids are telling mean stories about their heavier peers, researchers add one prompt: “Imagine why this person might look this way. What might their life be like?” Instantly, the kids tell richer stories—about food access, family patterns, bodies that don’t respond the way we’re told they should. An invitation to imagine something different opens up a window. Empathy rises. Blame drops. The story shifts.

With just a little push, the kids were able to imagine a different story. A story that, we now know, is a much more true story.

Now. Back to how terrible the world is.

Or is it?

The world has never been this bad before!

Well, just a little imagination shows this isn’t true. Think of being a gay man in the 1980s. A trans person, in nearly any decade before this one. A girl who wants to play pro sports. A kid born with cystic fibrosis.

Or to get even more personal: all my life I beat myself to pieces over the failures of my body, I ran thousands of miles, I spent thousands of hours calling myself names and tottering myself over over my shortcomings and my failures and my sins. The story was irrefutable. I was heavy. I was lazy. I was broken.

Then science found a shot. And then, for me, the screaming stopped.

The central story of my life—and dammit, can you believe it?—I was wrong the whole time.

Do you get what I’m going for?

Is the world falling apart?

Or is that a story?

And what would happen if we imagined a better one?

What Does This Have to Do with Mary Magdalene, And Us?

I told the story of Mary Magdalene because it was interesting to me, how this story the whole world believed for more than a thousand years — that there were always four gospels, and they were in general agreement on what Jesus believed — that story wasn’t true. Or at least not completely true.

So many of the stories we believe aren’t true.

That insight could doom us. We are telling some terrible, terrible, terrible stories.

But we don’t have to. We could tell a better one.

A Story About What Could Still Be True

You asked if I’m trying to convert you. I’m not. I’m trying to crack the window. Mary Magdalene taught me that the air on the other side is different.

For centuries we inhaled one story (well, four) and called it gospel; then the window opened and a truer draft blew in.

What if that is happening right now?

What if the world isn’t falling apart—what if our story about it is?

Is the story of the world terrifying you right now?

Is there something you believe that is causing you pain?

This person voted this way because they are hateful and cruel.

People are so much meaner than they used to be.

We have never known hard times like this before.

Now take a breath. Remember that you are a human being. Storytelling is your superpower. Stories, we have seen again and again and again, change the world.

Use your imagination. Think about science and history. Think about Mary Magdalene, and the Dust Bowl, and 1968.

Are you sure there isn’t a better story, beneath this one?

Why does that matter? It’s simple. It’s science. It’s history.

The stories we tell tend to become true.

Let’s try to tell a better one.

(And even better, coming up next: let’s try to make it fun.)

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At the beginning of this summer, I wrote a piece called Be Afraid. I told the monsters they better start running, because we were coming for them. Given what’s happened since, I could say oops, sorry demons, please don’t hurt us.

Nope. Keep running, monsters. Do your worst. (You already are.) I can see where it’s coming from. You’re afraid of me. Or, more to the point, you’re afraid of all of us.

We’ve been down this road before.

When Power Panics

When last we left Mary Magdalene, she was living her life as a leader of the Christian rebellion, recruiting disciples and preaching truth to power.

Actually, technically, when last we left Mary Magdalene, she was dead. By the mid-fourth century, she was long gone, but her followers were growing stronger, and the Roman Empire was starting to crack. People were seeing through the corruption, greed and rot at the heart of the empire; they were tiring of a world in which a small elite of powerful men had all the power and riches and still wanted more.

And so they were meeting, in secret, and they were saying, We don’t have to live like this, there is another way. We don’t have to do what these men tell us, we can do something else.

For centuries, persecution against these rebels flared—brutal under emperors like Decius and Diocletian—then eased, then flared again. But the rebellion continued. Unable to stamp it out, Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea in 325. It didn’t decide the Bible’s table of contents; that took shape over the next decades. But it did bind church and imperial power more tightly.

There were a lot more gospels, back then. Not just Matthew and Mark and Luke and John but also Mary and Thomas and Phillip. And there were other writings besides Acts; texts like The Gospel of Truth, a meditation on salvation, and Thunder, Perfect Mind, a poem voiced in the Divine Feminine.

Over the later fourth century, bishops effectively settled the twenty-seven-book New Testament in the Greek-speaking churches (famously listed by Athanasius in 367). The list has held in the West ever since.

But the tradeoff came at a cost.

The most threatening stories were buried. Edited out of the canon. The official New Testament was packaged around that time, and it has never changed. History was severed so cleanly that until Cairo in 1896, and then Nag Hammadi in 1945, we never even knew the whole story.

This is how long Empire has been afraid of us. They have been burying the truth since the first century A.D. For thousands of years, they have always been afraid of the same thing.

They have always been afraid that we will remember who truly has the power in this world.

Hint: it’s not them.

What They Buried

As imperial favor grew — legalized under Constantine in 313 and made the empire’s official orthodoxy in 380 under Theodosius — Christianity’s leadership increasingly mirrored imperial hierarchy. Popes, bishops, priests, and deacons formed early; the College of Cardinals—upper management—crystallized centuries later, particularly by the 1000s.

The entire purpose of this structure was to ensure that power remained centralized and controlled. To ensure that powerful men in institutions still got to decide who was in favor and who was not. Priests who heard our confessions and forgave us our sins; Popes who interpreted the word of God.

The structure has evolved since then; we’ve got Protestants and Evangelicals and all other branches now, but what has remained intact in every case is simple:

Someone else tells you when you’re okay.

Someone else declares that you are saved.

If you follow the rules set by the Church, by a select group of men, then you will spend eternity in the company of angels. Or you will prosper. Or, or, or.

That’s the story they have been telling us, desperate for us to believe it, for thousands of years.

But it’s not a true story.

The true story was there, all along.

You Do Not Need Permission

It’s hard to overstate how much it shook Biblical scholars, when these erased gospels were discovered. For so long we thought there was only one truth about what Jesus said, and what Christians believed.

But it turns out there was a whole other story all along. As Cynthia Bourgeault says, “To Bible scholars who had grown up on the master story, the worldview emerging from these recovered texts looked like a theological version of Alice in Wonderland. They were staring at a Christianity that was simply unfathomable.”

The first temptation was to dismiss the texts as imposters. But the evidence wouldn’t cooperate. In fact, the Gospel of Thomas is shown to be as old or even older than Mark, the earliest of the canonical gospels.

Those texts were authentic. And they were original. And they were buried so deep it was only a miracle that we found them, after fifteen hundred years.

Which begs the question: what in the world did they say?

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The Room Where It Happened

We weren’t in the room where imperial power met church power. But when you compare what was left out with what was kept in, two patterns emerge.

But when you compare what they took out with what they left in, there are two very simple common denominators.

First, most of the excluded texts recognize Mary Magdalene as Jesus’ partner, the “apostle of apostles,” a leader in her own right. The Gospel of Phillip even notes that Jesus “loved Mary” and “kissed her often” on the mouth, which fueled modern intrigue but it misses the larger point.

This isn’t a story about sex, as Cynthia Bourgeault points out in her fantastic book The Meaning of Mary Magdalene. It’s a story about love, and power, and where it really comes from. And in all of the erased texts, women are presented as equal in divinity to men. In the Gospel of Thomas, in fact, Jesus gets so exasperated by his own apostles’ attempt to figure out a hierarchy that he says, “When you are able to make two become one, the inside like the outside, and the outside like the inside, the higher like the lower, so that a man is no longer male and a woman, female but male and female become a single whole… then you will enter in.”

Yeah. You can see why Rome didn’t like that one.

So that was the first thing that was in all the erased texts: we are all equal in the eyes of God.

(And to be clear: the canonical gospels point in this direction too. But in the officially approved New Testament, that witness is read alongside passages attributed to Paul that have often been used to silence women and denounce others — a tension for another day.)

Second, and just as threatening to Empire: salvation does not require permission.

In text after text, when people ask what does it take to be saved, the answer is simple.

You do not need anyone’s permission to be saved. You need only follow your own heart.

There is a lot more to say about what was buried, but I want this to be really simple right here, because in the end, it is really simple.

You do not need anyone’s permission to be saved.

You only need to look inside your heart, and listen to the truth that is inside there, inside all of us, every last one of us.

What’s in there? Well. That’s the plot twist.

Missing Pages

When the Gospel of Mary Magdalene was recovered, in Egypt in 1896, its origins were murky. It had been buried inside a wall, uncovered, but somehow survived 1500 years intact? Seems unlikely. But however it survived, the manuscript was beautifully preserved — with gaps. Six opening pages and four from the middle were missing.

Two earlier Greek fragments later turned up, confirming its wider circulation. But interestingly, those missing pages were missing in every version. We have never recovered the beginning of the Gospel. And we have never recovered one other section, the lacuna, the missing pages, that show up when Mary asks Jesus,

“How do we know the truth?”

If the truth is inside of us — if the truth is to be found within, and not from external voices or sources — how can we know what that truth is?

Mary asks that question.

Presumably Jesus answers her.

And the answer is missing.

No one, no scholar and certainly not me, can say for certainty what is in those missing pages; for that matter, no one can say that those missing pages are absolutely the truth. But maybe that’s the point, isn’t it?

The answers are not to be found outside of us. The answers are inside of us.

There’s a reason they are on the run.

There’s a reason we do not need to be afraid.

There’s a reason they are.

Listen.

Listen.

Listen.

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Sources: Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (1979); Karen King, The Gospel of Mary of Magdala (2003); Cynthia Bourgeault, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene (2010).

I used to not have a life. I only had a job.

Here’s the plot twist. I loved my job. I loved it. My boss, Kathy Bremer, was an amazing, heart-forward woman who once, when I screwed up three times in a row, said, “That’s terrific! That means you’re learning!”

(She’s still wonderful. She wrote a book on how to find work you love. Read it!)

On the occasions I wasn’t messing up, we had so much fun. One of our first ideas, for anti-tobacco, was to connect local radio stations with junior high students. The kids would write and produce their own commercials, and the best one would get a paid advertising run. The advertising was a MacGuffin; the real impact, we said was all the creative energy we could unleash from the kids and the radio stations. We were exhilarated and terrified when we won, because no one had ever done this before, but we did, and it worked better than we had imagined.

For ten years, that was my job. Coming up with creative ideas, with amazing people, to make the world a better place. Honestly. What could possibly be better than that?

When we started, we were small, and no one noticed us, so we could do what we wanted. Sometimes we wanted to stay up all night writing a proposal and staging a production of Annie in the hallways (“it’s a hard knock life”). Sometimes we wanted to help a nonprofit launch a prenatal intervention program. Sometimes we wanted to see if we could take an absurd abstinence initiative and make it cool and open minded. Sometimes we pitched a sound reduction campaign for CDC because if we won it, I said, we could officially brand ourselves the “No Sex, No Drugs, No Rock and Roll” creative team. (We did not win it.)

The only problem was, we were really successful. And then the people in New York who had all the power, who had never met us, noticed our money. And then they decided they wanted to get involved.

And then the story changed.

It’s just like what happened to Mary Magdalene, if you take some fairly dramatic creative license, and the long view.

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Tale As Old As Time

When last we left Mary Magdalene, she was just like me, just like all of us, when we are at our best. She was working with her closest friends, doing work that she really cared about, making a difference. In her case, she was continuing the work of her best friend (some scholars think, possibly, her lover), who had been crucified because his rebellion threatened the Roman Empire. But even after his death, his cause continued. Christians continued to meet in secret, sharing eucharistic feasts, offering comfort, building momentum, continuing to insist that only God is God, the Emperor does not have the final say.

We say the Apostles’ Creed now without even thinking about it (probably best not to think too much about it anyway), but in those days, just to whisper the words “I believe God the Father almighty,” was to commit an act of treason that could get you killed.

This is not the part me and Mary have in common, but here’s the part we do: Mary, and the other disciples, were really successful. Even without Jesus, the movement was continuing to grow. More and more people were rebelling, saying “Caesar is not God, only God is God,” and meanwhile, the Roman Empire was stuttering. Three hundred years after Jesus’ death, long after Mary herself had died, thousands of years before air travel, the message of Jesus — love above all, there is no God but God — had traveled around the world. Before the printing press existed, the gospels and stories were being translated, one word at a time, into ancient Coptic texts in Egypt and Greece and Israel.

Mary and the other apostles were working in secret; after all the first wave had passed on, their followers were continuing to tell the story.

Sometimes we tell a story, and sometimes that story is true. Sometimes power sees that story, and claims it for themselves. And sometimes power sees that story, and is threatened by it, and tries to stamp it out.

They can try to cancel our stories, or our late night shows, when we say something they don’t like.

They can take over our stories, claim them for themselves, bleed them for power until they aren’t recognizable any more. (That’s what happened to me.)

They can try to bury our stories, if they’re too threatening. They can rebrand us as prostitutes or footnotes. (That’s what happened to Mary.)

But there’s something really cool about stories.

Stories, unlike people, don’t die.

Stories, unlike people, can always be resurrected.

It’s happening right now.

Can you hear it? No? That’s okay. It’s chaotic out there. Empire is screaming, and Empire is on a rampage.

But that’s because Empire is scared. That’s because Empire is losing.

Do you hear the other story? The truer story? The story they’re still trying desperately to hide?

The one that Karl Reinhardt found in Cairo, in 1896? The one that DaVinci painted, in the Last Supper?

That story. That true story. That story that has been right there, inspiring the good and terrifying the wicked, since before the Roman Empire.

It’s not a story about religion. It’s a story about rebellion, and what happens when power gets scared. It’s a story about what people can do, no matter what.

Do you hear it?

Do you want to?

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“Did you know there was a Gospel of Mary?!”

This is what I shrieked to Steve, sometime just before the pandemic, when I stumbled into that bit of history.

I grew up the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, then I married one, so I assumed I was pretty up to speed on basic Christianity. My vision of Mary Magdalene was the prostitute who Jesus took pity on, who got on the nerves of the real apostles and sang a ballad in Jesus Christ Superstar, claiming everything was all right when it clearly wasn’t.

But it turns out she wrote a gospel? She was an acclaimed leader of the early Christian church?

I was furious. It was sort of like a reverse Santa Claus situation; all my life I’d been told something wasn’t true, when it was.

Mary Magdalene wasn’t a footnote, or a random foot washer. She was the Luke Skywalker of the early Christian resistance. She was a hero. She was a main character! Check out the painting above, of the Last Supper, by DaVinci. See Jesus? Look to his right. Who is sitting on his right side?

Is that a guy? Or is that Mary Magdalene, with the flowing blonde hair, the bosom, his literal mirror image? DaVinci had an opinion.

And I, who grew up in the church, married into it, have known the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer by heart all my life, I never had any idea!

It is a shock, to discover that stories we believed all our lives were, in fact, not the truth at all.

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Some Of This Is On Me

Now, to be fair, I’m an idiot. For one thing, I read DaVinci Code when it first came out, and that is, of course, the entire point of the book. Somehow, though, I didn’t retain that information. No, when Mom asked me what I thought of the book, I said to her, “It’s weird.”

“What’s weird?” she asked. We were probably going to a movie. I was in my early 30s and Mom was my best friend; she had raised me, of course, and her faith was the central fact of her life. Once, describing the way God had saved her when she was lonely and unloved, she said “From the time I was a very little girl, I thought God was holding my hand.”

I shrugged. “It’s just weird, reading the book, to think, like, what if Jesus was a real person? Like someone who actually lived in history?”

Poor Mom.

“That’s the entire point!” she said to me. I don’t think she was angry. I think she was stunned. It was like raising a kid to not believe in gravity. “Who did you think Jesus was?”

I paused to consider.

“I guess, I always thought Jesus was a metaphor.”

Poor Mom. “A metaphor?!”

I tried to reassure her. “Like, a really good metaphor.”

Yes. it’s true. We all know my obsession with stories, so I guess it makes sense that I thought Jesus was, in fact, an elaborate narrative device. To be fair to me, I did believe in gravity, and the same document that told me Jesus was the literal son of God also told me that the world was created in seven days. I knew the first bit was a metaphor, so I assumed the second bit was, as well.

Stories are tricky, aren’t they? Telling the difference between stories and history, between myth and fact, that’s tricky too. To this very day, I am still trying to figure out how much of the Iliad and Odyssey is history, and how much is made up. (Don’t you wish you lived with me? Poor Steve.)

Why Does It Matter?

Also to be fair, I am extremely far from the only person who wonders where the line is, between story and truth. I was amused, and then touched, when I married Steve, to discover how many people are tormented by this question. More times than I can count, we would be invited to dinner with an older couple, and sometime after the main course, the wife (always the wife) would say to the husband (always the husband), “It’s okay, you can ask him,” and the husband, usually in his 70s or 80s, almost always a pillar of the church, would lower his head and whisper,

“I’m not sure Jesus was literally resurrected after crucifixion.”

And they’d look up, anxious, like they were going to be cast out onto the cobblestones from their own home, and Steve would smile.

“Neither were the gospels,” he would say. And he’d point out that in the oldest gospel, Mark, there was no resurrection scene. Jesus never came back at all. And in the other three gospels, there were three different versions of the story. Once Jesus ate breakfast on the beach. Once he walked through a wall, scared everyone to death, and vanished again. And once he dared Thomas to touch him, to prove he was real, because no one believed he was actually there. On the point of the resurrection, the gospels are profoundly, fully, irrefutably unreliable.

”What if I don’t believe in the physical resurrection?” they would ask.

”What if resurrection is bigger than that?” he would reply.

The Opposite is True

Turns out I was completely wrong, when I traumatized Mom. Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t a metaphor. He was a real person who lived in history. He may or may not have been the literal son of God; he may or may not have been literally resurrected after death. Personally, I suspect that part really was just a metaphor. (I say this trusting that Steve will not throw me out on the cobblestones, though Mom might be kind of bummed.)

But it doesn’t change the story so powerful it split the human calendar in two.

Just like Mohammed, just like Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth was not a metaphor. He was a person alive in history. He was really born into occupied Palestine, when the Roman Empire was oppressing ordinary people.

He really said that there was no God but God. He really said to care for the poor and the downtrodden. He really infuriated the emperor by claiming they had no clothes. He really was killed because he refused to bow to Caesar.

But the stuff that happened after he died? The stuff about Mary, and the underground leaders of the original Christian movement? The original mega-merger between Christianity and Empire? That stuff, it turns out, most of us don’t know at all.

And that’s the stuff that is still driving history today. From the fall of the Roman Empire to the Dark Ages, to the rise of the Christian Right, all the way through to the tragic events in Utah and Colorado yesterday. It’s all right there. It’s not a metaphor. It’s not about what you believe. It’s history.

And we’re still living in it.

And the story is still asking us to listen.

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(Flash forward fifteen hundred years.)

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It is January, 1896. Dr. Carl Reinhardt is standing in front of a well-stocked stall in the largest antiquities market in Cairo. This market is a clearinghouse; locals display shelves crammed with ancient Egyptian vases and cups and pendants, eager to bargain for a deal with Western cash. Meanwhile, scholars and archaeologists stand shoulder to shoulder with rich tourists, trying to discern between history, treasure and trash.

The setting is straight out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I suspect Dr. Reinhardt doesn’t look anything like Harrison Ford, and I’m almost certain he isn’t carrying a bullwhip. He’s a scholar from Berlin whose expertise is the study of ancient Egyptian languages (including Coptic), papyri, and texts. This is how he knows the vendor is lying to him. What he doesn’t understand is why.

There is little doubt that the papyrus he is holding is authentic. Later testing will reveal that it dates back to the fifth century AD, when an Egyptian translator painstakingly copied it from its original Greek. In those days, every manuscript was a unique work of art; the only way to copy a book was to literally write it out letter for letter. In an era when reading was a rare skill, writing and translating were even more so. In the ancient world, most stories were passed down orally. Only the most precious stories were written down, let alone copied and preserved.

Dr. Reinhardt can see this document has been remarkably well preserved. Eventually he will learn it is comprised of 72 sheets of papyrus, 141 pages, hand stitched together to form a codex (book), a leather like material stretched over a wooden frame as the cover. His close investigation will show that the first eight pages, and three pages from the middle, have been pulled out. What was in the missing pages, he wonders.

(More than 125 years later, we still don’t know.)

Dr. Reinhardt asks the vendor where the manuscript came from but the answer is vague. Something about a “peasant” who discovered it “inside the walls” of a Christian burial site. When the vendor presents the codex to Dr. Reinhardt, it is nestled in a box of feathers, which is certainly not how it was found when it was discovered.

Most written documents from antiquity are found preserved in an airtight casing, usually enamel or stone. If this codex had really been tucked inside a wall for the last fifteen hundred years, nothing would remain but dust. And yet here is a book, nearly intact, with most of the pages still readable, all of them inscribed with neat Coptic text.

Dr. Reinhardt acquires the manuscript and takes it back to Berlin, careful not to damage the fragile pages. He enters it in the Papyrus Collection of the Berlin Museum and it gets a label: Berlin Codex 441.

Now picture the scene at the end of Raiders, because this is essentially what happens to this codex. It vanishes from the public eye for nearly fifty years.

History Has Its Eyes On You

It’s not that no one was paying attention to this mysterious papyrus. Three times, scholars attempt to translate it.

Three times, history interferes.

First, when World War I breaks out, much of the Museum’s collection is placed into storage for protection and scholarly work halts. After the war, Carl Schmidt, a Coptic specialist, begins to work on the translation, but he is in poor health and dies in 1938, before he completes his translation. The pages linger, unfinished, until Europe is engulfed in a second global war. Allied forces begin to bomb Berlin. Scholars at the museum evacuate the codex for safekeeping, eager to preserve the story it tells, keen to protect the history it represents. The archive where it is stored is flooded and parts of the collection stored there are destroyed altogether. Berlin Codex 441 survives, but not without damage. In the humidity and poor storage conditions, some pages sustain water damage, making the Coptic text — already 1200 years old and counting — even harder to decipher.

When the War is finally over, Berlin Codex 441 ends up on the wrong side of the wall, in East Berlin, where Cold War tensions make international collaboration on historic works nearly impossible.

It will be another ten years before the Berlin Codex 441 is finally translated, first into German, by Walter Till, early in 1955, and then, later the same year, into English, the full translation appearing in the Journal of Biblical Literature.

Where it finally becomes known as what it always has been: a nearly complete version of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene.

The Room Where It Happened

In the year 380 A.D., at the insistence of Emperor Constantine, the Edict of Thessalonica declared Christianity to be the official state religion of the Roman Empire. It was history’s original mega-merger and its implications are still unfolding in your life, and in mine, to this very day. So many of the headlines and the hatreds that are driving us can be traced back precisely to that back room deal. The arc of history split forever on that day, and we will never know what might have happened if Christians had said no to Constantine.

But all this time, there has been another history. A secret history. A hidden history, which we might cheekily describe as herstory, a story that was buried and scratched out and erased. But a story that is still true, and is still alive, just beneath the surface, right now, right here, imploring us to remember.

We are beginning just this moment in history, just barely, to realize the story we’ve been telling for millennia, a story presented by four eyewitnesses, a story so powerful it split history in two, that story was never complete.

It matters not at all what you believe in, who you believe in, what religion you practice, or if you practice any religion at all.

The truth is, part of that history was buried, and not by accident.

Listen.

This story is still unfolding.

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Sources: Karen King, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, 2003 and Walter Till’s original translation, 1955. Also Steven Spielberg.

I’ve written before that 2006 was the magic hour of my life, the most beautiful year I’ve ever known, the year I finally met my match.

We can match my marriage to the technology timeline: Online dating was a thing, but it was still kind of scandalous, and I had only tried it once, years before. The first time I tried it was a web site that I’m not sure still exists and whose name I can’t remember; it claimed to get over superficial impressions by letting people get to know each other organically before sharing pictures. Pictures were shared after four interactions, and the first several men I matched with blocked me as soon as they saw my picture.

This did not raise my confidence, but one guy bravely stayed the course, so even though my warning signs were blinking this guy is not for you, I agreed to a first date. He was searchable online, I could see the evidence that he had in fact sold his early tech company for a significant amount of money to Disney, which explained why he was now building a literal cabin in the woods, an hour outside of town.

He wanted me to come visit him in his cabin in the woods, and I am perfectly aware that this sounds like the start of an absurd horror movie, but as my friend Darrie can attest, it is absolutely the truth, because cell phones did exist in 2006, and I called her on the phone as I bumped through a gravel road in the wilderness.

“This is his name and this is his address,” I said to Darrie. I was not foolish enough to call Mom and tell her about this location, she would have been reasonably panic stricken. “In case he tries to kill me, ha ha.”

And for a little bit I worried he might. Fifteen minutes after I arrived at this cabin lit only by lanterns, my date invited me to try a sound bath sensory deprivation chamber he’d been building, and soon I found myself lying on a table in a dark room, alone, wearing headphones, while the guy closed the door behind him (DID THAT THING JUST LOCK?), saying that he would finish up preparing our dinner in the kitchen, I should relax, he would be back soon. I remember lying on the table and looking at the open window and thinking maybe I should just climb out, but he lived in the woods, and I didn’t know if I could find my car, and he could catch me anyway, if he wanted to, if I made a run for it.

(Note to everyone reading this: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME, YOURS OR ANYONE ELSE’S. I am well aware that in a different genre, this could have been how my story ends.)

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In the end, he turned out to just be eccentric, and I hope he found his eccentric match. But it did scare me off online dating for the next several years, lest I end up ONCE AGAIN ON A TABLE IN A DARK ROOM IN THE WOODS.

To top it all off, I don’t know if you remember, but back in those days, the big media story was the insight — backed by science!!! — that as a woman at the age of 38, I was more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to get married. Literally, the odds were that the next guy who wanted to date me likely WOULD want to kill me, rather than marry me. I’m not kidding. This was the literal headline in the newsmagazines, back in 2006. Single Woman Likely To Get Killed By Terrorist.

The experts were telling me every day that I had no chance of having my dreams come true, and the real world was doing its best to back them up. Maybe the next time I found myself on a table in the woods, it wouldn’t turn out in my favor.

It was GRIM out there, people, and time was running out.

Meanwhile, In North Carolina

Online dating in 2006 was not a common thing among people past their 20s, and Steve had his profile private, so congregants wouldn’t accidentally stumble upon him. After years toiling online, he had already met “both the Presbyterians” in the Western North Carolina dating pool, and he was also starting to lose faith.

He had planned a trip to Atlanta the next month for the Festival of Homiletics, aka ComiCon for ministers, and thought perhaps there would be a wandering Presbyterian in town for the gathering, so he did the one and only search he would ever do outside of Asheville, and he specified women around his age, college educated, and at least open to the possibility there might be a God.

The very first profile that popped up was mine, written just one day earlier. Granted, there was no picture (I wasn’t going to make that mistake again), but the letter was funny and sharp, and as he said to a friend of ours recently, “I’d gotten to the point where I was desperate just for someone who could offer subject-verb agreement. Now this woman is talking about the axis of evil and she also wants to go paddling? Is this even possible?!”

So he wrote me back, the first lines of the first letter he ever wrote to me, “The Chattoga? Really?”

I read that sentence on a Saturday morning, and as I’ve said before, reading the email that followed gave me a shivery feeling, like I had gotten a letter from my best friend. I sat at my desk in my little house, and thought, how can this be real?

What Is Happening In Here?

After I read Steve’s first email, on a Saturday morning, an email that made me laugh and think of a million stories I wanted to tell, I immediately wrote back. But here’s the thing: I wasn’t trying to impress a new guy, I wasn’t trying to flirt, thank goodness, that has never worked out well for me. All I was trying to do was write a letter back to my best friend, which I did. It was easy to do, all the material was right there.

He introduced himself by noting that he was a Presbyterian minister, “which I understand might be kind of weird.” I wrote to him that I was raised in a Presbyterian church, and my mom was a Presbyterian minister.

“Also my dad’s a judge, and my brother’s a psychologist,” I wrote. “Apparently the universe thinks I need very close supervision.”

I could even assure him that dating ministers had no way to scare me anymore: “My high school boyfriend was the minister’s son,” I wrote, and I told him a story: once Ben and I snuck into the church kitchen to make out during Sunday services, but our brothers tattled on our whereabouts, and we lost track of time.

So I have this extremely vivid memory of standing with my back pressed up against the oven burners, in a dark kitchen, my fingers clutching the edge Ben’s shoulders and my eyes peering past his ear, with my blue Oxford shirt at least partially unbuttoned, and the kitchen door swings open, and there stands his father, my pastor, wearing a robe and carrying a Bible, framed in the bright light, thundering, “What is happening in here!”

So right up front, Steve knew that not only was I unlikely to hold it against him for being a Presbyterian minister, I also could endure significant religious trauma and laugh about it years later.

And right up front, I stopped trying to impress a guy I had never even met, and was just trading stories with my best friend.

Did THAT Really Just Happen?

I called Mom as soon as I hit send on that first letter. I couldn’t believe that this might be happening. A guy who could make me laugh out loud, a whitewater paddler, and a TarHeels fan? A man who looked at my list of three favorite books and said he absolutely agreed with me on Lonesome Dove, but when it came to Barbara Kingsolver he preferred Prodigal Summer to Poisonwood Bible? This was a fight I could imagine having for the rest of my life!

When I told her he was a Presbyterian minister, Mom went immediately to the presbytery registry, and looked him up.

“Robyn,” she whispered, as if she could hide her excitement, “He’s a Rhodes Scholar.” So the first thing Steve ever did to Mom was delight her, and I love that.

I hung up the phone on that Saturday morning, after I sent my response, and I went out for the day. My office was having a picnic, and I took Boo, my poodle, out to the park. We laughed with my friends, and played with my dog, and ate hot dogs, and all day long, I had a secret. All day long, there was a little buzzing in the pit of my stomach, not a certainty, but a question.

Is it possible, I thought to myself, all day long, in the bright yellow sunshine and the echoing neighborhood park, is it possible that my whole life just changed and I don’t even know it yet?

Somewhere out there, a Presbyterian minister was reading a letter from me. Sometime today, this guy was going to read my response, and either he’d feel the same way as me, or he wouldn’t. He might not. But maybe….

Is It Happening Again?

The feeling came again, when I was at the movies with Mom and Darrie that night, and my Blackberry buzzed (2006!), and it was five pages back from him, and just like that, we were off and running.

Steve admitted that he had not read the third book on my list, Pride and Prejudice, “because I’m a guy,” but it didn’t matter, because from the beginning our relationship was conducted like a Jane Austen novel, with the romantic leads writing each other letters back and forth.

We took immense pleasure in seeing who could write the most delightful emails to the other. It was competitive entertainment, from the very beginning. I’d read a letter from him, bust out laughing, and then sit down and try to one-up him, as best I could. It set up a dynamic for our relationship that exists to this very day, where we try to delight the other with our wit and insight, and we’re always both trying to win.

So. The world is terrible right now. The experts are once again telling us that we are likely to be killed by a terrorist rather than get a happy ending; and the crazy technology guy in the woods is trying to lock the door behind us.

All that is true. But I have a feeling I haven’t had inside of me since 2006, when I read that first letter from Steve. I have that same buzzy feeling I had in the park that day.

When I met Steve, it signaled the end of one act of my life, and the start of another. I can’t predict the future, of course. The current catalyst isn’t as clear cut as a letter from Steve, but my body recognizes the feeling. But I’ve been working with this idea for some months now, and something inside me is buzzing, against all reason, with the same question I had in the park, that Saturday, almost twenty years ago.

Did your whole life change and you don’t even know it yet?

Granted, it’s just a feeling. But God, does it feel good.

And for the first time in a while, I legitimately can’t wait to see what happens next.

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Hi. Yes, you. You fucking monsters. We’re coming for you.

You might think you’ve had a big victory. Did you feel no shame, cheering for stealing money from children and sick Americans, in order to feed the rich? I feel sad for you. You’re broken inside. I know it haunts your dreams at night; I know the effort it must take you, to squeeze your eyes so tight shut that you can’t see the suffering around you, so you can pretend it isn’t happening.

How awful it must be, to live inside of you.

And you know, don’t you, that it’s coming to a close. I can tell you know. Your behavior is giving you away.

You call things big and beautiful as if that will hide the fact that they are foul and awful — but you’re not fooling anyone.

We’re onto you.

We see how frantic you’re getting. Crueler and crueler, because you know the walls are closing in.

In Germany a few generations back, most people kept their head down because they were scared of the monsters. Have you noticed? I know you have. Our heads aren’t down. We’re standing straight up.

You’re opening concentration camps, and giving them branded merchandise, “Alligator Alcatraz,” and threatening to put political opponents in there. It’s not because you’re strong. It’s because you’re terrified and you’re weak, and we can see it.

Jeff Bezos wrote in a letter to his shareholders, “I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified.” We get it. You want us to be afraid. As long as we’re cowering, as long as we are spiraling with fear and anxiety, you can control us. Fear makes us feel weak. It makes us feel like victims. It makes us think we need someone strong to protect us.

You’re not strong. You’re a moron having a foam bubble party on a yacht while the world burns. You’re a bully standing in front of warehouse cosplaying a tyrant and thinking it’s funny.

Oh, you can do damage. And you keep doing damage, thinking more of us will cower. But guess what?

We are not afraid of you.

Look me right in the eye.

We are not afraid of you.

We are onto you.

We see the ludicrousness of your gazillion dollar weddings, and we chase you out of the city. We’ve scared you out of your own town halls, the representatives of the people who are too afraid to serve the people. That never turns out well.

We see you trying to get Jewish people to be terrified of a 33 year old brown skinned man with the foreign-sounding name who is standing up to Empire, as if that’s never happened before.

Now you pass this bill, and you expect us to cower. You expect us to howl, to weep, to rend our garments, everything is lost, everything is ruined, we are so afraid.

Boy did you get that wrong.

I have never been less frightened in my life. I am doing things you can’t even see, I am making plans you can’t even imagine, and I am not alone.

My heart breaks for those who are suffering. Your cruelty is something that you will have to answer for, some day, but I’m not thinking about you, except to say this.

I see you. We all see you. And we’re coming for you.

You’re not the hero of the story. You’re the monster, and history has always known what to do with monsters.

In this world, we don’t run from monsters. Monsters run from us.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Here we come. Your time is almost up, but us?

Oh, we’ve never been more ready.

Three. Two. One.

Run.

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And yet.

Book Seven of Harry Potter is also exciting because you know, deep in your heart you know, the good guys are going to win.

That’s how I’ve been feeling, these days. Scared, sure. But also excited. And ready.

Harry Potter. Great. I can hear you now. For one thing, isn’t J.K. Rowling cancelled, and hasn’t she kind of lost her mind? And also, hi, it’s a children’s book, at the core. I think we have moved beyond the time when a children’s book can comfort us! Man, Castellani, you are REACHING, here.

Well, first of all, J.K. Rowling studied classics at university — her parents wanted her to study something practical, but classics is what felt practical to her, and guess who was right? And you know what studying the classics taught her: it taught her, this is how a story works. This is how a story always works.

From Homer to Harry Potter, there are these essential truths.

The story starts with something broken, a kid in a closet, a world at war. (Iliad starts nine years into the Trojan War, a world already weary of a never-ending battle.)

The story starts with a world that isn’t working right, with a hero who isn’t yet ready to make a change.

And then it starts to turn.

I wouldn’t read anything J.K. Rowling writes these days; she has fallen into a vortex of pain and fear and anger, and at this moment, she can’t see her way out of it. She told a FANTASTIC and DEEPLY TRUE story about wizards, but at this moment in history, she’s not a reliable narrator.

But you know who is?

Galileo!

Ha, didn’t see that coming, did you?

You scientists are going to like this one. So are those of you who might miss my husband in the pulpit.

Prone To Ranting

When we were first dating, Steve published an opinion editorial on Jesus’ point of view about immigrants: pro, if you recall. He published the piece at Christmas time, he remembers, and the title was “Oh Come Let Us Deport Him.” He noted that Jesus was an immigrant, that in the big picture, we are all immigrants. (This was 2006, by the way. Sometimes we take a while to learn.)

He went to look up his piece online, when it published, and zoomed down to the comments section. Those of you who know my husband know he likes affirmations, but those of you who have been in the comments section know that is not a place to find them.

The top rated comment under his article said the following: “I know this guy. He’s a self proclaimed Christian prone to ranting.”

Steve looked at the comment, and his face fell. I stood beside him, and looked at the comment.

“A self-proclaimed Christian prone to ranting,” I said to him. Then I grinned and poked him. “I mean, he’s not wrong.”

I can’t say if Steve is still a self-proclaimed Christian, that’s for him to write about (read his memoir!), but I can tell you, he is absolutely still prone to ranting, and we have been on a tear recently.

One of the things we have been talking about is Galileo. (I know you wish you lived with us. Come visit!), and so I invited Steve to rant about Galileo. Here he goes:

The Story of Galileo, by Steve Runholt

Back when I used to preach regularly (read: EVERY SUNDAY FOR A LONG TIME), I sometimes felt an urge, a need, to mix things up a bit. I did this as much for my listeners’ sake as for my own.

So every so often I would ask my congregants to close their eyes and join me on an imaginary journey. In the blink of an eye, as fast as the speed of thought, we would find ourselves on the other side of the world, thousands of years back in time.

“Imagine you’re a young shepherd boy,” I might say. “You’re standing out on a sun-drenched plain, a sling shot in one hand, a small stone in the other. Standing opposite you is a towering, heavily armed giant, holding a shield in one hand, brandishing a long, heavy sword in the other.”

Or: “Imagine you’re hunkered down in the hull of a small fishing boat. You and your companions had hoped to make an uneventful crossing of the Sea of Galilea but a fierce storm has blown up and now the boat is being tossed around on the foam-topped waves so violently you’re convinced you’re going to die.”

The exercise brought these old, old stories to life for us in a new way. Or that was the hope, anyway, that closing our eyes and engaging our imaginations would help us see or hear or smell things in them we had never experienced before and, thus, more vividly sense the truth of them for ourselves.

So. Imagine that you’re standing on the rooftop of your modest villa in Padua, Italy. It’s midnight and you’re holding a new type of telescope up to your eye, one the new type that has just been invented somewhere in Holland.

You do this over and over again, night after night, in part because you’re wonderstruck by what you’re now able to see with the aid of this powerful new device, and partly because you’re terrified by it.

You’ve determined—through empirical observation—that one of the foundational beliefs held by you and literally everyone else on earth is wrong: the only explanation for the phenomena you’re seeing is that the earth moves.

The truth shocks you as much as it will shock everyone who hears it but there is no denying it: the earth is not the center of the universe, the crowning jewel of God’s own creation. You’re not even sure the Sun is the center of the universe, a thought that is, even for you, unnerving.

When you finally publish your findings—backed up by irrefutable and easily repeatable observations--the response is swift and harsh and exactly what you expected. Thugs are sent to your villa to arrest you. You are brought before Church officials—the highest officials in Italy, perhaps the highest officials on earth—and charged with heresy.

THE EARTH DOES NOT MOVE, they thunder. They insist you recant, that you renounce this wildly subversive, utterly disruptive claim.

You know your reputation is on the line, along with your career at the university, and perhaps even your life. So you say nothing. Your silence is perceived as an act of defiance.

The same goons who came to your villa now drag you away, back to your cell. Underneath your breath, just loud enough for a few well-placed observers to hear, you whisper, E pur si mouve.

But it does move.

When he first raised that telescope to his eye, it was not Galileo’s intention to disrupt the established order of his time. He had not planned to challenge the theological and cosmological assumptions every European shared, from the simplest peasants to the Pope.

He raised that telescope to his eye because he was curious. In effect, he gazed at the cosmos for fun, because he loved the experience of seeing wondrous new things.

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Galileo Is My Guide

Okay, this is Robyn again. The reason I love this Galileo story, the reason I’ve been getting strength from this Galileo story, the reason I have been singing the Indigo Girls around the house, is I think we are having a Galileo moment in history right this moment. I really do.

I think, right at this moment in history, when Voldemort is in full power, and no one listened to Steve about immigrants back in 2006, when we have been living in this state of compromise for such a long time and we are more than nine years into a Trojan War, I think Galileo is among us.

And I think there’s more than one of him.

And I think they’re telling us a true story in lots of different ways.

No, I’m not gonna give you the punchline yet. Myself, I’m still listening. But I think it’s becoming clear.

Also, as we’ve said before, no one is coming to save you. Not Harry Potter, definitely not me, also not Galileo. You are the hero of this story. So I’m going to just ask you a question, here, today, as we move forward side by side into this terrifying, unstable, incredibly exciting world.

What do we believe today, in the same way people once believed the world was flat?

What do we believe, what have we believed for so long that we have forgotten it wasn’t always true?

What do we think is true about the world, but is really just a story?

Who is trying to show us something better?

Whose crime is looking up the truth?

Imagine it’s Book Seven, or Year Nine of a long war. Imagine a crucial moment is upon us, because it is. Imagine you know you’re going to win, because you are. Imagine you’re absolutely ready, because you are.

Look all around you. Try to peer past your blind spots. Now close your eyes and listen. Listen with an open mind and a curious heart.

What do you believe, now?

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And I was kind of embarrassed, and I kind of whispered, “Actually, I’m doing pretty good.”

I know!!!

Last week I was on a business call with a good friend, and we sort of talked about the latest insane bit of news, and my friend, who is a really positive and upbeat guy, by nature, said, “I just don’t think any of this is going to get fixed in my lifetime.”

And I said, “Oh, I don’t know about that. I think we’re right in the middle of figuring it out!”

I haven’t been posting because I haven’t been despairing, and I haven’t been sure what to say about that.

I know what’s going on. I know. And I’m not taking it lightly. My Senators, all GOP sellouts, are going to put me on a “do not call” list if I don’t stop ranting into their answering machines, and my family text chain this morning is workshopping sign ideas for Saturday. The one below, from Steve, is my favorite so far.

We all know what is happening out there. It is objectively terrifying.

But, plot twist.

I am not afraid.

Did I Run Out Of Despair?

It’s reasonable to say to me, “You’re not afraid because you’re not the one in their sights.” And it’s true that middle aged pudgy white ladies are not ICE’s primary demographic. We can accuse me of living in a space of privilege, but that’s too narrow a view.

Because of course this is happening to me. This is happening to all of us, whether or not you recognize it. This week I re-read Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter From A Birmingham Jail.”

This is not happening to someone else. This is not happening somewhere else. This is happening right here, right now, to all of us.

We are all going to suffer. I know this. The thing is, we’ve been suffering for years, and maybe after the last decade, I’ve just run out of despair, and I’ve run out of anger. Like, all that stuff is just depleted. I go to hunt for anger or outrage and my cupboards are bare of those emotions.

I’ve been angry, I’ve been afraid, I’ve been desperate, and it hasn’t changed anything.

So I’m giving up on giving up.

You know how sometimes, when everything in life is going incredibly well, that you become terrified it’s all going to fall apart?

Well, I’m sort of living in the opposite state right now. Everything is quite objectively terrible, and somehow I am confident we’re all about to come together.

One of the things that people keep saying is “We are breaking things that will take generations to rebuild.”

But here’s the thing. If those things were working, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Maybe that’s how I feel, right now. Like, okay. We have made a giant mess. Time to clean it up.

I never had kids, but I feel kind of like a mom whose kids are behaving REALLY QUITE BADLY and I’m stepping in. And yes, understood, these kids have access to the nuclear codes and all our personal data. It’s not great. But I’m the grownup, and I’m taking charge.

And I’m not angry, because I’m just tired of being angry, angry doesn’t feel good inside of me.

And I’m not afraid, because something inside me, maybe it’s my storyteller, understands that this is just a season. A hard season. Objectively, a frightening season, and perhaps I should be more afraid.

Nevertheless. When I look inside myself right now, bizarrely, the only thing I can find is hope, and peace, and confidence.

God said “Fear Not”, and maybe I finally believe.

This is not okay.

But I think we will be.

Maybe that’s what I will put on my sign, on Saturday. See you there.

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In advertising, when we were making commercials, we used to say: it can be fast, and it can be good, and it can be cheap, but it can’t be all three. Choose two. If you want it cheap and you want it good, it won’t be fast. If you want it fast and cheap, it won’t be good.

It was an excellent rule of production, logical and helped to clarify: what do you care about most, and what are you willing to give up?

I have always loved writing, but at the beginning of this year, I realized, I wasn’t loving writing this anymore. Truth is, I hadn’t really been loving it for a long time.

Writing used to be my favorite thing to do, but I found myself dreading it. I second guessed my sentences, and my stories, and my publishing schedule. When I hit publish on a post, I’d think, oh thank God, that one’s done, and then I would start worrying about the next.

(My husband, a pastor who had to preach every Sunday, calls this “the relentless return of the Sabbath,” which makes me laugh.)

When I started to share my writing, I immediately came face to face with all the ways in which I was falling short. Substack started counting my metrics, and was constantly bugging me to improve them. Monetize! Re-stack! Share! Engage! They started sending me performance notifications and constant arrows indicating whether I’m “rising” or “falling” and did I gain or lose subscribers, views, income, etc.

And I started to play along. I was raised a capitalist girlie, prone to achievement; I’m competitive, and I want to win, and after a while, it became clear: you are losing.

And I started to feel stressed, and sad, and frustrated. This started to feel like something else at which I had failed. I’m not Glennon Doyle! I’m not Brene Brown! I’m a loser!

I say this because I think while a few of us don’t have substacks, most of us have this feeling, much of the time. Most of us feel like life has set some metrics for what success looks like, and we’re not stepping up.

This is not a story about substack. It’s a story about success, and what it really looks like.

Be Careful Here, Castellani

I spent most of my life following all the rules. Trying to be skinny enough and successful enough and work hard enough and pretty enough and funny enough and etc. etc. etc. In the corporate world for twenty-five years, my company kept setting higher and higher bars for revenue and profits and I kept working harder and harder to clear them, until I realized — it was all a game, and the bosses could change the rules whenever they wanted to. I watched my corporate overlords fire some of the best, smartest, most interesting people in the company, for absolutely no reason at all.

And I realized, oh. They can change the rules whenever they want.

The world is always setting very high targets of what success looks like, and the truth is, most of us can’t hit those targets most of the time. Fifty percent of Americans possess 2.4% of the country’s wealth, while the top one percent have thirty percent. If the economy were a pie, the majority of us are getting by on crumbs and slivers, and feeling bad about it.

And so I decided, ten years ago, I didn’t want to play that game anymore. And I walked away from it.

I’m not blind, or insane. I recognize that to survive in this world, at least at this moment in time, there are basic necessities, like paying your mortgage and having health care. And those basics are in doubt right now, for most of us, including me, by the way.

We’re not living in some utopia, and we can’t pretend that we are.

But. But. BUT.

I think we still have the power to give up, at least sometimes. At least a little bit.

And I have found there is immense power in that.

What If You Didn’t Care?

Writing has always been my favorite thing in the world — see the picture above. I don’t think I am particularly special, but writing has always been the thing I love the most, the way some people love baking, or science, or music, or coding. I think we all have something in our lives that brings us joy, that makes us feel whole, and writing has always been that for me.

But writing was suddenly starting to feel like a burden, like a constant beacon of failure. I kept feeling pressured, to “fix” my substack, and my life, to get bigger, to publish more often, to break through, whatever that means.

Not to mention, AI has made it clear that if I want to be really successful, the smartest thing I could do would be ask ChatGPT to write this essay; it would be faster and more reliable and it would definitely follow all the success algorithms.

It came to a head one Saturday morning. Steve and I were walking in the forest, and I said, maybe I don’t even like to write anymore.

When a computer could write this substack better than me, when I’m not going to hit the metrics the world cares about, why should I even bother?

And then I thought about how it feels when I lose myself in the flow, when I’m writing and something funny and true and interesting comes out of nowhere, and it hits me like a little zing, and I thought, I love that feeling. I don’t want to lose that feeling.

I thought, what I love about writing is how it makes me feel. And what I love about writing is when it makes other people feel good.

What if I wrote for those two reasons, and I gave up the third one?

What if I gave up on being successful?

Using the advertising model: You can have joy, and you can have meaning, and you can be a big success. Choose two.

And I thought, what if you just give up the success?

I thought, what if you just write when it makes you feel good, and you write because it makes you happy, and you write because it’s fun?

So that’s what I started doing, months and months ago. I decided this substack had only one rule:

I wasn’t allowed to stress about it.

This is a substack about flourishing, and goddamnit, we are going to flourish.

I am going to write because it is fun, and I am going to publish when I write something true that I think could be helpful. And I am going to ignore the stupid rules.

I am going to stop trying to be successful, on weird terms that hardly ever apply or pay off. I am going to go back to the basics, me at the desk, telling a story. Looking for the flow.

I’ve been doing it for months now. It has made a real difference.

The minute I start stressing about writing, I step back, and say, this is not what I’m doing here. I am here for joy, and I am here for purpose.

If you want a regular schedule and an algorithm designed to go viral, AI can do that. But that’s not what I’m aiming for any more.

The world tells us what success looks like, but we don’t have to listen to the world. It’s just a story.

You can have purpose.

You can have joy.

You can have success according to the capitalist oligarchs.

I choose two.

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If you haven’t noticed lately, our world is trying desperately to feed us fear. The news cycle, the algorithms on all our social media accounts, the standpoint of the press that “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Maybe you are among the many, many Americans and global citizens who have hit a tipping point in the diet of fear you are being fed by the world around you: completely sick of it to the point that you are just going to stop eating it.

Maybe you are still stuck in the cycle of doomscrolling and fearing for the future.

Wherever you find yourself individually, I am noticing collectively that there seems to be a cultural shift in how we are responding to fear. And that response is rooted in the science around how to face our fears – engaging in curiosity.

It turns out that curiosity is a good antidote to facing our fears. Curiosity does not necessarily extinguish our fears, but engaging in curiosity is an excellent way to stop letting fear take center stage in our lives. A podcast host and academic researcher and physician I follow, Dr. Kemi Doll, summarized it well in a recent podcast when she said that she wasn’t trying to stop her fear from existing; she just wanted it to stop being in the driver’s seat.

When fear is helpful vs. when it’s not

Feeling fear is a biological response to threat that keeps us safe and alive. Just this morning, my daughter came downstairs, heart racing, after waking up from a bad dream. “I dreamed a snake bit me, and I’m just scared of things that bite.”

“Well, that’s actually really good,” I told her. “Your body is teaching you how to keep yourself safe from things that bite, which can be dangerous. But I know it doesn’t feel good to be afraid.”

Where fear starts to come off the rails a bit is where a lot of us find ourselves, in a perpetual rinse and repeat of anxiety about some unknown future threat. We fear how things might or might not turn out, we fear what people might or might not do to us, we fear if things will or won’t work out. This constant cycle on repeat can highjack our brains and bodies in ways that are terrible for us.

Be more curious than you are fearful

In the workshop I have been leading on hope, my fantastic collaborator Robyn Castellani always reminds participants, “Be a little more curious than you are afraid.”

Her statement is so powerful, in large part, because it’s grounded in decades of scientific research that shows the antidote to coping with fear is curiosity. It also acknowledges that we can’t get rid of our fear, but we can push it to stage left.

I have noticed a lot of momentum building around this concept. Dr. Martha Beck’s recent book, Beyond Anxiety, is centered around the core concept and research that shows creativity and curiosity are some of the best (and often only) ways to pull ourselves out of a state of anxiety and fear.

This concept was echoed recently in a conversation between Suleika Jaouad (three-time cancer survivor and New York Times best-selling author) and Elizabeth Gilbert(also New York Times best-selling author), around fear centered on the launch of Suleika’s new book, The Book of Alchemy. During their conversation, they asked two journaling questions: “What are you most afraid of?” and “What are you most curious about?” They talked about how we must acknowledge our fears, leave them, and then move into a space of curiosity. One practical way to do this is to create a daily ritual of creativity: where you create for a set amount of time every day.

And I see this theme emerging in our HOPE workshop: a pattern of acknowledging our fears and then choosing to step into curiosity, creativity, and joy anyway.

For a long time, science focused on how fear inhibits creativity and curiosity, but we are now finding the opposite is true too: creativity and curiosity can dampen the impact or “voice” of fear.

Interventions designed to enhance your curiosity

Because of the many demonstrated benefits of curiosity, including greater life satisfaction, more engagement with work and even better academic performance, scientists have become interested in whether you can develop tools or interventions to increase curiosity.

In a recent meta-analysis, Schutte and Malouff summarized and analyzed the research of 41 randomized controlled trials (across 4,496 participants) that looked at the effectiveness of interventions designed to improve curiosity. What they found was that these interventions did, in fact, significantly increase curiosity. And these results held steady across a variety of types of interventions, age groups, and time periods (indicating lasting effects).

Interventions varied widely and focused on:

• Mindfulness to trigger non-judgmental awareness and curiosity

• Mystery, such as looking at a picture and guessing which city it was in

• Game playing, such as pretending to ride a bicycle in a video game

Interestingly, interventions designed to improve a more general sense of curiosity were more effective than those that focused on a specific realm of curiosity, and interventions that incorporated either mystery or playing games were especially effective. And these interventions were proven to work on so many people – children, adults, health care workers, employees in work settings, etc.

Interestingly, interventions that used mystery had some of the most robust effects. This means leaning into something you don’t really know much about is an excellent way to build curiosity.

My family and I have a near weekly ritual of exploration – we find a place, a store, a park, a restaurant that we have never been to before, and then we anchor ourselves to that new thing and explore the mystery of discovering that place. The meta-analysis found that the key thing to making mystery so effective is to focus on obtaining new information, new knowledge or learning new skills.

An act or ritual of curiosity

This week, go explore or do something that peaks your curiosity! You can prompt yourself by asking these three questions:

· What am I most afraid of right now? (You can write this down).

· What am I most curious about? (It can be related to your fear or totally separate. You choose).

· What is one thing I could do this week or every day for 15-30 minutes to lean into my curiosity?

Wishing you all a happy, mysterious week of discovery!

Thank you, Megan!!

Last week I wrote about my three-act storytelling workshop to help cancer survivors create hope, no matter what. One of my readers contacted me to brainstorm an issue that they’re having at work, saying that they wanted to help reset the narrative for their employees, but people were so distraught and cynical that they couldn’t imagine getting anyone to sit down for a workshop on hope.

They’re just not in that mindset at all, said this person. I get yelled at for being too optimistic.

And I understand. Sometimes you just don’t have the energy or emotional bandwidth to attend a long workshop, or read a long substack (!!), on why things aren’t so bad. And yet, I think we can all agree that wallowing in despair is not particularly beneficial for morale or our own mindset.

I am in that space myself, sometimes more frequently than I’d like, and I’ve built up a roster of one-line stories to get my own self back on track.

So if you don’t have time to attend a workshop, or if trying to give a talk on hope makes your coworkers cranky, then feel free to borrow any of these scientifically grounded one liners. :)

“I’m not putting that stinky fish in my boat.”

This is sort of the despair version of “see the river, not the rocks.” There are times when saying “see the river” feels a bit too happy, because you’re being assaulted by chaos and ugliness, from inside or out.

So what I do is picture myself on a kayak, paddling along while people yell insults and pelt rotting stinky fish at me from the shore.

I can’t stop people (or my own brain) from throwing rotten stinky fish at me. But I can damn well decide not to carry the fish with me. So when I hear something awful and rotten that doesn’t serve me, I say firmly, I am not putting that stinky fish in my boat, and I throw it back out, and keep paddling past.

“Don’t worry, it’s only the abyss.”

Sometimes everything is terrible, and there’s no point in denying that. But the terrible is always temporary, and the abyss is not the same thing as the end. So when I am drowning in despair over the state of the world or the state of my finances, I say “Don’t worry, it’s only the abyss,” which makes me laugh, and I carry on.

“Butterfly incoming.”

I wrote a while back about how we tend to forget that every transformation follows a period of turmoil, darkness and despair. Dark Ages before Renaissance; Good Friday before Easter; winter before spring. As Mary Magdalene said in her gospel, “Before resurrection, you must die all the way.” While in a cocoon, the caterpillar becomes goo. A literal puddle of goo.

So this reminds me, it is normal to come completely unglued, from time to time. It doesn’t mean we’re falling apart. It means we’re transforming.

Goo at the moment means butterfly, incoming.

“Time to Stockdale myself.”

There is one story I tell again and again, in workshops and in my own head, when my situation feels miserable. It is the story of the Stockdale Paradox; the story of Admiral James Stockdale who, after spending seven years in a Vietnam POW camp, said that “optimists died first.” When life is terrible, it’s not helpful to lie about it. But you can’t give up either, because, whoops, “pessimists died next.”

So if optimists and pessimists die during hard times, what are we left with? What story works? The Stockdale Paradox!

The Stockdale Paradox, the survival story, is one that acknowledges the awful truth of the present moment, but also believes that one day, life will have meaning and joy again.

As James Stockdale said, in all his years of torture and suffering, “I never lost faith in the end of the story.”

So when in doubt, I just remember to Stockdale myself, and I say, this is awful right now, but I’ll never lose faith in the end.

“Goddamnit, my life is a love story.”

Here’s the thing. I just get one life, and I’m not going to let the universe put me in some god-awful dystopia David Fincher head-in-a-box sort of narrative. I might not get to choose the setting of my story, but I get to choose the mindset, and my life is a love story, goddamnit.

So do what you must, universe. Have at it, oligarchs. I am not writing dystopia. The story I’m telling here is a story about love, and all that it can transform.

The story I’m telling is one that makes more of me, no matter what.

The story I’m living is one that bends towards the light.

The life I’m creating is one that I hope will be good for others, too.

So there.

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Last week I went to Seattle to lead an all-day workshop for women with recurrent ovarian cancer. The name of the workshop was “HOPE In Three Acts,” and our goal was to help women flourish, no matter what, by helping them to shift the stories they were telling inside their head.

This was the story inside my head, that day: What if this doesn’t work?

I’ve been doing my storytelling workshops for a long time, and I always have total confidence, because the science is rock solid, and who doesn’t love a good story? But the stakes felt different here, because I wasn’t working with nonprofit organizations or health care companies or advocacy groups looking for inspiration for their work.

I was talking to women who were living through the hardest season of their lives, and I was daring to tell them we could help.

And I couldn’t help but wonder: what if we were wrong?

What if this story didn’t work?

What if this story hurt?

A Story A Long Time Coming

This project has been a long time in the works; my research partner, Megan Shen, wrote about it a few weeks ago. Megan and I met when I did a storytelling workshop for the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care, about how to change the narrative around illness. Megan, a Ph.D. in social psychology, attended the workshop and thought I wonder if this would make a clinical difference for my patients?

There were signs, all along the way, that this partnership was going to be something transformative. Perhaps the first one was when Megan submitted the initial grant application for the research; she named our series, “Project HOPE.”

To quote Megan herself, “HOPE focuses on supporting women with recurrent ovarian cancer, which is often a challenging prognosis and illness journey. It pulls from the science around the power of storytelling, coping strategies and present mindedness, and community and social support to help women cope and dare I say thrive with the right now reality of their situation. Its goal is to find ways to help women with recurrent ovarian cancer thrive, even when their circumstances may be telling them it’s not possible to thrive here.”

I read her application and I thought, oh.

And I thought, Mom.

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A Story That Ended Terribly

I spent much of 2023 telling the story of the worst year of my life; the year my Mom spent dying. For thirty years, Mom was the director of a cancer center in Atlanta; her focus was on quality of life for her patients and their families. Her mission was to “Create Hope.” It was her mantra, the title of her newsletter, and the license plate on her car. She was a beacon of hope to everyone who knew her, able to craft meaning and joy and purpose out of the hardest circumstances.

Mom dedicated her life to the premise of hope and joy and love no matter what, which is why I was never able to get over the way her story ended. She lost her mind, she lost her faith, she even lost her belief that those around her loved her. She spent most of the last year of her life scared, and psychotic, and feeling alone (although she never was), and I just couldn’t bear it.

I could not bear that this was the way her story ended.

And so I took my own advice, and I changed it.

A Story That Started Over

The first workshop we did was over zoom, some weeks ago. I was anxious all day long leading up to it. I lit a purple candle, in honor of my Mom (it was her favorite color), and set it behind the computer screen, where I could watch its steady glow. The women filed in, and introduced themselves, talking about their work at a food pantry, and teaching yoga, and learning piano, and I got ready to start.

As I began to speak, explaining how stories work inside our brain, and how if we change our stories, everything changes, one of the women started to move around in her seat. She looked agitated, and finally she couldn’t help herself anymore, she waved her hand, she interrupted.

Oh God, I thought. It’s not working. I said, “Yes?”

And she said, “Can you please give this workshop to my doctor?”

I laughed, in relief, and explained, yes, in fact, we have had the same requests from providers who saw the pilot version of this workshop, and in fact have already received funding for a provider-focused version.

The zoom workshop went well, but it also felt that this next one, in person, was going to be the real test. Could we bring a group of women together, and could we create a story that would create hope?

This is what I was in Seattle last week to explore.

HOPE In Three Acts

For this workshop, we focus on telling three kinds of stories — hope in three acts. We talk about how to create a story that can help you feel strong and inspired, when you are suffering. We talk about how to craft a story that helps you find peace, joy and purpose in the midst of life’s deep uncertainty. And we close the workshop with a story about how to find meaning in grief and loss… through love.

Again, quoting the actual research scientist on our team, my partner Megan Shen:

“Our field is so centrally focused on cure at all costs that we often forget how to help the human side of our patients thrive. To find hope, joy, and love even during a hard diagnosis….We had hit on a nerve, a major need in this community. And I have seen that nerve pulse more strongly in recent years.”

As I sat in the hotel lobby a week ago today, waiting for Megan to pick me up so we could lead the day together, I wrote in my journal, using a purple pen, Mom, I hope you are here with me today, and I hope I make you proud.

Purple was Mom’s favorite color, and ever since she died, “purple in an unexpected place” has been our code. For more than ten years, when I need her, she shows up as purple — one time a dog dyed purple crossed in front of my car, another time an older woman dressed head to toe in purple danced down the street in front of me. I ask a question, and she answers it, in tones of purple.

We did the workshop, and as we introduced ourselves, I explained how I came to this work. I told the story of Betty Castellani, who started working with hope and cancer forty years ago, when no one was telling those stories. I talked about the decades of cancer survivors who shared our Thanksgiving meals and our holidays, who helped me build my house, who went to movies with us, who became our families.

This was my Mom’s story, and I told it

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A Story With A Twist At The End

When I began this workshop, the same thing happened as had happened on Zoom; a woman raised her hand, just as we got underway, asking “Do you need to have cancer to take this workshop? Can my family take it?”

We laughed and said, yes, we are working on that too, and we spent a wonderful day together. We spoke about hope and resilience and “this is what your brain looks like on stories,” and the source of suffering, and the source of joy. We talked about epigenetics, and how the stories we tell get coded onto our DNA, and last for generations.

We spoke about the fact that no one lives forever, but then we closed with a twist, with these words.

There’s no such thing as a happy ending. Because there’s no such thing as the end.

The end of one story is also, always, the beginning of another.

The story you tell will change your life. But far beyond that… it will change ours too.

Because when you tell us a story of a time you were strong, we all remember: we can be strong, too

When you tell a story of courage, courage resonates through generations.

When you tell a love story, the love lingers long after you are gone.

No one lives forever.

But your story?

Your story will never end.

Who knows what will happen from here — with this work, with these workshops, with these women, with all of us. It is all unknown.

But I take hope from this promise, above all else.

I couldn’t stand the way Mom’s story ended.

And so I changed it.

I couldn’t stand to live in a world without hope.

So, with all kinds of friends and partners, I am still trying to create it.

Oh, and one last thing. The next morning, in my journal, I told Mom about what had happened that day, the stories we had shared, the gratitude and the joy and the energy and the love the women offered, and I said, Mom, I hope I made you proud.

That night, in my hotel room, everything was purple.

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She was only nine years old, but her heart was already failing, and so was her immune system.

Then one day, the doors to her prison crashed open, in a burst of sound and light and chaos, and the world as she knew it was gone forever.

This is Lucy on the day we met her for the first time.

Lost

I’ve said before that the world is VUCA: volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. It always has been. It always will be. And anyone who tells you that they know how it’s all going to turn out is wrong. No preacher, no President, no prophet, no psychic, no pundit, no one can predict how our story is going to end. Perhaps it is the most painful truth of life as a human on this planet. There’s no such thing as an omniscient narrator.

People are losing their jobs, social service safety nets are being stripped away, legal immigrants are being torn from their families and shuttled to countries they do not know, while the President laughs at them.

There is anger and fear rippling through the air like heat waves you can almost see, and you don’t need to read the public health reports to know that more people feel depressed, more people feel lonely, more people feel despair, than in generations.

All my life my Mom was the most stable, most loving, most grounding force in my life, as sure as gravity, but in one night, it all fell apart, and she became someone I could not even recognize. In the years since she died, I have started to contemplate that perhaps Mom is not the only pillar of my life that I am going to lose. Perhaps she was just the first one.

Perhaps it is all going to fall away.

Does that make you feel insecure? Uncertain? Afraid?

I understand. Sometimes I am tempted to feel the same.

But then I look at Lucy.

There were forty dogs seized in the raid in Virginia. Forty dogs living in unbearable conditions, caged, in an unventilated shack, with no water and no food. The Sheriff’s office had to bring in environmental services to run fans in the shed to make the air safe enough for humans to breathe, before they could rescue the dogs.

The puppies were quickly adopted, but time was running out for the seven oldest animals, who were filthy, covered in fleas, terrorized. Carolina Poodle Rescue (CPR) drove a van in the middle of the night to save them, the day before they were scheduled to be put down. When CPR arrived, the keepers pointed to one dog, the oldest in the pack. She was nine years old, with a severe heart murmur, broken teeth, bare patches all over her back, cringing from human touch.

There’s nothing you can do for this one, the keepers said, She’s beyond saving.

Meanwhile, Steve and I were heartbroken at the loss of our beloved poodle Annie. Within a week, we were at CPR where I announced that one dog would not be enough to fill the void left by Annie; we would need to get two. We quickly chose Huck, who looked and acted exactly like every poodle I had ever loved: black and bright eyed and bounding with life. Meanwhile, the volunteer had to carry Lucy into the trailer because she couldn’t climb stairs. Lucy was pale in color, bare patches on her back, coat like a used Brillo pad. She pressed herself against the walls and cringed from our touch… but then she started to play with Huck. The two of them, who had never met before, romped and rumbled like puppies. I saw a spark, but I was uncertain. It seemed like most of her life was likely behind her, and I felt so much grief every time I lost a dog.

“My last two dogs died at the age of twelve,” I said, doubtful. “That means we would only have her for three years.”

“Yes,” said the volunteer, “But it will be the best three years of her life.”

So we took them both home.

Found

On our first walk in the neighborhood, a garbage truck barreled around the corner and reached its claw out like a Transformer to grab a garbage bin. Lucy, in an instant, somehow backed out of her harness, which was not a thing I knew was even possible and took off, a blur of raw terror. I was shrieking, thinking, oh God, I have lost this dog forever. I ran after her, into the backyard of one of those big old Montford mansions, towing Huck behind me.

An older man came out onto his patio, wearing only boxer shorts; he barely got a word out before I thrust Huck’s leash into his hand and took off through the back of his property, calling for Lucy.

She was just a white blur moving in and out of the trees. I knew if I was agitated she wouldn’t come to me — she barely knew me!! — so I dropped onto my hands and knees and started crawling across the back yard, cooing, trying to act submissive.

At which point this man’s wife came out into her own back yard to find her husband in his underwear holding a black poodle on a leash while a strange woman wriggled through the grass on her belly making submissive noises.

“What is happening?” she shrieked.

I mean, that’s not why we moved neighborhoods, but I’m not going to say it wasn’t a nice bonus.

Carolina Poodle Rescue said to us, when we got her, “She will eventually warm up to you, we think, but she probably won’t ever like most people.” It took a while for Lucy to adapt, and we still don’t walk her in the neighborhood on trash pickup day.

But.

The first time we took her to a park, it was like watching a baby giraffe find out what legs can do, as she chased her new brother through the grass, giddy with freedom, astonished at what was possible.

Today she sleeps in a bed at night, lounges on pillows like Queen Nefertiti. She gets cookies on demand (she just looks at us, I used to live in a cage, and we’re like, Here! Take all our money!). When she wants attention, she smacks my laptop shut. She hikes regularly in the mountains; she’s splashed in the ocean and frolicked in snow. She’s even been to Maine, and her report card is: lobster outstanding, turnpikes terrible. All our friends, especially their kids, compete to be the one who Lucy loves the most.

At her last checkup, her vet not only pronounced her healthy, but estimated her age, based on her eyes and teeth, is approximately eight years old. In other words, Lucy today is a year younger than she was when we adopted her six years ago.

Here are some glimpses of Lucy’s life in the years since experts said she was beyond saving.

The Mystery

There is no denying how much suffering is in the world right now. There is no denying how much fear and uncertainty surrounds us.

My eyes are open, and I see all the division and the hurt and the anger.

My heart is open, and I feel all the heat and the pain.

We have lost people we will mourn for the rest of our lives.

We are living in mortal bodies, all of us, and nothing lasts forever.

But.

The point of any story, the point of every story, is to remind us that the abyss is not the same thing as the end.

I’m not claiming to know anything for certain; I am certainly not claiming that I know how this story is going to end.

But this is what I know for sure.

Once upon a time Lucy thought the whole world was a cage, and loneliness, and puppies that were taken from her, and never enough food. Lucy thought the world couldn’t be any better; she didn’t know better was possible.

Then one day that world blew apart and she was terrified.

Now she is living a life she could have never imagined.

The thing is, some stories, even the darkest most hopeless stories, have happy endings, and isn’t that why we read them? Romance stories remind us, when we feel lonely, love is out there. Mystery stories remind us of the power of plot twists, and solving unsolvable problems.

Why do we rescue dogs? For the same reason we share stories, to remind us:

Transformation is possible.

At some point in every story, the hero reaches an abyss. A point in the story where all is lost.

But the abyss is never where the story ends.

Curiosity and imagination is what we must turn to, when the world feels particularly fraught. A Tribal leader once said to me, after his land had been destroyed by White people and he was trying to bring it back to life, “They have stolen everything from us. We cannot allow them to steal our imagination.”

So imagination is what I’m going to lean on, as I imagine the possibility that this season of fear and division could actually be a bridge to take us someplace better.

History suggests that most times of intense struggle and turmoil are followed by positive advancement. Climate scientists are pointing out the revelations and breakthroughs that are literally within our grasp, today.

So I’m going to trust history too, that turmoil today does not mean we are at the end of something.

Or, actually, perhaps we are at the end of something.

But what if what comes next is better?

What if we are in a cocoon, and something different is about to break free?

What if all of our progress so far, all the struggle and turmoil, has been to prepare us for what we are about to do?

What if the life we are losing is nowhere near as wondrous as the life that awaits us, if we are brave enough to reach for it?

What if we are Lucy?

Or, what if we are here to save her?

.

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That’s not just science. That’s history. Stories are rewriting and shifting history all the time. Right now I’m thinking of two stories — one five words, one four — that have changed the world dramatically.

I promise you know them.

One of those stories saved Western Democracy during the most perilous time in modern history. The other story has split a country in half.

That’s the monkey’s paw of storytelling: A story can change everything… but not always for the better.

I’ve explained the science behind Churchill’s story before. The science holds, but this story is not going to work for us now. We can all agree this is no time to keep calm, and the last thing we can afford to do is carry on.

The red hat story is powerful, because it speaks to a deep fear that the world is out of control, moving in the wrong direction, leaving us behind. The red hat story helps half of us feel less afraid, and more in charge.

But for half of us, the red hat makes us feel more afraid, less in control; it makes us feel like we are moving in the wrong direction.

The red hat story is powerful. But it’s also scaring us, dividing us, breaking us apart.

Oh, and one more thing. It’s literally not true. In fact, it’s actually an impossible story.

I wonder if we could write a better one?

Great Again Is A Broken Story

For all its power and emotional resonance, this four word red hat story has two lies in it: GREAT and AGAIN.

Let’s start with GREAT. The red hat story is built on a deep longing people feel to return to a safer, simpler, more secure time. In The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, a fantastic book about Christianity’s collapse to extremism, Tim Alberta quotes a leader of the evangelical movement on how it started: “We want to go back to the 1950s but without the racism and the sexism.”

Well, okay, but the racism and the sexism was sort of a defining feature of the 1950s. In this mythical past we long to return to, there were no civil rights. Women couldn’t have credit cards, or work in executive positions. People who didn’t fit into a narrow acceptable band were ostracized from society. Oh, and also, a family could survive on one income, which they absolutely could not today.

And even if they could, AGAIN is always impossible.

To quote Mary Chapin Carpenter, when it comes to life, “There’s fast, slow and stalled, no reverse.” Time travel doesn’t exist, so there is no going back and also, do we really want a world without DoorDash, civil rights, and the survival rate for breast cancer was 22 percent?

Great again isn’t true, and it isn’t possible. It’s a broken story that is breaking us apart.

Fortunately, we can do better.

We always have.

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What’s Better Than Great Again?

I love the science behind better than ever. It speaks to the growth mindset, to a goal that is admirable and universal.

I mean literally, better than ever is a better promise than great again. It has the added bonus of being true.

Better than ever is the entire story of humanity, and especially Americans. It’s why the Pilgrims came here, and it’s why immigrants continue to show up today. (If you think the country needs less immigrants, well, I imagine Native Americans would agree with you, but we’d need to go all the way back to evicting the Pilgrims, if we wanted to be fair.)

And the truth is, we can never go back. We can only get better. And good news: we are! In his book Enlightenment Now, “In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide.”

But there’s a real problem with this story, and why Pinker’s book didn’t change the national mood or the trends of fear and despair.

The reason the red hat story still resonates for millions, the reason we are all afraid, is because most of us believe the world isn’t getting better. More people than ever say this country is going in the wrong direction.

Simply put, better than ever might be true, but it doesn’t feel true, and when it comes to storytelling, feelings trump facts.

Better than ever doesn’t feel believable.

So what’s a storyteller to do?

Sounds like we need another three words. And something else too.

….But Only Together

As Barbara Boll-Branch’s research showed, the two most important factors in human flourishing are to engage regularly in community, and to have good close relationships. But we are in the midst of a loneliness epidemic. Only 18% of Americans feel connected to a community; red hat voters are more likely to say they have not one friend.

We have become more divided, more angry, more isolated, and it doesn’t matter if so many things are getting better.

We can’t flourish when we’re alone.

We can’t change for the better when we’re broken apart.

We’ve got to become ferociously empathetic.

If we want to get better than ever, we’ve got to do it together.

Better Than Ever, But Only Together!

If you hang out with me, it is likely that you have heard this story already, and on Saturday, I took it public, waving my story along with 7500 other people who had their own.

And I was overjoyed with how much our stories overlapped. So many speakers talked about the need to protect each other, to come together, to turn away from the cruelty and back towards caring for each other.

Less about who we want to destroy, and more about what we want to transform.

Less about resistance, and more about creating something else.

Less about division, and more about unification.

My friend Sunita (pictured above) said to me in excitement: “This totally confirms everything you’ve been saying!” (She brought her story to complement mine, and to honor Cory Booker.)

Dad texted me afterwards:

Now let’s be clear.

I am not Winston Churchill, and Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are definitely not going to fund this movement. I am one of like 1800 Substacks that are showing up in your inbox today.

But that’s okay, because this is what I know about stories.

The best ones start with a single spark, and they work from the inside out.

Want to play along? It’s simple. Start telling this story to yourself. Six words. You can edit to make it work for you. It’s a work in progress, and we’re going to build it as we go along.

But to start, this week, just tell yourself this story, right now, whenever you think about it.

Science is clear. This story will change the chemicals in your bloodstream. It will change the structure of your brain. It will shift your neural networks.

Better than ever, but only together.

Tell the story, quietly in your head, to start, and let’s see what happens next.

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