A few years back, I wrote this piece about our sweet family dog, Hazel, just after she died. It was recently published in The Orange Rose Literary Magazine, so I thought I’d also share it here.

I woke up around 8:30 on a Monday, feeling a bit sick, and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. As I looked out the window over our sink and into the backyard, I noticed my twelve-year-old chocolate lab, Hazel, lying on the ground in the wood chips near the shed. On first glance, nothing seemed amiss. Hazel often lay around outside, sunbathing and collecting dirt she’d later bring inside. But on my second look, I noticed her head was twisted in a direction that failed to comport with her splayed legs. I thought to myself, only dead things lie like that. My mind filled with fog, and I began repeating, “Oh no, oh no.” I went outside to look more closely. I touched her, and she didn’t move. Her tongue was sticking out and her mouth was full of wood chips, as if she’d fallen over and bitten the ground in pain. Ants had begun to crawl on her face.

***

Hazel was my first dog, and I confess she often got on my nerves: barking at our guests; barking at strangers on the street; barking when other dogs barked; barking for no apparent reason; (did I mention the barking?); leaving stinky surprises in the back yard; getting in my way when I worked around the house. On one of our early walks together, Hazel had done her business next to a tree, and I’d stopped to put it in a plastic bag. As I reached for the pile with my right hand and held the leash loose in my left, two squirrels chased each other down the trunk of the tree, across the street, and up a tree on the other side. Hazel bolted after them, jerking the leash awkwardly from my hand and fracturing my ring finger in a nasty spiral pattern. For the next few months, I had two pins stuck through my finger, and I used dictation software at work. (My wife lovingly called it my “Franken-finger,” after the bolts sticking out of Frankenstein’s neck.)

But Hazel was also incredibly sweet. Her love language was play. Most days, when I returned from work, she’d tempt me into a game of rope-tug or chase. She loved vegetables, especially raw carrots and zucchini, and she respected assiduously the boundary between the human food we sometimes offered her and off-limits human food—even if the latter was there for the taking. She loved to kiss my wife and daughters’ faces (not really my thing…), and mostly, she just wanted to be around us, to make sure her pack was okay.

In the months prior to her death, Hazel had been ailing. Skin at the edges of her fur—around her paws, mouth, and eyes—had developed sores. Her hind legs had stiffened, and she went completely blind. She changed from a dog who craved walks to one who couldn’t manage more than a block or two. The vet couldn’t identify the cause of Hazel’s ailments without expensive tests, which likely would have led to even more expensive treatment. For better or for worse, we aren’t the kind of people who spend big money on a pet, so we ended up treating her symptoms with steroids. We understood there was something really wrong with Hazel and that she was not long for this world. The treatment mostly worked—the steroids cleared up the sores—but it made her extra-thirsty, which led to extra drinking, which led to less bladder control, which led to peeing in the house, often on herself. We developed a routine for cleaning her up and carried on.

The weekend before she died, my other family members went out of town, leaving me to care for Hazel alone. At first, I dreaded the idea. I typically spend Saturday working around the house and Sundays lying low. I imagined taking care of Hazel would be something like caring for a young child: you can’t get anything else done, but you also don’t get any rest. However, I found I actually enjoyed it. I managed (uncharacteristically) to let go of my non-Hazel expectations and purposed simply to be present to my sweet old girl. When Hazel had an accident, she’d make her way to wherever I was and stand in front of me until I saw she needed help. She’d patiently endure the humiliating clean-up—mini-sponge-baths for a dog who hated water—and then resume lying around or clumsily navigating the back yard by Braille. Her dependence on me reminded me of my own profound dependence on others—a fact I should keep in mind but usually overlook. My compassion for our loyal, frail, stoic Hazel deepened. She was never much for physical affection—if you reached to pet her on the head, she’d typically shrink back a few inches. But several times that weekend, I’d stroke her belly while she rested on the rug and speak tenderly to her, and I noticed her exhales become more pronounced and timed with my touch, as if consciously absorbing my love.

***

After examining Hazel where she lay, twisted in our yard, I went back inside, unable to think what to do. Despite my reluctance to touch something dead, I decided I should move her to the shade and wrap her in a sheet; it seemed undignified to leave her exposed, where she’d fallen. I laid out the shroud, picked her up, and carried her to the side yard. As I set down her fifty-five-pound body, my lower back clenched in a spasm. Though I didn’t welcome the pain, it somehow seemed appropriate: a physical reminder of my loss. Irrationally, I both hoped my injury would heal quickly and that it would linger on a while.

Later that day, a young man with a stronger back came to pick up Hazel’s body for cremation at the Humane Society. I led him to the side yard. He gripped the shroud and hoisted her up. I followed as he carried her and slid her body into one of the locking compartments in the back of his truck. He closed the inner door, a steel grid with four-inch squares, and as it clicked shut, I was overcome by the fact that I would never see Hazel again. The young man with the strong back started doing paperwork. “Is it okay if I touch her?” I said. He nodded, and I slipped my hand through one of the openings in the grid, parted the shroud, and stroked the soft fur on her belly one last time. Tears welled. After a few seconds, I turned back to the young man. “I’ve got an old dog too,” he said. “I’m not ready for this.” I nodded. As he tore off my copy of the paperwork, my face crumpled in sadness. I joined my daughter on the front porch; we stood together and cried.

In the mornings, when I’m doing my exercises or getting on my bike to ride to work, Hazel is not there curled up on the couch, or poking her head through the doggy door, just to see me off. At midday, when I’m making my lunch, she’s not there begging politely for a baby carrot or a piece of cucumber. At the end of my work day, she’s not there to greet me with wagging tail and a rope in her mouth. At bedtime, she’s not there to breathe into my soft words and tender touch. When the dogs next door bark, she isn’t there to reply. And I can’t remember why she ever got on my nerves.

This morning, I received a message through my author website from what seems like a scammer. I get many of these, most of which invite me to submit my book to a “book club” or “reading group” who are “enthusiastic” to read it.

They generally don’t ask for money up front, but I’m sure email #2 would introduce the pay-to-play clause. Which is incredibly silly: if your book club wants to read my book, why don’t they just get it and read it? Answer: because there is no book club.

Many of these messages praise my book in suspiciously subtle detail, making me think scammers have turned ChatGPT loose on the back-cover copy, or even the entire book.

And I’m not going to lie: the first of such messages I received—which came, literally, on publication day—was initially gratifying. It felt good to think someone had dived deep into a piece of writing I poured my soul into. But alas, ‘twas only a robot that read my book.

The message I got this morning, though, was next-level. It seemed to be from an actual editor at a legitimate indie publishing house (I looked her up), reaching out to see what other pieces I might be working on, and whether I’d like to explore a publishing relationship.

The only red flags were (1) some turns of phrase I wouldn’t expect from a literary editor, (2) they got the title of my book wrong—they called it Body in Barrel rather than the correct Body in a Barrel—and (3) the domain name of their email address was “aol.com” and not the domain name of the publishing house.

Dispiriting

Such scammy messages don’t even approach traction with me, but I do find them dispiriting. They target the most vulnerable desires of an artist—to have their work seen and appreciated.

Despite knowing that any message conveyed through my author website is likely spammy or scammy, I can’t help but feel a shot of hope when I see one in my inbox. What if it’s an actual publisher or agent? But then I open the message, and it feels like someone’s taunting me, trivializing the sweat and courage it took to make art and offer it to the world.

It’s not only scam emails I find dispiriting these days. My wife continues to struggle with her recovery from cancer. One of my young-adult children struggles with debilitating long-term effects of Covid-19, layered on top of her autism. My other young-adult child is struggling to break into a shriveled Los Angeles entertainment industry.

At work, the consensus deal to share the shrinking Colorado River, which we water engineers have been aiming at for six years, has failed to materialize, making it more likely I’ll spend the remaining years of my career supporting lawsuits rather than managing water collaboratively.

And these burdens don’t even broach the daily indignities of current American politics, which we so thoughtlessly impose on the entire world. There is so much that feels heavy.

When we say someone has “spirit,” we often mean the person approaches life with zest, energy, enthusiasm, or determination. This is the sense in which my (long list of) burdens has been “dispiriting,” lately. Life has felt a bit tasteless. Even things I generally enjoy—writing, exercising, following soccer—have felt flat. And, though I can’t tell for sure, I attribute that loss of spirit to the cumulative effect of my burdens.

Jesus Gave Up His Spirit

In this emotional context, John 19:30—a verse I encountered in my prayer time on this Good Friday—struck me in a new way:

“When Jesus had received the wine, he said, ‘It is finished.’ Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.”

The verse comes in the middle of John’s account of Jesus’s crucifixion. The expression, “gave up his spirit,” is surely meant to indicate the point at which Jesus died. Often, this way of putting it has made me think of some incorporeal animating substance—spirit—departing from Jesus’s body (whether or not that idea is anachronistically Cartesian).

But what if we thought of it, instead, as a kind of “dispiriting” of Jesus, a surrendering of his energy, his enthusiasm, his motivation—in a word, a yielding of his will?

Of course, this reading says too little. As I noted, the verse really means that Jesus died. But death does entail a loss of will, a yielding to forces beyond our own that take life. So, at a minimum, it doesn’t seem wrong to say that Jesus’s “giving up of his spirit” would include a loss of energy, enthusiasm, determination, or will.

To go further, it seems like part of the point of describing his death this way—as a “giving up of spirit”—is to communicate a kind of surrender of his will to God’s. In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prays,

“My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” (Matthew 26:39)

Jesus’s “giving up of his spirit” is the fulfillment of this prayer: in the moment of his death, he yields his drive to live, his will, and embraces God’s will, dark and difficult as it is.

Into Your Hands, O Lord

Of course, those who follow Jesus are also called to imitate his death. In Luke 9:23-24, Jesus says,

“If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.”

What could it mean to take up a cross—an instrument of death—daily? Interpreted literally, we mere mortals could only ever take up a cross once.

In my view, the operative phrase, here, is “let them deny themselves.” The calling is not to literal death, but rather to a daily yielding of will or spirit, just as Jesus gave up his spirit to God on the Good Friday cross. To the extent that the zest, the energy, the motivation, the will that constitutes our lives is different from God’s will for us, we are called to yield, to live daily the compline prayer from Psalm 31:5—“Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.”

So, friend, if, like me, you find yourself lacking in zest, struggling for energy and motivation, beleaguered by the burdens of life—if you find yourself dispirited—perhaps it is not such a bad place to be on this Good Friday. God willing, the zest, the energy, the motivation will return. But for now, only imitate the Savior, and let your spirit rest in the hands of our loving God.

That Jesus was laid in a manger is perhaps the most iconic element of the Nativity. This Advent season, as I re-read and reflected on the story in Luke 2:1-20, I was struck by how many times the story mentions the manger.

And she gave birth to her firstborn son; and she wrapped him in cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn. (Luke 2:7)

And so the angel said to [the shepherds], “Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people; for today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” (Luke 2:10-12)

So [the shepherds] went with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the child lying in the manger. (Luke 2:16)

When an uncommon word like “manger” appears three times in a short passage—a word appearing only once more in the entire New Testament (Luke 13:15)—this usually means we should pay attention. But what exactly is the meaning of the manger in the Nativity narrative?

A Sign of the Messiah

Most obviously, the manger shows that the child set within it is the Messiah, Christ the Lord. As the angel says to the shepherds in Luke 2:10-12, the baby lying in a manger “...will be a sign...” When the shepherds find baby Jesus, the manger confirms the angel’s claim that he is “a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”

As Joseph A. Fitzmyer points out, the mention of a manger evokes Isaiah 1:3 from the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible—the Septuagint or “LXX”—which was popular in Luke's first century context:

An ox knows its owner and a donkey the manger of its lord; but Israel knows not me, and my people does not comprehend (Fitzmyer, 394).

The implication in Luke 2 is that the shepherds will be different from the ignorant, uncomprehending Israel of Isaiah's time. They will resemble, rather, the ox that knows its owner; like the donkey, the shepherds will recognize the manger as a sign of their lord.

Technically, the cloths in which the baby is wrapped are also part of the sign (Luke 2:12), though newborns wrapped in cloths aren’t so unusual (we wrapped our newborn girls like that). If the cloths alone were the sign, it would be something like saying, “And this will be a sign for you: you will find the baby breathing.” With that kind of sign, the shepherds might wonder if they had the right baby or whether he was really so special. The manger is much more particular and unusual, lending weight to the angel's messianic claim.

However, as Fitzmyer points out (pp. 394-395), the reference to being wrapped in cloths evokes the Wisdom of Solomon, a deuterocanonical book included in the Septuagint (though not the Hebrew Bible), in which the narrator is the wise king Solomon, the son of king David:

And when I was born, I began to breathe the common air and fell upon the kindred earth; my first sound was a cry, as is true of all. I was nursed with care in swaddling cloths. For no king has had a different beginning of existence; there is for all one entrance into life and one way out. (Wisdom of Solomon 7:3-6)

In this passage, Solomon is insisting he was a baby like every other to support his claim that his wisdom was not inherent to him, but rather given by God as an answer to his prayer. The point for us is that a first-century Jewish reader of Luke would hear “wrapped in cloths” and associate baby Jesus with Solomon, implying that Jesus was a son of David, a king, the Messiah.

Poverty and Status

The manger also tells us something about the socio-economic status of Jesus' family. As the story goes, immediately before Jesus was born, Joseph and a pregnant Mary traveled to Bethlehem to be counted in the Roman census. When they arrived there, Mary gave birth, but since there was no room at the inn, she birthed him in the stable, with the animals, and lay him in a manger.

Fair enough: if there's no room at the inn, you need to improvise. But if Joseph or Mary have money, you know they don't end up in a smelly, dirty place like a stable, laying their newborn in a manger. Money opens (literal) doors. The fact Mary birthed Jesus in a stable implies they were poor.

The parallels with modern American culture are painfully obvious. We relegate poor people to worse life outcomes and offer them fewer opportunities than their counterparts with means. Their neighborhoods are less safe, their educational opportunities are substandard, their healthcare is worse, and our system of justice slants against them, to list but a few examples. Sadly, the manger suggests such treatment of poor people is timeless.

More happily, though, the manger also suggests such treatment is mistaken. Jesus, the Messiah, a king, God incarnate—a high-status human if ever there was one—visited us as a poor person. The lesson: financial poverty is not a sign of true worth or status. Our regard for, and treatment of, the outwardly poor should at least be equal to, if not greater than, our treatment of those with money.

The Meaning of the Manger: Jesus our Sustenance

Finally, that Jesus was laid in a manger suggests he is a kind of sustenance. A manger, of course, is a feeding trough for farm animals. Typically, a manger holds hay or grain for animals to eat. The implication is that we, like donkeys who recognize the manger of our lord, should come and feed on its contents—the Lord himself.

Viewed from this angle, the manger evokes John 6:

Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day, for my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. (John 6:53b-55)

In this chapter of John's Gospel, Jesus chides those who follow him simply to get free bread, claiming that what they really need is him, the “bread of life.” With no little controversy, Jesus suggests they eat his flesh and drink his blood as the means to genuine life, eternal life.

Although passages like this did elicit charges of cannibalism against Christians in the first-century Roman Empire, the language in John 6 does not urge the consumption of literal flesh and blood. Rather, John 6 picks up on the early church's practice of the Eucharist, the ritual consumption of bread and wine in conformity with Jesus' model in the Last Supper (Matthew 26).

Similarly, it seems the Luke 2 image of Jesus in the manger suggests the Eucharist: Jesus is the grain or bread we farm animals are to feed on if we're to live the deeper, richer, fuller, eternal lives that God intends for us.

Although the church has long debated whether the bread and wine of the Eucharist are the literal body and blood of Christ or instead something symbolic, at a minimum the taking of the elements enacts a prayer that God in Christ would be intimately close to us, part of us—incorporated into every aspect of our being just as food becomes the literal substance of our bodies.

Perhaps the most profound way to understand the manger, then, is as an invitation to commune with Christ, to feed on the Bread of Life, to take him in, to welcome him as our substance and life, just as Christians do when they partake of the elements of the Eucharist.

I’ve often felt a tension in my theology when it comes to the concept of joy. On the one hand, in Galatians (5:22) Paul counts joy among the “fruit of the Spirit.” As Christians, our joy is to grow like fruit, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, and that joy is to be a steady, stable, even permanent experience as we mature. I’ve often heard pastors describe such joy as persistent even in the face of negative or difficult circumstances.

On the other hand it seems the Christian is not to be inured to life’s pains and disappointments as a Stoic might be. Indeed, Jesus wept at the death of his friend Lazarus (John 11:28-37), and he fretted in the Garden of Gethsemane at his impending death (Matthew 26:36-46). If Jesus is our example (he is!), then it seems appropriate for Christians to feel the pain and disappointment of life.

Are these two teachings at odds? They’ve often felt so to me. In my experience, the degree to which I am emotionally available to life’s painful vicissitudes is the very same degree to which joy eludes me. At times, the level of my joy has seemed to ride the ups and downs of life and has lacked the steady, stable, permanent character of Spiritual fruit. In such times, assertions from the pulpit that Christian joy is “deeper” or “abiding” or “present regardless of circumstance” didn’t help (even if they were true). They only added to my confusion.

Aquinas on Christian Joy

More recently, I’ve found Thomas Aquinas’s teaching on Christian joy in his Summa Theologica to be helpful in dispelling the confusion. In the Secunda Secundæ, Question 28, Article 1, Aquinas says the following:

For joy is caused by love, either through the presence of the thing loved, or because the proper good of the thing loved exists and endures in it; and the latter is the case chiefly in the love of benevolence, whereby a man rejoices in the well-being of his friend, though he be absent. On the other hand sorrow arises from love, either through the absence of the thing loved, or because the loved object to which we wish well, is deprived of its good or afflicted with some evil. Now charity is love of God, Whose good is unchangeable, since He is His goodness, and from the very fact that He is loved, He is in those who love Him by His most excellent effect, according to 1 John 4:16: “He that abideth in charity, abideth in God, and God in him.” Therefore spiritual joy, which is about God, is caused by charity.

Here Aquinas claims that joy is brought about in two ways: (1) by being with someone you love and (2) by the well-being of someone you love. So it brings me joy to be with my wife, my children, or my friends, but it also brings me joy to know that they are doing well, even if I can’t be with them. Conversely, as Aquinas says, sorrow arises from the absence of those I love, or from knowing that they are not doing well. In this way, joy is a function of the status of those we love and our relationship to them.

(As an aside, I take it that Aquinas would say our joy and sorrow for ourselves works similarly. There is a proper love for self implied in the command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” So assuming I love myself, when things go well for me, I have joy, and when they go badly, I have sorrow. Similarly, we might say that when I’m at one with myself—a kind of “being with” myself—I have joy, and when I am alienated from myself—a kind of estrangement from myself—I have sorrow.)

Now, says Aquinas, consider the case of God. First, if we love God, then God abides in us, according to 1 John 4:16. But, God’s abiding in us is just a kind of “being with” someone you love, which, Aquinas told us, is a source of joy.

Second, God’s well-being is never in question. As Aquinas puts it, God’s “good is unchangeable.” So our assurance that God is doing well is another source of joy. What’s more, both sources of joy are as stable as our love for God. To the extent that we experience love for God, to that extent Christian joy is available to us, since God is with us and doing well.

We can also see that such joy is compatible with genuinely experiencing the pain and difficulty of life. While I might suffer sorrow because one person I love isn’t doing well (me, for example!), I can still experience abiding joy because my beloved God is with me and is always doing well. This is the joy of being with a friend even when other circumstances of my life are poor. There is genuine joy, because of my friend, alongside genuine sorrow, because of my circumstances.

So Christian joy can, indeed, be abiding and stable, even as we confront with honesty the troubles of life, since such joy is rooted in God’s unchanging wellbeing and in our abiding love for God.

Since graduating from university, I've sought elusive satisfaction in my work. I’ve been a water engineer (and continue to be one). I completed a PhD in philosophy. I tried academia. And now I write.

Writing comes closest to scratching the itch—when words and ideas flow, I lose track of time, and I experience deep joy. But flies still sully the ointment. My time for writing is chronically short. I crave full, consecutive days, weeks, and months to write, yet my reality is writing in ragged snatches, wedged between quotidian duties. (Exhibit A: I’m editing this piece between shifts of prepping food for Thanksgiving.)

I also yearn for a wider audience. What I think is my best work—a novel manuscript I’ve spent nine years writing and at least two years pitching to agents—has yet to see the light of day. Beyond some writerly friends and a few helpful editors, no one has read it. It languishes on my computer, two unnoticed megabytes, alongside last year’s tax records and invoices from our latest home repair.

Lately, I’ve been applying another coat of polish to the manuscript, preparing for one last proposal, which I plan to submit before Christmas. With the holiday season upon us, I imagine it will be months before I know the result. Months of checking my email too often—expectantly, hopefully, anxiously—waiting to hear from a publisher.

Advent Waiting?

Since it’s Advent and Jesus is my Man, the waiting seems appropriate. Advent is, after all, the season when followers of Jesus wait. And there’s a straightforward way in which my wait for a publishing deal is waiting for Jesus to act. I take him to be a member of the Trinity, that divine trio in charge of providence, and so I view a publishing deal—a thing that feels, at this point, mostly out of my control—as an opportunity my Messiah either will or will not afford. In this sense, and in this season, I wait for Jesus.

But is that the kind of waiting Advent’s really about? Waiting for something you want from the Divine Vending Machine? Strictly, Advent’s a season when believers wait for Jesus himself.

As a reenactment of the Bethlehem story, we wait for the Messiah child to be laid in a manger. But perhaps less figuratively (and more strangely), Advent is also about waiting for the return of Messiah—the second coming or “Parousia,” as theologians call it.

Believers understand the Parousia as that time when Jesus will return to finally and completely fulfill the promise of the gospel—to make God's kingdom evident, to establish justice and peace, to put sorrow and sighing to flight, to make all things new, to set all things right, to be fully and obviously present with his people.

Misplaced Longings

At my most lucid, I understand my longing for a publishing deal, and more generally the quest for satisfaction in my work, as a misplaced longing for the Parousia, for God’s appearing.

My culture says work can fulfill me. As an unavoidably cultural being, I've chased that dream for thirty years. Conclusion: I think my culture is wrong on this point. While a lucky few may experience something close to fulfillment in their work, there are always issues, problems, setbacks, and flaws. And for the less-lucky many (like me), work falls far short. If reality inevitably fails this dream, why do we keep dreaming?

I suspect it’s because every human being, to some degree or another, longs for the satisfaction, the completion, the wholeness of the Parousia. It’s just that we lack the will and spiritual vision to lodge this longing in the right place. Instead, we subvert it, channeling it into activities that can’t bear its weight. My form of such idolatry has been work and accomplishment, but it takes myriad forms, including the pursuit of money, power, food, romance, sex, and art, to name just a few. As John Calvin put it, the human heart is a veritable “factory of idols.”

Zechariah and Elizabeth

And yet. And yet.

Consider the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth—the “other” Advent story in Luke 1. Like Sarah, in the book of Genesis, Elizabeth had been unable to bear children and was beyond the normal age to do so. As many translations put it, she was “barren.”

There are practical reasons Elizabeth and her husband, Zechariah, might lament this barrenness. Without children, there’d be no one to care for them in their old age, no heir to bear the family name and property, and none of the joy of raising children.

But I suspect their heaviest burden was the cultural stigma that came with barrenness in first century Judaism. Since God had the power to open and close wombs, barrenness was tantamount to accursedness. Elizabeth and Zechariah’s longing for a child must have felt deep and desperate.

So, what does God do? Against the grain of human biology, God grants them a son, John the Baptist, the prophet and forerunner of Messiah Jesus. God answered their culturally-conditioned longings in the culturally-approved way: God gave them a child.

Virtue as Ordered Love

This old story speaks to me. I don't know whether Elizabeth and Zechariah’s yearnings leaned idolatrous. But the story does give me hope that God might yet open the door to publishing, despite the fact I (sometimes) load my writing life with too much baggage.

Just as having a child is a good thing, writing and publishing remain good things. The answer is not to jettison the good things we tend to idolize. Rather, as Augustine might put it, the answer is to “properly order” our love for such things, which, for Augustine, is to take on virtue, to form good character.

Easier said than done. In this age between Advents, properly ordered love—a balanced love for good things that doesn’t mistake them for the Parousia—will always be a struggle. Alongside the gracious and mysterious work of the Spirit, ordering our loves requires the practice of spiritual disciplines—not least among them, waiting.

Waiting shows me I can live without the good thing I wait for. I won't die without a publishing deal. Over time, this waiting shrinks my beloved object down to size, properly ranking its love below that for God, and thereby affords me a healthier, happier desire.

But what of waiting for God? The Advent lesson is not that we can live without God. Rather, Advent waiting teaches us to cope without the Parousia, to go on without God’s manifest presence and its promise of all things right. In short, Advent waiting grows in us a master virtue essential to this tense age between, the virtue by which we cling to the hidden-for-now God, whom we’ll one day see—that virtue we call faith.

In Wendell Berry's novel Jayber Crow, Troy Chatham marries Mattie Keith, takes over her family's well-kept, sustainable farm in Kentucky, and proceeds to run it into the ground, mechanizing production, growing cash crops, leveraging assets, and wringing the land dry. The novel ends with Troy clear-cutting the last pocket of old growth forest on the Keith land, straining to maximize value as he loses the farm to his creditors.

In a telling passage, the first-person narrator, Jayber Crow, describes Troy's behavior as an effort to “make something of himself”:

But, really, I don't think he liked himself. If he did, why would he have worked and suffered so to be something he wasn't—to make “something” of himself? (p. 336)

In Crow’s language, “making something of yourself” involves a willful striving toward accomplishment—in Troy's case, becoming a big-shot agri-businessman. But it also implies striving after something that doesn’t quite fit, trying to be someone that you’re not.

Crow himself recalls times when he tried to make something of himself—or at least felt the impulse to do so. As a young man he thought he should become a preacher. But, after attending Bible school, he realized he had too many questions about his faith and the Bible to stand up on Sunday mornings and preach sermons.

Later, he attended literature courses at a university in Lexington, Kentucky, “pushed by the feeling...that I ought to make something out of myself and rise above my humble origins” (p. 71). But, his motivation for study soon waned:

I kept attending classes until the Christmas vacation began . . . but I could see that I had come to another end. I had completely lost the feeling that I should make something of myself . . . I know now that even then, in my hopelessness and sorrow, I began a motion of the heart toward my origins. Far from rising above them, I was longing to sink into them until I would know the fundamental things. (p. 73)

Making Something of Myself

I relate to Chatham’s and Crow’s impulses to make something of themselves. All my life, I've wrestled with an urge to be more than I am, to achieve great things that, ultimately, were not a great fit.

For example, I grew up playing soccer. From age seven through eighteen, I played with more or less the same team and the same coach. I was a natural. I was tall for my age, I could kick the ball far, and I had good defensive instincts. I developed into a strong center back, captain of my team. When I was sixteen we won the British Columbia provincial championship for our division, and I scored a header in the final match.

I never really thought much about my soccer-playing. I never fretted about whether I would get game time (I always did). I never evaluated my performances too deeply (there were good ones and bad ones). I just played, unselfconsciously, and the world opened space for me to do so.

In contrast, around eleven I began also playing volleyball. At first, I played because I did it well and enjoyed it. But after a few years, I began to see things I could accomplish with volleyball. I set goals for myself, I made progress. By the time I was sixteen, I was no longer tall for my age—in fact, I was short for an elite volleyball player—so I trained like a fiend. I measured and increased my vertical jump. I aimed to play on the best teams. I subscribed to Volleyball Monthly magazine. I dreamed of playing for an NCAA team in California. I dreamed of the Olympics.

Some of these goals I achieved. I played at a high level through my high school years, and I ended up walking onto the Stanford men’s varsity team as a freshman. But none of these volleyball achievements were especially natural. I fought hard for everything I did in the sport. I prised open space for myself. I fretted about my performance. I worried I might not make it. The contrast with soccer couldn't have been more stark: volleyball was making something of myself, while soccer was not.

A pattern of rejecting things that felt natural in favor of things that felt difficult and ill-fitting has played out many times in my life, especially in my education and work. There's been more than a measure of self-rejection in it. Deep down I felt not enough. As a result, things natural to me seemed not enough. I had to do things that were more than mere me. Chatham and Crow make me think I'm not alone in this compulsion.

Calling

In Berry’s novel, the opposite of “making something of yourself” is to follow a calling. Crow’s calling is to be a barber. At the orphanage where he grows up, he is made assistant to a barber and learns to cut hair and shave beards. While at university in Lexington, he falls into a job as a barber to support himself. After drifting back to Port William, the town near where he was born, he stumbles into buying the vacated barber shop and becomes the town barber, a role he occupies (more or less) into his old age. As Crow put it,

Surely I was called to be, for one thing, a barber. All my real opportunities have been to be a barber...and being a barber has made other opportunities. I have had the life I have had because I kept on being a barber, you might say, in spite of my intentions to the contrary. (p. 66)

In Jayber Crow, a calling is a life that fits a person, that feels natural. You don’t decide on a calling and strive after it—that would be “making something of yourself.” Rather, a calling decides on you. You stumble upon it, perhaps contrary to your other intentions, almost by accident. And, as Crow says, that calling opens other opportunities for you; it opens a road ahead. If volleyball was, for me, making something of myself, soccer was a calling, at least for a season of my life.

How to Find Your Calling

I believe there is a calling for everyone. This doesn't mean everyone's calling will make them rich, or even that it will make them any money at all, despite the ideas of our money-hungry culture. I just mean that for every person, there is a natural fit between the world and a life of a certain shape.

Embracing a calling can be difficult. Socio-economic pressures to make something of ourselves can crush us. And if, like Troy Chatham (or me in certain periods of my life), we don't like ourselves or don't feel that who we are is okay, then psychological resistance to a genuine calling can also mount. As a result, many of us get stuck doing things that seem outside our calling. To follow a calling, we must be honest about what motivates us and resist the pressures to make something of ourselves.

What if you want a calling but don't know what yours is? The challenge here is we can't control our calling. We can’t just find it through some systematic process that works every time. Nevertheless, Berry’s novel suggests there are things we can do.

First, we should ask, what seems to fit? What feels natural? What brings joy? What do you do when you don't have to do anything? Activities like these can be clues to a calling.

Second, where are the opportunities in your life? Which doors have just fallen open, in contrast with those that may have required great effort to open? Answers to this question may have only a loose connection to calling. After all, the easy path is not always the right one, and I don’t mean to say there is never a place for hard work. But it can’t be blind over-work. It has to be work in the right direction. And sometimes past or present opportunities can prompt us to that right direction. At a minimum, if opportunities do not open in a certain direction, it’s unlikely that’s our calling.

Third, we must slow down, be present, and attend to our lives and our world. Wendell Berry’s writing is known for its deep sense of place. Jayber Crow is replete with extended descriptions, especially of the natural world, that call us to go slow and attend to the world around us rather than rush by it on our way somewhere else. For example, Berry describes Crow navigating a massive flood while on his way back to Port William:

The air was full of a hundred different sounds of pouring and of tree branches beating together, and my mind got full of those sounds. I was going along, not listening but just hearing, not looking but just seeing, not thinking anymore of where I was trying to go or even of how I was going to find something to eat, just setting one foot in front of the other. (pp. 89-90)

Here Crow is absorbed in the sights and sounds of the natural world surrounding Port William. It’s no coincidence he’s on the cusp of embracing his calling as barber in that town. Berry’s message seems to be that unless we slow down and really notice our current place in the world, our calling will remain opaque.

Why is this? Because, ultimately, our calling is the fit between ourselves and the world. We must understand something of the world and of ourselves—our “humble origins,” the “fundamental things” about us, as Crow might put it—if we’re to recognize that fit. Of course, the true identity of a human being is slippery and malleable. None of us will ever codify who we truly are. But we can often distinguish between what fits and what doesn’t, if we're sufficiently attentive.

Finally, be compassionate with yourself. To follow a calling, we must accept who we are and how we fit with the world, including our limitations and flaws. Be kind to yourself, friend. Trust that there is something good in you. Embrace what you know of that good self and the good world, beneath the layers of sorrow, struggle, and sin that might obscure them. There is a way you fit in this world.

When I began my studies at Fuller Theological Seminary in 2001, I was hungry for theology. But not all theology.

Like a good Protestant, the Reformation “solas” had seeped inside me—those rhetorically powerful principles at the heart of Protestant faith: sola gratia (“grace alone”), sola fide (“faith alone”), solus Christus (“Christ alone”), sola scriptura (“Scripture alone”), and soli Deo gloria (“to the glory of God alone”).

Perhaps predictably, then, the real theological action, for me, was with Jesus and my relationship to him: What, exactly, can we know about Jesus? Is he divine? What exactly is faith, and how do we come by it? What is the nature of salvation? To put it in theological terms, I hungered for Christology (the theology of Christ) and soteriology (the theology of salvation). The answers, of course, were to be gleaned from Scripture, so I was also desperate to study the Bible.

Ecclesiology is sexy

What I had little taste for was ecclesiology, the theology of the church. Its questions—What constitutes the church? What is church unity? What is the nature of the sacraments?—struck me as unsexy, unimportant, or dead easy to answer. Again, my theological taste was predictably Protestant: sola ecclesia was not one of the Reformers’ principles.

However, as I’ve grown older, my theological interests have almost inverted. I find myself more often pondering questions of ecclesiology than any other sub-discipline. Perhaps it’s that I’ve settled my other views, but the questions of what makes for church have taken on new import.

Indeed, they became downright practical several years ago when my wife and I decided to join a different church in a different denomination. “What do I think about the nature of the church and faithful Christian worship?” The questions now felt urgent.

’s beautifully-written and insightful new book, Why I Am Protestant, has helped me plunge still deeper into the questions of ecclesiology. It answered questions I didn’t know I had and generated new ones I’m now wrestling with. I’ll focus, here, on the new ones.

My wrestling in no way impugns the book, even where I diverge from its views. Quite the opposite: for me, the highest praise I can offer is that a book of theology taught me things and made me think. Why I Am Protestant did this in spades.

Protestant notions of unity

Maybe the most pressing ecclesiological question for Protestants should be about church unity. The unity of his disciples was important to Jesus: not once, not twice, but three times in the upper room discourse Jesus prays that we would be “one” (John 17:11, 17:21, and 17:22-23).

And, of course, since the beginning, Reformers like Martin Luther, whose work would ultimately produce the Protestant church, were labeled schismatics, those who broke away from the church and destroyed its unity. How can Protestants answer this charge?

According to Felker Jones, we need not understand church unity in the way the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches understand it—as a unity of church institutions. She points to two other models available to Protestants: Martin Luther’s idea of unity as “faithful practice” and the notion of “branch ecclesiology” from the English Reformation.

According to the first idea, what constitutes church unity is faithful Christian practice. As Felker Jones puts it,

“For Luther, the most important practices of the church were proclamation of the gospel and administration of the sacraments. He argued that the Roman Catholic Church had broken the unity of the body by failing to preach the gospel of grace and failing to faithfully administer the sacraments as sacraments of grace.”

Luther’s idea is that where the church shares in faithful practice, the church exhibits unity.

According to the second idea, branch ecclesiology, the church is like a tree that naturally grows different branches over time, some of them Eastern Orthodox, some of them Roman Catholic, some of them Protestant, etc., with Jesus at the root of them all.

“It seems right that the many branches of the one church should grow out into the world in ways that fit context. This one goes north, that one south. This one needs special nurture because its context is hostile. That one flowers in the abundant sun. All the branches connected to the root will bear fruit. All are alive only because they draw from the one trunk and rely on one solid root system.”

On this picture, church unity is the historical unity of a living organism, a tree that grows many branches, a body with many parts, each of them vital to the health and activity of the organism.

But is it unity?

As I’ve reflected on these three models—institutional unity, the unity of faithful practice, and the unity of an organism over time—I find myself wondering if any of them represents the kind of unity John’s Jesus had in mind for his disciples. Consider the unity of the early believers in Acts 2:44-46:

“All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts. . .”

While this portrait of unity may seem overly ideal and impossible to achieve for what is now a global church, it does make me think church unity has more to do with warm, generous, lovings relationships, than with institutional continuity, gospel proclamation, or common history. This is not to say the ideas captured by the three models are unimportant; they just don’t seem like biblical unity.

If I’m right, then perhaps the most honest thing to say is that the church, in virtually all of its forms, has ruptured repeatedly across history, leaving an obvious trail of disunity—along with many instances of localized unity. This goes for Martin Luther’s movement, but also for Roman Catholics in their response to Luther, and for both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches in their historical split, among many other examples.

On this view, unity is an ideal difficult to achieve for sinful believers in a sinful world, and perfect unity may well be impossible. But, in the spirit of Luther, I would want to affirm the priority of faithful practice over unity, even while affirming both as important.

If my understanding of faithful practice requires that I break the relational unity of the church, then so be it. As the divisive nature of Jesus’ own ministry suggests, faithfulness to the gospel is just more important than unity with all of God’s people. I hope I wouldn’t take such a decision lightly—and I don’t think Luther or the other Reformers did—but there I would stand. I could do no other.

Scripture and tradition

All this talk of “faithful practice” might leave one wondering what the measure of such practice is. As a Protestant, I’m inclined to say, “sola scriptura.” But, of course, Scripture isn’t self-interpreting.

In the second-century, Marcion thought the God of the Hebrew Bible was entirely distinct from the God of the New Testament. He affirmed the authority of Scripture, in some sense—albeit a New Testament canon reduced to ten of Paul’s letters and a shrunken version of Luke’s Gospel. It’s just that the way he read Scripture was eventually declared heretical.

Cases like these seem to cry out for an interpretive tradition to guide our Bible reading. As Felker Jones describes, a common Roman Catholic complaint about sola scriptura is that it leads into a “jungle of incompatible truth claims . . . with no foreseeable likelihood of resolution.” Without an established tradition of interpretation, goes the complaint, we have nothing to say to Marcion. We are left to fight endlessly over the correct reading of Scripture and, therefore, what makes for faithful practice.

But an interpretive tradition to guide our Bible reading is the very sort of thing the Reformers were at pains to reject. They wanted us to read the Scripture for ourselves, not in Latin but our native tongues, without the mediation of church tradition.

The center of Scripture

Since my seminary encounter with Marcion, I’ve struggled to reconcile the fact of interpretive diversity with the Reformers’ thought that Scripture is our ultimate theological authority. In Why I Am Protestant, Felker Jones confronts this issue head-on:

“The canon [of Scripture] has a center, about which we can discern enough family resemblance among interpretations to be able to recognize it or at least to object when we fail to do so. In my judgment, that center is reliably identified in the early ecumenical creeds, with a Protestant center extending past the creeds to sola scriptura and sola gratia. . . . As to the edges of the canon, we are free to a diversity of interpretations, . . . and more importantly, we are free to the task of being the kind of body in which that diversity may flourish.”

Her idea, here, is that the central teachings of Scripture are clear and understandable, that the early ecumenical creeds (e.g., the Apostle’s Creed and the Nicene Creed), supplemented by two solas of the Reformation, help us identify that center, and that outside the center we should embrace the diversity of interpretation, not rue it.

Felker Jones’s approach, here, is eminently sensible. It certainly gets us to a constrained yet generous way of reading Scripture that cuts through the interpretive “jungle.”

Sola scriptura?

Nevertheless, questions still linger for me. While the creeds supplemented by sola scriptura and sola gratia might solve the interpretive problem spawned by the Reformation, to my mind they still constitute a kind of interpretive tradition at odds with sola scriptura.

Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that every statement of the creeds comes directly from Scripture (a point some might debate), the creeds necessarily leave out many teachings of Scripture. Indeed, they must if they’re to separate the center from the margins.

But, as we know from modern journalism, what is included and what is left out of a story—even the order in which elements of a story are presented—constitute a “take” on the events being reported, an interpretation. There is no purely objective journalism. Similarly for the creeds: it seems to me they must be a kind of traditional interpretation of the center of Scripture—albeit one amenable to Christians of most stripes.

But if the creeds (supplemented by sola scriptura and sola gratia) still amount to an authoritative tradition of interpretation, then sola scriptura doesn’t belong in that tradition, since part of it’s point is to demote or even reject tradition. Indeed, perhaps the very idea of sola scriptura is at odds with itself: if Scripture alone is authoritative, why trust an extra-Biblical churchly principle like sola scriptura? The principle seems oddly self-defeating.

And yet, and yet . . . the idea of a foundational, authoritative text rings true to me. I’m hopelessly Protestant, despite my inability to make sense of sola scriptura.

Protestantism as a living tradition

Perhaps Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of a “living tradition” can help us. In After Virtue he writes, “A living tradition then is an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition” (p. 222). For MacIntyre, a living tradition just is a self-critical discussion over time—across generations—about what constitutes the tradition.

For Protestants, this historically extended argument might include debate over how to interpret Scripture, including the validity of ideas like sola scriptura that lie at the heart of the tradition. In principle, Protestantism might even throw out sola scriptura, or radically reinterpret it.

But thinking of Protestantism in this way does not entail that we would ditch its core ideas blithely or wholesale, in the style of a Cartesian skeptic. Rather, the self-critical discussion that constitutes our tradition should be slow, careful, communal, and coram deo—done before the face of God, with fear and trembling.

In the end, despite its struggle with the notion of tradition, Protestantism, too, is a tradition with core beliefs and principles, with a (defeasible) claim of authority over the people within it, and with its own fair share of sin and failure.

Perhaps the deep lesson of the Reformation is that such traditions—whether Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant—ought always be open to reform. The Protestant slogan, “Reformed and always reforming,” is apt, as ’s delightful new book reminds us.

S.D.G.

God is omnipotent.

God is omniscient.

God is omnipresent.

God is just

God is faithful.

God is love.

God is slow.

Yes, God is slow. Or so claim and in their new book, Slow Theology: Eight Practices for Resilient Faith in a Turbulent World (Brazos Press, 2025).

Well, not always slow. The authors point out Psalm 147:15, according to which God’s “word runs swiftly” to accomplish God’s will, and Isaiah 5:26, in which the prophet says God will summon foreign nations “swiftly, speedily.” But, state the authors, “more often than not, God is described as acting slowly. . . . Two to one, God’s slowness is highlighted more than his quickness.”

For example, God could have created the world in a flash, but instead Genesis portrays God rolling it out in six “days,” which I take to symbolize eras best measured in creeping geologic time. Swoboda and Gupta point out that the Bible passage most quoted by other Scripture when describing God’s character is Exodus 34:6-7, which famously says God is “slow to anger.” God is (mostly) slow.

Imitating Christ

We, too, should slow down. On the seventh day, with the ponderous work of creation complete, God rested. Why? Not because God was exhausted, say Swoboda and Gupta, but to set us an example, to establish a rhythm for human life that is sufficiently slow.

The authors also note the insight of Japanese theologian, Kosuke Koyama, in his 1979 book, Three Mile an Hour God: the incarnate God of Christian faith, Jesus of Nazareth, conducted most of his world-transforming work on dusty roads in Galilee, walking at three miles an hour. If Jesus is the exemplar of humanity, perhaps there is something to learn not just from what he did but how he did it: slowly.

Of course, this call to slow down is meant as an antidote to the blistering pace of contemporary Western culture, according to which we must hone our efficiency, maximize our time, and juice every drop of productivity before rushing to the next thing.

Moving Slow

In this call to slowness, our authors are not alone. As they point out, their book joins a growing body of work, including Slow Church by C. Christopher Smith and , Slow Kingdom Coming by Kent Annan, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer, Alan Fadling’s An Unhurried Life, and Eugene Peterson’s The Contemplative Pastor.

What struck me as fresh about Slow Theology was that most of the eight practices it offers for slowing down center on the development of a believer’s theology—the cognitive framework of faith.

For example, Swoboda and Gupta counsel patience as we come to know God, accepting the slow unfurling of such knowledge and our ignorance in the meantime. They commend the weekly practice of sabbath as a way to cultivate calm minds capable of reflection, pondering, and thoughtfulness. They encourage us to sit with the theological problems we encounter and not rush on from them with canned answers.

Reasoning Together

The practice that resonated most for me was that of communal reflection. Swoboda and Gupta write, “we live out . . . faith together, interconnected, interrelated, and in constant need of communal experience. Doing the work of theology together is . . . slower and more difficult. But the end result is bound to be clearer and truer.” Amen.

My denomination, the Presbyterian Church USA, currently has no fixed stance on the marriage and ordination of gay people. Instead, it leaves the matter for congregations to determine for themselves. Although my pastor has long-held convictions that gay marriage and ordination are perfectly acceptable, due to the divisive nature of the issue and the diversity of views in our congregation, our community had never articulated a public statement on the issue.

However, several years ago, after a person who identified as queer quit our church because they didn’t feel welcome, the Session (the board of ruling elders on which I sit) took up the question of whether to post a statement on our website affirming a commitment to welcome people of all sexual orientations fully into the life of our congregation, including its sacraments, membership, ceremonies, and leadership.

For over a year, the Session read biblical scholarship on both sides of the issue, discussed the relevant theological arguments, considered our personal experiences, engaged the rest of the congregation in “listening sessions,” and prayed together about the best course of action. We pursued this communal discernment with fear and trembling, in full knowledge that other churches in our denomination had ruptured while posting similar welcome statements.

In the end, our Session decided in favor the statement. What did not happen was a wrenching split in our congregation. People whose scriptural convictions run contrary to the welcome statement remain in our pews alongside those who support it.

I attribute this happy result to the process of reflection and discussion we undertook together. The Session could have posted the statement after a swift vote at an evening meeting. Instead, we moved slowly, and the result was continued love, unity, and stability, despite what could have been a divisive change. As Swoboda and Gupta suggest, the process was slower and more difficult than simply voting, but it was also better.

Slower than a Speeding Disciple

Today is a day off from my job, so it’s a writing day. A day I’m hungry for a quiet block of time—some precious hours of unbroken thought allowing me to write something coherent.

Instead, I have contractors in my house. They’ve been here three months, and there’s at least two weeks still to go. I’m writing in snatches, between contractor questions and requests to move furniture so they can paint walls, remove old windows, and drop in new ones.

This contractor work is a gift, a blessing, work for which our old house has ached for years. But it’s also disrupting my writing day and making me anxious, stealing the special time I look forward to once every two weeks, and making me wonder whether I’ll finish this review.

Yet amidst the disruption—as I’m standing on a step stool, removing curtains from rods and folding them as neatly as I can, wishing I were in the writer’s chair—I hear God’s whisper to slow down. To live this book I’ve just read. To be patient with the slow, inefficient, inconvenient pace of life and discipleship. The paint will go up. The windows will slide into place. The words will make their way onto the page. The work will get done.

And so will God’s work in me. God works on God’s own time. The pace of Christian discipleship often feels slow to us. It’s God’s project, and it lasts our entire lifetime. The contribution of Swoboda’s and Gupta’s Slow Theology is to help that fact sink in. Slowly.

After announcing the upcoming publication of my first book—a novella titled Body in a Barrel about a washed up Las Vegas mobster and, you guessed it, a body in a barrel—one of my most faithful readers stopped me at church and said, “Mob fiction? Really?”

This reader knows I write about Christianity and that I’ve written a novel about slavery in the early church (coming soon). I take my faith seriously. Behind his question, I hear him wondering what a Christian is doing writing fiction about the Las Vegas mob.

Would Jesus write crime fiction?

Years ago, one of my favorite professors—an Anabaptist pacifist at Fuller Theological Seminary—had a bumper sticker stuck to her office door that read, “When Jesus told us to love our enemies, I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean kill them.” If we belong to a movement that centrally values love for all people, we shouldn’t enact or endorse violence. But, of course, there’s violence in crime fiction, and my book is no exception.

If you’ve ever watched a mob flick, you’ll also know that mobster characters often use foul language. Sometimes every other word from their mouths has four letters. And I’ll admit my book has some of this too. How can I square this with Paul’s claim that obscene and vulgar talk is “entirely out of place” (Ephesians 5:4)?

There's a live question, here, about what counts as “vulgar” for Paul, and I'm not convinced he'd proscribe every use of every four-letter English word. After all, this is the man who said (in Philippians 3:8) his past achievements as a zealous Pharisee were “σκύβαλον”, which may be translated as “crap,” “excrement,” or something profane (recently, weighed in here on whether Paul was cussing). Nevertheless, for the sake of my argument here, I'll just assume that Paul wouldn't approve of mobster talk.

So, restating the question plainly, given the violence and vulgarity in typical crime fiction, would Jesus write it? Should serious Christians write it?

Fiction as true lies

My answer begins from Mr. Hemingway’s principle, which I cling to like a life raft: “A writer’s job is to tell the truth.” Of course, as a fiction writer, Hemingway didn't mean all writers should be journalists or non-fictionists, pumping out mere facts. But explaining how his principle applies to the falsehoods of fiction is tricky.

Whether intentionally or not, the best fiction communicates truths about the human condition. Even as it lies to you, with its pretend plots and contrived characters speaking made-up lines, fiction helps you see humanity more clearly, embrace its joys, and grapple with its problems.

And, at its best, fiction's special privilege is to do so with feeling. Emotion propels the truth of good fiction like a bowstring propels an arrow. Good fiction moves us, thereby wedging its truths deeper into our souls than non-fiction generally can.

How does fiction deliver that feeling? Through the vivid portrayal of human life. Good fiction gives us characters with believable histories and relatable desires, characters we identify with, in part, because they feel real, even if the story is set in a fantasy sci-fi world.

When we're swept up in a story like that, we're open to the larger thematic truths it suggests. In contrast, when some element of a story strikes us as in-credible or false to our experience, it tends to break the fictional spell, and our openness to truth dissipates alongside our emotional engagement.

So, on a granular level, fiction must tell with believable particularity the truth about the events and psychology of human life. If a story does this, it can also communicate broader thematic truths about what it is to be human. You might say good fiction is a set of true lies.

Writing sin

Now, returning to my question about crime fiction, whether or not we like it, the truth is that a lot of bad stuff goes on in our world. Being human means exposure to violence and vulgarity. People kill. People cuss.

Indeed, it's a core theological claim of the Christian faith that the world is broken and everyone is sinful. In chapter II of his book, Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton famously said that sin is an empirical fact, one we “can see in the street,” a fact “as practical as potatoes.” Assuming we understand “sin” in its less theologically loaded sense—as “missing the mark,” rather than “disobeying God”—I tend to agree with him.

Suppose someone rejects most of the ethical norms society urges on them, biblical or otherwise. Even that person likely has a minimal set of personal ethical standards, on evidence when someone steals their wallet (stealing is wrong!) or cuts them off in traffic (fairness!). I'd wager that even such moral minimalists violate their own standards from time to time.

And if we broaden out and judge by the most intuitive norms of social justice, the wickedness and exploitation built into modern society virtually forces us to violate those standards every day, if not every hour (think: structural racism and sweat shops).

For the Christian, of course, sin is more than mere fact: it's woven into the fabric of the good news—the gospel—which is that God is restoring this broken world, not least the sinful people who endeavor to follow Jesus. Forgiveness and redemption are central to Christian faith, but those concepts are tightly bound up with sin: without it, what is there to forgive or redeem? Without a broken, evil, sinful world, the good news story of Christian faith makes no sense.

The deeper argument lurking here is that the Bible, the source of our gospel story, is, itself, a dark book. Cain kills Able. David steals Bathsheba. Herod beheads John. Pilate crucifies Jesus. And those stories barely gesture at the wickedness within its pages. If the Bible—the Christian's rule of faith and practice—portrays the depths of human sin, I see no reason the Christian writer shouldn't do the same. And for the writer of fiction, that sometimes means portraying acts of violence and vulgarity.

In his little book, Art and the Bible (which I do not endorse in its entirety), Francis A. Schaeffer calls the fact of sin the “minor theme” of the Christian story, and its redemptive aspects the “major theme” (p. 83). Fiction that leaves out the minor theme comes off as romantic, Pollyannaish, and unrealistic. Because it doesn't meet us in our sinful world, it carries the whiff of falsehood and rarely moves us.

Limits: sin as spectacle

Suppose we grant that fiction writers who are Christian should include violence and vulgarity in their work from time to time. We might still wonder whether we should portray such features vividly. What if we just refer to them or imply them?

There are times when reference and implication will do. Our stories don't need to spell out every bad thing that happens in literal gory detail. But, in my view, there are also times when reference and implication aren't enough. Because the truths of fiction land best when we feel them, sometimes a reader needs to feel the badness or wrongness of an event, especially if it's central to the story. When done well, the vivid portrayal of sin can be part of what makes a story linger and provoke thought.

Nevertheless, there are limits. Much modern fiction—whether in TV, movies, or books—uses sin as spectacle, to titillate. Such stories have no profound truth about humanity to offer; their end is external to the story, mere eyeballs and money. That kind of fiction is little different from the ancient entertainment of the Roman colosseum where people and animals were slaughtered for amusement.

When a writer has nothing more to say than, “Look at this violence, isn't it cool?” she effectively holds up the sin as something good, something to be sought as an end. And to hold up sin as good strikes me as tantamount to endorsing it, which is a creative boundary I think no Christian writer should cross.

Jesus and crime fiction

While Jesus did tell some pretty dark parables (e.g., the parable of the wicked tenants in Matthew 21:33-41), I don't know whether he would write crime fiction. But if a Christian writer is stirred to write it—or to write fiction in any genre that portrays sin vividly—I think she should write it and write it well. As the Bible illustrates, merely portraying sin does not entail endorsing it.

Sin-filled fiction may be dark, but we can think of it as presenting the first part of the gospel—the minor theme—with emotional power. When fiction prods us to feel that reality of sin deeply, the desire for the redemptive major theme won’t be far behind.

This is my hope for Body in a Barrel. While the story portrays violence and vulgarity like any crime fiction, I hope those elements communicate troubling truth about the human condition and leave us longing for redemption. Alongside the darkness, I hope readers gain a glimpse of the kingdom, the major theme—the transformation, justice, and love that will one day swallow darkness in its glorious light.

Remember blogs? Those things that reigned supreme in the world of online writing in the late 90s through the mid-2000s?

I do. In 2010, as a young girl-dad, I started a blog about children’s books (don’t look for it; it’s not there anymore). I wrote reviews, I interviewed other bloggers, I optimized for Google, all with the secret hope of ruling the blogosphere and quitting my day job. And it totally happened.

No, no, it didn’t. I bought the blog stock high and sold it low. But it did help me avoid my dissertation.

A few years later, I started a theology website where I posted my papers and course notes from seminary (again, don’t look, not there). It wasn’t a blog, exactly, but the website used a clunky WordPress interface, so it counts. I put spammy Google ads on it and made a hundred bucks a year—enough to cover most of the web hosting (my recalcitrant day job covered the rest).

Then, when I finally discovered my real calling—writing fiction—I learned that if I was going to publish, I needed a platform (a bunch of people who want to read my writing), which, apparently, also required a blog. So, in 2017, I started one on my author website (web hosting funded entirely by my day job), and I’ve been blogging ever since.

Until now. Because writing on Substack totally isn’t blogging. At least that’s what they tell me. I started this-here Substack publication (“Sub·plot”: see what I did there?) for several reasons.

Experiments in indie publishing

First, after a protracted bout of story submissions to literary journals, agent queries about the novel in my drawer, and the realization I’d always be an outsider to the literary-industrial complex (that might be the Enneagram 4 talking), I jumped into the world of indie publishing.

And I couldn’t be happier. My debut book, Body in a Barrel, launches next week—a novella about a washed up Las Vegas mobster and a body-stuffed barrel that shows up on the shore of Lake Mead. My angst about pleasing the fickle publishing industry has vanished, and contentment has caught me by surprise. I also quite enjoyed making a book—having the cover designed, working with an editor, developing a marketing plan, etc. There will be new anxieties, but I just don’t see my worries about trad publishing coming back. I think my book is good enough to be in the world, and next week that’s where it’ll be. Boom.

But I still have that novel burning a hole in my drawer. Some writer friends have advised me to leave it there, but I’ve come to realize I’m not okay with that. I’ve labored over it for nine years, and I continue to think it, too, is good enough to be in the world. I could publish it as a whole, like my novella, and eventually I plan to do so. But my novella taught me that such ventures require a fair bit of up-front cash (duh!).

Around the time I arrived at that deep insight, my friend, , passed me this cool post by on self-publishing:

KK

Everything I Know about Self-Publishing

In my professional life, I’ve had several bestselling books published by New York publishers, as well as many other titles that sold modestly. I have also self-published a bunch of books, including one bestseller on Amazon and two massive hit Kickstarter-funded books. I have had lots of foreign edition books released by other publishers around the world…

Read more

a year ago · 1289 likes · 103 comments · Kevin Kelly

Here’s what struck me:

“In general, people devote less time to books because of the huge amount of attention they require. It is easier to string that attention out in an ongoing series of posts. If a long-form book comes out of it, it is much easier to reel that string of attention back into the book. And with the advent of paid subscriptions, readers can subscribe to your ongoing book.”

This passage stirred an idea for a different indie-publishing experiment: post my novel online in sections, the first few for free, to get the story going, and the remainder behind a paywall for those enjoying the story. As the novel unfurls in series, I gain feedback from my most loyal readers, and I set about drafting another story. Once the serial is complete, I use subscriber funds to gather it up and send it into the world as a book (subscribers = investors!). Then rinse and repeat. Kelly describes it as a

“. . . dynamic process of write > publish > rewrite > republish . . . a way of building up and maintaining attention.”

So I want to try this experiment. If only there were an easy way to implement a paywall for my writing . . .

Easy paywall

Reason two for joining Substack: the platform makes it easy to implement a paywall. Indeed, this is Substack’s jam.

We’re in an age where readers of screens expect free online “content.” And this expectation is fine to some extent, but the dark side is that it conditions us to resent paying for what we read online and to accept, instead, spammy ads spewed across our screens. This conditioning makes life tough for writers, because, as Kelly points out, so much of our attention as a culture has shifted away from the page and onto the screen.

The truth is, good writing isn’t mere content. It’s writing. Writing well is highly skilled labor that demands creativity, expertise, substantial time and energy, and years of practice. And this labor is valuable: it helps us navigate ourselves and our complicated world in countless ways. As such, I think the labor of good writing deserves remuneration—even online.

As (what I hope is) a writerly retirement appears on my horizon, I’m no longer under the illusion I’ll ever earn a living by writing (the fifth stage of grief: acceptance of the day job), but I do hope to carry out my practice of writing and publishing in a way that is more financially self-sustaining than it has been so far. And Substack seems to offer a way to do that.

(I don’t plan to put any posts behind the paywall until my fiction starts rolling, but voluntary paid subscriptions are welcome and available now. Click below if you’re interested.)

Upgrade to paid

Grow the audience

Reason three: Substack is designed to help a writer grow her audience. It has nifty features to automatically encourage new subscribers and to spread writing around the platform. For example, the “Recommendations” feature makes it easy for a writer to recommend other Substack publications to her readers, and for other writers to do the same for hers.

Why do I want to grow my audience? I’m not looking for fame. (At least I hope I’m not; the motivations of the heart are too slippery to tell sometimes.) My desire for audience growth is partly about the financial sustainability I mentioned above. I’m not going to charge a ton for a subscription, so sustainability must be the work of many hands.

But mostly, my desire for audience growth is about getting my writing to the people who will enjoy it, learn from it, and be encouraged by it.

With the launch of Body in a Barrel, I’ve been thinking a lot about marketing my writing. For many writers, the idea of marketing turns their stomach. This is what agents and publishers are for, they say. Such writers want to focus on the art, keep their hands clean, and leave the filthy lucre to others.

And fair enough: some book marketing is skeezy. For example, I hate the idea of “writing to market,” whereby an author researches what sells and writes a book to that end. Such an approach turns the entire writing venture into marketing.

I think writing projects should spring from the interest and imagination of the writer, and that the goal should be art—work that tries for beauty, meaningfulness, or some such end, not mere money.

In contrast, on my picture, marketing is something that happens later, after the art is made, and is about bringing the art to the attention of those who will appreciate it. I’ve found that kind of marketing to be a creative act in itself, and one I can do with a clear conscience.

So it’s not just growing an audience for its own sake; it’s about connecting the work with the right people. I don’t need a huge audience. I just want the right audience. I want to find my people. And I think there are more of them out there.

It’s the community, stupid

The last reason I’m joining Substack is to be part of a writing community. Substack strikes me as what would happen if the blogosphere and Twitter had a baby. (I’m talking Twitter, people, not X; no one wants to have a baby with X.) Yes, you can publish articles on Substack, but it’s also inherently social. Indeed, it has a kind of social media built into it called “Notes.” You make a short post, and readers can like, comment, repost, or share it on their feed, just like other social media.

On Substack

Introducing Substack Notes

As of April 11, 2023, Notes is available to all writers and readers on Substack. Visit Notes…

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3 years ago · 3212 likes · 1098 comments · Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, and Jairaj Sethi

And, of course, publications like Sub·plot are knit together with others in the Substack ecosystem that facilitates recommending, sharing, appreciating, and connecting.

So yes: I want to find more readers, but I also want to find more like-minded writers. I want to read their work and, I hope, travel this writerly path together with them. Like one big bloggy family.

The blog is dead. Long live the blog.

So, folks, my blog is dead. But it turns out my blog by another name smells just as sweet. In fact, sweeter. Welcome to sub·plot. Thanks for your support. Happy reading. Please comment liberally!