Cinemorphosis

Category: Confessions

  • Chronological Humility

    Chronological Humility

    Emmanuel Carrère once believed wholeheartedly in the Resurrection. During his years of Christian conversion, it was not merely a theological proposition but the organizing principle of his life. Today he sees it differently. He describes it as a bereavement fantasy born among a few dozen grieving followers that somehow spread across continents, converted nearly a quarter of humanity, and remains a phenomenon that still “intrigues, fascinates, troubles, and moves” him.

    Notice what he does not say. He does not dismiss believers as fools. He does not congratulate himself for escaping religion. Nor does he portray his conversion as an embarrassing lapse in judgment from which his enlightened self has thankfully recovered.

    That restraint lies at the heart of The Kingdom.

    Carrère explains that he wrote the book to prevent his present, nonreligious self from assuming moral or intellectual superiority over his former believing self. He is suspicious of certainty itself. Rather than explaining conversion and de-conversion with neat psychological formulas, he treats them as mysterious human “mutations” whose causes and meanings remain partly hidden. He refuses to simplify either transformation into triumph or pathology. As he puts it, “I’m writing this book to avoid coming down too firmly in my favor.”

    The book is animated by what I would call Chronological Humility: the refusal to assume that the latest version of oneself is necessarily the wisest simply because it arrives later in time. Today’s certainty may become tomorrow’s embarrassment. The present self has no automatic claim to superior vision merely because it occupies the newest chapter of the autobiography.

    In that sense, The Kingdom is not merely an investigation of early Christianity. It is Carrère’s ongoing apprenticeship in humility, perhaps one of the lingering gifts of his years as a Christian. Humility keeps the mind porous. It reminds us that growth often requires surrendering convictions we once defended with absolute confidence. Every fundamentalism, whether religious or secular, begins with the comforting illusion that the journey has ended and certainty has finally been achieved.

    My maternal grandfather, Richard Meyers, understood that illusion better than he realized.

    Born in 1915 and dying in 2001, he devoted much of his life to Marxism. In his younger years, his politics possessed the unmistakable rigidity of religious fundamentalism. Competing ideologies were not merely mistaken; they were inferior. Religion was a collection of fairy tales, and those who believed in it were captives of childish superstition.

    When I converted to Christianity as a teenager, he was deeply troubled. Eventually he resigned himself to what he considered my intellectual captivity. He once told a fellow Marxist, with genuine sadness, “It’s too late for him.” He believed he could see Christianity’s claws buried deep inside my brain.

    His loyalty to the movement was so uncompromising that even Stalin, despite overwhelming evidence of his atrocities, could not be criticized because doing so, he insisted, “hurt the movement.” The cause demanded silence where conscience demanded speech.

    Time, however, has a way of softening even the hardest certainties.

    Of all the changes my grandfather made, one remains especially dear to me.

    In 1990, while waiting for a play to begin in Hollywood, we wandered the streets looking for a place to eat. Along the way we met a homeless Vietnam veteran who said he was hungry. I bought him a meal at a nearby burger restaurant.

    My grandfather disapproved.

    Feeding one homeless man, he argued, did nothing to solve the structural causes of poverty. Charity was sentimental. Systems, not sandwiches, changed history.

    “I don’t care about solving the future right now,” I replied. “I care about relieving his hunger today.”

    The conversation ended there.

    Or so I thought.

    Two years later, while we were eating together at an Italian restaurant in San Pedro, he unexpectedly returned to the incident.

    “I was wrong,” he said quietly. “You did the right thing.”

    It was a simple sentence. No fanfare. No dramatic confession. Just an elderly man acknowledging that his younger self had been mistaken.

    That moment warmed my heart far more than if I had won the original argument. I wasn’t moved because he admitted defeat. I was moved because he had demonstrated the rarest of human virtues: the willingness to become a different person without pretending he had always been one.

    I suspect that is precisely what Carrère hopes to preserve in himself through The Kingdom. The book is less an argument for or against Christianity than a safeguard against the arrogance of believing that the latest version of Emmanuel Carrère has finally escaped the mistakes of all the previous ones. It is an act of Chronological Humility—a refusal to declare victory over his former self because he knows that someday even his present convictions may become another chapter in the long story of a mind still learning how to change.

  • The Gospel According to Common Sense

    The Gospel According to Common Sense

    I have feared eternity for as long as I can remember. My life has felt less like a spiritual journey than a protracted campaign in a war for my own soul. Much of that campaign has been chronicled in my collection of essays, The Theology of Biceps, where barbells, vanity, faith, mortality, and salvation wrestle each other beneath fluorescent gym lights. Lately the battle has intensified. I am approaching sixty-five, that age when abstractions begin presenting themselves as appointments rather than ideas, and I have reread, for the fifth time, Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, his brilliant, maddening meditation on Christianity. Between Carrère’s relentless fascination with the Apostle Paul and my own inability to leave theological questions alone, I have spent months drowning in what I call Theological Vertigo: that state in which every answer generates three new questions until the mind becomes exhausted by its own seriousness.

    Our family vacation to Carlsbad interrupted the cycle. I read less. I wrote less. For the first time in months, my mind had room to breathe.

    One morning we ate breakfast at the French Corner. I ordered a savory crepe and drank coffee softened with milk, cinnamon, and honey. It was, without exaggeration, one of the most satisfying meals of my life. I left the table neither hungry nor bloated but suspended in that miraculous middle ground where appetite and satisfaction shake hands. For several fleeting minutes I experienced something approaching perfection. The meal did not merely fill my stomach; it seemed to quiet some hidden chamber of the soul that usually refuses to stop talking.

    Then we wandered into downtown Carlsbad. My family disappeared into a used record store while I remained outside. I have never liked the smell of old books or aging paper. To many people it evokes nostalgia. To me it smells like mildew wearing a tweed jacket.

    As I waited, I found myself contemplating the familiar inventory of deficiencies: the thirty extra pounds I continue to carry, my inconsistent discipline, and my growing realization that I need more daily companionship than I once admitted.

    Then I noticed two men walking toward me.

    They appeared to be in their early seventies. Both wore safari hats, T-shirts, shorts, and tennis shoes. Their phones rested casually in their back pockets rather than monopolizing their attention. Their conversation flowed with the easy rhythm of men who had probably taken the same walk together hundreds of times. They laughed. They listened. Neither seemed in a hurry to dominate the conversation or perform for an invisible audience. Their calves were sculpted from years of walking rather than months of gym heroics. They looked younger than many men twenty years their junior because their bodies had quietly become advertisements for moderation.

    I envied them immediately.

    Not simply because they were lean, although I certainly noticed that. I envied the life their bodies implied. These were men who had discovered that exercise and friendship need not compete for time. They had fused physical fitness with social fitness into a single daily ritual.

    I doubted they spent evenings rereading Emmanuel Carrère or wondering whether Paul was history’s greatest religious genius or its most successful narcissist. I doubted they classified themselves as “religious,” “spiritual,” “agnostic,” or “secular.” They probably possessed something rarer than an ideology.

    They possessed common sense.

    You take care of your body.

    You walk every day.

    You eat reasonably.

    You cultivate friendships.

    You show up.

    You repeat the process tomorrow.

    None of these habits requires a bestselling self-help book or a sophisticated theology. They emerge from the accumulated evidence of ordinary life. They are conclusions reached not by speculation but by observation.

    Standing outside that record store, I began to wonder whether I had spent years practicing Existential Overfishing—casting my line ever deeper into the waters of ultimate meaning until I had forgotten the fish swimming near the surface. Had I mistaken depth for wisdom? Had I become so absorbed in metaphysical puzzles that I had overlooked the plain truths available to anyone willing to pay attention?

    Questions flooded in.

    Is common sense enough?

    Is common sense superior to profound religious contemplation?

    Have I submerged myself beneath a sea of fascinating but largely irrelevant abstractions?

    Have I mistaken intellectual complexity for spiritual maturity?

    Have I, after all these years, simply lost the plot?

    Perhaps the life of the Common Sensalist is the wiser path.

    A Common Sensalist believes that flourishing depends less upon elaborate theological systems or fashionable self-improvement programs than upon the quiet authority of ordinary experience: daily exercise, enduring friendships, moderation, meaningful work, simple pleasures, and habits repeated until they become character. Such a philosophy does not reject transcendence. It merely insists that the road toward it may begin with putting on walking shoes instead of opening another theological treatise.

    As I stood there waiting for my family to emerge from the record store, I felt strangely melancholy. I had spent decades wrestling angels while two elderly men had apparently settled for walking with friends.

    I still wasn’t sure who had chosen the better path.

    But I knew exactly where I wanted to eat breakfast the next morning.

  • Pauline Mirror Syndrome

    Pauline Mirror Syndrome

    There is no escaping Paul. To become a Christian is, in some measure, to place your trust in him. You must accept that the man who never met the historical Jesus became, through his Damascus conversion and subsequent revelations, an apostle every bit as legitimate as those who had walked beside Christ in Galilee. More than that, you must believe that Paul’s visions conferred an authority so profound that he became Christianity’s most influential interpreter, the man whose voice would ultimately drown out nearly all the others.

    For many believers, this poses no difficulty. Paul is the heroic convert, the fearless missionary, the brilliant theologian who carried Christianity into the Gentile world.

    For others, he is a problem.

    His letters often pulse with an unnerving competitiveness. He dismisses rivals with astonishing confidence, defends his authority with relentless vigor, and repeatedly reminds his readers that his gospel came not from human teachers but by direct revelation from Christ. To admirers, this is prophetic certainty. To skeptics, it can sound perilously close to grandiosity. His confidence is so complete that it occasionally borders on solipsism, as though the final court of appeal were not the testimony of others but the private theater of his own mind.

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère imagines Paul regarding the Jerusalem apostles with something approaching contempt. Their understanding of Jesus, rooted in firsthand acquaintance, strikes Paul as merely “Christ according to the flesh.” Carrère compares him to “those critics who prefer not to read the books or see the films they review to be sure that their judgment won’t be swayed by the work in question.” 

    It is a devastating image. Paul becomes the supreme authority precisely because he refuses to be constrained by eyewitnesses.

    Some readers find this exhilarating.

    Others experience what I call apostolic recoil: the instinctive revulsion one feels toward a revered religious figure whose personality seems morally or psychologically suspect despite his canonical status.

    I belonged to that second camp almost from the beginning.

    I remember sitting in church when I was seventeen as a member of the choir introduced a hymn. His face glowed with affection as he announced that Paul was his favorite apostle. The warmth in his voice startled me because it exposed the opposite reaction within myself. I disliked Paul with remarkable intensity. He struck me as arrogant, combative, ambitious, and intoxicated by his own authority.

    The realization filled me with shame.

    I was a new Christian, yet I harbored deep hostility toward the man who had done more than anyone else to shape Christianity. Surely this could not bode well for my faith. I was suffering from canonical dissonance: the unsettling psychological conflict that arises when one reveres a religious tradition while distrusting one of its indispensable architects.

    What did this say about the authenticity of my conversion? Had I embraced Christianity while instinctively rejecting its chief interpreter?

    Decades later, my opinion of Paul has become more nuanced but no less conflicted. Emmanuel Carrère has supplied historical and psychological reasons to question Paul’s extraordinary self-confidence, yet I have gradually come to suspect that my resistance originates somewhere far less flattering.

    Perhaps the problem is not Paul.

    Perhaps the problem is me.

    I recognize too much of myself in him.

    His ambition.

    His vanity.

    His hunger to be right.

    His tendency to trust the authority of his own mind.

    When I recoil from Paul, I may simply be recoiling from my own reflection.

    I call this Pauline Mirror Syndrome: the unsettling experience of rejecting the Apostle Paul because one recognizes in him the very flaws one struggles to forgive in oneself.

    The mirror is often more difficult to face than the man standing inside it.

  • The Gospel According to the Irvine Spectrum

    The Gospel According to the Irvine Spectrum

    On our way to a vacation in Carlsbad, we made an unplanned pilgrimage to the Irvine Spectrum. A retailer had forgotten to remove one of those magnetic security tags—the kind that doesn’t merely protect merchandise but threatens to baptize it in indelible dye should you attempt to liberate it yourself.

    It was ninety degrees outside, yet the mall overflowed with shoppers who looked as though they had wandered out of a lifestyle advertisement. Most appeared to be under twenty-one, gliding effortlessly through the promenade in athletic shorts, yoga pants, or denim cutoffs so abbreviated they seemed engaged in an argument with modesty. They possessed that enviable firmness exclusive to youth: muscles earned not through discipline but through adolescence itself. Nature had done all the work, leaving many of them with the faintly irritating confidence of people who mistake a genetic inheritance for a personal achievement.

    The boys wore that ubiquitous haircut that resembles broccoli sprouting from their skulls: luxuriant tufts piled high above sides clipped so close they looked apologetic. Somewhere a barber had convinced an entire generation that vegetables belonged on the human head.

    The older men were no less committed to the performance. Many looked to be in their forties, dressed in expensive athletic wear that existed less for exercise than for exhibition. Their fitted shirts advertised sculpted shoulders, bulging biceps, and veins that appeared to have negotiated sponsorship deals with their forearms. Aviator sunglasses completed the ensemble. They looked as though they had stepped directly from an Outdoor Voices or Vuori photo shoot, each one silently auditioning to become the patron saint of functional leisure.

    Then there was me.

    I was too old for the mall, too heavy for the uniform, and wearing exactly the wrong shirt: a T-shirt emblazoned with Snoopy and the words World Champion Dad.

    At that moment, I did not feel like a champion of anything.

    While my wife and daughters disappeared into the stores to rectify the retailer’s oversight, I settled into the shade beside a fountain and watched humanity file past.

    What struck me first was not the clothing itself but its uncanny uniformity. Nearly everyone seemed assembled from the same inventory. Their shirts, shoes, sunglasses, handbags, water bottles, and watches appeared to have been harvested from neighboring storefronts. Like hermit crabs constructing protective shells from whatever debris washes onto the ocean floor, these shoppers had fashioned exoskeletons from the flotsam and jetsam of consumer culture.

    But the clothing was only the outer shell.

    The deeper transformation had taken place beneath the fabric.

    These people had absorbed the mall’s emotional atmosphere as thoroughly as they had absorbed its fashions. They radiated the mall’s synthetic optimism, its perpetual cheerfulness, its frictionless sentimentality, and its promise that fulfillment was perpetually one purchase away. Every storefront preached the same gospel: happiness is available in your size, and it’s twenty percent off this weekend.

    Deism proposes that the Creator reveals Himself through nature.

    Mallism proposes something else entirely.

    It teaches that the faithful gradually become expressions of the mall itself. Its architecture colonizes their imagination. Its values become their values. Its aesthetics become their personality. They cease merely to shop there; they begin to embody the place.

    The mall, in other words, manufactures not only consumers but a recognizable species of human being.

    Watching the procession from my shaded bench, I wondered whether I had stumbled into a habitat rather than a marketplace—a carefully engineered ecosystem in which identity, aspiration, and self-worth circulated through the air-conditioning along with the scent of cinnamon rolls and expensive perfume.

    Perhaps every civilization eventually constructs temples.

    Ours simply installed escalators.

  • The Judgment Instinct

    The Judgment Instinct

    Many of us are born with a moral conscience. We do not need religion to experience the sting of guilt or the quiet satisfaction of having done the right thing. Years ago, I had a Hungarian student who described herself as coming from a “very atheist but moral family.” She was one of the most conscientious students I have taught—honest, intellectually rigorous, and incapable of cutting corners. I never doubted her for a moment.

    Conscience transcends religious belief. Religion may give conscience a vocabulary, a theology, and a story, but it does not create it. The impulse to judge ourselves seems to arrive long before we learn the language of heaven and hell.

    One of my earliest memories comes from when I was three years old. A little girl and I wanted a box of raisins before dinner, but my parents refused. Outraged, I threw a tantrum. In the chaos I lurched forward, accidentally knocking the little girl down a flight of apartment stairs. The image seared itself into my mind. I was horrified—not because an adult scolded me, but because I knew, with the terrible clarity that only children can possess, that I had done something wrong. The guilt lingered into the next day. Unable to bear it, I performed my own act of penance. I deliberately hurled myself down the same staircase, as though suffering could somehow balance the moral ledger.

    Around that same time, I became obsessed with the nursery rhyme “This Old Man.” I remember standing in the lunch line at nursery school, trying not to gag at the sulfurous smell of boiled lima beans, singing the song under my breath. When I reached the line, “This old man came rolling home,” an inexplicable vision filled my imagination. I saw an endless procession of people—young and old—watching the old man stand in judgment over the life he had lived. Then, one by one, they understood that they would be judged next. The image carried no explicit heaven or hell, no angels or devils. It was simply an overwhelming certainty that every life would one day be weighed.

    I knew nothing of religion.

    Yet I seem to have been born with what I call the Judgment Instinct: the inborn intuition that our lives will ultimately be evaluated by a moral standard higher than personal preference, social approval, or self-justification. Religion did not implant that intuition in me. It gave a name to something I already sensed was there.

  • The Telos Test

    The Telos Test

    Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange contains a recurring refrain: “What’s it going to be then, eh?” The words linger because they refuse to let the reader remain a spectator. They demand a decision. They ask not merely what one believes, but what one intends to become.

    The question came back to me while reflecting on the Greek word telos—the ultimate purpose toward which every action aims. What, then, is the telos of my fascination with the early Christian church? Why do I keep returning to the conflict between James and Paul, to the expectation shared by Jesus and Paul that the end of history would arrive within their own generation, and to the ways later editors softened those failed expectations by rendering the prophecies more elastic? What is the purpose of exposing cracks in Christian doctrine?

    Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Emmanuel Carrère, Elaine Pagels, or Bart Ehrman successfully chip away at the church’s claim to doctrinal certainty. What then? Burgess’s refrain becomes a philosophical audit. It asks whether my scholarship has a destination beyond demolition. It is another way of asking the question posed by R.E.M.: after losing my religion, what remains?

    In truth, I doubt I could ever lose my religion entirely.

    Whatever label I eventually assign myself—Christian, agnostic, or something in between—I cannot silence the conviction that I will one day answer for the life I have lived. My conscience refuses to dismiss the possibility of judgment. I imagine my thoughts and deeds passing before me in merciless clarity. I see myself shrinking beneath their weight, my knees buckling, my confidence evaporating, reduced to asking not for vindication but for mercy. I do not regard this as a uniquely religious neurosis. It seems to me a universal human intuition. Religion did not invent our moral sense; it gave language, symbols, and stories to an accountability that most of us already feel lurking beneath the surface of consciousness.

    That is why my ambivalence toward Paul is never merely historical. It immediately becomes personal.

    “What’s it going to be then, eh?”

    Am I dismantling Paul’s authority because I seek the truth, or because I seek permission?

    If there is no final judgment, no resurrection, and no afterlife, do I thereby acquire a license to indulge every selfish appetite? If organized religion collapses under historical scrutiny, am I morally obligated to replace it with another vision capable of disciplining my desires?

    Martin Hägglund attempts precisely this in This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. He argues that meaning arises from our finite existence and our obligations to one another rather than from eternity. It is an intellectually serious project. Yet I wonder whether I possess Hägglund’s confidence in human nature. Do we really possess the moral resources to repair ourselves? Or is Paul correct that something within us is too deeply fractured to heal itself?

    Steven Pressfield offers another alternative in The War of Art. For him, humanity’s fallen nature appears under a different name: Resistance. Salvation comes not through grace but through disciplined creative labor. The Muse replaces the Holy Spirit; artistic practice replaces spiritual formation. I admire Pressfield immensely. Yet I hesitate before turning art into a universal religion. Is artistic transcendence truly available to everyone? Is disciplined creativity sufficient to tame the darker regions of the human heart?

    Then there are Elaine Pagels and Bart Ehrman. Both drank deeply from the well of Christianity before becoming two of its most influential historical critics. Both retain profound respect for Jesus while rejecting much of traditional Christian doctrine. In their hands, Christianity often becomes less a supernatural drama than a humanitarian ethic. Hell recedes into metaphor. Divine wrath becomes a cautionary tale about human cruelty. The central question shifts from salvation to compassion.

    As much as I admire their scholarship, I sometimes wonder whether they perform what I have come to call Therapeutic Transfiguration: the transformation of a demanding religious tradition into the language of emotional wellness, affirmation, and psychological flourishing.

    Stephen Prothero voices a similar concern in his review of Karen King and Elaine Pagels’ Reading Judas. He writes:

    I prefer to take my religious history free from demands for contemporary relevance, so whenever someone in the historical-Jesus fraternity makes Jesus mutter moral maxims that might as easily have been uttered by President Bush or Oprah Winfrey, my anachronism antenna goes up. In this case, Pagels and King massage the multicultural sensibilities of their readers by opining that the Gospel of Judas represents a “sharp, dissenting voice” against the “single, static universal system of beliefs” of official Christianity. Preaching to the “spiritual but not religious” choir, they tell us that, like other noncanonical texts they have championed elsewhere, this gospel aims to “encourage believers to seek God within themselves, with no mention of churches, much less clergy.”

    What Prothero objects to might be called Oprahfication: translating historically specific and often unsettling religious claims into therapeutic affirmations about inner peace, self-discovery, and personal fulfillment. The apocalyptic prophet becomes a motivational speaker. The call to repentance becomes an invitation to embrace one’s authentic self.

    I confess that Oprahfication unsettles me as well. Whenever I hear sweeping assurances about “the divine within,” I picture an Oprah Winfrey interview with Deepak Chopra dissolving into a warm bath of inspirational platitudes. Even if there is some truth in the claim that God may be encountered within, it remains a perilous proposition. For every soul who genuinely discovers humility, I fear thousands more will disappear into the funhouse mirrors of narcissism, mistaking self-absorption for enlightenment.

    Of course, the opposite error is no better. Certain Puritans became so intoxicated by the doctrine of human depravity that they all but erased the possibility of salvation, imagining a universe in which nearly everyone was damned. Such despair borders on the demonic. Yet the opposite doctrine—that humanity is innately divine and naturally good—contains its own danger. If everyone already possesses effortless sanctity, then no one requires transformation. Without an exemplar who calls us beyond ourselves, goodness becomes whatever we happen to prefer, and heaven gradually dissolves into a congratulatory mirror.

    Which brings me back to Burgess.

    “What’s it going to be then, eh?”

    That question is no longer about Paul. It is about me.

    Am I searching for historical truth, or am I constructing an elegant rationale for living exactly as I please? Is my criticism an act of intellectual honesty, or an application for moral exemption?

    I hope it is neither cynicism nor rebellion that drives this inquiry. I hope my quest is animated by the desire to see reality more clearly while remaining accountable to whatever goodness ultimately governs it. If I dismantle inherited beliefs, I pray it is not to clear space for selfishness but to discover a foundation sturdy enough to support a life worthy of judgment.

  • Breakfast at the Edge of Another World

    Breakfast at the Edge of Another World

    One morning I sat at the piano while my wife prepared her breakfast—a pot of rolled oats simmering quietly on the stovetop. As the warm, earthy aroma drifted through the house, I was four years old again, carried backward in time to the winter of 1966.

    My brother had not yet been born. It was just my mother, my father, and me driving toward Lake Tahoe. Before we reached our destination, a snowstorm descended with more fury than anyone expected. My father had no tire chains, so we abandoned the journey and took refuge in a small roadside motel, where we remained snowbound for several days while the Sierra disappeared beneath an endless blanket of white.

    My parents bought provisions from a nearby market. Every morning we ate bowls of Quaker Oats sweetened with brown sugar and cooled with milk. To my four-year-old self, it was paradise. Even today, no gourmet breakfast can rival the comfort contained in those humble bowls of oatmeal.

    Yet the smell of those oats carried an unexpected paradox. They meant warmth, safety, and home, but they also became permanently entwined with something altogether stranger. We were isolated in a tiny motel, surrounded by a landscape so white and silent that it seemed the world itself had vanished. We were a single glowing window in an infinite universe of snow.

    The motel television only deepened the feeling that we had crossed into another reality. Alongside familiar cartoons appeared programs I had never imagined could exist. There was Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt. Stranger still was a British science-fiction serial called Fireball XL5, whose cast consisted entirely of marionettes speaking with impeccable British accents.

    To my four-year-old mind, Fireball XL5 felt less like a television show than a fever dream accidentally transmitted from another galaxy. Nothing obeyed the ordinary rules of childhood. The marionettes smiled with unsettling serenity, their painted faces suspended somewhere between fearless astronauts and department-store mannequins that had wandered off after closing time. Their rocket streaked through glittering constellations that looked as though someone had punched tiny holes into black velvet with an ice pick. The dialogue carried the solemn authority of Shakespeare performed by sleepwalkers, while the eerie electronic score suggested that outer space was inhabited not by extraterrestrials but by ghosts.

    At four years old, I lacked the vocabulary to call it surreal. I only knew that I loved it because it made no sense. Fireball XL5 occupied that peculiar territory where wonder and nightmare shake hands, leaving a child convinced that television, like dreams, had uncovered a hidden dimension adults somehow accepted without question.

    Those three snowbound days fused together two emotional worlds that have never since separated. The comforting smell of oatmeal became permanently married to the delicious strangeness of Fireball XL5. This is what I call The Cozy Uncanny: the emotional condition in which domestic comfort becomes inseparable from profound otherness, producing memories that remain both reassuring and dreamlike.

    When my wife’s oatmeal filled our kitchen this morning, it carried me effortlessly back to that motel near Lake Tahoe. A single scent collapsed sixty years. Suddenly I was once again that little boy sitting safely indoors while an unknowable universe waited just beyond the frosted window.

    Perhaps that is why my favorite smells remain the smells of breakfast: rolled oats, French toast, pancakes browning on a griddle, maple syrup warming in the air. These aromas do more than remind me of childhood. They reassure me that no matter how strange the surrounding world becomes, there remains a path back home. I sometimes think that if I were suddenly transported into the bizarre universe of Fireball XL5, the smell of oatmeal alone would give me enough confidence to believe I could find my way back.

    People often predict that religion will eventually disappear, that modernity will finally outgrow humanity’s longing for transcendence. I doubt it. Our deepest desires are not arguments but homesickness. We are creatures who instinctively seek warmth, belonging, and a place where the strange finally becomes familiar. The smell of rolled oats, French toast, or pancakes does not merely awaken nostalgia. It awakens the ancient conviction that somewhere there exists a home we have not entirely forgotten.

    Perhaps our religious impulse is nothing more—and nothing less—than that incurable longing to return there.

  • Watermelon Theology

    Watermelon Theology

    In 1979, around the time of my conversion, I was a seventeen-year-old bodybuilder performing barbell curls in the family den while the television droned in the background. On the screen stood a large Southern preacher wearing a green seersucker suit and speaking in a voice that sounded uncannily like Foghorn Leghorn’s. Amid all the sermons I have forgotten, one metaphor lodged itself permanently in my mind.

    “Religion,” he said, “is like a watermelon. You enjoy the sweet fruit, but you have to accept the seeds. A lot of people can’t accept the seeds, so their faith fails.”

    I have been chewing on those watermelon seeds ever since.

    The fruit has never been my problem.

    If I step back from the Bible and read it as the grand narrative of moral order and moral dissolution, of humanity’s perpetual struggle between sanctification and self-destruction, I find myself repeatedly stopping in admiration. Surely there is such a thing as spiritual health and spiritual decay. Surely the person who learns humility, self-control, forgiveness, courage, and sacrificial love becomes someone fundamentally different from the person consumed by vanity, resentment, lust, greed, and appetite. We become what we repeatedly do, and eventually our habits cease to be things we perform; they become the substance of our character.

    Christianity also explains something else with remarkable psychological precision. It understands the persistent ache that seems woven into the human condition. We are creatures forever searching for transcendence while repeatedly mistaking stimulation for transcendence itself. As the Reverend Eugene Peterson observed, many of us pursue moments of escape through recreational sex, drugs, alcohol, celebrity, politics, or the intoxicating madness of crowds. We mistake emotional intensity for spiritual fulfillment.

    The Sermon on the Mount and Paul’s Letter to the Philippians propose something radically different. Happiness is not found through self-assertion but self-emptying. Power is discovered through service. Life is found by relinquishing the desperate project of preserving it. The Gospel’s diagnosis is humiliating precisely because it leaves so little room for self-congratulation. Paul, who knew his own failures intimately, dismissed the self-help philosophies of his age with astonishing brevity. Human beings, he insisted, are not merely uninformed. They are unable. They require grace.

    Whenever I read Jesus or Paul, I cannot escape the feeling that they have perceived something enduring about human nature. This does not strike me as one religion among many, each pointing politely toward the same destination. It confronts me with a diagnosis that continues to unsettle me.

    Then come the watermelon seeds.

    There are, first, the supernatural claims.

    I would be dishonest if I claimed to believe them literally. Noah living nearly a thousand years. The ark. The parting of the Red Sea. The Virgin Birth. The dead emerging from their tombs during the Crucifixion and walking through Jerusalem. Jesus raising the dead. Paul doing the same. Above all, the Resurrection itself.

    Then there are the historical seeds.

    The expectation that the Kingdom of God would arrive within the lifetime of Jesus’ contemporaries appears to have receded as history stubbornly refused to cooperate. Scholars argue that later editors softened or reframed passages whose original urgency had become increasingly difficult to defend.

    Then come the institutional seeds.

    Paul’s breathtaking declaration that “there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” gradually yielded to later church structures that proved considerably more interested in hierarchy than equality. Letters now widely regarded by many scholars as pseudonymous instructed women to remain silent, submissive, and excluded from leadership. The liberating impulse of the earliest Christian communities became entangled with the far less inspiring politics of institutional preservation.

    And finally there is perhaps the hardest seed of all.

    Hell.

    Infinite punishment for finite creatures.

    A doctrine that has haunted Christian thought for centuries.

    The temptation, of course, is simply to spit out the seeds.

    Many people do.

    The miracles become metaphors.

    The Resurrection becomes symbolic.

    Sin becomes psychological maladjustment.

    Judgment becomes poor self-esteem.

    Christianity quietly dissolves into a soothing spirituality where every religion points toward the same divine reality, nobody is terribly mistaken, vice is largely a matter of perspective, and the highest commandment is simply to relax and enjoy yourself because life is short.

    Once I begin removing the seeds, how do I know which ones are merely unpleasant and which ones are load-bearing?

    Where does revision end and reinvention begin?

    At what point have I ceased pruning Christianity and quietly invented another religion that merely borrows its vocabulary?

    This is what I have come to call Foundational Anxiety: the fear that questioning one foundational belief will begin a cascade of doubt that ultimately leaves a person without any stable moral, philosophical, or spiritual ground.

    It is also why I think of my predicament as Watermelon Theology.

    Watermelon Theology is the attempt to preserve the nourishing moral and spiritual fruit of a religious tradition while wrestling honestly with doctrines, miracles, and historical claims that resist belief. It refuses both naïve certainty and fashionable dismissal. It insists that the fruit is too nourishing to discard lightly, even while acknowledging that the seeds remain stubbornly lodged between one’s teeth.

    Can I resolve this dilemma in a thousand-word essay?

    Hardly.

    Millions of people have spent two millennia arguing over these very questions. Many of them are smarter than I am. Augustine stood in this line. Aquinas stood in this line. Luther, Calvin, Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, C.S. Lewis, and countless others stood here as well.

    I do not get to complain that the line is long.

    I simply take my place in it.

  • The Professor Who Told Me I Wouldn’t Make It

    The Professor Who Told Me I Wouldn’t Make It

    In 1979, on the first day of freshman composition, my professor read my writing sample, looked up, and matter-of-factly informed me that I was not going to make it.

    He recommended that I enroll in a remedial writing course to repair my grammar and expand my vocabulary before attempting freshman composition.

    He looked exactly like the sort of Catholic high school teacher Hollywood used to cast: bald, square-jawed, stern-faced, and economical with words. He possessed the kind of commanding presence that could silence a room without raising his voice. There was nothing theatrical about him. He was not cruel or sarcastic. He simply carried himself with the quiet authority of someone who respected standards too much to pretend they didn’t exist.

    What he gave me that morning was not encouragement but reality.

    He measured me honestly and showed me, without apology or condescension, where I stood. My writing was not yet good enough.

    Looking back, I realize that his verdict was one of the greatest gifts a teacher ever gave me. He refused to flatter me with comforting illusions or lower the bar so I could feel accomplished. Instead, he pointed me toward the work I needed to do.

    Nearly half a century later, I remember him not with resentment but with gratitude. Sometimes the most compassionate teacher is the one who tells us the truth before anyone else is willing to do so.

  • The Great G-Shock-Seiko Divide

    The Great G-Shock-Seiko Divide

    Jeremy lives in Louisiana, but over the past decade he and I have shared the peculiar fraternity that develops among people who have spent far too much time thinking about watches. He has followed my YouTube channel long enough to witness my latest affliction unfold in real time.

    It began six months ago with a Casio G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000.

    Then came the Rescue GW-7900.

    Soon afterward I was fully initiated into the cult of Multiband-6. Every night while I slept, invisible radio signals synchronized my watches to atomic clocks, and every morning I awoke to the intoxicating certainty that the digits on my wrist displayed the exact time—not approximately, not close enough, but the precise time.

    Jeremy watched this transformation with sympathy until he made the fatal mistake of buying a few Multiband-6 G-Shocks himself.

    Recently he wrote to confess that his own hobby had entered a state of upheaval.

    Not ruined.

    Upended.

    He had contracted the same addiction.

    Like me, he had become enslaved to the quiet pleasure of glancing at a digital display that never needed correction. Like me, he found himself staring at mechanical divers worth several thousand dollars and struggling to justify putting them on his wrist. His collection, like mine, had suffered what I call The Great Divide.

    Mine is specifically the G-Shock–Seiko Divide.

    Jeremy’s divide is somewhat different. His luxury mechanical pieces wear both Swiss passports and Japanese ones, but the conflict is identical.

    Two incompatible ideas of what a watch should be now compete for the same wrist.

    Ironically, this essay began as something far more trivial.

    I intended to make a YouTube video reviewing my Seiko divers on Divecore Waffle straps made from Hydrogenated Nitrile Butadiene Rubber. Three of my twenty-millimeter Divecore Waffles currently adorn my Seiko SLA055, SLA051, and SLA023. My SBDC203 remains on its original Seiko “Chocolate Bar” rubber strap, while my Seiko Tuna SBBN049 wears a twenty-two-millimeter Divecore Waffle.

    I genuinely miss my Divecore FKM HP straps. They were magnificent. Yet the lingering discussion surrounding PFAS—the so-called “forever chemicals” associated with fluorinated materials—finally persuaded me that they were an unnecessary source of anxiety. My suspicion is that the straps are probably harmless. But “probably harmless” is an awkward companion for something strapped to your skin every day. Why carry even a hypothetical worry when the Divecore Waffles are every bit as handsome?

    I had planned to spend twenty minutes discussing rubber straps.

    Then I stopped myself.

    Who cares about straps?

    I already made peace with abandoning steel bracelets years ago.

    The straps weren’t the story.

    The story was that I had reached a point where every glance at my watch box required choosing between two entirely different philosophies.

    My Seikos are objects of astonishing beauty.

    Their dials possess depth, warmth, texture, and craftsmanship that industrial resin can never hope to imitate. On today’s used market my five Seiko divers are probably worth around nine thousand dollars. They are miniature works of art.

    My G-Shocks, by contrast, are worth perhaps a thousand dollars altogether.

    They are molded from industrial resin.

    They resemble equipment more than jewelry.

    They synchronize themselves every night.

    They weigh almost nothing.

    They display the exact time in large, unapologetic digits.

    They ask nothing of me.

    The Seikos appeal to my aesthetic imagination.

    The G-Shocks satisfy my practical mind.

    Guess which one wins about ninety percent of the time.

    It would be easy to write one of those tiresome minimalist sermons declaring that I should have skipped expensive mechanical watches altogether and bought only affordable G-Shocks. Such hindsight is wonderfully economical because it edits out the actual life that was lived.

    For more than twenty years I sowed my horological oats among mechanical watches.

    There was obsession.

    There was ecstasy.

    There was irrationality.

    There was financial excess.

    There was genuine beauty.

    There was hard-earned knowledge.

    Without those decades, I would never appreciate the peculiar satisfaction of glancing at a Mudman GW-9500 and knowing that the time displayed is as accurate as physics presently allows.

    Counterfactual histories are comforting fantasies. They allow us to imagine that wisdom could have arrived without tuition.

    It cannot.

    An hour before writing this, I was wearing my beloved Seiko Uemura. I admired its magnificent dial, then found myself squinting to determine the approximate time.

    Approximate.

    A few moments later I quietly removed it and fastened the Mudman to my wrist.

    Jeremy understands exactly why.

    My suspicion is that thousands of other watch enthusiasts do as well. Once you’ve crossed the Great Divide, you never entirely return. The two worlds continue to coexist, each beautiful in its own way, while your wrist quietly votes for only one.