Past and Future Feeling

Walking through campus

Communing with memories

Like overhearing intimate conversations.

Much easier

Than the attention

The present demands.

Lulled into a

Soft timelenssness

Blessed as much

By what I can’t remember

As what I can.

The buildings

And landscape

Have a commonplace holiness about them

Memory’s physical evidence.

The existence of all feeling

Evidently lives on.

Each student

Embodying various emotions

Versions of which

Have all been felt before.

And will be felt again.

Not a tired emulation

But an endless springing

Emotions embodied

Over and over

Alchemized in new

And beautiful combinations.

Every emotional state

I’ve lived here

Lives on here.

The overwhelming stress

Flattening self-consciousness

Awkward nervousness

Grim satisfaction

End-of-semester catharsis

And more.

It’s all still here.

Which is comforting

In a way difficult to explain.

The wheels of emotion

May turn us

And weary us

But we can’t weary it.

And the world

Never wearies of it

Or us.

Isn’t this some form of immortality?

Thoughts on the West

One of the reasons I believe the West is so compelling is its expansiveness. It draws the mind to new breadths and heights–awakens our faculties and renews the soul. The West is a landscape almost beyond our imagination–if we were tasked with designing a new world from a blank slate I doubt any “rendering” would come close to the alien, majestic, vertigo-inducing landscape found here. Maybe because it is so beyond our imagination it frees it to some degree.

And, it also feels sparsely inhabited enough (in places) that you can breathe a little. The American pioneer archetype was always looking for space and open landscape–I think, to some degree, we return to that search when we go West. Of course, there is a time and place for human contact and civilized society–but we’re wild creatures (in a good sense) to some extent. We need time on the landscape. Time enough in the desert to feel parched and exhausted, time enough out in the open to be soaked to the core in rain, time enough in the thick forest to feel the instinctual fear of long shadows, and time enough in the mountains to feel your extremities numb in the wind and driving snow. Because, on the other side of these feelings, these real and enlivening experiences, our wonder re-awakens. Our senses are shaken, jolted, and dusted off. We feel more human because we feel more. There is a special feeling in these genuine and life-affirming experiences that come as a ‘pearl of great price’ for those who depart civilization for the wilderness–even if only temporarily.

Most importantly, too, I believe experiencing nature to be a spiritual experience. The West, relatively unspoiled as it is, allows much more easily than other places, for this sort of communion. And it does more than simplify signify spiritual concepts–it foreshadows them as it speaks in the same divine register. One of my favorite quotes, from Thoreau, exemplifies this role: “In a pleasant spring morning all men’s sins are forgiven.” To me, this feeling mirrors divine absolution. No matter what we may have done, no matter how lost we may be, the landscape makes room for us. The sun doesn’t hide from us. This infinite grace is poured down upon us. Who has seen a more spectacular miracle than Spring? Who has felt more warmed, more enlivened, than by the first warm day of our vernal resurrection? If it is repentance, or death, or life, or love (or any of the quasi-religious nature-inspired moments), it is also a call, beckoning us to plant these feelings, those visions of eternity, in our everyday lives. Thus, the West is a little garden of eternities.

First, we see the vermilion red cliffs calling down salvation and grace, then we recall it once out of sight, and then we try to plant a bit of this salvation and grace in our everyday lives. We imbue a bit of this ‘red rock redemption’ into our pattern of life and character.

But again, it’s more than a symbol. For a symbol has no inherent power other than what it stands for. It may be a symbol, but it’s not that alone. For example, the clearest image or metaphor or likeness, for me, of eternal life are the seemingly endless summer days I spent with my siblings on the grassy fields behind my middle school, playing soccer and watching the clouds pass in the pale blue sky–heavy with humidity. It was an idyll, a perfect moment carved out of time. Though it may not be laying up stores in heaven, it seems to me a laying up of stores of heaven. These memories seem full of the very stuff of eternity. It seems as if time itself is pregnant with eternity. Though eternal life may not consist solely of staring up at puffy white clouds sailing through the blue sky (though I hope it is) this memory, for me, seems the best approximation to heaven. Or at least that is the thought that most resonates with my soul.

Emerson said “nature is the symbol of Spirit.” I take this to mean that nature shows us what we are capable of–reminding us that beauty and bounty are our birth-right in the “givenness of things.” If the mark of virtue is to see the “miraculous in the ordinary,” the West adds a distinctive element. Out here, where the miraculous is so apparent, so unavoidable, our challenge is to continually see the miraculous day in and day out. To not become inured to the miracle of this Western existence.

Ethereal Things

Salvation is blinding white light

Soaking through my vision, 

Evoking a feeling beyond words.

—

Rapture is a glowing, faint orange rock outcropping

Jumping out of a deep blue sky,

An unmediated ecstasy

Freely offered to the soul.

—

Life everlasting was that time on the grassy fields

With white clouds above

And an entire summer ahead.

—

Though not the coldly precise definitions

We often converse in,

Perhaps–

Until we can speak like the sunset,

Talk of endings like the twilight,

And move minds like the morning sun–

Ethereal things are best

Left to earth’s explanation.

Sunset Salvation

The world is a soft and warm hue

And the mountain won’t let us look away

Its rock metamorphosing to a glowing state

Reminiscent of eons past,

And the azure sky urges our minds

Toward the infinite

As the evening light on the mountainside intensifies,

Somehow. The mountain is a lit flame,

Our innermost ecstasy

A feeling made of rock and dirt and trees

and things. In the soft shadows of the snowy incline

A faint blue vaguely imitates the sky.

This is a revelatory moment

As a beautiful order emerges.

In this way our silent mountain watches us

Watching it.

And rewards us each passing day.

Though snow and wind may batter,

It remains unchanged.

A promise? Some sort of sign

perhaps? For it guarantees the same new feelings

In meticulously infinite

repetition. Even if it only happened once,

It would be enough.

Yet here,

You can see salvation each evening.

My Father’s Friend

While returning to my hometown and spending the holidays with my family, I witnessed a beautiful reunion of childhood friends. We took a detour home one Sunday through my dad’s childhood neighborhood. By some perfect coincidence, we saw his childhood friend (that my dad hadn’t seen in nearly 30 years) pull into his driveway. My dad quickly stopped the car, and waved down his friend.

Seeing my dad talk with his old hometown friend was nothing short of paradigm-shifting. Seeing this man, likely weary in some ways of the world he inhabits, light up when he saw the face of a childhood friend was transcendently beautiful. I had several thoughts as a result.

Life is very short, how fast it must feel to my dad’s friend, occupying the same house, the one he grew up in, for 50 years. This turned my mind to the words of famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow, “We are all poor, blind creatures bound hand and foot by the invisible chains of heredity and environment, doing pretty much what we have to do in a barbarous and cruel world.” He used this merciful frame of mind to explain his approach to the law, including defending infamous defendants, even murderers. I tend to view the world in slightly more miraculous and beneficent ways, but I think his point is valuable, and echoes Abraham Lincoln’s expansive view of humanity when he said of the South, and their slave-owning economy, “they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.”

Often we meanly objectify someone’s worth. We want to know what they did to deserve our attention, our respect, our interest. This commodification of the soul has highly destructive repercussions, but the strongest rebuttal of this ideology is also the simplest. To see the life-force, the sentience, the soul-strength, of a living being is enough to know that it is good. Walt Whitman describes this goodness of earth and the things around us in breathless rejoicings.

“I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe,
and am not contain’d between my hat and boots, And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good, The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.
I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth, I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and
fathomless as myself, (They do not know how immortal, but I know.)”

There is no need to justify ourselves to another, or seek status. The gravity of existence is self-evident.

And nothing emphasizes the preciousness of life as its own tenuousness. My wife and I slept over at a small rented room during our stay, and one evening we found a small cricket in the corner of the tiled bathroom. Its existence was as tenuous as it gets. Perhaps we were tempted, slightly, to play god. At least a cold and distant god, ready to rid ourselves of a temporary annoyance in the most permanent and, for the cricket, catastrophic way. How easy it is to crush crickets and the human spirit.

This same delicate dance of survival played in front of me this past summer, in one particularly memorable moment. I stood on a bridge overlooking a fall on the Provo river. A beautiful bird, an American Dipper–the only aquatic songbird in North America–fluttered from rock to rock just inches above the falls (the pair of falls descend about two feet each). I could feel my palms sweating as this small bird fluttered about, in and out of the river, and foraged precariously close to what would have surely been a deadly fall. It survived, and the melodrama quickly faded. But in those moments the weight of existence made itself known. It felt like a low-watt God-like moment, of sorts, to watch the desperate and beautiful struggle play out with an intense sympathy.

Moving Out

Staring at open space

Remarking how spacious it all feels

And how empty.

Remembering past promises

–Whispered implicitly from vaulted ceiling–

We begin to clean,

Scrubbing hard to remove ourselves

From this borrowed space.

Sweeping up crumbs and memories

Working hard to leave none behind

Wiping away smudged fingerprints

–As if past expectation personified reaches backward for us

Or at least looks back

To scrutinize us one last time–

Until all that is left are Windex streaks

On transparent panes.

Now checking the mail one last time

And finally setting down the keys.

Minds spurred forward

In subtle parallel

To another time

Now only faintly grasped

When keys and rings are surrendered together.

When the spaciousness of existence

Is matched by our untethered souls.

When that borrowed space is cleaned and readied one last time

While we are gracefully removed from it.

When that which should moulder

Moulders

And that which should live

Lives

And that which should move out

Moves on.

Rest and Unrest

Give hope some kind of rest.

A few days ago, during a break at work, I decided to research Mormon-Native American relations in early Utah. What I read between various online sources was depressing and horrific, but no longer shocking. There were stories of massacres, tales of murder and ambush, and accounts of extrajudicial killings.

And it was only a war if a hunting trip can be called a battle between the hunter with his shotgun and the hunted with no warning. I already suspected, comprehended, that things were like this.

I knew that before Mormon pioneers came there were Native Americans, and after, there were only a few. But knowing generalities was easier for my somewhat well-rested hope and my carefully tended equilibrium.

—

Is there hope at all? Or are we all wending our slow way toward hell? A journey that becomes hell itself as it plunges off toward the void?

Our whole history, present, and future determined to be a sprint toward self-destruction? A conscious attempt to destroy ourselves before the dying sun can? Searching for a greater meaning often makes no sense, sometimes even seems ironic. God often seems so theoretical and pale compared to the dark hues of of a crazed reality.

It’s so easy to only believe in my eventual, and inexorable, destruction and disappearance. It’s just too much. Is there no merciful rest? And what about the almost blasphemous beauty that continues amid the cruel inhumanity? A small Native American boy is brutally killed in the afternoon–then in the evening the sky is again a stunning spectrum of color. The insane juxtaposition of beauty and thoughtless horror seems to be just that.

Coupling these disturbing images to the present moment makes the anomie, the displacement of my place from any ordered or rooted time, complete. A present moment of confusion, materialism, environmental destruction, hatred, senseless discussions and arguments.

—

Among the most destructive things now are the rationalizations, the acceptance that things have come to this, that there is some sort of righteousness in this collective death spiral of hate, bitterness, and materialism. The idea that the past is a testament to righteousness, the premise that the future will be better, seem self-righteous affronts to the suffering.

There are a plethora of apologists for a glossy past and a glorious present, but of these apologists, almost none inspire the same revulsion in me as those who profess religion. They believe in a higher power while by turns glorying in and ignoring the perversions of our low existence in a cruel inversion of the Tower of Babel.

They do this without any apparent hesitation or conscientious objecting. Many of these apologists may have been drafted into this war, but no matter, for they quickly took up arms for their “holy cause.”

Do we live in a day of wrath? For it is a day that is itself dissolving into its own fiery ashes.

—

Some days I fall into a nearly bottomless pit in search of hope. The dark pit of a forsaken well, in search of the liquid substance that gives life and reflects light.

When I reach the thick black of the bottom, in that light-less depth, I scrape my cup on the stony cold rock bottom in hopes of water. So often there is none.

The pitch black is just pitch black. The watery hope is either dried up or was never to be found here. It is in those moments that I am most brutally faced with the bare facts of my existence. The possibility that this is it. That there is no point. That behind every symbol is another symbol and another…until nothing. That the representations, the signs, the types all hide a nothingness that lurks silently behind.

Other days, though, there is water.

—

Holy.

The very earth is on fire.

Holy.

The air is filled with a smoky and acrid grit.

Holy.

The translucent temples melt and flow into a plastic sea.

—

Was there no mercy promised? Any rest given?

It seems that the easing up has not come. Or has come in some slight and infinitesimally small amount.

Or maybe it has come.

Yet a powerful temptation remains. As Jesus was tempted to throw himself out into the void, so are we. To make some kind of perverse atonement and sacrifice our finite hope in pursuit of some greater cause.

Probably, though, it was never our sacrifice to make. Any heroism to it is swallowed up in its emptiness.

—

The peace that comes, any rest that may be, the mercy that could come upon us, perhaps is not complete until we have sat with our quiet agonies. To feel the full weight of our helplessness.

To weigh the bitterness, both within and without. To realize that we alone are nearly powerless against the suffocating dread and fear of our untethered world.

If the story is to end happily, the full weight of that joy would be impossible to fully comprehend without considering the possibility of annihilation.

If we are to sit silently with others, we must do the same, sometimes, with ourselves. Not to revel in it, but to grope around in it for a while.

—

May some light reflect off the forsaken well’s waters.

May some light be found there, even when the well is barren and dry.

With no water or light to reflect.

May I imagine the light, or remember the light.

Even in the darkest night.

Imbuing Life with Meaning

As a Christian, specifically a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I often feel constrained to see how the pieces of my life should fit together coherently. Likewise I strain to see how world history can be condensed into a single epic narrative, and I search, many times fruitlessly, to understand our current political situation as a logical step or rational progression in a history arcing toward equal justice. However, lately, this tidy vision through which I tend to see my life, and the events swirling around it, has become more clouded, and the inherent meaninglessness of certain tasks, or irrationality of certain phenomenons has led me to question this more optimistic narrative.

The immediate cause of this paradigm shift has been my new job as a paralegal at a debt collection law practice. The coldly amoral yet supposedly perfect economic market justice so extolled by neoliberals and libertarians loses its shiny quality when applied to the cases of the impoverished saddled with debt at steep interest rates that doom them to wage garnishments, abysmal credit scores, and a life spent paying off the debt at rates barely even with the per diem interest increase. The fact that the debt collection industry has become an industry worth billions of dollars is a sad reflection on the economic condition of our working class. In my job I find myself in almost perpetual internal conflict. The utter disregard our law firm has for the day-to-day condition of the debtors we are obliged to collect from is nothing short of depressing.

For context, the situation of one debtor I will call Anna. She called me one morning, intermittently crying about her $20,000 car debt, her abusive ex-husband, her now deceased fiancee who committed suicide months ago, and the emotional trauma she still deals with from her tumultuous life. She is only the co-signer to the car loan she now owes on–and alleges her ex-husband virtually forced her to do so–but is nonetheless being garnished at rates that forced her to call us. It was a call she made out of desperation, not believing that there was anything to be done. Fortunately, we were able to work out a partial release of the garnishment, such that she would only be required to pay $100 each pay-check (a $200 reduction). However, around a week later we came to find out that the release of garnishment was late in being applied and we received a $350 garnishment for her. I talked to the attorney in charge about what could be done (could we send back the money? etc.). He replied that our firm “does its best” to work with debtors and that our policy is to never give back money once given. In my opinion, a cynical approach, although, no doubt, a monetarily profitable one. Entering that garnishment from Anna into our financial accounting system was painful, but a sort of dull pain borne out of a sense of moral exhaustion.

In “high church” tradition, now the lesson. What sort of coherent and uplifting moral can be drawn from these experiences? What can be learned from witnessing such devastation? Especially as a witness actively involved in abetting such devastation? My mind was never before drawn to the existentialists, but these past few weeks have rosied their philosophical worldview. Yet, I still hesitate to reject any sense of meaning, any order in this world of ours. My faith gives me a different perspective, and perhaps one that still holds out understanding for those bleak moments in which life, beyond simply appearing unfair, starts to shed all its meaning. Through my hope in Jesus Christ, I have already acknowledged a central character in a universal narrative that lends meaning to life. Through my understanding of his sacrifice, I acknowledge an ends, a goal that gives eternal significance to our time here. Nonetheless, I believe that this grand purpose to life, should not be conflated to mean that every single moment on earth has a similar grand design. Maybe it does, but I tend to doubt that every single moment has an inherent moral valence, that each second is imbued with a grander purpose. I am moving in the direction of believing that some moments may be purposeless, inchoate, or senseless. In these times, I believe, it is up to us to imbue them with a grander meaning. To wrestle with what it means to exist in a complex world. Cognizant of a grander (macro) design, but mindful of the fact that we may have a much more integral role in imbuing the seemingly trivial and mundane (micro) events around us with purpose and meaning than we tend to suppose.

An Eschatology of Hope

Growing up as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints I have been intrigued to see how world-views can vary so much by congregant. For ease of analysis I would break down these distinctive paradigms into two camps. One is the perspective that the world is quickly becoming more and more evil and that whatever good still in the world is under near-constant siege. In this vision, any political good enacted by those with good and righteous intentions is mostly a pyrrhic victory. This is a mostly “black and white” perspective. There may be some nuance in this vision, but not enough to really matter. The second perspective is defined in nuance. In accordance with church orthodoxy it is still understood that there is, or will be, a certain culture, or sub-culture, arcing towards immorality and permissiveness. But, at the same time, this belief coexists with the understanding that our world is quickly becoming safer, more tolerant, and, generally, a better place to live. Nonetheless, there is obviously an amount of cognitive dissonance in holding these two sometimes conflicting ideas as true.

I believe that the reason that these two camps have formed is due to fundamentally distinct interpretations of our eschatology (the theology of death, judgment, and the destiny of the soul). There is some interesting reading to be done on the differences between postmillenialism, premillenialism, and amillenialism but it is quite clear that, doctrinally, we believe in premillenialism, in that we believe Christ will come before the thousand years of peace alluded to in the book of Revelations.

Disregarding the semantic arguments encircling the distinct views of the millenium, there is a common apocalyptic world-view that can take root as a result of premillenial eschatology. I find this hopeless and gloomy view illogical, and wholly uncharacteristic of Christian understanding. Nevertheless, I would identify a certain type of premillenialism as a cause of this. It is a premillenialism that has evolved into a siege-like mentality. Everything and anything is reduced to a cosmic and Manicheaen duel between good and evil. In this way we reduce Satan, or any ultimate evil, to an easily studied caricature. In an assumption that any of his malign purposes can be easily discerned, we paint with broad strokes and ascribe his cunning to any movement or happening not easily understood.

There are many unfortunate consequences of such a paradigm. Foremost, any belief in the forward progress of mankind is discarded. This is a crippling loss, and it permits a politics of cynicism and obstruction to flourish. Cynicism, because any social or political innovation that purports to progress our civilization will be met with skepticism of some ulterior motive, or perhaps simple disbelief. And obstruction, because this doomsday vision enables only this tool for doing good. Because (according to this view) the world is becoming ever worse, one must jam up the levers of political power and procrastinate the apocalypse (while converting ready souls).

I find this theology of apocalypse to be completely wretched. It promotes hopelessness, anxiety, and helplessness. It is utterly contrary to the empowering message of Jesus Christ, a message that preaches love, tolerance, action, faith, and hope. Instead, we need to wrest a message of hope from the premillenial eschatology. I don’t know exactly how that will be best be done, but I believe the task to be urgent.

Perhaps members of the restored Church of Jesus Christ, and all Christians as well, don’t take enough ownership of our theology. Sure, we have some variable level of knowledge of specific points of doctrine, but too often we don’t systematically develop these, and consequently our theology is threadbare and undeveloped. As I see it, our understood doctrine is as points of starry light in the night sky, but a true theology works as an organizing tool, a way to map and connect these points of light. I believe that each Christian should have their own theology, a way to make sense of the often confusing array of doctrine, a method to bring order to the chaos. For this is a truly Christian task, an emulation of God’s work. I don’t mean to say that each believer can pick and choose their own doctrine, but, just as each Gospel writer inserted their personality, their soul, into the narrative, so must we develop a theology that reflects Christ, his doctrine, and our personality. In so doing we will create a theology, and eschatology, not of despair and destruction, but of vibrant hope and renewal.

The Chaos of Certainty

What seems to define our current era is a tendency toward chaos, a collective feeling that the center will not hold. Edward Luce brilliantly lays out this thesis in his short book, “The Retreat of Western Liberalism.” He maintains that our modern world is defined by chaos and underlain by great uncertainty.

As I look towards the future, I sometimes find myself thinking about how long this mass hysteria will last. Will it define my generation? What is it that triggers such fear and collective self-doubt? The responses to these questions will define my generation (and beyond), and these queries necessitate thoughtful and reasoned research and discussion. Beyond any single specific policy proposal, I think that the manner we view our proposed solutions to be an integral part of the answer.

Any policy or program designed to lead to a more enlightened, peaceful, and prosperous community is based on a specific way of knowing and explaining the world. The paradigms through which we evaluate, analyze, and sort through these competing, and often conflicting, societal blueprints are so personal to our ideology, experience, education, and religion. And they are susceptible to innumerable biases, errors, and incomplete information. As the Apostle Paul wrote, we “see through a glass, darkly.” This seems to be one of the defining characteristics of human existence. Consequently, what political views we hold may be less important than how we hold them.

This lesson has been gradually unfolded to me since 2016. That summer I returned home from a two year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I saw a sort of visible and shocking poverty that I had never fathomed growing up in an affluent northern Virginia town. I had known wealth and comfort and peace and plenty for all my life. At home we left our doors unlocked and our bikes and sports equipment strewn across the lawn day after day. Yet, I came home almost precisely at the moment that Donald Trump secured the Republican nomination for president, a man who had run on the idea of a sick, enfeebled, impoverished, insecure America. I sat staring at the TV, completely shocked, when Trump spoke of “American carnage” at his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. The picture he painted reminded me not at all of the community that was America for me. Not surprisingly, he did not win my community, or state, in the election.

Yet, there were many communities that cast their vote for him because, symbolically or literally (or both), they were devastated. And not a ‘developing world’-type devastation. For in many measurable ways they were doing much better, but in another less-measurable sense, much worse. The coffee farm laborer in Nicaragua may be desperately poor, yet tragically this poverty is mirrored all around them and, excepting an escape from the county, this fate may seem unavoidable. On the other hand, a steel worker in Pennsylvania was born with the “American Dream” of self-advancement and material prosperity almost preternaturally, and after seeing other Americans achieve prosperity and fortune, was eventually laid off after 30 years of work with only meager savings. This steel worker is likely to feel a visceral sense of relative deprivation, especially when compared with the idealized wealth of the “coastal elites.”

In one sense the “correct” evaluation of America’s economic and political condition is incredibly relative and subjective. The truth for an unemployed former steel worker in the Rust Belt may be that America is in real and undeniable decline, that any national economic growth hasn’t delivered for them, and that the government only works for the privileged and wealthy. However, the truth for me in 2016 was that America was in a much better political and economic state than most other nations, and that ours was truly a government for the people, by the people.

These diametrically opposed paradigms (neither completely right nor wrong) collided on November 6, 2016. The result was an incredibly uncomfortable awakening to the reality that since the 1970’s our nation was becoming more and more unequal, that there was one America in which advancement and socio-economic progression were realistic, and another in which it was increasingly unlikely. Among many things, some of these symptoms and not necessarily causes, the meritocracy broke down, over-arching macroeconomic policy shifted from full employment to low inflation, capital controls eased, and (as Wolfgang Streeck notes) capitalists employed ‘investment strikes.’

In a sense, then, I was incorrect in my evaluation of the U.S. economy and consequently our democracy, for it was not working for all Americans. Although I still believe Donald Trump was, and is, wrong to blame this on immigrants and trade deals while not acknowledging the deeper roots, he (or his advisers) was right that there is something nagging many in Middle America, something that pushes towards frustration, resignation, resentment, and anger.

Now, nearly three years into Trump’s presidency, the political certainty on either ideological side is irrational and untenable. We hold onto partially true, or even completely flawed tropes to steady ourselves, not realizing that this grasping doesn’t connect us with reality, but rather to a sort of tribal mythology. To combat this, I believe, to paraphrase a college classmate, each of us has a sacred moral obligation to doubt. And not in some sort of fatalistically depressed way, but rather in a honest and searching manner. With the intellectual humility necessary to admit when you are wrong, when your logic is flawed, when your ideas don’t bear fruit. I don’t wish to say that the truth is unknowable or unattainable. I happen to believe in certain unchanging truths, nonetheless, the unchanging beliefs I hold onto happen to be relatively few in number (compared to what I don’t know or yet understand). For any given political question this uncertainty leads to sincere questioning, honest searching, and a gradual shift in perspective. Ultimately, our political models are only as useful as they approximate the world around us. So, if we perversely intend to twist and coax the world down to the comfortable ideological model we built for ourselves, then we should not be surprised to live in a rather twisted up, knotty, and chaotic world that bulges and contorts in all the wrong directions.

We must find ways to work within our ideological frame without being consumed by it. It is for the 21st century citizen to doubt while they believe. Not to cast away these frames, beliefs, or foundations, but to understand that the world is infinitely more complex than our finite vision. To understand that at certain times we must re-order, re-examine, or re-work our paradigms, no matter how long-held or cherished. I am convinced that any re-weaving of the social fabric–the one being torn apart by culture wars, rhetorical battles, and self-interested politicking–must begin with the intellectual humility of doubt, a doubt that enables one to see past ideology and begin to understand another’s arguments. This will combat the chaos of certainty, the delirium of the echo chamber. Meanwhile, as Pastor Jeffers tells Revered Toller in “First Reformed”, “Jihadism is everywhere–even here.”