I am convinced that this life is a healer’s journey, and that working on our own healing will contribute to the healing of the world—and indeed, working for the healing the world will contribute to our own healing—the two are inseparable.

I didn’t always think this way—I grew up with the fear of Hell and the goal of Heaven, which necessitated me looking …

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What Trauma Studies Demand of Christian Studies and Contemplative Practice

Recent developments in the understanding of trauma require Christian thought leaders to radically reassess our interpretation of our own religious stories, beliefs and rituals.

Fleshing out Trauma

In his game changing book The Body Keeps the Score, “Bessel Van Der Kolk M.D. uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’s capacities for pleasure, engagement, self control, and trust” (BM). His argument is profound: trauma is a very physical experience, and one that can become “stuck” in our bodies for years after the trauma causing incident has taken place. Von Der Kolk writes “After trauma the world is perceived with a different nervous system… every new encounter and event is contaminated by the past” (53). In short, the long lasting effects of trauma cause us to physically react to innocuous triggers as if we are we experiencing the traumatic event all over again, in the present^[1] and thus we over/re/en/act in a way that over/rules our free will.^[2] Psychoanalyst David Richo explains “Triggers and reactions happen so fast that we don’t have a chance to pause, look at what is really happening and make a wise choice. This is because triggers activate our limbic system, where the emotions reside, not our prefrontal cortex, where rational thoughts preside” (Triggers 2).

Both the overwhelming physicality of trauma, and the manner in which it over rides our conscious choices ought to take those of us with Christian backgrounds back to our own sacred text. For Paul speaks of “sin” as a collective infection “in the flesh” which has just such an effect: “But I see another law at work in my body, warring against the law of my mind and holding me captive to the law of sin that dwells within me” (Rom 7:23). Paul had no access to our scientific understanding of trauma, but he seems to be nonetheless describing the feeling of wrestling with its biological effects: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” He writes as many trauma survivors would, feeling possessed by an unwelcome force within them, that overrides their thoughts and intended actions. Let us further consider his thoughts, replacing the word sin with trauma: “As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is trauma living in me…For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is trauma living in me that does it” (15-20).

After generations of incorrectly thinking that Paul was writing that the body itself is evil, we must change our thinking to consider Paul’s notion of “sin in the flesh” as trauma trapped in the body (sarx). Further, it seems that Paul understood that intellectual activity and moral effort alone would not be effective against such an embodied affliction. Embodied religious ritual must first “offer up the body as a living sacrifice” in order to allow us to only then “be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom 12:1-2). I would like to suggest that we must consider if actual multi faceted physical participation in the “body of Christ” was in part designed to treat our trauma though embodied practice and liturgical ritual.

We see notions of this all throughout preceding scripture. Is it any wonder that Jesus, before he healed the souls and spirits of the masses, first healed their bodies? Does this not radically change what it means when Jesus offers healing and then says “you are well, now do not sin”?^[3] Is he warning those healed of getting tangled again in the traps of trauma? In the Hebrew Scriptures, is it possible that after the physical liberation of the Hebrew slaves the very laws handed down in the Exodus were in fact a culturally specific treatment plan crafted to liberate an oppressed people from internal slavery to trauma?

Trigger Training in the Praxis of Pause

This line of thought profoundly deepens our understanding of contemplative practice as well. To cite the early teacher Origen as an example, from the very beginning the mystical tradition foundationally emphasized “first” stilling the body, “in a settled disposition” as entering “a hidden place”, which would eventually cultivate a state “calm and orderly in soul” until one finally lived from the place they embodied “the entire life” as “a single great prayer” in this settled state (119, 121, 98 Prayer). But it is a common misconception to think that this stilling the body means ignoring the body, as opposed to be fully present to it. This is no different than incorrectly assuming ascetics entered the wilderness to avoid noise, as opposed to listening to nature. No, one paid careful attention to nature just as one paid very nuanced attention to the body, in stilling it, in “the study called ‘Natural’” Physike—learning from it, in order to “train his natural intelligence” so that “nothing in life may be done which is contrary to nature” (Song 40,41).

For example the ancient art of Hesychasm—which focused on the act of sinking the mind into the heart in contemplation—stressed paying attention to what was going on in one’s physical body and emotions.^[4] The Russian mystical master Theophan the Recluse explains the importance of physicality and feeling in this tradition:

Where is the heart? Where sadness, joy, anger, and other emotions are felt. Stand there with attention. The physical heart is a piece of muscular flesh…[that] serves as an instrument for these feelings.…Stand there in the heart, with the faith that God is also there. (The Art of Prayer 191).

Today we see clearly this awareness of sadness and anger—especially in a purposefully still state—slowly increases our capacity to pause with God between “Trigger” and involuntary “Reaction”. Then, as Richo describes “We can insert a third option between stimulus and response” (6, 7). Classically this effort was defined as waring with the passions, or askesis. But once again trauma studies must ask us to reinterpret our understanding of the mystics, no longer reading passions as natural urges of the body, but rather reading negative passions as embodied traumas, and their triggers which lead to destructive reactions. If contemplative practice carves out safe space to pause with God, when we confront our triggers and slow the leap to automatic reactions—then, it functions like good trauma work:

We can mobilize inner resources not only to cope with triggering events but even to work though the traumas that caused them, to heal some of our post-traumatic stress. The triggers then have less power over us. We move from feeling unsafe to safer and and from feeling insecure to more secure, the essence of self trust. Triggers thrive on the illusion that we can’t trust ourselves. With inner resources we find we can trust ourselves indeed—and in need. (Richo 6)

Practice teaches us to take a contemplative pause, cultivating an awareness that we are safe with the divine and safe with ourselves. Contemplative practice carves out a trustworthy space, where we can realize we are no longer in the traumatic memory but here in the present and in our bodies. Ideally we learn to access that space in order lived life as well.

The greatest interpreter of the Desert Fathers and Mothers—Isaac of Nineveh—seems to describe just such a state—in which over time, traumatic memories don’t go away, but ascesis slows down their ability to trigger, hijack, or disturb the soul. The prolonged practice of contemplative “Works… do not shake off the memory’s awareness… but they take the grief of recollection away from our mind. Henceforth it happens that when the recollection passes though our mind, it does so to our advantage” (118). Over time, with repeated practice, quiet trust interrupts the trauma’s ability to trigger us, and by the praxis both trauma and trigger become agents of transformation.^[5]

Since the very beginning of the Christian mystical tradition, this internal work of uncovering hidden traumas and triggers was included in the quested “self knowledge”, and it was the sine qua non of spiritual growth.^[6] This helps us understand why Origen insisted that for the soul to come know itself as “beautiful… it is necessary for it to be threatened” (SF 39), because we needed the gift of being triggering to untangle our traumas. Ricoh writes:

Thus, triggers can arouse post-traumatic stress that we wished to avoid. Yet, they also thereby give us a lively chance to recognize and mourn our losses, disappointments, and abuses. Indeed every trigger is a catalyst for grief. Our sudden reaction—for example, sadness and chagrin—is how we begin to show that grief. (4).

And thus healing can begin. Uncovering ignored grief and trauma might be another name for the much sought after “gift of tears” so praised by Eastern Christian mystics in their transformational journey. Tears at first “act like a river in spate that sweep away all the bastions of sin” or trauma, and then they become “to the soul like rain or snow to a field, making it yield a bountiful crop of spiritual knowledge” (Stithatos, Philokalia 21). No wonder Isaac stresses that “Every passion…exists for our benefit [and] has been given by God. The passions of the body have been implanted in it for its benefit and growth” (130). There is a gift in the grieving.

Original Spin: Ancestral Trauma

But the most shocking aspect in which recent trauma studies for Christian thought is the revelation that trauma can have multi generational effects. Mark Wolynn, the author of the book It Didn’t Start With You writes:

Recent developments in the field of cellular biology, neuroscience, epigenetics, and developmental psychology underscore the importance of exploring at least three generations of family history in order to understand the mechanism behind patterns of trauma and suffering that repeat.” (17)^[7]

Once again we ought to notice that this supposedly new scientific idea is in perfect alignment with an old Biblical idea. Wolynn explains that because of

…research demonstrating that stress can be passed through at least three generations of mice, the researchers surmise that children born to human parents who experienced a traumatic or stressful event would also likely pass the pattern down not only to their children, but to their grandchildren as well. Uncannily the Bible, in Numbers 14:18, appears to corroborate the claims of modern science—or vice versa—that the sins, iniquities, or consequences (depending on which translation you read) of the parents can affect the children up to the third or fourth generation. Specifically, the New Living Translation reads ‘The Lord is slow to anger and filled with unfailing love, forgiving every kind of sin and rebellion. But he does not excuse the guilty. He lays the sins of the parents upon their children; the entire family is effected—even children in the third and fourth generations’. (39)

This mythological language describes a scientific and experiential reality. Humanity lives in a perpetually passed down pandemic of trauma. We might refer to this as “karma,” and we know it in lived experience.^[8] Contemporary contemplatives know this all too well, such as the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplative Richard Rohr, who reflects “it seems to me that we have lost or ignored the wisdom of the body almost completely. I have often taught that if we are not transformed by our pain, we will almost certainly transmit it to those around us, and I am learning that we pass it on to future generations as well” [e.m.] (DM 2.2.20)

No doubt this transmitted traumatic inheritance is the real meaning of “original sin”, an idea coined by Augustine, when he attempted to put his spin on the story of Adam and Eve, and explain the consequences of their actions for future generations. After all, the entire book of Genesis is a chain reaction of multi generational familial discord—eventually being “planned-over-for good” by repeated divinely guided acts of forgiveness (Gen 50:19-21). Ancient theology described this process much more accurately: John S. Romanides explains “Predating Augustine by more than two centuries, the earliest tradition of the church calls our forefather Adam’s sin not ‘original’ but ‘ancestral’ literally the ‘forefatherly sin’ from propatorikon amartema” (8). If we continue to explore the notion of “sin” as an ancient description of what we now understand as trauma, it becomes truly revolutionary to reconsider the Christian religion as a treatment plan for inherited ancestral trauma. Likewise again we might also consider the more ancient rituals of the Pentateuch as a treatment plan for collectively experienced inherited cultural or even racial trauma, so clearly mythologized as a population subjugated to 400 years of enslavement, and thus needing an internal liberation after their dramatic external Exodus.

Collective Infection Needs Collective Response

Our history tells us that the early church acted as a powerful non violent agent both confronting societal injustice and offering healing to those traumatized by it. Indeed historians now see this as the primary reason Christianity grew in the ancient world. Again contemporary trauma studies gives us insight into how ancient contemplative practice acted as an agent of healing. Using racial trauma in America as a potent example, the work of Resmaa Menakem reveals the transformative potential of those who learn to physically face their own traumas, and those of society:

Healing… begins with the body—your body. But it does not end there. In order to heal the collective body that is America, we need social activism that is body centered. We cannot individualize our way out… nor can we merely we strategize our way out. We need collective action—action that heals. We need to join that collective action with settled bodies—and with psyches that are willing to metabolize clean pain. I can’t stress this enough. Bringing a settled body to any situation encourages the bodies around you to settle as well. Bringing an unsettled body to that same situation encourages other bodies to become anxious, nervous, or angry. That discomfort in turn, can sometimes activate people’s lizard brains and create a fight, flight, or freeze, or annihilate response. In America, all too often this results in an injured or murdered Black Body. (238)

This opens our eyes to the way collective trauma might be hidden in our individual symptoms—CG Jung said “A collective problem, if not recognized as such, away appears as a personal problem” (MDR 233 )—and how our individual practice might effect the collective.

Further Menakem reveals that a societal sickness like racism has caused so much trauma—and been caused by it—that it cannot even begin to be discussed, must less corrected—by those who have not learned to settle their individual bodies when they are triggered. He teaches a methodology that allows one to be trigged and sit in the discomfort, and increase one’s capacity to bare it, then work to heal.^[9] But from that contemplative place, true activism can take place, and is even fueled.

This powerful example of how a settled body is most effectively active should remind us of the words of many a mystical master. “Acquire a peaceful spirit,” claims Seraphim of Sarov, “and then thousands of others around you will be saved” (Moore 126). Seraphim and Menakem remind us that it is not only trauma that causes a viral chain reaction. The anti-body of inner tranquility can be transmitted as well. Healing can be as corporately contagious as trauma itself, body to body.^[10]

Lastly then, this viral outlook ought to remind us that original Christianity rarely spoke of individual salvation to the degree that our present culture obsesses about it. Rather healing took place as a collective effort in the corporate Body of Christ, in which sufferings and recovery was shared. Perhaps we need to demystify our understanding of the body of Christ and let trauma studies again remind us of the value of actual embodied communal practice. This ought to give us new embodied insight into Paul’s reflection in Col 1:24, that “in his flesh” he participates in the as yet ongoing sufferings of Christ, on behalf of the Body, which is now the Church.

Again Menakem is valuable as a guide here. He insists that the deepest healing can only take place inside of what he calls “culture.” His insight is so crucial I will quote from him at length. In the following passage, consider the role religion plays in culture:

Culture is how our bodies retain and reenact history—through the foods we eat (or refuse to eat); the stories we tell; the things that hold meaning for us; that images that move us; what we are able (and unable) to sense or feel or process; the way we see the world; and a thousand other aspects of life. Because culture lives in our

bodies, it usually trumps all things cognitive—ideas, philosophies, convictions, principles, and laws. In many cases, it even supersedes human desires and needs. Change culture and you change lives. You can also change the course of history. Many well meaning social activists overlook this essential fact. They focus relentlessly on strategy, but strategy means nothing to our bodies and lizard brains. When strategy competes with culture, culture wins every time. (245-6)

To Illustrate his point, Menakem offers examples of culture(s)—The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America, the Mafia, the Klu Klux Klan. He then offers what makes them a culture as he understands it:

Each of these organizations has elders, ritual, symbols, mentoring, roles, titles, awards, codes of behavior, rules of admonishment and belonging, a shared history, a communal vibe (a shared vibrational language), and an explanation of the world and our place in it. These can be deeply soothing to the human body—especially a traumatized body. They can also create a deep sense of harmony with other bodies that belong to the organization. And all of these cultural trappings—and the powerful sensations and experiences they engender—are immediately available to anyone who becomes part of the group and adhere to its structure.

More than anything culture creates a sense of belonging—and belonging makes our bodies feel safe. This is why culture matters to us so deeply. We humans want to belong. We experience belonging—or the lack of it—in our bodies. We experience it deeply. When we belong we feel that our life has some value and meaning. But we can never belong to a strategy… Social activism is necessary for changing the world in positive ways. But if our collective body is to fully heal from the trauma of white body supremacy, we must create cultural shifts as well. (246-7)

The significance of this call for culture cannot be over stated. What Menakem calls culture we once called “church,” “liturgy,” and “participation in the body of Christ.” Many progressive Christians today are quite taken with ideology and strategy, books, ideas, and disembodied techniques, while fearing “elders, ritual, symbols, mentoring, roles, titles, awards, codes of behavior” etc. We prefer to make our own individual on the fly spirituality. But culture “trumps” that every time, and indeed we have been Trumped in our time, have we not?—by a contemporary conservative “Christianity” that for all its evils, knows how to use culture. Perhaps it is time to explore the re/creation of a Christian “culture” this as an agent of healing and liberation yet again, rather than leaving “Christianity” as the dressing gown of a culture that perpetuates the very maladies for which we once offered the medicine.

In conclusion, I suggest the science of trauma must be taken into deeper consideration in our exploration of Christian scriptures, theology, and liturgy explored as treatment plan for the soul. More to the point in our continued quest to recapture the original essence of early Christianity, we ought to explore the development of new rituals that express the Christian mystery in a way designed to confront trauma in safety, and work towards liberation and healing, privately and corporately. Contemplative Christianity especially is best equipped to reclaim this sacred task.

For Further Reading

Thus it cannot be stated enough that we must be willing to learn from trauma specialists as we reinterpret our scriptures to reconsider and reclaim our own ritual and practice. We must be willing to look at those studying trauma at work physically in the individual person, such as Peter Levine’s Trauma and Memory and Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score.

We must consider those exploring how trauma plays out in myth and meaning making systems, such as Donald Kalsched’s The Inner World of Trauma, and Fanny Brewster, who explores racial trauma from a Jungian lens in works like Archetypal Grief: Slavery’s Legacy of Intergenerational Child Loss and The Racial Complex: A Jungian Perspective on Culture and Race.

Moving forward with those who explore trauma and societal illness and injustices such as racism, we must study those like Ruth King and Resmaa Menakem, who use embodied practice to heal trauma individually and on the systemic level, revealing how trauma both perpetuates and is perpetuated by the sick soul of culture. Their respective works Mindful of Race: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out, and My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies are master works in contemplative healing.

Origen instructed us that the Christian life starts with the literal flesh, then progresses to the realm of the psyche, before opening to the mystery of the spirit. How foolish to interpret literal flesh metaphorically, and miss that the foundation of the flesh was quite literally reminding us of the foundational necessity of practice that settles and heals trauma trapped in the body. After reading experts like those listed above, it is then worth revisiting the entire legacy of Christian mysticism with a new literal look at embodiment. We must consider that the “anti-body bias” of many Chistian mystics may be more anachronism than actuality.

Works Cited

Van der Kolk Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma. Penguin Books, 2015.

Chariton of Valamo, Igumen. The Art of Prayer: an Orthodox Anthology. Edited by Timothy Ware. Translated by E. Kadloubovsky and E.M. Palmer, Faber and Faber, 1997.

Isaac the Syrian. The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian. Translated by Holy Transfiguration Monastary, The Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 2011.

Jung, C. G., and Aniela Jaffe. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. William Collins, 2019.

Menakem, Resmaa. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Central Recovery Press, 2017.

Moore, Archimandrite Lazarus. St. Seraphim of Sarov: a Spiritual Biography. New Sarov Press, 1994.

Origen, et al. Origen on First Principles: Being Koetschau’s Text of the De Principiis. Peter Smith, 1973.

Origen. Origen, Spirit And Fire: a Thematic Anthology Of His Writings. Edited by Hans Urs von. Balthasar. Translated by Robert J. Daly, T & t Clark Ltd, 2005.

Origen. Lawson. The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies. Translated by Ruth Penelope, Newman Press, 1978.

Richo, David. Triggers: How We Can Stop Reacting and Start Healing. Shambala, 2019.

Romanides, John A. The Ancestral Sin. Translated by George S Gabriel , Zephyr, 2008.

Smith, Allyne. Philokalia: the Eastern Christian Spiritual Texts: Selections Annotated & Explained. SkyLight Paths Pub., 2012.

Wolynn, Mark. It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. Penguin Books, 2017.

^[1] “A triggering event that is a throwback to an archaic trauma feels like it is happening in the present. The brain’s amygdala, part of our limbic system, stores original trauma and fear reactions with no sense of time, of impact, or of our intervening years of growth and self-strengthening. This is why triggers today can give us the sense that we are still as powerless as we were in childhood” (Richo, Triggers 4).

“People with PTSD relive feelings and sensations associated with trauma despite the fact that the trauma occurred in the past. Symptoms include depression, anxiety, numbness, insomnia, nightmares, frightening thoughts, and being easily startled or ‘on edge’”. (Wolynn 19).

^[2] “Triggers activate the sympathetic nervous system. We are moved toward fight, flight or freeze. Stress hormones chime in, all beyond our immediate control—another reason we feel powerless” (Richo 4).

^[3] “Some time later there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool with five covered colonnades, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda. On these walkways lay a great number of the sick, the blind, the lame, and the paralyzed. One man there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. 6When Jesus saw him lying there and realized that he had spent a long time in this condition, He asked him, “Do you want to get well?” “Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am on my way, someone else goes in before me.” Then Jesus told him, “Get up, pick up your mat, and walk.” Immediately the man was made well, and he picked up his mat and began to walk…Afterward, Jesus found the man at the temple and said to him, “See, you have been made well. Stop sinning, or something worse may happen to you.” John 5:1-13

^[4] This practice seems to back at least to the time of Origen who in the third century counseled: “Enter rather into your own inmost heart and seek diligently for other eyes” (Song 290). Likewise Theophan the Recluse is descrying the same unbroken practice in the 19th century when he writes: “When the mind is in the heart, this is in fact the union of mind and heart which represents the reintegration of our spiritual organism” (The Art of Prayer 157)

^[5] Scientific research now validates what ascetics discovered in the laboratory of experience: “Today thanks to neuroscience—and more specifically research on brain plasticity —we are aware that we can reprogram our neurological pathways to change our self defeating patterns. The prefrontal cortex can come up with healthy ways to respond to events. Then we do not have to be at the mercy of immediate, irrational and unplanned reactions… Our spiritual practices may also help… Indeed with conscious attention our prefrontal cortex can reframe events and experiences so they do not have to be so triggering. The prefrontal cortex in full activation can calm some of the amygdala’s overblown reactions. To move from our primitive brain to our ‘reasonable cortex’ we can evoke an alternative thought pattern that is positive and resource enhancing. St. Paul wrote, ‘Brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praise worthy—think about such things (Philippians 4:8)” (Richo 5).

^[6] Origen wrote that God “makes the height of spiritual health and blessedness to consist in the knowledge and understanding of oneself” (Song 130). Self-Knowledge is the key to health and vitality of soul, and comes by an awakening of a special kind of intelligence. “Thus we must understand once and for all how vital it is for a soul—and especially for one who is good and lovely in disposition and awake in her intelligence—to acquire knowledge of herself” (139). Likewise then, to lack self-knowledge is a very great malady, a blindness or a dangerous sleeping sickness. “So huge a danger it is for the soul to fail to know and understand herself” (137). This is extremely crucial for collective transformation as well. The self-knowledge of just one individual—or the lack there of—has ramifications for all: “the negligence of one involves the hurt of many” (138) contributing to a collective unconsciousness. Thus again “…How great an evil it is for the soul not to know herself” (129). Personal healing likewise, is for the good of all.

^[7] “The history you share with your family begins before you are even conceived. In your earliest biological form, an unfertilized egg, you already share a cellular environment with your mother and grandmother. When your grandmother was five months pregnant with your mother, the precursor cell of the egg you developed from was already present in your mother’s ovaries. This means that before your mother was even born, your mother, your grandmother, and the earliest traces of you were all in the same body—three generation sharing the same biological environment” (Wolynn 25).

^[8] C.G Jung wrote “I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, with is passed on from parents to children. It had always seemed to me that I had to… complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished…A collective problem, if not recognized as such, away appears as a personal problem.” (MDR 233 ).

^[9] Menakem is doing pioneering work to understand, confront, and heal racialized trauma individually, then collectively—especially in black bodies, white bodies, and police bodies. His book My GrandMother’s Hands—is worthy of its own deep exploration.

^[10] This again takes us back to the ancient understanding of ancestral sin and corporate healing. Consider the following passage from Cyril of Alexandria, replacing the word sin with trauma: “How did many become sinners because of [Adam]? What are his miss steps to us? How could we, who were not yet born, all be condemned in him, even though God said, ‘Neither shall fathers be put to death because of their children, nor children because of their fathers… Thus, all were made sinners, not be being co-transgressors with Adam, something which they never were, but by being of his nature and falling under the law of sin [/ inherited trauma]… [Originally Adams’] body was tranquil and calm… being still. But because he fell under sin [/ was traumatized]…the nature of the flesh… was assaulted… in our members was unveiled a savage law. Our nature then became diseased” (qtd in Romanides 168). In ancient Christianity “The body is not an evil thing” (Romanides 160) but that rather it genetically “inherits an abundance of good and bad traits from parents and forefathers” including trauma. But “The interdependence among [hu]men[s] is so close that the endangered life of one [hu]man can be saved by the blood of another” (161). Blood of course being the link of soul and body as “The life is in the blood” (Lev 17:11), shows us why the physicality of cross, healing, and praxis are so crucial.

—Kintsugi Again—
“In the Japanese art of mending ceramics
with powdered gold, no one ever talks about how they'd leave the pots,
cups, and cracked bowls broken
for a while, sometimes whole generations.
And so I say to you: let your heart stay
shattered in your chest, let it ache.
Some may claim you've now been
broken open, and can let in the light.
This might be true, but before you rush
to gloss over the wounds, filling
the holes with gold so they glimmer,
try to find beauty in the broken places too,
proof of where the fire left its marks on you.”

These moments find all of us. Fr Richard says the sooner or later, if we are on any kind of classical spiritual schedule, we will fail at something or something will fail us. Loss will find us. He calls this “Falling Upwards” invitation.*** But it’s so not easy. I am convinced we may as well lean in, and take the journey of grief on purpose, rather than by accident. (I think half of living life well is about saying YES, and choosing to do things on purpose rather than by accident, but that’s a different post.) It is possible that our wounds can lead us to new wisdom, our losses can lead to us to new love, and our detours can lead us to new directions. But if you cannot trust that, then I am at least reminded of how powerful it is remind ourselves we have agency, a choice, always, in what to do when life breaks our plan or breaks our heart. As the holocaust survivor psychologist Viktor Frankl says, the last of our humans freedoms is always that we get to choose our attitude in every circumstance, and we can choose to MAKE meaning even when we can’t find it.**** But holy smokes, that takes time. And sometimes it starts with simply saying, I will say YES to wherever this is taking me. What about you? Have you ever said YES when the escalator of life seemed to be taking you down? Have you experienced a disorder that became a holy disorder? Are you finding the courage to do so right now? I’d love to hear about it. And yes, please do listen to my conversation with Alexander on the latest episode of Healer with a Thousand Faces. It’s so good. He offers ancient wisdom for navigating this. For literally thousands of years humans have been going through this and passing on their experience to the rest of us as encouragement and advice. We may as well lean into the road maps left for us by those who have been through it. And then it becomes our turn to share. Speaking of, what has this been like for you?

*From The Healer With a Thousand Faces: Four Paths to Healing with Alexander Shaia, Feb 5, 2026
**The Tears of Things, Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage 2025
***Falling Upwards: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, 2011
****Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946
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Those of you who know me well know that I love movies, from the weird to the wonderful, from the overplayed to the obscure. And of course, this is the time of year that I’m ever drawn to one of my all time favorites. You probably guessed from the title that I must be talking about Brian DePalma’s 1973 masterpiece, The Phantom of the Paradise. (You did guess that, didn’t you?) This mad musical mash up of Faust and the Phantom of the Opera is a smorgasbord of sounds, styles, show stoppers and scene stealers. It’s a got a little bit of everything—except a diverse cast, and the ability to pass the Bechdel Test. Nonetheless, treat yourself to this comedic rock tragedy if you can, for a weird, wild ride about a record producer named SWAN who has sold his soul to the devil, and in the end, loses everything, as you do when you make a deal with the devil. Why do I think of this movie during the holidays? It’s not a Christmas movie, except that it’s such a gift. But it always gets me thinking about memory and metanoia, tragedy and transformation, conversions and, of course, Dicken’s Christmas Carol. Let me explain. Sometimes life imitates art.

Said evil record producer “Swan” in P.O.P. is played by the great Paul Williams in one of his few on screen roles. Williams being the most successful musician you’ve never heard of: At a towering 5’2” he was never good looking public facing rock star material. Represent, my sibling, represent! Williams wrote the songs that made other people famous. He wrote “An Old Fashioned Love Song“ and “Out in the Country“ for Three Dog Night, “You and Me Against the World“ for Helen Reddy, “Fill Your Heart” for Biff Rose, further popularized by Bowie, and “We’ve Only Just Begun“ and “Rainy Days and Mondays“ for the Carpenters. He also scored a ton of movies, winning him Emmy’s and Academy Awards—including for “A Star is Born” with Barbara Streisand. Not too shabby. My personal favorite, he co-wrote “The Rainbow Connection” for the Muppet Movie.

But success is a fickle friend, and like the record producer he played in Phantom, he partied a little too hardy, lost control, and spent the entire 1980s spiraling into self destructive addiction. His chaotic lifestyle burned all his professional bridges one by one, until no one would work with him anymore. His career ground to a halt, he crashed and burned. Like Swan, he realized he’d lost control and lost his soul, but rather than riding his deal with the devil down to Hell, he went into recovery. He had a true conversion and came out a changed man, having a deep humbling spiritual awakening. Since then he’s maintained a daily practice of gratitude and trust, and the mantra “Surprise me God, lead me where you need me.” But back in the early 90s, he was nonetheless persona non grata in his industry as his track record made him just too risky to work with. He surrendered it and let it go.

Sometimes it’s our shared losses that let us take a chance on each other, and offer grace. Paul got a phone call. It was Brian, the son of one of his previous collaborators. Brian’s dad had died, and he was attempting to carry on the franchise his father Jim had left behind. Brian didn’t think he was up to the task of filling his father’s shoes, so he decided to ask Paul for help, and take a risk on a man recently reborn. Ironically, Brian would be attempting to direct his first film—a story about a man who had ruined his life, run off all his friends and loved ones, but was invited to take stock of it all, and given one last chance to turn it all around. Paul saw himself in the conversion of that character so clearly. He said yes to Brian Hensen and poured his heart and soul into writing songs for a movie about redemption, about how it’s never too late to change. He wrote songs about how we can let the things that haunt us take us back to love, and how that love rewrite our past, present, and future. And so Paul wrote all the music for “The Muppet’s Christmas Carol,” that other Paul Williams movie that I have to watch this time of year. And I have to sing along:

“The love we found, the love we found
The sweetest dream that we have ever known
The love we found, the love we found
We carry with us so we’re never quite alone.”

Those of you who have been around for a minute know that I think Dicken’s story of Ebeneezer Scrooge is the most psychologically insightful exploration of how traditions can carry trauma, but also lead to transformation. The Holiday’s muscle memory work a metanoia—a conversion—on us.

Every year the holiday season roles around again. Whether intentionally or not, traditions happening all around us trigger memory inside us—the movies, the music, the lights, even Christmas specials and shopping, these are rituals sacred and secular. And ritual causes us to remember. Love it or hate it, this kicks us into reflection on our lives. The slow crawl from Halloween to New Year’s brings up a lot, and asks a lot of us. And while we can ignore that and slog through, the soul cannot be ignored forever. Because the soul in part, is made of memory. For many of us, the holidays are bittersweet at best, a haunted time, with difficult memories of painful experiences, or even happy memories of those no longer with us—with whom we’ve been separated by death, distance, or discord. It’s an invitation to look back on how we thought our life was going to turn out, and who we thought would be a part of it.

Here’s the genius of Dicken’s story and I think the reason for it’s timeless appeal: Scrooge is an old miser who has run off every friend and love he’s ever had, but he cannot escape his own soul, his memories and dreams, when the holidays awaken them one more time. I hope you know the story: His dead business partner Jacob Marley rises from the grave to haunt him with a warning: he is headed down a path that will leave him even more lonely and tortured in the afterlife than he is now. This should be scary shit. But there is still hope: Scrooge will be haunted by three Spirits, who will each in turn lead him to reflect on his past, open his eyes to the present, and ponder where it is all going in the future. And he will be given a chance to change his ways. That, in short, is exactly what traditions do. They are an ancient technology meant to trigger memory and reflection: We look back to see what is haunting us: What do we want to remember from the past, how did it shape us? What wisdom was offered to us? How do we need to open our eyes more clearly to see what’s going on in our present, to be there for our own life? And how can that guide us into the future? And of course, the way I read it, all of this is bringing us around again to the truth that only a generous love makes life worth living. But it’s hard to keep our hearts open to love in a world that is ever pressuring us to be selfish and closed off. Yes, this story is a scathing critique of greed, something that is becoming more necessary as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. More on that another day. But its also a brilliantly simple look at how the holidays work on us every year, to try and slow us down—to get us to reflect, to remember and to open back up to love. And we can work with this or against it, buts it is going to happen. We get to choose whether it will be a haunting or a visitation. Even if we hate the holidays or don’t celebrate, we can ghost the traditions, but they will still haunt us. We can choose to remember, and in so doing re-member ourselves, put ourselves back together regardless of how life has tried to knock us apart.

So I suggest we steer into this on purpose. Because when we do things on purpose, we do them with purpose, and often a deeper purpose is revealed. At least, that’s what I do. So every year I spend the holidays hanging out with Scrooge’s Spirits, doing an end of the year self examination along the remembered rhythm of Scrooge’s visitations. In so doing I turn the haunted season into the hallowed season, true holy holidays.

Following the story of the Christmas Carol, I take at least four weeks to meditate and write on four questions from Mid-December to my birthday in the first week of January. I’ve shared this practice with many friends and those for whom I offer spiritual direction, and folx have adopted it and adapted it. Today, in this season, I’n sharing this practice with you: This exercise can be done in four days, in four sessions with a journal, or forty minutes of good conversation, etc. (While doing this, I also listen to Patrick Stewart read Dicken’s tale, and watch a few versions of the film.)

1. I start out by letting holiday traditions bring up what they bring up, often some painful memories, and I ask myself with Jacob Marley, “What or whom, is haunting me right now?” Looking back, what has haunted me throughout this year? What has interrupted my sleep? What old traumas and unhelpful stories are coloring the present with the past? What fears about what I cannot control are steering the choices that I can control? What am I afraid of? I don’t try to fix anything in this exercise, I simply notice and name it. Then I ask whatever is haunting me what message it has for me.

2. In the second week or second reflection I then spend some time with the Spirit of the Past. I let myself sink into warm memories, and I ask myself, What or whom from the past wants to be remembered? Who in my life has truly showed me what love is? Who is missing—separated by death, distance or discord—and what does their absence teach me? What did my tor-mentors teach me? How are those who have passed on still here with me now? How can I pay better attention to the cloud of witnesses watching over me? With pen and paper, I imagine trusted guides who have gone on, and I imagine what they are saying to me right now. And I put mementos of loved ones on the altar, in my heart and in my home.

3. In the third reflection I listen to the Spirit of the Present and I ask, “What or whom do I need to pay more attention to in the present?” I love this scene in the Christmas Carol where Scrooge is invited into a banquet loaded with an delectable feast. In this spirit, Fr Richard Rohr tells me the great tragedy of most folx (after) life is that they are waiting until they die to enjoy the divine banquet, and they don’t realize the table is set all around them right now. He says their hell will be realizing they could and should have been enjoying the feast all along. He writes “The Western mind almost refuses to be in awe anymore. It’s only aware of what is wrong, and seemingly incapable of rejoicing in what is still good and true and beautiful.” So I ask, how can I take a long and clear loving look at the real right in front of me? How can I see the good, the true and the beautiful even in the midst of the greed, the trauma, and the brokenness? Where can I find “awe” and wonder? James Finley says that most of us are “skimming along the surface of our own life”, and as such we are suffering from “depth deprivation”. How can I plunge into the depths of what is happening. How can I “Be here now” as Ram Dass taught us? What good things do I need to slow down and appreciate? And how can I work to share the banquet with those around me in need? How can I work to make love and beauty more real in my own life, and for those around me, right now? (I have found practices like spending three min a day meditating on something beautiful, or especially keeping a daily gratitude and grief journal, keep me in touch with love.)

4. Finally, as I approach the New Year—and shortly after it my 49^th birthday—in my last reflection I’ll ask What wisdom has this reflection offered me for the future, for 2026? I won’t make a plan per se, but I’ll look for areas to keep my heart open, and also to extend my hands to those around me. I’ll try to stay open for the chance to make love more real in the world around me. You may recall that the Ghost of Christmas future is scary looking—like a Dementor or a Wring Wraith. I let the parts of the future that are scary be scary, and I listen for wisdom even in the fear. (C.G. Jung say fear leads us to reflect, so we should stop trying so hard to drown it out.) Nonetheless, I’ll pray “God surprise me this year, lead me where you need me.” And I choose to believe it can be better than my fears, and that I can be better, even as I choose to love my imperfections this year. I rewrite my personal mission statement, and I identify curiosities and intentions for the New Year. If you are a goal person, this is a great process to consider what really matters as you think on the New Year.

The Desert Fathers and Mothers—those ancient Christian wilderness mystics—taught my fav spiritual principle of apathea. While its sounds like “apathy”—not caring about anything—apathea is the principle of not caring about what doesn’t matter, so that we have more energy to care about what matters most. In all of this, I am asking myself, in the last year what have my actions told me I truly care about? But what actually matters most? What do I choose to care about and how can my actions and intentions match that in the here and now? What changes do I want to make this year in my rhythm of life to better support that? And of course in all of this, I’m looking for where love is being offered to me, and where I can offer love.

We are given the gift to ever be reinventing, re-membering ourselves. As Ram Dass says “You’re perfect just the way you are. And, you need some work.” And while our conversion may not be as dramatic as that of Paul Williams, or Ebeneezer Scrooge, it is the greatest gift to ever be living in an ongoing transformation into love that most lets us know we are alive. And we don’t have to do it alone. We can’t. As the man also says, “We are,” after all, “just walking each other home”. Or as Paul Williams said it through Ebenezer Scrooge:

“With a thankful heart that is wide awake
I do make this promise
Every breath I take
Will be used now to sing your praise
And beg you to share my day
With a loving guarantee
That even if we part
I will hold you close in a thankful heart

“Life is like a journey
Who knows when it ends?
Yes, and if you need to know
The measure of a person
You simply count their friends
Stop and look around you
The glory that you see
Is born again each day
Don’t let it slip away
How precious life can be”

Merry Christmas Y’all, and Happy New Year. Write on, and shine on!

Mything the Point of “My Story”[1]

Two teachers more than other have helped me muse, massage, and message the messy maze of my meandering life, metamorphosizing it into a myth: Swiss Psychologist and explorer of the soul par excellence, C.G. Jung claims we find the meaning of our life in our stories; they function as the true scripture—the Word of God[2]—for us. Origen of Alexandria—who heavily influenced Jung—claimed that it is essential to examine our stories because God “makes the height of spiritual health and blessedness to consist in the knowledge and understanding of oneself”.[3] Both men seemed to think that exploring my story deeply would somehow lead me to know others and God authentically.[4]

It seems that from the moment we are born, we start telling and being told stories about how the world is. We cobble these together these to form an internal “GPS” to help us navigate life—to find our way in the world and our way around the world. Stories about:

GOD, or the gods, our master narratives about the fundamental principles of existence, what some have called THE STORY.

PEOPLE, our beliefs about humanity, society, relationships, social systems, what some have called Y/OUR STORY.

SELF: this is MY STORY, everything that I think I know about myself.

G.P.S.—get it?

(Fr Richard Rohr uses a similar model of My Story / Our Story / The Story that he calls “The Cosmic Egg”, borrowing from Joseph Chilton Pearce. I hope they will both forgive me for liking my GPS model better.) This GPS exists to help me explore the world, to get out and encounter others and listen deeply and learn. In theory, knowing my story helps me to empathize, and meet others in y/our story. And combining our shared experience is my best guess at whatever THE STORY might be. Of course, I run into problems when I start to fall in love with my story about reality, and project it out onto everyone else, mistaking MY STORY with Y/OUR STORY, and THE STORY. Then my GPS stops updating altogether.

But life is often kind enough to steer us off the map, right into a situation where our GPS fails us, and we crash hard into the jagged rocks of irreconcilable paradox, something too big for our schema. Jung goes so far as to say that God orchestrates radical confrontations with others and reality to get us out of our willfulness and subjectivity.[5] And while we need this “stripping of the veils of illusion” to encounter reality, it is very painful and dangerous, and feels like a death[6], as our sense of self, understanding of the world, and faith in the/God/s falls apart.

This has certainly proven to be the case in my story: Once upon a time, both my parents, my brother and I were all pastors. But like so many people, I was deeply let down by the Evangelical Story, church leaders, and who I had become in that system. So I cast it off and found a better version of THE STORY, pursuing comparative religious studies and psychology instead—both fields took the stories of others more seriously, helping me expand my own.

By 2008 I was in a doctoral program that I loved, and working my dream job leading a progressive spiritual community attached to a Manhattan theater. But in six month’s time, my brother had taken his own life, my niece had been born without a father, the stock market had crashed—wiping out my dream job and my schooling, and my mother had died with very little warning. The new story that I thought I was living had fallen apart, externally and internally.

Experts says our stories give us a sense of coherence in the midst of chaos.[7] I had long believed in the right to write as a rite, and writing was the primary practice by which I explored myself, others, and talked to the/God/s. But in the aftermath of 2008’s chaotic events I could only find rest—and escape from chaos—in quiet contemplation. I suddenly cherished being invited to move beyond words and narrative, letting go of faith in any story of coherence. I eventually ceased journaling, verbal prayer, and looking for meaning in any of it at all.

But as the years have gone by, I’ve found that just because I’m done with MY STORY, doesn’t mean it’s done with me. In fact, my trying to ignore my story, has only invited it to wreck havoc in my life now—coloring the present with the past—often without my realizing it. Jung is adamant that we often mistake our unconscious stories for fate: Let me be clear, I project my unconscious stories out there as “The Story”, the big spiritual stories, systems, models, and theologies that drive my life, which I then suspect should also drive yours. (I like to call this mytheology, when I mistake my myth with my theology.) So lately, I’ve had to face how I use ideas of wordless “contemplation” devoid of narrative, to avoid going back and working with those life moments, letting those stories retell themselves to me, and offer me new layers meaning.

This carried into my work at The Center for Action and Contemplation’s Living School—which I enrolled in after finally finishing my dissertation, which ironically had explored the sacred stories of scripture and the self. I thought TLS would initiate me beyond these nagging narratives into the quiet bliss of loving mystical union. Gods, was I wrong. I had no idea the extent to which the contemplation of a “Christ soaked world” is the contemplation of a crowded and chaotic cosmos, soaked with stories in the sounds of silence. Lately I’ve come to realize contemplation is deep listening, not deep ignoring.

Interestingly enough, Jung claims that just when the GPS we’ve written fails, an inner GPS quietly comes online, a “central guidance system”[8] of sorts that begins leading us to the story we didn’t want to see, or couldn’t see, the shadow story—which is not the false story—but the unseen reality we meet in radical confrontations with others and ourselves.

So I’ve started listening to that Inner GPS, and letting her re/tell me stories. I let myself return again to what Origen calls “the care for self-knowledge”,[9] which comes of reading and writing “the books of the soul” and “the pages of our heart”,[10] and asking the questions Jung says are most important: “What myth am I living?”[11] and what is its meaning?

And I’ve let myself replace the word “story” with “myth,” for the following reasons:

First, because myths are messy, full of contradictions, as I am full of contradictions. I think about my brother’s suicide: I love my brother, I hate my brother. I forgive my brother, I resent my brother. I miss my brother, I feel his presence with me at all times. I am nothing like him, I hate how much we are alike. I think about my life: I am grateful for my losses and how they opened me up, but I wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemy, and I would never relive them.

Origen says our mind lives between feeling one way, and then another, at all times.[12] But perhaps this isn’t a problem. Just about all of us, if we are honest, feel at least two opposite ways about just about everything important, just about all of the time. We just don’t know that’s normal. And we just don’t have permission or a place to express it. My myth doesn’t erase this mess, it simply makes room for all of it, without asking for coherence or consistency.

Myths are multiple: Have you ever playfully argued with family or friends who remember the same story differently? Or, tried writing or recording yourself telling the same story once a week for a month? Go back and listen, and chances are even you tell the same story differently at different times. We are a collection of different narratives that contradict each other and don’t line up accurately on a time line.

Jung claims that in fact these variant stories actually reflect the “polycentric”[13] shape of our souls. We are peopled with many “little people”[14] inside of us, multiple personalities with multiple voices and multiple stories, and this is natural and healthy.[15] Learning to listen to them inside of us equips us to hear the many stories of many different people outside of us. We have all been multiple selves, and we are multiple selves at the same time, always living in the wheel of the samsara of the self. Embracing the plurality inside of us equips us to embrace the plurality outside of us.

In fact Origen tells us this is why scripture is shaped the way it is—like a human person:[16] full of contradictions.[17] Why does the Bible offer so many different versions of the same stories? Quite simply because, so do we, everyday. And that’s the whole point. Psyche is not singular.

I ache for how my poor brother could not bring his personal lifestyle in line with what he thought was expected of him as an evangelical pastor. He ended up living a lie, or more accurately lying to live. But his life and death ironically remind me to celebrate my own inconsistencies and multiplicities, to keep telling and living my stories as many different ways as I need to, letting them contradict each other, remembering: The vitality is in the variance.

Myths are always in the middle: As a Spiritual Director, I often hear “I don’t really know where to start this story.” I always respond, “Start in the middle, because we are always there, working our way backward and forward.” Our stories don’t have a beginning a middle and an end, they aren’t straight or chronological in their meaning.

This reality was burned into my mind two weeks before my mother died: I held her limp hand, looking into her fading eyes, on the same day that I looked into the blazing eyes of my new born niece as she gripped my hand like a tiny vice—life’s a wheel of death and resurrection.

Just so, our stories are circular, they keep coming around again to offer us new layers of meaning. Jung says the human soul is like an apocatastasis[18] —a theological word he borrows from Origen—that refers to the cosmos being a cycle of healing, where all things come around again to become whole, but in a wholeness that holds more and more complexity and diversity. For the divinity is in the diversity, the progress is in the plurality, the vitality is in the variance, and there is no end to the meanings of our stories.

Myths are Mutable: Our stories change with each telling: they grow as we grow. What my story meant then, might not be what my story means now. We all benefit from an outside editor, such as a good friend, a spiritual director or therapist who can offer us a new telling of an old story.

The night my bother died, a total stranger looked me in the eye and said “You are telling yourself a story about every warning sign you missed, and every way you should have prevented this. Stop.” She knew I needed a better story.

Jung claimed that myths evolve over time, because their natural function was to help the soul heal: Myths are Medicinal. Following our inner “life instinct”,[19] what might seems like grievous loss, may yet yield growth; our wounds may lead to wisdom, our detours to new direction and our losses to new love. We stay open because we never quite know where the story is going. Our worst choices can lead to our best outcomes—Jung asks “What would have happened if Paul had allowed himself to be talked out of his journey to Damascus?”—so we have to be willing to companion others and ourselves on a “daring misadventure”.[20]

Origen says our worst hurts eventually become “health bestowing wounds”,[21] the worst scandals invite us to the deepest meaning,[22] when we lose sight of God our Co-Author, or lose the plot, our search becomes all the more deep,[23] and when we wrestle with “impossibilities”[24] we move beyond our stories being “absurd fables and silly tales”.[25]

But in the end, receiving this healing perspective is a choice we can only make for ourselves—it is toxic to force it on someone else’s story. Perhaps this is why Jung counsels us to craft our own “healing fictions.”[26]

Myths are made up: sure, it’s a profoundly subjective fiction. But it’s the great work of an incarnate life to write a myth that yields meaning—to find “a meaning worthy of God”[27] in Origen’s words. Because meaning, like love, is often made, as much as it is found.

Myths are mysterious: In three months leading up to my brother’s death I was on three consecutive flights that each put down for an emergency medical landing. A mentor warned me, “A major detour is coming in your life.” Was I being prepared? Do I tell the story that way?

Myths are mournful: They do not require the luxury of a happy ending, or really any resolution at all. In a time when our culture has forgotten how to mourn, myths make space for our grief and our sadness and get us back in touch with the multiplicity of the movements of our hearts. As such they return us not only to the language of loss, but the language of love.

Myths are not mortal: Eleven years after my brother died, he came to visit me. On the 7^th day of an 8 day silent Zen retreat, in which there was no speaking, no reading, no journaling, and no eye contact—even with yourself, requiring all mirrors to be covered—my brother showed up to look me in my mind’s eye. We spent the day together walking and talking, and worked out quite a bit that was unreconciled between us. Was this a projection? A psychological fiction? A hallucination? An elucidation, or a visitation? Yes, I think it was all of the above. Myths move beyond the boundaries of space and time, connecting us beyond distance, discord, or even death.

Myths are Mutual: Our stories cross with others. Two months before my brother’s suicide I met an older classmate, who was obviously grieving something very deep. He did not reveal what it was until I told him that I worked as a spiritual director of sorts. He looked at me hard with tears in his eyes, and revealed that his son in law was a prominent artist who had just taken his own life by drowning himself in the ocean. “Some people plunge into the depths of their souls, but they get lost. In ancient times the Shaman showed people how to dive in and find their way back. We need shamans again.” I promptly forgot this for a decade. But now the story that preceded my brother’s death is today how I end my story here… Wondering where the shamans are who can lead us into the depths of our subjectivity, and show us the way out again so that we can find each other in our shared mythologies.

Myths move me to meet others: and they are how I move in the real world.

I’ve shared snapshots of my story which connect me to the stories of others: exvangelicals, those who’ve lost a parent; the semicolon tattoo emblazoned on my middle finger—draw your own conclusions—quietly connects my story with my brother’s and connects both of us to others touched by suicide. Even Origen and Jung offer me a story about how to read my stories, to make my myths meaningful. But it is worth returning again for a moment to the apocatastasis so central to the their stories—in which the soul and the cosmos are growing into a mystical wholeness: But that wholeness is not some vanilla puree of uniformity, but rather an increasingly crowded universe, in which we ourselves are filled with multiple personalities, in which we are in a cloud of beings living and dead, in which the universe and the stars themselves have souls, and in which we learn to hear the crowded chaos as a choir chiming chiasmic cords. This deep listening to “the music of the spheres”, this infused contemplation, this bhavana, lives beyond the duality of apophatic and cataphatic theology, beyond the duality of “Our Stories”—which is all the cosmic egg really is—and the contemplative notion of “No Story”—which is, after all, also still a story. It’s a fall of mycrocosm into the music of the dramacrocosmos, and it has no bottom.

So my stories—my myths—are not really mine alone, they move me towards encounter with others. Yet I cannot know anyone or anything without constantly coming up against the limits of my own subjectivity and facing what cannot be known. It always brings us to the limits of what we can know—as such is myths can be mystical. Bottom line, Jung said that our myths lead us into the underworld of our depths, to face some things we may not want to see, but therein slumber the great mysteries.

In the end, I am reminded that in my theology—my mytheology?—Incarnation is participation in story, the divine acting out in flesh in the healing of the world.No matter how contemplative we become, “Stories make us human” for Humanity is a “Story Telling Animal”.[28]To lose our stories is to lose touch with our humanity. To ignore my story is an all too easy short cut to ignore y/our stories, and to bypass suffering altogether, and that utterly misses the point. Contemplation does not erase my stories, it liberates them from the tyranny of the ego’s singular point of view, so that it can lead me

[1] Note: Recently a version of this article appeared in the Fall 2021 edition of CAC’s publication ONEING. After getting a look at this very fine issue, I decided I would release an “author’s cut” of my own contribution. Firstly, it lets me express my intention and story just a tad more clearly, with less of the necessary restraints on space and style. Secondly after reading the amazing contributions of my fellow authors, this lets me wrestle further with the model of the “My Story / Our Story / Other Stories / The Story”, otherwise known as “The Cosmic Egg”. But above all, I simply find it very much in keeping with the spirit of my own article to go back and revise or re-tell the story. So once again here is my story—my take on Mything The Point of My Story:

[2] “It is not we who invent myth, rather it speaks to us as a Word of God [a Logos]. The Word of God comes to us, and we have no way of distinguishing whether and to what extent it is different from God. There is nothing in this Word that could not be considered known and human, except for the manner in which it confronts us spontaneously and places obligations on us” (Jung, Memories Dreams, Reflections. New York, Vintage 1989. 340).

[3] Origen, The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, trans.R.P.Lawson (New York: Newman, 1956), 130.

[4] Carl Jung writes: “Self knowledge is not an isolated process… Nobody can know himself and differentiate himself from his neighbor if he has a distorted picture of him, just as no one can understand his neighbor if he had no relationship to himself. The one conditions the other and the two processes go hand in hand.” We cannot only focus on our inner reality. My Story “is possible only if the reality of the world around us is recognized at the same time” as y/our shared story. C.G.Jung, CollectedWorks 14, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), para. 739.

[5] “To this day ‘God’ is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions, and change the course of my life for better or for worse.” C.G. Jung, “Letter to M. Leonard,” December 5, 1959, Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume 2, 1951–1961, trans. R. F. C. Hull (East Sussex, UK: Routledge, 1976), 525.

[6] “This stripping of the veils of illusion is felt as distressing and painful…this phase demands much patience and tact, for the unmasking of reality is as a rule not only very difficult but often very dangerous” (Jung, Collected Works 14, para. 739).

Jung equates experiences like this—of losing one’s illusion of the world, one’s religion, and of “the fictitious picture of one’s own personality”—with “a figurative death” (674).

[7] “We are all tellers of tales. We each seek to provide our scattered and often confusing experiences with a sense of coherence by arranging the episodes of our lives into stories” Dan P. McAdams, The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self (New York: Guilford, 1993), 11.

[8] EdwardC.Whitmont,TheSymbolicQuest:BasicConceptsofAnalytical Psychology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 218.

[9] Origen, Song, 130.

[10] Origen: Spirit and Fire: A Thematic Anthology of His Writings, ed. Hans Urs von Balthasar, trans. Robert J. Daly (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1984), 327.

[11] In Symbols of Transformation, Jung writes, “to get to know ‘my’ myth, I regarded . . . as the task of tasks,” asking of the reader as well, “What is the myth you are living?” (Jung, Collected Works 5, xxv).

[12] Origen, On First Principles: Being Koetschau’s Text of the De Principiis Translated into English, trans. G. W. Butterworth (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973), 42

[13] Jung “opened a view of the personality that is no longer single-centered but polycentric” (James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (NewYork: Harper Perennial, 1992), 24.

[14] C.G. Jung as qtd in Hillman, 24.

[15] James Hillman writes that “we too are ultimately a composition” (41) “always constituted of multiple parts” (24). Jung asserts “The psyche not being a unity but a multiplicity” (Aspect of the Feminine. Princeton University Press, Princeton. 1982.90). Archetypal psychologists go so far as to reject any theory of unity within the Psyche “to save the diversity and autonomy of the psyche from domination be any single power” (Hillman 32).

[16] “For just as [hu]man consists of body, soul, and spirit, so in the same way does scripture, which has been prepared by God for [hu]man’s salvation” (On First Principles 276).

[17] For example, in exploring how “one” is experienced as “a diversity of persons” (C.G. Jung CW 14, para. 6) in Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung in fact cites Origen, who writes: “See how he who thinks himself one is not one, but seems to have as many personalities as he has moods”, and also in Homilies on Leviticus: “Understand thou hast within thyself herds of cattle . . . flocks of sheep and goats . . . Understand the fowls of the air are within thee . . . Thou seest thou hast all those things which the world hath” (CW 14, para. 6.n26). Origen was adamant the soul was multiple, and influenced Jung’s rediscovery of what historian Peter Brown called “the Greek gift to Late Antiquity: ‘a sense of the multiplicity of the self,’” while Alan Watts has insisted that the “ancient paths of mysticism” knew this from the very beginning.

[18] “. . .the ‘renewal’… of the mind in not meant as an actual alteration in consciousness, but rather as the restoration of an original condition, an apocatastasis. This is in exact agreement with the empirical findings of psychology, that there is an ever present archetype of wholeness . . . It brings about an integration, a bridging of the split in the personality caused by the instincts striving apart in different and mutually contradictory directions. (C.G. Jung CW 9.ii, para.73)

[19] (Jung, MDR 348)

[20] “Saul owed his conversion neither to true love, nor to true faith, nor to any other truth. It was solely his hatred of the Christians that set him on the road to Damascus, and to that decisive experience which was so to alter the whole course of his life. He was brought to this experience by following out, with conviction, his own worst mistake… What would have happened if Paul had allowed himself to be talked out of his journey to Damascus? …[Therefore each of us ] must decide in every single instance whether s/he is willing to stand by a human being with counsel and help upon what may be a dating misadventure” (C.G. Jung, Psychology and Religion: West. (Princeton University Press, Princeton 1984). 200, 211.)

[21] (Origen, Song 199)

[22] “Consequently the Word of God has arranged for certain stumbling-blocks [skandala], as it were, and hindrances, and impossibilities, to be inserted in the midst of the law and the history.” This is to make the literal meaning insufficient, even scandalous, lest we “by never moving away from the letter fail to learn anything of the divine element” (Origen, OFP 285).

[23] “God is my witness that I have often perceived the Bridegroom drawing near me and being most intensely present with me; then suddenly He has withdrawn and I could not find Him though I sought to do so. I long therefore for Him to come again, and sometimes He does so. Then, when he has appeared and I lay hold of Him, He slips away once more; and, when He has so slipped away, my search for Him begins anew” (Origen, Song 280).

[24] “Even impossibilities are recorded in the law for the sake of the more skillful and inquiring readers, in order that these, by giving themselves to the toil of examining what is written, may gain a sound conviction of the necessity of seeking in such instances a meaning worthy of God” (Origen OFP 286-287).

[25] (Origen, Song 28-29)

[26] For Jung, the principle malady of the human is the lack of a myth, a “healing fiction” which provides “the meaning that quickens… (and) give(s) meaning and form to the confusion of (their) neurotic soul” (PR:W 199). This is so central to Jung’s psychology that he defines “psychoneurosis… ultimately as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning” (199).

[27] (Origen OFP 287)

[28] Johnathan Gottschall. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make us Human. New York: Mariner Books, 2012.

I’ve spoken about this before, but I’ve never fully shared how shattering these deaths were in the cruelty of their timing. In 2008, both my mother and brother were in the process of turning their lives around after a season of massive losses.

At 31, I was no stranger to death. As my friend Mirabai Starr says, “It’s just one of those incarnations.” I lost a classmate to a brain tumor in the third grade. In junior high, a kid who sold me CDs on the bus ended his own life. One of my very best friends died in a rock-climbing accident at 19. It was the first time I was asked to give a eulogy. In my early twenties I lost my punk rock pal Digger, then Josh my Thursday morning breakfast buddy, both to suicide. I was there when one of my best friends lost his father-in-law—the early morning angel of our gym—to an accident on black ice. My bestest boss, Tom—one of the best men I’ve ever known—went home to take a nap before church and peacefully went home into eternity. When I was doing my internship as a mental health worker one supervisor pointed out that I’d had a lot of death in my life and suggested I avoid working with the Elderly, or a high-risk population. So, I worked with teens instead that year, but one of my kid clients murdered the father of another client. (And tragically the same supervisor who’d made the suggestion that I might need a break from death, was, ironically killed in car accident a year later.) And of course, at the end of this litany I finally lost my grandfather, my favorite person who’d ever lived.

The deaths of these others preceded losing my brother and my mother… But Mom and Tim just hit different—not because of their battles with death, but because of their battles with life. Tim spent years struggling with his mental health, but my brother had finally seemed to be really recovering, really rebuilding his life as a promising pastor with a pulpit, and a baby on the way. He was rebuilding a church my parents had founded but blown up. His sudden loss was a shock and a shattering to many, if not a total surprise to some.

My mother had also been a Pentecostal Evangelical Pastor, but by the time of my brother’s death she had been “cast out”—shamefully mistreated in a messy too public divorce, literally losing faith, friends, family, house, hope, and her home in the process. And I mean that, she was literally without a home for a while, a once prominent pastor and pillar of the community was staying with random friends and working odd jobs just to get by. But after this brutal deconstruction of her life, in 2008 my mother was finally rebuilding. That September she was stepping into a new story.

She had just lost her son, but she was counting the days for his baby to be born in just one more week, and my mother was putting all her grief into planning to be to the best grandma she could be for Tim’s child and widow.

She was in the first month of grad classes in a counseling program at the local seminary—she told me she wanted to help pastors and women going through what she had experienced, being abused by toxic religion. Her second wedding was one month away and she—and we—were so happy with her fiancé Bob. They were weeks away from moving into a new house they had just finished building together. It was the beginning of a season of what Fr Richard Rohr calls, reconstruction, a reordering healing after so much chaotic loss.

And then she was gone. She never got that reconstruction, that new season of life. Despite losing her faith in patriarchal and abusive Christian organizations— “the good old boys club” she called it—she never stopped believing that God had a plan for her life, that “God works all things for the good” in the end. Neither she nor my brother got to finish their healing journey, to live out the next act of life that was waiting for them.

I was left to make sense of it all, devastated by the cruelty of this unfinished healing. Why did this happen? And wtf was I supposed to do with it? I asked quite a few questions of quite a few gods, and quite a few people.

Ironically, several friends suggested I immediately write a book about all of this. (During the height of the dramatic deconstructing of the Church my parents had built, my mother would repeatedly joke “We are just making good chapters for the book Michael is going to write about this someday!” Someday Mom, someday.) But I have seen many an author friend try to pen a fresh heart break into a book before that heart has time to heal. So I decided I would wait at least ten years to tell the story. But I would write a winding rambling reflection every year on the anniversary of my mother’s death, as I do now, for the 17^th year in a row.

Looking back I can see how my mother and brothers’ healing cut short—how their unhealed wounds, and my own—sent me out wandering: From Pennsylvania to New York City to California to New Mexico I’ve been looking for answers to the questions that stretch my broken heart open wider. I went to places like Peru, China, and Egypt. I’ve wandered jungles and deserts and hoods. I dropped out of seminary to study comparative religion, mythology and Jungian Psychology instead. There’s a PhD in there somewhere and quite a few other pieces of paper that say I supposedly learned somethings. I studied with The Guild for Spiritual Guidance, The Center for Action and Contemplation’s Living School, got certificates in Grief and Trauma studies. My wounds had set me to wondering: How do I come back from all this loss? If Everything Belongs, why does it have to hurt so bad? How is it possible that love actually seems to be greater—or at least sneakier—than our suffering, to break through our heart breaks in the midst of our losses? What even is love then, how can it sustain us? How do we heal? And why is it that I find the old, ancient answers so much more useful than what I’m finding in the current cultural conversation, pop philosophy, the insights of the influencers, and whatever the latest philosophical fix is? Lastly, what do we do with all the love we have for the dead? And what do the dead have to do with us? So many more questions…

Speaking of ancient—around 17 centuries ago Origen of Alexandria taught the spiritual life called for “discussion not definition”—I often say it’s about exploration not explanation. The quest it seems really is in the questions, asking more than the answering, contemplation is a conversation, and spirituality is about the seeking, I think. Curiosity, Origen said, was a gift implanted in us from the divine, and a form of love. (When it seems that perhaps there isn’t some comforting “meaning of life” to be found, I find the act of looking for meaning is meaningful itself.) Carl Jung said that some of the best questions are handed to us—unanswered—by our ancestors and our recent family. Certainly, this was what happened with my brother and mothers’ healing interrupted.

These wounds certainly sent me wandering and wondering, but these questions also brought me to so many wise guides. Despite all the studies my best education has simply been the lives and deaths of the people I’ve met along the journey, some famous teachers, some quiet unknown sages. Someone once put me down as “a spiritual Forrest Gump! You just blunder around and bump into amazing people!” There was a clear diss in saying that it was just a lot of dumb luck that put me in proximity to some spiritual heroes.

But they were right. It also happens that because of the luck of my vocation, in just the last three years I have recorded over 300 conversations with dozens brilliant spiritual teachers and healers, who I very deeply respect. And here, a pattern has begun to emerge. What I see over and over, are people like my mother, who put their life lessons and their personal healing in the service of healing and helping others. In doing so they make meaning out of their suffeing, as much as find meaning in it. Their life losses lead to love, and their life detours lead to new directions.

Origen said that this life is a classroom and hospital, and we are here to learn and to heal. There are some days it’s very hard for me to feel like a benevolent universe is conspiring for my wholeness and education. But I’ve found that on those days I can still choose to live as if I have the opportunity to learn and heal every single day.

Origen however did believe Greater Forces were at work to teach and heal us, and he believed that healing work continued even after death. (Whether that’s in an ongoing after life, or in the fact that we carry on the healing work of our loved ones after death—or both—I leave to you dear reader, to wonder. We’ll talk about reincarnation another day.)

Regardless, Origen said that eventually our wounds, if we stay with them long enough, become “health bestowing wounds.” Eventually even our wounds can teach us about healing, if we learn to listen. Our wounds can lead to wisdom.

I’m reminded an old Irish pastor turned therapist named Neil Gas. In his Belfast accent he would remind me: “Michael, the pain you can feel is the pain you can heal.” Forgive the obvious, but I think he was getting at two things—First, before we can heal our own wounds, we have to be willing to feel them. That’s hard in a culture that is always asking us to shut down, dissociate, or spiritual bypass around the hurt in our hearts almost every moment of every day. But if we climb back into our hearts, we will find so much more than just pain. There is a reason the primary spiritual practice of ancient Christian contemplatives was to “sink the mind into the heart.” Our hearts are organs built for healing and to love. Origen says we go into the heart to look for other eyes—because this changes the way we see everything—through love and the potential for transformation.

When you learn to see this way, the second meaning is also clear: The pain you can heal in yourself, is the pain you heal in others. When we find the medicine that we need, when we do our own healing work, it also leads us to the medicine that is ours to share. (Or as my friend Carmen Acevedo Butcher reminds me, “We become the medicine.”) We put our healing in the service of the healing others. Our wounds lead us to our wisdom and to our work in the world. Our healing isn’t just for us. We can’t heal alone and we don’t heal alone. Healing takes place in community and for community.

Like my mother, I hope to put my healing in the service of others. To offer help for those who have also suffered the loss of loved ones, beliefs, and communities. In following her example, I am perhaps helping complete her healing journey. I’m continuing the healing work left incomplete by my mother and brother. And lately I’ve begun wondering if I’m not only healing for them but literally healing with them. I wonder if they are here helping me heal, and being helped by my healing?

My mentor and friend Dr Barbara Holmes seemed to think so. She taught me that some hurts are too big to heal alone. Healing takes place in community and for community. But she would also often remind me that this more than human world is a hospital staffed by more than human helpers—animals and ancestors and all manner of animated—literally ensouled reality. We are living in a crowded cosmos. The classroom of life has many chairs; there are many seats around the fire. Dr B insisted that my deceased loved ones and ancestors were supporting me and guiding me, especially in my dreams. When she died last year on October 15^th, it was only fitting that she too began speaking to me in my sleep.

I suppose it’s not small stretch to get there—I’d already been listening to dead people for years—as so many teachers talk speak through history in the pages of the books I read. As my friend Paul Swanson says, “When you spend a lifetime reading the mystics, it starts to feel like all of your best friends are dead.”

In this classroom and hospital, I began to see patterns in the lives of friends and guides, my doctors and teachers, living and dead…

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell said that all the great stories were about how to live a life—from Hercules to Harry Potter—and their patterns offered us identifiable instructions for individuation, for finding ourselves, even as we fight our battles and slay our dragons. For a long time, I took comfort in the idea of the Hero Journey—that all of us are the hero of our own story, and our great task is to find out who we are and live of our life, which is a heroic act indeed.

But I find lately that I’m over heroes. I think I see a pattern that is even older, especially in the stories that focus on vitality over violence, curiosity over control, contemplation over conquest, wisdom over warfare, medicines over mighty acts, healing over heroics. And I think it’s in so many of the great stories, in everyone from Hildegard to Hermione, Chiron to Christ, Merlin to Mother Teresa.

Mircea Eliade identified this as the pattern of the “Shaman”—a word he took from Siberia specifically, but applied to similar expressions of it all over the world: In this pattern, the healer first suffers a near fatal wound or sickness, recovers, learns about healing—often from an ancient lineage*—and then becomes a healer for the local community. (*And they might learn to talk to plants, animals, ancestors, and angels in there too.)

I’m way more interested in the shaman than the soldier, the wizard over the warrior, the wounded healer over the hero. I’m far more interested in The Healer with a Thousand Faces. I think it’s the story our wounded world needs right now.

So, Mom, I decided to write that book instead… someday soon. But first, to be sure, I decided to go back and ask some of my favorite teachers if they saw this pattern in their own lives, and the lives of their good guides. A friend suggested that if I was going to have these conversations anyway, that I may as well record them and share them. And so, I’ve recorded 15 conversations so far, in which I meet with a wise friend and say simply:

“I’ve been seeing this pattern:

“That our wounds set us out on our wandering—they shape the path of our lives.

Our wounds give us our wondering—the unique questions that are ours to ask and answer.

Our wounds lead us to our wise guides, the teachers that appear when the student is ready.

Our wounds give us our unique wisdom; they become our teachers.

Our wounds lead us to our work in the world, as the pain we can feel becomes the pain we work to heal.

Has any of this been true for you, or the healers you have studied?”

And then the conversation goes where it goes. I’m posting the first of those conversations today, with my friend and mentor Mirabai Starr, in honor of my Mom’s Feast Day. (The Catholic Church celebrates a saints’ “feast day” on the anniversary of the day after they died, as their first day in Heaven, for me, the first day of after life or ever life.) I’ve learned a lot in these talks.

My friend Carmen insists “our wounds also lead us to our weird”, they help us cast off the cultural script’s others controlled us with, puncturing perfection and oppression. As Jung says, “Most of us are walking around in shoes too tight for us.” Our wounds help us kick off those shoes. We become our wounded, weird, wonderful selves.

I’ve learned that our wounds also, paradoxically, lead us to our wonder—somehow to beauty and love, to what matters most, to what cannot be taken from us, and come, unbidden, as miracles, in their own timing.

I’ve learned that healing is a path that is ever ongoing, and it’s just what love does. When I die, my healing will be unfinished, but it will continue. My mother and brother’s healing continue as well, in me. We do not heal on our own—we can’t. But our healing work isn’t just for us either. We share it with those who have gone before us, but are still with us, and all those around us. And I’m learning so much more, and there is more to learn and more to heal…

So… I’m sharing these rambling words with you and sharing these conversations in The Healer with a Thousand Faces Podcast. Maybe I’ll write that book. And I’m saying thanks Mom, for being a continued part of this healing journey, and healing, I hope, through all of us.

For the last few months now I’ve been recording a series of secret conversations… as a part of a secret project I’m working on… but we’ll get to that…

Even though I have a PhD in mythology, I’m sort of over the idea of “the Hero’s Journey”, made famous in Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Conversation for another day, but I’m not feeling inspired to try and be the hero of my own story at the moment. I’m skeptical of heroics, I’ve lost faith with where they can get us, and I’m tired of seeing life as a drama with me as the shining star, for the sole purpose of my own individuation. I do love this book, and partially because of it and the unique experiences that have shaped my life, I have become far more interested in the Healer’s Journey.

Let me explain:

It just so happens that as a result of the unique work that I do, in the last three years I have recorded over 300 conversation with several dozen spiritual teachers, those I consider heroes and healers. And in those conversations I began to see a pattern, that I also saw reflected in my own life and the lives of so many loved ones, and so many historical figures that I’ve studied over the years. It seems…

Each of us comes into this life with Wonder as our birthright… be we also inevitably are wounded, because it’s hard to love in this challenging world.

Paradoxically, our wounds often set us off on our wanderings, our unique wounds shape the path that our unique life takes, the winding road we walk.

Our wounds also very often give us our wonderings, the unique questions that become ours to ask and answer—yours are different than mine, mine are different that yours.

But if we follow our path and ask and answer our own questions—we walk out our wanderings, and we wrestle with our wonderings—we will eventually come to our unique wisdom.

Origen of Alexandria talked about “health bestowing wounds”, showing how each of our unique wounds would lead each of us to our unique wisdom. When we find our own wisdom, when we let our wounds lead us there, we have found our medicine. But in finding the medicine we need/ed, we also find the medicine that is ours uniquely to share with the world. (Or as my friend Carmen Acevedo Butcher has shared with me, “We BECOME the medicine that is ours to give to the world.) The pain that you can feel has now led you to the pain that you can heal.

And in this, our wounds lead us to our work… our “lever and a place to stand” as Richard Rohr calls it, channeling Archimedes.

And somehow, all of this leads us back to Wonder, which I have seen again and again in so many teachers, our lives are so much more than wounds and work.

And yes, I see this in folx I respect, because I think in this process described above, our wounds also lead us to our Wisdom Teachers.

There it is: these days I’m so much more interested in walking my own Healers Journey, over any Hero Journey. When I think about those I admire, I am way more interested in Shamans over Soldiers, Wizards (wise ones) over Warriors, Healers over Heroes, especially with a bit of mysticism over might, and prophetics over profit. And as a mythologist and a student of both depth psychologist and mysticism, I think I see this pattern playing out in the stories of Shamans, Healers, Wizards, Mystics, and Prophets. (And also, maybe even the heroes that Joseph Campbell wrote about. No shade to JC, I promise.)

So I decided to record a series of conversations with people I respect—some of the wise guides I was led to by my own wounds, wanderings and wonderings—bounce this idea off of them and see where it went. I have loved these conversations and continue to learn so much from them.

So, yes, I mentioned a secret project in the subtitle. In the last few months I’ve been recording a secret podcast called The Healer with a Thousand Faces. It explores the idea that we all have the opportunity to put our healing in the service of healing the world, and teases out this pattern that our wounds might lead us to our wanderings, our wonderings, our wisdom, our work, and our wonder. I’ve recorded maybe 15 conversations so far. They are all over the place but they have led me to believe more and more this “Healer Journey” pattern offers all of us that opportunity to turn our wounds into “health bestowing wounds.” But the secret project of course isn’t the podcast. It’s just the small task on my life. I have done much healing from my own wounds, and the wanderings and wonderings continue. So I am ever trying to figure our how i can put my own healing in the service of healing the world, in the way that is uniquely mine. Hope to share more soon, and hear how this has been real for you.

Nope. Boring old zombies. Its enough to put me to sleep, but then of course, I would dream about zombies again. And as a result I’ve been forced to get curious for decades now about Americans’ a century long cultural obsession with zombies, showing up in movies, tv shows, books, comics, and most annoyingly, my nightmares.

As a mythologist and depth psychologist by training I’m also convinced that the monsters that haunt the popular culture of a society show us something about its collective shadow,—and often offer us a warning and even some wisdom. I also was taught that if you will make unconscious conscious—expose and interpret what’s really going on there—listen to the hidden message in the metaphor—it might stop haunting your dreams. So fifteen years ago I finally decided to do a little digging around the history of the undead.

What I unearthed led me back to the rantings and writings of a twentieth century mad scientist who prophesied an impending apocalypse. Ironically this cured my nightmares completely, but left me far more terrified for the state of the world we now find ourselves in… while also offering some hope for surviving what often feels like an impending apocalypse. If you’re willing to take the journey with me, I’d love to know what it quakes and shakes, stirs and disturbs in you:

Movies: Mysteries Metaphors and Meanings

Most zombie movies themselves are a relatively uncomplicated affair, but the evolution of the genre is very revealing about the moment that we find ourselves in as a culture. See what you can spot for yourself:

I was surprised to learn the word “Zombie” has African origins. It’s actual definition is “a corpse said to be revived by witchcraft, especially in certain African and Caribbean religions.” Remember I’m interested, not an expert—but the notion of the zombie seems to have come to American ears as folklore from Haiti. (I first visited Haiti at 17, and from the tarantulas to the voodoo it was indeed enchanting and terrifying to my sheltered American experience.) Stories abound about voodoo witch doctors who could put a curse on a hapless victim which seemed to kill them, only for the malevolent medicine man to resurrect them in a semi comatose state. They had to obey the control of their master, as a mindlessly obedient slave, a zombie.[1] See any cultural relevance yet?

Zombies stumbled into the silver screen in 1932’s White Zombie, -- which featured zombified Haitians, enslaved against their will, forced to work in a plantation and serve as enforcers of Bela Legosi, a white man who has harnessed the dark powers of voodoo. In this film and the films that imitated it, white folks’ clear fear of Voodoo is ever present, as is the danger that some white protagonist will also end up zombified. These films almost aways seem to have a subplot in which a woman is un/successfully turned into a zombie, as the result of yet another man confusing the desire to love a woman with the desire to enslave her. Any cultural relevance there?

The idea evolved in 1943’s Revenge of the Zombies—which featured a Nazi scientist trying to create zombie super soldiers, an enslaved unthinking undead army for the Third Reich. The tag line for this one was "DEAD MEN CAN'T DIE... but live to follow a mad-man's will!" Regardless of what actual occult activities the Nazis did/not get into despite Indianna Jones’ best efforts, the clear fear of an army of mindless evil racist soldiers is quite understandable while WWII was at its horrible height[2].

In the 1950s zombie movies were all over the place—Teenage Zombies—alien invaders[3], Russian scientists trying to enslave American citizens, crazy experiments, you name it. But many seem to be about the fear of unpredictable scientific technological advancement. To quote the great Ian Malcolm, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” And of course the cold war was filled with fear of invaders, invisible and otherwise, who were more technologically advanced, lingering memories of the near successes of Nazi science.

In 1968 George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead changed evertything. For reasons mostly unknown all the corpses everywhere resurrect as shambling hordes of “ghouls” that seek to feast on the living, terrifying a cast of characters boarded up in a random farm house. (This is the one to watch.) It was only after this movie grew in popularity that film critics began to call it a “zombie” movie—the word is never spoken in the script., But and tthe name stuck, and the “zombie” genre as we know it came to life, multiplying in all the subsequent sequels, spin offs, and inspirations into a zombie horde—with hundreds of movies alone, not to mention others forms of fiction.

Do please note here, that we’ve just taken a journey from Haitian zombies forced to mindlessly work, all the way to American zombies who stumble along and mindlessly eat, or consume. (I’ve written elsewhere about this obvious commentary on colonialism.[4]) But both worker and consumer are mindless automatons.[5]

We’ll get back to the previously mentioned zombie super soldiers next time with another set of nightmares. (But we won’t say it better than the Cranberries did in the song “Zombie”.) Long story short, many folx fear being enlisted in a cause against their will, whether it’s a religion, an imposed identity, a nationalism, etc. There’s something here about the power of culture to mindlessly enslave us. And something deeper still about being drawn into conflict—or imposed oppositional orientation--against our will.

Suddenly zombies movies are telling us something about the moment we are living in, the fears we find ourselves in, aren’t they?

Two more things to point out in the zombie genre’s evolution. In the 2000s with films like 28 Days Later and The Dawn of the Dead remake, zombies started literally running at high speed. Annoying. As if hordes of the undead weren’t enough, now they are mindlessly sprinting after you. Better get in shape if you are going to outrun the incoming apocalypse, as evidenced in the overwhelming advancing avalanche of zombie horror.

Finally one last evolution in the lore, also showing up mostly in the 2000s onward in movies and shows like The Walking Dead: Zombie plagues are now caused by a highly infectious and contagious virus, that typically spreads around the entire world in a pandemic.

So why am I telling you all of this? Again years ago in an effort to understand my nightmares, when I did a little research and I interpreted the dreams and realized some things, my nightmares just… went away. But my waking fears increased, as the messages in the movies have become all the more real. And I’m still tired of waking up tired. So let’s review, shall we?

There is a Western fascination with zombies, that has spread like a virus:

zombies who are enlisted to work,

mindless zombies,

zombies who can’t stop consuming,

and who run in a living death,

threatening to infect the entire world.

Does any of this sound familiar? Does it touch a nerve? Do I need to spell this out further? Oh don’t worry, I will. Buckle up.

Announcing the Apocalypse

Moving on from mindless zombie movies—which might not be so brainless after all--we’re going to get a little more intellectually intersting now: Because all of this reminded me of the writings of one of my great anti/heroes, a true tor/mentor in my life, who has mis/guided me by always plaguing me with hard truths. (I can’t help but think of a scene in the movie 28 Days Later in which “The end is very fucking nigh!” is spray painted on the wall of a church of all places.)

Nearly a century ago, Swiss Psychologist C.G Jung was trying to warn the world of an impending apocalypse: He claimed that the greed and speed of Western culture was like a virus that was going to infect and destroy the entire world: “The tempo of America is being taken as a norm to which all life should be directed… [but all] throughout America there are thousands suffering sick souls who are never quite hospital cases[6]… That is the sickness of Western man, and he will not rest until he has infected the whole world with his own greedy restlessness… The breathless drive for power and aggrandizement in the political, social, and intellectual sphere, gnawing at the soul of the Westerner with apparently insatiable greed, is spreading irresistibly in the East and threatens to have incalculable consequences. Not only in India but in China, too, much has already perished where once the soul lived and throve… No one wonders at his insatiability, but regards it as his lawful right, never thinking that the onesidedness of this psychic diet leads in the end to the gravest disturbances of equilibrium.”[7] Jung is saying that hunger for possessions and power—political as well as psychological—was contagious, and was spreading around the world with increasing speed. This in turn caused life to increasingly speed up in cultures that previously had a slower pace of life. Jung is exasperated by how many folks don’t bother to question their constant growing hunger for more… more possessions, more experiences, more power. Ironically, this desire for what seems like more life, faster and faster, was actually cutting people off from their vitality, and especially the traditional sources of vitality. Chasing more life was resulting in a living death.

I share Jung’s concern with how quickly this state of affairs has become normal, and that no one seems to notice. In the last century our entire way of being human has been upended by hunger and hurry. The zombie plague is here, we are all infected, and no one noticed.

Zombies, like vampires, are always hungry and never full. This is exactly how Jung describes the sickness of Western Culture. Why the hunger? Fourth century Christian mystical philosopher Gregory of Nyssa claimed that humans were created as infinite capacities for insatiable desire. This is less bad than it sounds, Nyssa believed we were created for love and connection, and that love was infinite. Thus our ability to give and receive love must also be infinite. And therefore our capacity to continually grow into that love, must also be infinite, beyond even this life. (We could explore here whether those old Christian mystics believed in reincarnation, but we won’t go down that rabbit hole.) The challenge here is if that infinite desire gets pointed at anything less than love, we will never be satisfied. And Jung might say that as we have lost the old traditional ways of finding our connection to soul, love, and meaning—God?—our hunger has increased. We are gorging ourselves with things that will never fulfill us, addictions that will never fill us up. Never mind that capitalism is ever hacking that hunger to keep us acting as consumers in a never ending spending spree. We are ever chugging salt water, chasing and chomping what will never feed us or fill us up.

All we zombies, enlisted to mindlessly work, consume, and run… till everything is destroyed. And so, like the mad scientists and aliens in those 1950s zombie movies, we invent new technologies to help us in the chase, in our speed and greed:

Jung warned that these improvements in technology, that focused on improving our external quality of life were in fact robbing us of the time and attention to focus on our internal lives—what really made us alive as opposed to undead. Our supposed progress “may do away with a great many evils whose removal seems most desirable and beneficial [disease for example!] yet this step forward, as experience shows, is all too dearly paid for with loss of spiritual culture. It is undeniably much more comfortable to live in a well-planned and hygienically equipped house, but this still does not answer the question of who-is-the-dweller-in-this-house and whether his soul rejoices in the same order and cleanliness as the house which ministers to his outer life. The [hu]man whose interests are all outside is never satisfied with what is necessary [basic necessities], but is perpetually hankering after something more and better which, true to his bias, he always seeks outside himself. He forgets completely that, for all his outward successes, he himself remains the same inwardly… the inner man continues to raise his claim [to be heard], and this can be satisfied by no outward possessions. And the less this voice is heard in the chase after the brilliant things of this world, the more the inner man becomes the source of inexplicable misfortune and uncomprehended unhappiness…”[8]

Jung claimed we were inside out, externally comfortable, internally uncomfortable. We live longer more comfortable lives while we die inside. Chasing more life faster and faster was resulting in a living death. And in our pursuit of external technological advancement, we were losing touch with the ancient sources of technology for internal exploration. This was why Jung tried to take his patients and his readers back to mythology, to yoga, to Taoism, to Zen, to the mystical and hermetic branches of Christianity. In Modern Man in Search of a Soul Jung claimed "I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life–that is to say, over 35—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life." Jung seems to have anticipated the invasion of the Western Mind with Eastern thought, and certainly influenced Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell and so many others who broadened the American spiritual conversation in the second half of the twentieth century.

To the main stream religion, Jung wrote “Christianity must indeed begin again from the very beginning” and open its eyes to its mystical and mythical origins, with the hope of helping its followers rediscovery their own mythic and mysterious meaning, their souls.[9]

Interestingly enough, around the mid twentieth century there was a movement in Catholic Scholarship called “Ressourcement” a movement that attempted to “return to the sources” by taking Catholic thought back to scripture and the early Christian mystical tradition, unfortunately known as the “Patristics.” This movement would have a huge influence on Vatican II, and give birth to the resurgence of “Contemplative” Christianity, beginning most visibly with the prolific writings of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton in the 50s and early 60s. Merton seems to have shared Jung’s concern that as we lost touch with these ancient technologies for cultivating our internal lives, we were less capable to cope with the rapid development of external technology. “What I am saying is, then, that it does us no good to make fantastic progress if we do not know how to live with it, if we cannot make good use of it, and if, in fact, our technology becomes nothing more than an expensive and complicated way of cultural disintegration.”[10] Merton offered repeated warnings against technology progressing faster than we could use it responsibly, much less process its unpredictable implications: Fossil fuels might give us cars even as quick as they cook the ozone, harnessing the power of the atom gives us nuclear energy but also nuclear weapons. And all of this is causing us to disintegrate… to decompose culturally.

Jung likewise warned our advances were dangerous: “…we exalt progress. But our progressiveness, though it may result in a great many delighted wish-fulfilments, piles up an equally gigantic Promethean debt which has to be paid off from time to time in the form of hideous catastrophes.”[11] He’d seen these catastrophes living through two world wars, but has also seen these wars fail to slate self destructive hunger for more progress, which was often self-sabotaging even in seemingly small ways.

One of my favorite teachings from Jung is the importance of paying attention to the enantiodromia—which literally means “running towards the opposite”—those behavior patterns in which our efforts and actions consistently produce the exact opposite results or impact that we intend. For example, we create devices to “save” time, but: “All time-saving devices, amongst which we must count easier means of communication and other conveniences, do not, paradoxically enough, save us time but merely cram our time so full that we have no time for anything. Hence the breathless haste, superficiality, and nervous exhaustion with all the concomitant symptoms— craving for stimulation, impatience, irritability, vacillation, etc. Such a state may lead to all sorts of other things, but never to any increased culture of the mind and heart.”[12] Why is it that the many steps we are taking to “save time” are actually costing us time, and rather than slowing down our lives, are speeding them up? Jung wrote that in the 1940s, but it is just as true today. Why are all the systems and tools that help us be more organized leaving us distracted and exhausted? Why are the tools that allow us to communicate across distances quickly—from cell phones to social media—somehow breaking down our ability to be in meaningful relationships? Why is unlimited access to information making us less intelligent? Why are so many organizations dedicated to the betterment of humanity accidentally doing harm? (It might have something to do with the fact that we haven’t dealt with our inner contradictions and addictions, and so they leak out in our creations.)

Even so, as Jung warned above, “the West” spreads its greed and its speed on the waves and webs of technological marvels. I saw this in real time when trying to travel through a large city in central China in 2006. We were delayed due to a massive digger exhuming the streets. (The little boy in me still thinks tractors are cool.) Our guide apologetically explained to us that wires were being laid throughout the city, but thenm proudly informed us that while most residents of the city had never owned a telephone, all of them would have high speed internet by the end of the year. I would never deny or decry the democratizing of information and communication. And yet I couldn’t help but wonder if this was a gift or a curse on that city. Rapidly advancing technology is changing the way we think and connect in culture and community, altering centuries of traditional wisdom and guidance for knowing how to be human, and human(s) being together.

Technology helps us go faster, but then we push our brains and bodies to keep up with technology, to out run our technology in order to have a moment’s peace, even as our mental capacity for being together is disintegrating. I can’t help recall that zombies are mindless, but in many stories zombies crave brains, and can be killed only by destroying the brain.

In The Heart of Trauma, Bonnie Bandenoch writes about Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships. She leads me to reflect on how the speed of technological progress shapes our thinking, remaking us in its image: In considering how the different sides of our brain focus on different types of thinking--the left hemisphere of our brains focuses on logical task oriented thinking, and the right hemisphere focuses on abstract creative connective intelligence—it seems that in moments of trauma danger the “left” thinking of cold logic kicks in to help us make quick decisions focused on survival. Of course traumatic triggers can also kick us into fight or flight. Badenoch warns how our speedy culture is increasing leaving its right brain left behind: always triggering and tricking us into fight or flight to go fast: “[Because] Our left-centric way of being… is busy disassembling and reassembling pieces of living experience in order to control and manipulate, it can have the felt sense of a manufacturing plant whose values are ‘how much it can do, how fast it can do it, and with what degree of precision’ (McGilchrist, 2009, p.430). This drives us to move at an ever-accelerating pace that leaves very little time for the slow, leisurely face-to-face encounters that allow us to truly see, hear, and support each other, particularly in moments of fear and pain. We might say that we are moving at the speed of trauma.[13] At the same time, the left focuses us on task over relationship, correct behavior over moment-to-moment lived experience, judgment over curiosity. All of these lead toward blindness to the opportunity for connection that is alive in every moment.”[14] If Badenoch is right, our right brains are being left behind: this type of technological thinking is increasingly eroding our connection to our creative depths and each other, right in a moment of fear and pain when we most need each other.

Now we are going to take one last step into this, one last painful look in the mirror, and I warn you, you may not like the corpse like face you see there. But, lest we assume we who are dedicated to the spiritual and material betterment of our fellow humans are already in on Jung’s warnings and immune to this infection, Jung offers one last caution: “[Hu]man[ity] has come to be [hu]man[ity]'s worst enemy. It seems to me that we have reached the limit of our evolution, the point from which we can advance no further.” Why you ask? “Humanity started from an unconscious state and has ever striven for greater consciousness.” Yes, Jung’s entire career was about helping us encounter the unconscious and bring it into consciousness. But: “The development of consciousness is a burden, the suffering and the blessing of [hu]mankind. Each new discovery leads to greater consciousness, and the path along which we are going …inevitably calls for greater responsibility[15] and enforces a great change in ourselves.”[16] Let’s unpack this for a minute. Jung is saying that when we increase our consciousness—when we grow, we also increase our burden of responsibility to change, to live differently in accordance with those new insights. The more I get in touch with my shadow, the more that familiarity is going to ask something of me. I have to consider the implications for you and for me, and to integrate that and live it. This is why Jung repeatedly referred to growth as hard ethical work. Jungian psychologist Eric Neuman’s brilliant book Depth Psychology and a New Ethic claimed unsurprisingly that by introducing the world to shadow work, Depth Psychology was calling the world to a New Ethic. And yes that is difficult, slow work.

But Jung is saying—decades ago—we are now hitting the limits of our evolution, our ability to grow and integrate that growth responsibly. And I believe it is because he is telling us that we are going too fast, and growing too fast. When our consciousness has to keep up with the implications of our technological progress, we have to grow at the same break neck speed of our technology, and all the unpredictable responsibilities that come with it—how to use smart phones, social media, artificial intelligence, and gasoline, ethically. Likewise as technology makes the world smaller, and we become more aware of the experience of our neighbors, that knowledge demands that I must keep up with the responsibilities of my actions on their well being—my white privilege, the international impacts of my spending money in the Walmart on the corner vs a corner boutique shop, my shopping on Amazon, my purchasing the electronics I used to make that purchase or type this article. As I sit here in a coffee shop in Albuquerque, with a few keystrokes I may be affecting warehouse workers across town, child workers in south east Asia, and incurring the judgement of folx online that I’ve never met in person.

Meanwhile as I attempt to do my inner work, I want to stay connected to kindred spirits. But staying conversant with friends who are doing their own inner work means that I need to consume all the latest content on Internal Family Systems Theory, Polyamory, Psychedelics, Somatics, Sexuality, the Enneagram, and Dungeons and Dragons on a slow day, just to have a conversation, regardless of where I stand on these topics. And yes, there is pressure to keep up.

The demands of this spiritual psychological and ethical progress are nowhere more prevalent than with Political Progressives, among whom I consider myself. Whether by accident, intention, or infection, our progressiveness moves at the same speed as technological progress. We are attempting to increase what we know, so we can heal, grow, and show up so fast, that we cannot keep up with our “increased consciousness”, and the responsibilities that calls for any more than we can keep up with the ramifications of fossil fuels, smart phones, antidepressants or AI. But you are expected to. You need to be up on the latest writings on your attachment style, all the inner personalities that IFS wants you to get to know, what’s up with everything from polyamory to politics to which pronouns to use for your friends—I myself prefer “they / them” by the way, so I get it—where to recycle, how to be an ally, how to be an advocate, what to call the homeless these days—not the homeless by the way—, how to wear and word you’re woke, how not to get canceled, how to deal with your religious trauma, what artists and teachers have been canceled, what is happening moment by moment in a 24 hour news cycle and why we are boycotting Target right now. And everything you learn calls you to a new place of responsible action. Can you keep up? I want to. Yet I have to wonder, have we tried to keep pace or even out run the pace of empire?[GU3] Have we demanded too much, too fast, to go-go-go, grow-grow-grow, and show-show-show it? (Not to mention that you are expected to demonstrate your inability to keep up with compensatory performative urgency and performative misery, or as I recently heard it described “tight white butthole syndrome.”[17])

I will only mention in passing that too many of us have experienced how cannibalistic progressive communities and organizations have become, especially of the predominantly white variety. Like voracious zombies we are ever on alert for an excuse to take a bite out of each other. Then we put a bullet in the head of anyone we suspect has been bit, not knowing we are all infected, as we eat each other alive. Cancel culture is a cancer, and it grows like a cancer, devouring everything it touches.[18]

There is another word for this, one that defines the zombie genre: violence.

You know: Go-go-go, and grow-grow-grow move at the same tempo, often the terrible demanding drums of domination, the enslaving energy of empire. But those of us who work for change are working as hard as we can as fast as we can. And it’s just not working.

Because meanwhile, it seems these days, the conservative masses have themselves said, NO. No more progress. No more DEI, no more political correctness, no more learning new genders, no more having to stretch to give more space to women, to BIPOC folks, to immigrants etc. Old fashioned folks have been pushed too far too fast, it’s too much and THEY HAVE SAID NO. NO MORE. Make America Great Again may as well be, Make America Manageable Again. The red hat is a red light to a progressive culture moving at break neck speed. Nope. No more progress. No more feeling or learning new things.

Let me be extra clear here: I don’t see this conservative development as a virtue. I’m not saying this is a misguided step in the right direction. This to me feels like a literal apocalypse, with the freedom and well-being of so many I love not yet realized, and the hard earned freedom and well-being of so many I love in danger.

But perhaps what we progressives have most in common with the conservatives is the exhaustion, and the experience of ever being agitated away from attention, and programmed to over plan and under perform: Backpacker theologian Beldan Lane warns us: “Our conditioning as members of a consumer society prevents us from abandoning hope that, with sufficient planning, we might yet be able to see and do [and fix!] everything. To move slowly and deliberately through the world, attending to one thing at a time, strikes us as radically subversive, even un-American. We cringe from the idea of relinquishing, in any moment, all but one of the infinite possibilities offered us by our culture. Plagued by a highly diffused attention, we give ourselves to everything lightly. That is our poverty. In saying yes to everything, we attend to nothing.”[19]

Friends this is where I live. I’ve never been chased by zombies in the real waking world, but in my efforts to make a difference I have lived the real nightmare of 60 hour work weeks, with ten hours a day on zoom, and I have delt with the constant vertigo, the body aches, the ulcers, and the insomnia that leads to, living in a constant state of activation, agitation, and distraction, feeling like the walking dead.

And I help teach the balance of contemplation and action for a living.

We progressives especially are going faster and faster in an attempt to stop the spread of hate and fascism and empire, in an attempt to wake people up and hold them responsible. But if Jung is correct, we may be blind to the ways we are actually defeating ourselves, spreading the very virus that is destroying the world, in our efforts to counter violence with violence.

Our technologically assisted attempt to do more things at once may be an attempt to grasp more power than we can hold, to force ourselves, our lives, and the world to be what we think it should be. This very effort may instead be disempowering and disintegrating us. Walter Brueggeman writes: “Multitasking is the drive to be more than we are, to control more than we do, to extend our power and our effectiveness. Such practice yields a divided self, with full attention given to nothing.” Brueggeman is an Old Testament Scholar who councils us to instead slow down and return to the sacred practice of rest, in his book Sabbath: Saying No to the Culture of Now.[20]

Public theologian Tricia Hersey has taken up the cause here, in her work on the “Nap Ministry” and her book Rest is Resistance. She declares with prophetic warning: “When we finally wake up to the truth of what a machine-level pace of labor has done to our physical bodies, our self-esteem, and our Spirits, the unraveling begins…There is no way around this. We have all participated willingly and unwillingly in the allure of grind culture. We have done this because since birth, we slowly are indoctrinated into the cult of urgency and disconnection... these toxic systems refuse to see the inherent divinity in human beings and have used bodies as a tool for production, evil, and destruction for centuries. Grind culture has made us all human machines, willing and ready to donate our lives to a capitalist system that thrives by placing profits over people… I believe the powers that be don't want us rested because they know that if we rest enough, we are going to figure out what is really happening and overturn the entire system. Exhaustion keeps us numb, keeps us zombie-like, and keeps us on their clock.”[21] So we see what the speed of these toxic systems are doing to us.

So now what? Is it too late? Can we hope for a cure?

Contemplation as Vaccination

In his book Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity Peter Kingsley claims Jung was a prophet foretelling the end of Western Civilization, that it’s too late. (But not too late, as the title seems to suggest for all of humanity, or whatever comes after the dominance of the west.) If Kingsley is right, we will write Jung’s condemnation of unbridled progress off as insane, because to an insane culture sanity always looks crazy: “Greeks and Romans, too, almost made a business of dismissing their own prophets as mad. And this intimate habit of closely associating the prophet whose job it was to bring a little sanity and balance back into the world-with insanity still clings tight to the roots of western culture.”[22] Yup. But I don’t know that its hopeless. I do agree that Jung was a prophet who tried repeatedly to warn us, a madman spraying words on the wall: “The End is Very Fucking Nigh”. But also, always the warning came with some wisdom, hoping to turn us back from the brink.[23]

In a 1931 interview Jung said that the world was being enlisted in the eager ever infectious quickening pace of American life : “The tempo of America is being taken as a norm to which life should be directed….[but] throughout America there are thousands suffering sick souls who are never quite hospital cases.” But ever the doctor, he offered a treatment plan: “What America needs in the face of the tremendous urge toward uniformity, desire of things, the desire for complications in life, for being like one's neighbors, for making records, et cetera, is one great healthy ability to say ‘No.’ To rest a minute and realize that many of the things being sought are unnecessary to a happy life…We are awakening a little to the feeling that something is wrong in the world… We want simplicity. We are suffering… from a need of simple things.”

Jung’s revolutionary solution starts small with simplicity and slowing down. Is that naïve? He certainly took his own medicine, and he quite literally opted out of technology and unplugged. Jung built a stone house with no electricity and moved in. He established a more natural home base in an increasingly chaotic technological world. While many of us could not afford that full time option, are there ways we can slow down and unplug?

In The Solace of Fierce Landscapes Beldon Lane reminds us how unnatural our current lives are. He also reminds us this is not the first time this has happened, and he counsels us to look to others who said “NO!” to the infection of dominant culture. In fact in the third century right when the Roman Empire was taking over the Christian religion, in what could have been a moment of great panic and fear, many mystics and seekers, revolutionaries in their own right, headed out into the desert to go deeper.

Merton tells us this Imperial “Christian” civilized “Society… was regarded by them as a shipwreck from which each single individual [hu]man had to swim for his life.”[24] Like Jung and many of the survivors in most zombie movies, they fled for their lives out of the cities into the safety of the wilderness. (Ironic that we think of wild places as unsafe.) These Desert Fathers and Mothers headed out into the natural spaces to slow down and pursue the physical practice of hesychia—stillness, and the mental practice of apathea—learning not to care about what didn’t matter. This of course freed up their energy and attention to care about what mattered most. Lane reminds us we too can practice this, but it requires us to be in one place at one time mentally and physically: “Full awareness of the unnoteworthy immediate moment is the grandest and hardest of all spiritual excercises… Learning to focus one's attention in any single sphere (no matter how mundane or commonplace) is a training in the attention needed for more important encounters…One only can love what one stops to observe. ‘Nothing is more essential to prayer’— said Evagrius, ‘than attentiveness.’”[25]

So, what are we to do? We infected zombies who are running ourselves into the grave, working ourselves to death, consumed with insatiable hunger, mindlessly distracted, our right mind left behind, over stimulated, triggered, and spread so thin we do not notice our brains boiling and our bodies literally falling apart around us?

Can we come back to life? Is it too late?

Jung, Merton, Lane and Hersey seem to be telling us that we need to return to re-vitalizing practices— we need to practice running for our lives, back to our lives: Finding even tiny moments to slow down and return to nature, or our own natural rhythms—what some call contemplative practice—might simply be practicing paying attention to the fact that we are, in fact, alive.

Let me write that again: contemplation is practicing paying attention to life and being alive. And it might be our best vaccination against the zombie virus.

Yes, it may be as simple as checking in to see if you are still alive. Let’s try it:

First, lets check for a pulse:

The greatest ancient Christian contemplative practice is the Prayer of the Heart, where we sink our mind into our heart and let it be recollected and re-educated. Can you take a moment right now to pay attention to your heart beating in your chest?

Give this a minute. Find your heart beat.

Can you focus your thoughts, only on your heart?

Stay with this.

Can you send your heart some love and thank it for beating?

Second, are you breathing? So many Eastern Practices—and the prayer of the heart—tell us to follow our breath… to pay attention to your breathing and slow it down. Can you simply take a moment right now to be still, to simply breathe?

Give this a second.

Can you observe your breath?

Can you slow it down?

Can you thank your nostrils and lungs for keeping you alive? Send them some love?

As you slow your breathing, can you feel your heart rate slowing down?

Do you have breath and a heart beat still? If so, you are still alive. Tell yourself there is still hope.

You can choose to begin there: focus attention on your breath and your heartbeat and send yourself love.

There is a beautifully underrated zombie film called Warm Bodies—which is also a retelling of Shakespeare’s Romio and Juliet. In it, a zombie experiences a flicker of beauty, and it causes his heart to start beating again. It’s love that brings him back from the living dead.

Maybe that’s the answer as well. Beldon Lane told us that paying attention was a form of loving. Maybe we can begin to cultivate the acts of giving small moments of loving attention—to our pets, our partners, to our problematic parents even, to our problematic internal parts?—to our neighbors, really, anything anywhere as long as it’s one something somewhere. We can eventually work our way up to problematic political adversaries, but first we start small. (Remember, in trying to pay attention to everything, we pay attention to nothing. In trying to love everything well, we love nothing well.)

This I think, is why contemplative practice is making a come back. It’s practice for being alive again, an invitation to resurrection, dying to distraction one tiny little hard fought moment of rest at a time.

From there, perhaps we can choose to wake up to what is happening.

We can choose to find our voice, to say NO. No more.

We can choose to SLOW DOWN, we can choose to practice a little stillness in our lives.

We can choose what to care about even when the world tells us that everything is an emergency.

Let go of performative urgency, let go of performative misery. It’s not really helping anyone. I promise. Unclench your butt hole.

Unplug, get off the tread mill, get off the phone, even if it’s just for a moment.

Turn off, tune out, drop in.

In practicing saying NO, you can choose, truly what you say YES to.

From there maybe we can plug back in to the sources of life:

Plug back in to the old spiritual technologies .

Plug back in to our own depths.

Plug back in to relationships.

Re-connect & re-member.

Plug back into Love.

Maybe give it a try?

More soon.

Oh, and a PS—You may notice that I have also referred to “prayer” interchangeably with contemplative practice. Is prayer another way to talk about paying attention to—and thus loving—Life—or to the Source of life which may be called God? I would argue that yes it is. Beldon Lane teaches contemplative prayer is simply a surrender of our striving to let love happen. In “the letting go of one's thoughts, the emptying of the self, the act of loving in silent contemplation what cannot be rationally understood… The ego is relinquished, along with its constant flow of chatter and illusion of control, so that love may happen. Love, after all is the only way God can he known.”[26] But if you prefer to pray the old fashioned way, I’ll only add, this is probably a good time to focus on the Source of Life and ask for help, and call on powers greater than our own. I sure do.

[1] The 1985 book The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombies, and Magic is a wild read if you want to see this through American eyes, which is what I’m discussing in this article. If you want to take this seriously, you should read something written by an actual practitioner.

[2] Not to mention the irony of white supremacists repeatedly attempting to harness the magic of the very cultures they deemed inferior.

[3] UFOs, and the fear that an even more powerful “other” might drop out of the sky to colonize us, are a phenomena for another day.

[4] The reality of how Europeans’ insatiable craving for sugar caused the enslaved and near destruction Haiti, is more disturbing than any film.

[5] This is especially interesting, because the script of dark skinned zombies chasing white protagonists is flipped in Night of the Living Dead, as the sole black actor is the protagonist chased by white ghouls and surrounded by hapless white refugees. See my one season podcast Cinemartyr for an in depth discussion of this one.

[6] This opening line is taken from a 1931 interview with Whit Burnett, for New York’s Sun magazine. A longer excerpt appears later in this essay.

[7] (CW II, PAR. 962).

[8] Same source as above.

[9] (Jung CW12: par.13. See also 14,15).

[10] Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander pg. 67-68

[11] (CW 9 par. 276)

[12] (CW 18, PAR. 1343)

[13] Emphasis mine.

[14] (pg 27).

[15] Emphasis mine

[16] (CW II par 962).

[17] From a conversation with Amelia Weesies

[18] Recently Fr Richard Rohr reminded me several of us this the reason he founded the Center for Action and Contemplation, after starting out on the “community of communities”—over a dozen alterative progressive Christian communities working for social change and progress—and then watching all of them slowly implode and eat themselves alive. He explores this in his book, Simplicity.

[19] The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality—my all time favorite book—pg 189

[20] (quote on pg 67).

[21] pgs 20, 17,7,29

[22] Pg 249

[23] I default to the best definition of “prophet” I have yet read from retired Episcopal bishop and Choctaw elder Steven Charleston: “Prophets appear first as an early warning system within any culture at risk.… They serve as teachers to instruct people about what to do to end their suffering and alter the course of destruction. Finally, they are mystics who describe the future and guide people into it themselves…. Prophets are immersed in…ancient teaching…[and] their tradition even as they talk about how that tradition will need to change to meet new challenges.” Check out Steven Charleston’s book We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope if you are interested in learning more.

[24] The Wisdom of the Desert pg 3

[25] (pg 83).

[26] (pgs 67,73).