This is a long-form personal essay I’ve been working on. It isn’t meant as doctrine or argument—just an honest account of where my thinking has arrived so far. I’m putting it here simply so it has a place to live.
PROLOGUE
New London
There was a boy in a WELS school in New London, Wisconsin, sometime in the early 1980s, who knew something was wrong before he had the language to name it. His mother had just been suspended from the church — a doctrinal dispute over communion, the exact kind of boundary-marking dispute that small confessional denominations treat as load-bearing and that everyone outside the tradition cannot quite believe is real. Both parents eventually left, finding their way to a Missouri Synod congregation, which was close enough to the tradition to feel familiar and far enough to feel like a verdict. The boy stayed in the WELS school. And on Monday morning, the same pastors who had suspended his mother stood at the front of the room and taught doctrine.
He did not make a scene. He was twelve, and twelve-year-olds rarely make scenes over ecclesiology. But something registered — quietly, with the particular precision of a wound that doesn’t bleed immediately. The certainty on offer was institutional. It came packaged with authority and with belonging, and those are powerful things, and for a long time he did not fully disentangle them from truth. But the disentanglement had begun. The message received — not from the pastors, who were doing what they believed was right, but from the situation itself — was that certainty is a posture as much as a position. That belonging and questioning cannot always coexist. That you can sit inside a tradition while not fully inhabiting it, present in the room but occupying a slightly different room inside yourself.
That split — between belonging and questioning — once opened, does not fully close. You learn to live with it, to work it, eventually to value it. The boy grew up and moved to Madison and built a career and a family and then watched the family break apart and rebuilt himself on the other side of that, and through all of it the questions were still running. Not in crisis. Not obsessively. But persistently, the way a river runs: you don’t have to watch it constantly to know it is there and that it is going somewhere.
This essay is an account of where the questioning has arrived — provisionally, with more conviction than expected, with enough honesty to know that the map is still not the territory. Call it a working worldview. Call it a theology in progress. Call it what a forty-seven-year-old actuary in Madison, Wisconsin, actually believes when he is being careful and honest about it. The boy in New London would recognize the questions. He might be surprised by some of the answers.
• • •
SECTION ONE
Building the Model
An actuary builds models of uncertain futures. This is the job, stated plainly: take incomplete information about a complex system, apply the best available mathematics to it, and produce a probability distribution that is useful enough to make decisions with. You do not know what will happen. You produce the best current approximation of what might happen and in what proportions, and you hold it seriously enough to act on it. You do not hold it so tightly that you cannot revise it when new data arrives. When reality diverges from the model — and it always does, eventually — you update the model. That is not failure. That is the process.
It took a long time to recognize that this is also the right relationship to have with beliefs about God. Not the certainty on offer at the WELS school, where every question had an authorized answer and the authorized answers were themselves the point — where doctrine was less a description of reality than a set of boundary markers telling you whose team you were on. And not the dismissal on offer in the secular environment of adult Madison, where the question of God was treated as settled by default, the way some people treat questions about astrology: with a polite patience for those who haven’t yet grown out of it. Both of those positions share a structure: a closed system, not genuinely open to evidence, performing certainty as a social function. The actuary in me found both of them unsatisfying for the same reason.
The WELS training had given something real despite its limitations. There is genuine appeal in a closed, coherent world where doctrine organizes everything — where every question has an address, every mystery has a name, and the community is held together by shared commitment to the same authoritative texts. That appeal is not merely comfort-seeking. A coherent system has explanatory power. It makes predictions. It gives you something to test against. The problem is not coherence. The problem is the insistence on closedness — the institutional reflex that treats revision as betrayal.
In college, surrounded by people far more cynical about institutional Christianity, he found he didn’t fully disagree with their critiques and didn’t feel compelled to defend the tradition, but he also didn’t feel the compulsion to discard the tradition that most of them assumed was the obvious next move. The more revealing experience came from a different direction: his roommate from Kuwait, a practicing Muslim who wanted to talk religion constantly — not aggressively, but with genuine appetite, the way some people want to talk about food or music. Those conversations were some of the most interesting of that period. And they revealed something uncomfortable: how easy it is to enter a religious conversation with someone outside your tradition committed, below the level of conscious awareness, to not changing your mind. To treating the other person’s framework as interesting data about the other person rather than as a genuine challenge to your own position. Both parties do this. It is the failure mode of all tribal religion, regardless of tribe. You are not reasoning. You are performing the social function of reasoning while defending a border.
The twenty years in Madison that followed occupied a middle space that was uncomfortable to occupy and genuinely difficult to explain to people who preferred the cleaner options on either side. Christianity felt compelling at a deep level — not always emotionally, not in a way that translated neatly into church attendance, but as an intellectual and spiritual framework. Institutional Christianity felt off-putting in ways that were sometimes petty and sometimes profound. His social environment leaned secular and skeptical; his internal world leaned searching. He lived in that gap without resolving it, which is an uncomfortable way to live but has the advantage of keeping the model provisional and the questions live.
The first time the tradition felt genuinely open rather than closed was at Blackhawk Church, listening to a teacher named Tim Mackie. Mackie spoke about Christian texts the way a good scholar speaks about a difficult and rewarding problem: with curiosity, with appropriate uncertainty, with the sense that the thing being examined was larger than the examination. It was not the performance of authorized answers. It was something closer to discovery. That distinction mattered enormously. A closed system teaches you what it has decided. An open system teaches you how to look.
The goal, then, is not certainty. It is a working map — held with enough conviction to navigate by, and enough honesty to revise when the territory proves different from expectations. Every good model has confidence intervals. Every good map has a legend that includes the date of the last update. This essay is a report on that map, as it currently stands.
• • •
SECTION TWO
The Limits of the Frame
Epistemic humility is not relativism. This distinction matters enough to state directly, because the two are routinely confused — as if acknowledging the limits of your frame commits you to the position that all frames are equally limited, or that nothing can be known. That conclusion does not follow. What follows from taking limits seriously is not “anything goes” but “we should be appropriately careful and genuinely curious.” Which is a different thing entirely.
Imagine a creature living in two dimensions — flat, unable to perceive depth, confined entirely to the plane. A three-dimensional object passing through that plane would be, to our two-dimensional creature, a kind of miracle: a shape appearing from nowhere, changing its cross-section in ways that followed no discernible rule, then disappearing. The three-dimensional object would be completely real. It would be physically present. It would be operating according to laws that were perfectly consistent and completely describable — from a vantage point the creature lacked. The creature would have two options: take the appearances seriously as evidence of something it couldn’t yet frame, or dismiss them as anomalies and go back to whatever two-dimensional creatures find comfortable. Neither option makes the three-dimensional object go away. But only one of them puts you in a posture of genuine inquiry.
We may be in exactly this position relative to dimensions of reality we cannot perceive — not because we are credulous or wish it were so, but because there are experiences that consistently fail to fit the materialist frame, and dismissing them on the grounds that they don’t fit the frame is not reasoning. It is the two-dimensional creature’s choice. Experiences that exceed the frame deserve attention rather than dismissal. This does not mean accepting every claimed experience uncritically. It means that “that can’t be real because my current framework has no place for it” is not a conclusion. It is a refusal to conclude.
The second image comes from physics, and it is stranger than the two-dimensional analogy. At the subatomic level, particles do not occupy definite states until they are observed. They exist, between observations, as waves of probability — a superposition of all the possible states they might be found in. The act of measurement, of observation, appears to collapse that wave function into a single actuality. The particle was not in a definite location before you looked. It was in a probability distribution across all possible locations. Looking is what made it somewhere specific.
Some serious physicists and philosophers take this to mean something that the casual materialist account of consciousness does not easily accommodate: that consciousness is not merely a passive observer of a pre-existing reality, but is in some sense constitutive of it — that the act of observation is genuinely participatory. This is not claimed here with more confidence than the physics warrants. The measurement problem remains contested. But what it is not is exotic woo-woo thinking. It is mainstream physics, taken seriously by people whose credentials are not in dispute, pointing toward something the standard materialist story does not cleanly contain. The relationship between mind and world is stranger than the conventional account assumes. That is not a small observation.
The fact that our frame is limited does not mean all frames are equally useful, or that the limits can’t be mapped. Some two-dimensional observations tell you more about the three-dimensional object than others. The limits of the frame are themselves data. What they require is appropriate humility and appropriate curiosity — and the willingness to take seriously what the frame cannot account for. That is not a retreat from rigor. It is what rigor actually looks like when you apply it to the full range of available evidence.
• • •
SECTION THREE
The Story We Are In
Facts do not cohere into meaning by themselves. A list of events — even accurate, verified, causally connected events — does not produce meaning. Meaning requires narrative: a structure that gives events direction and weight, that connects them to something larger than their individual occurrence, that makes it possible to ask not only what happened but what it was for. This is not a weakness of human cognition. It is the structure through which human beings live, rather than merely register, their experience.
The last year of a marriage ending. Living in the basement of the family home — which is exactly as strange and quiet as it sounds, this particular kind of exile that is still inside the thing it has exiled you from. There were two things happening simultaneously, and they were completely unlike each other, and they were both genuinely present. One was the anguish: the specific weight of depression that arrives not as sadness exactly but as a kind of atmospheric pressure, everything slightly heavier than it should be, the ordinary texture of the day difficult to move through. The other was something almost monk-like: a resolution, made deliberately, to do everything possible with maximum honesty and love — to test his own intentions rigorously, to observe what was actually happening rather than what he wanted or feared was happening, to refuse the comfort of a self-serving story even when a self-serving story was available.
The couples counseling sessions were spaced two to four weeks apart, and he began to live in those intervals as observation periods. Noticing everything. Testing his own responses. Tracking what changed between sessions and what remained fixed. This is not a natural way to live inside a marriage that is breaking apart. It was the only mode he had access to that felt honest — that felt like actually being in the situation rather than managing it from a protective distance.
A pattern emerged. Not immediately, and not with clean regularity, but clearly enough that it stopped feeling like coincidence and started feeling like information. A moment of genuine clarity — a real connection, a conversation that went somewhere true, a session in which something genuinely shifted — followed, almost reliably, by something harder. An escalation. Something that reversed the ground gained or complicated it significantly. He noticed it. He named it in therapy. He began to predict it. The therapist listened carefully and said something carefully noncommittal, which is what good therapists do when a patient is telling them something they need to hear from themselves.
The variables were too complex and the timing too specific for him to have been orchestrating the pattern unconsciously. That was the thing he sat with. He is not in the habit of magical thinking — the actuary’s occupational training runs strongly against it — and the explanation that he was somehow generating the pattern himself required him to be a far more sophisticated unconscious actor than any evidence suggested. The simpler conclusion was the stranger one: he was not the author of the pattern. He was a character inside it. Something outside his own will and intention was applying pressure at exactly the right points, as if the story had a structure and was being told by something that knew where it was going.
This is the argument, stated plainly: we are not collections of facts. We are characters in a story. The question worth asking is not whether the story exists — it does, by the very fact of having a structure — but whether it has a direction. Whether it is moving toward something. Whether the shape of the narrative is meaningful rather than arbitrary, and what our role within it is supposed to be. Narrative is not consolation. It is not something we project onto a meaningless sequence of events to make ourselves feel better. It is the structure of meaning itself. Without it, events don’t become more real. They become less coherent. The monk in the basement already knew this. He was paying attention to see whether the story would confirm it.
• • •
SECTION FOUR
Jesus as a Vector, Not a Boundary
There are two very different things you can do with the name Jesus, and they produce results so different from each other that it is sometimes difficult to believe they are working from the same source material. The first is to use Jesus as a boundary marker — a credential, a tribal signal, a way of designating who is inside the group and who is outside it, who has access and who is excluded, whose prayers count and whose don’t. This version of Jesus is primarily a social function. He organizes community, maintains distinction, provides the insider language that lets members recognize each other and identify non-members. He is a wall, however warmly decorated. The second thing you can do is use Jesus as a vector — a direction. Toward love. Toward the other. Toward the dissolution of the defended self in genuine encounter with another person. This Jesus is not a destination. He is an orientation. He points faithfully toward something, and following the direction he points is what the tradition, at its most honest, has always meant by discipleship. These are not two interpretations of the same tradition. They are two movements in opposite directions, wearing the same name.
The standard theological shorthand — “trust Jesus,” “Jesus loves you” — is worth examining honestly, because it does not actually say anything when you look at it directly. What does it mean to trust a historical person whose existence you cannot verify with certainty, whom you cannot visualize with any confidence you are visualizing accurately, whom you cannot directly encounter? What inner experience does the phrase “trust Jesus” describe? For many people inside the tradition, the honest answer is that it describes a posture of belonging — a confirmation that you are on the right team, using the right language, inside the right community. It is not primarily a description of an actual inner state. It functions as a signal. Theological language of this kind is tribal in the same way that team jerseys are tribal: it tells you something about the person wearing it, without necessarily telling you much about the game being played.
The harder problem — the one that forces a real revision of the standard framework — is the pre-Columbian Americas. It is worth sitting with this without hurrying past it, because it is not a trivial objection. The indigenous peoples of the Americas numbered in the hundreds of millions. They built civilizations of genuine sophistication and depth — agricultural, architectural, astronomical, philosophical. The vast majority of them were destroyed by disease before any sustained encounter with the Christian narrative could occur. Before any missionary arrived, before any translation was attempted, before any version of the story was available to them in any form. Are we to believe they had no access to whatever Jesus points toward? That the movement toward love, toward the other, toward genuine self-transcendence — the things that the tradition at its best has always named as the heart of the matter — were simply unavailable to them because they lacked the name? That conclusion requires a God so small and so provincial that believing in him would be an embarrassment. If that is the God on offer, the secular Madison default is the more honest position.
The resolution, when it came, came from within the tradition itself — and specifically from where the tradition begins. The Gospel of John does not open with Jesus. It does not open with the manger or the ministry or the crucifixion. It opens with the Logos: the divine Word, Reason, the ordering Consciousness that was present before creation, the light that lights every human being who comes into the world. Not every Christian who comes into the world. Every human being. The early church fathers — Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria — understood this. They argued that seeds of the Logos were scattered through all human culture, all human wisdom, everywhere genuine insight and genuine love and genuine orientation toward the other had taken root. What the incarnation made visible was not something previously absent from the world. It was something previously unnamed. It was the giving of a face to what had always been present.
There is a scene in Luke 24 that becomes luminous under this reading. Two disciples are walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus after the crucifixion. A stranger joins them on the road. They don’t recognize him. They talk for hours. He opens the scriptures to them in a way that has them rapt. And then, at the table, in the breaking of bread, they recognize him — and he vanishes. The conventional explanation treats this as a kind of conjuring trick: God clouded their perception, they couldn’t see through the disguise, and then the veil was lifted. This makes the disciples into props and the whole scene into a parlor game. But consider another reading. They didn’t fail to recognize a disguised individual. They encountered a genuine stranger — another human being, walking the same road — through whom the Christ-consciousness was fully and genuinely present. Through the conversation, through the hospitality of the table, they found Jesus in him. Not because he was Jesus in disguise. Because the thing that Jesus most fully was — the Logos, the orientation toward love and genuine encounter — was present in this stranger, and the recognition was not of a face but of a quality of being. “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked with us on the road?” The burning heart was the recognition. It is consistent with Matthew 25: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me… whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me.” The Christ is encountered in the encounter with the other. You can meet it without knowing its name. The stranger on the road was not a disguise. He was the thing itself.
This is not abstract. In conversations about love — about what it actually means to show up for another person, about the movement toward the other that costs something, about the dissolution of the defended ego in genuine encounter — the ideas land. They cross almost every difference of background and belief. The content reaches people who would stop listening the moment the word “Jesus” appeared. Not because they are hostile to the content, but because the word has been so thoroughly colonized by the boundary-marker version — the insider signal, the implied claim that everyone outside the boundary is wrong — that it sometimes functions as a wall before it can function as a door. The thing the word is pointing at is universally accessible. The name is not universally accessible. Insisting on the name in those moments is a choice to prefer the map over the territory.
Early in the period after separation, a first date that led nowhere produced, on the bus ride home, a conversation with a lawyer in immigration law who mentioned volunteering organizations that worked with new arrivals. While thinking through what that might look like — what it might mean to actually show up for someone whose circumstances were entirely unlike his own — another passenger asked where the Target was. It was his first day in America. A professor from Iran, his wife and baby with him, going to buy things for their first apartment. They were helped off the bus, offered a ride home with their things — there were a lot of things. They insisted he come in. One chair in the apartment, which they made him sit in while they sat on the floor. Biscuits. Iranian politics. A pack of saffron pressed into his hands as he left. He got a new phone eventually. He never saw them again. But whatever you call that afternoon — whatever tradition you invoke to account for it — it was not nothing. It had the density of something that matters. Something that counted.
On a dating app, as an experiment in honest self-disclosure, an atheist named Nicole asked the first question: What is one book you would recommend everyone read? The answer was the Bible — at the risk of being immediately blocked — but not for the reasons you think. And then:
| “Take out any requirement to believe the historical accuracy of or conform to anyone else’s opinion of it. Then I think it can be viewed as a book of generations of different people trying to make sense of their circumstances through a lens of some kind of common ideal, building their thoughts on previous generations’ reflections while their own world is falling apart. It’s like a compilation of human experience. Then the second part is one fairly insignificant person giving his view of what that means and how to live. Then a bunch of other people building off that. I think that’s interesting.” |
Her response: “Never have I ever thought of the Bible in that context…thank you for sharing.” The ideas land when you strip the tribal language. Every time. Not because people are waiting to be converted, but because the thing the tradition is pointing at — the movement toward the other, the compilation of human experience, the question of what it means and how to live — is not owned by any tradition. It is the human project. The tradition is one particularly sustained attempt to pursue it. Strip the boundary markers and what’s left is something nearly everyone can recognize.
Following Jesus as a vector means moving in the direction he pointed: toward the other, toward love, toward the dissolution of the defended self in genuine encounter. You can follow that vector without the name, and people do, constantly, in every culture and every century. And you can invoke the name while moving in exactly the opposite direction, as history demonstrates abundantly. What matters is not the label. It is the direction of travel.
• • •
SECTION FIVE
God as the Potential of the Universe
The quantum vacuum is not empty. This is one of the stranger results of twentieth-century physics, stated plainly enough that a non-physicist can sit with it: what looks like empty space — the nothing between things — is in fact a field of pure potential, seething with virtual particles that constantly flicker in and out of existence, energy that is never simply absent but always present as possibility. Particles emerge from this field and return to it. Some physicists speak of the universe itself as having emerged from such a field — not from nothing, in the sense of absolute absence, but from everything-as-potential, an infinite sea of possibility from which actuality crystallized. In that framing, God is not a being within the universe who occasionally intervenes in its operation. God is more like the field itself. The condition of possibility. The ground from which everything that is actual constantly emerges and to which it returns. Not a being among beings. The being in which all beings participate.
There is an image for what reaching toward God actually feels like from the inside. Imagine existence as a plane — the flat, ordinary surface of the day: the news feed, the inbox, the accumulated texture of the unremarkable, the way an hour can pass without anything in it that will be remembered. Quantum fluctuations ripple across the surface constantly, most small, some larger — moments of contact, of genuine noticing, of something briefly mattering more than it did a moment before. The ordinary world, experienced from inside it. But occasionally something extends much further. A tube, protruding from the plane deep into space, reaching toward God. From inside that tube, the plane you just came from looks compressed. Flattened. Almost two-dimensional — the way a cluttered inbox feels like wallpaper when you have just returned from something that actually moved you. The ordinary world does not look shallow from inside it. From the tube, it does.
These extensions happen sometimes far and sometimes not as far. The distance is genuinely uncertain — you never know how close you have gotten, only that you have gone further than before. And then you collapse back to the plane. The next time you reach, you do not go as far, and you begin to wonder whether you will ever reach that distance again. This is where faith lives — not as certainty, and not as comfort, but as the conviction that given the right confluence of circumstances, the extension is always possible. The tube can always reach. And sometimes you extend further than you knew through a chance meeting or an ordinary act of charity, without registering it as reaching toward God at all. The measuring instrument — your own subjective sense of altitude — is not reliable. You may only see how far you went from a new vantage point, later, when the perspective has shifted enough to make it visible.
There is an apparent tension worth addressing directly. The mystic’s description of God is not potential but presence — already here, already holding everything, the ground from which nothing is absent. The mystic is not straining toward a horizon. The mystic is discovering that the horizon was always already here, that the thing sought was the seeking. How does that cohere with God as horizon, as the field toward which the universe is always reaching? It seemed, for a while, like two different Gods. The resolution comes from considering the frame itself. Potential, movement, becoming — these concepts only make sense inside a frame where time is linear, where there is a before and an after, where possibility precedes actuality. From inside that frame, God appears as potential: ahead, generative, the horizon toward which things strain. But from a timeless vantage point — the higher-dimensional perspective the essay described earlier — there is no before and after. The whole of what unfolds within time simply is, all at once, complete. What we experience sequentially as potential-straining-toward-actual is, from outside the frame, already finished. Already present. Already held.
Potential, then, is the temporal face of presence. God as potential and God as presence are not two different things — they are the same reality perceived from different positions relative to time. Both descriptions are true. Neither is complete alone. From inside the river, the water is always moving. From above — from a frame in which the river exists all at once, source to mouth — the whole river simply is. The mystic and the model-builder are both right. They are standing in different places, describing the same thing.
Meaning, value, and consciousness — the things that most stubbornly resist materialist reduction, the things that the standard story has the most difficulty accounting for without quietly changing the subject — may be less like accidents within a blind and indifferent universe and more like the universe’s own deepest capacity expressing itself. If the field is not merely random, if it is oriented — if its deepest tendency is toward complexity, toward consciousness, toward the kind of being that can turn around and ask what it is — then consciousness is not a fluke. It is not an unlikely side effect of matter that got complicated enough. It is something the whole unfolding was moving toward. And if that orientation is not merely structural but is in some sense loving — if the field is not only generative but cares about what it generates — then the universe is not the kind of place where meaning is imposed from outside. It is the kind of place where meaning is the deepest available fact.
• • •
SECTION SIX
The Painting and the Paint
The instructor was teaching value and contrast — how to see, which is the thing art instruction is actually about, underneath all the technical vocabulary — and she made a point that stopped him: you do not draw the object. You create the darkness around it. The contrast that defines the object. The negative space that gives it form and dimension. The image is not made of the light strokes. It is made legible by the dark ones. Without the shadow, there is no face. Without the darkness, no depth, no dimension, nothing to see. The light alone is uniform and unreadable. You need both, and it is the darkness that does the heavy lifting.
That image landed close to something felt but not yet articulated — a sense of what the nature of reality was trying to do with the dark parts of experience. Life contains so much darkness. This is not a controversial observation; it is the beginning of almost every serious religious and philosophical tradition ever attempted. What is less commonly said, outside of traditions that have earned the right to say it, is that there is an increasing sense, across enough years of paying attention, of things becoming more contrasted. Not darker, exactly. More defined. As if life began in a gray zone where nothing was clearly good or clearly bad, just flat and undifferentiated — the texture of a life that hasn’t been pressed into its own depths yet — and is gradually resolving into sharper definition. The dark becomes more clearly dark. But this does not produce despair. It produces something closer to the opposite. The good stands out more vividly against it. Not naive optimism, which requires looking away from the shadow, and not cynicism, which decides the shadow is the whole painting. Something more like clear sight — the kind of seeing that only becomes available when you stop requiring the image to be uniformly pleasant.
From inside the painting — which is exactly where we are, every day, in every moment — a dark stroke looks like damage. It looks like loss, like something gone wrong, like the composition failing. The stroke arrives and the immediate experience is: this should not be here. But from the painter’s perspective, outside the frame and outside time, that same stroke is load-bearing. It is doing essential work. The darkness is not the opposite of the image. It is the condition of the image’s legibility. Remove the shadows from a Rembrandt and you do not have a better painting. You have a flat, luminous surface that communicates nothing. What made the painting great was the decision about where the darkness went.
Theologians have a phrase for this — the felix culpa, the fortunate fall. The ancient intuition that the shadow is not a mistake, that the wound is not incidental to the whole, that the coherent composition requires exactly what, from inside it, seems most like rupture. This is not offered as easy comfort. Easy comfort requires looking away from the dark strokes, and the point is the opposite — that honest looking reveals their necessity. It does not make the dark strokes hurt less. Nothing in this essay is intended to make the dark strokes hurt less. But it does suggest that hurt and meaning are not mutually exclusive. That what feels like damage from inside may be, from outside, exactly right.
We experience ourselves as agents moving through a world — painters making choices, exercising will, deciding where to put the stroke. And that is true. The agency is real. The choices matter. But from the timeless frame outside time, we are also the paint on the brush, being swept across the canvas in service of a composition we cannot see from where we are standing. Both are simultaneously true. We are the painter and the paint. Subject and object. Agent and medium. The painter outside the frame sees the whole composition at once — finished, present, complete, every dark stroke exactly where it needs to be. We see it stroke by stroke, each mark arriving in sequence, some strokes feeling wrong until the ones that follow reveal why they were necessary. This is not passivity. The paint’s willingness to go where the brush leads, to receive the stroke and hold it, is the condition of the painting’s existence. The paint that resists is the blank canvas. The paint that goes is the art.
• • •
SECTION SEVEN
Synchronicity: When the Map Lights Up
Synchronicity is not a theory about how the universe works. It is an observation about moments when the outer world rhymes with the inner world with a precision that probability doesn’t comfortably account for — when the timing is too specific, the convergence too exact, the content too pertinent to the thing you were just thinking about or the question you were just sitting with, for randomness to feel like a satisfying description. The model doesn’t require these moments to be miraculous. It doesn’t require a supernatural mechanism or a divine hand moving pieces on a board. It requires only honesty about what these moments actually feel like, and the willingness to take that feeling seriously as data rather than dismissing it in advance as the kind of thing a rigorous person doesn’t get taken in by.
The conditions under which synchronicity became visible are worth naming, because they are consistent across every instance. Every one of them came during a period of sustained pressure and heightened attention — when the stakes were high enough that the ordinary defensive distance from experience had become impossible to maintain, when the frame of ordinary life was stressed enough to become transparent. And most were not pleasant confirmations. They were not the universe offering encouragement. They were the universe applying pressure at exactly the right point — the tube extending not into comfort but into clarity. Which is, in its own way, a form of love, but not the sentimental kind.
There was a ritual during this period that didn’t announce itself as a spiritual practice but functioned as one. After four intense days of parenting — the full absorption of that, the depletion and fullness of it combined — the kids would go back to their mother’s on Fridays. A nap with no agenda to get up. Then drag yourself out into the world somewhere: a bar, a bike ride, a bookstore, wherever the Friday took you. Several of those Fridays turned into something. Not predictably. Not on any schedule. But the empty container — the evening with no plan and no outcome required — had a way of filling with things that mattered. An empty container, as a spiritual practice, without that name.
The Jamal Arc
The first Sunday after separation was one of the five hardest days of his life. He went to church without a clear reason, unsure whether he wanted to see anyone or be seen by anyone, moving on the momentum of habit. He ended up sitting next to a young Black man from Chicago — Jamal, on probation, who played guitar, who had moved to Madison to get away from the kind of trouble that follows you if you stay near it long enough. Their circumstances were entirely unlike. Something in the story felt similar anyway — the sense of being in a moment of real consequence, of things having come apart, of what happens next genuinely mattering. Darrin thought he might be able to help Jamal, might be positioned to serve as some kind of mentor, which was the kind of generous self-concept that feels less generous when you look at it closely. Then Jamal looked at him and asked if he could pray for him. The grace arrived from the wrong direction. He received it, somewhat stunned, and let it register.
Some months later, determined to be the person who initiates rather than waits — the one who builds connections in a world where ghosting is the path of least resistance — he reached out deliberately. They met at the restaurant where Jamal worked. Jamal seemed overwhelmed with what he was carrying, talking almost to the air, hardly landing inside any single thought long enough for conversation to take hold. Darrin listened and realized, with unusual clarity, that he had nothing to offer. No insight, no resource, no wisdom that was actually useful for the particular shape of Jamal’s situation. He crossed Jamal off the list. Not in a hard way. Just an honest recognition: this is not a connection he knew how to build.
A beautiful summer Friday night — no agenda, one of those empty containers. He was walking toward a bar to see if a bartender he liked was working, which is exactly the level of plan a Friday evening of this kind has. He looked up at an intersection and saw Jamal. His roommate had been arrested that morning. He had nowhere to stay. Without deliberation — without running a cost-benefit analysis or deciding what the appropriate gesture was — the sentence arrived fully formed: I don’t have my kids tonight. You can stay at my place. That night, watching Jamal play guitar on State Street — looping the chords of House of the Rising Sun and soloing over the top, something real happening in it, not performance but necessity, music being used for what music is for — he felt the particular clarity of having been placed exactly where he was supposed to be. He drove Jamal to the homeless shelter the next morning because the legal problem was genuinely beyond what connection or goodwill could reach. He said so plainly, without pretending otherwise. Some things require not help but honest company.
Christmas Day: nothing on the calendar. One text. Leftovers and a few movies — the particular pleasantness of a day with no ambition, just presence. Took him back to the shelter the next day. No agenda, no outcome required, no story being built. Just the fact of company on a day when company was the whole thing.
Seven months later, biking home and thinking he should probably check in — the thought arriving with no particular urgency, just the low hum of someone you haven’t been in touch with — his phone buzzed. Jamal had texted at exactly the same moment: someone had stolen his guitar. They met for barbecue on State Street. Jamal was down — guitar gone, a job recently quit, the news that a baby in Chicago was confirmed to be his. From a charitable fund set aside specifically for moments like this — money designated to be given away, not loaned, not returned — he bought a replacement guitar. About four hundred dollars. Let him borrow the amp too. No conditions. No performance of generosity. Just the fund doing what it was for.
A few weeks later, running into Jamal on State Street, Jamal mentioned that someone had given him a four-hundred-dollar tip at the restaurant. Said it the way you say a good strange thing that happened — with a kind of wondering pleasure at the specific number. He didn’t say anything about the number. There are things you receive without making them yours, and there are things you witness without claiming them as confirmation. The symmetry was there. It didn’t need to be pointed at.
The pattern across the arc is worth naming directly. Every engineered encounter with Jamal failed. Every time the intention was to help, to mentor, to be the one who knew what was needed — it collapsed into nothing. Every encounter that came from a Friday night with no agenda, from looking up at an intersection with no purpose beyond walking to a bar, from a text arriving while biking home — something happened. You cannot decide you are the helper. The direction of grace is not yours to choose. You can only be available. The empty container is the practice.
Jani and the Book
The men’s life group found him during the worst stretch of the marriage, through a church website search at a moment when he needed somewhere to be other than the place he was. It met at a coffee shop across from his apartment, which was convenient enough to keep him coming even on the weeks when going anywhere felt like an effort. It consisted of another actuary who had started it — an improbable coincidence of profession — a young rocket scientist-engineer with the particular intellectual confidence of someone who works on things that have to be right, and a near-retirement IT professional who had once been a meteorologist, which is its own kind of interesting background for a man who had ended up thinking carefully about weather systems of the less literal kind. An improbably analytical collection of people for what was ostensibly a spiritual gathering. The analytical register fit.
Sometimes a young man named Jani attended, irregularly. He was quieter than the others, somewhat peripheral to the energy of the group — present but not quite settled into it, as if he had arrived from a different conversation and hadn’t fully made the transition. One week, working through the texture of what was happening in the marriage, the analogy arrived: when alone and thinking, he could inhabit many possible responses and directions simultaneously — a superposition of possible selves, each one genuinely available. But in his wife’s actual presence, he found only discrete fixed states, specific reactions that arrived without the range he could access when she wasn’t there. It was as if the wave function collapsed. The observation changed what was being observed. He said this with some tentativeness, aware it was an unusual metaphor for a life group.
At the end, Jani said quietly: “You like quantum mechanics.” Then he showed something on his phone — a book written by his father, on divine action and quantum mechanics.
He ordered it that weekend. It was an unusual Thanksgiving: family at Disney World without him, the particular silence of a holiday spent in a small apartment alone. He read the entire book. It introduced him to the measurement problem, to the philosophical implications of quantum indeterminacy, to the idea that consciousness might be constitutive of reality rather than merely observing it. Ideas that became central to the framework that eventually produced this essay. A stranger who barely fit the room handed him the book that changed the direction of the thinking, written by a man who had been pushed out of his own religious community for thinking too freely. It arrived in an empty apartment over a lonely holiday, and it landed exactly where it needed to land.
Jani moved to Germany not long after. That was strange. There is no other word for it that doesn’t either overclaim or underclaim. Strange is accurate.
The Halloween Hotel Bar
On one of those Friday evenings — Halloween, as it happened — he heard a podcast make an oblique reference to a book: a literary critic going through Russian short stories page by page to explain what makes them great. Not a strong recommendation, not a sustained discussion — an oblique reference, the kind you might easily not follow. He felt compelled to build the evening around it. Barnes & Noble, the book — A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders — then a hotel bar on the edge of town. The World Series was on. He ordered a drink and opened the book.
An older woman sat next to him and asked what he was reading. He showed her the cover. She said: “Oh, I love that book. And the Russians.” He had never heard of it before that afternoon. He had bought it based on a passing, oblique reference. This woman, at a hotel bar in Madison on Halloween, knew and loved it. She was in from New York. A short story author, now writing books for young adults — about kids going through divorce. She was divorced. They talked for three hours. She bought the drinks. He did not read a word of the book.
The whole thing felt like a Russian short story. That is still the most accurate description available: the form of the evening collapsed into its own content. A Halloween night, an oblique reference, a hotel bar, a woman from New York who had loved the exact book he had just bought, three hours of conversation, no follow-up, complete in itself. Life arranged itself into literature. Chekhov would have recognized it.
The Healing Prayer
In the weeks after a Wednesday afternoon that is difficult to describe without making it sound like a comedy of catastrophe — divorce settlement arriving in email, a difficult ending to a brief and transcendent connection arriving by text, a family emergency from his mother, all within thirty minutes of each other — both groups he had been attending came to their natural ends. The Alpha group had a final cookout. He forced himself to go. He was in a haze. He could not make small talk. He felt crushed by a weight that was always there but that day he could feel in full, the way you sometimes feel the whole mass of a thing all at once rather than the portion you are usually carrying.
David was an older man in the group who prayed for everyone with genuine earnestness — not performatively, not with the practiced cadences of public prayer, but with the blunt sincerity of someone who actually believed he was talking to someone who was listening. He went around the cookout praying for people. This had never been Darrin’s thing. The laying-on-hands, the spoken prayer over a specific person — he had never been comfortable inside that form. But in the moment, with a clarity he did not manufacture and did not quite understand, something became plain: he had to ask them to pray for him, and it would work. He asked. They prayed. The weight came off. Not gradually, not partially. It came off.
“I’m fine ascribing it to chemical imbalance and the power of suggestion, a tail event.” That is the honest accounting. The mechanism could be entirely natural — the nervous system responding to the experience of being held in another person’s attention, the particular chemistry of genuine care. The mechanism is not the point. What is strange — what the model calls synchronicity rather than coincidence — is the specific configuration: the particular group, the particular people, the particular David, the particular Sunday when forcing himself out of the apartment felt like the only available integrity. That is not the mechanism. That is the situation. And the situation, when you look at it honestly, does not feel like noise.
This is what synchronicity teaches, finally. Not that the universe is arranged for your personal benefit. Not that the coincidences prove the model correct, or that they could not be otherwise explained. Only that when you pay attention — when the stakes are high enough and the frame of ordinary life is stressed enough to become transparent — the map lights up. The tube extends. Farther than you expected, usually. And you collapse back to the plane. And you trust that the chance to extend again is always real, even when you cannot feel it, even when the plane feels entirely flat and the tube seems like something you imagined in a period when you were paying better attention than you are now. The possibility is always real. That is the faith statement. That is the whole faith statement.
• • •
CONCLUSION
The Long Road from New London
The boy in the WELS school in New London did not know, at twelve, where the questioning would lead. He knew only that the certainty on offer was not, in fact, certain — that it was institutional, which is a different thing, and that pretending otherwise felt like a different kind of dishonesty than the ones the doctrine was warning against. He stayed in the school. He kept attending the classes. He sat in the same room as the pastors who had suspended his mother and received the doctrine they were authorized to deliver. He was twelve, and twelve-year-olds do not storm out. But he was also already somewhere slightly outside the room, occupying a different space inside himself, and that space — once opened — proved permanent.
The questioning has arrived, decades later, at a working worldview. Not certainty — never certainty, and less interested in certainty than before, because certainty now reads as a warning sign rather than a goal. Something held with enough conviction to navigate by and enough honesty to revise when the territory proves larger than the map. An actuary’s relationship to his best current model of the most important question he knows. The confidence intervals are wide. The model has been updated several times and will be updated again. That is not a weakness. That is the appropriate relationship to an inquiry of this scope.
The map contains the following, briefly named. A Jesus understood as a consciousness flowing through the world — the Logos of John’s prologue, the light that lights every human being — rather than a boundary around a tribe. A God understood as the field of potential that surrounds and permeates all things, identical, from a timeless frame, to the presence the mystics have always described. A world whose darkness is load-bearing rather than incidental, whose shadows do the essential work of making the image visible, whose wounds may be what the composition required even from inside what felt like rupture. And scattered through the ordinary surface of things — on bus rides and summer street corners and Halloween hotel bars and cookouts you forced yourself to attend and intersections you looked up at for no particular reason — moments when the outer world rhymes with the inner world with a precision that stops you. When the map lights up. When the tube extends.
The extension is always possible. Not guaranteed, not available on demand, not always felt as reaching toward God — sometimes it arrives through a chance meeting you didn’t arrange, sometimes through an act of ordinary charity that doesn’t feel like anything more than itself, sometimes in a conversation that crosses every difference of background and lands anyway with the force of something true. Sometimes, from a new vantage point later, you will see how far you actually went. The measuring instrument is not reliable. But the possibility is always real. The boy in New London would understand. He was already living by it, without knowing the name for it, sitting in a room he was not quite inside, asking questions he didn’t yet have the vocabulary for, waiting — patiently, with twelve-year-old patience — to see where they would go.
AFTERWORD
A Note on Authorship
The essay you have just read was written by an AI. The ideas in it are mine.
Both halves of that sentence require unpacking, and neither half is as simple as it sounds. The prose — the sentences, the structural architecture, the connections to the Logos theology and the quantum vacuum and the felix culpa and the Emmaus road — was generated by a large language model. I described ideas in conversation, sometimes at length and sometimes in fragments; the AI rendered them into essay form, proposed frameworks, named the parallels I was drawing without knowing I was drawing them, and suggested connections to traditions I hadn’t read directly. I edited, redirected, confirmed, and pushed back. The AI rewrote, refined, and persisted. The process was closer to a sustained collaboration than to dictation — but the direction of the collaboration was always mine.
A rough accounting: across two conversations, approximately eight to nine thousand words of raw material were contributed on my end — stories, observations, metaphors, theological positions, feedback on drafts, corrections of emphasis, instigation of new directions. The essay itself runs to just over six thousand words of finished prose. By raw word count, the contribution exceeded the finished document’s length. By prose quality, the AI produced something I could not have produced alone. Both of these are true simultaneously, and I don’t find them contradictory.
When Constance Garnett translated Tolstoy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the sentences were hers — the rhythm, the syntax, the English rendering of a Russian interior that most English readers would otherwise never have access to. The ideas, the characters, the moral seriousness, the whole enormous architecture of the thing — those were Tolstoy’s. No one disputes that the novels belong to Tolstoy. And yet scholars write dissertations about Garnett’s Tolstoy as a distinct artifact, because a translation is also its translator’s projection of the original, and that projection is never neutral. Gregory Rabassa’s English rendering of García Márquez was so fine that García Márquez himself said it was better than the Spanish original. Better, and still not García Márquez’s.
This essay is a translation in that sense. The things in it that feel most true — the things that land with the weight of actual experience rather than constructed argument — are mine. The tube protruding from the plane toward God: that image arrived in conversation with the AI, but it described something I had been trying to describe for years without a frame for it. The painter outside time looking at the whole composition at once: that came from a drawing class observation I had carried without knowing what to do with it. The Jamal arc across six encounters over two years: that is testimony, not prose. The boy who stayed in a WELS school after the pastors suspended his mother and learned early that certainty was institutional rather than inherent: that is biography. The moment Nicole the atheist said, “Never have I ever thought of the Bible in that context” — that conversation happened. It happened on a dating app in Madison, and the words were hers, and they landed exactly as described. These are not translations. These are the source text.
What the AI contributed was a set of capabilities I do not have: access to an extraordinarily wide range of intellectual traditions, the ability to recognize what I was building before I had named it, and facility with the specific register of careful, honest personal essay — the literary magazine mode, the voice that holds the personal and the philosophical as a single thing. It told me the Logos theology of John’s Gospel already contained my pre-Columbus argument, which I had constructed independently without knowing the tradition had been there for two thousand years. It named the felix culpa when I described the painting and the paint. It recognized the Emmaus structure in my account of a conversation in a Madison bar. I did not know those names. The AI did not have those experiences.
There is a real question here about what authorship means, and the honest answer is that the question is genuinely open in ways that would have seemed exotic five years ago and will seem ordinary in five more. What can be said with confidence: the ideas, the experiences, the metaphors, and the lived theological positions in this essay are mine. The prose is a rendering. Both the rendering and the original are necessary for the essay to exist in this form. Whether that makes this my book, or our book, or something that doesn’t yet have a clean pronoun — I am content to leave it open. It fits the spirit of the rest of the document. The map is not the territory. The translation is not the original. And the essay, whatever its antecedents, is the thing it is.
Postscript
One postscript, because the essay insists on it. On the day this essay was mostly composed and first read — Labor Day, a holiday Monday that was not quite ordinary — the reader felt compelled to go out, not with the ordinary restlessness of an empty evening, but with the specific acceleration that follows reading your own interior life rendered back to you through a lens that is not quite yours: the slight vertigo of having been translated, and finding the translation pretty accurate. He sat down at a restaurant bar and nearly dismissed the man next to him before saying anything. He asked anyway. A simple “How are you doing today.”
The man was a retired investment professional, in town for a pension board meeting, who had spent much of his career working alongside actuaries. When asked whether, as a retired professional, he had tried using AI at all, he mentioned — with something that registered as mild embarrassment, the kind that signals a person isn’t quite sure what to make of what they’ve done — that he had used it to write a book. The conversation drifted, as the questioner’s mind had been drifting all day, toward what that actually means, what the value of such a thing is. Then, in passing, the man mentioned that he sits on something with Bill Gates, and that Gates had told him five years ago that the next great race in technology would be for the AI personal assistant. At the time, he said, he had dismissed it. He wasn’t sure the value was really there.
This is the detail worth sitting with. It is not impossible to walk into a bar in Madison and find yourself next to someone who moves in the same circles as Bill Gates. But it is the kind of improbability that, when you stare directly at it, begins to resist easy accounting. A man who had written a book with AI — something he almost certainly would not have attempted five years ago, before the tool existed — was being asked by another man who had spent all day doing the same thing whether the value was real. The questioning came from one direction and found an unexpected echo. And between them, in passing, the name of the person most responsible for the existence of the tool they were both uncertain about, who had predicted its arrival offhandedly and been disbelieved.
The anecdote is mildly interesting in isolation. Dropped into the world this essay describes — into the Friday nights with no agenda, the strangers who arrive with the exact book, the encounters that are complete in themselves and then gone — it becomes something harder to name. Not proof of anything. Just the pattern, doing what the pattern does: arriving when you are paying attention, in a form you did not expect, on a holiday Monday that was almost an ordinary day.
Final Post Script – A word exclusively from the human author
I’ll keep this short because I don’t actually like my own voice. There were versions of this before and after that I generated with AI, but this version is the one that hit me like an emotional sledgehammer. It was the one that I stopped and gave my fullest attention to. There are some things when I read it that don’t feel entirely accurate or don’t capture the actual nuance I feel and I may otherwise like to adjust. There are some phrases used that made me feel how they could turn off someone who spent a lifetime committed to their own unique conceptualization, for which, the chosen words that were used would cause an internal collapse and reckoning if they were to nod in agreement. I don’t want that. It can be tortuous. So I tried several more versions after this one to try to smooth out the edges that didn’t feel right or completely true, but each new revision seemed to drop something I genuinely liked about the prior, while also introducing another frame that I found really interesting and compelled to go deeper on. One version switched all the pronouns to “I’, probably better for a personal essay, but I did not like that and decided stop trying to get an A and settle for a B+. There are too many other things to do in the world and I will drive myself mad if I try to pull on all those strings. I’m pretty sure they would ultimately just be echoes of the moment of pure attention that I did have. So I’ll stick with this subpar English essay that overuses some played metaphors.
If you (the imagined reader) are interested in going further, you will have to ask nest time you see me out at the bar. You’ll recognize me because I’m the slightly overweight middle-age divorced guy sitting alone. The kind you politely turn away from if asked “How are you doing” because this is the type of conversation (you think) you want to avoid. But I find increasing internal resistance and loneliness when I try to try to go deeper by myself. I’m starting to think there is a fundamental limit to how far you can reach by yourself.
Leave a comment