From last time:

This orientation depends on a pretty basic claim concerning human knowledge. Expression and articulation don’t start with fully-formed concepts; they arise from a pre-conceptual, bodily-felt dimension of meaning that precedes and exceeds explicit thought. It’s not right to call this an emotion, or a feeling, or a cognition in the narrow sense. It’s a tacit, holistic apprehension of situations; it’s a way in which the body “has” meaning prior to its being formulated in words. This is what we mean by “felt sense,” a term I discuss in detail elsewhere (and will write more on soon). This is why I call this embodied theopoetics.

Focusing feeds and informs my theopoetics. I want to explain a little more about that, which I’ll attempt to do in this essay.

The felt sense is a powerful guide, and it can take a little getting used to in order to know how to get the most out of it. I find it helpful to clarify that while the felt sense is usually experienced bodily, it can also be imagistic, or otherwise not exactly “in” the body. However, I still refer to the body as the site of our experience of the felt sense, because it is through our embodied cognition (sensory, emotional, kinesthetic, etc.) that we engage the felt sense.

Previously, I wrote that

For most of us, [the felt sense] arises within the body; though, as Gendlin says the body is the universe, so the felt sense can extend beyond our physical body, or even be located outside of the body; it can involve more than “just” the body and its sensations. Nonetheless, our embodied nature is the basis for our experiencing.

The felt sense can show up differently for different people at different moments, and it can have all kinds of aspects: color, movement, shape, size, and more. Some people are quite visual; others more gestural; others more verbal. The felt sense will come in whatever way it comes for you: visual metaphors, gestural indications, memories, colors, emotions, and so forth —all might be part of any given felt sense.

I also think it’s useful to know that the felt sense is a bit paradoxical: it’s something like an implicit perception that’s vague and precise, and it’s usually indeterminate while also being directive. I mean that it’s vague because it’s not yet clearly articulated, and it’s precise because not just any articulation fits. The indeterminacy of the felt sense means that it feels like an opening to something which isn’t always clear and demarcated, but definitely means something, and the directiveness of it is the way it guides you: you can listen to it, follow it, and allow it to unfold, which leads to deeper understanding and insight. Eugene Gendlin says “The felt sense wants to move. It has a directionality.”

Rather than immediately imposing the thoughts or labels that are already available to us, we wait and allow a more nuanced or exact articulation to emerge; we listen openly to what’s there inside. We might then try tentatively to find words, phrases, or images, which we check against the bodily sense they arise from. If the words or images don’t fit, we let them go; if they resonate, we check in again and see if there’s more. This isn’t about gaining new information through a deductive process as much as a gentle bringing-into-language of something that was implicitly present but not yet said.

When language is brought into relation with this level of experience, it’s clear when the right words or images are found: a phrase or image can feel exactly right and in resonance with the felt sense, or it can miss the mark and fail to ring true to what’s there. Meaning isn’t just picked up from an already-determinate interior, like mail from the post-box, and it’s not imposed from outside like an order from on high. Meaning is rooted in experience; it emerges in the interaction between the implicit bodily sense and the explicit expressive form, the words we use to describe it. Sometimes we have to fumble a bit to get close. This is how an embodied sense functions as a constraint on the right words, because while it doesn’t create suggestions on its own, it does guide their fit.

This is an attempt to describe phenomenological reality, or what’s happening in/for us in a given moment. It’s a fundamentally descriptive and invitational undertaking, not a normative one—you can get closer and more precise to what resonates, but there is no “right” answer, other than what makes sense to you and your felt sense.

Many modern folks can have some difficulty accessing the felt sense at first, because many of us live somewhat alienated from our bodies and our inner being. This alienation may be in part a symptom of capitalist dissociation, wherein we can get caught up in being productive or image-focused, for instance, so much so that we forget we are even caught up at all. We forget that we have great depths within us. This points to the importance of connecting with and listening to the body to recover our full humanity. Focusing is one of my favorite practices for this.

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There’s a direct structural convergence between Focusing and theopoetics. They both start from the implicit rather than the explicit; they both treat language as emergent, tentative, and always subject to revision; and, they both rely on a criterion of adequacy that goes beyond formal coherence. So, in a more nuanced way, theopoetics can be defined as theological discourse that remains accountable to the embodied, implicit ground of meaning from which it arises. To speak theologically is to try to articulate what’s alive and co-arising inside us: to bring into language, as faithfully as possible, a dimension of reality that can’t ever really be fully objectified.

This has several implications for theology more generally. First, if God isn’t an object among objects, then reference to God can’t go on in the same way as reference to finite things. It must be indirect, and mediated through forms of language that exceed anything like literal description. Rather than secondary embellishments, metaphor and symbol serve as the primary vehicles of theological meaning.

Second, doctrines may be understood as stabilized linguistic achievements, forms of speech that have proven capable of bearing and carrying meaning across time. This can be important for shared and communal senses of meaning. But the stability of any doctrine doesn’t eliminate its provisional character; a doctrine remains, at least implicitly, related to the experiential and embodied processes it first emerged from, and to which it must continue to be responsive if it is to be at all relevant. Otherwise it will become a stale imposition which we can’t relate to at all; what’s the point of that? Or, from the other side, our engagement with anything like doctrine or teachings must always be alive and imbricated with our own lived experience and how the teachings resonate with us, or don’t. I think of Kierkegaard and how important subjective truths are, how what is “true for me” (or you) is the only thing that can really matter to me (or you). If it doesn’t touch us, if it doesn’t feel important to us somehow, it won’t make a difference to us.

Third, the question of authority is understood differently, because if theological language arises from the interplay between tradition and embodied sense-making, then obviously authority can’t come only from either pole. It’s not purely subjective or purely formal, because it has to be negotiated within the ongoing effort to express lived meaning in a way that’s faithful to inherited forms (where relevant), while also being responsive to present experience. This isn’t arbitrary or random; the criterion of “fit” or resonance with experience is vividly important. Not every expression or articulation will resonate with the depth from which it claims to arise.

So: theopoetics is the practice of bringing forth language about God or the ultimate, through forms of expression that are in living responsiveness to the embodied, implicit processes which constitute meaning. Theopoetics situates systematic thinking within a prior field of lived expression. The adequacy of theological language depends not only on its logical coherence, but on its capacity to arise from, and return to, the depth of embodied understanding that both grounds it and goes beyond it.

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The term theopoetics joins two Greek roots: θεός (theós), meaning god/God, and ποίησις (poíēsis), which means making, forming, or bringing forth. I don’t think of God-talk, or theology, as mainly about stating propositions, but as a kind of making, a co-creative activity in which we leverage language in response to that which is ultimately beyond it. Whatever ultimate reality is, whatever it means that there is something rather than nothing, whatever “God” is or might be, words are ever only, at best, fingers pointing at the moon. The “moon” is always beyond our empirical understanding.

So, in a sense, we are always reaching, pointing towards the ultimate, gesturing or putting words to it or making paintings or songs that attempt to convey something which, in lived experience, feels true about reality. This “making” shouldn’t be misunderstood as invention or pure fabrication; we aren’t just “making it all up.” It’s a lived co-creative experience, and not just anything goes (more on that below). Theopoieisis names a responsive process in which something comes to expression through language or art, without ever just being reducible to it: the poem, the essay, the song, etc, never fully capture the Real.

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Some traditions say there are a thousand names for God. Each name gives a perspective, a bit of true information about the Real, but not the whole shebang. A thousand names get closer than one, in a way, the way that walking around an object gives more perspectives on it. You can say more about a house if you see it from multiple sides and angles than just from one; however, you can never fully and exhaustively describe it, because the most complete description of the thing is actually the thing in itself, so all efforts at describing are bound to be only partial. The most complete and detailed map of a given terrain would have to be life-sized to include as much detail as possible—and the map still wouldn’t capture the aliveness of the land.

Theopoetics means a mode of theological speech (including writing and other nonverbal media) that treats language as more than a vehicle for conveying pre-existing content: language, expression, is a real, unfolding event in which meaning is brought forth and evoked. The meaning is in the very attempt at expressing, because in that process we too, as living beings, undergo a process of “approximation” which does something to us, grows us, brings us closer to the Real in our utter failure to fully describe it.

A definition like this places theopoetics in a particular relationship with more familiar forms of theology. Systematic or doctrinal theology typically aims at something like a scientific theory of God (which is actually a category error, but we’ll pass over that for now) and seeks coherence, exhaustiveness, and the stable articulation of the claims it makes. Its governing question focuses on what can be said, and how such statements may be rendered consistent and intelligible with regard to core texts and doctrines of the tradition at hand.

With theopoetics, we don’t reject these kinds of aims, but prefer to situate them within a broader field, in which the main concern isn’t a finished statement or a nicely-polished doctrine, but rather the very conditions under which meaningful theological speech even becomes possible at all. So, theopoetics prefers forms of language like metaphor, symbol, and narrative, which are capable of bearing more meaning than they can ever exhaustively define. This means that the claims of theopoetics are deliberately provisional, because they remain open to revision as the processes that generate them continue to unfold.

This orientation depends on a pretty basic claim concerning human knowledge. Expression and articulation don’t start with fully-formed concepts; they arise from a pre-conceptual, bodily-felt dimension of meaning that precedes and exceeds explicit thought. It’s not right to call this an emotion, or a feeling, or a cognition in the narrow sense. It’s a tacit, holistic apprehension of situations; it’s a way in which the body “has” meaning prior to its being formulated in words. This is what we mean by “felt sense,” a term I discuss in detail elsewhere (and will write more on soon). This is why I call this embodied theopoetics.

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We tend to assume that seeing is the simplest thing we do, but in fact it may be the most deceptive.

It’s easy enough to say that we live in a time of crisis; what’s harder is to name how deeply that crisis is rooted in the way the world appears to us. We hear every day about climate change, political fragmentation, and spiritual exhaustion; many of our conversations touch on or revolve around these and similar issues. Usually, solutions are proposed at the level of policy or discourse as well as personal behavior; but beneath these, there is a more basic difficulty, which is so constant that it rarely comes into view: we do not see the world as it is, and we do not quite notice that we do not see it.

There is no “view from nowhere.” All perception is actually already interpretation. What we call “the world” is given through habits of attention that we neither choose nor fully understand. We seem to encounter ourselves as bounded subjects, set over against an external field of objects; we experience mind and body, self and other, human and nature, as if these were simply there, as though these categories were obvious and unquestionable. Of course, these distinctions have some value; they make orientation, action, and survival possible, but they aren’t merely functional. They end up solidifying and being reified, taken less as useful differentiations than as fundamental separations that define the structure of reality itself.

I think this is where something goes sour—but it’s often not in a dramatic or easily recognizable way. The very structure of language predisposes us to dualistic thinking, so that the shift from perceived difference or distinction between “earth” and “sky” or “me” and “you” becomes, over time, a feeling of full separation. Even our notion of self emerges through processes of differentiation that enable survival and the experience of agency, but the “self” becomes problematic when we give it too much primacy. We can tap into the fact that the self is constituted in and through its relations—with other life forms, with the body, with the environment—and it is always relating. Every breath relates your lungs to the wider world, for instance; every thought comes to you from “somewhere” and relates to something in the world, or in your mind, in your imagination.

There is no pure interiority and no purely external world; both emerge together within the same relational depth. Yet how easily we forget this in our busy lives. We come to inhabit a world in which the human stands over against nature, the self over against the other, the mind over against the body; and because these divisions feel immediate, we rarely ask whether they are true or final; we don’t think to look behind the curtain. This leads to conceptual confusion and a deformation of experience. We do not just think in divided terms; we perceive a divided world.

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What appears “objective” in our picture of the world may in fact be a projection of our own assumptions; as Czech philosopher Erazim Kohák observes, it is the image of nature as “dead and mechanical” and of the human as either “robot or rebel” that is most deeply subjective, a construction mistaken for experience. This matters more than we usually admit, for if the world seems given as fundamentally separate, then our forms of action will follow accordingly. We will tend to use and consume “nature” if it appears as external and inert rather than vibrantly alive and part of us; we will tend to manage or exclude an “other” that appears as totally outside us, rather than recognizing the shared reality of our existence; and a “self” that is felt to be an isolated being will turn inward, intent on securing itself against what surrounds it—an anxious, self-protective move. We cannot relate to the Real in this way. Even our attempts at care are shaped by the very divisions they seek to overcome: we try to repair a world that we have already learned to experience as broken.

There is a familiar response at this point, one that is both understandable and insufficient. We are told that the problem lies in our behavior; we need to act differently, to choose better, to adopt more ethical practices. Buy less, recycle more, be kind… There is truth in this, but it doesn’t go far enough: action follows perception more deeply than it follows intention or decision. We don’t first choose how to see and then act; rather, we act out of how the world already appears to us. If that appearance is structured by unnoticed separations, then our actions (however well-intentioned) will remain caught within that paradigm.

I don’t ask this question to suggest that we abandon distinctions; the ability to differentiate is obviously necessary to navigate embodied life. And I don’t want to collapse everything into some vague unity, with all differences dissolved into sameness. The issue isn’t difference itself, but the tendency to convert difference into division, and division into an account of reality. To see differently would be to recover a sense in which distinctions can hold without solidifying and becoming separations. To see differently would mean encountering self and world, human and nature, as internally related rather than externally opposed.

Easier said than done, usually. It is not a matter of adopting a new theory, or affirming a different set of propositions. It has more to do with the discipline of attention; with slowly learning to notice, with open curiosity, how the world is given, and how quickly that givenness is organized into familiar patterns. Can we learn to heed the Heideggerian call to “let what shows itself be seen from itself”? Can we see that paying attention is a form of prayer?

The ethical and the perceptual can’t be cleanly separated. To attend well is already to begin to respond differently; to see more truthfully is to loosen the grip of those divisions that shape our behavior without our conscious awareness. Moral transformation may depend less on isolated acts of will than on the ongoing formation of vision, on what Iris Murdoch calls the “quality of our habitual objects of attention,” which quietly shapes what we are able to see—and therefore how we are able to act. She suggested that the just and loving person is one who sees more clearly what is there. The claim is easy to mishear, as if it referred to a kind of refined sensitivity or heightened awareness. In reality, it’s different from that; it asks whether what we take to be obvious—the separation of self and world, the discreteness of things, the isolated estrangement of humanity—is in fact the result of a partial and habituated way of seeing.

A similar intuition appears if we attend more closely to perception itself; what seems like a relation between a subject and an object begins to look more like mutual participation in a field that exceeds both. David Abram gives this a particularly vivid expression, describing perception as an involvement in a more-than-human world from which neither “subject” nor “object” can be cleanly abstracted.

Relation is primary, and what we call “entities” emerge within it. This might sound unfamiliar, but mystics have been saying it for ages. The Buddhists call this dependent co-arising, or pratītyasamutpāda. If this is even partially right, then the separations we take for granted aren’t so much false as derivative: they describe something that’s been abstracted out from a more basic interbeing.

What happens when we notice what these claims make possible? If our experience of the world is shaped by our habits of attention, which render difference as division, those habits can be retrained. This doesn’t deliver us from ambiguity or conflict; life, the world, and our place in it are still complex. But noticing and adjusting our attentional habits opens the possibility that we might encounter the world otherwise than as disconnected parts, and this kind of encounter with the world bears directly on how we live within it.

The crises we face are real, and they call for response. Our most immediate task may not be to act more urgently within a divided world, but to see how that division is created and sustained. As long as we take separation to be the basic truth of things, we will continue to reproduce it, even in our efforts to overcome it. The work for us is unpretentious, and perhaps more subtle than it first appears. To enact a lasting transformation of the world towards a place that truly cares for all, we need a transformation of the way the world is given to us, the way we take it to be. That change, if it occurs at all, will take place in and through the loving discipline of attention to reality.

We may not yet clearly see what is Real; but the work of learning to see has already begun. Attention, after all, is our most authentic and our purest prayer.

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This essay took me longer to put together than I anticipated. Writing about nonviolence feels important and difficult (always, but especially lately). Ambiguity and uncertainty are frequently not our favorite realities to sit with, but I’m a fan of not fighting reality, and reality is ultimately ambiguous and uncertain. I like to remember that acceptance is not the same as approval, and I hope the thinkers I discuss here can help us understand that more capaciously.

(Non)violence and moral size

Our public life feels reactive, brittle, impatient, and explosive. I worry sometimes about how easy it seems to confuse intensity with depth or seriousness, or mistake domination for true strength; at the same time, it often seems like patience or restraint is treated as a lack of conviction. It’s easy to oversimplify complex moral realities in order to act quickly or cope with a fast-paced world. This oversimplification risks violence to our humanity, individually and collectively. It flattens our being.

Violence participates in this reduction in ways that are not always fully acknowledged. Violence does not merely inflict harm: it simplifies the field of relation. Violence may be considered as a hierarchy and imposition of force; it distorts truth because it diminishes the fullness of others, reduces conflict to talking points, and evacuates real complexity. This is not only an ethical failure; it’s a failure of perception. I’ll say more about this later.

Nonviolence does something much more delicate and difficult: it makes space for the fullness of others and the complexity of the situation. It does not deny the presence of conflict, nor does it evade the necessity of action; rather, what nonviolence resists is the temptation to resolve tension by eliminating one of its terms: it can hold a polarity in dynamic tension. To act nonviolently is to remain in relation without reducing the other to something that can be easily dismissed or controlled. Nonviolence is the form that truth takes when the self is large enough to hold opposition and difference without hatred or abstraction. Nonviolence is not weakness; it is the existential achievement of a self spacious enough to bear complex realities without distortion.

One of our main moral issues today is not only that we differ regarding what is true or just, but that we often lack the ability to remain present to complex realities that exceed our immediate grasp. We want to feel control in the face of expansive uncertainty, and we might be willing (subconsciously, perhaps) to erase dimensions of complexity to be able more easily to grasp situations and try to make sense of them. And I think our difficulties are not only about difference and disagreement, but about capacity, or insufficient moral size. We may consider moral size as the cultivated capacity to hold ambiguity and complexity (good and evil, power and vulnerability) without collapsing into violence or domination.

We see moral smallness manifest in an inability to tolerate ambiguity; an urge to expel discomfort; an entrenchment of ideological certainty. These can also be coping mechanisms for when we’re overwhelmed, but can become, over time, firmly-held attitudes of moral smallness as our habits become more fixed. What do we do about this? How can we maintain moral flexibility without losing resolve? How do we grow our moral size?

I’ll use Gandhi’s work as an example, with support from Bernard Loomer’s notion of moral size and Simone Weil’s writings on gravity and attention. Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) confronted injustice without shrinking the moral field. I see his commitment to nonviolent resistance as embodying moral size. Simone Weil (1909-1943) can help us clarify the interior discipline required for such size. She describes clear attention as a sustained refusal to allow the ego to determine what is seen, and to instead insist on seeing clearly and truly. If we take Gandhi and Weil, with Loomer’s notion of size, we can better understand how to construct coherent and capacious nonviolence in our own lives, and redefine power as relational capacity rather than coercion. This contributes toward a liveable model for embodied public theology today.

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Gandhi: truth begins in inner clarity

When Gandhi was a young man in apartheid South Africa, he was treated badly due to being darker-skinned than the European settlers. He was forcibly removed from a first-class train carriage, despite holding a ticket, because a white passenger complained—and this was a wake-up call for the young Indian lawyer. He was awakened to the structural violence of the apartheid system, and began to see how it enabled dehumanizing attitudes and actions. While it is true that Gandhi’s work initially focused on the rights of Indians, which today we may view as an unsatisfactorily robust anti-racist attitude given the situation of Africans and other non-whites in South Africa, being booted off the train spurred Gandhi into what would become the focus of his life’s work: nonviolent resistance to oppression.

For Gandhi, God is Truth, and his life was a quest to “see God face to face.”

Gandhi practiced daily prayer and meditation during his whole life, and regularly read from various scriptures for orientation and inspiration, including the Sermon on the Mount, the Qur’an, and especially the Bhagavad Gītā. His practice of daily self-examination mirrors Simone Weil’s notion of attention: a rare, disciplined generosity that clears the mind of ego and allows reality to emerge. The pursuit of truth is inseparable from self-discipline. This doesn’t necessarily mean severe asceticism, although both he and Weil engaged that way. Resistance to injustice presupposes a prior engagement with the ways in which one’s own perception, speech, and action are shaped by distortion.

One cannot consistently and effectively resist injustice or falsehood in the world without first confronting distortion in oneself.

Truth requires disciplined alignment. Self-discipline, or self-examination, is not ancillary to an ethical political life; it is constitutive of it. Gandhi consistently frames the ethical life as the integration of truth and action. We must learn to perceive with as little distortion as possible, to speak in accordance with what we genuinely understand, and to act without undermining either perception or speech. While this seems straightforward enough, it places considerable demands on us as agents: each moment of alignment requires the capacity to endure what is seen and said without shying away from reality or retreating into evasion or inconsistency. In other words, it requires of us a strong moral center and considerable moral size.

Moral strength and moral size

Gandhi wrote about the moral strength required to follow the dharma of nonviolence. In fact, he said that “Nonviolence alone is the true religion for all times. Nonviolence is the dharma of awakening.” I hear echoes of Paul Tillich here, who wrote that “Courage is the affirmation of one’s essential nature.” For Gandhi, nonviolence is more than a refusal to take another’s life; it is the courageous enacting of love and truth as a force for real social change. This is our dharma, our true orientation and responsibility.

Understood in terms of moral size, our difficulty with truth might be more about endurance than sincerity in and of itself. Reality often presents itself to us in ways that are costly to acknowledge: do we have the courage and capacity to face what’s difficult? Speech, when it is honest, may disrupt established relationships or expose one to criticism. People don’t like being faced with uncomfortable truths, and truth-tellers often face a dilemma: go for radical integrity and tell the truth, or conform to social norms which prioritize comfort and the status quo? Action, too, may entail forms of loss when it remains faithful to both perception and speech. The work of alignment therefore presupposes a self capable of bearing these complexities without fragmentation.

Satyagraha as existential practice

The good news is, this increasingly-capacious self can be cultivated, and arguably must be. As Søren Kierkegaard suggests, inwardness entails a form of responsibility that is inseparable from Angst, anxiety: inwardness involves the recognition that one’s own position is neither final nor secure. In other words, our responsibility is existentially significant. This is why the inward dimension of Gandhi’s thought should not be construed as a withdrawal from the public sphere. It is better understood as preparation for a different kind of power. To act truthfully in the world requires a degree of interior expansion sufficient to sustain the consequences of truth.

Gandhi names his approach satyagraha, which means “truth force.” Gandhi himself said that “Satyagraha means resisting untruth by truthful means.” It’s something anyone can do, even if they act alone. “If one remains steadfast in it, in a spirit of dedication, it always brings success. Satyagraha knows neither frustration nor despair.” Satyagraha isn’t a technique that can be applied independently of the agent who employs it; it is inherently embodied and lived-out. It designates a mode of life in which each situation becomes an occasion for reaffirming one’s dedication to truth and integrity.

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Upon his return to India after two decades in South Africa, Gandhi brought with him his years of experience in nonviolent organization and resistance. He began to campaign more fervently for a return to Indian “home rule,” an idea he’d already begun working on many years before. He encouraged locals in Indian villages to reclaim traditional lives and livelihoods in resistance to British colonial power. Gandhi saw clearly that things were out of balance and unjust, and worked to peacefully bring about the changes he believed in. These were his “experiments with truth.” His powerful commitment brought him great support, and the satyagraha movement grew.

Truth is not a static possession but is something dynamic that emerges in and through relation. To describe one’s life as a “laboratory for truth” as Gandhi did is therefore to acknowledge that integrity is not given in advance; it must be enacted repeatedly, especially in circumstances that strain one’s capacity to remain in integrity. This raises a question: what enables a person to sustain such integrity when confronted with realities that are difficult to bear? What allows perception to remain open rather than defensive? What allows us to hold onto moral capaciousness, when it sometimes feels like the world, circumstances, life, want to crush us down to size?

Looking at the work of Simone Weil can be supportive in broadening our understanding of how to hold ambiguous realities while maintaining integrity.

Simone Weil: attention as the inner form of moral size

For Weil, attention is the practice of making space within oneself for what is real. Attention names a disciplined form of receptivity in which the ego is suspended, and the personality refrains from imposing its own categories upon what it encounters. This involves a deliberate interruption of the impulses that ordinarily govern perception, which include the desire to control, the inclination to judge, and the move to assimilate to our prior expectations that which is seen, rather than seeing freshly. Attention, in this sense, creates space within the self for an encounter with reality.

This resonates with practices that distinguish between observation and interpretation, and insists that what is immediately given should not be prematurely reshaped by our evaluative frameworks: it’s beneficial to learn to restrain our learned habit of judging and filtering the world according to our preferences. Weil reminds us that such restraint is not easy: it requires effort to allow reality to appear without distortion, particularly when what appears is unsettling or unwelcome to our ideas or our notions of ourselves.

Much of what passes for perception is already structured by prior commitments and defensive reactions. We barely ever realize we’re doing this, unless we train to learn to see it. Faced with what challenges us, we tend to move quickly toward explanation or dismissal. The result is not a clearer grasp of reality, which is what would be beneficial, but instead a version of reality that seems like it can be more easily managed or seems less challenging to our inner structures of control. Most violence begins in this kind of perceptual distortion: we see what confirms us; we ignore what unsettles us. Weil says that “We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.” Reality begins to seem much less hellish when we stop fighting it and practice being available with clarity. This is how we live in integrity with truth.

Gravity and resistance

Weil describes the force that drives this process of distortion as gravity. I interpret her use of gravity as akin to a self-oriented black hole, pulling everything to itself inexorably and with no mercy. Gravity draws even the self toward contraction, orienting it toward self-protection and away from openness. Under this influence, the complexity of a situation is reduced in order to make it more tractable. Others are diminished so that we can more comfortably accommodate them within our existing framework. This relates to the dilemma of sincerity we saw earlier: truth is anti-gravity. It is often easier in the moment to go along with the gravitational pull of the status quo, to conform, to follow selfish instinct, to live in mauvaise foi or bad faith, to be one of what Kierkegaard called “the crowd” and Heidegger called Das Man. Integrity and truth require of us the moral size to resist the pull of gravity.

Violence can be understood as one expression of this gravitational contraction. Violence is born when the self can no longer sustain the tension inherent in a situation and resolves that tension by reducing or eliminating what exceeds it, flattening the full aliveness of others or the complexity of a reality. This is the weight of gravity. The result of this crushing of distinctions is a form of pseudo-clarity, which is achieved at the cost of openness and truth.

Nonviolence is a resistance to this movement of flattening or contraction. It requires the capacity to remain open under conditions that might tempt us to close ourselves off. Nonviolence does not eliminate tension but sustains it without relying on reduction. In this respect, nonviolence can be described as a form of moral spaciousness. It obeys the interrelatedness of all things, in contradistinction to the gravity of the ego or the individual self. Nonviolence, like truth, is anti-gravity.

Gandhi’s practice exemplifies this resistance. He does not deny the force of gravity, but he refuses to yield to it.

Orienting to moral size

We’ve all seen how justice, when pursued without sufficient moral capacity, can become punitive. Strong conviction, when unsupported by breadth of moral vision, can harden into cruelty. What is often taken to be moral clarity may, in fact, reflect a failure to register the full complexity of a situation.

Power-over, power conceived as domination, operates by reducing others in order to secure control. Power-with, or relational power, on the other hand, functions through the capacity to engage others without diminishing them, thereby sustaining a more complex field of interaction. Gandhi’s authority is best understood in terms of this second form: he did not depend upon coercion but upon a form of integrity that others found compelling. He lived in radical solidarity with the poorest of the poor, and he put into action his deepest convictions. Even in the face of significant asymmetries of power, as when facing the entire British colonial apparatus in India, Gandhi maintained a sense of self that did not rely on the subordination of others. This is a decentered self, a self that locates its own center of truth in the relational sphere.

“If God is in everyone, Gandhi believed, then he would have to love everyone, even his enemy.”

Gandhi worked towards Hindu-Muslim unity in the complex social landscape of colonial India. He worked to end “untouchability,” deeply engrained in the caste system, because he saw it as profoundly dehumanizing. He called for strikes and fasts and peaceful demonstrations nationwide in protest of unjust laws, and was often successful on a scale difficult to imagine or comprehend. This small Indian man was so much larger inside than he appeared from outside.

He was consistently bolstered by his faith in justice and truth; he was imprisoned a dozen times, yet never wavered in his faithful commitment to nonviolent living, including the founding of various communities dedicated to simple living and satyagraha. His incredible spiritual stature regularly inspired millions to engage in nonviolent noncooperation, ultimately leading the British to quit India. His size also made him a target of those who couldn’t understand his real message, behind their own fear and struggles. Gandhi was assassinated in 1948, and died with the name of God on his lips.

Nonviolence as relational power

Gandhi’s nonviolence is not a withdrawal from conflict, but demonstrates a disciplined way of engaging it. It involves holding anger without allowing it to become hatred; confronting injustice without reproducing its logic; and refusing to expel the opponent from the sphere of moral concern. Nonviolence calls for a recognition of shared being while refusing to sever ties through violence. This capacity to hold steady and engage across differences, despite discomfort and ambiguity, reflects moral size.

The political implications of this stance are evident in the work of Dorothy Day, who was greatly inspired by Gandhi in civil disobedience and organizational principles, and with Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Joshua Heschel, who adapted Gandhi’s insights within the context of the American civil rights movement. Here, we see how love, enacted in nonviolence, functions as a thorough refusal to deny the humanity of one’s opponent. Clear noticing of our common humanity can bring clarity of purpose. As Weil writes, “there is not any love of truth without an unconditional acceptance of death.” This is an utter and honest facing of reality, an uncompromising love and humility and a staunch refusal to diminish others for one’s own convenience. This is true courage, born from clear and pure attention.

From a phenomenological perspective, this stance reflects an acknowledgment of our fundamental interrelation. As Martin Heidegger argues, we are always already situated within a shared world: we are thrown, entangled, implicated, permeable; our existence is not sealed off from that of others. To deny this entanglement through acts of domination is, in effect, to misdescribe the conditions of our own being. To live in truth, we must acknowledge reality and face the ambiguity of it with clarity and commitment to nonviolence.

Public theology as the formation of moral size

If these analyses are taken seriously, they suggest a reframing of public theology, which might be understood as concerned with the formation of persons and communities capable of sustaining complex and often conflicting realities without resorting to violence. Theological constriction tends to generate political constriction. Conversely, a more expansive theological vision can support the development of forms of life that are better able to accommodate plurality without fragmentation.

The central question that emerges is not whether we possess the truth, as though it were a commodity we could own, but whether we are capable of bearing it. Are we morally capacious enough? Are we large enough to hold good and evil, comfort and difficulty, friend and foe? To hold together what is difficult without reducing it requires a form of growth that cannot just be taken for granted. Gandhi’s life suggests that such growth is possible, though never complete. He always held that peace and justice must begin with purifying one’s own heart and one’s daily life: we gain truth from the inside out. Weil, too, reminds us that this begins in each of us, with attention. Each act of self-examination has the potential to enlarge one’s capacity to remain present with reality. Satyagraha is an ongoing experiment in becoming large enough for truth.

Practice: attending without reduction

In a fragmented public environment, our work with nonviolence might take more modest forms. It may involve acknowledging our biases and mistakes, choosing more humane and inclusive language, remaining in difficult conversations rather than taking the easy way out, or holding grief and hope in living ambiguity without trying to force a resolution. These practices don’t instantly resolve conflict, but they create the generative conditions under which nonviolent engagement becomes possible.

To what extent are we willing to resist the pressures that draw us toward contraction, and to cultivate the capacity required to remain in relation to what we would prefer to avoid? How big are we willing to get?

The one-truth act

At the start of the day, identify one place where you are tempted to hide, exaggerate, or soften the truth. Commit to practicing honesty in that single moment. (This is still possible with kindness!)

The ahimsa pause

Before responding in a conflict or heated moment, pause for a couple of breaths. It’s usually ok to say, “I need a moment,” and take your time breathing; this helps the other person understand what’s happening, and gives them a moment to breathe, too. Ask yourself how you can respond in a way that preserves the dignity of all involved.

Suggested reading, to go a little deeper

Mohandas Gandhi, Selected Writings, edited by John Dear. A collection of various writings on many topics; helps give an overview of Gandhi’s life and work.

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace; I have the Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr translation from the French, which includes new material previously not included in earlier editions. This work is a collection from Weil’s notebooks, published posthumously.

Bernard Loomer, S-I-Z-E Is the Measure, an article he published in 1974 and in which he discusses moral size as including the full range of existence, not merely the good. I’ve elaborated and expanded on this idea in my essay. Loomer, in a 1976 essay called Two Conceptions of Power, discusses linear or unilateral power versus relational power. I use the analogous terms “power-over” and “power with” which were popularized by Mary Parker Follett over a century ago.

Extra: Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be. A powerful and inspiring work by a fascinating existentialist theologian. Strongly recommended.

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The broken space between us

Our political crisis is, at its root, a crisis of the relational. We increasingly inhabit modes of interaction in which we turn other people into objects, viewing the Other as something to be managed or resisted. This is more than just a sociological development: it’s a spiritual one, and it reflects a widespread diminishment of our inborn capacity for presence, attention, and responsibility.

Against this flattening, I look to some remarkable 20th-century Jewish thinkers who insist that authentic human encounter, and the divine summons embedded in it, is the precondition for moral and communal life. For Martin Buber, the I-Thou encounter is the ground of genuine dialogue; for Abraham Joshua Heschel, the divine pathos calls us into responsibility for one another. These two men offer a framework for reimagining our habitually transactional public life otherwise: as a field of encounter.

In this essay, Heschel’s vision of shared responsibility and moral community will be informed by Buber’s relational ontology in order to examine how a posture of attention and respect forms the foundation for moral and communal life. Buber’s philosophical framework posits the encounter as the very ground of ethical action, with particular attention to how moments of authentic relational presence can transform both the private and public spheres. Heschel extends this framework into the moral and political domain: for him, a God who feels and experiences the pathos of injustice summons us into responsibility, wonder, awe, and moral urgency.

We can see how these two thinkers together offer a politics of relation, a vision of public theology rooted in presence and mutual dignity. What would public life look like if each interaction were approached as a meeting of whole beings?

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Buber: the I-Thou as a destabilizing encounter

Martin Buber (1878-1965) was a Jewish philosopher and theologian who focused on dialogue and encounter. At the heart of his thought is a simple but radical idea: that human beings encounter the world in two basic modes, I-It and I-Thou.

The I-It relationship is practical and necessary for navigating daily life. This is the mode we use for categorization, tasks, analysis, and control; it’s the mode in which we may consider a tree as a provider of fruit, shade, or lumber. However, when I-It takes over totally, the richness of life is subsumed into the instrumentalization of all our encounters. Buber writes that “without It a human being cannot live. But whoever lives only with that is not human.” We must remember that other possibility he lifts up, I-Thou.

I-Thou is responding to the other as a subject, as both alive and reciprocal. I-Thou considers the tree as a living being and part of an integrated ecosystem. In this dialogical mode, infinity and actuality are experienced as real, living presences. It is in this mode that we interact with the sacred.

Buber sees a significant parallel in how we relate to other people and how we relate with God. This informs his extensive writing about t’shuvah, return, in the sense of returning to God, the ultimate Thou. Buber might say that we all stand in direct relationship with God, no mediator required; God is a subject and cannot be the object of faith. If we approach life with an openness to Thou, to the possibility of sacrality, we may find it, because God is “the eternal presence.” This is a relationship; this is a reciprocity; this can open the way to person-to-person, I-Thou encounters between us.

It’s also important to understand that the I-Thou moment is not a moral achievement or a permanent state; it’s a flash of lived awareness and mutuality. Nonetheless, it has ethical and social consequences. When you listen to a friend with full, unadulterated presence, without thinking about what you’ll say next, you touch into I-Thou. When you apologize sincerely, without needing to defend yourself or prove a point, I-Thou shows up in how the relationship takes precedence over the ego or the need to keep score. When you stand beside the sea, or on a mountain, and forget yourself entirely in the feeling of awe, I-Thou is why you feel seen and held and in communion. These moments break our ordinary awareness and can even be a little unsettling: I-Thou exposes us and strips away protective distance; it demands something of our humanity.

The true experience of I-Thou is a rare, destabilizing, morally dangerous event because it is immediately undone by fear, desire, strategy, memory, or imagination—almost everything dissolves I-Thou back into I-It. It’s important to understand that this is the very structure of embodied existence, so this doesn’t represent some failure of virtue. Wanting to grasp the I-Thou and hold onto it, wanting to always live like that, converts Thou into It. This fragility denies us the comfort of stability and control: we must live with the reality of contingency and impermanence.

A political sphere dominated by I-It logic breeds selfishness, alienation, cynicism, and hostility. Buber reminds us that justice and communal flourishing depend on the recognition of others as subjects, not objects. What must come first is not the individual or even the community as an entity, but “the common relation to the center”—an orientation, for instance, to the existential value of all persons. This alone can guarantee the true life of a community. I-Thou is not a naive idealism; it’s an existential stance that opens the possibility for presence and authentic dialogue.

Heschel: awe, responsibility, and resistance

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) was a rabbi whose mother and sisters were murdered by the Nazis. His entire world was destroyed by the horrors of the war, and he left Europe for the United States to begin anew—one of the small number of escapees who could do so. He later became a leader in the United States civil rights movement, and said famously that “in a free society some are guilty but all are responsible.” How we relate to that responsibility matters.1

We can see that Heschel emphasizes the ethical summons generated by a true encounter. For example, an encounter with awe isn’t just about the beauty of a sunset but is “an intuition for the creaturely dignity of all things.” It’s the shock of reality breaking through, when the world confronts us with its fragility or dignity and we cannot look away.

Importantly, for Heschel, awe is more than an emotion; it is a way of perceiving reality. He doesn’t consider God to be an object that we might apprehend or discover, because God is a profound presence that exceeds our comprehension. Heschel knows that wonder and radical amazement aren’t escapist emotions: they are catalysts for moral attentiveness; they rupture the tidy boundaries of the “self” and open one to the ultimacy of reality.

For Heschel, the root of ethics is what he calls “divine pathos”: God’s capacity to be affected by human suffering and human cruelty. Unlike classical notions of an impassive and unmoved deity, for Heschel, God is personally involved in the world’s anguish. This idea of divine pathos can also be framed naturalistically as the ethical pathos of reality itself: the world’s suffering impresses itself upon us. This is a phenomenology of attunement, and moral demand arises from our being alive, interdependent, and affected.

One of my favorite Heschel quotes is “Life is a hiding place for God.” God is everywhere present for Heschel, and this is why ethics is never merely a human project: every encounter carries theological weight, because every injustice touches God’s pathos. To act justly is not simply to obey a moral norm but to respond to God’s own felt concern for the oppressed. True wisdom is “sympathy with the divine pathos,” and pathos awakens responsibility.

Heschel’s own moral urgency was shaped by direct experience and personal history, most powerfully by the Holocaust and by his public ministry during the civil-rights era. His life embodied his philosophy, and he brought his moral conviction to action, for example by speaking out against the Vietnam war and engaging in interfaith dialogue.

In 1965, the rabbi marched in Selma during the civil rights movement. He walked shoulder to shoulder with Martin Luther King, Jr. and others, facing armed offense, empowered by the peaceful crowd he was part of. He later wrote that he felt his legs were praying. He wasn’t so much moved by the spectacle; what was so powerful was the moral clarity of standing beside others in danger, in a moment when human presence itself was an enactment of an ethical stance.

Heschel’s marching at Selma was an embodiment of his theology of the human person: seeing suffering as a rupture in the divine-human relationship, and responding with presence, courage, and moral clarity. For Heschel, the ethical obligation is inseparable from the recognition of awe, wonder, and the dignity of the other.

Convergence: moving from encounter to ethical action

Buber and Heschel converge on the idea that authentic relationships form the foundation of public life. Buber focuses on the structure of relationship itself, which provides the how: being open to meeting others as sacred subjects, because this presence itself is transformative. Heschel focuses on the ethical summons that arises from relationship and provides the why: awe and wonder and the pathos of God generate moral urgency and responsibility. I read Heschel as encouraging an ethically-charged calling from the ontological encounter Buber describes. We can see how these two thinkers offer a vision of the relational public: a space where attention, respect, and ethical imagination shape communal and personal action. The sacred emerges between people, in the relational field.

This relational public is not just interpersonal, because it can also scale to communities and movements. We can see connections to other thinkers we’ve considered in this series. King dramatizes the moment when a moral encounter becomes a summons, like calling for peace after his house was bombed: “we must meet hate with love.” Day demonstrates the moment when that encounter is transformed into radical hospitality, such as in her daily decisions to feed and clothe those who came to her for help; her service was a form of honoring the divine image in each person. Both make visible the movement from the experience of encounter to the action of ethical relationality.

Heschel and Buber illuminate the inner posture that makes justice, care, and generosity possible: presence, attentiveness, and awe. Buber’s I-Thou becomes the micro-structure of encounter; Heschel’s divine pathos becomes the motivating force for justice and solidarity.

Presence in a fragmented world

Our public life today often privileges the I-It attitude (we might even notice this in our private lives, too). However, reading Buber and Heschel, there is an invitation to small but profound public interventions. Simply noticing the deep humanity behind someone’s fear or anger can open the possibility of an I-Thou moment, and even brief acts become gestures of responsibility, transforming our public life from a transactional space into one of fuller presence.

Heschel insisted that “the opposite of good is not evil but indifference,” and that our society’s moral obligation is precisely not to be indifferent to the suffering of others. This points to the actions of moral care and the posture of radical amazement, which includes a vision of all of reality as worthy of awe. Our responsibility to others is lived in the relational encounter: our awareness of another’s real presence awakens wonder and care, and moves us to action.

Considered together, these threads form a public theology of the everyday: our daily inhabiting of awareness and responsiveness, even through small gestures, accumulates into a life that affirms the sacred potential of relation. Even in a fractured, transactional world, the space between us—the moments of genuine encounter—remain the site where justice, compassion, and community are made real.

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A politics of encounter

A politics of encounter begins in the small or unremarkable moments when we choose to engage with another as a presence, rather than an obstacle. Through our choices, the possibility of true community reenters and reinvigorates public life.

Buber reminds us that presence matters; Heschel reminds us that presence carries responsibility. The world is made and remade in the space between us.

Even in the smallest gesture, this vision becomes tangible. The invitation is simple: notice the sacred in the other, and act on the responsibility that recognition generates.

Short practice

A simple way to cultivate presence and attunement to the world around you.

One square meter of wonder

Spend several minutes focusing your attention on an object, or on a small surface like part of a garden or a carpet. Open to the possibility of a tiny glimpse of “radical amazement” by noticing textures, light, movement, and relational dynamics.

See how soft your attention can get; see how wide; see what happens when you let what you’re looking at show you what it really is.

You might jot down a few lines about what revealed itself and how it might call you to respond. Paying attention to the smallest details cultivates the habit of ethical awareness and regard—the readiness to respond to the Other, human or more-than-human, that ethical life requires.

Suggested reading, to go a little deeper

Abraham Joshua Heschel, Selected Writings, edited by Susannah Heschel. Heschel’s daughter compiled and published this collection of excerpts and writings from her father’s body of work. Engaging, readable, and very worthwhile.

Martin Buber, I and Thou, in Walter Kaufmann’s translation from the German. Buber’s best-known work, philosophical and perhaps challenging but worth the effort.

Extra: Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, published interview of Levinas by Philippe Nemo, translated from the French by by Richard Cohen. An interview which gives a good overview and entry to the philosophy of Levinas.

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Day’s voluntary poverty as solidarity

In our modern maelstrom of economic precarity mixed in with the mindset of “not enough,” the idea of deliberately living with less can seem radical, or even threatening. It seems like society trains us to fear scarcity and dependency, while technology impels us to stay busy to avoid being alone with our thoughts. We learn from an early age to strive for “ideals” of more and bigger in a fictional framework of hyper-independence.

Against this tide, Dorothy Day made a countercultural choice.

Day (1897-1980) was a journalist, activist, and co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, which is a network of houses of hospitality, communal farms, and a newspaper devoted to mercy and justice. She lived simply alongside the poor, grounding her writing and activism in a shared daily life of feeding, sheltering, and accompanying those on the margins. In choosing her form of voluntary poverty, Day chose a life of radical attention and simplicity.

Her life inspires some compelling questions: what does it mean to live deliberately, to align our inner conviction with our public action, and to let our spiritual choices shape our material and social life? Day’s radical hospitality is an embodied phenomenology of encounter: in refusing to distance herself physically from the material reality of those she served, Day was not retreating from the world but opening herself fully to it.

This essay explores how Day’s choice of simplicity functions as an existential practice: a deliberate stance that cultivates ethical witness and relational care. We’ll consider how her voluntary poverty was a form of resistance and a way of reclaiming moral and social freedom.

Day’s vision

It’s essential that we distinguish between involuntary poverty, such as that imposed by structural injustice, and Day’s voluntary poverty, which was an ethical stance she chose to live out. Of poverty, she wrote: “I condemn poverty and I advocate it; poverty is simple and complex at once; it is a social phenomenon and a personal matter. It is a paradox.”

As a convert to Catholicism, Day’s life was rooted in her understanding of the teachings of Jesus; the “primacy of the spiritual” made everything easier to bear. This is not unique to Catholicism, Christianity, or even organized religion; what matters is to have an ultimate compass point.

“Work as though everything depended on ourselves, and pray as though everything depended on God.” —Dorothy Day

Day’s vision was not without critics. Some argued that she risked romanticizing poverty, but she understood her choice and did not prescribe it for others. For her, material detachment was a source of freedom rather than suffering: it meant living with enough. This created an increased capacity for presence and solidarity through freeing attention and effort from consumption and status-seeking to enable a greater focus on works of love, mercy, and justice. This posture is a form of existential self-definition, in the refusal to let social pressures dictate one’s lived values.

Attention as existential practice

Chosen poverty mirrors the existentialist idea of the chosen risk, a deliberate decision that places one outside the comfort zone of predictable social norms. Imagine Dorothy Day opening the door of a tenement-flat kitchen each morning with no guarantee of enough food for everyone, but choosing that shared life nonetheless. Embracing simplicity is both a personal and a moral statement, and this choice requires a disciplined interior life.

In Day’s case, her existentialism receives its moral logic from Christian personalism, which is centered on the inherent dignity and value of the human person as created in God’s image. In life, freedom is realized in the recognition and reception of the other as a bearer of infinite worth; for Day, we are all children of God. She chose a life of proximity to the sites where dignity is most threatened and most visible: the vulnerable humans lined up outside her door, “the least of these.”

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Simone Weil’s philosophy can help us understand Day’s practice in a new way. For Weil, attention is “the rarest and purest form of generosity” and is the precondition of moral life. It undergirds the difficult work of suspending ego, fear, and projection long enough to let another person’s reality really touch upon our own, as Dorothy Day did daily. Attention is a form of moral gravity, anchoring us in what is real even when reality is painful—like during the Great Depression, how each morning hundreds of people lined up in the street and in the cold outside the Catholic Worker offices, awaiting coffee and bread. Each person would be received fully, in their personhood and need.

Another philosopher, Iris Murdoch, helps by showing how attention becomes moral vision. She emphasizes the clarity in slowly purifying our perception to allow us to see others truthfully, rather than through the fog of fantasy or projection. Our choices are only as good as the vision that guides them. The interior life, then, is neither escapist nor fully private; it is the field where our responsibilities take form.

Day’s hospitality is Murdoch’s vision translated into material form; it is Weil’s attention enacted through meals, shared rooms, and the stubborn refusal to turn away when things got hard. A degree of renunciation becomes an existential and moral practice: a chosen risk that makes a new kind of attention possible, a form of clear seeing that makes love responsible, and a simplicity that makes solidarity real.

Seen in this light, Dorothy Day’s voluntary poverty is a sustained practice of attention and clarity. Her simplicity was a way of turning down the inner noise that distorts perception. This is why the Catholic Worker houses were more than sites of charity: they seem to have almost served as laboratories of attention. The crowded rooms, unpredictable encounters, and shared precarity all demanded of Day a disciplined openness to the reality of the persons before her.

Love made material: the practice of shared vulnerability

Her work with hospitality houses, soup kitchens, and the Catholic Worker (both the newspaper and the movement more broadly) are all ways of materializing love in action. This might have looked like serving a simple meal in winter to everyone in line around the block, or midnight rushes to get the paper to press on time. Day created material and spiritual space for others in her life. She knew that shared vulnerability generates solidarity, and she would have been familiar with Galatians 6:2 (“Carry one another’s burdens”) and Matthew 25:40 (“Whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did for me”) and taken them to heart.

Day refused to occupy a position from which the suffering of others would be merely observed without also being shared. In this, we hear echoes of the existential and the social: Day understood that one only discovers the contours of one’s freedom by choosing a risk that reveals what one is unwilling to abandon.

Seen within the broader grammar of existential and public courage explored across this series, we may remember how Kierkegaard illuminates the inward courage required to choose a life against the crowd, and how MLK showed that individual moral courage finds its expression in communal struggle. We see how Day’s life embodies both the inward decision and the relational enactment of care, made manifest in shared material vulnerability. In her world, radical hospitality is inseparable from the concrete realities of everyday life.

For Day, the “works of mercy” were rich opportunities to stake one’s life on a different ordering of value. During the Depression, for instance, she spent nights on tenement stairwells during eviction crises, keeping watch so that marshals could not drag a family’s furniture into the street. This material proximity also reframes courage itself. Fear diminishes not only through inner fortitude but through mutual presence, and through the recognition that vulnerability becomes more bearable when it is shared. Day’s willingness to be caught in the same sorrow as those she served exemplifies relational courage.

Holding loosely: what our hands can offer

Dorothy Day’s life teaches that freedom and care are inseparable. Opting to live with less is a resistance to the structural and psychic forces that encourage greed, distraction, and moral disengagement. To embrace simplicity is to practice courage: to notice, to release, and to welcome openness.

Voluntary poverty can readily be misread in ways that blunt its razor-sharp edge. It is not an aesthetic preference or some kind of privatized morality; it’s a phenomenology of ethical life. But Day’s example is too costly for many to imitate literally—and that’s part of why she is such an extraordinary figure, and literally on the way to being recognized as a saint by the Catholic church.

Her personalism was radical and pressed back against the systemic issues which created and maintained the gulf between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” The tension most of us experience in learning of her life and service can be generative: it forces us to confront our own thresholds of comfort, fear, and complicity.

In a contemporary context, Day’s practice is profoundly countercultural. We all know that algorithmic consumerism, the attention economy, and subscription capitalism can foment an intense psychological pressure to accumulate, perform, and distract. Choosing voluntary simplicity can help us resist these dehumanizing rhythms: slowing down, keeping possessions light, prioritizing people over productivity, and practicing mutual aid. We don’t have to be as radical as Day to make important room in our lives for the powerful work of mercy and goodness; we just need to be willing to try something new.

Small, concrete acts, like releasing unnecessary items, or giving generous time or attention to others, become existential gestures. When we create space to relate to others as Day did, rather than instrumentalizing or strategizing our relationships we can reclaim freedom, cultivate solidarity, and restore a sense of ethical agency. Voluntary poverty can exist on a spectrum, and in this light, it’s not a moralistic demand but a practical undertaking: it is an experiment in freedom, an embodied way to navigate modern life with greater attentiveness, courage, and relational presence.

Short practice

The durable power of Day’s witness invites us to consider the possessions, habits, and fears we cling to, and to ask: what would it mean to loosen one clenched fist, if only a little? Her aphorism, “Love is the measure,” reminds us that ethical life is enacted in the humble, courageous, and relational choices we make every day.

In a culture organized around scarcity and self-inflation, Day’s life suggests another possibility: that freedom may be more about release than holding on. We may consider what we gain not in what fills our hands, but in what they’re free to offer.

Releasing one thing

A practice for letting go of attachment and reclaiming attention and space for what truly matters

Each week, choose one thing (or five, or three) that you can release, recycle, delete, or share with someone. These can be physical items, digital files, or even habitual thoughts or behaviors. For each, you might pause and reflect: “In opening my hand or in letting this go, what freedom might be created? How might this action allow me to notice someone or something else more fully?”

Dorothy Day’s life was less about deprivation and more about creating availability for others, for moral attention, and for lived presence. This ritual is a micro-practice of that stance.

Suggested reading, to go a little deeper

Dorothy Day, Selected Writings, edited by Robert Ellsberg. Eminently readable and highly moving writings from her journal, newspaper, and more—inspiring and powerful.

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace; I have the Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr translation from the French, which includes new material previously not included in earlier editions. This work is a collection from Weil’s notebooks, published posthumously.

Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good. An accessible and interesting entry to Murdoch’s work.

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The dual demands of freedom: self and society

Most of us are familiar with that feeling when, despite our fear or uncertainty, we must make a choice. Maybe there’s a conversation we know we should have, or we have an obligation we’d rather ignore. In such moments, we can inwardly sense the possibility of action along with the weight of responsibility. What we choose matters.

This is when we discover that freedom is both a social condition and an existential one. Perhaps it’s always both personal and communal. Freedom rises up from our inner courage and it is realized distinctly in social transformation. Courage and conscience can become a public practice through the intersection of existential selfhood and social liberation.

To understand this better, we’ll look at two unlikely associates: Søren Kierkegaard, a 19th-century Danish writer (he did not want to be called a philosopher!), and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a 20th-century Black Baptist minister. While both Kierkegaard and King were Christian men, and while their religious commitments informed how they understood freedom, responsibility, and courage, they are both widely relevant outside of any particular religious lens.

Kierkegaard helps us understand the inner experience of freedom and the personal side of courage. He helps us see that freedom begins with confronting our own responsibility and our Angst, anxiety. King shows how the inner courage to maintain personal responsibility in the face of systemic injustice can be translated into collective, transformative action. Drawing from both men, we see a picture of freedom that is deeply personal and fully embodied; this freedom depends on our relationships with others, and is directed toward moral justice.

Kierkegaard: anxiety as the gateway to freedom

For Søren Kierkegaard, anxiety is a spiritual mood that hits us when we suddenly realize the contingency of choice. We experience ourselves as free to choose, and this brings an open feeling of possibility: the reality that we could actually choose. This understanding ushers in the vertigo of ambiguity and a sense of responsibility. When we act (or do not act), we choose, and are thus responsible.

This existential anxiety is exactly what gives birth to authentic action. Anxiety here is not an emotion so much as a state of being; it is what Kierkegaard famously calls “the dizziness of possibility.” Consider a moment when you took a small risk, like speaking up for someone, or naming “the elephant in the room,” or sharing something personal with a friend when you weren’t sure how it would land. Or consider a moment in Kierkegaard’s own life, when he broke off an engagement with the woman he loved, due to an inner anxiety around making the wrong choice for his life—and hers. In moments like these, we recognize that we could act, that something might change because of us. That recognition can be dizzying.

In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard explains that this experience isn’t a flaw or even a problem, but can be considered the doorway to true human freedom. Kierkegaard himself lived much of his life in tension with the crowd, because for him, freedom requires standing alone in decision, bearing the weight of uncertainty, and choosing to become the kind of person one is responsible for being. Conformity cannot be permitted; we must personally engage with our own values and responsibilities. This genuine individuality, though it may be terrifying, is really the only way Kierkegaard sees to a free and meaningful existence. This way, we discover that ethical responsibility cannot be delegated—at least not without internal avoidance, ignoring the self, which results in blind conformity rather than a full, authentic life. Any genuine relationship with self or other relies on the inward integrity made possible by this embrace of responsibility.

Kierkegaard’s insight is quite intimate: freedom is not only chosen; it is felt. The self is summoned by freedom. This is almost a vocational call to fulfill the possibilities of human existence as a free being. Anxiety appears precisely at the threshold of our most meaningful choices; it is unsettling, yes, and also instructive, because it indicates where authentic action is possible.

MLK: nonviolence as a practice of public freedom

Martin Luther King, Jr. was deeply influenced by personalist and existential thought and the understanding that individuals matter, choices matter, and relationships matter. For King, freedom aims toward what he called the “Beloved Community,” a term he inherited from the philosopher Josiah Royce. Dr. King uses the term to refer to a hard-won community in which dignity and belonging is secured for everyone. MLK’s theology became a call to ethical praxis, or, put differently, to walk the walk. We see this when love is embodied as a disciplined form of justice, and we feel this in the hope that refuses to surrender to despair.

In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, King insists that justice requires constructive tension and a willingness to endure discomfort and risk for the sake of transformation. He rejects the moral complacency of those who are “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice” and opposes what he calls the “tranquilizing drug of gradualism” (I Have A Dream). Dr. King saw how slow incremental changes could actually allow racial injustice and oppression to persist, and how a false sense of progress could encourage complacency. He called instead for the “fierce urgency of now.”

Like Kierkegaard, King critiques the crowd, but with an important difference: whereas Kierkegaard feared the dissolving of self into unthinking conformity, MLK feared the collective’s adjustment to injustice.

King repeatedly returned to the prophet’s cry in Amos that justice must “roll down like waters,” reading it as a demand that courage take material, public form. For him, freedom becomes real only when it is enacted with the body: it must be marched, and spoken, and risked. In this he was inspired by Mohandas Gandhi. Dr. King talked about the idea of creative maladjustment, which is a refusal to adapt to evil or injustices like the sickness of segregation. He frames this creative maladjustment as courageous, an ethical and nonviolent stance. (How clearly we today may still benefit the world through creative maladjustment!)

In the 1950s, after weeks of receiving repeated threatening phone calls during the Montgomery bus boycott, King was feeling real fear. He writes of how he sat alone one night over an untouched cup of coffee, his hands shaking, and felt he had reached the end of his rope. In that moment he prayed for the strength not to falter, because he knew his community needed him to be an example of courage. His public determination grew from an existential sense of responsibility, and this inner confrontation fueled his public leadership.

After King’s house was bombed while his wife and baby daughter were inside, he rushed home to find a crowd preparing for violent retaliation. Standing on his bombed-out porch, King lifted his hands and called for peace. He insisted that dignity, rather than mob vengeance, would be their guide. For King, the discipline of nonviolence grows from agape, a form of steadfast, unselfish regard he drew on as a way of seeing others clearly enough to refuse their dehumanization. Years later, during the Birmingham campaign when King agreed to be arrested rather than call off the protests, his body in a jail cell became the object moral lesson. This is how he walked his walk.

Embodied courage, embodied agency

As living creatures, the body is the meeting point. Our bodies carry our fears and our hopes; courage always shows up in the body; we feel fear in the body; and nonviolence is enacted with the body. This leads to the heart of an embodied public practice, and in his work, King helps make visible for us what Kierkegaard mostly kept internal.

Kierkegaard and King converge on the idea that freedom is born in risk. Both resist the false division between private conscience and public action. Kierkegaard captures this in his image of a person standing at the edge of a cliff, seized not only by the fear of falling but by the startling awareness that they might choose to leap: this is the moment when possibility reveals responsibility, and the self discovers it cannot hand off the burden of choice. King takes this inward vertigo and turns it outward: the trembling recognition of possibility becomes the march, the sit-in, and the willingness to place one’s body in a jail cell for the sake of justice.

Where Kierkegaard shows the solitary individual confronting responsibility, King shows how that solitary decision gains strength in shared enactment. Freedom can become an inner awakening as well as a form of publicly-embodied courage. For King, the beloved community takes shape in the actual practices of shared responsibility, like neighbors walking children to school during the bus boycott and crowds choosing restraint rather than retaliation.

Who we become depends on how we respond to life’s demands. Kierkegaard and King, taken together, show that freedom requires two movements: seeing possibility and acting in solidarity.

Existential freedom in contemporary crisis

We are all aware that we live in an era saturated with anxiety, which contributes to an unraveling sense of shared reality. It can all be overwhelming, but Kierkegaard can help us interpret this condition as the experience of possibility, because anxiety reveals openings: ways we might act, speak, resist, or change. We might speak up against a racist joke, or in favor of a person who is often overlooked. We might take actions which embody principles of truth and justice.

King provides a pattern for such action: choose constructive tension rather than resignation. The little things can embody liberation in the direction of a beloved community, things like refusing to comply with dehumanizing norms, practicing solidarity even in small ways, or resisting the crowd’s drift toward indifference in the face of (even normalized) injustice. These gestures are small echoes of the larger pattern: anxiety awakens an awareness of possibility, which leads to a recognition of responsibility, which is enacted bodily and publicly.

Kierkegaard orients us to the inward summons of freedom, while King helps show us how to carry that freedom into the world. As MLK wrote from his cell in Birmingham, “We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”

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Invitation:

What if we consider freedom as a daily practice of attention and courage? What is one small freedom-practice you can take this week—one place where anxiety might be pointing toward possibility?

Short practice

Through these exercises, you can begin to bring the ideas here into daily life: noticing fear, discerning possibility, and taking action. I believe that fear becomes less private and less overpowering when we practice not running away from it.

Name the possibility behind the fear

Sit comfortably in a way that allows you to breathe easily and helps you focus your attention. Bring to mind an anxiety, a fear, or a hesitation, big or small. Notice how it feels in your body: is there tension, tightness, fluttering, or weight? What is the feeling like?

When you’ve been with the feeling for a while, ask: “What possibility is this feeling pointing toward?” You’re just asking; the answer may not come right away, or might not come in words.

After sitting with the question, note down what arises for you: a sensation, an idea, whatever it is. If something like an answer arose, you might write down one small, concrete step you could take this week toward that possibility: it might be sending an email, having a conversation, or simply acknowledging the feeling or situation out loud to yourself.

You might close the practice by remembering that freedom is practiced in small acts, or, as Mother Teresa said, we can all “do small things with great love.” Notice if you feel a little more ready to step through the anxiety, fear, or hesitation and into possibility.

Suggested reading, to go a little deeper

Martin Luther King, Jr., The Radical King, edited by Cornel West. Very engaging and readable collection, including some of King’s more radical works, which might surprise some readers.

Søren Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, in either the Alastair Hannay or the Howard and Edna Hong translation from the original Danish. Not necessarily the most accessible entry to Kierkegaard (if there is such a thing as an “accessible entry to Kierkegaard”), but it’s the one I read most recently.

For a very good biography of Kierkegaard, I recommend Kierkegaard: A Single Life, by Stephen Backhouse.

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I guess we’re all aware by now that we live in an age of collective afflictions like social fragmentation, political polarization, and an increasingly complex ethical landscape. Many of these problems are downstream of something much deeper: the question of how to live well—and what that means—demands renewed attention. I might say living well includes living thoughtfully and courageously, and involves acting in accordance with one’s principles. How can we cultivate an inner life of reflection and integrity while responding to the exigencies of the world?

This series, Paths of Presence, takes as a starting point the lives and works of four remarkable figures—Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Mohandas Gandhi—each of whom demonstrates that the morally-lived life is inseparable from attentive presence, relational responsibility, and principled action in the public sphere. Across their lives and writings, we find roadmaps to their embodied practices, and can discover a structure of attention and courage in which reflection and action are inseparably bound. In each essay, I’ll pair one of these figures with a philosopher or two to help highlight certain aspects of the life and work under consideration.

Martin Luther King, Jr. held notions of justice born from the felt experience of oppression and collective action. He models the integration of moral imagination and social transformation; for King, courage and reflection are essential for effective justice work. We’ll pair him with Søren Kierkegaard to see how inner freedom can serve as the foundation for social action and liberation.

Dorothy Day lived her hospitality as a material, bodily, and relational spirituality. She embodied solidarity and voluntary poverty as an existential moral practice, making abstract principles tangible through her sustained relational commitment. We’ll look at Day in the light of Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil’s work with attention as a moral practice.

Abraham Joshua Heschel experienced attunement to the world’s suffering as moral revelation. He insists that our ethical responsibility arises from the act of encountering the other—particularly in suffering or marginalization. With Heschel, we consider relational presence in public life and the power of radical amazement. Martin Buber’s notion of I-Thou will enrich our understanding and appreciation of Heschel’s work.

Mohandas Gandhi demonstrates nonviolence as bodily restraint and spiritual transformation. He explores truth and moral discipline as lived commitments, and shows how these principles can guide our actions even under systemic oppression. We’ll consider moral size, an idea drawn from Bernard Loomer, which will bring new dimensions to how we read Gandhi and help us (re)consider nonviolence and moral capacity in our own lives.

For me, at the heart of this exploration there is a philosophical and existential question: how can the moral life be both internally coherent and outwardly transformative? Drawing on the insights of existentialism, phenomenology, and relational ethics, in this series we’ll examine the intimate relationship between freedom, responsibility, and public action.

The essays are deliberately interdisciplinary, and they will point toward actionable insight, because I hope to offer you tools to engage ethically and courageously in your own life. To that end, each essay will include a practice of embodied engagement: things like attentive noticing, reflective journaling on moral choices, or small acts of solidarity. This is to bring theory into practice, because moral life cannot be only philosophical: it must be embodied, bringing our attention and deliberate action into the world.

Ultimately, Paths of Presence is an inquiry into what it means to live morally in both inner and public life. It’s an invitation to cultivate attentiveness, courage, and relational responsibility; to experiment with the ways reflection informs action; and to inhabit the public sphere with integrity, care, and vitality.

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I wrote last time about different kinds of knowing, and how knowledge is more than a transaction or something we possess: knowing is felt.

What does it mean to you to know something? What does it mean to you to know “god/God” or ultimate reality? I wonder if “knowing” is a way of participating in that reality; if by our living and our life we communicate in embodied, enacted ways with the very ground and source of our being.

The existentialist theologian Paul Tillich famously described God not as a “being” among other beings, but as Being-itself—the depth or ground of all that is. In this view, God is not a supernatural entity “up there,” but the ultimate reality that underlies and permeates everything; God is not an object, but the Source from which all arises. We see this ancient orientation in various traditions from around the world; it reflects an old intuition. These metaphysical formulations are not pointing to a “thing” or being to believe in. It’s about an infinite actuality that is intimately near, closer than our own breath, preceding our own self-awareness, pulsing with our own heartbeat. God is not separate from us, but immanent, everywhere.

If the divine is the ground of being, then it makes theological sense that we would encounter the divine, first and foremost, in our own grounded being. If God is the ground of being, then our access point is through our own embodied groundedness: the simple, embodied awareness of being here, now. So instead of being something “other” to reach towards, what if the sacred is something we are always already within and that is within us? We can sense it intricately, when we learn to tune into it.

I think it’s so interesting how many traditions speak of this, in their own ways. Buddhism holds that awakening isn’t a belief (how absurd!) but a shift in direct perception or insight. In Advaita Vedānta, Brahman, nondual reality, is not separate from the self, the ātman; it is That which knows itself through presence. Sufis talk about knowing the Divine through the taste of the Real, through immediate sensing. These are different ways of gesturing towards the ultimate.

On any of these paths, we don’t approach the divine or the sacred intellectually: it’s sensed in the body, in silence, and in liminal awareness. So we might say that this felt sense is not only therapeutically useful: it has theological applicability. It is a kind of prayerful epistemology: knowing by abiding, by listening, by surrendering to the embodied edge of the unspoken. What would it mean for feeling and embodiment to take epistemic priority, then, over abstraction, cognition, mentation, logic, or reason?

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Spiritual understanding as inner attunement: the embodied edge of the unspoken

In many mystical and contemplative traditions, true knowing arises from a mode of attunement that enhances life and gives depth to our lived experience. This points to a way of knowing that doesn’t begin intellectually, but in real contact, which is often subtle, and always embodied.

The phenomenal, or what we perceive in immediate experience, is a gateway: a portal to the ultimate. All we really have is experience, so any “answers” we seek must come experientially. This does not mean turning off the brain! Our sense experiences already involve conceptualization, but in daily life attunement to the senses is about as deep as we can get to the ground of pure experience.

For those formed in traditions that privilege cognitive assent—orthodoxy or “right belief” as the epistemological ground—this can feel like a radical reorientation. And maybe it is: radical, as in going back to the roots. For instance, the early desert mystics knew that spiritual discernment could not be outsourced to the rational mind alone; it had to be felt, tested, waited for, and listened to through the body. If we go far enough back, we’ll find this type of embodied “listening” all over the place.

To return to the body, then, is to return to an ancient form of knowing. This is not a regression; it’s an atavistic posture, an opening to something primary and primordial. We might consider it a kind of theological listening.

Images of the ultimate

Our most intimate knowledge is always embodied. If we want to use “god” for the most atomic reduction of experience, we end up with something that feels like a field of possibility, an open potentiality. Our living embodied experience could be considered an image, a manifestation in motion, of the field of potentiality, god/God. The pixels of our experience point us to the edge of what we can know empirically before what some call “faith” kicks in.

How different is our relationship with (and experience of) reality if we view god or the ultimate reality as king or father, mother or ocean. Feminist theologian Sallie McFague wrote about the importance of our choice and use of metaphors (for that is all we have: all we can say about the Ultimate will be with metaphor, analogy, etc)—our metaphors strongly influence our experience of god or the ultimate. If God is a punitive father, or a despotic king, or an all-embracing mother, or the ocean to my wave…—our theology dances with our metaphysics and affects everything we do, because it influences who we are and how we experience ourselves, others, nature, and life as a whole.

Embodied theology: knowing from “within”

So what does this mean for everyday spiritual life?

It means that moments of quiet presence, of deep listening, of feeling into the unspoken center of a question, may not be tangents or merely “preparation” for the “real” spiritual work—they are spiritual work. They are the places where theology begins again, not only as theories about God, but as a felt encounter with something larger, deeper, and more alive than we can fully name. This is the apophatic edge of phenomenological experience.

Meditation and other practices can “clean the mirror” and allow for increasingly less conceptual interference in our experience. Iris Murdoch writes that moral vision is clouded by self-centered fantasy; we often coast along on storylines that the ego prefers, rather than truly engaging with reality. It’s actually unbelievable how much we live on autopilot and projections. So we must ask ourselves, do we prefer the ego-comforting fantasy, or do we want reality? One is necessarily limited and circumscribed; the other is boundless.

The philosopher Eugene Gendlin wrote that our bodies are not sealed-off containers; they are interactions. Every felt sense is a kind of relational knowing—not just about us, but about how we are living in the world, and how the world is moving in us.

That means the felt sense is theological. It is where we meet the world and the sacred in living flesh and in each breath.

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A practice for returning to ground

If God is the ground of being, then sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is to pause, and feel the ground. Here’s a practice you can try:

Find a quiet moment. Let your body rest in your chair or on the floor.

Gently bring your attention to the sense of contact: feel your feet on the ground and your body on the seat. Notice your hands, and let them be at ease.

Allow your awareness to deepen, and tune your noticing beyond physical sensations to the wider, felt quality of being here.

Ask inwardly: What is the ground of my being right now? Or maybe: How is the sacred meeting me here, in this body? You’re just asking; the answer may not come right away, or might not come in words.

Wait and listen. After sitting with the question, note down what arises for you: a sensation, an idea, whatever it is. What you’re listening for is something quieter and more subtle than thoughts or feelings. Just see if a sense of meaningness forms.

This is not about making something happen; it’s about trusting that the sacred is the very aliveness, the nowness, of this moment.

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Over the centuries, theology—and religion—have frequently treated “God” as a conceptual object: an entity to be defined, defended, or disproved. A lot of theological discourse still orbits around metaphysical formulations, epistemic justifications, and doctrinal boundaries. And as useful as these are, they may be missing something essential: the actual encounter.

We might think of theology as a stuffy academic enterprise: lofty ideas about God, or debates about divine attributes, or mapping the mystery of the universe onto metaphysical grids. I wrote last time that

I’ve learned that what makes a person “religious” isn’t any specific beliefs or affiliation, but the kinds of questions one asks, which fundamentally have to do with one’s ultimate concern. When your ultimate concern fits under the heading of “God-talk,” well, we may be in the realm of theology.

It’s a much broader field than you might expect.

I propose that theology may be—must be—not only written and debated, but felt and lived.

Theology must be practiced and embodied.

We all have metaphysical assumptions: ideas about reality, or about what is real, and so forth. These assumptions influence and affect (and sometimes even drive) our choices, and regulate and shape our lived experience. Our implicit understandings of what we might call “God” also seriously influence our lives. Metaphysics deals with the nature of reality; theology deals with the nature of “God” or what is ultimate.

Knowing God (spirit, the Beloved, the inner teacher, the True Self, the Friend…) is an understanding. Old English used to have different words for different kinds of knowing.1 In modern times this distinction has been lost in English, and we often think of “knowing” almost with a sense of possessiveness: I know XYZ; this information is mine. But of course, so much of our experience is not transactional, possessive, or dichotomous. In fact, most true knowledge, in the sense of wisdom and understanding, is less linear and more embodied than the knowledge of facts.

Knowing isn’t just something we think; it’s something we sense. Have you ever had “a feeling” about a person or place, and knew something was off, or your life was about to be upturned? That feeling is implicit, and our minds are great at rationalizing, such that we usually don’t realize we’ve concocted a story to explain the feeling; we just notice the story and the feeling all wrapped up together. Like, “of course this place gives me the creeps, it’s dark and unfamiliar” or “I bet I’m crushing on this person because they remind me of That Someone.” But before the story and the rationalization, there is pure implicit feeling.

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Theology has roots in the implicit. When the philosopher Eugene Gendlin spoke of the “implicit,” he was referring to the deep structure of experience that is already forming in the body. It’s that which is carrying meaning, direction, and understanding even before we can name it. The felt sense is how we touch the edge of that knowing. It is where knowing, in the sense of understanding, actually begins, and where meaning is made: underneath the verbal, conceptual layer; in actual experience, before it thickens into words.

This is the domain of the felt sense—and I propose that it may be where we can most truly know God.

It’s not only individual, personal, or emotional things that we know implicitly. The body is part of the world’s unfolding, and what it senses may include what is most real, most ultimate. The rapid evolution of science, which describes what things in the world do, can lull us into thinking we understand what things are, but if we listen to the body’s knowing, we can learn much more.

Faith is partly an openness to meaning that isn’t discernible in the present moment: meaning is an unfolding, evolving, living process.

From a spiritual perspective, this is profoundly significant because it suggests that the sacred is not accessed by escaping the body, but by entering it more fully and listening for what emerges prior to our cognitive interpretations.

In other words, embodiment is not a distraction from spiritual knowing; it is its ground.

Next time, we’ll talk about the ground of being, the way in which we might view God not as an ultimate being, but as Being itself: the depth dimension, the first and final source.

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You can read part four here.

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This is based on personal experience and reflection, and expressed in accordance with my current views, which may, of course, change and evolve. Pretty much nothing is final, and life is constantly unfolding.

Nothing changes. Everything is changed.

One day, I was out for my morning walk, and a portal appeared. I don’t mean literally appeared, because it wasn’t exactly visible, but more like I sensed it; almost like intuiting a doorway in the dark, but outdoors, in the middle of the quiet street, with morning sun shining everywhere.

So. I was out for a walk, and a doorway ‘appeared.’ I hadn’t seen it before, but it was familiar anyway. And there was the feeling that I’d been given this choice before, whether to walk through it or not, and now it was time; the portal pulled on me gently.

Somehow I knew it was like an expiration date had come for this side of things; on the other side was spaciousness, lightness, and a way of being without the weight of the idea of me or the need to maintain a self.

How to explain this?

It felt like going through that doorway meant no longer fighting with reality but participating fully in it; no longer conspiring against but allowing myself to conspire with Things As They Are.

I’ve experienced some really surprising changes over the years that I’ve been engaged in spiritual and psychological development work—and particularly over the last several years. Some things that seemed likely to be permanent have dropped away; some ways of being that didn’t seem accessible to me before are now the new normal. Certain structures of reality and categories of being have shifted radically; certain boundaries that seemed immutable are seen through completely. The sense of personal identity rearranged itself from something I'd never even noticed was so tight and heavy, to something more like an open field, or an ocean; pure spaciousness.

I know this probably all sounds a little weird.

A couple of years ago, everything fell apart. The life I had built up was lovely, though not without challenges, yet I had outgrown it suddenly—so suddenly, it seemed, that the feeling was of rapid shedding, splintering, shattering.1 I think of cicadas when they shed their exoskeletons, or hermit crabs when they outgrow the shell they’re in and have to find a new one: there’s an in-betweenness, a liminal space in which the old doesn’t fit and the new is still being sought out, or adjusted to.

In retrospect I actually knew for quite a long time that big changes were coming, but nonetheless I remember intimate discussions with friends about feeling almost on the brink of madness, living on the edge of something surreal.

The abyss is my terror and my friend.

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The closer we get to the light, the sharper seems our shadow.

The personality structure naturally resists annihilation: it fears its own dissolution; it pushes back against negation or disappearance. And, I think the journey of spiritual, perhaps even human, development may eventually require shedding the burden of believing in the persona: the ego; the crafted and created self. The thing is, we usually don’t realize the ‘self’ is a creation, a useful fiction; we hang on to it for dear life, mistaking its sense of reality and ISness for our own being. Or rather, it hangs on for dear life and we don’t realize yet that ‘we’ aren’t it.

Our stories and our notion of selfhood are fictions, which doesn’t mean they aren’t real, it just means they aren’t true.

Life began pulling rugs out from under me—the personality suffered quite a bit from professional changes, personal predicaments, interpersonal irritations, financial and health and life logistics issues, burnout—and toss in a global pandemic, the climate crisis, multiple wars and sociopolitical chaos… It was a Challenging Time in my life.

In one way or another, I lost jobs, friends, relationships, living spaces, and more, along with much of who I had thought I was. Some of this was Totally Fine; life happens, and change had long been a huge part of my life, so to some extent I could take a lot in stride. Some of it, however, was Not Fine: very difficult, unpleasant, no bueno, and just Too Much At Once.

And then: the portal.

Somehow, after walking through that portal (not sure how else to explain it), there arose a new awareness of the ‘self’ that felt like realizing I was wearing a heavy, bulky coat that I could just…take off. I now could, to some extent, choose if and when to wear it, and let it fall when not needed.

It was like peeling off a mask I’d worn so long I forgot my real face underneath; how fresh, light, vulnerable—yet powerful—to remove that mask!

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Nothing changes. Everything is changed.

So what’s different now?

Life continues on, without this ‘personal’ self. Life keeps happening, and Jane simply isn’t the doer. It’s not that there is ‘no self’ as can happen in meditation; that’s fine, and is quite a trip, but that’s not it. The self is still there, for some things for which convention requires a self, but the personal identification with that self was snuffed out in that portal.

From the outside, it seems in many ways there isn’t much difference, at least not obviously. In other ways, my whole life was upended, including my living situation, professional trajectory, personal relationships, spiritual life, and so forth. I’ve gotten much more focused on what feels like my most important work, and let go (for now) of things I love doing but which aren’t such a priority.

The main difference since the portal, for me personally (relish with me the irony of language, if you can), is in how I move through life, and let life move through me.

This difference is almost impossible to overstate. I just wear things more lightly now, which sounds so insufferably simple.

So what is this, really? All I can say is that this is living in grace. Please forgive how pretentious that sounds. I am not special, I don’t deserve this, except that…actually, everyone does, forever. This is not something I ‘earned’ with meditation or prayer; I truly do not believe it can be ‘earned’ in those or any other ways (although yes, you can get some very powerful feelings and states from, for instance, meditation).

As the saying goes, “Enlightenment is an accident, but spiritual practice can make one more accident-prone” (Suzuki Roshi). So practice probably plays a role for many of us who experience something like this, but I am certain that it is simply grace that really ‘does it.’ And at the same time, this is truly possible for absolutely anyone, if you want it. (This gets tricky; if it’s the ego/persona wanting this, it won’t happen, because the ego will resist like hell its own dissolution or being disbelieved or seen through, which is a necessary part of this whole ‘unfolding’ thing.)

I’m still highly volitionally involved in my life; I have not become a potato person2 or a passive lump, but volition feels different. Awareness doesn’t feel like ‘my’ awareness, but like a larger pattern, and that pattern is where volition and decisions and choices arise from, instead of from the ego thinking it’s running the show. It’s a feeling of living in trust and flow, rather than vigilance and control.

More on this soon.

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Last time, I wrote about how the felt sense is a doorway, and how there are ways of knowing that aren’t intellectual or conceptual. Our direct, embodied experience can tell us so much!

Embodied theopoetics investigates how bodily felt experience grounds and informs our understanding of lived reality and being. And, I’m also curious about what we can know or understand about how we view and relate with the nature of reality and the ultimate (that’s the theopoetics).

What is ultimate or most important to us plays an obviously large, though often unrecognized, role in our lives. I’ve been experimenting with reclaiming the term “God” for what’s ultimate for me. Here’s briefly how I mean the term God, from my article, God is a Verb:

The ever-unfolding, always-becoming, here-and-now is all that is. Anyone can experience this directly, no belief required. In fact, you might need to lay your beliefs down for a moment in order to access this experience.

For shorthand, we can call this ever-unfolding Allness “God”. It may be helpful to think of God as a verb —a happening, a becoming— rather than a person or person-like being, or an entity, or noun of any sort. God: the great unfolding.

I know the term “God” is a loaded one. Lots of people squirm at the word, and if that's you, that's ok. I still take issue with the word “god”, as it's been used and abused for centuries, but I find it a useful word and am in a personal process of reclaiming it.

So, let’s talk a bit about ultimate concerns and what “God” actually is/might be. This is important for understanding our metaphysical assumptions, which influence our embodied experience and understanding of life.

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We all have gods, whether we call them that or not. What you value most in life is, for all intents and purposes, your god. The philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich wrote1 of one’s “ultimate concern,” and we all have an ultimate concern. It may be all too easy in daily life to get swept up in prioritizing that which is only worthy of a partial allegiance, rather than putting front and center that which is our true ultimate concern: the infinite and eternal.

There is an existential reality at play here, which leads many people to neurotically avoid “nonbeing by avoiding being.”2 Full living—full being—includes coming to terms with what is ultimate. Again, this ultimacy may be different for different people, or at different moments in life, though I think there tends to be a process by which we eventually settle into one general view of what our ultimate concern is. Eventually, seeking and searching slows, and we no longer have that eager hunger for an ever-distant shore: we’ve found our ground.

I’ll be using the word theology, a word we ultimately get from the Greek θεός/theós, meaning “god,” and‎ λόγος/lógos, which means word or speech. So, God-talk. I bring theology in because I’ve learned that what makes a person “religious” isn’t any specific beliefs or affiliation, but the kinds of questions one asks, which fundamentally have to do with one’s ultimate concern. When your ultimate concern fits under the heading of “God-talk,” well, we may be in the realm of theology.

It’s a much broader field than you might expect.

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An important aspect of spiritual maturity involves questioning what is ultimate for you, examining what’s real, and choosing your moral values and systems with integrity and coherence. To be fully mature, we must move towards standing on our own feet with regard to our inherited concepts. Personal experience is fundamental and must not be ignored, but it is not the only story.

Jung wrote that “when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.”3 And Plato’s Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”4 That which we ignore or refuse to examine will still drive much of our lives. This is true of metaphysics, theology, and more. Let’s get curious about what’s behind the curtain.

To many, theology seems like an intellectual game. Religious traditions have developed vast systems of doctrine, metaphysics, apologetics, and philosophical argument. There’s a long and illustrious lineage in many traditions of well-known theologians.5 But for many people today (especially those seeking an honest and intimate spiritual life), the God of doctrine, systematic theology, scholarly treatises, or institutions more generally can feel distant, abstract, or irrelevant.

An embodied experience is an understanding that our processes of cognition, including thoughts, emotions, and perceptions, are grounded in and arise from the interactions between the body and the world. The epistemology of embodiment tells us that the body and its environment are not really separable; there is constant communication and interaction going on. This interaction or interbeing has deep and wide roots that connect us and our lived experience to the One, the Mystery, the Ultimate. This is what I call the theology of the felt sense.

What if God (spirit, the True Self, etc) is more than a belief to have, but is a reality to participate in? What if God speaks not just in words and ideas, but in direct experience? What if God is not primarily a concept to believe in, but a presence to encounter? And what if the body, the very ground of our felt sense, is the place where that encounter begins?

You can read part three here.

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“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” —Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

Paying attention is itself a form of prayer. It’s a way of honoring the sacred woven through the mundane. Simple noticings: an unexpected rainbow; the downdraft buzz of a hummingbird’s tiny wings; the scent of flowering trees generously blooming into the morning air.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Hebrew concept of shabbat, the sabbath, which invites us into a rhythm of not merely rest, but presence. While a sabbath is a break from productivity and work, I also take it as a way of entering into the fullness of being: of noticing the breath, feeling the earth beneath my feet, or glimpsing the mystery shimmering in sunlight on a leaf.

Presence can be gentle, but it is not passive. It is an active, discerning gaze: a way of opening the soul’s windows wide in order to welcome something fresh, and allow in the light and the shadow, the sound and the silence. Presence is to dwell fully right where we are—even when that place feels small or broken. Honestly, sometimes the small, broken places need our presence the most.

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When I was little, we had a little piece of art on the wall, and it said “wherever you go, there you are.” So how about it: dwelling fully, right where we are.

In this dwelling, the divine indwells. Meister Eckhart knew that “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.” The sacred is not elsewhere; it is right here, in your hands and in your breath. It is in your presence here on this earth.

To live contemplatively is to carry this awareness forward, threading each moment with reverence. It is to let silence and prayer infuse the ordinary until the ordinary becomes luminous; or rather, to let silence and prayer polish the windows of the ordinary until the ever-present luminosity is hidden no more.

Invitation to Practice:

As you move through your day, pause often to notice. Attend to your breath, to the light, to the textures around you. See what little joys you notice. Let these moments be your small altars of presence. You can gently hold on to the divine thread running through everything, and let it be your guide back into presence.

Prayer:

To the divine weaver,
Spinning thread that holds us close,
Let that shimmering strand guide me
To dwell in the prayer of presence.
Allow my gentle attention
To take in the small beauties
Of the perfectly and utterly ordinary,
And let me see the luminous
And the tremendous
In the brilliance of a rainbow,
In the smallest flower,
And in the softest breath.

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What helps the heart remember the prayerful side of its nature is a faithful, gentle circling back, a reorientation to the depth dimensions of being.

The desert mothers and fathers spoke of πάλιν, pálin, ‘again’ in the sense of returning again and again to the inner room of quiet, stillness, and prayer. Prayer itself is a form of returning, an opening to an ‘again,’ a circling toward the Beloved—no matter how we may have strayed.

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I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not ever complete the last one,
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, that primordial tower.
I have been circling for thousands of years,
and I still don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

There is something that is both purposeful and fragile in this sacred discipline of returning. We must understand that it is not about control (of our experience or of outcomes), but about consent: in returning, in circling back, we consent to being found; we consent to God’s presence; we consent to an enormous love that defies any concept of ‘deserving.’

To return is to recognize the grace that awaits us, not only at some imagined finish line, but all along the way. Our return is always met with joy, a pure welcome that both precedes and transcends any notions of merit.

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Our friend Rilke reminds us, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.” Returning is an act of love for the questions, the silences, and the imperfect prayers. It is a spiral dance with God that holds no condemnation for our faltering, no judgment of our doubts, and no demands for our perfection.

In this unceasing motion of return, in the ever-widening circles and circling back, our prayer is not performative but becomes a practice of mercy: mercy toward ourselves, in all our beautiful humanity, and mercy received from the One who is the center of the circle itself, the One who waits with outstretched arms, eternally to receive the wanderer back home.

Invitation to Practice:

Notice today how many times your attention drifts from presence. (I’m guessing it will be about 726,348 times.) Each time, with gentleness, simply return. There is no need to judge; the noticing and returning is the point. Consider the distractions or wanderings a gift, a new opportunity to come back. Trust that in this rhythm of wandering and return, you are being formed, and you are held in mercy.

Prayer poem:

Oh, allow me to wander
And thus discover myself anew,
From different and unfamiliar perspectives
That bring insight, and a longing for home.
Oh, allow me to wander,
But never far from your gaze
And as the circle widens, call me always
To return, to return, to return.

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The mystics have always insisted on this: silence is not the absence of God’s voice, but its very essence.

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There is a quality of presence that doesn’t announce itself with any great fanfare; it simply is. It’s something like a shawl on the shoulders on a cool morning—a light touch, but deeply comforting. You might notice this presence on a walk, or looking at the sunrise, or quietly folding laundry on a summer evening. It’s like a sudden, subtle change of light; a veil is lifted, and something feels like “more” or different somehow. Something new comes into awareness after having already been quietly present for a while.

This presence, this wordless spaciousness, doesn’t answer questions or solve problems. It might not even relieve whatever existential ache you may feel these days. Yet there is something soothing to it, something that steadies the hands and the gaze; there is something that holds part of the veil back, just for a moment, to give you a glimpse beyond. This presence sustains and sanctifies the moment with the breath of holy quiet.

Meeting this presence, or finding God or Source in the quiet, is a way of opening more fully to reality. There are dimensions we usually don’t notice in the day-to-day, and this whisper of presence can lift our gaze to something normally unseen: the utter holiness of the absolutely ordinary.

Invitation to Practice:

Spend a few moments today attending to silence as a presence rather than a void. Listen closely to what’s beneath the surface of your surroundings. Do you notice stillness? Do you notice vibrancy? What holds you in this moment? Perhaps you can feel the voice of God as the silence within and around you.

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Prayer:

In silent speech to the God of silence:

Let me hear you in the hush,

Let me sense you in the stillness.

May my restless mind find peace in your serenity,

And may the quiet teach me what I need to know.

I seek not answers, but awe;

Not knowledge, but wonder;

And I seek You, not beyond the silence, but within it.

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To say that no man is an island
is missing the point,
     or rather, focusing only on the most obvious:
the surface;
the superficial.

We are, of course, all islands,
yet interconnected in our depths
   far below what the eye can see;
      far below where the sun's rays reach.

And I—
I am an island,
    and I am adrift:
       tectonic clashes and tsunami waves
    bashing and crashing against my
       sometimes fragile shores.

And I—
I am an island,
        and underneath the surface churns
   and roils a tumultuous deep blue depth
        filled with otherworldly-seeming creatures,
   unknown and unimagined on that surface high above.

        And otherworldly indeed they are,
    for the surface is not the same as the depths,
and in the depths live other creatures
    with other senses
        and other ways of being.

So I—
I am an island,
  and it seems I live inverted,
    plunging deeper into the depths,
      seeking that space of ultimate connection,
    uncertain on the surface with fewer dimensions,
  harsher light,
and sharper edges.

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I think we’ve all had a particular kind of moment, the experience of which we instantly recognize, even if we don’t have ready words for it. It’s a feeling of “that whole thing” when you consider a situation, or a sense of whether you like a particular person or place. This isn’t about a thought, or an emotion; it’s something more like a subtle, bodily “about-ness.” Something feels more present, or the air feels thicker, or there’s just something… It’s the feeling of meaning itself, forming just under the surface of your awareness, or just out of the corner of your eye. You aren’t sure what it is yet, but there’s something there.

It’s like a doorway has appeared. This is what philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin called the felt sense.

The felt sense isn’t a hunch or a gut reaction; it’s more nuanced than intuition and more embodied than insight. Gendlin described it as a bodily knowing: it’s an inner sense of a situation, experience, or question that is not yet in words, but carries its own kind of wholeness, truth, and direction.

For those of us with an active spiritual life, this quiet opening is often where the sacred starts to speak.

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More nuanced than intuition, more embodied than insight

To clarify what the felt sense is, it helps to understand what it isn’t. It’s not the same as an emotion, like sadness or joy; it’s not just a feeling like anxiety or anticipation; and it’s not a thought like “I should do this” or “better think twice.” The felt sense is what you sense before thoughts, feelings, and emotions arise clearly. (I describe it a little differently here.)

The felt sense is often fuzzy, body-based, and may be hard to pin down, but if you stay with it, gently and with curiosity, it often begins to shift, to reveal something, or offer a next step that feels surprisingly right.

Imagine you’re facing a life decision. You’ve made pro and con lists; you’ve talked to friends; you’ve thought about it from all angles; yet something doesn’t feel resolved. You pause, drop inward, and feel into the tangle, the “whole situation.” There, maybe in your chest or belly, you sense a tightness, or maybe a flutter, or something else. If you sit with it, without analyzing it, but just letting it be, it might eventually speak to you: maybe This path feels safe, but it’s not right for me. Something clicks for you, and the pros and cons don’t matter; you now know what you need to do.

This moment of clarity didn’t come from logic or emotion: it came from the felt sense.

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The inner sanctuary: spiritual dimensions of the felt sense

In many religious and spiritual traditions, truth is not just something we think or believe; it’s something we encounter. It arises through listening, through waiting, through surrender, through presence.

Mystics across traditions describe moments when something larger moves within them. It goes by many names: spirit, the Beloved, the inner teacher, the True Self, the Friend, God… These encounters are often quiet, subtle, and hard to describe. They aren’t arising intellectually, but from somewhere deeper: the body, the silence, the liminal spaces of our being.

This is why the felt sense matters spiritually. It is not just a psychological tool. It’s a threshold experience: a place where something real, meaningful, and sacred begins to take shape or make itself known.

In Sufi practice, the felt sense is related to dhawq, the taste of truth that arises in the heart-mind. It is direct, experiential knowing. In the nondual Shaiva tradition, this might be called pratibhā. In Christian contemplative language, this might be the still small voice, and in Quaker tradition, it might be how the Inner Light makes itself known.

In all of these, something real, alive, and trustworthy is felt before it is explained. This pre-conceptual knowing can be cultivated, and has been by many mystics and practitioners, through different practices of prayer, meditation, and contemplation. It’s our human birthright to touch into this wellspring of wisdom.

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Practicing the listening

We live in a fast culture that rewards fast answers, clarity, and certainty. But we know that spiritual life rarely (if ever!) moves that way. It tends to unfold on sinuous, subtler timelines, in multiple recursive layers. The felt sense invites us to slow down and stay present with what is not-yet-clear, and to listen for what is forming.

Gendlin called this kind of listening Focusing, in the sense of a camera lens bringing an image into view. In Focusing, we bring gentle, inward attention to what is wanting to be known. In the spiritual life, this kind of attention can be a form of prayer.

To practice it, you might just take a moment to pause and let your attention drop into your body. Notice your breath and the seat or support beneath you. Then bring to mind a situation, a question, or even just the sense of being you right now. Notice: is there a place inside that feels meaningful, but hard to describe? Stay with it. Let it show itself to you in its own time.

This is not about “figuring it out.” This is listening with your whole self.

The sacred may speak in silence first

In the weeks ahead, I plan to share more about how the felt sense relates to spiritual discernment, to intuition, and to transformation.

If this embodied spiritual listening speaks to something in you, please let me know in the comments!

Sometimes God, or life, or truth speaks in ways we might have forgotten how to listen to. We can always tune in to that quiet something in the body, our felt sense of what’s arising.

There is always a doorway, and we’re lucky to have the key.

You can read part two here.

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Silence becomes a sanctuary, if we let it be so.

I know a lot of people have learned to think of prayer as requiring words, but I don’t think language is an essential element of prayer. The depth dimensions of grace are like the deeper waters of a slow-moving river: the current will carry you, in words or in silence.

The main thing is to show up, to give yourself that time to perhaps sit in silence with upturned palms. Showing up is the prayer. You might light a candle, or you might just breathe and be in that wordless presence.

Connection and communion requires no verbal communication. God, Source, or however you call it, doesn’t need you to be a poet. If there is a creator of the universe, surely the creator comprehends silence. You don’t need to offer information, or petition, or thanks, but simply presence: the simplest of gifts, and yes, sometimes the most challenging.

Invitation to Practice:

If it feels like words aren’t working right now, let them go. Light a candle if you like; sit in a quiet place and allow the silence to speak for you. Let your longing live without language. It’s ok for silence to be your chapel. Let the rhythm of your breath become a poem. Allow the blessed beauty of wordless presence to bloom into prayer.

Prayer, if words might be helpful as a bridge into silence:

Space of silence, before and beyond speech,
I offer my presence when I have no words.
Let this space bring peace,
And let my breath be my devotion,
And let me know the holiness
Of yielding to the quiet.

We all know the feeling of filling calendars, and filling silences, and filling bookshelves (I’m SO guilty of this one!), and filling up every spare moment. What scares us so much about emptiness?

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In a productivity-obsessed society, is it any wonder even our downtime is meant to be “useful”? Apparently even our spiritual practice has to be moving us closer to enlightenment, giving us insight, or…proving a point?

I think the most real and true things operate differently. My “self,” for instance, doesn’t operate in linear time, nor does my soul function in comprehensible, rational ways. I’ve noticed how out of balance I sometimes feel when I try to realign with the seasons and the moon: the big busy world has its own logic; God’s logic, if we dare to call it that, is something else altogether.

“We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.” — inspired by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It’s only in retrospect, usually, that I’ve noticed the deepest soul work having been done. Times of frustration, situations I wanted to avoid, or stuck spots I didn’t think I’d make it through were later seen as proving grounds, the times of greatest growth. It’s obvious, looking back, but sometimes the most profound transformation happened when it seemed like God was saying little (and doing even less); the times that felt so empty were actually filled to overflowing with possibilities and promise.

I call those times a strange benediction. The architecture of mercy is invisible in those moments, though while we don’t see it, it acts to scaffold and sustain our experiences of emptiness. On the other side of those experiences, I've found a depth and fullness inconceivable before, which exists only for having traversed those unfilled spaces, and allowed the emptiness to be full of itself in the best way.

How is it to be in that emptiness, and just to be with it without rushing to distraction or productivity? How is it to allow the architecture of reality to take its time in revealing itself? I wonder if you can feel your participation in a deeper rhythm. I wonder if we can believe that grace works in stillness and confusion, too, and trust in that fertile hollow space that is there when we stop rushing to fill it.

Invitation to Practice:

Let some of your quiet time be “useless” today. Consider it holy uselessness! See if you can feel the part that usually seeks filling, and what that part might have to say to you. Notice what thoughts or feelings come with allowing a little emptiness: is there a hungry ghost trying to get its fill? The paradox is it can only be filled with the emptiness of surrender.

Prayer:

O holy space of emptiness
And holy time of uselessness,
Help me notice the beauty of the unfilled moments
And see the mercy hidden in the larger pattern.
Help me find joy, just a little,
In moments of frustration
And trust that the aliveness
Will keep me full, full, full.

This Friday is “Bandcamp Friday,” which means that when you buy my music that day, Bandcamp will waive their share of the sales, so artists like me keep more of the money you spend on our music. It’s also important to note, many musicians only make money from direct sales, like through Bandcamp or the artist’s own website, and see no money at all from sales on platforms like Apple music or streaming on Spotify and the like. (This will depend on how “big” an artist is, how the algorithm favors some things over others, if you have a label or distributor taking a cut, etc.)

To be clear, I knew putting my music on streaming platforms would not make me money. I put it out there, as I do with my writing here, freely. However, many people pay for streaming or downloads thinking artists will see some of that money, which so often isn’t the case.

I’ve had music on all the streaming and sales platforms for over five years and never seen a penny from any of it. This is common for smaller artists who are not on the fame-and-festival circuit. Thousands and thousands of streams, people who love the music, and don’t realize that many artists only see some data about the listening audience, but don’t receive income from streams or even purchases through most platforms.

The best way to financially support me is through direct purchases of my music on Bandcamp, or working with me directly, or making a donation. Non-financial ways to support include sharing my work with others, reposting, liking and commenting, sending me messages—it’s all great!

I know there are SO many people and causes that need our support. I am so deeply appreciative of those of you that have ordered my music from me, or supported me in other ways. And I need more support to finally finish my long-upcoming second album, PRAKĀŚA, which I hope to put on Bandcamp in the next couple months.

Thanks so, so much for being here.

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