“You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame. How else could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra—
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It’s been two-and-a-half years since I’ve written on this website. Two-and-a-half years since I deleted Facebook, canceled Netflix and HBO, and whittled the number of friends I regularly talked to down to four. Decluttering life by moving away from technology and unproductive activities, as well as knowing which relationships to prioritize and which to let go, has worked wonders for my inner peace.
Prior to making these choices, there was a feeling of being overwhelmed by multiple writing projects that I wanted to do well and not mediocre:
When it came to reviews of books or films, there was a weird pressure (self-imposed) to always be reading or watching something.
When it came to op-eds, keeping up with world events involved not only maintaining contact with a fair number of journalists, activists, and other writers, but also involved a lot of travel to different places (which involved having to save a lot of money).
When it came to my essays on history, the amount of labor that went into research took up so much time and money that producing them without some form of monetization no longer made sense (on one occasion, I spent $100 on a rare book to get a single citation, for an article that only generated 300 clicks the first six months and no donations).
I was tired. But more than just tired, it became apparent that if writing was going to be anything more than a hobby, I would need time to develop better strategies for revenue.
So in December 2020, I took a break.
My eight thousand regular readers gradually (then rapidly) left to find more active authors. Editors of different magazines detected my lack of enthusiasm for their pitches, and the regular exchange of emails once filled with suggestions, rejections, and banter dried up. Within three to four months, digital tumbleweeds were blowing across inboxes that were once full. And for the time being, that was exactly what I wanted.
What since has transpired over the course of 30 months has, surprisingly, been more travel; I’ve dived deeper into a love of cigars since having my first one in 2017; my reading has become more regular—averaging one book a month—with classical literature being prioritized over other genres (more about which classic literature in Whiplash II); I paused my career as a defense contractor; I moved to Mexico; I finished a southern crime novel; and after delaying for far too long, I’m finally completing my bachelors degree online.
But what is likely the most noticeable difference about my life now, in contrast to what it was two-and-a-half years ago, is that I’ve gotten married. My wife is a wonderful woman with a sharp mind and generous heart, who looks like a supermodel and makes the best damn tacos in the universe. She likes my love letters and I like watching her dance; she does not like my dark and dirty humor, and I don’t like her very specific instructions for laundry. All of which is to say that we make each other happy in ways men and women should make each other happy, and we drive each other crazy in all the ways men and women should drive each other crazy.
At the risk of coming across overly sentimental, there are certain songs that pair with certain seasons of life, and in the past few months the lyrics to “Ordinary World” have struck me as a perfect match for mine:
What has happened to it all?
Crazy, some’d say
Where is the life that I recognize?
Gone awayBut I won’t cry for yesterday
There’s an ordinary world
Somehow I have to find
And as I try to make my way
To the ordinary world
I will learn to survive
Yet though these developments certainly impacted the trajectory of my life for the better, they are not entirely or even mostly the reasons for how I have changed, or, for that matter, why I have chosen to resume writing after such a short amount of time (originally I had planned a break of at least five years).
A big part of what’s changed about me in the time I’ve been away is that I believe in God again.
Which couldn’t have happened at a more inconvenient time.
In February 2020, just before the pandemic, I had completed a book called Embrace The Void Bravely (& Other Secular Sermons), which made the case for living an optimistic life without belief in God. Specifically it was a book that offered a cheerful nihilist approach to love, purpose, friendship, happiness, and death. It received a lot of praise and was blogged about and posted across platforms like Instagram and Facebook by fans who lauded its “hope” and “affirmation”. Looking back, I can’t help but wonder if they continued feeling that way about the book’s advice during the outbreak of Covid and the worldwide lockdowns… because its author folded like a cheap lawn chair in a light breeze. But why?
You notice the quote at the top of the essay from Nietzsche. There are two kinds of people who read Nietzsche: 1) readers who take his “death of God” as a grim warning about the emptiness of modernity and what lengths humans will go to fill the void of meaning, and 2) readers who see Nietzsche’s “death of God” as an invitation to a neverending party where we, over time, can “create meaning” along with futuristic paradises. In my case, I was the latter Nietzsche reader who became the former. Until very recently in life, I bought into the entire “basket” of naive modern presuppositions: the inherent goodness of human beings, the trajectory of history inevitably going in the direction of progress (rather than history being cyclical with periods of advancement and decline, and “progress” being a somewhat subjective term), the fundamental desire of all persons being liberty and not safety, and that all of that was quite independent of a “fairy tale epistemology” and able to be derived from pure reason. That—as the slogan of the American Humanist Association went—we were “Good Without God”.
Then 30 happened. When I turned 30, we were a year into the pandemic, and everything I thought true about the irreligious contemporary world over those past 12 months had been completely upended.
“Human beings naturally long for liberty.” Nope.
“Human beings will rebel when treated like cattle in need of herding.” Nope.
“Western governments will surely recognize that people have needs beyond mere sustenance, and consequently will end lockdowns as quickly as possible.” Once again, a big fat NOPE.
(“Human beings are inherently good?” Hahahaha.)
I was astonished—and maybe for the first time in life, genuinely repulsed—by not only the public’s willingness to comply with extreme pandemic restrictions, but eagerness to comply and shame others into complying. Stories of nosy self-deputized assholes shouting at people for jogging, cycling, and going to the park during lockdowns. An account of a neighbor peeking over the fence and telling a woman, “That’s the second time you’ve been out in your yard today.” A news report of a man spitting on hikers who dared to walk the trails without wearing their masks. Or my personal favorite: this finger-wagging article written by a weak, lispy, clown university administrator panicking that college students might be enjoying Thanksgiving at the same table as their families instead of eating “responsibly” in separate rooms (as you peruse this guy’s prissy op-ed, rend your clothes and cover yourself with ashes over the fact we’re no longer a nation that enjoys John Wayne).
But all these examples of excess and paranoia on the part of individual losers pale in comparison to what governments got away with during this time. Australia using facial recognition software to “bust” people defying lockdowns, and sending people to detention camps if they were infected (and the New York Times justifying it). Scotland denying IVF treatments to women who refused to be vaccinated. New Jersey using drones to disperse outside gatherings. If the excessive pandemic restrictions achieved one good thing, it was that they proved to me that the idea that Enlightenment secularism was somehow the “guarantor of rights” was a joke I had taken far too seriously far too long.
Thus began a reconsideration of everything I once cherished about political secularism, the supremacy of science over other forms of knowledge, the West, and the Enlightenment project. It became immediately (and uncomfortably) apparent to me that without a transcendent order to appeal to for what was just and unjust, our liberties could easily be discarded (not just by world leaders but by ourselves) in order to embrace a technocratic elitist dystopia comprised of “experts” and serfs. But worse, a dystopia not restricted to any one place; a dystopia truly inescapable because it would cover the whole world.
A seasoned believer will quickly note that God emerging from the embers of my charred heathen imagination was—at least initially—rooted less in curiosity and enchantment, and more in despair. That my Damascus moment came about as a frightened response to liberal scientism’s authoritarian streak; to mention nothing of my simultaneous growing hatred of the public spaces of Western countries, immersed as they were in distraction, fear, uniformity, and vulgar advertising, while empty sloganeering masqueraded as “wisdom” on signs, stickers, and clothing.
Ever the history enthusiast, I couldn’t help but notice that the so-called “Dark Ages” produced some of the most magnificent mythology, poetry, cathedrals, and personal and family legacies filled with grand purpose (good and evil, granted, but grand nonetheless). Meanwhile our “so much better” time produced hopelessness (as relativism is incapable of setting goals to hope for), atomized individuals, hyper-specialization, and ugly brutalist architecture built around concepts like “sustainability” and “efficiency” but not beauty and certainly not meaning.
But when my “newly-minted redpilled trad” rage somewhat subsided, flirtation with a return to theism didn’t remain at despair. Curiosity and enchantment did follow.
From early-2021 to early-2022, a metaphysical boredom paired with a worldview crisis prompted me to seek out a one-time encounter with psychedelics. When you’ve been an atheist for eight years, and you’ve had the mindset for so long that says there is no reality beyond the physical, it’s almost impossible to “jolt” yourself out of that rut without a little extra help. Or at least for me that was the case. And for so many, I think, the transition process from belief to cold rationalism functions as an irreversible “lobotomy of imagination” which filters the sublime, the fantastic, the miraculous into black-and-gray matter. But in the spring of last year, a very mild dose of psilocybin was able to clear the neural pathway of a man who couldn’t entertain the existence of a supernatural realm—even when I really wanted to—and allowed me to open my heart to the possibility of a coexistent spiritual world and its Sovereign Ruler. Forgiveness for all the terrible things I’d done? What a beautiful aspiration! A life after death? What hope! What joy!
Of course, I am not unaware that to abandon “dignified reason” for faith over a drug trip sounds ridiculous, and in the minds of most skeptics, returning from materialism to spirituality under any circumstance is a bit like putting wet swimtrunks back on after drying off. You just don’t do it. Unbelief is supposed to be a one-way ticket. And also yes, I know, I really know, you really don’t need to tell me: I get that neither drugs nor pandemics nor a “kids these days” diatribe is proof of God.
But it’s not my goal to give you proof, however one might define that, although this isn’t because I don’t have any arguments. On the contrary there have been plenty of arguments for the existence of God I have found persuasive. It’s just that I’m wary of presenting a return to faith as a mere ascent of the intellect, when in truth it’s actually a much grander transformation in how one emotionally beholds the world, the cosmos, and every creature therein. Thus, instead of offering here a list of reasons for God’s existence, I’d rather be more intimate and share a prayer I’ve been praying everyday multiple times a day for the past several months:
“Lord, I believe in you. Help me in my unbelief.”
On the surface this seems a very strange kind of prayer, but if thought about for more than five seconds, it’s anything but strange. Because it’s not as if a rediscovery or re-acceptance of a transcendent reality is somehow a magic switch that, once flipped, undoes in an instant all the habits of an unbelieving mind. The reversal of unbelief by belief is at once a fast and slow-moving process. Sure, you believe in a God, and that’s a big step, but do you really think He had a Son? Born of a Virgin Mother? Who is the Redeemer of past, present, and future, and existed in history yet also stands outside of it in some infinite spiritual realm? Okay, you accept all of that, but do you really wanna love your neighbor? Bless those that curse you? This takes a lot of time. And more than a lot of time, it takes a certain type of praying for a higher power to chisel away the residual doubt that stubbornly remains (or even is subconscious).
And it’s for this reason, I suppose, why I’m being somewhat chickenshit—or maybe not quite “chickenshit”, but noticeably evasive—about giving a complete account on how I arrived at God and how I arrived at Christianity out of all the other organized religions. The purpose of this essay is to update readers upon my return about why my future writing will be different from past writing, but I DON’T think it’s the right format for a full-on conversion account.
For that, a book is needed. And a book is exactly what I’m working on right now titled The Epiphanies.
The Epiphanies will actually be two books in one volume describing in detail my religious and political shift (the first, about religion, being called Riddles From Empty Space, and the second, about politics, being called Cravats Roasting On A Burning Tire), set to be released either late this year or early next year. At the moment all I can say about the project is that the cover is going to look very elegant, I’ve hired a magnificent illustrator, and the partial manuscript I’ve sent out has collected some really kind endorsements by some great people.
While the primary focus of Riddles From Empty Space will be my conversion to Christianity broadly (as the target audience is young men who don’t believe at all and feel adrift), it will also touch on my conversion to the Eastern Orthodox Church.
To give a quick preview, one of many reasons why I chose Eastern Orthodoxy was because it wasn’t cool. I have a suspicion of “hip” spiritualities, see. I had it when I was an atheist and I have it now. There’s something too easy, too cheap, too kitsch about crystal jewelry, rock runes, horoscope tattoos, flowerbed Buddhas, or dreamcatchers on a Sedona storefront. The way Western culture generally treats spirituality resembles the way it treats everything else: as a product. Our conception of the mystical is inauthentic, shallow, and consumerist. Typing “spirituality” into the Amazon and Ebay search bars reveals titles that reflect a boundless narcissism at once comical and desolate:
Discovering Your God-Self
Twist Your Fate: Manifest Success
Becoming Supernatural: How Common People Are Doing The Uncommon
The Altar Within: A Radical Guide To Liberate The Divine Self
Spirituality For Badasses: How To Find Happiness Without Losing Your Cool
No notion that embarking on a journey away from materialism and toward the transcendent might cost us something. That there might be a negotiation somewhere along the way, a total surrender, a sacrifice, a price of admission. Or that an otherworldly entity would ever demand we change as individuals in some manner we might not want to but must in order to gain its favor. We write and think and speak about God as if He were a celestial Tony Robbins, assuring us that our precious identities are more sacred than He is. A genie in a lamp you rub three times for luck on your next lip injection. Worse, a parallel spirituality seems to have emerged in the West where “self-love” has finally reached the destination it was heading for all along: self-worship. A non-religion religion where “each one of us is our own god” as long as we “manifest that” somehow. Altars within, and all that jazz.
This was one of the reasons why the unpopularity of Christianity made me revisit it as a concept and pay more attention. Nobody likes the Christians. I mean, people don’t hate the nominal ones that show up for the nativity and easter plays but otherwise never go to church. And no one finds the Christian threatening who says “Yeah I love Jesus” but whose real religion is football or Joel Osteen. But Christians who take their faith seriously? Christians who attend worship weekly? Christians who attempt to apply scripture, the wisdom of the early fathers, and the traditions of the saints to their lives? Christians who raise their kids in the faith? Christians who follow some form of liturgical calendar and pray regularly? People don’t like those kinds of Christians. Those kinds of Christians make us feel bad, and if there’s one indissoluble truth Americans cling to in the 21st century, it’s that we’re not ever supposed to feel bad.
Naturally then, if it was serious Christianity our culture and media derided, then there must have been something about it that threatened culture and media as they currently existed, and dammit I wanted to be a part of that!
Yet taking this approach meant recognizing that within Christendom, too, there were Neville Chamberlain-esque groups determined to appease hostile crowds and conform to the demands of sinister activists and apparatchiks:
The “Disneyfied” rock concert megachurches, where it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or woman, you’re gonna sing about Jesus like He’s your boyfriend; and who refuse to take definitive stands on divisive issues, mistaking spinelessness for love and acquiescence for humility.
The “progressive” churches who—with a straight face—hold that a first century Galilean living in one of the harshest periods of recorded history just so happened to hold all the political and social views white upperclass lesbians adopted ten years ago; and that, moreover, you don’t even have to believe that that Galilean is the actual Son of God. He can just be a “symbol”.
The ex-vangelical sisterhood blogosphere—heavily overlapping with the first and second groups above—who read the Bible like it’s a Gilmore Girls episode complete with quirky characters and ridiculous motives, not to be taken seriously, only snickered at, and if taken “seriously”, only with the ultimate intent of dismissing whatever is read. For those who weren’t big fans of exegesis, or really any kind of coherent hermeneutic, the twee musings from Strong Women practicing “radical empathy” and excusing every sin in the (literal) book while Taylor Swift played somewhere in the background seemed to be a hit.
But Orthodoxy appeared to be the opposite of all this. Orthodoxy was intentionally un-hip.
Almost nobody on the outside held a positive view of its chanting and bowing and weird-looking icons and repetitions.
Almost nobody on the outside appreciated its incessant demand that its adherents deny themselves rather than “empower” themselves (or, more nuanced, that self-denial leads to a type of empowerment the world can’t provide).
Almost nobody on the outside understood why it preferred stoic reverence to emotional theatrics, nor appreciated that its parishes closer resembled Byzantine fortresses than high school gymnasiums.
And yet, there it was, like broccoli in ice cream, a tucked-in t-shirt, Iggy Pop at a Miami beauty pageant, having survived for two millenniums and passing through the graveyard of once-trendy-now-forgotten spiritualities along the way. And that’s how it’s done so. Orthodoxy makes no space for feel-good gimmicks, “relevance”, or even small liturgical “updates”, because a central part of its modus operandi is refusing to give people what they want. “Your wants are not to be trusted,” it says, “Your ideas about what is ‘fair’, ‘just’, or ‘moral’ are not to be trusted. You exist in a world that brainwashes its inhabitants into thinking that what is foolish or evil is ‘life-giving’ and ‘good’, and therefore you must learn what true wisdom and beauty are, even if initially what you learn seems counterintuitive or feels wrong.”
This call for submission, echoing the words of St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians (3:19), is an invitation to all who join to confront their Jungian shadow. To slay the dragon in true St. George fashion, and integrate the rough parts of ourselves into the whole of who we are, so it can be channeled for good when going out and confronting the stupid, the banal, and the evil. Faced with the mission Orthodoxy calls us to, which is not “to live a healthy and blessed life” or to merely “feel affirmed as God’s children”, but instead to be at war with principalities and powers and forces unseen, how could I turn away from such a demanding, uncompromising, martial, meaning-filled way of life?
And it hits me—as I was reading just a few hours ago, a news article about how the Anglicans are considering “gender neutral language” for God in their liturgies—that Eastern Orthodoxy is perhaps the only Christian branch that’s stalwartly maintained its masculine character. Ritualistic, deep, ancient, foreboding in all the right ways, and confident (not embarrassed) about the truth it carries, it outshines so many of the Western denominations that have exchanged the boldness of death overcome for placation, emptiness, mawkishness, and timidity. Which is why a portion of Riddles From Empty Space will be devoted to why young men in search of spiritual community should look into Orthodoxy before being dragged by their girlfriends or wives to a church where “following Jesus” means waving their arms and crying.
I realize I’ve given a warp speed update on a conversion—not only to theism, which itself is a tectonic shift in worldview—but to an organized religion. But, again, keep in mind this is an update, not an account. Be on the lookout for The Epiphanies either at the end of this year or beginning of next year.
Pivoting back to what I said in the beginning about how monetization will impact my new approach to output, what this likely means is that my essays will be shorter. My main revenue will come through book sales, and my marketing will be geared toward the sale of those books. With that in mind, I do encourage you to sign up for my Cowboy Mystic newsletter. I know you’re asked by every single website you click on to join a list, and if you’re like me you never do. But for independent authors who don’t rely on agents and who don’t have huge advertising budgets, mailing lists are our bread and butter. You will never receive any junk or spam, and your email will never be sold to other parties. All you will receive are updates on new essays and book releases as well as any giveaways or deals.
Soon to write Part II, which will give an update (not an account) on how I’ve changed politically, my mind wanders to a quote by Vladimir Solovyov, who, in his 1889 book Russia & The Universal Church, taught that “If the faith communicated by the Church to humanity is a living faith, and if the grace of the sacraments is an effectual grace, the resultant union of the divine and the human cannot be limited to the special domain of religion, but must extend to all Man’s common relationships and must regenerate and transform his social and political life.” That is, that if the Lord is Lord of all, then there is no corralling Him into a neat category separate from other categories. That if Christians are supposed to promote what is objectively true, what is objectively good, what is objectively beautiful, along with what provides hope and stability and sustenance for future generations, this must also be our cultural and legislative outlook. We cannot have a double-mind.