“We’re heartbroken. We’re overwhelmed.”

The letter goes on to say:

“Our doctors, nurses and people working in health care are doing everything we can to take care of you when you’re sick. And yet every day we’re seeing avoidable illness and death as a direct result of COVID19.”

But I don’t need to open a newspaper to know that doctors are heartbroken and overwhelmed. Because I am married to one of them.

For two years I have watched my wife work on the front lines of the healthcare battle against COVID in our state. In the early days, we didn’t know how bad it would be. We read stories of young doctors dying in Italy. We talked about life insurance and wills. We tried to prepare for anything.

All that first year, while a lot of people complained about having to miss haircuts or wear a mask to Target, she went to the Emergency Room over and and over and worked ten-hour shifts in head-to-toe protective gear that left deep marks on her face. She and her colleagues tried to make plans for what would happen when their system was overwhelmed. They begged people to flatten the curve. And they waited for the vaccine to be developed, the one tool in their battle against COVID that might give them chance of winning this war for good.

When the vaccine was ready last year, healthcare workers were the first to get their shots. She got hers in December. She was so excited. Not only did it protect her while she worked to save lives in the Emergency Room; it also meant that there was an end in sight for the nightmare of 2020.

It’s been a year since then, and there’s no end in sight.

Not because the vaccine doesn’t work, or because the healthcare workers aren’t still busting their asses every day in the hospitals, but because not enough people are doing their part — getting the shot, wearing masks, social distancing.

Still, she goes to the hospital, five days a week, and tries to do what she can.

But like all the other doctors, she is demoralized and heartbroken.

Day after day she comes home from work and tells me about how the Emergency Room is full. The waiting rooms are full. The ICU is full. Mostly it’s full of people with COVID. Almost of all them are unvaccinated.

She tells me about what it’s like when people die alone hooked up to ventilators because the virus has destroyed her lungs. She tells me what it’s like to sit with their families and say there’s nothing she can do. There was one thing they could have done — get a vaccine — and it’s too late.

For the past six months I have watched this work take a toll on her, wear her down, break her heart. I have listened to her anger and held her when she cried and just sat next to her in silence when there was nothing left to say.

And then she gets up and goes back to work the next day.

///

Today the Atlantic published an op-ed titled, “Where I Live, No One Cares about COVID.”

In it, the author explains that “the virus simply does not factor into my calculations or those of my neighbors, who have been forgoing masks, tests (unless work imposes them, in which case they are shrugged off as the usual BS from human resources), and other tangible markers of COVID-19’s existence for months—perhaps even longer.”

I have heard that from a lot of folks. Maybe even you.

Maybe you have decided to just live your life and take your chances. Maybe you’re young and healthy and maybe you’ll be fine when you get COVID. Maybe you don’t know anybody who has gotten long COVID. Maybe you don’t know anybody who has died. Maybe you feel like it’s a personal choice, and doesn’t have an effect on the people around you.

But the healthcare system is not doing well. Waiting rooms are full of people sitting all day waiting to be treated for regular emergencies — strokes, heart attacks, broken arms — while the beds are full of COVID patients who can’t breathe because they didn’t get the damn vaccine.

The doctors are heartbroken and overwhelmed.

My wife is heartbroken and overwhelmed.

Your choice to forgo the vaccine, or to shrug off masks and tests, are contributing to that heartbreak.

Even if you are completely fine when you get COVID, by allowing your body to be an unvaccinated host for COVID you are prolonging the pandemic and giving the virus more opportunities to infect other people.

When you get the virus, you might not even know it. But it’s quite likely that you’ll pass it on, and on, and on, and you won’t see the grandparents dying with a tube in their throat because you were a welcoming host to the virus.

My wife will.

///

I know what the internet says about the vaccines. I know there are some unknowns. I know nothing is risk free.

I also know that if she had a chance, my wife would tell you that (by all reasonable calculations and nearly-universal consensus among Emergency Room doctors) the risks of COVID are extraordinarily higher than the risks of the vaccines.

I know it’s hard to know who to trust these days, but it seems like it would make sense to trust the doctors.

While a lot of us were getting degrees from Bible College, Ellen got a degree in biochemistry, and then went to medical school, and then residency. I don’t know much about how vaccines work, but I know that somebody with a degree in Biochemistry probably has a better understanding of it than I do.

I know there are rumors that the vaccines cause paralyzation, that the vaccines cause death. If this was the case, it would be Emergency Room doctors who would know. After all, that’s where dying people usually go.

But the Emergency Rooms are full, and not from people dying of vaccines. It’s full of people just like you, unvaccinated. Beloved Grandparents. Healthy Dads. Pregnant Moms. People who though the cure was worse than the disease.

They were wrong, and my wife is the one who has to watch them die.

So go on the internet. Do your research. Learn everything you can about the risks of the vaccine, the risks of the virus. I can understand that.

What I can’t understand is how you think that you’ll make a better risk assessment than an Emergency Room doctor — unless you also have a degree in biology or chemistry, unless you’ve also spent the past ten years dedicating your life to learning and practicing medicine, unless you’ve also spent the past two years watching people die from COVID wishing there was some way to go back in time and get the vaccine before it was too late.

///

I don’t think you’re an idiot, or a bad person, for not being vaccinated.

Though this situation seems obvious to me, I know that is because of my proximity to someone deeply involved in the fight against COVID.

I know that we are all all shaped by our communities, by the information we have access to, by our particular relationships and experiences. I know that our convictions are mostly subconscious, and that logic has very little effect on what we believe.

I don’t expect you to change your mind.

As the poet Glen Hansard sang, “When your mind’s made up, there’s no point trying to change it.”

But I wanted you to know that in our house, we are overwhelmed, and heartbroken.

And though I love you, I cannot think of you without feeling the weight of your contribution to the crisis that is crushing the doctor that I love — either because you think you can make a better medical decision than those on the front line of the battle against COVID, or because you just don’t give a shit.

Either way, it hurts. It hurts her, and it hurts me to see it.

I just wanted you to know.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

If you ever get tired of discoursing about the attributes of God and just want to stop believing in supernatural entities altogether, that’s ok. If you are weary of holding on to your beliefs white-knuckled and teeth-gritted, you can let go. You will be ok.

I promise.

We were given so much bullshit, so much fear-inducing propaganda about the importance of mental assent to the notion of a supernatural mind in charge of all this. We were told it was the only way to be happy, to be a good human, to live a meaningful life. We were told blessed are those deny their embodied experiences of reality and call it faith. We were told blessed are those who call curiosity doubt.

The Bible invites us to taste and see what God is like, to judge a tree by its fruits. I did, and here is what I found: The God I once believed in promised me freedom and gave me shame. The Gospel I preached promised me life, and it crushed my soul. The Christianity I knew promised the Kingdom of Heaven, and instead it destroyed the Earth.

My religion told me that if I ever left, I would never be ok. I left anyways. I’m ok.

The truth is this: For some people, belief in God is live-giving and good but for many of us, belief in God severed us from our own humanity and divinity. For many of us, letting go of God was the only way to find our way home.

I am called to be a witness to what I have seen, and this is my story as true as i can tell it: Doubt was the door to salvation. Freedom is found on the other side of unbelief. God is gone and I love the world and

it is well with my soul.

“This highway adopted by NIHILISTS.”

There was a logo, three outlines of pine trees rendered in 2D and overlapped. It looked like this:

I feel like that image reflects the state of my soul these days —

A nihilist adopting a highway.

A pantheist falling in love with a dying planet.

A father defying the inevitability of an extinction-level event and daring to dream a world for my children.

//

August has been liminal.

August has been tough.

Before summer we were languishing. Remember? Now what is this? Exhaustion? Burnout? Grief? Anxiety? It’s all of it and the late summer heat is heavy with the turmoil of a planet that is falling apart.

The earth will be fine, of course. Molten rock or gaseous blob, planets keep being planets.

But the earth we know — green and blue and full of life and life makes art and language and we experience ourselves amongst it — that world is not doing well. And well, it’s my world. It’s the world that made me, the only world in which I could exist.

The dualism at the heart of the Christianity I knew taught me to love not the world, for it is all passing. To be a friend of the world is to be an enemy of God.

But God is gone and I love the world and at last I am home, the prodigal son returned from the bullshit of a Father who was never quite real, to the arms of existence herself, the universe which has always been my birthright. But we are not doing well, my species and I.

//

This is now, now.

This is me alive in my own skin.

I am tired and I am sad but I know who I am and that is a good and beautiful thing.

I am a channel of words and a prophet of nature at the end of the world.

A prophet at the end of the world… what a strange and sad and beautiful thing!

I was once told that only that which is eternal has value. I unlearned that and learned that I am temporal and finite, that “I” exist as a trick of my own biological consciousness.

still, I am alive in my own skin.

This is now.

//

I want you to know that this is your life.

It is happening right now. Not when the laundry is put away. Not when your next project launches. Not when school starts, or ends. Not when your to-do list is finished. Your life is happening now.

You do not need to get more organized, more sleep, more money before you start participating in your own existence and savoring the texture of ordinary life.

You are currently growing. You are always walking.

Don’t wait for the next checkpoint in your life before you exhale and come into your own body and identify with your skin.

//

August is now, with all it’s anxieties and aching and wonder.

I fucking hate August.

I can’t remember the last time I felt a good vibe about the concept of August. Even as a kid, it felt claustrophobic with the weight of summer’s end.

Since I left God the Father I have fallen in love with the earth that has always been my home. It’s a visceral affection for the aspen trees waving in the summer breeze, a deep attraction to the creek winding behind our house, an aching longing for the bruised sunset sky, and a slightly-horny crush on the moon.

Allowing myself to feel this way about the reality around me has done more for the God-shaped hole in my heart than my Father in Heaven ever did.

Last year, my love for this little corner of the earth grounded me as summer turned to fall. Watching the leaves fall and the creek turn to ice and the green woods fall silent and cold and white was like watching someone you love fall asleep.

I kissed the earth gently on the forehead and wished her rest, knowing she’d was up green and blue and full of life on the other side of the calendar.

This year is not the same.

The sky is heavy with smoke and the creek is all but dried up. Already the leaves have begun dropping.

The one I love is sick. I don’t know if she will survive.

My stomach is in knots with sadness.

I’ve moved straight from Denial to Depression as I struggle to come to terms with the fact that we are almost certainly on the doorstep of a mass-extinction event. It seems almost too terrible to be true.

And I am sad about the end of humanity. I feel anxiety about societal disintegration, and anger about the needly human suffering that will ensue. I worry about my children a lot, and my grandchildren even more.

But I am also sad for the woods and the creek.

I always knew I was going to die. We all are. But the land isn’t supposed to die.

It’s supposed to go on and on and I am worried about the one I love and I am sad.

But,

I want you to know that this is your life. This is now, now.

Your moment of awareness in the unfolding organism that is the universe.

And I am sad that I came into existence just as my species engineers their own extinction, but I am so grateful that I have had a moment to experience this before it all burns up.

Meanwhile the world goes on. Oh, Mary Oliver, you always know what to say. Meanwhile the geese are flying home again. So we keep walking.

It’s ok. It’s all ok. We learned that from the trees.

Meanwhile I will be passionate about doing everything I can to leave the earth.

For me, that probably means to keep doing what I’m doing: Sisyphus rolling a rock with a smile on his face.

After all, this is my life.

This is Part 2 of a two-part series called “Summer’s End”, taken from the pages of my journals from the summer months of 2021. I’ve also adapted it into podcast episode by the same name.

Read Part 1 here: Summer’s End (July).

Listen to Summer’s End on Existential Happy Hour wherever you get your podcasts. 

The gift of awareness comes with the awareness of death and this gift is harder to receive. On the most perfect days it whispers reminders that this moment is fleeting, already almost gone.

Summer.

My lifetime.

Even our species’ collective gasp of lifespan on our rare little planet.

I worry about the planet a lot these days. I’m sure you do too. It’s different reading about it on the internet than having an embodied experience of an ecosystem spinning out of order.

This is tangible. Visceral.

The moon turns to blood like the last days, orange with smoke of Canadian wildfires. The hazy air is dangerous for my lungs.

The sun burns through the summer sky and cures my winter depression and my body feels good for the first time all year but the thermometer should not read 90 this many days in a row, not here in Minnesota.

The heat is ominous.

We are wearing masks in stores because a pandemic is still happening and our species has shown itself absolutely helpless to get its shit together. Everything is falling apart.

Theological people like to say that “apocalypse” means showing how things really are, but some days it feels more like the cresting arc of a lifespan, like every other organism in the world, like the stars themselves, we have danced our few notes with the universe and now we are slipping away.

Summer.

My lifespan.

Our species, alive and conscious on this rare and beautiful earth.

//

I once believed that the earth would be redeemed, that life promised life again, that this conscious experience was just the beginning. I believed that somehow I would shake loose the constraints of time and become immortal while still maintaining the identity and awareness I call me. I believed that the end of the world was the beginning of heaven.

I believed that we had all the time in the world, in the world to come.

I cannot count on any of that anymore.

Now I believe there is no God but everything, there is no heaven but earth, there is no soul but the consciousness emerging from the organism I call me.

I surrender to the universe as it is, not as I wish it to be. I seek to understand the heart of what is Real — what I once called “God” — and to live in harmony with it.

I repent of the idol of theism, of making God in my image and worshipping the Creator instead of the uncreated.

I return from the far country of ideas about a Father in Heaven I learned from a book, and I find my place among the children of the Earth. .

//

The Book of 1 John says to love not the world, neither the things that are in the world, because the world and all that is in it is passing away.

I don’t care.

Given a choice between heaven and earth, I choose earth every time. I choose what is real, this world, this existence, this moment.

I choose this doomed planet in all its suffering and wonder, in all its tragic fleeting beauty.

I cannot do anything else.

I am a creature of the earth. It belongs to me, and I belong to it.

I cast my lot with the trees and the skies and the sunlight on my skin, with this remarkable planet and this lonely Milky Way and this mysterious universe that is becoming aware in our own bodies.

When I was a Christian, I was told that the hope of an afterlife was the only thing that made this life meaningful. But as I have sought what is Real (what I once called “God”) I have found no foundation strong enough to support the hope of heaven for me.

Like so many other things I believed, my curiosity led me to the end of my belief in Heaven as such, and I was forced to confront my mortality. I had to stop telling myself a story of unique human immortality and return to my place with the cycle of life and death, with the trees and mammals and every other organism and even the stars.

But to my surprise, I have not found the loss of heaven to be inevitable, unbearable nihilism.

What I have found is that when I contemplate the brevity of my rare and fleeing consciousness, I am filled with gratitude and also, sadness. Consciousness is a gift, and so is consciousness of my own mortality. Gratitude and sadness are both the same emotion, just different expressions. Together they tell me that this life is meaningful, and so very precious.

I know that one day I will set down my pen and close my eyes and it will be the last time, and I ache for the sadness of that moment. I long to awaken again and again and behold this world forever.

I cannot.

The ache tells me how precious it is; my inevitable non-being urges me to breathe deeply of this universe while there is still breath inside my body.

Summer is more than half over. I feel it in the hot, heavy air of a July sunset.

I am dying.

Slowly (I hope) but dying all the same.

I don’t know how many more habitable years this planet has left, or what it means to stare into the face of a self-inflicted extinction-level event.

I am sad about all of this.

But I am grateful, so grateful for this moment. I’m grateful for the July sun on my shoulders, the orange moon in the sky, and another day on this weary planet.

I am grateful for consciousness.

And though I hate the heavy sensation of it in my chest, I am grateful for the ache that reminds me how precious it all is.

Fuck.

This is a new year.

These are the first words of a new year.

Time is meaningless, and so is existence, but
I am ensnared in both,

god in skin trapped in meaningless time and
meaningless existence and
craving meaning I make it myself.

don’t you see?
the craving of meaning is the beginning of meaning,
the desire for a story drives my pen
so i write stories.

I write meaning into the meaningless,

I call into the void and the voice
I hear echo across the chasm is my own, but
we are alive and it is enough.

this is bullshit.
I’m writing bullshit.
it doesn’t matter.
I’m writing.

do you feel that? do you feel the pen in your hand moving?
your ligaments and finger-bones given over to vesslehood,
given in service to the river of words, the words become flesh
and possess my skin and finger bones and
my brain is quiet,
ego has no say here, he
only watches and provides spelling advice

while the hand and the river of words commune,

i slip my fingers into her and make myself one with her,
give myself completely to the attention of her every breadth and curve,
the river and whisper of desire,
desire to be known,
desire to exist,
desire to be once again connected to all things
and

I am the point of connection,
my fingertips are the locus of alchemy.

I make magic,
I make love,

I make meaning out of
nothing,

I make the river sing.

This is the question, more than any other, that unravelled the very last thread of my theistic belief.

Death and life and good and evil are locked in a chaotic equillibrium that tumbles onward but doesn’t necessarily bend toward justice, and almost certainly ends in the annihilation of all things.

The existence of a loving, active, all-powerful Creator of the world (God) is not impossible to believe, but it is implausible.

///

If God is the one who created this whole system, wrote the laws of nature that are the conditions for all that exists, the fact (or illusion) of human free will is not enough to absolve God of the guilt for the reality that exists within the world God created.

When I look at the world as it is, it seems to reveal a God who is not loving, not active, not originator, or not existent at all.

The world is bathed in the absence of the God I once sought.

///

Some forms of faith demand the denial of our existential reality, believing without seeing.

But it is not a moral virtue (faith) to insist against all evidence that the world is other than what it reveals itself to be.

If we persist in believing the implausible, rebelling against the evidence of reality as we encounter it, what is belief founded on at all other than our own longing?

If we insist that that the world is that which we long for it to be (created by a loving God), not what it actually is, on what foundation do we ground our existence other than our own implausible hope?

///

It is not faithfulness to believe the implausible only because we really wish it were so.

This is idolatry. This is making God in the image of our longings.

My faith calls me to bow in humility before the world as it is, not as i wished or hoped it would be.

As a seeing, feeling, thinking, learning, conscious being who exists in this world, I cannot in good faith claim that this is a world made by a loving, all-powerful Creator.

It’s an amazing, intricate, world full of suffering and death.

It’s not enough.

But it’s all we have.

It is miraculous all the same.

lately time has been really fuckin chaotic – in my house and in my head. good chaos, much of it. seminary and redecorating the house and playing with the kids and building things with my hands and starting a new thing as a deconstruction coach and launching my agnostic astronaut ass out into space at the helm of the existential happy hour podcast. also the regular chaos of being a human trapped in a flesh prison: taxes and cleaning the garage and cooking spaghetti seventy times seven for kids who never want to finish the food on their plates.

i often reach the end of a day feeling like i haven’t accomplished anything of value, despite having done stuff all day. to-do lists are never finished. as soon as they’re done, you just make a new one. mail that rebate form. respond to three emails. put the laundry away, the laundry you washed back in august. the days and weeks stretch and blur and i am disoriented.

i printed this to-do list and put it above my desk to remind me of what is important to me. when i feel lost in the pandemic-induced meaningless of temporal reality, i look at the list and try to find a way to do something on that list. when i get the inevitable late-afternoon productivity guilt, i look at that list and realize i did actually accomplish a few things that matter. i probably did actually read a few chapters, or connect with the people in my family. that can be enough. sometimes i just want to take a nap. then i remember that’s on my to-do list too.

this is a simple to-do list. it doesn’t purport to change the world. i don’t know if it’s god’s will for my life. but it’s my life. and it is a good one. thanks be to existence for all of this.

If I had ever been able to experience the God they spoke of in the way they spoke of Him, I probably would have been satisfied.

If I had heard the still small voice of the Divine without also hearing the still small voice of doubt saying it’s all in my head, I wouldn’t be sitting here surrounded by the broken pieces of everything I once believed about the Universe.

But it never felt all the way real.

How firm a foundation? My hope is built on nothing less.

How am I supposed to built a life on an ultimate foundation that feels not real?

How am I supposed to live with a still small voice that says “You are living in a delusion. It doesn’t feel real because it isn’t real.”?

Two decades I spent smashing the mute button on that internal alarm.

Doubt, I called it. Sin, I repented. Doubled my daily intake of brainwashing to suppress the sound of unsatisfied misgivings.

What am I supposed to do?

Pray against the darkness of deep mystery without certain answers.

Step into the light of what you know to be true.

Ignore the sensation in your chest telling you that you don’t actually know it to be true.

Try to forget that you are choosing a story which does not resonate with the experiences in your body.

Convince yourself that you don’t have to convince yourself.

Doubt your doubts.

Help my unbelief, say it again.

Most of all, don’t ask

why?

“come out here and dance with us,” the gods beckoned.

I looked, and behold, under everything, gods dancing on dark waters, an eternal empty stage, a void, a screen on which our illusory reality is projected, hologram-like.

“wait, so it’s all just floating on nothing? nothingness and space and sheer unconstructed non-being in every direction, all the way down?”

and god said, “always has been”

this always catches me by surprise, because i am happy + at peace, more than I’ve been in a while

my path has led me quite a bit down the road from the borders of orthodoxy wherein i lived the first 30 years of my life, but i don’t feel like i have lost anything of value.