There is a recognisable trajectory among public evangelical Christians.

Someone begins in a conservative Christian world, builds a substantial platform within it, and then begins to question parts of the theology that formed them. As their beliefs change, their audience changes with them. Eventually, they no longer need to find another Christian home because the platform itself supplies many of the things a church once supplied: community, affirmation, authority, purpose and income.

The audience becomes a portable congregation.

This does not mean their questions are insincere. Nor does it mean money explains someone’s theology. It means that a platform changes what is socially and economically possible. Most ordinary Christians who leave one form of Christianity have to find another community—or face the loneliness of having none. A successful public figure can make the journey itself into a continuing vocation. Deconstruction becomes content. Reinvention becomes a brand. And an audience can follow the person long after they have ceased to belong meaningfully to a church.

Jen Hatmaker is a particularly visible example of this journey. She began in conservative evangelicalism, became one of its best-known authors and speakers, progressively departed from its beliefs, publicly announced she stopped attending church, and continued to speak about faith from an increasingly post-church position.

Her recent reflections on hell are therefore about more than hell. They offer a window into what happens when someone raised within a cramped version of Christianity discovers that it is intolerable but does not discover the greater Christian tradition waiting beyond it.

The subtitle of Hatmaker’s essay says it plainly: “Laying down my belief in hell didn’t cost me my faith—it rescued it.”

She describes an enormous psychological release, as if “ten million pounds” had come off her shoulders. The God who had terrified her disappeared, and in his place she found a God she could trust—a God of love, patience, kindness and compassion.

It is easy to understand the relief. But relief is not the same thing as truth.

The relief

Christians should not mock the relief people feel when they abandon a frightening doctrine of hell. We should ask what kind of hell they were taught.

Hatmaker describes a God who watched her constantly, recorded her failures and seemed ready to condemn people for being born in the wrong family, country or religion. Her Evangelism was driven by panic. The Christian life became an extended attempt to remain on God’s good side while rescuing everyone else from a punishment God appeared eager to inflict.

That picture of God should be rejected.

A God who delights in torture is not the God revealed in Jesus Christ. A heaven from which Christians gaze approvingly at the sufferings of their neighbours would not be heaven. It would simply be another form of hell.

Some preaching about hell has been psychologically destructive. It has manipulated children, intensified scrupulosity, turned evangelism into terror and made God appear less merciful than an ordinary human parent. Christians should acknowledge this without defensiveness.

If that was the burden Hatmaker laid down, then some of her relief was deserved.

But psychological relief is spiritually significant and theologically ambiguous. It can mean that a lie has been removed. It can also mean that a difficult truth has been numbed.

The question is not merely whether a belief makes my head and heart feel aligned. The question is whether it tells the truth about God, the human person, freedom, evil, justice and love.

The proper alternative to abusive theology is not the abolition of theology. It is better theology.

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The hell that should be rejected

Hatmaker appears to have been given two possibilities: either God actively sets people on fire forever, or there is no hell.

But these are not the only possibilities available within the Christian tradition.

Christian history contains plenty of lurid preaching, speculative geography and attempts to frighten people into good behaviour. But the church has never required every imaginative description of hell to be treated as a photograph of the afterlife. Fire, darkness, exclusion, death, thirst and destruction are biblical images pointing towards a reality beyond our present comprehension. They tell us that the reality is terrible. They do not give us a visitor’s guide to its physical layout.

At the centre of historic Christian teaching is something more profound: hell is the final separation of a created person from the God who is the source of life, goodness, truth and joy.

God does not create human beings for damnation. God desires their salvation. Hell is not God discovering one final opportunity to be cruel. It is the terrible possibility that a person can persistently refuse the love for which he or she was made.

Sin is not merely the breaking of an arbitrary rule. It is the deformation of desire. We repeatedly give ourselves to certain loves, tell certain lies, justify certain cruelties and make certain compromises. Those actions do not remain outside us. They form us.

We become people capable of particular kinds of action. We may also become incapable of other kinds. Pride can make apologising almost impossible. Resentment can become an identity. Deceit can so thoroughly shape a person that truth feels like an attack. The refusal of love can become the kind of person we are.

Hell is the final seriousness of that possibility.

This does not require us to imagine God gleefully throwing people into a furnace. It asks us to believe that our lives possess real moral substance and consequence, that freedom can be tragically misused and that God will not call evil good simply to make the story end pleasantly.

The false choice

The great Christian tradition offers neither the religion of terror nor the religion of automatic reassurance. It holds together judgment, mercy, freedom, purification and hope.

Judgment is not the moment at which Jesus ceases to be loving. It is instead our encounter with the truth of his love.

In that encounter, everything false is exposed. The ways we have harmed others, deceived ourselves and resisted grace can no longer be hidden. For many, this encounter can be understood as a painful purification: the fire of divine love burning away what is false so that the person can finally become capable of communion.

That is a very different image from a divine torturer maintaining a cosmic prison. But it is also very different from saying that nothing finally matters because God is nice.

Grace does not make wrong into right. Forgiveness does not mean that the victim’s suffering was insignificant. Mercy does not declare the oppressor and the oppressed morally interchangeable.

Those who have destroyed other people cannot simply be seated beside their victims at the eternal banquet as if nothing happened. Reconciliation requires truth. It requires judgment. It requires the death of whatever made the destruction possible.

Christian faith has always insisted that the Judge is also the Saviour. The one before whom our lives are exposed is the one who has already given himself for us. Judgment and mercy meet in the person of Christ.

This is why Christians may hope for the salvation of every person without declaring in advance that damnation is impossible. We are not authorised to populate hell. We are not invited to speculate happily about which enemies are there. The proper Christian posture is to hope for everyone else while taking the danger to ourselves seriously.

Hell is first a doctrine about me, not a doctrine about the people I dislike.

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What else disappears?

The problem with abandoning hell is not simply that one item has been removed from a list of doctrines. The more revealing question is what else must change once it has gone.

Hatmaker’s argument does not appear to stop with rejecting literal flames. Judgment itself begins to disappear. Evangelism becomes embarrassing. The distinction between salvation and lostness becomes morally suspect. The goal of faith becomes being loving, kind, emotionally healthy people and good neighbours.

There is much here that Christians should affirm. Christians should be good neighbours. We should reject manipulative evangelism, spiritual superiority and delight in the imagined punishment of others.

But Christianity cannot be reduced to neighbourliness. The gospel is not the announcement that God wants us to become pleasant, well-adjusted people.

If there is no meaningful possibility of being lost, what are we saved from?

The New Testament speaks of salvation as forgiveness, liberation, healing, reconciliation, resurrection and participation in the life of God. We are not merely reassured. We are rescued from powers we cannot defeat by ourselves: sin, death, falsehood, self-deception and the inward curvature of the human heart.

If our central problem is that religion made us feel ashamed, salvation becomes the discovery that there was never anything fundamentally wrong with us. Jesus becomes the great confirmer of our underlying goodness. The cross becomes an illustration of divine solidarity rather than the place where sin is judged, death is defeated, and humanity is reconciled to God.

Something similar happens to our understanding of evil. A therapeutic culture is often highly sensitive to suffering but less capable of speaking about guilt. It knows how people have been wounded. It is less certain how to say that wounded people can also become people who wound.

Some evil is not adequately described as ignorance, trauma, maladaptation or the failure to flourish. Human beings can knowingly exploit, degrade and destroy one another. We can love power, cruelty and falsehood. We can refuse repentance because repentance would require the surrender of the selves we have constructed.

A world without final judgment risks becoming a world in which the victims of history are never finally vindicated. Their pain may be acknowledged, but the moral order itself remains unsettled. The dead receive no justice. The torturer and the tortured arrive at the same end without any necessary reckoning.

Then love changes too.

“God is love” is not a progressive revision of Christianity. It is at the heart of the Christian confession. The dispute is not about whether God is love. It is about what love means.

Christian love is not limitless affirmation. It seeks the real good of the beloved. It opposes whatever destroys the beloved. It forgives, but it also purifies. It comforts, but it also commands. It receives us as we are but refuses to leave us there.

A love unable to judge anything cannot protect anyone. A God who is never opposed to evil is not more loving to evil’s victims. He is indifferent to them.

Hell and the self-made self

Beneath the argument about hell is a deeper disagreement about what a human being is.

The modern self increasingly understands identity as something discovered within and then expressed outwardly. My desires, experiences and psychological sense of integrity tell me who I am. Institutions, communities and traditions are legitimate to the extent that they affirm that identity. When they do not, they become obstacles to authenticity.

Within this world, relief possesses enormous authority. A belief that produces inner conflict is assumed to be oppressive. A belief that produces psychological integration appears self-validating.

Historic Christianity begins somewhere else. The self is not self-originating. I do not create my nature, my purpose or my final good. I receive life as a gift. I discover myself not by turning endlessly inward but through communion with God and others. Freedom is not the power to invent the good; it is the power to recognise, receive and participate in it.

This is where the doctrine of hell becomes unexpectedly revealing.

Hell is the terminal form of the self-made self.

It is not the created person successfully becoming independent of God, since no creature can become the source of its own existence. It is the person refusing to receive their life as gift—curved inward, defending their own sovereignty, preferring the diminished world of the self to the surrender involved in love.

The project of self-creation cannot finally produce freedom because it leaves the self imprisoned within itself.

This also helps explain the importance of the post-church platform. A church, at its best, is a community we did not create, composed of people we did not select, receiving a faith we did not invent. It connects us to the dead, the unborn, the poor, the inconvenient and the stranger. It can contradict us.

An audience is different. An audience gathers around a personality. Its continued presence confirms the personality’s authority. If part of the audience objects, another audience can replace it.

Again, this does not make public theological change dishonest. It does mean that a platform can insulate the self from the kind of belonging in which beliefs must be tested against something more durable than personal experience and audience response.

A platform can follow my evolution. A tradition can ask whether my evolution is growth.

The striking feature of many public deconstruction stories is not simply that people leave conservative evangelicalism. There are many historic Christian homes beyond that world. The striking feature is that they often cease looking for a home at all. The journey moves from one cramped form of Christianity not into the breadth and depth of the church’s tradition, but into a post-ecclesial faith organised around personal intuition, therapeutic categories and a curated community.

The tragedy is that the tradition they believe they have outgrown may be one they were never actually given.

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The hope beyond fear

Christians should hope that hell is empty.

We should pray for the salvation of every person. We should refuse to name anyone as certainly lost. We should believe that grace can reach people in ways hidden from us, including at the final boundaries of life. We should never speak of hell with relish.

But hope is not the same as advance knowledge.

To hope that every person freely receives salvation is different from declaring that refusal is impossible. Christian hope is not optimism about human nature. It is confidence in the mercy of God while remaining honest about the terrifying capacities of human freedom.

The doctrine of hell was not given so that Christians could terrorise children, control congregations or imagine their enemies screaming. It is a warning addressed to every human being that our lives matter, our loves form us, and the refusal of truth can become a prison.

At the same time, hell is never the centre of the Christian proclamation. Jesus Christ is.

The Christian story is not that God created a torture chamber and then offered us a technical means of escape. It is that God entered the depths of human violence, estrangement and death to find us. In Christ, the Judge has borne judgment. The one who exposes our falsehood has descended into our darkness. The one who calls us to repentance has already given himself for our salvation.

That is why evangelism need not be frantic or manipulative. It can be witness: an invitation into the life for which human beings were created. It says not merely, “Avoid punishment,” but, “Be reconciled to God. Come out of the closed room. Receive the life you cannot give yourself.”

Jen Hatmaker is right to throw out the image of a bloodthirsty God who enjoys suffering. She is right to reject smug Christians imagining themselves applauding from heaven. She is right that fear can deform faith.

That is the bathwater. Throw it out.

But the baby is the truth that love, freedom, evil, justice and salvation are real enough to possess eternal significance. It is the truth that God’s love is more demanding and more beautiful than affirmation. It is the truth that we are created rather than self-authored, that our choices form us, that victims will be vindicated, and that grace does not call evil good but overcomes it.

Perhaps that is the larger invitation.

When the version of Christianity we inherited becomes impossible to believe, our only choices are not fundamentalism or departure. There is an older, deeper and far richer Christian tradition than many of us were given. It has wrestled with judgment and mercy, freedom and grace, heaven and hell, without resolving the tension through either terror or sentimentality.

If that tradition can help us recover hell from its caricatures, perhaps it can help us recover other things we were preparing to discard.

Before announcing that we are done with hell, we should ask whether we have ever encountered the doctrine at all.

At the 2024 British LGBT Awards, David Tennant received an award for being a celebrity ally. During his acceptance speech, he turned his attention to Kemi Badenoch, then the Minister for Women and Equalities.

“Until we wake up and Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist any more. I don’t wish ill of her, I just wish her to shut up.”

The audience applauded.

To be fair to Tennant, later qualified what he had said, no doubt aware of its implications and growing backlash. He did not claim that he wanted Badenoch harmed or killed. He appears to have meant that he wanted her removed from public influence and, more particularly, silenced.

Yet the qualification does not make the sentence less revealing. It clarifies the kind of non-existence being imagined. The preferred world is one in which the dissenting person has disappeared from public life and can no longer speak.

It would be a category error to pretend that a hostile comment about one politician is equivalent to wishing away an entire race, religion or sexual minority. It is not. Yet we know instinctively why the language of non-existence is so dangerous. Replace Badenoch’s name with the name of a class of people defined by their race, religion or sexuality, and the obscenity becomes immediately apparent.

Naming a single political opponent does not make the desire to erase harmless. It merely makes it easier for an audience to applaud.

The question that interests me is not whether David Tennant is a good or bad person. Nor is this principally an argument about his politics, Badenoch’s politics or the contested questions of sex and gender that lay behind his remark.

The more searching question I want to explore with you is this:

What kind of identity requires the silence, disappearance or non-existence of another person in order to feel secure?

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Why Fragile Identities Crave Affirmation

All human identity is formed through relationships. None of us creates ourselves from nothing. We learn who we are through families, communities, languages, traditions, bodies and histories. We need recognition from others because we are social creatures.

There is nothing pathological about wanting to be known, respected or treated with dignity.

The difficulty begins when the self claims absolute authority to create its own identity while also requiring everyone else to ratify what it has created. It says, in effect, “My identity is mine alone to define, but it cannot remain secure unless you repeat my definition of myself.”

That places an impossible burden and requirement upon everyone else.

Their disagreement can no longer be received as disagreement. It is experienced as a refusal of my existence. Their words are not merely mistaken or offensive. They become an assault upon my being.

Once disagreement has been translated into existential harm, the dissenter becomes dangerous. If their speech becomes a threat to my existence, even their silent beliefs start to feel like a negation of myself. If their presence destabilises my identity, their disappearance can begin to feel like liberation.

This pattern is not confined to a single political movement or to one side of the argument about sex and gender. Religious, nationalist, racial and political identities can all become organised around the same fragility. Ideologies change, but the structure of human behaviour remains remarkably consistent.

• I do not merely believe that you are wrong. I need you to affirm me.

• I do not merely want to persuade you. I need to compel you.

• I do not merely oppose what you believe. I begin to imagine a better world in which people like you can no longer speak.

Eventually, the imagined better world becomes one in which you are no longer present at all.

This is what I mean by ontological fragility. Ontology is simply the language we use when asking what it means to exist, what is real and where our being comes from. An ontologically secure identity can survive the existence of people who reject it. An ontologically fragile identity cannot. It must keep recruiting witnesses, demanding recognition and silencing contradiction because the self it has created lacks sufficient substance to stand without continuous public confirmation.

The problem is not simply intolerance. It is a self that has become dependent upon the negation of another.

Dancing on Graves: What death permits us to say

The recent murder of Ann Widdecombe has brought this into sharp focus again.

Widdecombe was found dead at her home in Devon on 9 July 2026 with serious injuries. Police opened a murder investigation, and Counter Terrorism Policing later assumed responsibility for the inquiry while officers continued to investigate the motive.

Her death was followed by a stream of online contempt. There were people who did not merely criticise her political record or express relief that she would no longer exercise influence. Some celebrated. Some appeared to take pleasure in the possibility that she had suffered. Police are actively investigating social-media posts celebrating her death.

The same pattern followed the assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University in September 2025. Many people across the political spectrum condemned his murder. Others joked about it, rationalised it or celebrated it. A Reuters examination found posts declaring that he had received what he deserved, alongside others invoking the language of karma.

People’s mileage with social media will vary. Yet anyone who doubts that this attitude exists can spend a few minutes searching the names of Ann Widdecombe or Charlie Kirk on the major platforms. You do not need to scroll far before encountering people who regard death as a legitimate verdict upon an opponent’s beliefs.

The argument frequently takes the same form.

This person held beliefs that caused harm. Their words made other people feel threatened, unsafe or denied. Their death is therefore interpreted as a form of recompense. The suffering of the deceased restores a supposed moral balance because they are believed to have caused existential suffering in others.

This is the point at which a political disagreement becomes a metaphysical drama. The deceased is made to carry responsibility for the pain, insecurity and instability of those who hated them. Their death is then treated as though it has removed something poisonous from the universe.

It has not.

No human death can bear that redemptive burden.

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Relief is not the same as delight

An important distinction needs to be made here.

Someone who has suffered serious physical, sexual or psychological abuse may experience relief when their abuser dies. That relief can be the body’s recognition that an actual threat has ended. The continued existence of an abuser can feel like the continued presence of the world in which the abuse occurred. Their death may finally remove the possibility that they will return.

I know something of this distinction personally. My childhood and early adult life were marked by prolonged emotional and physical abuse from my mother, and later by persistent verbal abuse and manipulation from both my parents. When they eventually took their own lives—something I would never have wished upon them—I discovered, alongside the grief, an unexpected relief. When someone asked what it had been like, the word that came was quiet.

After years of noise, pressure and emotional intrusion, there was finally silence. I was not glad that they were dead; I was relieved that the abuse had ended. Their tragedy, as I came to understand it, was an inability to form selves stable enough to live without controlling, manipulating and wounding others. Their deaths did not satisfy me. They ended the demand that I keep carrying the instability of their identities.

It would be pastorally cruel to stand at a safe distance and lecture survivors about the emotions they should experience. Relief is not always vengeance. Sometimes it is the first sensation of safety.

Our legal traditions also recognise, however imperfectly, the human desire for a final reckoning with those who have committed terrible harm. Arguments about capital punishment partly turn upon whether the death of an offender can ever provide that finality, and whether the state has the right to provide it.

That is a serious and difficult moral territory.

It is also very different from taking pleasure in the suffering of a stranger because she defended traditional Christian beliefs about marriage, family and the human body, or because he expressed conservative political opinions that many found offensive.

Disagreement is not abuse. Offence is not violence. A public figure holding beliefs that contradict your own identity is not the same as an abuser retaining the power to enter your home, damage your body or control your life.

When these categories are collapsed, every political opponent, every person who disagrees with our beliefs can be redescribed as an abuser. Once that happens, punishment appears therapeutic. Cruelty can be presented as self-care. The suffering of the enemy becomes evidence that justice has occurred

The Grave Reveals the Living

Why does someone’s death so often become the moment when others finally say aloud what they have carried within them?

I suspect death removes the last restraints created by relationship.

While someone is alive, they can answer back. Their face, voice, family and vulnerability may disturb the caricature we have made of them. There may also be social, professional or legal consequences for publicly announcing that we wish they did not exist.

Death removes those restraints.

The dead cannot respond. They cannot correct our account of them. They cannot surprise us by displaying kindness, humour or vulnerability. They can be reduced entirely to a symbol of the beliefs we hated.

Death also gives malice a kind of moral camouflage. The speaker can claim not to be threatening anyone because the person is already dead. A desire that would have appeared vicious while its object was alive can now be disguised as commentary, satire, political analysis or moral judgement.

And now social media supplies the audience.

A remark that might once have remained an ugly private thought can now be turned into a public performance of allegiance. The cruelty proves that I belong to the right group. It shows that I know who deserves sympathy and who does not. Approval from the crowd converts malice into moral status.

The grave therefore becomes revelatory.

It reveals little about the dead that was not already known. But it now reveals the architecture of the living soul making its remarks about the dead.

The person celebrating imagines exposing their opponent's moral bankruptcy. In reality, they are showing how dependent their own identity has become upon opposition. Another person’s non-existence feels like an increase in their own being.

Yet being, identity, and self cannot be built by negation.

You do not become more substantial because another person has disappeared. You do not acquire dignity by celebrating the loss of theirs. You cannot heal your wounds by taking pleasure in someone else’s suffering.

Hatred creates nothing. It feeds upon what already exists. It promises strength while consuming the person who harbours it. It offers the temporary exhilaration of moral superiority, followed by the need for another enemy, another punishment and another public demonstration of contempt.

An identity that requires enemies will never run out of them.

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The Identity Jesus Received

Christianity offers a radically different account of identity.

Jesus does not invent himself. His identity is received from the Father.

At his baptism, before he has preached a sermon, healed the sick or confronted an opponent, he hears that he is the beloved Son. His identity precedes his achievement. It is a gift before it becomes a vocation.

The temptations that follow are attempts to make him prove what he has already received.

“If you are the Son of God,” the tempter says, turn stones into bread. Throw yourself from the Temple. Demonstrate your power. Force reality to acknowledge who you are.

Jesus refuses.

The same temptation returns at the cross. If you are who you claim to be, save yourself. Come down. Make us believe. Establish your identity through spectacle, coercion and the defeat of your enemies.

Again, Jesus refuses.

The cross is where the received identity of Jesus is subjected to the complete refusal of others to affirm it. He is misnamed, stripped, beaten, mocked and displayed as a fraud. He experiences real violence, humiliation and abandonment. His enemies do not merely disagree with his beliefs. They attempt to destroy his body, erase his claims and extinguish his presence from the world.

Yet their refusal cannot alter who he is.

Jesus does not need his persecutors to validate his identity. He already knows himself as the one who comes from the Father and returns to the Father. His life is received rather than manufactured, and therefore it cannot be sustained or destroyed by the recognition of the crowd.

This allows him to do something that should still astonish us.

The one through whom all things were made, and in whom all things hold together, does not wish his enemies out of existence. The only person in the scene with the authority to summon overwhelming power refuses to use it to vindicate himself.

He forgives.

This is not because the abuse is unreal or the injustice trivial. Forgiveness is meaningful precisely because the wounds are real. Jesus does not pretend that crucifixion is a misunderstanding. He bears its marks in his risen body.

Yet he does not turn those wounds into a grievance around which to organise his identity.

When Jesus leaves the tomb, he does not establish a movement devoted to retelling the wickedness of those who harmed him. He does not gather his disciples to rehearse the humiliations he suffered or construct a programme of revenge against Rome, Pilate, Herod or the religious authorities.

Instead, He comes speaking peace.

He restores Peter. He breathes the Spirit. He sends his followers into the world. His wounds remain visible, but they are no longer weapons with which to control others.

The risen Christ is not without memory. He is without resentment.

What Happens When We Face Death?

This is the identity Christians are invited to receive.

Christian identity is not dependent upon everyone believing in Jesus. It does not cease to exist because someone mocks the Church, rejects the resurrection, disputes Christian sexual ethics or regards Christian belief as dangerous.

People are free to disagree with us. They are free to ridicule what we believe. They may misunderstand our motives, denigrate our faith and refuse every account we give of ourselves.

None of that can remove an identity received in Christ.

This does not require passivity. Christians may oppose falsehood, resist injustice, protect the vulnerable and argue forcefully in public. Love does not prevent judgement. It governs the purpose and manner of judgement.

The Christian does not need to coerce others into believing what they do to remain a Christian. Nor should we need the silencing, humiliation or death of our opponents to confirm that Christ is Lord.

The security of a received identity creates the possibility of genuine disagreement because the existence of the other person is no longer a threat to my own.

This is one reason the command to love our enemies cannot be reduced to an admirable moral ideal. It is a test of what kind of identity we possess.

A self founded upon achievement, public recognition or ideological conformity will struggle to love an enemy because an enemy threatens the conditions upon which that self depends. A self received in Christ can desire the good of an enemy because the enemy has no power to revoke what God has given.

Our culture has become adept at cancelling those whose existence complicates its preferred account of reality.

We can remove people from institutions. We can close their bank accounts, destroy their employment, refuse them platforms and make their views socially expensive to express. Sometimes institutions need to discipline real misconduct. Sometimes speech has proper consequences. Yet cancellation becomes something darker when its true purpose is to render a person socially non-existent because their continued presence threatens the group's moral certainty.

Can we do the same to Jesus?

We can remove Christian symbols from public places. We can treat his teaching as embarrassing, oppressive or obsolete. We can ridicule those who worship him and construct versions of Christianity that remove everything in him that contradicts our desires.

We cannot make him cease to exist.

Our own deaths will finally expose the strange reversal at work. We spend our lives demanding that the world validate the identities we have assembled. We imagine ourselves standing in judgement over everyone who refuses. Yet we will eventually stand before a reality we did not create and cannot coerce. For death will come to us all.

The risen Christ will not simply ratify every identity we have fashioned, every appetite we have declared sacred or every grievance around which we have constructed a self.

Some identities will not survive that encounter.

The identities built from domination, resentment, rivalry, contempt and enemy-making will have to die. This is not the annihilation of the person. It is the rescue of the person from the false self that has consumed them.

The final Christian hope is not that Jesus will validate everything we have made of ourselves. It is that he will bring us into the identity for which we were meant to be made.

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A Final Diagnostic Test

The reactions to the deaths of Ann Widdecombe and Charlie Kirk offer a diagnostic that should unsettle all of us, regardless of our politics.

What happens to me when someone I intensely dislike or perhaps despise suffers?

• Do I feel even a flicker of satisfaction?

• Do I secretly believe that the world contains more goodness because this particular person no longer exists?

• Have I made another person so responsible for my pain that their suffering feels redemptive?

• Does my identity require other people to affirm it, repeat it and surrender their own judgement before it can feel secure?

• Do I regard those who refuse as people to persuade and love, or as obstacles to be silenced and removed?

These are questions for Christians before they are questions for anyone else. We have our own histories of coercion, persecution and the destruction of those whose presence disturbed our confidence. We are no less capable of building identities around grievance, tribe and enemy-making.

The test is not whether we can love people who affirm us.

The test is whether our identity is sufficiently rooted in Christ that we can desire the good of those who deny us, oppose us and misunderstand us.

Death has a strange way of revealing us.

So when someone’s first instinct is gratitude that another human being no longer exists, they imagine they are making a statement about the deceased. In reality, they are making a confession about themselves.

Nothing reveals the paucity of our own being more starkly than needing another person’s death to feel more fully alive.

A friend tells you spiritual direction changed her life. Another warns you it is like cheap (and bad) therapy. Someone you respect is certain it is just the New Age in Christian clothes. And then a priest you trust tells you it is one of the oldest practices in the Church.

So which is it?

Both the enthusiasts and the critics are often partly right. The enthusiasts are right that something real, Christian and special happens in spiritual direction. The critics are also right that a great deal passes under the term and has very little to do with Christ. Both can be true at once. So what follows is an attempt to help tell them apart.

I understand the suspicion. I share some of it.

Over the years, I have heard reports about spiritual direction. “I spent an hour talking about myself.” “My director never once mentioned Jesus.” “It felt like therapy with a candle.” “My director talked about themselves for most of the time” “It sounded spiritual, but I’m not sure what about.”

If that is what spiritual direction is, they are right to walk away from it.

But….

You can misuse anything.

You can misuse preaching. You can misuse the Bible. You can misuse worship, prayer, the sacraments, mission and, as we know all too well, social justice. People have done real harm with every one of these things. We don’t conclude that mission, worship, prayer, justice, etc. are all invalid because of the misuse of those.

The misuse of a thing does not define the thing per se. It exposes what happens when its centre and true north have become lost. Spiritual direction is no different. To judge it by its distortions is to judge it by the exact moment it stopped being true to itself.

So the real question is not whether spiritual direction can go wrong. Of course it can. The question is what it is when it goes right and is right in and of itself.

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Why it drifts

The reason so much of it drifts is not a failure of technique. It is due to the water we swim in.

We live, as Charles Taylor has shown, in an age of expressive individualism, where the self is something we author rather than receive. We live, as Philip Rieff saw, in a therapeutic culture, where the aim of the inner life is no longer holiness but feeling good. Our attention is harvested and sold. Our imaginations, desires and passions are captured before we have chosen anything. And the deforming result is a God remade in the image of our own therapeutic needs. A God who affirms. A God who soothes. A God who exists, conveniently, to help us become more fully ourselves, even when we have no idea who we are.

Drop spiritual direction into this cultural water, and it will absorb and dissolve it. This drift is not a plan. It is a kind of gravity well in which the self moves to the centre of everything, and everything begins to orbit it. Including spiritual direction.

Here is the hinge of the whole matter.

Every spirituality has a centre. Tell me what stands at the centre, and I can tell you, with some confidence, where the whole thing is going.

Self            →   therapy
Authenticity    →   self-expression
Consciousness   →   a generic mysticism
Christ          →   Christian formation

Put the self at the centre and spiritual direction becomes therapy. Put authenticity at the centre, and it becomes the cultivation of self-expression. Put consciousness or “the sacred” in general at the centre, and you get a generic mysticism that could belong to anyone or to no one.

Put Christ at the centre, the living Christ, and only then is it Christian formation. Not because of everything that happens within spiritual direction, but because of the One to whom it is ordered.

What makes anything Christian?

Someone often pushes back here and rightly so. Who decides what Christian is? Who are you to decide what is and isn’t Christian?

First, it is true that anyone can call anything Christian. The word is not trademarked. People attach it to practices, politics and products that would have baffled the apostles.

But, second, Christians have never accepted that the name Christian settles the matter of being Christian. From the beginning the Church drew boundaries. Paul confronted a different gospel and called it no gospel at all. John warned of spirits that would not confess Christ come in the flesh. The early church councils met to debate and discern what was Christian. The creeds were written.

The emergence of the creeds was long, costly, intellectually demanding, spiritually discerning, and anything but obvious. Christians didn’t wake up one morning and agree on precise formulations about Christ and the Trinity. They spent nearly four centuries wrestling with Scripture, worship, philosophy, language, persecution, and competing interpretations before arriving at the creedal consensus. That consensus emerged from a shared experience over time of Christ as their focus for life and death, and from asking a question beneath all their questions.

Who is Christ?

And then, in light of that, what does it mean to be a Christian, one who believes in and follows Christ?

So, then third, when I say spiritual direction must be Christ-centred, I am not inventing a definition of Christianity to suit myself. I am receiving one. I am using the same Christ that Scripture proclaims, that the creeds confess, that the Church has worshipped for two thousand years. I am not the author of this standard. I am its heir.

Not Christ as a warm idea. Not Christ as my inner wisdom. Not Christ as the most enlightened teacher in a long line of teachers. Not Christ as my therapist. Not Christ as my supreme affirmation. Not Christ that I have adjusted to fit my personal version of him.

But this Christ.

The eternal Son, the Word who rested in the Father’s heart before time found its first morning. The One through whom all things came into being: the galaxies in their silent splendour, the seas in their restless depths, and every human soul breathed into being.

He entered the world that his love had called forth, clothed himself in our fragile humanity, embraced our suffering, was crucified beneath the weight of our brokenness, descended into our death, rose with the dawn of a new creation, ascended into glory, and now reigns in the eternal communion of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

He became what we are, that we might be drawn into the mystery of who he is and, through him, be welcomed into the eternal communion of love shared by the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.1

This changes everything.

When Christ is at the centre, spiritual direction becomes something far larger than a conversation about my feelings and sense of self. It becomes Trinitarian. It is the Son drawing me, by the Spirit, into the life of the Father.

The spiritual conversation matters deeply, but it is not the destination. It is our small participation in a far greater movement that began before the foundation of the world and will never end.

Christian spiritual direction is one believer helping another to notice, discern and respond to the living Christ who is already present and already at work.

Notice the order. The director does not generate the encounter. Christ is there first. Direction only helps a person see what grace is already doing and answer it. The real director in every session is the Holy Spirit. The human one is a friend who points and says, quietly, “Look.”

Which brings me to the thing I most want to say.

The problem with bad spiritual direction is not psychology. It is not emotion. It is not silence. It is not the imagination. Every one of these can serve Christ, and often does. The problem is subtler, and sadder, than any of them.

The problem is that Christ quietly leaves the room.

No one announces it. No one decides it. The conversations stay warm, the insights keep arriving, the candle still burns. Experiences are still generated. But somewhere along the way the Christ stops being the subject, the centre and the goal. And the self slides into the space and place that he leaves.

Whenever spiritual direction ceases to be ordered towards encounter with the living Christ, towards communion with the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit, it has suffered a christological heart failure. It may retain all outward signs of health, yet it has lost the very life it exists to share.

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Five Questions Worth Asking

If you are wondering whether the direction you are receiving, or offering, is Christian, you do not need a checklist. You need the questions the Church has always asked.

• Who is at the centre?

• Which Christ am I meeting?

• Is Scripture shaping the encounter, or only my feelings about it?

• What is this ordered towards? My self-understanding, or my surrender.

• Who am I becoming? More fascinated with myself, or more in love with him.

And then one last question, the one that tells you almost everything.

• When I leave this conversation, whose presence has become more real to me?

If the answer is my own, something has gone wrong, however pleasant it felt.

If the answer is His, you have been in Christian spiritual direction, whatever else was or was not said, or however expertly or inexpertly it was made.

Christian spiritual direction does not exist to make us experts on ourselves. It exists to make us friends of Jesus Christ. To know him. To love him. To follow him. To be changed by him, and through him to be drawn into the life of the Father by the Holy Spirit.

That has always been the Christian vision.

It still is.

For twenty-five years, I sat with people, as a pastor, in the places where their lives quietly came apart. As a coach, a mentor, and a spiritual director, I have heard the same disappointment described in similar ways.

A marriage that never became what they hoped. A career that promised significance and gave them a grinding routine. A ministry that stayed smaller than the dream, and smaller than the prophetic words once spoken over it. A retirement long-awaited that arrived and felt empty. A faith that, somewhere along the way, stopped having meaning and purpose.

Underneath the particulars of those moments, there was almost always one sentence. This is not how I thought it would be. And beneath that, quieter and harder to say aloud, another. This is not the life I hoped for. And then something harder still, more often felt than spoken. God has let me down.

Something else has been happening over the years during these conversations. Never have people been so encouraged to discover themselves, express themselves, reinvent themselves, heal themselves, curate themselves, and at last become their true selves.

We are told this is freedom.

Yet people seem more anxious than ever. More fragile. More tired. More disappointed. Relationships fray when commitment starts to feel like a threat to self-expression. Experiences are consumed and discarded because none of them delivers the life we were hoping to find. Communities are thinning out, treated as optional, because they ask us to submit to something larger than ourselves. Ideologies grow attractive because they offer a sense of belonging and affirmation at the very moment our lives feel least secure. And disagreement, more and more, feels like an assault on the self we are making.

Why?

Because we have taken up a burden we were never meant to carry. The burden of creating ourselves.

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The Freedom that Became a Cage

First, let us be fair to the old world that produced the new one.

The old order held real oppression. Plenty of inherited identities were iron cages, handed down without consent and worn without joy. People were told who they were and given no room to become anything else. The chance to learn, to grow, to use their gifts, was kept from most of them. Modernity promised to break the locks. You do not have to accept what you were handed. You can become yourself.

That was a genuine gift and one I benefited from.

My grandparents, and theirs before them, were colliers and labourers. Their work was brutal, the kind that wears a body out and then ends it early, and many of them died young, numbed and killed in slow motion by drink and cigarettes.

I broke that cycle. The first break, and the deepest, was meeting Christ. But it was not the only one. For the first time in our family line, my parents had some say in where I was schooled. Education stopped being a wall of exclusion and instread became a door, a way into a different kind of life and a different economy than the one that had ground my grandparents down. I could go places they were never allowed to go.

But somewhere these freedoms of modern life hardened into an obligation. Identity stopped being something we discovered and became something we have to manage. It has to be curated, expressed, defended, and kept current. The self is now a never-finished project, and we are the only ones working on it.

You are both the manager and the project. No wonder it is exhausting.

There is another way to carry a self. We have half forgotten it.

Worship Reveals The Foundations of Our Identity

One of the simplest ways to discern whether we are receiving identity or constructing it is to pay attention to our worship. Not what we say in church, but the actual shape of our spiritual lives.

Do we seek communities that challenge and form us, or communities that affirm us? Do our prayers revolve around God’s purposes or our projects? Is Jesus Lord, or a consultant we have brought in, a therapist, there to help us become the person we have already decided to be?

Our worship always reveals where our identity comes from.

When identity is self-made, the whole of our spiritual life bends inward upon itself. Church becomes a consumer choice, kept as long as it serves us. Community becomes optional, useful until it costs us something. Worship becomes a form of self-expression. Prayer becomes self-improvement by another name. God becomes a resource we draw on to fund the life we are building. Underneath it all runs a single question: how can God help me become who I want to be and get what I want?

When identity is received, our spiritual life turns the other way. Church becomes the place where we are formed, including in the ways we would not choose. Community stops being optional and becomes necessary, because we cannot become ourselves alone. Worship becomes participation in something we did not invent. Prayer becomes surrender. God stops being a resource and becomes the source. Repentance and confession become the means of grace by which we let go of our self-making and receive who God made us to be.

And our identity question changes.

No longer, how can God help me become who I want to be, but who is Christ inviting me to become, in him, with him, and through him?

And here is the mercy hidden in the diagnosis.

We are as free as we ever were.

The invitation from God, our Maker, has not been withdrawn. We are still free today to choose Christ as the source of who we are, to receive our identity from him and live it in participation with him, rather than asking him to bless a self we have been trying to build. He will not be reduced to an affirmation we collect when our self-creation needs propping up. Nor is he Father Christmas, or a genie who delivers whatever we have decided we need. He offers something better than affirmation and better than supply. He offers himself, and our true self, along with him.

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The Real Scandal of Christianity

Christians build identities, too. We just use holier materials in our building. The successful-ministry identity. The faithful-remnant identity. The social justice activist identity. The traditionalist identity. The identity that comes from belonging to the right theological tribe and quietly despising the wrong one. For many of us, the Christian life becomes a series of these projects, and we walk out of one straight into the next, certain that this time we have found the real thing.

We can talk about Jesus constantly and still be carrying the whole project of self-creation. What gives it away is not our vocabulary. It is the symptoms, and the clearest of them is offence. When identity is received, an insult can be survived because the ground we stand on is not the thing under attack. When identity is constructed, offence becomes almost a reflex, because every criticism lands on the foundation of who we are.

Watch how easily we take offence, and how long we keep it. It is one of the most reliable warning lights on the dashboard. The others glow around it. Defensiveness. Comparison. And an exhaustion that never lifts, wth a disappointment that keeps returning.

The Deepest Christian Claim

The deepest thing Christianity says about you is not discover yourself, or express yourself, or create yourself.

It is: receive yourself.

Identity is not achieved. It is received. Not passively, as though you were nothing and had nothing to do. Not fatalistically, as though the matters and affairs of your life were already closed and decided. But relationally, through participation in Christ. You are known by God before you are impressive to anyone. Loved before you are successful. Called before you have accomplished a single thing.

The question that has been grinding you and me down begins to change. It is no longer, who am I creating myself to be. It becomes, who am I becoming in Christ?

This is the real scandal of Christianity, and it is not the one people expect. The scandal is not that you will be shut out of heaven unless you say the right words in the right order. The scandal is harder and stranger than that.

It is that you are not, in the end, free to be whoever you want to be.

The freedom we have been chasing was never going to be found in self-invention. It is found in Christ, or it is not found at all.

An Identity That Needs No One’s Approval

This is where Paul, writing to the Galatians, says something strange. I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.

A self we create needs constant affirmation to stay upright. Validation. Recognition. Agreement. It survives only as long as enough people keep agreeing to hold it in place. Withdraw the affirmation, and it begins to wobble, which is why so much of modern life is spent anxiously defending it.

The identity Paul describes does not work like that. It can take being misunderstood. It can take ridicule, failure, being pushed to the margins, even persecution, because it no longer rests on the self or on the crowd. The self is no longer carrying the impossible job of being its own foundation.

So perhaps the exhaustion is not a sign that we have failed at making ourselves. Perhaps it is the entirely predictable result of carrying a weight that was never ours to carry. The weight of being your own creator.

And perhaps the invitation of Christ begins exactly here. Not with striving. Not with another reinvention. But with receiving. Receiving a life. Receiving a name. Receiving an identity you do not have to manufacture or defend. Receiving yourself, at last, from the One who has known you all along, better than you have ever known yourself.

A self you make wears out, because it was always too small to bear the weight of a whole person. But no Christian has ever exhausted the identity given to them in Christ. It does not run dry. There is always more of it to receive.

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What Death Will Reveal

Worship reveals where our identity is coming from now. Death will reveal what it was all along. It is the one test none of us will sit by choice, and it takes everything we have built. Our achievements, our affirmations, the carefully kept image, the tribe that agreed to see us as we wished to be seen.

None of it survives its stripping.

This is why death so frightens the self we have made. It is not only the loss of life. It is the loss of the one thing holding that self upright. A constructed identity is performance, and performance needs an audience. Death empties the room. When the applause stops, when the likes dry up, when the achievements fall silent, a self that was built has nothing left to stand on, because it never had being of its own. It was borrowed, propped, sustained from outside. And what is sustained from outside can be taken from outside, which is what death does.

Death does something different to the self that was received.

It does not destroy it. It reveals it. The identity that rested on Christ all along is brought into the open and shown for what it always was, and it turns out to have been the truest thing about us. A self received in Christ participates in the life of the One who simply is, a being that does not depend on circumstance, or memory, or breath.

This is why it cannot be lost. Death is not its end. Death is our unveiling.

So the question death finally answers is the one we spend our whole lives avoiding. Not what did you make of yourself, experience, and achieve, but whose were you? We will each find out, on that day, what our identity actually was. And the mercy of the gospel is that this unveiling does not have to wait for death.

We can surrender our self-making now. We can confess our ego drama, turn to the God who loves us, and begin to receive the self he made us to be.

On national radio recently, a Christian commentator was asked about the calls to make this country Christian again, and this was his answer:

“I am a Christian who studied theology, and Jesus wasn’t a Christian. He was a Jew. Jesus welcomed people of all religions and races. In fact, it upset the religious leaders. Those were the only people Jesus was ever angry with — the excluders. Jesus didn’t care about people based on their religion or their colour. Jesus welcomed everyone. So, therefore, to be a Christian nation is to be an inclusive nation.”

The argument feels compassionate, generous, and obviously Christian, and it appeals to something deep in us. None of us wants a narrow church, or a fearful one, or a church that turns people away from Christ. Yet as I listened, I found myself wanting to ask the one question nobody in the studio seemed interested in asking.

Inclusive of what?

The question is never whether inclusion is good; the question is always inclusion into what. Inclusion is not a destination but a direction. It tells us that a door is open, but it says nothing about what lies beyond. The Christian story has always insisted that the door is open, so the real question has never been whether people are welcome. The question has always been what they are being welcomed into.

Who This is For

A brief word before I go on. I am not writing against the people who built forms of the ‘inclusive’ church. Many of them arrived where they are through compassion: through knowing people who had been wounded by the church and wanting to ensure they were not wounded again. That impulse is not the problem. It is one of the most Christian instincts there is.

When people hear the language of repentance, they often hear rejection; when they hear the language of transformation, they hear condemnation; when they hear the language of holiness, they hear exclusion. I understand why, because the church has too often taught exactly those lessons. Yet the answer to distorted transformation cannot be the abandonment of transformation altogether. The abuse of a thing does not remove the need for the thing itself.

What concerns me is something else: the framework that gradually formed around that compassion, and what it has quietly done to the faith. I am writing for those who feel uneasy. Those who sense that something has gone wrong and struggle to put it into words. Those who have begun to wonder whether faithfulness and cruelty have somehow become confused with one another. Those who suspect that their discomfort must mean they lack compassion.

It does not.

This short essay is an attempt to give that unease some language.

A Word That Carries Too Much Weight

And the words the church once used tell us what is missing. Koinonia. Agape. Philoxenia. Caritas. Communio. Each carried its own theological grammar. Koinonia meant participation in Christ; you could not have it without participation. Philoxenia meant receiving the stranger as Christ; you could not have it without receiving Christ. Inclusion has no such grammar of its own. It borrows whatever grammar surrounds it — corporate diversity, therapeutic affirmation, liberal politics, the language of rights. The word is empty by design. That is why it can be poured into any vessel and made to sanctify it.

Inclusion has no such grammar of its own.

It borrows whatever grammar surrounds it, be that corporate diversity, therapeutic affirmation, liberal politics, or the language of rights. The word is empty by design. That is why it can be poured into any vessel and made to sanctify it.

The argument works like this. First, assert that Jesus was inclusive, which is true, as far as it goes. Second, define inclusion by listing the specific things you include. Third, conclude that anyone who doesn’t include those same things is therefore exclusive and un-Christian.

But step two is doing all the work, and is often unexamined. The speaker gets to define inclusion, and then uses that definition to exclude. It is the oldest linguistic move in progressive rhetoric: seize a universal term, then fill it with particular content, and wield it against anyone who objects. Diversity. Equality. Now inclusion. The words arrive trailing virtue, to make disagreement look like bigotry before it has been given a hearing. This is not an argument.

It is a vocabulary coup.

For much of Christian history, inclusion sat alongside other Christian goods such as holiness, truth, charity, worship, repentance, communion, mission, discipleship, and none of them stood alone. Each was held in relationship with the others.

Increasingly, inclusion has become more than a virtue. It has become the lens through which everything else is read: Scripture, doctrine, ethics, and the church itself. The danger is not that inclusion matters too much, but that it comes to matter more than everything else.

But the move goes further than a single word. It now operates on the noun itself. Inclusive church. Emerging church. Progressive church. Affirming church. Open church. In each case, the qualifier sits in front of the noun and silently reorders what the noun used to mean. The adjective was supposed to describe a kind of church. It now claims to be the true form, from which everything else is a deviation.

The ancient creeds knew the four marks of the church: one, holy, catholic, apostolic. Each was inseparable from the others. New qualifier-church descriptors drop three in order to absolutise the fourth, or import a fifth and rank it above the original four. The Catholic Church is a confession of unity across time. Inclusive Church elevates one chosen virtue to become the organising principle of the whole.

This is not a renewal movement. Renewal works through the whole. The monastics renewed the church through prayer. The Reformers renewed it through the recovery of grace. The charismatic renewal restored attention to the Spirit. Each contributed to the totality of the gospel. The ‘qualifier-churches’ do something different. They lift one virtue out of the whole and announce that the whole must be reordered around it. The qualifier no longer describes. It governs.

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A New Creed and Confession

Inclusion rarely arrives alone. It comes as a "package deal" of identity politics that bundles a person’s faith with a specific, non-negotiable set of modern left-of-centre political and social positions. To be considered an authentic “Christian,” you are often expected to buy into the entire package. Which most often includes affirmation of every sexual and gender identity; diversity, equity, and inclusion as an ordering principle; decolonisation; pro-Palestinianism and climate activism; pro-choice; the vocabulary of allyship and lived experience.

You can predict the whole package from any one of its parts. A Christian and a church that adopts one will, within a few years, have likely adopted them all. This is not a coincidence. It is coherence. The parts hold together because something underneath holds them together. And what holds them together is a complete account of reality.

It has its own story of what is wrong with the world: hierarchy, exclusion, the inherited sins of the West. Its own account of who is good: the marginalised, defined ever more finely. Its own salvation: liberation, visibility, validation, the dismantling of structures. Its own righteousness: allyship, deconstruction, the confession of one’s privilege. Its own damnation: to be found on the wrong side of history, named a bigot, and cast out.

This is not merely a set of opinions. It is a soteriology and means of salvation. It tells you what is broken, who is righteous, what must be done for salvation and what awaits those who refuse. Belonging now comes to be measured by this new confession. One way to diagnose what confession is at work is to ask, could someone who does not believe in Christ say these sentences from two confessions?

• Love is love. Yes. Trans rights are human rights. Yes. We stand with the marginalised. Yes.

• I believe in one God, the Father almighty. No. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate and rose again on the third day. No. I am dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. No.

The first confession can be spoken by anyone. The second can only be spoken by someone who has staked their life on a crucified and risen Lord. When a church says the first fluently and the second only with embarrassment or complete elision, a substitution is complete.

Most Inclusive Christians did not set out to replace the gospel with an identity politics programme. They set out to love people the church had failed to love, and they reached for the only moral vocabulary the surrounding culture still offered with confidence. The vacuum was real, as was the compassion. What began as a way of loving the excluded becomes, in time, the thing by which the church defines itself — and a church defined by the new creed and confession no longer needs the old one. Christ becomes optional and a figure invoked to bless pre-existing commitments that the church could hold just as firmly without him.

The Door Jesus Actually Opened

There is a version of Jesus that fits comfortably within modern assumptions. In this version, he walks through Galilee, affirming people exactly as they already understand themselves. His primary concern is that nobody feels excluded, and his chief opponents are those who would challenge another person’s identity or self-understanding. It is an appealing picture, and it is also very difficult to reconcile with the Gospels.

The Jesus of the Gospels does something stranger and far more generous. He invites everyone into a kingdom that begins with repentance - metanoia: the turning of the whole person. Not self-improvement. Not therapy. Not the affirmation of the self you have already built. But a re-making.

The first word of his public ministry is not affirmation, but repentance, and repentance has become one of the most misunderstood words in Christianity. It is usually heard as self-loathing or moral self-improvement, when in reality it means something far deeper. It means turning toward reality. It means reorienting one’s entire life toward God. Repentance is not the rejection of the self; it is the surrender of the illusion that the self can be its own source and centre.

This is why Jesus can offer unconditional welcome and radical transformation in the same breath, because the two belong together. He does not love people because they have changed, nor does he love them so that they can remain unchanged. He loves them into change.

This is the most radical welcome imaginable. Because it means Jesus meets you precisely as the person who needs re-making, which is all of us. The tax collector, the Pharisee, and the woman caught in adultery. The door through which everyone enters is the same: the recognition that who I have made myself to be is not the whole story of who I am.

This fragmentary Jesus of ‘inclusive christianity’ is manufactured the same way every time. The only people Jesus was ever angry with were the excluders. But Jesus was angry at many things. Hypocrisy. Greed. Hard-heartedness. Religious performance. Unbelief. The misuse of Scripture to evade duty. He pronounced woes on whole cities. He spoke of outer darkness, of the narrow gate, of depart from me, I never knew you. The inclusive Jesus is not a discovery. He is a self-selected fragment of the Gospels, polished and held up as the whole.

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Affirmation vs Transformation

As mentioned already, inclusion is not a virtue until you specify what you are including people into. The church is not primarily a space of affirmation; it is a community of transformation. It includes sinners — all of us — not to leave us as we are, but because what we are is not yet what we shall be.

The Christian claim is not that you are fine as you are. The Christian claim is that you are loved as you are, and that the love is powerful enough to change you. Come as you are. You will not stay as you are. Both of those things are true. Both of those things are good news. To call that exclusive is to have misunderstood the gospel. Or to have understood it and decided to prefer something else.

From its inception, and for two thousand years, the gospel has been the offer of inclusion in Christ. Our inclusion isn't a project of self-creation, but a surrender to the cross, where we drop the exhausting act of defining ourselves and instead receive our true identity by actively participating in the death, resurrection, and self-giving love of Jesus Christ.

This participation is the deepest freedom a human being can know. The exhausting labour of self-authorship is over. You no longer have to hold yourself in being. You no longer have to justify your existence with your achievements, your alignments, your correct positions, the endless maintenance of a self that was never firm enough to stand on. You are held. And the self you receive, hidden now with Christ in God, is not smaller than the one you were building. It is the one you were always meant to be, the one your self-creations were a forgery of.

Freedom is not the freedom to do as you please. It is the far greater freedom of no longer needing to secure yourself at all. This is what the inclusive door opens onto. A cross, an empty tomb, and a life poured out that you could never have authored yourself. That is the inclusion the gospel offers.

Affirmation leaves you exactly as you are. The gospel makes you large enough to die for someone else.

I was abused as a child. My mother was the abuser. Both my parents died by suicide. I carry a genetic inheritance of depression and anxiety, not as a theoretical vulnerability, but as a daily feature of my interior life, my whole life.

I am not telling you this to establish credentials for suffering. I am telling you because what I want to say is only worth anything if you know I have actually lived it.

And this article is not about why any of this happened. Because most writing about suffering first reaches for that question, and I think it is often the wrong one. In my personal experience and as a pastor for over twenty-five years, the why rarely survives contact with actual grief, actual pain, actual abuse.

What people need is something to do with the suffering that is already there. But I need to name one answer before I go further, because it is so common and so damaging that leaving it unnamed would be a disservice.

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The Answer That Does the Most Damage

It goes like this.

God directed this. He allowed it, planned it, shaped it, because he knew what good he would bring out of it. He needed to form you this way.

Sometimes this message arrives as a bible verse given to you. Sometimes, with a gentle pastoral arm around your shoulder. It is almost always offered with genuine love.

It is not the God of Scripture. It is abhorrent.

A God who instructs suffering into your life, who designs your abuse, your bereavement, your illness as instruments of some later purpose, is not the God I recognise from the Gospels or from the long tradition of the Church. He is not a cosmic engineer of cruelty who then asks you to be grateful.

I have watched people lose their faith trying to sustain that gratitude. I have watched others go quiet inside, concluding that a God who works like that is one they cannot love.

God does not direct suffering into your life so he can use you later. That is not a reason. That is not comfort. And it is not true. God may allow suffering for greater purposes, and he most definitely redeems and transforms us through it. As I have discovered. But he is not the author or the genesis of the abuse and lack I suffered.

Closer, But Not Enough

We live in a world that is profoundly broken, at structural, relational, and biological levels. The harm of other people’s sin lands in bodies and psyches that did not ask for it. The collective weight of human fallenness generates consequences distributed without fairness and without warning.

My mother’s choices, my parents’ despair, the particular chemical inheritance I carry. None of it was directed at me by God. It was the tragedy of a broken world, and the harm of sin I did not commit. And then so many times my own sin was leveraged and catalysed into more pain.

This understanding of fallenness restores the truth that suffering is not what God wants or intended. But it is not enough for the day I am actually living in. It explains the landscape. It does not tell me what to do with my body, mind and soul, while I am standing in it and hurting.

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Christ Enters: The First Movement

Here is where I want to go next. Not an explanation. But a way of participating.

Most Christians have some grasp of the first movement with Christ and suffering. Christ enters our suffering. The incarnation means exactly that. God in a body, God in the full range of human experience, including its most devastating corners. Good Friday is not a symbol. It is God taking suffering and death into himself from the inside. He knows grief from within. He is not remote from your pain. He is in it. I do not want to move past this too quickly, because for many people, it is the beginning of everything.

But the incarnation is not only about sympathy. The ancient word for what Christ does is recapitulation. He gathers up the whole of human life, every experience, every wound, every darkness, and carries it through death into resurrection. He does not redeem humanity from a distance. He enters it, lives it fully, and transforms it from within. The pattern he traces is the pattern we are invited to follow.

And here is where most of us stop.

We have been told that Christ did everything, and that there is nothing left for us except to receive the benefits. So we position ourselves at Easter. We take the resurrection and keep the cross at a comfortable distance. We ask Christ to carry what we will not touch ourselves. And in doing so, we miss the very route into the life we are seeking. Because the way into resurrection runs through Good Friday. It always has. It always will.

Christ did not abolish suffering. He recapitulated it. He took it into himself and carried it somewhere it could not go alone. And he invites us into the same movement. To pick up the cross and follow him into his life, his death, his rising. Not as a performance of piety. As the actual shape of Christian existence.

Most of us keep Christ safely on the resurrection side and wonder why we feel distant from him in our darkest moments. The answer is not that he is absent. The answer is that we have not yet followed him to where he is.

So there is a second movement. It is less travelled. It is, I think, among the most extraordinary things in the New Testament.

A Minority Report: The second movement

Paul writes to the church in Colossae that he rejoices in his sufferings, and that in his flesh he is filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions. Theologians have wrestled with this phrase for centuries. What could possibly be lacking in Christ’s afflictions? The cross was not insufficient. That is not the answer.

The answer is that the body of Christ in the world is still living his life. The incarnation did not conclude at the Ascension. It continues in us, through us, as us. Caryll Houselander, the English mystic whose work I return to often, saw this with a clarity that still arrests me. What happened to Christ on earth is happening to him now in his members. His whole life is being lived now, through the whole body. Each of us carries a fragment. A moment. A particular experience.

She puts it this way:

Each of us can only live a fragment of Christ’s life at one time, perhaps one moment or one incident or one experience. But through our communion with one another in him, through our oneness because of his one life in us all, we make up what is lacking in one another and are whole.

Hidden in His Wounds

That word: fragment. Let’s press into this.

My suffering—the abuse, the grief, the depression—is a fragment of his life that I am carrying in my body, in this moment of history, in this particular nervous system. It is not outside him. It cannot be outside him, because I am in him. And because I am in him, what I carry, he carries. My suffering does not only go to him for comfort. It has become a dimension of his life.

Hidden in his wounds, as the old prayer says. My wounds are hidden there. And in that hiddenness, the suffering becomes more than something to survive. It becomes an act of worship.

This does not make what happened to me good. The abuse was wrong. The suicides were devastating. The depression is real and needs care. I am not spiritualising any of it. I am saying that suffering brought into participation with Christ is taken up into the largest possible life. Into the life of the one who has been through death and returned. Who is still interceding. Who is alive in the world today in his body.

You are his body. Your history is part of that body. Your past suffering, your present struggle. They are not residue from which you need to fully recover before you can be useful to God. They are, right now, fragments of his life being lived in you.

My anxiety can be taken to him, to kneel beside him in Gethsemane, and bear witness to his suffering and him to mine. To receive the grace that my anxiety in my life and in the world, bears something of him into the world too.

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The Invitation

Most of us learn to manage our suffering from a safe distance. We position ourselves on the Easter side of things and ask Jesus to fix what Good Friday broke. We want the resurrection without the descent, the healing without the wound, the light without the long passage through darkness. And so we hold our pain at arm’s length, explaining it, spiritualising it, waiting for it to resolve into something more acceptable and easier to carry.

But your Good Fridays are not problems waiting to be solved. They are thresholds waiting to be entered.

When you bring your suffering to the cross, it does not disappear into Christ. It is gathered into him. And in being gathered, something astonishing becomes visible. What you have endured, the abuse, the loss, the long dark inheritance of grief and anxiety, ceases to be only yours. It becomes his. A fragment of his life, held in your particular body, history, and soul.

This is not mere poetry or wishful thinking. The body of Christ is real, and it is alive in the world today, and you are part of it. This means that when you take your suffering to him, you are not handing it over to be discarded. You are discovering what it always was. A presentation of the living Christ. His wounds carried in yours. His sorrow moving through your sorrow. His love making itself known at the exact coordinates of your pain.

There is a solemn delight in this when you begin to grasp it. Not the false joy that pretends the suffering was worth it, or sent for your benefit. The deep and ancient joy of discovering that nothing in your life, not even its darkest passage, has ever been outside him. That your wounds have been hidden in his all along. That what you thought was only damage is also, somehow, glory.

You are not being asked to perform this. You are being invited to receive it.

Bring your Good Friday to his. Not to make it meaningful in the abstract, but to discover it is already meaningful in the particular. In your body. In your history. In the life that only you have lived. Christ is not waiting for you on the other side of your suffering. He is in it. He has always been in it. And as you enter into him through it, you become, in the most literal sense, his presence in the world.

That is the privilege. Body, soul, mind, and spirit, not merely expressing him but presenting him. The real, resurrected, living Christ, made known today in you.

There is a deep disphoria abroad in the world now.

You sense it in the restlessness of people who no longer know how to dwell peacefully within themselves. So many are searching for identity, longing to belong somewhere within their own lives, yet finding themselves caught between voices that fracture them rather than heal.

And within this, we have become strangers to the sacredness of the body.

Bodies have become something to give away to anything we desire and modify in any way we choose.

And yet the Christian vision begins with blessing:
the quiet, astonishing blessing of creation itself.

The body, your body, is not an accident of matter, nor a prison for the soul, nor a burden to escape. It is the living threshold through which we encounter the world, one another, and God. To be human is not a mistake in need of correction, but a sacred invitation into relationship, communion, and love.

Scripture tells us we are made in the image of God. Not abstractly, but bodily — breathed into life, formed from the earth, held within the goodness of creation. And in Christ, God enters human flesh completely, sanctifying our humanity from within rather than abandoning it. And Jesus calls us to receive an understanding of all we are, including our bodies, from Him.

There is something profoundly healing in being re-membered, re-joined to this, to Him.

In a culture of confusion and dislocation, perhaps one of the great spiritual tasks of our time is to learn again how to receive ourselves with reverence; to inhabit our humanity, our bodies, not with dislike but with gratitude.

On 20 June, I will be leading a one-day gathering at Waverley Abbey exploring embodiment, identity, sexuality, discipleship, and the Christian understanding of what it means to live as people created by God and called beloved.

Hosted by Waverley Abbey, the day will offer space for reflection, conversation, learning, and prayerful engagement with some of the deepest questions shaping our age.

For those in the UK who may wish to attend, details are at the link here:

👉 Your body, God’s design: clarity for a confused world👈

And for those further away, some of these reflections may still find you where you are as I post about them.

The longing beneath all our striving is not merely to define ourselves, but to come home to ourselves — to discover that beneath all confusion and noise, there remains within each life a quiet place where God still whispers blessing.

You probably recognise this kind of morning.

You wake up with purpose. In that quiet moment between sleep and being fully awake. When you went to bed, you planned to pray when you got up. But before you even get out of bed, your hand reaches for your phone.

You tell yourself it’s just to get your bearings and turn off an alarm. Maybe you want to check the time, see the weather, or find out if anything important happened overnight. You promise it will only take thirty seconds. It feels like a harmless way to start the day.

But the scroll has already started. A headline. A notification. A conversation thread that didn’t resolve itself without you.

Someone else’s morning is now inside your morning.

Then another. And another. And somewhere in the scrolling, not in any dramatic moment of decision, but quietly, like a tide going out, any movement to prayer is gone.

So you get on with your day. You’re productive and get things done. Maybe you even help others or do something kind. But by mid-morning, there’s a feeling you can’t quite name. It’s not really guilt or failure. It’s something lighter, a sense of being a little distant from yourself.

You feel farther from God, and you’re not sure how it keeps happening.

1. The Misdiagnosis

Your diagnosis of this problem might be to declare I have no discipline, I am addicted to my phone, or I need better habits. Maybe you have tried using willpower, app-blockers, leaving your phone in another room, or making new promises to yourself that only last a few days.

There are real neurobiological factors involved, and many of these strategies try to manage them. Still, these approaches often fall short. Why? Because these systems are not the whole story.

They exist within us a deeper reality:

We are spiritual beings, and something spiritual is affecting us.

We know what doom scrolling does. It wears us down, scatters our attention, and leaves us feeling empty inside. Yet we keep coming back to it. The reason is not only neurological. It is also spiritual.

The Pattern Beneath the Surface

A pattern emerges beneath the surface of your morning. It goes like this:

Agitation → distraction → productivity → spiritual displacement

Feeling restless leads to wanting a distraction; the distraction gives a false sense of relief; that relief turns into a sense of productivity (clearing our messages); and productivity, which is often seen as a good thing, quietly takes the place of being present with God.

But most explanations miss something important. This pattern does not really start with feeling restless. It actually starts even earlier.

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2. What’s Actually Happening

You Wake Scattered

You wake scattered. It doesn’t happen every morning, but it happens often. The night changes you. Dreams leave behind traces—images, emotions, and feelings that don’t have a clear source, along with a vague sense that something is unfinished but hard to name. There’s a kind of confusion right after waking up that most people ignore because it passes so quickly. Your mind isn’t steady yet. Your inner world hasn’t settled into the familiar shape of the day.

This isn’t a disorder. It’s a normal part of being human.

Christian Mystics paid close attention to the first moments of the morning because what you do right after waking up can shape your whole day.

Why the Phone Works — and Why That’s the Problem

And here is what the phone does in that moment. It works.

It works because it’s always there, always ready, and it gives you answers before you even know what you’re looking for. It tells you the time, date, weather, news, messages, and schedule. It quickly moves you from feeling scattered to feeling grounded, from nowhere to somewhere, from confused to informed.

When you first reach for your phone, it’s not really about entertainment.

It’s about finding something steady.

Your phone meets a real need inside you, which is why it’s so hard to ignore. It does solve a real problem, but it’s not the right answer.

The issue isn’t that the phone doesn’t work; it’s that it doesn’t work well. It does bring quick clarity. But it also overstimulates the very parts of us that need to be calm. It draws our attention outward just when we most need to turn inward. Instead of being present, we get pulled in many directions. The quiet, open feeling of early morning—when it’s easiest to sense God—gets crowded out by noise.

Then something else happens. This overstimulation leads to a certain kind of tiredness—a restless, shallow fatigue that looks like a normal morning on the surface. When prayer feels out of reach in this state, our souls turn to being productive instead.

Getting things done starts to feel like a way to make up for the lost morning, a way to make the day matter even after being thrown off course. This isn’t a moral failure. It’s a very human reaction to feeling empty inside. Still, it takes us further away from what really matters to us.

3. The Spiritual Cost

Displacement, Not Abandonment

It took me a long time to understand something: you can get things done and still feel out of place and out of sorts.

You can write, help others, care for your family, do your job, even focus on spiritual things, and still feel like you’re in the wrong place. Your outer life keeps going, but inside, you slowly lose your sense of centre. This isn’t hypocrisy. It’s something more common and subtle. It’s also drift.

Prayer does not get abandoned. It gets displaced.

There is a difference, and the difference is the key. If you abandoned prayer, you’d notice. You’d feel its absence, name it, and come back.

Displacement is harder to spot because your days still seem full, faithful, and productive. Only in quiet moments, late at night or when things go still, do you feel what’s missing.

Your connection with God isn’t gone. It just slowly stops being the place you live from and within.

What Ignatius Saw

Ignatius of Loyola paid close attention to this kind of change. He called it desolation—not a dramatic spiritual crisis, but a slow fading of inner passion, a drifting away from comfort, and a quiet loss of direction toward God. He was clear about one thing that often surprises people.

Desolation is not mainly a sign that you have failed. Instead, it is an invitation.

The restlessness you feel when you wake up, the sense of being scattered, and the need for stability are not barriers to your spiritual life. In Ignatian terms, these are the places where God is already working. Feeling disoriented is not something you need to fix before you pray.

It is exactly what prayer is meant to address.

When you pick up your phone in that moment, you are not just choosing to distract yourself. You are turning away from an important meeting.

Here is the hardest part to face: the real question is not just what you are distracted from, but what you are avoiding meeting in God.

The restlessness, the scattered feeling, and the leftover emotions from the night—what are they? What do they hold? What might come up if you stayed with them instead of quickly distracting yourself? Most of us never find out, because we move on too quickly.

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4. The Way Through

The Real Question

I want to be clear about this, because the wrong takeaway is thinking you need more discipline. To try harder. Just put your phone away. But that’s not the real turning point. That’s just willpower dressed up as something deeper which it isn’t.

The real turning point is realising you don’t reach for your phone because you’re lazy, undisciplined, or not prayerful enough. You do it because you have a real need for stability that isn’t being met in another way.

The real question isn’t how to stop reaching for your phone. Instead, ask yourself:

What would it look like to reach for something different?

This is a kinder, more honest, and more fully Christian question. It opens up possibilities that the discipline-and-willpower approach never does. And what I offer next comes from this Ignatian understanding of our spiritual nature and works deeply with the grain of our neurobiology.

A Simple Practice: The Waking Bridge

This isn’t a prayer program or a set morning routine. It’s simply a way to face any feelings of disorientation honestly, before they take you in another direction.

When you wake:

Notice your body. Before reaching for anything, feel the bed beneath you, notice the air, and pay attention to your breath. Remind yourself that you are here and present. Ten seconds is enough.

Acknowledge any disorientation. Don’t analyse it. Just say, for example: I am tired, foggy, disoriented, etc., this morning. Or: Something from the night is still with me. Or simply: I do not know what I am yet today.

Naming it helps keep it from quietly taking over.

Turn to Jesus before anything else. You don’t need an elaborate prayer. Just say something simple like: Here I am. I am tired/agitated/sad, etc. I am yours. You don’t have to be composed or feel a certain way. This just helps you reach out first to the One who can truly guide you.

Let this steady you. Stay here for a minute or so. The goal isn’t to have a spiritual experience, but to let your scattered thoughts settle in one direction before the day pulls them apart again.

This is the Waking Bridge. It’s short, you can do it again and again, and all it takes is a willingness to reach in a new direction. And you can do it any time of the day.

The Reframe That Changes Everything

You haven’t been failing at prayer. You’ve just been trying to start in a way that doesn’t fit where you are right now.

The entry point for most of us has moved. You begin the day more scattered, more disoriented than perhaps you used to. The world really has changed dramatically. Your sleep has likely also changed, and your nervous system is carrying more than it once did.

The old entry point—wake, sit, pray with immediate composure—may no longer be available to you. And rather than finding the new entry point, you have been grieving the old one.

But God has not moved.

God isn’t waiting for you to be calm and collected like you might have been in the past. God is right where you are now—scattered, unsure, maybe still half in last night’s dream, looking for something steady. That is where the meeting with Him is.

We’re not trying to return to how our prayer life used to be. We’re learning to receive right here, just as we are. Feeling lost isn’t the problem—it’s actually the way in.

Next time you wake, before your hand moves toward the phone, stay.

Even for a moment. Stay in the scattered, unresolved, slightly foggy condition that is actually you at that hour. Notice it. Do not judge it. Do not fix it.

And then turn to Jesus.

Not because you have composed yourself. Not because you are ready. But because you are there, and God is there, and that has always been enough.

Stay. Notice. Turn.

That is the whole practice. This is as Ignatius knew, and as the Christians intimate with God in the past were closer to the whole of the spiritual life than most of us have dared to believe.

If this spoke to something you recognise, pass it on to someone who might need it this morning. The people most likely to need it are the ones who will not think they do.

This article is for anyone who’s tried a rule of faith and found it hard to stick with, or anyone thinking about starting one. If you have one and it is working and helping you grow, wonderful, keep at it. But for many of us, a rule of faith can quietly become a setup for failure. Because, I want to suggest, there is something wrong with most rules of life, and it is not what you think.

The problem is not that they are too demanding. It is not that people fail to keep them. It is not even that they produce guilt when abandoned in February like a New Year’s resolution.

The problem is one of theological maladaptation.

Most rules of life rest on an assumption that almost nobody examines: that identity is something you construct. That the spiritual life is, at bottom, a building project. You survey the topography of your soul, design a blueprint for the person you want to become, and then select the practices that will get you there. Prayer and scripture in the morning, an examen before bed, fasting on Fridays, and silence once a month. You act with sincerity and discipline, and over time, you expect the structure to become as you imagined it would be.

This is not a Christian understanding of the human person. It is a modern one wearing Christian clothing.

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Two Visions

The way and why we choose a practice for a rule of life is generated by our — often unconscious — understanding of identity. In particular, where our identity comes from.

The modern world has a very clear answer. Identity is self-generated. We decide who we are and want to be. We construct a self from our choices, our values, our commitments, our carefully curated habits. And it is instinctual to bring this into our life of faith. We simply swap secular goals for spiritual ones. Instead of asking “What kind of professional do I want to be?” we ask “What kind of Christian do we want to become?” But the grammar is identical. The self is still the architect, and our life is still the construction site.

We imagine the person we would like to be, then work backwards to identify the practices that will form us into that person. We measure success by consistency and sustained output. Did we keep the rule? Did we show up? Are we becoming the person we set out to become? This version is spiritually sincere. It often produces real discipline. But underneath it, the core of our self often remains untouched, because the whole enterprise is still a project of control. We are often managing our own formation.

The Christian tradition says something different. Identity is not constructed but received. It is given in Christ, revealed through participation in him, and is discovered rather than invented. We do not become ourselves by assembling a life according to a plan we made. We become ourselves by receiving the life that is already being given to us in Christ. A rule of life built on this foundation begins somewhere else entirely. It begins with what is already happening. It asks not “Who do we want to become?” but “Who is Christ already forming us to be?” It does not measure faithfulness by achievement or consistency but by alignment. It asks, are we living in step with what is already true about us in Christ?

The difference between these two visions is not stylistic. It is not a matter of temperament or preference. It is a difference in theology.

What Practices Are Actually For

This difference changes what spiritual practices are about and for. They are not techniques for producing transformation. They are not tools for building a better version of ourselves. They are ways of positioning ourselves so that participation in Christ can occur more fully.

Think of it this way. Prayer does not manufacture closeness to God. It makes us available to a closeness that is already real. Silence does not create space for God to show up. It quiets us enough to notice that God has not left. Scripture does not fill us with information about God. It places us inside a story that is already our story, whether we have recognised it yet or not.

Practices slow us down enough to receive. They stabilise us enough to notice. They arrange our life with a poise that is already at work. They do not create life. They make us available to it.

This is why the language of “spiritual disciplines” can be misleading. Discipline implies effort directed toward production. But the Christian life is not a production. It is a participation. And the practices that sustain it are less like training exercises and more like acts of trust. We show up, not because showing up will build something, but because showing up is how we remain open to what is already being given to us by God.

When rules of life are built on the unexamined assumption that identity must be constructed, they all too easily become tools of self-creation. They may be well-intentioned, carefully designed, even beautiful in their ambition. But they still leave us in the driver’s seat, trying to build our way to God.

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Charisms: And how to form a rule of life

When identity is received in Christ, a rule of life becomes something else entirely. It becomes a way to participate with Christ to discover more of who wants us to be.

So if identity is received rather than constructed and if practices are participation, not production, then how do we actually form a rule of life?

Not by starting with habits.

But by following a different sequence of discovery: our charism, then our vocational rhythm, and then our rule of life.

Discover Your Charism

Before we organise our life around rules, we have to notice the life already forming within us—our charism. We might be more used to the idea of leaders having a charism. But we all have a charism. Our charism is not something we invent. It is the particular way Christ’s life is becoming visible through us. And we begin not by stating what we want it to be, but by paying attention to what it already is.

We can discover our charism by spending time with the Lord and asking some questions: When do we feel most aligned—most ourselves in God? What seems to flow when we are not forcing it? What do others consistently receive from us? What kind of presence do we leave behind?

This takes time to discern. Often, it will come as a simple recognition that this is how Christ seems to meet others through us. Peace. Clarity. Encouragement. Depth. Energy. Faithfulness. Whatever it is, we name it and receive it. This is not a kind of egotism. It is our core participation with Christ.

Notice Your Vocational Rhythm

Once our charism begins to come into view, a second layer emerges. We start to notice that certain patterns of life either sustain it or disrupt it. This is our vocational rhythm. Not a list of “shoulds,” but the actual conditions under which our life with God tends to flourish.

We will begin to recognise things like: when this is present, we are more aligned. When this is missing, something in us drifts away from our charism. These are often remarkably simple, but non-negotiable things. Things that might be: space for silence, unhurried presence with people, physical movement or rest, Scripture read in a particular mode, creative expression, meaningful conversation, learning and studying.

These are not random habits we picked up from a podcast or ideas from a book. They are the supports of our charism. Our life already takes shape around them, and even more as we press into them. And there is the flip side to this. There are habits and patterns that do not just fail to support our charism but actively deform it. Some things we have built into our life are quietly working against the very thing God is forming in us. Like the never-ending scroll that fragments our attention. Or the pace we maintain because slowing dow and stopping terrifies us.

These are not minor inefficiencies in our existing systems. They are anti-charism habits, and they deserve to be named with the same seriousness we give to the things that sustain us. Often, they are harder to see precisely because they feel normal. They have been with us long enough to pass as and be called our personality. But when we hold them up next to our charism, the distortion by them becomes visible. They cost us something - deeply. Part of forming a rule of life is naming what these things are are as we agree with God about who he made us to be.

And as we pay attention, we will notice not only isolated rhythms but patterns spanning time. Every person’s life has a rhythms and cycles: times of output and engagement, times of withdrawal and renewal, times of consolation, times of desolation. Instead of treating the low moments as failures and the high seasons as the “real us,” we begin to accept it all. It all belings. When do we tend to feel most alive? When do we drift or disconnect? What brings us back? What leads us away?

This is not about control. It is about noticing and learning the contours of our life in God. And when we understand our charism cycle, something changes.

We stop fighting ourselves and we start cooperating with the grace already at work in us.

I am full of Easter.

It feels as though every Easter I have ever known has been gathered into this one—retold, deepened, and made more real within my own life.

What J. R. R. Tolkien called eucatastrophe, the sudden turning where everything changes, feels less like a moment in a story and more like the quiet, persistent way God works within a life, drawing it into His own.

Not replacing it, but taking it up and expanding it.

Lent for me wasn’t merely observed this year, but inhabited through prayer, devotion, and reflection. Then Holy Week pulled me in further: from Palm Sunday into the Triduum, into those three days where time appears to slow and everything centres on the Passion.

I gave myself to it more fully than I ever have, immersed again in the suffering of Christ. Even re-watching The Passion of the Christ, not as a film, but as a Visio Divina.

All of this sits within a longer work God has been doing in me. Several years ago, through the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, I spent months praying daily through the life of Chris. Not merely to understand it, but to enter it, experience and be formed by it.

And over time, I began to see that it was not simply his story I was tracing, but my own life being drawn into his, to be retold with him. I discovered recapitulation and participation in Christ, one of the oldest understandings of salvation by the Church, and it has continued to shape my hopes, fears, sorrows and desires.

This Easter, this reality has come into focus again, not as something new, but as a deeper apprehension and participation in what C. S. Lewis called the “deeper magic” at the heart of creation. And I realise that God continues to answer my prayers, particularly the Anima Christi, which I prayed each day during the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises.

Most of our everyday speech is built to explain, organise, and conclude. It moves quickly, names things, and moves on. But some experiences—grief, love, God, the strange nearness of Easter—don’t fit into that kind of language. They resist being “said” in a straight line.

So I tried to write a poem to speak from within it. This Easter, I have woven the Anima Christi through my Easter Ignatian reflections.

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If I Had Been There

If I had been there, I would not have stood apart.

There would have been no “there” left between us.

I would have cried out as they scourged you,

the cry would have risen from within you and me together

your flesh opened, and something in mine

splitting with it too.

Your body, my salvation.

not distant, but breaking open around me.

Each lash gathers me.

my sin, my fracture, my hidden violences.

drawn into your torn body

as though you would not suffer

without taking me into it.

I would have knelt when they crowned you,

and felt the thorns find me too.

piercing through every false self

I have worn.

Your blood, not spilled away,

but falling toward me.

on me.

inibriating me.

washing what I cannot cleanse.

I would have begged to carry your cross,

and found I was already within its weight.

your Passion not beside me

but enclosing me.

Within your wounds.

I would not stand outside.

I would enter.

Held there.

Hidden there.

Kept there.

At the cross, there would be no safe distance left.

I would come close.

not brave, but compelled.

and fall at your feet,

your blood marking me,

your suffering sheltering me.

Your Passion, my strength.

not something I endure for you,

but something you endure

to hold me.

And when the spear opened your side,

I would not move toward it.

I would be drawn in.

Blood and water pouring,

and I

carried into that opening.

where mercy flows

without measure.

Baptised not in symbol,

but in the life that cannot be taken.

O good Jesus,

hear me.

even here.

Because even here,

I would not know how to remain

unless you kept me.

I would take you down from the cross,

but my hands should tremble.

knowing the body I hold

is the body that holds me.

Guard me within your wounds.

not as refuge from the world,

but as the place where I am remade.

I would wash you with my tears,

and find they are gathered into yours.

my grief taken up

into your offering.

I would wrap you for burial

slowly, reluctantly.

because leaving you

would feel like losing

everything.

And in the tomb,

I would not simply stay.

I would be enclosed.

Within your death.

hidden with you.

waiting without knowing how to wait.

Do not permit me

to be separated from you.

even here,

especially here.

The silence.

The sealed stone.

The cooling body.

Enemies pressing in.

doubt, fear, ending.

and I with no strength to resist them.

Call me.

from within this darkness.

Call me

not away from you,

but deeper into you.

And then.

the stone moves.

Not gently,

but as rupture of creation.

And you.

alive.

not returned, but risen.

From the hour of my death.

deliver me.

because something in me has died here,

and something else

is being born.

And I.

undone, but gathered.

Not outside your life,

but drawn into it.

into the place where all things

are being remade.

And I come.

because I must. to your feet,

to kiss, to worship.

not reaching toward you,

but waking to the truth

that you have taken me

into yourself,

and will not allow me to go.

—

May the deeper story of Christ continue to take hold in your life, drawing all that you are into His.

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In Part 1, I suggested that a crisis of identity lies at the root of all the crises of our age. And that this may be grounded in something even deeper: a crisis about reality itself.

You may have felt this yourself. You find yourself in conversation with someone you respect. Someone thoughtful, intelligent, well-informed. You’re both looking at the same events, the same headlines, the same facts. And yet, something doesn’t quite connect. We look not at faraway places, but at our own friends and family, and wonder why it seems that we no longer live in the same reality. Because in many ways, we don’t.

You can hear it everywhere now—in interviews, in news panel discussions, and in social media posts. Someone speaks with confidence, sometimes fluently. Their language is polished, morally charged, and full of the right key phrases. And yet, as you listen, something begins to slip. Their words circle around and around as their ideas fold back on themselves. Assertions replace arguments. Familiar phrases stand in for explanation. And there is no working out.

And you find yourself wondering instinctively:

What planet are they on?

It is not that they lack intelligence. Often the opposite. These can be thoughtful, articulate people. But their language is doing something more than describing reality. It is signalling belonging. It is expressing identity. It is locating the person speaking within a moral landscape.

Dialogue, conversation, and debate have collapsed. We are no longer seeking the truth, but signalling where we stand and defending it. Language has become coded, compressed, and self-sealing: claims are assumed, restated, and reinforced rather than tested. Circular reasoning gives the lie of coherence, feels safe, and is so very morally right. But this way of thinking and speaking never opens to testing of its claimed reality or to openness to others.

And often it seems most arguments have now collapsed into this infuriating summary assertion and claim:

It is, because I say it is—and because it is, it is.

What you’re hearing is closed-loop thinking. The claim proves itself, the speaker backs it up, and nothing outside it is allowed to test whether it’s actually true.

All reasoning closes in on itself: it is true because I say it, and I say it because it feels true. Allowing little room for a reality beyond, or for anyone to question or reshape it.

This closed-reasoning loop frequently manifests in statements like this:

• I represent the community because I live here; I know what they want because I am the one representing them.

• Trans identities are valid because they are lived experiences, and lived experiences are valid because they are how people identify.

• God exists because the Bible says God exists—and, since God wrote the Bible, it must be true.

On my leadership website, I recently wrote about how to recognise these ideological patterns that are likely to suck you in, and about more effective ways to respond to them. But no matter how much you try to present any good logical reasoning to someone using arguments like these, the other person often doubles down, perceiving and treating your response to them as a threat to their safety, social status, and self-worth.

Which is why it can feel so disorienting. You are not just disagreeing with someone’s conclusions; you are disagreeing with their reality. What is real is the domain of ontology. When you push back on a specific argument, you are attacking a branch of someone’s argument. When you diagnose and address someone’s reality, you are going to the root of their being.

Understanding someone’s ontology—their most fundamental “map” of what actually exists for them, is key, because it is the operating system that runs their being. If you only argue about what you see as facts, you are essentially trying to fix a system bug while the user is running an entirely different Operating System (their ontology) that is incompatible with yours.

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Ontological Questions

When you identify someone’s ontology, you stop seeing “stupid” arguments and start seeing how people have internally consistent ones for them that are based on a different reality. The most powerful reason to know an ontology is that it allows you to use the person’s own rules with them. This is often the only way to get traction with someone trapped in a closed-loop ideology.

You can stop arguing your reality and instead try to show how their reality is fragile. This can sometimes bypass their “identity shield” because it looks like you are helping them refine their own view rather than attacking it.

Ontological questions are like MRIs of the soul. They reveal the deepest reality of their beliefs. You can try to show that their identity cannot support the force of their own argument and break their closed loops. For example, try asking:

• “What is the most ‘real’ thing to you?”

• “Can something be true even if nobody believes it?”

• “If every human being disappeared tomorrow, would [the concept we are debating, e.g., gender, justice, or race] still exist in the world, or would it vanish with us?”

• “Is a person’s success (or failure) primarily the result of the choices they make, or the result of the ‘opportunities’ the system put them in before they were born?”

• “Is it possible for two groups to have a relationship that isn’t defined by one having power over the other?”

Applying this to the claim that “trans women are women” - because it is probably one of the most extant examples of competing ontologies - we might ask:

• “Is ‘woman’ a biological fact, a social role, or an internal feeling?” (Determines a person’s source of truth)

• “Can a person be a trans woman if they are alone on a desert island with no one to see them?” (Determines if they believe it’s a Social or Internal reality.)

• “What is the specific ‘thing’ a person is identifying with when they say they are a woman?” (Forces them to break the loop and provide a definition.)

But as we have likely already seen, when someone whose identity is deeply tied to a specific ontological framework is confronted with a “logical wedge” question, they cannot answer (a logical wedge is a simple idea or question that gets into someone’s argument and starts to break it apart by showing something doesn’t quite make sense). And they don’t just experience a “brain teaser.” They experience Ontological Shock and trauma.

Ontological Meltdown

Psychologically, the transition from a calm debate to screaming and emotional volatility is a well-documented defence mechanism, now writ large in our daily lives online. People trapped in ideological closed loops literally cannot see them. Their ontology acts as a “filter” on their sense of self and reality.

Defence mechanisms kick in, for instance, with the “no debate” tactic. The move is often presented as a strength, but it is usually the opposite. When someone declares a subject as “not up for debate,” it’s rarely because their position is beyond challenge. More often, it reveals something deeper: their account of reality is too fragile to withstand any scrutiny.

It’s not confidence, but rather a display of ontological fragility and brittleness.

For example, when biological males who identify as women use intimidation or violent threats to shut down women’s gatherings, it reveals more than disagreement—it exposes an ontological fracture, where patterns of dominance and misogyny betray the very identity being claimed and of men still behaving like men.

If something is real, it does not need everyone to agree with it to exist. Gravity still works if you deny it, and biology does not change because we vote on it. But when a claim like “trans women are women” is treated not as something open to discussion, but as something everyone must believe, it reveals that something else is going on.

It is the trying to close a gap between an internal sense of self and an external reality that does not fully confirm it. Because that gap remains, the claim requires constant agreement to hold it together. It cannot simply be tolerated; it must be believed, fully and without question.

Ontological Harm

This is why disagreement is often not treated as disagreement. It is treated as harm. Even someone saying, “I don’t think that’s true,” can feel akin to a crack in the whole structure of someone’s existence.

So the pressure increases—not just to be kind, but to agree; not just to agree, but to affirm; and not just to affirm, but to declare that their reality is reality. At that point, it stops being about truth and becomes about enforcement. And that is the key signal to notice. If something needs everyone to believe it to be real, it is likely not grounded in reality in the first place. It is a fragile ontology.

Any screaming and shouting is rarely about you; they are a desperate attempt to re-stabilise a collapsing reality. If the “loop” is the only thing holding someone’s identity together, then logic isn’t a tool—it becomes a wrecking ball. And when this occurs, the best thing to do is not fight back, but exit the interaction kindly and carefully.

“I can see this is a very personal and emotional topic for you, and I don’t want to cause you distress. It seems we have a fundamental disagreement on the ‘starting point’ of what makes something real. Let’s talk about something else.”

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Ontological Deconstruction

With all of this, we can begin to see what is really going on in our world. The ontological captivity and the projection of identity are at play. It gives us a way of asking better questions, questions that go to the heart of fragile accounts of reality. And as we have seen, doing so will often trigger defensive, even hostile responses.

So why bother?

First, to keep our sanity—to recognise that what we instinctively sense as faulty really is, and to understand why. But also to ensure we do not become captive to these same patterns ourselves, and to protect those around us who are at risk of being shaped or harmed by them.

Before we move on to better, more grounded accounts of identity and faith, we need to pause and look at ourselves. Christians have not been immune to distorted ontologies. At times, we have embodied them in ways that have harmed both ourselves and others. Often, this is why many Christians abandon one fragile ontology only to take up another—either to replace their faith, or to relocate it into something ontologically adjacent (Climate/DEI/Trans/Immigration, etc.)—largely unaware that their new beliefs and identity are protected by the same kind of fundamentalist defences they thought they had left behind.

If we can name that honestly, we may be better able to discern not only the faulty visions of reality now competing for our allegiance, but also the forms of Christianity we must learn to resist, too.

Christian Deconstruction

Fragile ontologies don’t collapse all at once. They hold together until they can’t.

For a time, people can live inside a closed system of belief, managing the gaps between what they are told and what they can see and experience. A Christian can ignore inconsistencies, explain them away, or double down with a ‘just have more faith’ mantra for a while. But there is always a limit.

The breaking point comes when the strain of denying reality outweighs the cost of facing it. When the language that once held beliefs together becomes thought-terminating cliches and self-referential platitudes designed to prevent real consideration of any doubts or questions. Such as:

• You’re just going through a season of doubt.

• You’re stuck in your head; you need to get into your heart.

• You’re just looking for reasons not to believe so you can live how you want (sin).

• You’re making it too complicated; just have faith.

Such phrases begin to feel like a way to shut down questions rather than any real answer. At that point, the cloed-loop starts to crack. And often, this is not merely a shift in ideas, but a major ontological shock. The whole structure of faith gives way because it was never anchored deeply in a better Christian ontology and reality in the first place. And many don’t just lose a version of faith—they lose faith itself. And the collapse can be very sudden.

That is the danger of all fragile ontologies. They cannot absorb reality. So when reality finally breaks through, everything built on them comes down with it.

Given not Created

So how do we begin to grow into a deeper, more grounded sense of what is real—something that can actually carry the burden of our lives. Not only our hopes and dreams, but also our losses, our disappointments, and the parts of our story we would rather avoid?

This is where many people now find themselves. The questions are no longer only about the world around us; they are now about ourselves. Who am I, really? And how do I know?

What would it look like to receive an identity in Christ that is not thin or virtue performed, but something we can genuinely live from? Something rooted and held together across both the material realities of our lives and the more profound spiritual ones, too? What would it mean to have an identity that does not need to be constantly asserted or defended, but can hold us even when everything around us feels unsure?

In this article (part 2), we saw how the collapse of shared reality has made identity increasingly unstable. When we no longer agree on what is real, it becomes much harder to receive who we are. And so, often without realising it, we begin to construct and self-create. We assemble identity from within; we express it, defend it, and refine it. Over time, identity becomes a project—something we are responsible for building and maintaining.

But what if identity was never meant to be something we build? What if it was always meant to be something we receive?

This is where the Christian vision becomes both deeply challenging and deeply hopeful. Christianity does not begin with the self; it begins with God. And from that starting point, identity is not something we create out of our own inner resources, but something given—something discovered through relationship, through participation, and through being drawn into a reality that is already holding us.

The question, then, is not simply “Who am I?” but, “Who am I if my life is received rather than constructed?” And what kind of understanding of reality makes that even possible?

Which is what I’ll explore next In Part 3 — Identity: Given or Invented?

Bristol Cathedral was consecrated in 1148. Consecration is the act of setting aside land or a building for sacred use in perpetuity. For the third year in a row, the cathedral hosted a Grand Iftar — a communal meal where Muslims gather at sunset during Ramadan to break their fast together.1 Cathedrals hosting Iftars have become increasingly common.2

During the gathering, the Adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, was recited:

Allah is the greatest.

I testify that there is no god but Allah.

I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.

Come to prayer.

The Adhan not only marks the time for prayer. It also proclaims Islamic belief and establishes the presence of Islamic worship within a physical space. Within Islam, this confession also stands alongside a rejection of the Christian belief that Jesus is the Son of God.

And when we hear that a cathedral has hosted such an Iftar meal during Ramadan, people notice very different things.

Some see a generous gesture of welcome. A moment of hospitality in a world that often forgets how to greet the stranger. There is something noble in the instinct to open a door, to share bread, to create a place where difference does not immediately become division.

But beneath the surface of such moments lies a deeper question.

It is the question of what kind of place a cathedral actually is.

For some, a cathedral is essentially a symbolic place. A beautiful building, heavy with history, belonging to the Church yet also part of the city's civic life. If that is how one understands it, then the space becomes generous and flexible. Many kinds of gatherings can be welcomed there.

But others sense something more.

A cathedral is not simply built of stone and glass. It is shaped slowly through the centuries by prayer. Through the rhythm of Eucharist, through whispered confessions, through grief carried to the altar and hope sung into the rafters. Over time, a place like this gathers a depth of presence. The air becomes thick with memory and devotion.

In the old Celtic language, people sometimes speak of thin places—places where the veil between heaven and earth seems somehow more open. Cathedrals can become like this, not because of architecture alone, but because of the long fidelity of worship offered there.

This is why some music belongs easily in such spaces. Sacred song does not interrupt the prayer of a cathedral; it continues it. But when another religion’s act of worship is spoken within that space, something different occurs. And so the question that arises may not truly be about Muslims at all.

It is about how we ourselves understand the sacred.

What do we believe happens in places where generations have come to seek God?

If we feel no tension at all, perhaps it is because we have come to see such places mainly as symbolic — beautiful, meaningful, but ultimately interchangeable.

But if something within us hesitates, if there is a subtle sense that the atmosphere of the place has been disturbed, that instinct may be telling us something about the nature of sacred space. Some rooms in the house of the soul are meant for particular kinds of presence.

Moments like this reveal something discerning about us. They show us how deeply we believe that the sacred can dwell in a place, and what the sacred is for us.

And there is another sacredness worth remembering.

For many people, a cathedral is not merely a landmark visited by tourists. It is their church. It is where they kneel, where they light candles, where their prayers gather week after week like small flames.

I wonder what it is like for them to return to that familiar stillness, knowing that within those walls another confession of faith — one that speaks differently of Christ — has also been spoken. Perhaps they were glad, perhaps they were disturbed.

And perhaps the deeper question is not about the event itself.

It is about how awake we still are to the mystery of the sacred that dwells in place, and what that means for us.

Perhaps the most meaningful response is not to rush immediately toward judgement, but to enter a moment of quiet discernment.

Events such as this have a way of revealing something about the landscape of our own hearts. They show us what we notice, what unsettles us, what feels natural, and what feels somehow out of harmony.

So it may be worth pausing for a moment and asking yourself:

When you hear that an Islamic prayer was spoken in a cathedral consecrated for Christian worship, what stirs within you?

Is there a sense of peace about it — a feeling that such gestures are simply expressions of welcome and generosity?

Or does something different arise — a hesitation, perhaps even a subtle grief, as though the deep consecration of the place has been unsettled and the sacred atmosphere of the space has been wounded?

Neither reaction should be dismissed too quickly or railed against. Discernment begins by listening carefully to what moves within us.

Sometimes our response reveals how we understand hospitality and our relationship with those who believe differently from us. At other times, it reveals something about how deeply we believe the sacred can inhabit a place — how prayer, offered across generations, can gather and shape the atmosphere of a space.

In this sense, the event itself becomes less important than the awareness it awakens within us.

Perhaps the real invitation is simply this:

• to sit with what we feel,

• to listen for what our reaction reveals about our own faith,

and to allow that awareness to deepen our understanding of the sacred.

Sometimes it is through such moments that we discover what we truly believe about God, about worship, and about the places where heaven and earth seem to lean a little closer together.

In discerning moments like this, it seems only fair to begin with generosity.

I suspect those who organised the event were genuinely trying to be welcoming. In a divided world, the instinct toward hospitality is a good and humane one.

And yet, as I sit with it, something still feels misplaced.

A cathedral carries the long memory of Christian prayer. Over centuries, it has been shaped by the worship offered there. When another confession of faith is spoken in that space — even with the best intentions — it can feel as though something sacred has been disturbed.

Not maliciously. But perhaps unknowingly, in the wrong room of the Christian house.

—

p.s Last year 2025, was the big year for Cathedral and Iftars, with St Paul’s and Bristol,

UK Cathedrals Hosting Iftars

The most frequent and notable hosts include:

Manchester Cathedral, Southwark Cathedral, Bradford Cathedral, Coventry Cathedral, Blackburn Cathedral

Lately, I’ve found myself opening social media and asking a question I never expected to ask about people I know and respect, and I fear they do of me:

Has everyone become radicalised?

By “radicalised” I do not mean violent extremism. I mean something subtler: the growing tendency for people to interpret the entire world through a single ideological lens — a kind of totalising narrative that claims to explain and order everything.

People who once spoke carefully about difficult topics now seem to air their views publicly about politics, identity, and cultural issues with an intensity that would have surprised them a few years ago. Others have adopted positions that feel not just strongly held, but defended with an ideological certainty — what psychologists sometimes call moralised belief systems — that leave little room for any nuance or curiosity.

It is not simply that opinions have changed. It’s as if we’ve gone from thinking aloud for ourselves to shouting for our teams — what social psychologists describe as tribal cognition, where loyalty to a group begins to shape how we interpret reality itself. We have traded the quiet complexity of thought for the loud simplicity of an identity, rushing past nuance until only ideology remains.

Ideas are no longer just debated. They are proclaimed with ideological fervour that sometimes carries the emotional intensity of religious commitment. Positions are no longer tentative or exploratory. They are often defended with a certainty that can feel unnervingly absolute.

What’s most unsettling is that this same pattern appears across very different movements. Progressive activism - climate, trans, immigration, Christian nationalist movements, culture-war Christianity, as everyone seems now to interpret the entire world through a single ideological lens.

Disagreement has been replaced with competing moral certainties.

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And this has begun to change the way many of us approach ordinary conversations.

Before raising certain topics — politics, identity, culture — there can be a quiet moment of hesitation. A subtle form of a social “handshake”, where we quietly test whether the other person shares enough assumptions about reality for conversation to remain possible.

Should I continue, or will I suddenly step on a pre-programmed ideological landmine, triggering a reaction? In a strange way, what was once ordinary conversation can start to feel like connecting two incompatible devices across an unstable network.

For most of us, this shift is deeply disorienting, disconcerting and often distressing. At times, it can feel as if the world, including most of our friends, is quietly radicalising around us

All this begs a question: if this is the case, what is causing this?

The familiar explanations come quickly. We are told that social media algorithms are driving polarisation. Others blame misinformation, the collapse of critical thinking, or the fragmentation of media ecosystems.

These explanations contain genuine insight. But they may not reach the deepest layer of what we are experiencing. The deeper crisis may be something far more unsettling:

Our identity crisis is really a crisis about reality.

At the centre of the polycrisis of our times is one of identity. Questions of identity now sit at the centre of public life. Who we are, how we define ourselves, what it means to be human — these questions shape debates about gender, race, nationhood, belonging, and justice.

But an identity crisis is the symptom that signals something deeper that is the cause.

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The Deeper Crisis of Reality

Human beings do not live by information and facts. We live from a deeper sense of what the world is — what it means to be human, where truth comes from, what life is for, and what gives meaning to suffering—and to the hope beyond it.

Philosophers call this ontology: our understanding of what reality actually is. In simpler terms, it is the story we believe about what the world fundamentally is and how we exist within it.

For centuries in the West, even people who disagreed about many things still shared certain basic assumptions about the world. There was a broadly Christian vision of reality: a created world, human beings made in the image of God, moral responsibility, the possibility of forgiveness, and a story that gave meaning to suffering and hope beyond it.

Those assumptions formed what sociologists sometimes call plausibility structures — the invisible frameworks that make certain beliefs feel obvious and others implausible. But when those structures weaken and are removed, something remarkable happens.

People do not simply change their opinions. They begin to inhabit different realities.

And when people no longer share the same vision of reality, even the best friendships become turbulent.

The arguments we see on the surface — about politics, culture, identity, and morality — often reflect deeper disagreements about what the world actually is. This helps explain why many modern public movements increasingly resemble religions as ideological ways of being.

• They offer moral certainty.

• They divide the world into heroes and villains.

• They promise redemption through struggle.

• And they provide something many people crave: identity and belonging.

In a world where the deeper story of reality has become unstable, these ideological movements offer something many people are searching for: somewhere solid to stand and make sense of the world.

Yet there is another layer to this story that Christians need to face honestly.

Some of the forces shaping this moment did not originate outside the Church. In many cases, they emerged within it.

For several decades, much of Western evangelical Christianity was shaped - and still is - by an intensely consumerist form of faith. Christianity was often presented as a pathway to personal fulfilment, emotional satisfaction, spiritual breakthrough, and purpose-driven success. The language of faith became intertwined with the language of self-realisation and material fulfilment.

In theological terms, this is an over-realised eschatology — the expectation that the promises of the Kingdom should be fully experienced in the present and in certain material and identity-realising ways.

• Faith promised success.

• Faith promised a breakthrough.

• Faith promised fulfilment.

• Faith promised therapeutic well-being.

But life has a way of confronting such expectations with the reality of suffering, disappointment, and ambiguity. And when the faith people were given cannot metabolise suffering, cannot make sense of disappointment, failure, and the ambiguity of life, something about consumeristic faith breaks. Some gave up on faith completely, and others migrated to ideologies adjacent to faith.

Many believers do not abandon their passion for meaning or justice. Instead, that passion became redirected into causes that promise a clearer moral narrative and a stronger sense of identity. Over-realised eschatology gets migrated into ideological causes.

• Political movements.

• Identity politics.

• Gender issues.

• Climate change.

These causes can begin to function as substitute eschatologies — narratives that promise redemption through struggle and transformation through political or cultural victory. The language around them may still sound Christian.

But their centre has fundamentally shifted.

Christ becomes a symbol supporting the cause rather than the reality in whom all things hold together. When this happens, Christianity itself can quietly become another ideology among many.

But the Christian faith begins somewhere very different. It begins with a claim about reality. In the New Testament, the apostle Paul makes a breathtaking statement about Christ: “In him all things hold together.”(Colossians 1:17)

This is not simply a nice devotional idea; it is a major ontological claim. It means that reality itself is not ultimately grounded in power, ideology, identity, or tribe.

Reality is grounded ultimately in Christ.

If that claim is true, then the search for identity that animates so much of our cultural conflicts begins to look very different. Identity is no longer something we must endlessly construct through self-definition or ideological allegiance. It becomes something we receive through participation in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ — what the early Church often described as sharing in the life of God.

In the Ignatian tradition, moments of confusion are not simply problems to be solved. They are invitations to deeper discernment. Ignatius encouraged his companions to ask a searching question whenever passions were running high:

What spirit is shaping the way we see the world?

Perhaps the destabilisation many people feel today is not only a crisis. Perhaps it is also an invitation. An invitation to ask a deeper question beneath the arguments of our age:

What vision/spirit of reality is shaping the way we see the world?

Because if our identity crisis is rooted in a deeper crisis about reality itself, then the most important question we can ask is not which side we are on. It is this: what is the reality we believe we are living in?

And if the identity crisis of our age is rooted in a deeper crisis about reality itself, then ontology may be the hidden fault line beneath many of our most intense cultural conflicts.

In Part 2 — Why We No Longer Live in the Same World — we’ll explore how and why the loss of shared ontology has made many of our conversations almost impossible.

Something painful is happening in many friendships.

Conversations that once felt relaxed and mutual now feel fragile. A passing remark about the news can suddenly derail a meal. People we once enjoyed talking about life with now sound as though they are speaking from entirely different worlds — worlds that sometimes leave us bewildered, or even appalled.

You may have felt it too.

One friend sees Western civilisation as fundamentally oppressive and in need of radical transformation, if not complete dismantling. Another sees that same civilisation as fragile, under attack, and in need of recovery. One believes identity is something we discover deep within ourselves by being true to our inner feelings. Another believes identity is something given — by biology, by God, or through relationships, tradition, and community.

The same headlines. The same events.

Yet we seem to inhabit completely different realities.

And if we are honest, the pull toward certainty and tribe — the desire to resolve the anxiety and distress this creates — is not only “out there.” Many of us can feel it within ourselves as well: the temptation to interpret the whole world through a single cause, a single outrage, a single explanation that promises to calm the storm and make sense of everything.

What is striking is that this same pattern appears across very different movements. Progressive activists, nationalist movements, culture-war Christians, and even people who claim to reject ideology altogether can begin to interpret the entire world through a single moral lens.

Many people assume the crisis we are living through is political.

Others believe it is technological — the result of social media, algorithms, and misinformation.

Some argue that it is behavioural or neuroscientific — the product of cognitive dissonance, bias, and our poor capacity for critical thinking.

All of these explanations contain some truth. But the deeper crisis may be far more unsettling.

It may be a crisis about reality itself.

Our culture often describes the moment we are living through as an identity crisis. But identity crises do not appear on their own. The identity crisis of our age is rooted in a deeper crisis about the nature of reality itself.

When people lose confidence in what reality is — what it means to be human, where identity comes from, what truth is for — identity becomes something we must construct rather than receive.

And when identity becomes unstable, ideologies rush in to provide meaning, belonging, and moral certainty.

A New Series: When Reality Fractures

Over the coming weeks I’ll be exploring this deeper crisis in a new series called When Reality Fractures.

Together we’ll explore questions shaping this strange cultural moment:

• Why identity has become the central battleground of our age

• Why ideological movements increasingly function like substitute religions

• Why some evangelicals, disillusioned with consumer Christianity, end up radicalised by causes

• Why both progressive activism and Christian nationalism can hollow out the gospel

• Why recovering a deeper Christian vision of reality may be the most radical response available

None of this is entirely new. Christians have lived through moments like this before.

Again and again, when the world around them felt unstable, they rediscovered something surprisingly solid.

Reality itself is not ultimately held together by ideology, tribe, or outrage. Reality is held together in Christ.

And if that is true, it may change how we understand identity, truth, politics, and even our fractured friendships.

The series begins later this week with a question many people are quietly asking:

Have All Your Friends Become Radicalised?

Subscribe if you’d like the first essay in the series delivered to your inbox later this week.

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I got to hear N. T. Wright speak recently about his new book, God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal. I’ve read him for years.

As he spoke, things began to accumulate — each one landing quietly, carried along by that wonderful, sonorous voice: we don’t have a soul; that’s Greek, Platonic, not biblical. The creeds are “approximations.” We are held in God’s memory. I’ve read versions of this before. But hearing them said so casually, in succession, did something to me. It caught the attention of my soul — if I can still call it that.

A strange sensation rose in my body, and by the time I noticed it, I had stopped breathing. An existential panic attack, induced in real time.

Because if I am nothing more than a narrative held in divine memory — if what persists between death and resurrection is essentially God’s recollection of me — then I have to ask: is that actually me? If resurrection is God recreating that narrative in a new body, is that continuity or replacement? Is the person who wakes on the other side of death the same person who fell asleep, or a very good copy — Jason 2.0?

Of course, language is limited. In one sense, every doctrinal statement is an approximation. But if you stress that the creeds are only approximations, they begin to sound like provisional human guesses rather than firm claims about reality.

And I cannot pretend this is merely theoretical. I have a soul. I know this not as a doctrine first, but as a lived fact. I attend to it in spiritual direction — my own soul and that of my directees. My grandson looks into it when he snuggles close, the way small children do before they learn not to. I have sat beside the dying, watched bodies fail, and seen something in a person burn brighter even as their flesh fades into the rupture of death.

There is a me that is more than my body. I am not ready to surrender that to anyone’s theology. I have already given it to Jesus.

That is why these aren’t abstract questions for me. Wright’s account produces real anxiety — I know because I feel it, as I suspect others do too. In pastoral care, you learn quickly what people reach for when everything else falls away. And when the theology itself becomes a source of distress, that is not an academic problem. It is a pastoral one.

So I am going to go through Wright carefully and say where I think he is mistaken. Christians have held and refined answers to these questions for two thousand years. And they provide an antidote to the existential crisis induced by Wright.

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Grateful for the gift, troubled by the architecture

Before I go any further, I need to say this plainly: N. T. Wright has given me gifts I did not have before I read him. I cannot fully account for the difference he has made in my theological imagination.

In particular he reinforced something I had already come to reject — the escapist “heaven” theology that has quietly colonised much of Western Christianity. The notion that we are souls trapped in bodies, enduring material existence until we are finally released into a disembodied spiritual elsewhere. Freed by praying prayers to go to heaven when we die. Wright is right to challenge that. It grew from a Platonic imagination. And it has done deep pastoral damage, teaching Christians to devalue the body, the earth, the present moment — the very creation God called good.

Christian hope is not escape but redemption. Not evacuation, but renewal. We await not the abandonment of creation but its restoration. Resurrection is embodied. It is physical. It is God’s future breaking into God’s present — heaven and earth joined. Creation groaning and, finally, finally being set right.

I say all of this because what follows is critical of Wright, and I do want that to cover over my gratitude. I am not a reader who has skimmed Wright and decided he is too clever by half. I have read him carefully. Mind you some of those volumes are large enough to require several lives to process.

But I now find myself somewhere I did not expect to be. Wright strengthened my love for bodily resurrection. But I fear that in reconstructing his theology around it, he has quietly destabilised the metaphysical foundations that make resurrection intelligible at all.

That is not a minor adjustment. It is a theological fault line. And it is the reason for this article.

Metaphysics by Another Name

What I now offer is the fulcrum, the hinge on which my whole critique balances and turns.

Wright tells us, quite explicitly, that he is not doing metaphysics. He is “doing narrative” instead. He claims he is not speculating about substances, souls, or invisible mechanisms. He is simply telling the biblical story.

But that move does not get him off the theological hook, so to speak. It shifts the vocabulary without removing the underlying metaphysical claim. Also, we are going to evaluate Wright carefully, so we need to be clear about what “ontology” and “metaphysics” actually mean.

Ontology is just a technical word for a very simple question: what is something, really? What is a human being? What makes you you? If your body dies, what — if anything — continues? Are you a soul inhabiting a body? A psychosomatic unity? A pattern of memories? A narrative thread?

Those are ontological questions. They are questions about reality at its deepest level.

Metaphysics is the broader conversation that addresses questions such as what ultimately exists, what persons are, and how identity persists over time.

Now, narrative theology such as Wright’s says: instead of beginning with abstract categories, let us begin with the story Scripture tells — creation, covenant, exile, resurrection, new creation. It resists philosophical systems and prefers drama to definition.

I understand that instinct, and I share parts of it. But here is the problem.

If you say, as Wright does, that human beings are constituted by story, that personal identity is narrative continuity, and that what survives death is God’s faithful remembering of that narrative until it is re-embodied, you are not simply telling a story.

You are making a claim about what a human being is.

That is ontology.

To say that I am fundamentally a narrative held in divine memory is not a poetic and narrative flourish by Wright. It is an answer to the question of personal persistence. It tells me what the “I” is between death and resurrection.

It takes me back to a Doctor Who episode I watched — or perhaps an amalgam of several, blurred together in my memory — when I was a very young boy. People were uploaded into a computer; their consciousness copied and stored. Only later did they discover the truth: they were just copies. The real them had died when the upload was complete.

I can still feel the existential dread of that realisation from childhood — that cold recognition that anyone offering to copy me into memory would not, in fact, preserve me at all. It would only preserve a replica. And when we are told that God holds us in his memory, the same question arises for me. Is that really me?

The terror here is not technological. It is deeply ontological. It is the thought that something could replicate me perfectly — speak with my voice, carry my memories, even believe itself to be me — and yet the real, continuous subject of me has vanished and been annihilated.

You cannot decline metaphysics by swapping your vocabulary. Calling it “narrative story” does not mean you have stopped making ontological commitments.

The real question, then, is not whether metaphysics is present with Wright. It is which metaphysics is being assumed by him, and whether that vision of the human person is coherent, pastorally responsible, and in continuity with the Church’s confession of embodied, enduring personhood.

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Divine Forgery: The Memory Problem

Let’s unpack this memory problem some more. While N. T. Wright uses several metaphors for how God preserves us, the specific phrasing of being a “song” or “tune” in God’s memory is most prominent in his discussions on personal identity and the intermediate state (the time between death and resurrection).

It sounds tender and pastoral. Even beautiful - again with that sonerous voice. But it is like a splinter in my mind and my soul - pun intended.

Here are some quotes and passages that best capture things from Wright:

1. The “Software and Hardware” Quote

This is his most well-known explanation of how God “remembers” the unique pattern of your life:

“God will download our software onto his hardware until the time he gives us new hardware to run the software again for ourselves.” — Surprised by Hope, Chapter 10

2. On the “Music” of our Actions

Wright often argues that what we do in this life—including music and art—isn’t lost, but is kept by God to be part of the future world:

“Every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation... will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly... they are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.” — Surprised by Hope, chapter 13

3. The “Tune” of Identity

In his more academic works and lectures, Wright explains that the “soul” is not a ghostly substance, but the “result” of a life lived. He often describes this as a “melody”:

“What if the ‘self’ is more like a theme or a tune which has been played on a particular instrument, and which, when the instrument is broken, lives on in the mind of the Composer until He creates a new and better instrument on which that same tune can be played more gloriously than ever before?” — From his lectures, see Life Between Death and Resurrection - N.T. Wright Archives

What do his claims, phrases and metaphors actually mean?

If I die and if I do not persist as a substantial subject, but am instead remembered by God, and then remade at the resurrection. Then what exactly guarantees my identity?

Memory is not being. I’ll say that again. Memory is NOT being.

To say I am “held in God’s memory” suggests that between death and resurrection, what remains is not me, but God’s perfect recollection of me. My narrative. My story. My pattern. My remembered self.

But a memory is not a subject. A memory does not suffer. A memory does not love. A memory does not wait in hope. So when resurrection comes, and God reconstitutes that remembered narrative into embodied life, I have to ask in existential fear:

Is that me? Or is it a divine copy?

This question is not about God’s faithfulness. It is about metaphysics. About identity. About continuity. If the original subject, i.e., me, does not in some way endure — however mysteriously — then what exactly is being raised from the dead?

To be clear, Wright does not deny that the person persists. He affirms conscious presence with Christ and speaks of continuity grounded in God’s covenant faithfulness. My concern is not that he intends annihilation, but that the metaphors he uses — memory, software, tune — leave unclear what ontological reality secures that persistence.

Here is a metaphor that gets to the heart of my problem with Wright’s metaphysics and theology:

If I burn an original manuscript and then rewrite it perfectly from memory, is that the same book? It may be identical in content and even flawless. But it is a forgery of the original. It is not the same physical object that passed through fire.

And if personal identity is reduced to narrative accuracy — to divine recall — then resurrection begins to look less like victory over death and more like perfect replication.

The pastoral implications are enormous. Because what we want — what we ache for — is not to be remembered well.

It is to survive into eternity with God.

The Promise of Persistence, Not Preservation

None of this is an abstract philosophical puzzle. It is an immensely pastoral one. It does not emerge in lecture halls but at hospital bedsides and gravesides. It appears when someone loses a child. When someone buries a spouse. When someone stands in the unbearable silence left by the one whose presence once made the world coherent.

In those moments, no one is comforted by being told: “They are currently discontinued, but remembered — waiting to be copied back into existence.”

That is not hope. It is some kind of archival preservation.

Christian hope has never rested on the idea that God is a perfect record-keeper. It rests on the far more radical claim that the person themselves persists. The subject remains. Death wounds us but it does not erase us. The one who loved us, and whom we loved, does not survive merely as a memory — however perfect the One who remembers. The beloved believer does not become a recollection in the mind of God, but remains someone God keeps in actual being.

Grief itself bears witness to this. Grief is not the pain of remembering; it is the pain of a relationship interrupted. It presupposes that the one we love is not an idea or a narrative, but a real and enduring subject whose absence is a violation, not an annihilation.

If personal continuity is truly broken in death — if the self does not persist but is later reconstructed from divine memory — then grief becomes more than sorrow. It becomes a metaphysical crisis. Beneath the ache of loss lies a deeper terror: that the one we loved has not passed through death at all, but slipped out of existence.

But Christianity has never proclaimed annihilation followed by replacement. It has proclaimed a passage and journey. Death is an enemy — but a defeated one. It wounds but it does not erase. The one who loved, who suffered, who trusted, who was known by God does not flicker out of being at death and wait for reassembly.

The Christian vision rests upon continuity of our being. The communion of saints assumes that hte saints remain. Prayer for the departed presupposes someone who endures. Christ’s promise — “Today you will be with me” — is not a pledge of future reconstruction but of continued presence.

Participation in God is not interupted and episodic. It is not switched off at death and rebooted at resurrection. It is a life held in Christ from first breath to final glory of resurrection. If death severs existence, resurrection becomes duplication. And duplication is not redemption.

Christian hope dares to say more. Nothing — not even death — can interrupt the being of the beloved in Christ. “Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” Not archived, and not rebooted, but the Lord’s.

The Christian promise is not that God preserves a perfect memory of us. It is that death cannot interrupt our actual being. The God who raises the dead does not recreate a copy from a divine backup. He raises the same person who lived, loved, and suffered that he has kept in persistent contact with him even in death.

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The Creeds: You Are Not Your Story

When N. T. Wright describes the creeds as “approximate,” I understand what he is trying to do - I think! He wants to resist the idea that the early church handed us a set of abstract metaphysical propositions detached from the story of Israel and the narrative of Jesus. He wants to say that the creeds are signposts, not cages. Fair enough.

But his use of the word approximate to describe them signals more than he perhaps intends.

The creeds did not emerge as devotional poetry. They were forged in crisis. They arose precisely to safeguard ontology, Christology, and anthropology — to protect claims about who God is, who Christ is, and what it means to be human in relation to him.

They arose because narrative alone proved insufficient. The crisis emerged because rival readings of that story were generating rival ontologies.

Arius could tell a story of Jesus, and so could Athanasius, as could Apollanarius. And the question became whose story about Jesus was true and real. In other words:

What is the Son in relation to the Father?

Is he of the same being (homoousios)? Or a creature? Narrative did not and could not settle that, and ontologies had to be named. And so the Church forged language under pressure — language that fixed what the story meant about reality.

The Creeds are not retelling the story. They stabilise the metaphysical claims implicit in and embedded in the story.

When the Nicene Creed says:

“God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God…”

It is not expanding the narrative, but is specifying the nature of being.

When it says:

“of one substance with the Father…”

It is protecting ontology, so when it says:

“He became incarnate… was crucified… rose again…”

It is protecting theological anthropology — what it means for humanity to be assumed, healed, and glorified in Christ.

The creeds function as guardrails. They ensure that the narrative does not collapse into metaphor, moral example, or symbolic drama. The creeds are not speculative add-ons to the biblical narrative. They are the church’s disciplined refusal to let revelation collapse into ambiguity.

Wright wants resurrection without Platonism, continuity without dualism, identity without classical substance metaphysics. Check. So do I. His instinct is pastoral and biblical: to speak in the language of story, covenant, vocation, and new creation. But if ontology is thinned into narrative, then narrative must carry ontological weight. I believe, as do others, that it cannot and creedal guardrails fail.

And we should notice what happens when those guardrails erode in particular with identity.

Identity Crisis and Narrative

Look at the modern identity crisis around us. The self has become a project. Identity is constructed, curated, revised, asserted. Any sense of givenness — that parts of who you are are received, not invented — is treated as oppressive. Nature becomes negotiable. Embodiment becomes plastic.

When anthropology is untethered from ontology, the human person collapses into willpower with a story attached.

And here is the irony: when we deny a substantial, enduring depth to the person and speak only of embodied narrative, we do not escape dualism. We create a new one. If the human being is reduced to material continuity plus remembered story, then narrative must now secure our permanence.

I persist because my story persists and that is disastrous for Christian identity.

If ontology is relocated into story, then story must carry the weight of my being. If I am defined primarily by a narrative remembered rather than by a persisting reality, then that narrative must bear the full burden of my identity — of what makes me me.

That is a burden narrative cannot sustain.

A story can describe me. Interpret me. Gather the fragments of my life into meaning. But a story cannot be me. Stories depend upon a subject who lives them. They require someone who acts, loves, suffers, and remembers.

If narrative is asked to replace the enduring subject who lives it, it collapses under the strain. Meaning is powerful. But it is not presence.

Now, to be fair, Wright does not advocate self-creation. He grounds identity in God’s covenant faithfulness. He speaks of being held in God’s memory. He affirms continuity and conscious presence with Christ.

My question is not about his intention.

It is whether narrative — even when grounded in divine faithfulness — is metaphysically sufficient to secure personal persistence.

Wright’s recovery of first-century Jewish categories has been a genuine gift. He is right to resist the lazy assumption that Christianity is baptised Platonism. He has helped many of us see resurrection and new creation in their proper Jewish frame.

But here is where recovery risks becoming restriction.

If theology is methodologically confined to what can be reconstructed of first-century Jewish thought, then later metaphysical clarifications begin to look like distortions rather than developments.

Revelation is given in history but it is not imprisoned by it.

To freeze theology inside the first century assumes that the earliest vocabulary is the purest form of truth. But the Church has always believed doctrine develops because truth presses outward, demanding clarity. That is not corruption but is fidelity under apologetic pressure.

And here is the deeper irony: rejecting “Greek metaphysics” does not eliminate metaphysics. It simply baptises another — a narrative ontology rooted in Second Temple Judaism. That too is an ontology. That too carries assumptions about being, identity, and persistence.

The real question is not whether we use metaphysics. It is whether we admit we are using it — and whether we allow the whole Church, across time, to help us think clearly.

This is where John Henry Newman becomes indispensable.

Newman reminds us that the Church is not trapped in the first century. Revelation is given once in Christ and entrusted to the apostles. But it must be preserved, defended, and articulated as history unfolds. That is what he means by the development of doctrine.

Development is not invention. It is organic growth. An acorn becomes an oak without ceasing to be the same living reality. So doctrine grows in clarity without changing in substance. Later formulations are not additions to revelation; they are clarifications of what was always there — especially when controversy forces precision.

When the Church adopted metaphysical language — ousia, hypostasis, nature, person — it was not importing foreign distortions. It was reaching for the best conceptual tools available to safeguard what Scripture already proclaimed: that Christ is truly God and truly man, and that salvation depends on who he is, not merely on the story told about him.

If the Church had refused to move beyond first-century vocabulary, it would have failed in its misson. Precision was not betrayal. It was faithfulness.

Revelation is rooted in the first century, but it is not confined to it. Development was actually a type of preservation.

And the same principle applies today. Modern understandings of the self — shaped by psychology and interiority — were unknown to first-century Jews. Yet the realities they name were not absent. The lack of vocabulary does not imply the lack of reality.

In the next section, I want to explain why the classical account — often called hylomorphic dualism — better safeguards resurrection, identity, and the pastoral promise that death does not erase the beloved, while avoiding the caricature of disembodied souls floating off to heaven.

Because the creeds are the Church’s refusal to let your existence dissolve into story.

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Hylomorphic Dualism: A Positive Alternative

Critique without construction is cheap. So let me offer something better — and something the Church has already given us.

The classical Christian account is neither Platonic dualism nor the “ghost in a machine” Wright rightly resists. It is hylomorphism — from hylē (matter) and morphē (form). On this account, the soul is not a detachable substance floating inside the body. It is the form of the body — the principle that makes this particular body a living human rather than a corpse. It grounds personal identity. It is not an optional metaphysical accessory.

This means I am neither a trapped soul nor a reducible organism. I am a unified, ensouled body — a living psychosomatic whole.

From here, death looks different. If the soul is the body’s form, then death is not annihilation or replacement. It is rupture — an unnatural tearing of form from matter, a wound in creation. The soul’s persistence after death is real, sustained in Christ, yet incomplete. It longs for reunion, because embodiment belongs to its nature.

Resurrection, then, is not God discarding the old and drafting a new version from memory. It is the restoration and glorification of the same embodied person. No divine copy. No celestial 4D reprint. Resurrection transforms what already persists and it does not replace it.

This is why the great participatory tradition (theosis) — from Irenaeus to Maximus — could speak of recapitulation and deification without collapsing into dualism or reductionism. Christ assumes our nature in its fullness, heals it from within, and raises it. He does not overwrite it. He gathers it up and brings it to its intended end. Theosis perfects nature and it does not replace it. Participation presupposes something real to participate in.

The soul, then, is not a ‘ghost in the machine’. It names the depth of a person — the irreducible subject who receives existence from God and is capable of communion with him. Participation does not dissolve that subject. It secures it.

And this hylomorphic account does three key things.

• It grounds personal persistence — the soul is the abiding form of our identity, held in Christ between death and resurrection.

• It avoids escapism — salvation is not liberation from matter but the perfection of embodied life.

• And it makes resurrection necessary and intrsinsic, not an ornamental decoration — because the human being is a body-soul unity, final salvation must restore that unity in resurrecition glory.

This works pastorally as much as philosophically. It is what you cling to at a graveside that can bear the weight of your gried. When someone dies, our hope is not that God has preserved a flawless memory of them. It is that the one who laughed, who wept, who held our hand is not gone into nothing. Death tears. But it does not delete a life.

So Christ reveals what we are. The soul explains how we remain. And resurrection completes what we were always meant to be.

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We have become a culture obsessed with trauma and deeply allergic to sin.

Even in evangelical churches—once the strongholds of sin-consciousness, altar calls, and conviction—the language has shifted. We now speak easily of healing our wounds, processing our pain, and understanding our trauma. We are shaped by our upbringing, our circumstances, and our neural pathways. We are victims of forces beyond our control.

We are rarely, it seems, sinners.

This isn’t entirely wrong. But it is dangerously incomplete.

When we refuse to face our own sin, our sense of agency becomes fragile. We no longer know where responsibility properly lies. As a result, even other people’s perceptions and thoughts begin to feel dangerous. To be interpreted, criticised, or even misunderstood is experienced not as a normal part of being human, but as an act of reduction and diminishment of who I am.

Blaming others for how they think about us is a warning light on the dashboard of our souls. What feels protective actually deepens our captivity. It hands our inner stability over to the judgment of others.

Facing sin interrupts this. When responsibility for our lives is owned in the presence of God’s grace, our identity no longer hangs in the balance of how others perceive us. We can be seen without being undone. Some judgments may indeed be wrong, some may be true, but neither has the power to define us. But only if we consider ourselves as sinners who sin.

We have tried to build psychological health without moral responsibility—healing without culpability, freedom without repentance. The result is a dangerous return to shame without forgiveness. In shame cultures, we can be exposed, cancelled, and labelled, but never redeemed.

A Christianity that forgets sin cannot sustain grace at all. When sin is removed, grace no longer has anything to do. It collapses into a kind of sentiment of kindness without cost, mercy without transformation, and love without truth. The cross is also reduced to a therapeutic tool, a symbol of reassurance rather than of redemption. Resurrection becomes little more than an affirmation of God's validation of us as we are, rather than a raising and resurrection into a new kind of life.

In the psychological turn, to be “saved” means feeling seen, soothed, and affirmed. These are important, but they are not salvation. Salvation is deliverance from sin’s power, from disordered desire, from the patterns that keep us bound, and ultimately from death itself. When our faith can no longer name or address these realities, it may comfort us, but it can no longer save us from what actually destroys us.

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Trauma Identity Trap

Somewhere in the last few decades, Western culture—and Western Christianity along with it—made a profound swap. We traded the language of sin for the language of trauma. We exchanged moral agency for psychological explanation, and we replaced confession with therapy.

This shift didn’t come out of nowhere. For so long and in so many ways, “sin” was weaponised—used to shame, control, and coerce rather than to heal. In many Christian settings, especially, it became a tool for enforcing conformity, punishing difference, and exerting control. The misuse and the damage were real and in plenty of places continue to be so today.

So we threw out sin altogether. The baby with the perverbial bathwater

And in doing so, we have discarded something essential. The recognition that we are not only wounded by the world but are capable ourselves of wounding others. That we are not just shaped by forces beyond us but are also responsible for the choices we make, no matter what has happened to us. That freedom begins not with explanation, but with the truth that a contemplation of our sin reveals.

The Trauma Identity Trap

We have become highly articulate about victimhood. We can name the ways we were hurt—by parents, partners, churches, cultures, and systems. We can catalogue our triggers and trace our pain with impressive precision. All of this has become an open part of even polite conversation when someone asks how we are. And in church circles, it has become de rigueur when asking for prayer.

This awareness does matter.

Naming wounds can be illuminating and necessary. But when trauma becomes our primary identity—when we are defined entirely by what was done to us rather than how we live from it—we enter a subtler and more pernicious kind of captivity.

We can all too easily remain trapped in the past, endlessly narrating our pain, circling our wounds without moving beyond them. And the great irony is this:

A culture obsessed with healing often struggles to become well.

Why? Because we have amputated a crucial truth. We are not only victims; we are also agents. We act. We choose. We participate in the world’s brokenness even as we suffer from it. We wound others even as we are wounded. The biblical word for this agency—and for its effects on ourselves and others—is sin, and where we are sinners.

To acknowledge this is not to blame any victims or minimise trauma. It is to tell a larger truth about the full complexity of being human—and that truth about our sin, paradoxically, is what opens the door to freedom. A freedom that still eludes so many of us.

Christ, the True Victim

Christian theology offers something the therapeutic models of life cannot: Christ himself. In Christ, we encounter the only truly innocent victim. He suffers without deserving it, without contributing to his own destruction through sin. His victimhood is complete.

And what does he do with this?

He does not cling to it. He does not build an identity around it. He does not use it to justify withdrawal, bitterness, or self-protection. He transforms it. His suffering becomes the place where all suffering—deserved and undeserved—can be healed.

The psychological turn and the culture of perpetual victimhood become a distortion of Christ as the true victim because they turn suffering into an identity rather than a passage to healing. In the gospel, Christ is the true victim not simply because he suffers, but because he suffers without being defined by it. He names injustice fully, but he does not organise his life around injury or grievance. He carries suffering through death and beyond it into resurrection. And invites us into the same.

Perpetual victimhood does the opposite. What begins as necessary truth-telling hardens into a fixed self-understanding. Pain is no longer something that happened to me, and becomes who I am. Moral authority is then drawn from my injury rather than my transformation. Forgiveness becomes impossible because it would loosen the identity that suffering has secured for me.

Ignatian spirituality addresses this dilemma head-on with particular clarity. In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius invites us to contemplate Christ crucified and ask:

What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ? What ought I to do for Christ?

Notice the movement. It begins not with what was done to us, but with honest attention to what we have done. Not because our wounds don’t matter, but because Christ’s wounds free us from being trapped inside our own.

Why Naming Sin Heals

Various Christian catechisms describe the pernicious nature of sin and its effects on us (e.g., the Westminster Confession of Faith). The Catholic Catechism says it most simply: sin wounds the soul. This wound disrupts our relationship with ourselves, with God, and with others. That isn’t a metaphor. Our choices damage our capacity to love—and to be loved. And here is what our therapeutic age has forgotten:

We cannot heal wounds we refuse to name—especially those we have caused and made worse.

God does not need us to confess because He is uninformed. He needs us to confess because we are. I’ll say that again. God does not need us to confess because He is uninformed. He needs us to confess because we are.

Healing requires exposure. Not only of what others have done to us, but of the ways we have damaged ourselves and others through fear, desire, avoidance, and control.

This is what confession and repentance offer that therapy alone cannot - the restoration of our moral agency. Confession reminds us that we are participants in our story, not merely its casualties. And in that recognition, something remarkable happens. We can become free in the ways we long for and desire.

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Sin and Freedom: The Ignatian Insight

For Ignatius, attention to sin is not about guilt or self-loathing. It is about freedom. Sin is understood through the lens of disordered attachment, good things made ultimate things, loves that quietly enslave us.

Success. Approval. Security. Comfort. Control.

None of these is evil in itself. But when they begin to govern our choices, when we sacrifice integrity, relationships, or truth in order to preserve them, they become chains that bind us.

The Ignatian examination of conscience is therefore not an exercise in self-surveillance, nor a catalogue of our wounds. It is a prayerful and honest review of our thoughts, actions, and omissions in the light of God’s love, so that what needs healing, forgiveness, and change can be truthfully named.

It trains our attention to notice where we are bound, where we habitually choose the lesser good, where fear drives our decisions, and where self-protection wounds others. The question is not simply “how was I hurt today?” but “where did I choose unfreedom over love?”

If we have forgotten how to understand sin in this way, we have also largely abandoned the practice of penance, once central to the lives of the saints throughout Christian history. Penance is not about earning forgiveness or punishing the self. It is a concrete response to grace, an enacted turning of the will. Forgiveness heals, but penance rebuilds. It names sin not only as something to be absolved, but as a poison to be detoxed. Penance is the medicine applied to what sin has disordered, an embodied habituated antidote that retrains our desires, heals habits, and restores freedom to us.

In Ignatian terms, this is acting against (agere contra): the deliberate choice of practices that interrupt the patterns which keep us bound. Lust is countered by learning to see others as people to be honoured, not objects to be used. Greed is countered by generosity, especially when holding on to resources feels safer than letting go. Pride is countered by openness to the truth about who we are. Anger is countered by patience, by refusing retaliation, and by choosing the blessing of others rather than harm. Blame is countered by taking responsibility and owning our part, even when explanation or defence comes easily.

None of this is about earning God’s love. It is about cooperating with it. Penance is how grace is given something to work with in real time, re-forming what sin has distorted, loosening disordered attachments, and retraining us toward life. Left unattended, we often continue to cooperate instead with trauma and with our sin, organising our lives around fear, pain, and self-protection. Penance names another kind of cooperation, an active participation with God’s grace that leads not to deeper bondage, but to freedom.

Anamnesis: Remembering Properly

Ignatian practice restores something we have quietly lost the nerve to practise: anamnesis (the act of recalling or remembering past events). Not as rumination or self-exposure, but as remembering that actually changes us. In the Christian tradition, what is remembered is not simply recalled. It is brought into the living presence of Christ so that it no longer governs us. This is what true confession of sin is.

The Daily Examen is not a therapeutic debrief or a moral performance review. It is an act of resistance against the lie that the past must be either endlessly rehearsed, quietly denied, or used as an excuse for our behaviours. We can invite Christ into the concrete details of the day we have just lived. And when we do so:

Nothing is erased, and nothing is excused, so that all may be touched by God.

We remember our sin not to punish ourselves, but to stop protecting us. We face sin not in order to be shamed, but because what remains unnamed continues to rule us. This is not some kind of spiritual masochism. It is Christian realism, in which freedom requires truth, and truth necessitates the courage to confess sin.

Again, none of this denies anything that has happened to us. Christ has entered every place of suffering, including those we did not choose and could not prevent. Trauma is real. Wounds are real.

But here is the unpleasant truth: our cultural moment prefers not to face the fact that the newly speakable truths of trauma can become a new form of captivity.

What began as necessary exposure can harden into identity. Pain, once named in order to be healed, becomes a story we cannot step outside of. The language that freed us from silence now quietly keeps us stuck.

The gospel grants a more demanding freedom. The true victim Christ has not sanctified victimhood as an identity. He has transformed it into a place of encounter. In Christ, suffering is neither denied nor endlessly curated. Instead, it is taken up, borne by, and changed by Him. Participation in His life means that pain is no longer our final authority.

What we need is not a return to shaming religion, nor a spirituality that flatters us by pretending we are only wounded and never responsible. We need a deeper honesty. One that tells the truth about what has been done to us and the truth about what we have done in response. A spirituality of participation, not explanation, and of transformation, not therapeutic management.

Sin wounds the soul. But it also binds it. And only what is faced can be healed.

Whatever happened to sin? We did not abandon it because it was too cruel. We abandoned it because it demanded change. And yet, it remains the narrow door into real freedom.

There is a passage from Caryll Houselander that has been quietly working on me, haunting me for the last few weeks. She writes that when someone is newly converted to faith — or newly reawakened to its meaning — it is like falling in love with God. And not in a gentle way, but in something far more dangerous.

“Everyone in the house will feel the presence, the danger of the Divine Lover… whose demands may be uncompromising, may turn the complacency of the middle way topsy-turvy…

He is the Pied Piper to the human heart.”

— The Reed of God

It is an unsettling image, and it is meant to be.

Because when someone really falls in love, life does not remain organised as it was; instead, it is automatically re-ordered around love. Diaries change without effort. Time rearranges itself. Energy and money flow differently. Clothes, holidays, and homes change. Priorities quietly but decisively shift. Other people notice. Sometimes they feel displaced. Sometimes unsettled. Sometimes mildly irritated and irked.

Love is never neutral. And it is never ever private.

Modern Western Christians have developed a rather middle-class habit of treating the Gospel as a form of spiritual life management. We tend to invite Christ into our lives not as a transformative force, definitely not as a disruptive one - God forbid, but as a sort of “Honoured Guest” who is expected to behave himself in the lounge of our daily routines.

The diagnostic question Caryll Houselander draws us into asking ourselves is whether we have allowed Jesus to become a hired consultant—a useful presence to be tapped for his expertise in “providence,” “well-being”, or “ guidance”—or whether we have truly surrendered to the disruptive intimacy of the Lover of our souls. And if we have others will definitely notice.

The Consultant Jesus is summoned when there is a crisis in the “parish of the self.” He offers a menu of options, provides a bit of emotional and psychological scaffolding, and then waits patiently in the spare room until his next summoning. He is safe, predictable, and entirely manageable, and he is on call 24/7.

The Lover, by contrast, is an intruder. Love, in its true theological sense, is not a feeling we “use” to improve our lives; it is a power that re-orders our world. A lover does not offer advice; a lover demands attention, presence, vulnerability, and a total reconfiguration of our priorities around them.

The tragedy of contemporary faith is that we have traded the wild, unpredictable terrain of the Spirit for the neatly paved cul-de-sacs of 'personal development.' We prefer a Christ who helps us manage our lives over a Christ who calls us to lose them.

Drifting and Shifting

Ignatian spirituality, in its bracing practicality, has very little interest, if any, in how sincere we think we are. Ignatius of Loyola was far less concerned with our self-perceptions than with what actually moves us—those hidden tides that order our desires, govern our choices, and quietly claim the geography of our attention.

The Arc of Desire

Many of us recall what it is to begin and renew a relationship with God with ardour. Perhaps it was a conversion, a retreat, or a sharp moment of crisis that yielded a crystalline clarity. In those seasons and moments, Christ felt not just close but compelling. Prayer was not a slot in a diary. It was the air we breathed, and the time we automatically entered. Scripture was not a text to be interrogated for promises of provision but was a voice that spoke life and relationship to us. Our lives seemed to bend themselves, almost effortlessly, around our relationship with God.

The Drift into Stagnation

But time, and the creeping domesticity of our souls, pass over and throughus. Without any dramatic collapse or grand apostasy, and without a conscious loss of faith, our relationship with God subtly changes its architecture and structure. We see how this happens in our earthly loves, too.

Relationships often begin with a disruptive love—a passion that upends our world and demands everything. Yet they can settle into a weary stagnation. The parent whose only interaction with their child is a request for money—a relationship reduced to a transaction. The marriage in which a partner is valued only for their proficiency in chores and household admin, with romance buried under a mountain of life’s “to-dos.”

The Subtle Shift

In our spiritual lives, a similar dissipation and fading can occur. Jesus remains a trusted friend, but no longer our centre of gravity. He becomes a support figure, someone we once loved deeply but now hold at a polite, respectful distance. Eventually, he might only be called upon for parking spaces, job opportunities, and relief from pain and suffering. The disappointments of life quietly relegate him to these support roles, and love fades into a kind of utility.

In time, the silence between Him and us grows so heavy that reopening conversation feels awkward—like old friends embarrassed by years of unresponded-to messages. Where do we even begin?

St. Ignatius would not rush to “fix” this with a frantic burst of spiritual activity. We’ve probably all tried that and know it doesn’t work in the long run. Instead, Ignatius invites us simply to notice. Which is easier said than done, but more powerful than we realise, because it taps into the fabric of the created order, the very nature of relationships themselves, and the heart of God’s desire for us.

Because what’s at stake isn’t our spiritual “performance,” but the very quality and nature of our lives. It is about a relationship. A loving Father, friend, or spouse doesn’t want a checklist; they want to be seen. Ignatius asks us to begin there. No rushing to fix things. No hiding behind apathy or excuses. Just awareness.

Love as the Engine of Formation

There is a fundamental truth about our humanity: we are not formed primarily by the accumulation of information, the rigours of discipline, or even the sincerity of our good intentions. We are formed, quite simply, by love—by that to which we repeatedly give ourselves, by the deep currents of our desire, and by whatever registers as most real in the marrow of our daily lives. Right now. Whatever our lives are ordered around, is being driven by our deepest love and desires. The driving desire to be secure, the fear of failure, and the protection from psychological pain.

The Architecture of Affection

Modern neuroscience, in its own dialect and method, has begun to confirm what the Christian spiritual tradition has always known: attention follows desire, and desire follows love.

The things that we love tell us what we are - Thomas Aquinas

You are what you love - Augustine

Neuroscience confirms Christian theology: what we love is what we do, and what we do shapes what we love. Our nervous systems are etched by patterns of attachment long before they are ever shaped by the content of our ideas. We are wired for relationships before we are ever trained in any beliefs.

In this sense, what we love becomes the invisible structure and shape of the soul.

Love acts as a kind of internal gravity. It is the force that reaches into the clutter of our minds and draws the scattered fragments of the psyche into a single, coherent orbit. Left to our own devices, we are often just a collection of competing impulses and anxieties.

But love brings order to the “inside” of us. It pulls our disparate parts together—our fears, our hopes, and our history—and holds them steady around a central point. It is not that love makes us perfect; it is that love makes us whole. It provides the steady centre we need to simply be.

There is a cosmological truth here. We do not discover ourselves by turning inward without end, but by what we love. We become ourselves through the objects of our devotion.

Like holding my new grandson in my arms for the first time yesterday.

Love moves outward from me, unannounced and unquestioned. I do not decide it; I find myself already given. To hold him. To cherish him. To care for him. To carry him into whatever life will bring. Nothing needs to be said. Nothing needs to be promised outloud.

It is all there—in the way I hold him, in the attention I give him. His eyes. His nose. His ears. His mouth. And suddenly my own life is being retold, passed on, through my son standing next to me and now through him.

Into my beloved grandson.

My life has fallen into the gravity well of this little bay boy, orbiting his existence held fast by love from which I will never escape.

Why We Resist — Even When We Want God

Our bodies and our beings are shaped for coherence. Familiar patterns feel safe, even when they quietly narrow our freedom. So when love invites a re-ordering, our nervous systems can experience this not as consolation, but as a threat.

This is why, in prayer, we sometimes notice movements of what Ignatius calls desolation:

• a restlessness that makes it hard to remain

• an avoidance of silence and the vulnerability of being alone with our own thoughts

• a retreat into analysis—a cool review rather than a warm, attentive beholding

• a preference for spiritual conversation about God over spiritual exposure before God

None of this means we are failing or resisting God. In Ignatian terms, desolation often arises not because God has withdrawn, but because love is loosening what once gave us a sense of control. What feels destabilising may be the very place where freedom is being offered to us.

This is why Ignatius teaches us to notice rather than correct. To stay with what is stirring, without haste or self-accusation. Noticing these movements is already a sign of God’s grace. It places us on the threshold of deeper desire—of what we truly want from, and with, God.

These movements are not obstacles to God’s presence. They are often the doorway through which consolation eventually returns—quieter, truer, and less dependent on our control.

Why Love Is the Risk We Avoid

At some level, we all know this: the deepest cry of the human heart is to be loved — and to love in return. Not admired. Not approved of. Loved. Known and still wanted.

When we hear of someone famous dying, the most beautiful thing to know is that they were surrounded by those who loved them. If love carries us into the world, we hope it will carry us out—and bear us carefully all the days in between.

And yet, again and again, we protect and defend ourselves from precisely this.

We see it everywhere. The sad person who cannot receive love even when it is offered. The person who keeps control because control feels safer than dependence. The one who postpones love until circumstances are fixed, wounds are healed, identity questions are resolved, and reputations are secured. The cliched truths of so many novels and movies.

I’ll open to love when I’m less exposed. I’ll receive love when I’m more secure. I’ll risk intimacy when I feel safer.

But love never works like that. Ever.

Fear of loss. Fear of humiliation. Fear of being seen too clearly. Fear of having our carefully managed identities disturbed. Fear that if love rearranges us, we may not recognise ourselves — or be recognised by others. This is what love is.

So instead, we often choose to keep love manageable.

We spiritualise it. We therapeutise it. We keep it useful and domesticate it.

And yet the irony is this: it is love itself — especially the love of God — that reveals these defences in us. Not to shame us, but to heal us. Love alone has the power to show us where we are guarded, fragmented, divided — and to attend to all that it reveals.

Ignatius understood this. The Spiritual Exercises are not a programme for self-improvement. They are an exposure to love strong enough to tell the truth, and patient enough to wait for consent.

All love carries this risk. Not only that our circumstances might change, but that our actions might change — and more deeply still, that our identity might be re-formed. Love does not simply reorder our schedules. It presses toward the centre of who we take ourselves to be, to call us into who we were created to become.

That is why true love always demands something.

Not in the sense of coercion, but in the sense of insistence. Love asks for participation. It calls for surrender, not because it wants to diminish us, but because it wants to make us more of who we were meant to be.

Few hymns express this more clearly than When I Survey the Wondrous Cross. The first few verses focus on Jesus and his love for us. Then comes the final verse, where, having seen and appreciated Christ’s love for us, looks around, wondering what gift it might be to give in return, including all of creation itself. But concludes that even that would be an offering far too small, because:

“Love so amazing, so divine,

Demands my soul, my life, my all.”

That word demands can catch in the throat. It sounds excessive. Unsafe. And it is all that and far more. For it is the grammar of love. Partial love fragments us and opulls apart more. Managed love leaves us atrophied, too. Only total love integrates and creates.

This is not the demand of a tyrant. It is the claim of a Lover.

Christian spirituality has always known this. Augustine’s restless heart. Bernard of Clairvaux’s insistence that love grows by loving. Teresa of Ávila’s warning that prayer will cost us our illusions. John of the Cross’s insistence that love wounds in order to heal.

Love presses toward union, which is why we hesitate. And why we also long for it anyway.

To let ourselves be loved by God — really loved — is to risk being reordered at the deepest level of identity, being and daily life. It is also the only way we ever become who we are meant to be.

The Pied Piper still plays, and God’s love still calls us.

And the question beneath all our strategies, delays, and defences is not whether love will ask everything of us — it always will.

But whether we will trust that such love is, finally, the safest place to give it in return.

P.S. A spiritual director is trained to hold a prayerful, attentive space where you can notice and share your lived experience with God — even in the most intimate movements of the heart, including love.

I’ve known the quiet seduction of the siren song — the pull toward not being here anymore. Not dramatically or impulsively, but as a slow ache: a longing to be unmade, so that the overwhelm and pain might finally cease. To lay it all down. The weight of abuse, abandonment, and the care I was supposed to receive as a child but never did took up residence in my soul. And the older I became, the more life seemed to expose that absence.

With every new responsibility, every relationship, every expectation, the lack grew louder. The demands of adulthood — work, calling, even faith — revealed the hollowness in me. Not as fresh wounds, but as old ones that had never healed, because there was never anything there to begin with. That emptiness, once unquantifiable, became painfully visible. Measured. Known. And eventually, life began to feel like a mountain with no summit — a climb I was never equipped to make.

Anxiety and depression became the atmosphere I lived in — subtle at times, suffocating at others. My prayers thinned into silence. My hope flickered dangerously close to extinction. And in that desolation, death didn’t feel like rebellion. It felt like rest. Like sabbath. Like the only open door I might choose.

“I have often been so depressed that I could not even pray. I wanted to die.”

— Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love

Beneath all of it — even beneath the longing for death as escape — was something deeper: a cry for deliverance. A desperate yearning to be rescued from the chaos planted in me when I was still a child. To be met by Someone who could see the whole story of my life and say, It will all be okay. What I mistook for a desire to end was, at its core, a longing to know my end — and to be carried there, not alone, but with love and mercy.

The psalmist says, “If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.” And I did. Depression and anxiety led me into the shadowlands — the space between what is and what I wished was. A place where sorrow hangs heavy, and rescue and resolution feel far away. In those shadowlands, suicidal ideation became a kind of siren song — promising relief, an end to the ache, a way out when nothing else seemed possible.

“The mind can descend far lower than the body, for there are bottomless pits.”

— Charles Spurgeon

I have known those depths — the kind that swallow words, faith, and hope. My life felt like it was always winter: frozen in grief, heavy with silence, untouched by a spring that never came. And yet, even there, I can now see that another song was already sounding.

As a child, caught in the chaos of abuse and absence, I was drawn to Aslan — to the hope of a Lion who rescues, who speaks peace into fear, who ends the long winter. I see now that my moments of longing to die were really a longing to be delivered. What I needed was not escape, but rescue. And it is Aslan’s voice — steady, wild, and full of kindness — that has called me out of the shadowlands and back into life.

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”

— C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

And maybe that is what faith is — not the absence of sorrow, nor even the absence of the desire for death itself.

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You Are Not Alone

As a pastor for over twenty-five years, I spent thousands of hours listening to people share their trials — and the toll those experiences had taken on their hearts, minds, and souls. Over time, I began to notice a quiet refrain, spoken in different ways but echoing the same pain. Often it came with hesitation, preceded by the confession that they had never told anyone this before. Then the words would follow:

“I just want to go to sleep and never wake up.”

“I wish I had never been born.”

“I’ve thought about ending it all.”

“No one would miss me if I were gone.”

“My family would be better off without me.”

“I’ve been thinking of ways to end my life.”

These were not rare admissions — they were heartbreakingly common.

Suicidal thoughts often arise from a desire to escape pain, not necessarily from a desire to die. They are frequently hidden; most people who struggle with them do not share them, even with close friends or family. One of the simplest ways I learned to bring relief was by letting people know they were not alone — and that they were in good company, mine included.

Suicidal thoughts are far more common than we tend to admit. They are not limited to those with visibly tragic lives. Even people of deep faith, strength, and apparent stability can find themselves in that dark place. Around one in five people will experience a mental health illness in their lifetime, and suicidal ideation is a common companion to many of them.

And I suggest suicidal thoughts are a normal dimension to faith, not an aberration of it.

Suicidal Ideation and Faith

The Church must learn to be a place where the cross is not just preached but shared — where suffering isn’t explained away but held with reverence. Suicidal ideation is not always about wanting to die — it’s often about not knowing how to keep living. These moments, as dark and terrifying as they are, can be a kind of participation in the mystery of the cross.

When someone says, “I can’t do this anymore,” they may be closer to the cross than they know.

To be a Christian is to be one who has come to the end.

— Fleming Rutledge

The Scriptures are full of those who came to that edge. Job cursed the day of his birth. Elijah begged for death beneath a tree. Jonah, Jeremiah, and even Paul. And Jesus Himself — on the cross, in the dark — cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The cross is the point at which God says, ‘Me too.’

— John Stott

That cry was not weakness. It was participation. And when we find ourselves in places of despair, where death seems like the only relief, we are not stepping away from faith — we may be entering the very heart of it. Suicidal ideation is not a sign of faith lost, but of suffering felt — a form of communion with the Crucified. The dark side of the cross is not failure, but the place where love bears unbearable weight.

God is not found in the way we think strength looks. He is found in weakness, in vulnerability, in the crucified Christ.

— Jürgen Moltmann

This is a theology that doesn’t fix suffering but walks with it. Like Jesus on the road to Emmaus, God often meets us in our despair, unrecognised at first, walking beside us in our unspoken grief.

The mystics and Church Fathers knew this terrain well. St. John of the Cross wrote of the dark night of the soul — not as punishment, but as purification. A place where all false comforts are stripped away, and we are left with the raw presence of God.

Christ passed through every stage of our suffering so that He might be with us in every moment of ours.

— Gregory Nazianzus

The Church’s role is not to rush people out of that place, but to remain with them in it. Like the women at the foot of the cross, we are called to stand near — not to offer answers, but to bear witness to their pain. To hold space for lament. To walk with those who can no longer walk alone.

We should also guide them toward help—therapy, medication, community—as gifts of God’s grace, not sources of shame for struggling to cope. The cross is not meant to be carried alone but to be shared.

There is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still.

— Corrie ten Boom

What if, instead of seeing suicidal ideation as a departure from faith, we saw it as an invitation? Not an invitation to death but to meet Christ in death’s shadow, to be drawn into His suffering, and by grace to be drawn out again.

God is not absent in our despair, but present in it.

— Rowan Williams

This is not the spiritualising of pain, but is the sanctifying of it. Saying: You are not alone. You are not broken beyond repair. You are wanted and held. And the voice of Jesus calling you out of the darkness does not shame or accuse. It’s the voice of the Good Shepherd — calling you by name, reminding you: This moment and overwhelm is not the end of your story.

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The Cross of Approbation

Jesus has kindly invited me into — and patiently guided me through — many experiences of his cross:

• The cross that saves

• The cross that I share

• The cross that I choose

• The cross that heals and restores

Each has brought real transformation and real respite from the desire for death. And yet, another dimension has come into view.

The cross of approbation.

Approbation is when someone with authority openly says; This is good. This is accepted. This belongs

This is the cross where my Christian life — and even moments of suicidal ideation — are no longer something merely to endure or manage, but are drawn into a deeper and more radical truth: even here, I belong. Even now, I am wanted. The cross of approbation is where God says Yes to a human life - my life - at its lowest point

The resurrection does not correct the suffering of the cross; it confirms it. Easter is God’s approbation of a life fully lived in trust and self-giving. The Father’s Yes is spoken over the Son — not because the suffering was good, but because the Son was.

If God can say Yes to his broken, bleeding, abandoned son on a cross, then my life is not disqualified by pain, weakness, or despair. This does not glorify suffering, nor does it say pain is good.

Instead, it says: My being is good — even when I and if life feels unbearable.

God’s Yes, HIs blessing, comes before my healing, before my strength, before my usefulness, before my understanding. It is an ontological blessing — a blessing spoken over my being itself.

I do not earn this, yes. I do not prove my way into it. I do not lose it when I fall apart. I receive it before I do anything right, I believe correctly, or I am healed or whole.

Because: It is good that I am here.

“If an individual is to accept himself, someone must say to him: ‘It is good that you exist.’”

— Joseph Ratzinger

The abuse and abandonment of my parents carved a void within me — a hollow where the most basic affirmation of identity should have taken root. Instead of It is good that you exist, I absorbed something closer to: your existence is about me and my needs.

Suicidal ideation often lives in our voids. It is not dramatic or impulsive; it is the grim logic of a soul never told enough that it was good to be. As my life’s demands increased, childhood absence became more visible, and the void began to ask whether it might finally be filled by ending life.

But here, at the cross, there is an inversion by God.

God does not look past the void to find a more acceptable version of me. He looks directly into it — into the exact centre of that hollow place — and affirms even that.

Instead of disappearing, I am invited to enter the tomb with Christ. I bring the void — the wish not to be — and place it where it belongs: inside his death. Christ carries it all the way down and leaves it there. What rises is not an improved version of me, but a resurrected one.

This is an Easter exchange.

In Practice

If the desire to disappear returns, I will not argue with it or shame it. I will offer it to the Lord. I will name it as participation, not failure: “This, too, I give you to you.” I will choose to die with Christ, rather than without him. I will let the Father’s Yes to my existence be my truth.

It is good that I exist.

And it is so very good that you do too.

A year ago, I wrote about Jesus — who he was, and who he is — as my anchor in life and in the growing chaos around us. Over the past twelve months, the world has not calmed. If anything, it has become more unstable. Ideologies harden, propaganda multiplies, and the pace of opinion accelerates faster than wisdom can keep up. There is more noise, less depth, and a growing sense that the ground beneath us is shifting further.

And yet Jesus remains. Utterly. Radically. Different.

He is my place to stand when everything else feels uncertain. He is the measure by which life makes sense, the source of identity and meaning when borrowed certainties begin to fail. He is not an escape from the storm, but the liferaft within it — and the quiet assurance that the storm does not have the final word. He is my hope not only for this life, but for a life yet to come.

This Christmas, I find myself returning to Jesus — not sentimentally, but deliberately, and desperately. The King of creation comes into the world, unlike any other. Not as power and ideology expect. Not as culture demands. As the world seems to devolve, I find that he does not recede. He becomes clearer and nearer. More sharply opposed to what is distorting our culture and our times. More compelling, not less.

So I offer this updated reflection on the Christ of Christmas, as we step once more into the liturgy that receives him tomorrow, on Christmas Day.

—

Jesus was unlike any other leader,

past or present.

Not simply better. Not merely wiser. But wholly other.

Fully God.

Fully human.

He lived without disguise,

died without resistance,

and rose without revenge.

And yet it is not only this that arrests me now.

He did not rape, torture, or kill.

He did not abuse the vulnerable.

He did not lie to survive,

cheat to win,

or steal to secure himself.

He did not manipulate crowds,

coerce loyalty,

or terrorise enemies or take hostages.

He raised no armies.

He incited no violence.

He had no political sponsors

and no machinery of power behind him.

He did not court the rich

or flatter the influential.

He stored up no wealth

to insulate his life

or guarantee his future.

Instead, he took the lowest place.

He knelt.

He washed feet.

He touched the unclean.

He ate with outcasts.

He crossed boundaries others fortified—

religious, ethnic, social, and gendered.

He honoured women.

He welcomed children.

He demanded the protection

of their dignity

and their bodies.

How utterly different.

And this difference matters so much now as it did then.

For we live in an age where identity is forged through opposition,

where belonging is secured by enemies,

and meaning is sustained by grievance, offence and denial of reality.

An age where politics has learned to behave like a religion,

and ideologies demand devotion, loyalty, and purity tests.

Many now turn to movements

to tell them who they are,

who they must fear,

and who they must oppose.

Intensity is mistaken for truth.

Outrage becomes a moral currency,

as identity politics creates people as tools of cultural warfare.

But Jesus does not offer an identity

constructed against others.

He does not gather followers

by naming enemies to be defeated

or tribes to be defended.

He does not baptise our causes,

sanctify our anger,

or lend divine authority

to our resentments.

He will not be reduced to a symbol,

deployed as a slogan,

or conscripted into our campaigns.

He is life.

He is truth.

He is reality itself—

the ground beneath my feet

When every ideological platform begins to crack.

Those captivated by ideologies

promise clarity but deliver captivity.

They offer belonging

at the cost of complexity,

certainty

at the price of love.

Jesus refuses our categories—

left and right,

progressive and reactionary,

pure and impure.

He stands before us,

not as an idea to agree with,

but as a person to follow.

Not as an identity to perform,

or someone to baptise, and recognise our self creations

But as a life to receive.

To follow him is to be loosened

and delivered from every false certainty

and re-anchored in love.

To belong to him is to be freed

from the exhausting labour

of self-justification and self-generation.

This is why he unsettles us still.

He cannot be captured by our movements.

He will not be weaponised for our causes.

He remains stubbornly,

mercifully,

real.

And in a world addicted to ideology,

He offers something rarer,

and far more costly still:

a life,

a way,

a truth

that we can actually stand on.

This Jesus captivates me. This Jesus consumes me.

To see him as he is leaves me only one response:

my soul,

my life,

my all.

Every December, our house turns into a kind of liturgy.

My wife hands me the Christmas boxes from the loft with a reverence that borders on priestly. This is her annual re-ordination into the quiet vocation of making our home coruscate with the lights and glimmer of Christmas. The tree goes up first, of course, but the real ritual begins only when she unwraps the ornaments one by one, pausing over each to welcome them back—as if, in her hands, an invocation takes place and they are transubstantiated into the real presence of others.

Out come the decorations our children made when their hands were still tiny. Out come gifts from friends who are now beyond our reach—some separated by distance, others by passing into eternity—yet they return to us faithfully every year as we open those boxes. Here is the bauble from the saint who became a second mother to her; here is the crystal star from that special Christmastime holiday we still talk about.

She pours a glass of wine, puts on the latest predictably sentimental Hallmarkeque Christmas film, and lets the soft absurdity of its plot wash over her. And when I walk into the room, I often find her in tears—not of sorrow, but of reunion. For in this simple ritual, she is gathered back to so much: to our children as they were, to friendships that shaped us, to the parents whose love formed her. Our whole story—dating, marriage, decades of life—is now mapped onto a fake tree in our lounge.

And this year, with our grandson tottering into the season, she is already shaping memories not yet fully formed—new ornaments from his favourite cartoons, ready for his small hands to hang. Even he, without knowing it, is entering our remembering.

What astonishes me every year is how viscerally she remembers—and how, in remembering, she is re-membered: put back together, stitched across the years, gathered again to the people who have made her life what it is.

And then we are re-membered, as she sends us photos of her progress, culminating in the final revealing of the shimmering Christmas tree. We are gathered up again as a family, rejoined across space and time by the quiet procession of WhatsApp images—the tree appearing like a small annunciation on our screens—until the day we will sit together in our pyjamas beneath its Christmas morning light.

And in this small domestic liturgy, something profound is revealed—something about the very reality of life, creation itself, and our place within it.

The Ache of Impermanence

The most precious moments of our lives do not remain with us as possessions. They move away from us. They slip behind us into the past. We cannot hold them by force; we can only hold them by re-membering them.

That ache you feel at Christmas—the sudden tightness in the throat when a child’s decoration appears in your hand, the person not present that you miss, the loved one passed away and beyond arriving in person again—is not merely nostalgia. It is the human condition breaking through. All that is beautiful is temporal. All that forms us eventually becomes memory. And unless we choose to remember, it simply dissolves into time.

We feel this most sharply in December because Christmas is, in its essence, a season of re-membering:

• We remember childhood wonder,

• We remember those who are gone,

• We remember who we used to be,

• We remember the world as we once hoped it might become,

• We remember the sad and broken moments of our past and the present

And in remembering, we are confronted by a universal truth: everything must be remembered, or it is lost.

The philosopher and novelist David Eagleman famously said, “You die twice: once when your heart stops, and again the last time someone says your name.”

There is something hauntingly true here. Human life is fragile enough that even existence depends on memory.

And yet—this is not the whole story. For there is a God who remembers us.

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The Cosmic Revelation Hidden in Our Remembering

We think remembering is something the mind does. But remembering is something the soul does first. It is not just psychological; it is spiritual. It is one of the truest and most faithful acts a human being can perform.

All of creation is upheld by the God who remembers. The biblical Hebrew word for this—zakar—does not mean mere mental recall. It means to call into the present with faithfulness, to hold someone within covenantal love.

God remembers Noah, and the waters recede. God remembers Israel and brings them out of Egypt. God remembers Hannah, and life comes forth. God remembers His covenant and acts.

The whole story of Scripture hangs on the God who remembers.

And at the centre of it stands a dying thief whispering, “Jesus, remember me.” Christ remembers him into life: “Today you will be with me in paradise.”

A dying man held by the dying God—and carried into eternity.

Our remembering, then, is a participation in God’s remembering. It is sacramental. When we remember, we join the divine movement by which God gathers all things into Christ. This is why the Eucharist is commanded to us as remembrance: “Do this in remembrance of me.”

Not because Jesus fears being forgotten, but because in remembering Him, we are remembered by Him. We are re-membered—put back together, reintegrated, healed—through participation in His life, His story, His body.

And this is why Christian remembering is never mere recall. To remember is the opposite of being dismembered. It is the gathering of what has fallen apart, the stitching together of what time has torn, the rejoining of what sorrow has separated.

When we remember Christ, we are not looking back at a distant event; we are letting ourselves be re-membered—joined again to Him who died and rose to gather all things into Himself. In remembering Him, we are remembered by Him—and nothing in us is lost. In Him, we are never forgotten.

Christmas: The Season of Being Remembered

Advent is, at its core, a season of holy remembering. In Advent, we practise the sacred art of remembering so that we are not dismembered by the pace, loss, and fragmentation of our age. We remember Christ’s first coming to recognise Him now, and we re-member His future coming so that our lives might lean forward in expectation.

Advent is not nostalgia but preparation—an opening of the soul so that Christ may re-member us into His life once more.

We decorate our homes with memory because we are creatures who become ourselves through remembering. But at Christmas, something even more astonishing occurs: we discover that God remembers us.

He remembers us in our frailty. He remembers us in our sin. He remembers us when the world forgets us. He remembers us when grief strips our names from others’ lips. He remembers us when we scarcely remember ourselves.

Our worship is not sentimentality; it is participation in His remembering. Every carol, every candle, every prayer is a joining of our fragile memory to His eternal memory.

One day, when Christ returns, we will not simply be recalled—we will be re-membered in the fullest sense: made whole, gathered, restored, stitched back together with all the saints into the new creation. Nothing lost. Nothing wasted. No second death.

So this Christmas, see the Gospel shimmering between the branches and be remembered as you remember.