My advice is to start by just reading through the poem and noticing what you notice. Don’t pressure yourself to understand every line. Just pretend you’re sitting on the beach, letting the tide wash up and over your toes.

A good poem will start working its magic on you, whether you’re a skilled reader or not. I won’t pretend to achieve this in my own work, but if you’re reading In Memory of W.B. Yeats, Auden will speak to you, at least a little.

Frankly, it takes practice releasing how you’re used to reading essays and instruction manuals, looking for something to apply or argue with. You don’t read poetry for information. You read poetry to understand something that can’t be well stated any other way.

For example, the only writing about God or spirituality, I find even slightly moving is poetry. When you’re talking about someone that’s purportedly omnipresent and experientially absent, how else can you approach him but through the slanted light of a poem? Essays about God tend to deal in absolutes, ultimately half-truths, that leave me unsatisfied and sometimes annoyed. Only in a poem can you discuss something and even understand it a little without eliminating its mystery.

In the same way, an essay is not the best medium to explore grief and suffering. The elegy is one of the oldest forms of poetry. We’ve been writing to commemorate the lives of those we’ve lost for almost as long as we’ve been able to write.

Still, no elegy brings back the living, and even the best poem is cold comfort for loss.

Tennyson writes in his epic poem on grief, In Memoriam:

I sometimes hold it half a sin

To put in words the grief I feel;

For words, like Nature, half reveal

And half conceal the Soul within.

Tennyson wrestles with the failure of language to capture truthfully the depths of his grief over his dear friend’s passing truthfully. And yet, he continues to write nearly 3,000 lines of poetry while grieving.

Poetry is for what can’t be spoken any other way. I think we desperately need the nuance and mystery that poetry allows in our soundbite world.

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It’s hard to convince you that poetry is worth your while if you’ve never experienced the vision an excellent poem can provide. Reading a truly excellent poem reminds me of putting on glasses for the first time. It wows you in the moment and leaves your vision a little clearer forever.

One poem I’ll suggest as a starting block for people wanting to dip a toe into reading poems is All My Friends are Finding New Beliefs by Christian Wiman. He takes care to make sure readers can follow along with him while still delivering a profound and beautiful lyrical experience (harder than it looks!)

If this piece inspires you to read a little poetry, let me know what you think!

Some of these programs create good artists. There are some contemporary Christian writers I adore like Christian Wiman, Scott Cairns, and Mary Karr. I love them because they are excellent artists. They are not so hemmed in by fear of the unorthodox that they can only write recycled praise and worship songs. This takes bravery and skill. Writing about a faith that dominated the West for 2000 years, too easily becomes cliche.

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I understand why the average literature enthusiast would laugh at some of the products of these magazines. It’s intuitive that writers must prioritize writing well above pushing an ideological agenda forward or else risk writing poetry worthy of cross-stitching onto a pillow.

But I doubt they’d acknowledge the same problem is lurking in many of the largest and finest magazines in the country.

Talking about ideological capture is really boring and whiney, so I’ll keep it quick.

Recently, it came to light that a white Canadian guy had been cosplaying as various invented minority writers to publish utter horse shit in various literary magazines. He even received a best of the net nomination.

His writing is meaningless, atrocious, and political in the worst possible ways. Yet he published… a lot.

I frankly prefer Dadaism to this nonsense.

He capitalizes so blatantly on identity — writing a poem about a lesbian wrestler: “You wanna know how I feel after being cheated out of a victory over Pat Patriarchy at Survivor Series? I’m furious. I’m hot. Ooh, I’m so mad I could kiss a woman I don’t even like right now!”

It calls into question in the most profound way the taste and goals of the editors of these magazines. Though I’m not a fan of this guy's actions (lying is still bad, feeding the pigs is worse), the literary community's longstanding choice to promote nonsense writing, stereotyping, and delirium above craftsmanship is insane.

I don’t want to be a champion of the straight white man. Plenty of them are assholes, just like every other group of people. I don’t want to be “anti-woke” and dedicate my life to being against an enemy that doesn’t even know about my existence.

But it’s pretty insane that “not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker.”

This means already established white male artists are still getting published, because they already have readership, but no one else is getting let into the literati.

Magazines choosing to publish unreadable political trash is hurting poets and poetry’s place in American society. We’re the butt of every joke already.

With the liberal arts under attack and undervalued from all sides at every turn, maybe we should start focusing on what we can do well. We can create beautiful things. We can understand and interpret the work of the past. We can understand our society with incisiveness, nuance, charity, hope, and humor. We have SO SO SO much to offer.

During a national crisis of meaning, the arts can offer something to hold onto; instead, we’re offering nonsense, violence, and despair.

It’s hard to tell which came first, art failing culture or culture failing the arts, but the solution is to break the feedback loop. Make something good. Publish something earnest that gives distracted, despairing people something to hold onto. Connect them with meaning, truth, and reality. Clean their glasses and help them see the world clearly. Don’t sell me any more bullshit when the whole world is a cowpie factory.

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I’ll leave you with an immaculate political poem by Seamus Heaney and link to Roosters by Elizabeth Bishop.

Punishment

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighting stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

Recently, I learned about a concept called “relationship anorexia.” It’s where people starve themselves for connection, usually as an attempt to keep themselves safe. For someone who came of age in the 2016 “if you don’t love yourself, how are you supposed to love someone else?” era of the “discourse,” this was a personal call out.

I fell prey to this idea that you had to be okay on your own to deserve or be ready for connection. Now I’ve learned this is a profound misunderstanding of what human relationships are like.

As a caveat, I do think there are some people, or some times in people’s lives where dating is probably not the best idea. I’ve probably even been that person, but more often than not, the people who are taking a break from dating, or pushing away their friends, or languishing in isolation are perfectly lovely, if lonely, anxious, and perfectionistic people. The people who are shuffling through relationships like a deck of cards, and maybe need to pause and do some reassessing, are usually NOT the people who “are taking a break from dating” or “focusing on themselves.” (yes, I realize this is judgmental, but it’s my substack, go home if you’re annoyed.) Maybe the food metaphor serves well here too. Some people binge on relationships to feel better while others restrict them as a means of control. I definitely fall into the latter category.

I met my current boyfriend while I was “taking a break from dating.” Those who know me know there were more breaks than attempts, and it was sheer dumb luck, divine providence, or a combination of the two that I met anyone at all.

During our early will-they-won’t-they flirtation, I was extremely concerned that I was not “ready,” stable enough, or whatever else to date him. Despite immense attraction, compatibility, and maybe even the early stages of love on my end, I was considering distancing myself and forgoing the risk of pursuing our connection.

To give myself credit, it was a stressful time of life and I was certified hotmess™️. Moving from friends to lovers sent me into a true panic, but I can’t imagine my life now any other way. He’s one of my best friends, wide-eyed and idealistic in a way that keeps me sane, and a good cook to boot!

In some ways, I was right in thinking I wasn’t ready for this. Maybe you’re never ready? I’ve definitely had to learn on the fly, but I don’t think there’s a way to learn some things without another person to challenge you. I’ve learned my self-criticalness can be obnoxious and create stress for others, even though I’m attempting to never bug anyone ever. I’ve learned that defensiveness is a relationship killer, and no matter how afraid you are that something is going terribly wrong, or how deeply you feel your partner is being unfair, it’s probably better just to hear them out first.

I’ve also felt a lot of my positive traits reflected back to me through his eyes. He makes me feel smarter and really believe that what I have to say as a writer matters. His routine response to my articles is “you’re brilliant” followed by a discussion of whatever idea is at hand. And I believe him when he says this, because I actually respect and cherish what he has to write about too.

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I feel more attractive (crazy how a little appreciation will do that for a girl), and I feel stronger both physically and mentally. He reminds me I’m tough and strong and can do the things that scare me. As a pretty anxious and risk resistant person, this is amazing.

There are a million benefits to these kinds of connections, but I’ve had to learn how to have healthy connections too – and I haven’t always been good at it.

Love’s superpower is to show you what needs fixing. Bumping up against another person’s heart and mind teaches you something about yourself. You don’t only learn what obnoxious things you do around the house – mine is leaving water bottles with their lids unscrewed and waiting to be spilled — you also learn if you can take criticism, how well you communicate, what parts of you are hurt, cranky, and need a little care. Love asks you to release control in a terrifying way. It asks you to trust, and there’s no way to protect yourself completely from these risks and still have love.

Trusting another person’s vision of you, their assessment of your strengths and weaknesses, is a new kind of intimacy I’ve never experienced. It’s nourishing and terrifying. That’s why I think the concept of “relationship anorexia” is such a helpful one for me.

When we cut ourselves off from others, we deny ourselves the things we need to grow. We shrink our lives and ourselves into something small and miserable and safe. It’s so so hard to love people and to open yourself up to that, but it’s also the only way to live. This whole idea of healing, self-protection, and the rest is maladaptive. I’m all for removing people who are hurting you from your life, but just because you had an evil ex-boyfriend (canon event unfortunately) who needed to go, doesn’t mean everyone is a threat to you. They might be frustrating sometimes, or require you to examine parts of yourself you’d rather ignore, but people are generally good to have around. Whatever security or convenience loneliness offers us, comes at a heavy price, a soul shrinking one.

Like our bodies wither and die without food, our hearts and minds need connection to grow and thrive. Take it from me (and hopefully be braver than I’ve been).

I’m genuinely worried about the number of us that can’t find connection and won’t accept it when it comes. I’m worried about the way technology numbs us to these needs and let’s us forgo real connection for cheap entertainment. It feels like opportunities for my fellow Gen Z folks to connect are getting slimmer and slimmer. It doesn’t have to be that way.

While I explore this new city, try to put myself out there (I’m writing this surrounded by strangers at a writer’s workshop), I’m reminding myself that relationships are hard, sometimes scary, but love is the stuff of life.

That all was a long, uncomfortable journey that I suspect I’ll never truly be finished with. I’ve gained a lot of freedom and perspective from this. I don’t feel like I have to shrink myself to fit a little box that the community can understand and accept anymore, but I’ve lost things too.

The advantage of dogmatism is simplicity. You don’t have to consider certain decisions the same way because you have prewritten answers.

Now I’m asking what comes after certainty – even cheap certainty? How can I live in doubt without paralysis?

It’s tough. I sympathize with golden-age thinkers, tech optimists, religious extremists, and the rest who wish to “immanentize the eschaton.”

I want peace on earth, an optimized existence, moral righteousness, and perfect pleasure.

Instead, I have a wonky knee, a world full of war, a dog that WON’T SHUT UP, and the inability to fold my clothing in a timely manner.

I’m constantly afraid that if I go too far down the rabbit hole if I commit too far to my growing convictions, I’ll end up living with regret, having become a zealot for an unworthy cause.

Most of my newer, more authentic beliefs, have grown from my distaste for centralization, control, and the constant race to the bottom in every avenue from food to politics to religious rhetoric. I’m fairly convinced I need to slow down and dig in. I know my cellphone addiction is pouring my life out like a cup of water on the sidewalk, watering nothing, boiling away into the ether. It all scares me, and I don’t feel strong. Maybe it’s time for a stronger separation from the attention eaters who would sell my “one wild and precious life” out from under me.

I fear I am too dire, that I’ve read too much Wendell Berry, Ted Gioia, and my friend Talia Barnes, but I also feel myself getting dumber, getting farther from what I love (writing, loving people, painting, and running around outside) and deeper into the zeroes and ones that make up our new world.

I’m scared that I’ve let something terrible colonize me (see Alien for exact horror levels) and also scared that I’ve been radicalized against a purely imagined threat.

The fear with me and radicalization or certainty is that I will make a sacrifice (throwing my iPhone in a creek, investing in better food, existing outside of consumer culture) that will limit connection with friends and family, make me lonelier, bored, and in touch with my feelings (heaven forbid I know), all for nothing. But when I lay it out like that, a change starts to seem necessary if not inevitable. Maybe we all need to believe something deeply, to slam doors shut so that we can open others. Maybe my past certainties were simply the wrong ones.

I would love to hear your thoughts, in comments, texts, article links, emails, etc.

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I’m the most hesitant local food shopper. I am a born and raised bargain hunter, so shelling out extra money for meat and produce doesn’t appeal to me. It wasn’t until my boyfriend started cooking delicious meals with high-quality ingredients that I began to change my mind.

Much of my life, I’ve accepted a conventional, semi-processed beige diet. I ate shredded chicken, rice, and beans for almost a full calendar year, and although this helped my wallet in a time when I lived in an expensive city on an entry-level salary, it didn’t spark joy.

“Eating healthy” or “shopping local” always seemed like status symbols to me. Growing up in the Seattle area, there were farmer’s markets everywhere. Friends’ parents got farm boxes dropped at their homes and did their own canning. Although I could enjoy the stray meals I had at their homes, I mostly accepted that the way I was raised — laughing at organic eaters over my Slurpee and Cheetos — was the right way. For the same reason, I rejected designer purses and a Lexus as aspirational, I rejected the farmer’s markets.

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I assumed people at organic foods or went to farmers markets, because they were afraid of chemicals or of getting fat. I thought that was dumb so assumed that life style wasn’t for me.

But I’ve realized there are fearless life-affirming reasons to shop local.

This morning 60-something strawberry grower gave me tips about how to keep her berries fresh longer.

Last week we talked to rancher about how she finished her cows. This I learned has to do with how cows spend the last few month of their life. Apparently many cows spend a good part of their lives grazing on open pasture, but it’s hard to get them fat without pumping them full of soy and corn at the end of their lives. She explained the regenerative farming practices they use, such as feeding the cows soaked walnut husks, that are cast offs from the orchard.

Even the little tropical plant, I had previously purchased on Amazon, from the market came with a charming experience with the grower who was enthusiastic about her plants and their longevity.

I can’t help observing how enlivening, even enjoyable it is to shop at a market, compared with the grocery store. Instead of overwhelming options, flourescant lights, and miserable cashiers, there were stalls of goods, money pouring into a local economy, and tons of people acquiring nutritious and surprisingly affordable produce.

Since moving to Sacramento, interacting with sellers at the farmer’s market has been a regular Sunday highlight for me.

I’m learning to slow down, appreciate the food I’m eating, and the process of acquiring and preparing it. This might not solve all my problems, but it’s definitely adding happiness to my previously beige-slop-consuming existence.

P.S. Because of inflation, you might be surprised how comparable (or even less expensive) the market price is to your grocery store. We bought salmon at $8 a pound! That beats even the frozen price of salmon at the store.

Yesterday’s victory, the reclamation of her master recordings, is a huge victory for Taylor. She’s never taken bullying quietly, from her successful lawsuit against a DJ who groped her, to her recent epic adventure to claim the rights to her music. She’s faced immense social blow back, but maintained her self respect, finding a powerful voice in one of the toughest industries there is.

I vividly remember the first time my peers turned against Taylor Swift. She’d become too successful and mainstream. The tabloids were full of surmises about her sex life, and she’d become as she describes it, “a national lightning rod for slut shaming.” I felt embarrassed on her behalf and hoped my enjoyment of her music didn’t make me look whorish or lame by proxy.

I think her refusal to go quietly bothered people. After dating multiple high profile and much older men, she didn’t shrug off her heartbreak or hide from the public eye. She laid out her humiliation, frustration, and sense of wrong through some of her finest songs.

In Dear John, presumably about John Mayer, she wrote, “Don't you think nineteen's too young / To be played by your dark, twisted games when I loved you so?”

She ends the song with triumph “I’m shining like fireworks over your sad empty town”

Mayer called this “cheap song writing.” But Taylor’s criticism seemed like a fair point to make about a then 32 year old, routinely dating late teen and early twenty year olds.

This is only one of many songs she’s written sharing her experience of the unfortunately very public events in her private life.

During the most scandalous period in Taylor’s career, when Kim and Kanye accused her of lying and launched the #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty, drastically changing public perception of Swift. Many articles arguing she was a fake nice girl or secret snake circulated in major publications.

Taylor’s response was the reputation album.

Look What You Made Me Do, the album’s first single, is a song full of rage at the damage to her reputation done by Kim and Kanye’s cancellation attempt. She writes, I don’t trust nobody and nobody trusts me”

She captures the feeling of isolation that comes with social backlash.

While Taylor was facing national criticism for “lying” about her mention in Kanye’s song Famous, I faced my own cancellation crisis. I’d chosen to speak up when I’d gotten injured by someone’s intentional violence. Like with Taylor, the squeaky wheel sometimes gets the blame. I too lost my good name, lost a sense of my past self (the old Jess can’t come to the phone right now?). I too had to get smarter and harder to get through. But just like Taylor “I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time.”

Cringe if you must, but Taylor Swift was my closest companion in those months. She understood me, soothed my loneliness, earned my admiration forever. The vulnerability she showed by expressing her rage, insecurity, and new found love to a world that appeared to hate her is remarkably brave. But that’s what Taylor does. She bares her soul and takes what comes.

She has integrity that people don’t expect from a pop star.

Although it took some time, Taylor came back bigger and better than ever. No matter what obstacles, criticism, or personal disaster arise, she rises over and over again, keeping her side of the street clean, waiting for the bullies who’ve tried to silence her, embarrass her, ruin her career to get what they deserve.

Her example and music gives me the courage to keep doing right, choosing to protect myself and my art, all well embracing love,life, and joy.

I wish all the best for her. I’ll be celebrating her reclaimed music by listening to reputation and following her example to speak now.

I understood Dostoyevsky as a compassionate Russian author who wrote about the least sympathetic parts of humanity and addressed existentialism with human and divine love. I couldn’t intuitively understand the political connection.

I wondered if the right wing emphasis on “doing hard things” valorized reading a 1000+ page Russian novel. They hadn’t bought into the narrative that reading any kind of genre fiction, be it westerns, romance, or fantasy, is the same as diving into a literary masterpiece. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy reading purely for pleasure as much as the next person, but I sit down for different reasons with an Emily Henry novel versus a James Joyce.

Literature attempts to do more than entertain, making it often more difficult to consume, but also more valuable.

It’s agonizing to me that because we have to accept and validate everyone’s reading preferences, we’re not allowed to state clearly that some books are more worthwhile than others.

People need to read great literature. A certain kind of person yearns to read it.

I can’t imagine who I would be if I hadn’t found a list of the 100 greatest novels ever written and started working my way through them at fifteen. If I hadn’t spent my four years of undergrad close reading the greatest books ever written, I would certainly be a shallower, less compassionate person.

I feel so lucky to have studied for four years under professors who, altough at an explicitly Christian conservative college, listened first to the authors we were reading, before thinking about ideologies or even class opinions. They taught me to approach the books I read with humility, to assume the author had something to say and to try to understand it before reacting.

This led us into the complex discussions of God, epistemology, and human purpose that I’d always hoped to have. They avoided the common pitfall of asking students to react to what they found offensive. Instead, they coached us through offensive texts, admitting yes, Dostoyevsky was anti-semitic or Faulkner wrote extensively about incest, but they were also more than that. They asked us to read deeply, even through discomfort.

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Too often, I hear people state that some great book or another just isn’t their taste. It probably isn’t. But I wish I could ask them if they think their taste is more valuable than whatever the author could potentially offer them.

My now favorite book was not at all “my taste” the first time I read it, partially because Moby-Dick is like fine-dining and I had a palate for Chipotle. When I tried to understand Moby-Dick in high school, naturally, I came up short. I remember complaining widely, asking how this could be “The Great American Novel” if it was so boring.

A friend's mom reassured me that only stuffy old guys considered it that, most people thought Huckleberry Finn was the greatest.

I wish she hadn’t said that. What I needed to hear (and maybe could not have tolerated hearing) was “maybe you’re just not ready for it yet.”

It’s good to read things that baffle you and you don’t like. At this point, I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve read something I didn’t get it at all, but eventually grew to love and admire.

I try to read things that are over my head and return to them a few years later or with a trusted advisor, hoping for more understanding. It took me three reads to grasp and love Moby-Dick, three attempts to even make it through The Brothers Karamazov, two reads, one with a professor, to enjoy The Sound and the Fury, and another two to fall in love with Beloved.

Probably my favorite book I read last year, Infinite Jest, was an absolute pain to read, but it touched me deeply, redefining my thoughts about addiction, mental illness, and the human condition.

There are so many good books on the other side of our discomfort and discouragement. It would be a shame to leave them all to the red pill dudes.

In the moment, I highly doubt that being with me through these difficult moments was fun for the people helping me. But the results are relationships that sustain and define us.

To love is to be inconvenienced and inconvenient.

It was embarrassing for me to go knock on my friend’s door, crying about my future. It was probably inconvenient for her to open her door and find me a sobbing mess, but she chose to let me in. That mattered.

Moments where we meet each other's needs, sit with each other in moments of pain, offer grace to the friend who is unpleasant in a time of crisis, these are the moments that matter.

So much of the good life, the life worth posting about on Instagram or discussing at dinner parties, is pleasurable and exciting, but ultimately hollow. Don’t get me wrong: I love a sweet treet, an Instagram Reel, or a trip to Thailand, but it can’t sustain me.

I can feel myself hollow out with pleasure when I’m only consuming, getting exactly what I want, and missing out on the rough and tumble life I was made for.

I need people to be inconvenient sometimes, to call me crying and pull me out of my solipsism. I need to love people who are messy and honest, people who accidentally hurt me and apologize later. I need people who let me inconvenience them too, people who notice when things are not right and refuse to let me slink away and lick my wounds in isolation. This is the meat of life.

I used to think Thoreau meant you had to experience everything when he wrote, “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”

But simply trying new things becomes its own kind of fatigue. Now I’m realizing Thoreau meant we need to connect to what is deepest and truest in the world. I have only ever found that in its most meaningful sense through human connection, by coming out of isolation and into life.

I’m grateful for those who have taught me what it means to be vulnerable, to take risks and connect. I’m still learning to be patient when they inconvenience me and most of all to accept that sometimes loving me is inconvenient.

Once I do, I have a feeling those connections, inconveniences and all, will be even sweeter, because they’re real.

I never knew exactly what I wanted, so during college and after, I was trying on selves, digging down into the sands of self to see what, if anything, was there.

She amazed me, partially because she didn’t seem to struggle like this.

She had a serious boyfriend, wrote opinion pieces, ran every morning, and studied hard. She was one of the most impressive people I met in undergrad.

I went to her wedding expecting a traditional service. I knew she would promise to obey her husband, but it was nothing I hadn’t seen before.

What I didn’t expect was for the entire service to sound like an apology for the strong woman whom I had come to know over the past year.

The pastor spoke about obedience, faithfulness, and God’s righteous purpose for marriage (reproduction). Her father praised her intelligence but mocked her for her strong opinions and unwillingness as a child to bend her head to lesser minds. Then everyone, and I mean everyone, praised her for conquering her spirited nature into the gentle woman she now was.

It was frankly insulting to hear. If my father chose my wedding to praise me for stating my opinions less, becoming more submissive and people pleasing, we would have a serious problem.

I can hear objections already, assuming that I am overreacting, reminding me that women want different things, that my career woman lifestyle isn’t for everyone. But that’s fine

I don’t really care if you want to be a stay-at-home mom or bake sourdough bread, but it physically pains me to watch women be teased, chastised, and dismissed for qualities that would have drawn universal praise and admiration if found in a man.

I saw this all the time growing up in a large nondenominational church. The same intelligence, strong-mindedness, and directness found in both my brother and me were treated very differently by church leaders. In him, it was leadership potential, while in me, it was an insurrection.

The same dynamic played out with my friend, who appeared brighter than her now husband. I’d seen her ambition, intelligence, and insightful understanding of the world. I’ve been to quite a few weddings since many lovely and traditional, but this one left its mark because it apologized for my friend, the bride’s aptitude for life outside the small boundaries they could understand or accept.

I felt like we were celebrating all the wrong aspects of the person whom I had come to know. I had to hold myself back from taking her aside and saying, There’s nothing wrong with you! It’s them! It’s always been them!

But I bit my tongue and prayed that the part of her so threatening to her pastor and father would someday find a space where it could be celebrated because she was truly a remarkable woman.

We’ve all rolled our eyes at foreign film watchers, contemporary art appreciators, and postmodern fiction readers. But their tendency for arrogance and self-satisfaction aside, maybe we should be more like them.

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It’s easy to read one poem or attend one opera and decide it’s not for you. Without the background understanding of art history, a contemporary art exhibit looks random with its found objects and canvases with colorful shapes. But once you understand a little bit more, a new world is unlocked.

My colleague gave a short talk on contemporary art last year that opened up my eyes. She explained avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square” as a radical departure from the imitations and representations of previous centuries of art. What I would have walked by with an eyeroll in an art museum before, I suddenly understood on a new level.

The same thing happened with my boyfriend and hip-hop. Those who know me know I’m of the Stevie Nicks, Joni Mitchell, Taylor Swift listening persuasion, but by listening to more hip-hop, I learned to appreciate a genre I never would have enjoyed previously. So much of contemporary hip-hop builds on samples used by great artists of the past. Their lyrics are in conversation with past artists. It took me a while to enjoy listening to my boyfriend’s music, but with some repetition and explanations from him, I began to see the outstanding artistry at work in the songs he loves.

Will I ever love hip-hop as much as him? Probably not, but I was surprised how quickly a genre I never previously enjoyed became relevant to me.

I should have known this was true, because my favorite literary genre, poetry, is at this point a mostly irrelevant art. My theory is that it requires too much investment before the payoff for most people.

Poems that were universally read by readers past, are now at best a homework assignment for most contemporary readers.

Take the first few lines of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” :

Let us go then, you and I, 
When the evening is spread out against the sky 
Like a patient etherized upon a table;

It’s hard to appreciate what was, for its time, an earth-shattering shift away from the softer sensibilities of traditional English poetry.

Compare the first lines of Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”

Come live with me and be my love, 
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

Eliot’s invocation of the modern, medical, and bleak invites the reader into a drastically different landscape from Marlowe’s. Throughout the poem, Eliot continually challenges conventionally poetic subjects like love, beauty, and youth in favor of his modern sensibility. The poem is earth-shattering, but only if you understand poetry.

In sharing my poetry writing, I’ve learned people are intimidated by the genre. They assume they are just too unskilled or the wrong kind of person to understand it. I think far more often, they just lack the context. Poetry isn’t meant to be esoteric or difficult, though some of it is. Through much of history, poetry was for everyone in the same way a pop song is now.

Some places to start:

• Read Zero at the Bone by Christian Wiman — both poetry and memoir about staving off despair in the face of affliction

• Read a collection of one hundred popular poems. Find one you like and read more of the poet. This is a great way to find a starting point with poetry. You probably won’t read if it feels like a chore, so follow what you resonate with to start. You might find, like I have, that what you like changes as you develop a deeper understanding of the genre.

• Lastly, if you’ll accept some non-expert advice, don’t worry too much about understanding. Let the poet take you for a ride. Let them sing their song to you and remain open to what you don’t yet understand.

His behavior was a huge problem and drove my then roommates nuts. I probably owe them all gift cards or something.

Training him changed me, because none of the approaches that came naturally to me worked. The tough love, cry it out, approach to dog training only resulted in complaints from the neighbors and a very anxious, very confused dog.

Through a course on dog psychology (you heard me), I learned Bartleby wasn’t stubborn, defiant, and rebellious like I thought. Mostly he was scared, overwhelmed, and confused about how to interact with the world.

The dog trainer taught me that rest is a skill that dogs have to learn. Dogs have to practice how to respond when excited or scared. It’s a skill more than a disposition. Many dogs learn this when they’re puppies through basic obedience training, but dogs who don’t learn face an uphill battle.

They have to encounter their stressors and fears in small doses, slowly building a higher and higher tolerance for stress. Learning to be quiet when their owners leave and to pass by a barking dog without losing their shit.

I set out to do this with some medicinal assistance for Bartleby. Dogs have to be in a state of relative calm or low to mid stress to learn. If they are completely dominated by fear or excitement, all the training rolls off of them like water off a duck's back. They just keep reacting.

It’s incredibly hard to change cemented behavioral patterns and as I was rolling up my sleeves and training Bartleby, I began to realize I had a lot to learn too. I couldn’t sit still either. I lunged and barked at what scared me (metaphorically), and thugging it out, gritting my teeth, and clenching my fists wasn’t working. I had to learn patience with my own responses. I had to do small scary things and forgive myself when they didn’t go well. I’m still trying to do this. I’m still learning to be still and be calm and be brave.

What I have accomplished has always been wholly by patience, persistence, and gentleness. I’m facing my fears slowly. Sometimes they still consume me and I howl and bark, but the next day I try again. I try a smaller challenge. I make sure I rest and reset myself. I bring treats on my walks, and I hate to admit it, but it’s working.

Two main things characterize the firehose of falsehood:

1. high numbers of messages being pushed out and channels to communicate them

2. a willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright lies.

The firehose relies on overwhelming us and confusing us. One researcher writes we “retreat into cynicism and the belief that the truth is fundamentally unknowable.” Ezra Klein has a great video pointing out how this strategy is playing out in the current administration.

But in some ways, Trump’s intentional use of the firehose of falsehood is almost indistinguishable from the usual screaming confusion of the digital landscape.

I don’t need to tell you how it works. Between the more innocuous #content, the dog videos, engagement pictures, and hiking pics, there is also THE END OF DEMOCRACY, HOW TO KNOW YOU’RE IN A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP, DON’T EAT THIS OR YOU’LL DIE #content.

And the second type, the urgent scary content, has money behind it. It’s produced in studios to capture our attention, and I at least find it irresistible. Intentionally, I didn’t download TikTok back in 2020 because I know myself and just like how I couldn’t eat only one cookie, I probably couldn’t watch just one video. That turned out to be true. Because now every app on my phone is basically TikTok and the only way to stop my scrolling is to delete them.

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It makes me sad because Instagram used to be a place where I kept up with friends and family. Now I can’t use it for that purpose alone without a Herculean amount of resolve that I simply don’t possess. Our digital landscape was created to be a firehose, to keep us trapped, angry, isolated, and cynical.

I’m trapped in the firehose right now and it sucks.

I don’t want to be cynical. I don’t want to be numb and overwhelmed and vaguely scared about a million things I already forgot about. It feels terrible, and it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the answer to this problem isn’t to keep feeling bad and keep whining.

I think maybe that cynicism from the firehose has made me believe it’s not actually better on the other side of this, that the effort and alienation involved in being less chronically online won’t be worth it. But reflecting on the firehose makes me think, there’s probably more for me beyond the screen. I have been happy and full of belief, and it was almost never when I was staring into the bright light of my phone.

So, this week I’m detoxing. I’m going to try to live outside of the firehose, at least for the most part. Wish me luck.

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Last year I wrote about why anyone should bother with life despite the inevitable suffering involved, with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as the context, this year about why bother writing.

As you might have noticed, I didn’t publish anything on my Substack for a large chunk of last year, because of yet another crisis of meaning surrounding writing. Probably because we were just dealing with another Most Important Election of Our Lives™ I feel a bit exhausted and overwhelmed by the world. Writing poetry or essays doesn’t feel important.

Jonathan Franzen describes my feelings better than I ever could in his essay, Why Bother?

I know there’s a reason I loved reading and loved writing. But every apology and every defense seems to dissolve in the sugar water of contemporary culture, and before long it becomes difficult indeed to get out of bed in the morning.

I struggle to explain to myself, let alone others, why I need to write my little poems and essays. Those things that I can’t communicate lose their meaning, especially when I’m struggling with feeling meaning at all.

I remember beginning my first notebook because I was a lonely child who didn’t know what i thought but felt things very deeply. I wrote because I was confused and knew as if instinctively that the page was the place for these confusions.

I am still often lost, lonely, and confused. Time and time again I put pen to paper to make sense of things and sometimes it helps.

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My mistake has been to try to understand why I’m writing, instead of accepting that writing for me is an act of defiance and hope. Although much in my life depends on the outcomes of foreign wars, the whims of Washington, and the price of groceries, writing must not.

Again, Jonathan Franzen claims, “The world was ending then, it’s ending still, and I’m happy to belong to it again.”

A quick study on humanity’s obsession with apocalypse during times of unrest reveals not every disaster is an apocalypse. I think the trick at times like this where there is civil unrest, polarization, and every other Fox and NBC buzzword, is to live with the impending apocalypse and continue planting your garden, writing your novel, and falling in love with each other and the world.

I have no idea how to do this besides just to try. But every time I write, I chip away a bit at the part of me that steadfastly believes nothing matters. I think the most important thing is to release first your depressive realism, your steadfast belief, “that it’s the world that’s sick, and that the resistance of refusing to function in such a world is healthy.” It won’t save you and it will make your life pretty miserable in the meantime.

I’m not claiming you don’t have your troubles. I’ve sure as hell got mine but I think writing is the only way I’ll make it through the next 50 years feeling anything like a sense of purpose.

As I began to share my writing again through Substack, so many lovely strangers and friends were kind enough to share their thoughts with me. I truly treasure your comments and messages. They help cut through the darkness.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Romano Guardini, which full disclosure I stole from the beginning of Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman.

We know now that the modern world is coming to an end… Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world, but the more precious will be that love which flows from one lonely person to another.

Though AI has its uses, so-called “generative” AI is far from generative. It mostly replicates the great thinking of the past. I’m highly skeptical that AI models will ever replace human ingenuity at its best.

My somewhat optimistic prediction is that what we create in its rawest, least digital form will gain even more value as a respite from the constant stream of mass-produced digital content.

Already people bristle at the Lisa Frank-esque glow of AI images, and this isn’t the first time popular tastes have rejected mechanized alternatives to art.

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John Ruskin wrote extensively as the Industrial Revolution peaked in England and many tradesmen became factory laborers. He theorized that architecture reflected the labor values of its time.

Ruskin suggested that Classical architecture reflected the “servile” nature of its society, where one master intelligence directed a large number of laborers to execute his ideas exactly. The clean sometimes sterile lines reflected the single intelligence that created it.

Alternatively, he held up Gothic architecture as an example of what can be achieved when laborers express their creativity.

Characteristics of the Gothic

1. Savageness

2. Changefulness

3. Naturalism

4. Grotesqueness

5. Rigidity

6. Redundance

Ruskin’s argument for the superiority of Gothic architecture due to the independence of the workers who built it has clear implications for his time, when machines were replacing craftsmen, but it speaks to our own moment too.

AI models like the factories before them are faster, better at standardizing, but ultimately less creative. Sure, factories replaced skilled laborers as the primary manufactures of drinking glasses, but they’ve hardly killed pottery as an art form. There’s a reason why people are willing to pay 30 to 70 dollars for a handmade mug on etsy but only 10 or 15 at Target.

The Arts and Crafts Movement developed after Ruskin’s writing and emphasized the kind of handmade, rugged artistry he valued. I predict there will be a similar pushback against AI-created art, just like there’s a pushback against cheaply made factory goods.

We crave the spark of humanity that’s injected into handmade, personalized art. The reason why machine-driven industries still thrive is that we can’t all afford a handmade mug, not to mention a doorknob or an engine block!

For writing, I’m fine with letting AI write the metaphorical “engine blocks” of our time. This of course means some of the more production-oriented creative jobs will inevitably fall to AI, but the best most innovative, mold-breaking work will still need a human touch humans, because we’re the best.

I dove into this aesthetic, bought vintage, spun records, and listened to bands you’ve still never heard of.

Here are some cringy Instagram photos to prove it:

But in 2017, to my utter horror, Taylor Swift was my top artist on Spotify. I considered learning Photoshop just to avoid embarrassment in front of my too-cool-for-school, indie music snob friends.

My friends roasted me (Reputation era Taylor Swift fans remember), but I learned something important.

The hipster culture I adored wasn’t as authentic as I thought.

At rock bottom, being a hipster didn’t mean being yourself. It meant rejecting the glossy, hyper-conformist youth culture of the early 2000s. It felt like payback for all the kids who mocked me in middle school for reading novels during recess by being the most artsy, insufferable version of myself imaginable.

Yet the Taylor Swift debacle taught me that striving to be unique and interesting could be just as stifling as trying to fit in.

I love Taylor Swift, she speaks to my poor melodramatic soul. To hide this “basic” interest would be just as lame as hiding your love for Neutral Milk Hotel from the cheerleaders.

What I love about Spotify Wrapped season is that everyone has a “cringy” favorite, whether obscure or basic. Everyone’s music taste reflects unique often hidden parts of them, and I love learning who is a secret country music fan or what regular concertgoer only had 12,000 listening minutes this year. In some small way, we all are what we love, and I can proudly say I love Taylor Swift. There are plenty of hipster-approved deepcuts in my listening history too, because I’m a real person, not a caricature.

When a close friend asked how I love Taylor Swift so much, but also love obscure poets, opaque novels, and late antique history. He essentially meant, how do you I person I find interesting like someone who I just don’t get.

To that, I answer you with a Whitman quote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

None of us are brands, no matter what Instagram would have us believe. We all like artists our friends just don’t get and that’s a good thing. Happy Spotify Wrapped everyone!

Percy asks one of life’s ultimate questions: “Why live?” And unlike so many narratives, it doesn’t hide behind easy answers, gloss over suffering with a neat spiritual solution, or revel in meaninglessness and despair.

Instead, it embraces the raw messiness of existence with an ultimate scene involving death, diarrhea, and baptism. 

I first read it for a Southern Literature class in the middle of the pandemic. At the time, dislocated from classes, from work, and friends I was deeply depressed and feeling lost. Reading The Last Gentleman, I felt seen in a very specific way for the first time.

Will Barrett is a neurotic meaning-of-life type, ambiguously troubled, directionless, and alienated from his fellow man. He interacts with people with equal parts naivete and arrogance, feeling he can see through their foibles into a deeper level of existence. I’ll admit, with some embarrassment, that I often felt the same way. It’s all too easy to sit at a party, red solo cup in hand, and imagine you’re the only person who has ever suffered.

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Anyway, Percy’s book spoke to me and in some ways deescalated my ongoing existential crisis — believing I was the only one who felt the pressing threat of meaningless in my day-to-day life. I return to The Last Gentleman when I feel far away from myself and when life feels somehow both futile and overwhelming. Each time, I come away feeling a little more grounded. 

Yet, despite my enthusiasm, no one else seems to like The Last Gentleman.

What for me is the ultimate contemplation of what it means to be human in a postmodern world, to them is a long, depressing book, about a character they just don’t relate to.

It’s frankly fascinating that 100 people can all read the same book and come away with 100 at least slightly different opinions about it. What’s comforting to me, might be disturbing to you, or just plain boring. And the reverse is true too! I’ve never been able to get into The Goldfinch even though so many people whose taste I respect have recommended it to me. 

I think this is part of what makes humans and our relationship to art so fascinating. True things have to be said and said over again with thousands of different lenses from thousands of voices so that even more listeners can understand them. We all turn to art to feel less alone and so if we don’t identify with a book, we’re not likely to enjoy it. 

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That’s why we have favorites and mostly they’re all different. It may be what makes finding another person with your favorite show or movie so special. You know at once that they are a like mind, that some small part of them and a small part of you are the same. 

I guess I should be grateful that everyone doesn’t relate to the somewhat arrogant and existential Will Barrett. 

It’s not a great way to be. 

That said, go read The Last Gentleman. For like 2% of you, it’ll be life-changing. 

Sylvia Plath (eventually the subject of my senior thesis) spoke to me. I also raged against society’s expectations, having grown up in a fairly conservative community. I longed to “eat men like air” with Plath’s Lady Lazarus. I didn’t understand what felt like resistance and empowerment to me, to others was a romanticization of depression.

Of course, all many people know about Sylvia Plath is that she died with her head in a gas oven, and now she’s the patron saint of the sad girls. 

In certain online enclaves, mental illness is a badge of honor. Groups many of them young women, many I’m sure lonely and rejected in their IRL communities turned to the site for comfort. They weren’t ill and in need of help. They were special, they felt things deeper than what normies could ever understand. Alienation became a badge of honor.

As you can imagine, the Sylvia Plath canonization on Tumblr is next level. 

This was the backdrop to my professor's warning: it does not make you special to be sad. 

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He pleaded with us not to romanticize our pain. We could of course “use it,” but being mentally ill would not make us artists. Almost 50k people die in the US every year from suicide, and not one of them is Sylvia Plath. 

My defensive sad girl brain found this offensive at first.

But when I calmed down and really listened to him, I heard his true message loud and clear. 

He revealed that he was never productive creatively when he was really struggling. He couldn’t deny the Sylvia Plath effect. He’d been a poetry professor for far too long. Artists, and especially female poets, are disproportionately mentally ill. 

I think people with mental illness are often drawn to creative outlets to understand themselves and the harsh external realities they’re facing. For me, I remember being a lonely child and turning to my notebook when no one else was there to listen. Writing for many is a coping mechanism, a coping mechanism you can practice and sometimes even excel. 

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Now, coming out of a fog of stress, I’m thinking again about my professor’s message. For the past few months, I’ve been too overwhelmed to write much, even though I’ve longed to and I know it would make me happier. Writing requires health, all action does. And the sicker you are, the less likely you’ll be able to do the very real work that writing requires. My takeaway is if I want to write, I have to do the work to stay healthy and when I’m not doing well, to accept that sometimes life gets in the way of what I love and stay the course until I hit better weather. 

I’ve heard from a few friends that they’ve experienced the same difficulties, but I’d love to hear your thoughts too if you’ve made it to the end of this blog.

McCarthy did this for me a few years ago when I read The Road. 

Through the story of a father and son traversing a postapocalyptic wasteland, McCarthy asks if life is worth living even in the face of cannibalism, rape, and starvation. None of these atrocities affected me the way that the mother’s decision to flee these horrors through death did. 

The mother’s carefully-considered choice to end her own life to avoid suffering is a frighteningly compelling one. Her reasons are simple: “Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us.” She believes unimaginable pain is inescapable, and her fear drives her to believe that her current life has no meaning due to the overshadowing promise of destruction. Most chillingly, she states, “My only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.” 

Her despair read my despair back to me and carried it to its natural conclusion. I caught myself agreeing with the idea that in her situation it would probably be better to be dead even at your own hand, than to live.

After all, why would anyone face rape and cannibalism when they could escape it? As sympathetic as the woman’s choice might be, I could not make peace with it. How could death become better than life? And if it can, at what point of suffering does death begin to become better? 

The longer I sat with the book (and it has haunted me for years now), the more unsettled I became with the woman’s act of despair and my own tacit agreement with her choice. I had accepted that life was good as long as relief from suffering remained a possibility.  

Reading Alan Noble’s On Getting Out of Bed completely convinced me that the mother and I had both underestimated the goodness of life. 

Noble understands McCarthy in a way I didn’t in my middle-of-the-night binge-read. He acknowledges the woman’s compelling reasons for choosing death but points to beauties within the rest of the book as compelling arguments against her choice. The father sees his son as evidence of the goodness of life. He sees himself as appointed by God to protect his son to the best of his ability and teach him that life has meaning even in the face of unspeakable horror.

The father doesn’t live with deranged hope that he will escape his situation. He knows that his life will probably remain as it is until his death, but he sees with remarkable clarity that his life has meaning. He becomes attuned to tiny goodnesses around him. These bless him and bring relief. 

I think this is something most of us could stand to learn a thing or two about.  

Despite its horrific setting, this book strengthened my understanding of the goodness of life. 

McCarthy insists we confront why we’re living at its most basic level. He tears through the comforts of civilization and asks the all-important question: when tragedy inevitably arrives will you choose to live your life? He insists we look threats to the goodness of life squarely in the face. Most remarkably he concludes that life is worthy regardless of pleasure and pain, hope or despair. Life is good without exception.

In the wise words of Alan Noble: “Your existence testifies.” That is enough.

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For example, I almost had to rehome my dog who I love desperately because of his endlessly barking and panicking whenever I left the house. I remember sitting on the phone with my dad genuinely wondering if I had what it took to rehabilitate him and pretty much believing there was no hope. But I was wrong. 

I tried one more training method, got him on puppy Prozac, and now know way more about dog psychology than I ever wanted to know. Now, he’s a changed dog, still anxious sometimes but broadly able to handle my absence and other old triggers without completely melting down. No one who knew him at the time expected this turnaround. 

It’s made me reflect on how many obstacles I’ve faced that seemed insurmountable before they suddenly weren’t. We’re always just one tectonic plate shift away from the unthinkable, good and bad. 

There have been a hundred moments that my friends and I never thought we could make it through and did in the past year and a half alone. 

My friend although still shaken about her health has found ways to move on with her life and continue furthering her career. After panicking that I would never find an interesting or worthwhile way to pay my bills, I’ve landed at an organization where I get to think and grow among outstanding individuals who I greatly respect. As I've written about previously, there was a time I thought I'd be able to go into a church without feeling panic and fear but now I do all the time. 

None of these breakthroughs were part of my strategic planning. I couldn’t have guessed my dog would be fairly functional, or that I’d have a good job (as an English major!) but I do. That’s the thing about goodness, it’s impossible to predict. 

But too often, I look into the future with despair. I imagine plodding on with unchanged circumstances and can’t imagine experiencing joy again. But this is never true. The path out of the mountains might not be visible, but it’s there. 

Christianity has long instructed me to hope. It told me about a Savior who conquers death, suffering, and evil. It told me I was panicking that I should trust. And often I couldn't or didn't listen. It’s too easy for instructions to hope and have faith to become weapons to invalidate grief and suffering. This is exactly wrong. There is no way to avoid pain. Neither faith nor hope nor anything is meant to erase pain. These things are only ways of looking forward beyond the present moment into a different and better future. The battles of the day still must be fought, even when they seem futile. Dogs must be trained. Doctors' appointments attended and breakups endured. The power of hope isn’t in avoiding pain but continuing despite it.

My resolution this year is to remember all the impossible moments of redemption that have interjected themselves into the lives of mine and my friends. Loss may be certain, but so is redemption. This year I’m reminding myself to carry on in hope, not a naive false positivity, but earnest belief that eventually things will change for the better. To quote Victor Hugo, “Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.” This past year, I’ve been more convinced than ever that he’s right.

Wax quotes John Piper and argues “To walk away from the church is to walk away from Christ.” I may be simply a victim of modern individualism as Wax suggests, but I can’t quite stomach this blanket statement even though he softens it slightly by allowing individuals the right to leave a particular congregation with the caveat that they must immediately seek out another one. 

My reflections upon reading these new rules are that Wax doesn’t appear to know much about those who are leaving the church. He mentions that, “We think people are leaving the church today because of all the church scandals. But it’s possible we hear more about church scandals today because people seek to justify their decision to leave.”

Perhaps this is true, but I tend to think disillusionment in the institution of the church is a legitimate concern. And although I now believe in the value of the church, I didn’t always, mostly because I’d never seen the church functioning as it should. 

Back in high school, I experienced repeated assault in a religious context, and it shook my belief in Christ and especially in his people. At that point, I believed that Christian leaders were all corrupt, self-serving, and defensive of their image above individuals under their care. I felt a sense of tension between the behavior I witnessed by God’s people and the person of God whom I’d learned about growing up in church. At that moment, I decided that either God was not good, God did not exist, or the church did not represent God and I stopped attending church. 

When I shared my doubts with my parents, they said that although they were sorry to hear I was struggling they believed God would guide me through even this. Every day I’m so grateful they did not bring down the hammer like Wax did in his article and castigate me for my unbelief and unrepentance. Their calm and continued faithfulness to God in the face of my doubts did more for me than any arm-twisting or guilt-tripping ever could. They showed me God was real and powerful by releasing me into his capable hands. 

And God caught me. Without going into too much depth, he stopped my spiral away from health, family, and friendship and in many many ways brought me back to life. 

By the time I entered college as a freshman, my understanding of God had been sharpened but I remained skeptical of the value of the church, after all the church had brought me into the darkest place I’d ever been. 

Through what I can only describe as God’s providential hand, I landed at Grace Anglican Church in Grove City on my second Sunday of freshman year and I never left. The simple reason was that the rector spoke to my suffering, the thing that felt most real to me at the time. He did not cleanse the Christian life of pain or encourage us to pretend that we were sinless and spotless but instead preached Christ as the hope for the darkest parts of us all. 

I witnessed remarkable things during my time in that church. Friends were baptized, doubters were embraced, and those traditionally abandoned by the church were welcomed as fellow heirs to Christ’s glory. 

People sometimes ask me why I’m still a Christian if I’m also willing to admit the wrongs that the church has done. The answer is because I believe in God and I believe in what the church can be because I’ve seen at least a part of it. 

I realize I’m incredibly lucky to be one of the ones who have made it through a struggle like this inside of the church. It haunts me to think of what would have happened if any number of tiny circumstances had played out a bit differently. I don’t think I would have been a Christian. I definitely wouldn’t be a churched one. 

This is why I can’t agree with Wax’s decision to chastise Christians who aren’t in the church. Sure, I understand that being in the church is important for believers. A professor of mine would often remind us that Jesus never sent his disciples out alone but always in pairs so that they could care for each other. I wholeheartedly believe this, so much so that I made my post-graduation plans so that I could support and be supported by some of my best friends. But I must reject Wax’s legalistic application of this principle. If going to church is still too hard, if you’re still figuring things out, that’s okay. I believe God holds us all, in and out of the church. There is help for you and there is hope for us all because we believe in a God who restores what was ruined and brings the dead to life.