July 14, 2026

Spiritualizing my ignorance

I’d like to take a moment to describe the abyss of confusion in which my understanding of religious ideas is stewing. Expect an intriguingly repellent mix of intellectual vandalism and occasional blasphemy, for which I am truly sorry. But please believe that I appreciate the aesthetic of faith’s imagery and texts. Some are truly remarkable. The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel has some really pretty sentences. So does Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations sitting on my desk (an artifact from my wife’s college years). The occasional passages I read when burned out make me feel like a low life. Like I’m missing out on a life of faith, love, communion, yada yada…

I’m not becoming religious. If anything, I’m becoming less convinced that reason is sufficient. Reason remains indispensable. It literally builds bridges, kind of explains black holes, and cures a lot of diseases. But somewhere along the way I quietly assumed that explanation was the whole picture. That information became wisdom if correlated and accumulated. That tolerance naturally became morality. That optimization eventually produced meaning. And consumption had something to do with stewardship.

None of those equations seem to really hold. All I truly feel is that I’m the clumsy steward of a soul, and that I owe my family and this planet. The soul is the oddball. A weirdly immaterial, yet embodied not-thing thing. The rest is painfully tangible but ignorable. Most days I would never make grand statements such as, “My conscious and loving existence gives glory to God.” Even writing that sentence makes me uncomfortable. Yet I also can’t deny that my modest experience of meditation, THC, and thirty-some years of being alive has revealed more divine than less.

I’d like to believe Sam Harris when he argues that inner peace can be reached without religious dogma. I suspect he’s largely right. But the more I pay attention, the less convinced I become that the disagreement is philosophical. It feels linguistic. Grace. Satori. Contemplation. Bliss. The process. Life. Struggle. Being high. Nirvana. It’s all the same idea. Yet every word carries a different flavor. At some point it’s a matter of taste. It’s said that our soul has a God-shaped hole. A hole I occasionally sense when distraction merely reveals it without beginning to fill it. I don’t particularly like the G-word, but I understand what people are trying to point toward.

Good stories are not loud because they carry some truth about people. Perhaps that’s what religion is all about. I can’t pinpoint exactly when mankind realized that reason alone doesn’t necessarily lead to sanity. My guess is that it happened around the same time we started performing rituals. Rituals, and stories, by extension, are older than religion.

Lately I’ve found myself sympathetic toward people of faith. Not because I suddenly share their certainty, but because I finally understand that they aren’t merely making claims about the universe. They’re practicing a way of relating to it. Some reformed Catholics, for example, gained my respect precisely because many defend the separation of church and state as a consequence of their faith rather than in spite of it. They see shoving belief down other people’s throats as a sign of weakness. I can now appreciate people sustaining healthy communities around biblical values without dogmatic oppression. Common sense can be extracted from many different sources.

My own worldview already rests on a surprising number of Judeo-Christian concepts. Heaven. Hell. Saints. Demons. Good. Evil. I don't even particularly like some of those words. They're clunky but useful concepts. They can always be reframed if they become simplistic. Some traditions simply fit my groove better than others. The same thing happened with a few Catholic writers: Anne Lamott. G. K. Chesterton. Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr.

Their relationship to the divine feels intellectually and aesthetically desirable. There is a groundedness in their writing that I used to mistake for naivety or stubbornness. Now it strikes me as a kind of freedom. It doesn’t necessarily dumb down the world. If anything, it allows them to inhabit its contradiction. (Something I sorely need.)

Sometimes I think I’m a Buddhist. Sometimes I talk ironically to Jesus. Sometimes I think I’m an atheist and all of this is embarrassingly sentimental. Spiritual matters remain deeply cringe to me. My secular upbringing left me almost completely empty-handed on the topic. We learned the basic critique of religion (crusades, the inquisition, modern conflicts…), not really how to understand why intelligent people kept returning to it.

Near my in-laws’ place there’s a Buddhist temple with a giant golden Buddha overlooking the landscape. The first time I saw it I immediately felt the ick. Too much gold. Too much spectacle. At the same time I’ve never been more open to Buddhist philosophy. Aside from some exuberant rituals and weird offshoots, much of it resonates deeply with me. The collapse of all things into “the One” fits surprisingly well with my persistent perspectivism.

Nonetheless, the passage of time keeps working on me. The Methodist preschool my toddler attends used to bother me ideologically. Today, watching the teachers care for him, I can appreciate the meaning some people find through the life of care their faith calls for. Good on them. We’re all on the same monkey team.

At the same time, a lot of the friction between my wife and me seems to stem from discomfort with moral judgment. On my side, I suspect this is another consequence of my secular education. Rationality and tolerance were presented as sufficient foundations for a good society. Today I’m less sure. How do you tolerate what no longer sounds rational? I don’t have an answer that doesn’t involve anything that will sound woo-woo. So far, my generation’s answer has largely been to abbreviate everything into tolerance.

Everything is supposedly acceptable, and somehow nobody is content. That doesn’t feel like a way to live. “The vibes are off” we say these days. Lately I've listened to politicians talking about abundance, representation and pragmatic governance. It all sounded sensible. It also sounded empty. Just like my dear tech industry, rhetoric done well seduces me easily.

Thomas Merton once suggested that humanity’s terrible history is evidence of grace rather than evidence against religion. I found the thought agreeable. Not because I think it proves anything, but because I suddenly noticed how selectively I had been taught to assign blame. We blame religion for the Crusades while rarely blaming science for nuclear weapons or climate change. My only conclusion is that Catholics are simply another group of tortured souls trying to make sense of our predicament. Listening to them, I often discover that I disagree less than I thought. I just don’t have the same therapist.

I don’t naturally perceive an anthropomorphic God. I do, however, sense something non-conceptual. Consciousness. Life. Nature. The universe.

Giant eucalyptus trees in my neighborhood give me a sense of connection to something huge and very slow. Not merely another carbon life form but something rooted, patient and indifferent to our intellectual fashions. Scientifically speaking, it’s just an arrangement of carbon atoms. So am I. Yet the "extra thing" I experience in their presence refuses to be reduced to chemistry.

That realization keeps happening to me. Michael Pollan’s descriptions of plants remain more immediately accessible to me than Anne Lamott’s descriptions of Jesus. And yet Anne moves me too. It’s remarkable that it took me this long to genuinely sympathize with people like her. Perhaps I just need to read more.

Thomas Merton’s descriptions of the prison of his own intellect sound oddly familiar. My life (and intellect) bears no resemblance to his, yet the itch seems similar. There must be more to life than managing circumstances and feelings. There must be a different posture. One that doesn’t require moving to Siberia or entering a monastic life. The fun thing about religion is that it seems to be the accumulated expression of precisely that frustration. Thousands of years of intelligent people looking at consciousness and refusing to conclude, "Well… I guess that's that."

A few years ago we bought our first house in San Luis Obispo. Only months after moving in I remember telling her that one day we’d probably leave it. It didn’t land particularly well. She had orchestrated the purchase and usually serves as the voice of pragmatic counter-entropy in our household. But that thought has stayed with me. Not because I dislike the house. I mostly like it. Rather because owning it made me aware that everything important in life is transient.

That realization feels spiritually significant, although I struggle to explain why. There are probably older and wiser words for all of this. For now, I trust the quiet echoes of my ignorance. That's all spirituality means to me these days.