For many tired Christians, Lent has become another self-improvement project: give something up, try harder, and do better by Easter. Most of us know how that usually ends.

I have come to see Lent differently, as a return. It is forty days of coming back to Christ and receiving from him the life we keep trying to build for ourselves. That conviction became this book.

The book

As an Ignatian devotional, Re-membering: Returning to Christ, Receiving Your Life invites you to spend Lent in Jesus' company, following him through his life, death, and resurrection. Most days, you read a short passage from the Gospels and then step into the scene, as though you were standing there yourself. You notice what stirs in you, bring it to him in prayer, and find that, by the Spirit, he meets you there. Sundays are for going back: you return to whatever moved you most that week and stay with it a little longer.

I am grateful to Pete Greig, Margaret Silf, Amy Boucher Pye, Leonard Sweet and Andy Hickford, who have kindly commended it.

Equipping the Church, part of Kingsway, will publish it on Thursday 19 November.

Read the opening for free

If you would like a taste first, you can download the opening of the book below: the Introduction and the first five days of Lent, from Ash Wednesday to the First Sunday. Please feel free to share it.

Re Membering Free Sample

497KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Read the introduction and the first five days for free. Here are the first pages of the book: the Introduction and the first five days of Lent, from Ash Wednesday to the First Sunday. Download them, read them, and pass them on.

Download

Links for ordering

Amazon.co.uk pre-order

Equipping The Church UK pre-order

Amazon US: link coming soon!

Read it with me

From Ash Wednesday on 10 February to Easter Sunday on 28 March, I'll read the book alongside anyone who wants to join me. I will write a short note for Ash Wednesday and for each Sunday of Lent, to read with the book.

How to join

Just subscribe to SpEx. The Lent notes go to every subscriber, along with everything else I write here, so one free subscription gives you all of it. If you already subscribe, the notes will come to you.

Subscribe now

For churches and groups

I am also preparing resources for churches and small groups, and they will appear on this page. If you lead a church or group, or know someone who does, please share this soon, since most churches choose their Lent books before Christmas.

Grateful,

//Jason

We ran out of chairs.

This past summer of 2026, at Wildfires, a charismatic festival that gathers thousands of Christians in a field in West Sussex, we ran out of chairs.¹ Every morning and evening, the big top was filled with worship. One afternoon a smaller tent filled too. A few hundred people had come to my seminar on Ignatian spirituality, the way of prayer taught by the sixteenth-century Basque soldier who founded the Jesuits. Rows of chairs stretched out through the tent's open sides, every one taken, and another hundred or more people sat on the grass behind them, leaning in to listen.

The numbers surprised me, and I wondered whether all of this was new to them. So I asked. Who had heard of Ignatius? Who had heard of the Examen, his daily prayer of looking back over the day with God? Hands went up all over the tent. Many were already praying this way and had come to explore more.

That field was one of several signs.

When Kingsway, an evangelical publisher, invited me to write a book for Lent 2027, they asked for an Ignatian one because they were seeing growing interest in all things Ignatian. And at the London Centre for Spiritual Direction, which I have led for nearly two years, our longest-serving tutors tell me the same story. Twenty years ago, evangelicals were rarer on our courses. Now evangelicals of every stripe make up a major rump of our students.

Ten years ago, if you had told me that I would make the Spiritual Exercises, train as an Ignatian spiritual director and lead a centre that trains others, I would have laughed at you. I could not have imagined. Yet here I am, writing from inside the thing I am describing.

So why? Why would evangelicals, people like me who were in the past often taught to treat anything Jesuit with suspicion, now fill tents and training rooms to learn a Catholic way of prayer?

Here is my suggestion. Evangelicalism taught us to want a personal relationship with Jesus. Ignatius teaches a way to live one. When we step into Ignatian prayer, we find a house we recognise, and inside it the rooms we have been missing. And I have come to believe those rooms were built for every Christian.

Suspicions

In 1999 D. H. Williams, a Baptist minister teaching at a Jesuit university, wrote a book urging evangelicals to recover the early Church. He knew his readers. He subtitled it A Primer for Suspicious Protestants.^2. The suspicion was already thawing. From Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline in 1978 to John Mark Comer’s rule of life and 24-7 Prayer’s Lectio 365 today, each generation has opened another door into the older house of the church.³

Ignatius was a suspect too.

In 1526 and 1527 church authorities at Alcalá and then Salamanca jailed him and examined his teaching. They suspected him of belonging to the alumbrados (”the enlightened”), who claimed direct experience of God.⁴ The man we learned to see as the spearhead of the Counter-Reformation was first suspected by his own Church of trusting encounter with God too much.

We have been crossing this Ignatian threshold longer than most of us know. In the early 1970s, the evangelical writer Joyce Huggett and her husband agreed to speak at a student retreat, then discovered it would be held in a Catholic monastery. For evangelicals like them, she wrote, “the thought of darkening the doors of a monastery seemed as strange as planning a visit to another planet.” She later wrote that the visit would “change the direction of my spiritual pilgrimage”. Later, in a Jesuit journal, she explained why Ignatius “hooks Protestants”. She sorted her reasons under two headings, familiar territory and missing pieces of the jigsaw, and they still describe what evangelicals find today.⁵

Subscribe now

Ignatius as an Evangelical

Anyone who writes seriously about evangelicals soon finds themselves quoting David Bebbington, a historian at the University of Stirling. In 1989 he set out four marks that have become the most widely used account of what holds evangelicals together, across all their streams and three centuries of history.⁶ Conversionism: lives need to be changed. Activism: the gospel is expressed in effort. Biblicism: the Bible is held in high regard. Crucicentrism: the cross stands at the centre. Run Ignatius through that quadrilateral, and he correlates with all four.

Start with the Bible. The Exercises lead a person through the Gospels scene by scene, from the Annunciation to the Ascension, praying each one with the imagination. Huggett found them “so bible-based that they might accurately be re-named ‘Biblical Exercises’”. One friend told her, “I’d never experienced eight days when the focus was simply the Bible,” and came away saying, “I have re-discovered the Bible.”

Then the cross. The Exercises give a whole Week, one of their four movements, to the Passion. And in the first meditation of the first Week, Ignatius asks the person praying to imagine Christ before them on the cross, and to ask:

what I have done for Christ, what I am doing for Christ, what I ought to do for Christ. (Exx 53)⁷

That is conversion, and anyone who has heard an evangelistic appeal will recognise it. Christ has given himself for me: what will I give him? The call to answer him with a whole life has passed from voice to voice since he first said “Follow me” beside the Sea of Galilee, through Billy Graham’s crusades to festival tents like those at Wildfires, where people still give their lives to Jesus. Ignatius built the Exercises around that call, and they end in a prayer of surrender, the Suscipe:

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my intellect, and all my will. (Exx 234)

The first Jesuits went out from that prayer as missionaries and teachers to the ends of the known world. That is activism.

Most familiar of all is Jesus himself. Read the Jesuits, and you meet men and women who cannot stop talking about Christ. They pray with a sheer confidence that he is alive, risen and at work by the Spirit, and that anyone who comes to him will be met, called and formed into the person he made them to be.

So, Ignatius has us ask for the same grace again and again: to know Jesus from the inside, so that we love him more and follow him more closely (The Spiritual Exercises (SpEx) #104). Each time of prayer ends in conversation, made, he says, “as one friend speaks to another” (SpEx #54). This is the personal relationship with Jesus that we have always preached, given a shape we can practise every day.

The heart is familiar ground too. Over a few generations, evangelical worship moved from the head towards the heart, and Ignatius takes feeling seriously. Evangelicals whose traditions put the mind first and distrust feeling remain wary, and their worry is understandable: feelings can deceive, and imagination can project flights of fancy. Ignatius shared that worry too. He wrote his rules for discernment to test what moves in us by its fruit. Christians, who already believe that God speaks, find in those rules a tested way of “distinguishing between spirits” (1 Corinthians 12:10) and sifting of our emotions.

Forgiven but unformed

Few theologians ever taught the gospel as a bare transaction, but many of us heard it that way. Jesus took my punishment. I am forgiven. That is true, and I will never stop being grateful for it. But when one picture of the cross becomes the whole of salvation, forgiveness comes loose from transformation. We knew we were forgiven. We were less sure we were being changed. Salvation became about praying prayers to go to heaven when we die, and disconnected from formation in everyday life. This is the ‘bar code’ Christianity Dallas Willard alerted us to.

Willard introduced the concept of ‘bar-code Christianity’—also called a ‘Gospel of Sin Management‘—in his 1998 book, The Divine Conspiracy. Willard used the supermarket scanner analogy to critique a transactional view of faith that reduces salvation to a legal label applied to an unchanged life, comparing it to how a scanner reads the exterior barcode while ignoring the package's contents.

Meanwhile, before being scanned into heaven, something else was forming us in everyday life. James K. A. Smith, whom many evangelicals read, explains that we are what we love and that we learn to love through repeated practices he calls liturgies.⁹ The shopping centre has its liturgies. So does the smartphone. Every day, they shape and steer what we want. A Sunday sermon cannot undo a week of scrolling, because information cannot counter a liturgy. Only another liturgy can.

Ignatian prayer is that liturgy, and it is disarmingly simple. Each evening, the Ignatian Examen exercise and prayer walks us back through the day with God, noticing where he was at work. Each time of prayer begins by asking God for what I want. Ignatius trains us to find God in all things, in the office, the kitchen, our hope, dreams and even our sin, as much as in church. And the doing is the point. Prayer forms us the way friendship does, through time spent together.

The innermost room of Ignatian Spirituality is participation. (Yes, I am about to quote Calvin in a piece about a Jesuit. Bear with me.) Calvin opens the third book of his Institutes like this:

as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us.¹⁰

Union with Christ was never a Catholic import. Paul longed to “be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own”, and to know Christ, “the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (Philippians 3:9-10). Those two verses trace the whole shape of the Exercises. The first movement of the Ignatian Exercises is discovering a righteousness not my own, where we face our sin in God’s mercy. Knowing Christ is the second movement of the Exercises, walking with him through the Gospels. Sharing his sufferings is the third, at the cross. The power of his resurrection is the fourth.

So the Exercises refuse the shortcut from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. They walk us all the way into the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, until his story becomes the one we live in. We spend our lives trying to make ourselves, and the effort pulls us apart. In him we are put back together. I think of it as being re-membered.

The last of these rooms holds a companion. One person, a Spiritual Director, gives the Exercises to another; but Ignatius tells that guide to stand aside and let the Creator deal directly with the creature (SpEx 15), trusting Jesus to do his own work. Ignatian prayer is designed so the encounter depends on neither a platform nor a personality, but on direct encounter with the Lord. More broadly, Ignatian Spirituality flows from this core belief and practice.

Subscribe now

Built for Everyone: Why this matters now

This reaches well beyond evangelicalism. No generation of Christians has had its desires shaped so relentlessly by screens it carries everywhere, and every tradition has its own ways of leaving people forgiven but unformed. Perhaps evangelicals feel the gap first because no one has often spoken more warmly of a personal relationship with Jesus.

Ignatius built the Exercises to adapt to a person’s age, education, and ability (SpEx #18), and to be prayed in the middle of ordinary life by people too busy for a retreat (SpEx #19). They suit the chief executive and the young mother, the professor and the person who left school at sixteen. When Pray As You Go, the British Jesuits’ prayer app, became a hit with North American evangelicals, its director said her Jesuit colleagues were surprised.¹¹ Catholics, too, may rediscover their own inheritance because evangelicals came looking for it. Importantly, Ignatian spirituality and practice also place people within the Church of many kinds rather than against it, unlike some forms of post-church spirituality. It does not set people up against their current ecclesial locations and history.

The Rooms Ahead: What comes next

Over the coming weeks I will open these rooms one at a time.

The Magnificent Obsession. Why Jesuits cannot stop talking about Jesus, and what happens when you pray a Gospel scene as though you were standing in it.

A Relationship of the Heart. Can you trust what you feel in prayer? The sceptics get their say, and Ignatius offers a test, nearly five hundred years old, for telling God’s voice from your own.

Forgiven but Unformed. Why so many of us know we are forgiven yet feel unchanged, and what the shopping centre has to do with it.

Not Straight to Sunday. What Paul, Calvin and Luther knew about the cross that many of us hurried past.

You Become What You Pray. A fifteen-minute daily practice that can change what you want.

Contemplatives in Action. Who this is for, and the one thing you need before you begin.

Subscribe, and each piece will come straight to you.

Subscribe now

So I End Where I Began

I think I know what drew the people to a seminar at Wildfires, because it once drew me. I was about halfway through the Spiritual Exercises, staying in a hotel during a training week with a group of pastors. We stayed up late talking about church and ministry, over some average hotel wine, and I went to bed with four hours before my morning prayer in the Exercises. I never needed the alarm. I woke early, eager to open my Bible and pray, for the sheer delight of meeting Jesus. My hunger for Scripture, for Jesus, for the Father and the Spirit, caught light that week, and several years later it still burns.

Two disciples once walked the road to Emmaus beside a stranger who opened the Scriptures to them. When at last they recognised him, they said to each other:

Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us? (Luke 24:32)

That is what I think the people on the grass in the field at Wildfires were reaching for. Not a technique, but Jesus, close enough to speak to, and a road long enough to walk with him.

Where to begin. You need not wait for the next piece. Pray As You Go, the British Jesuits’ free app, offers a short guided prayer every day. Try the Examen tonight: fifteen minutes looking back over the day with God, noticing where you felt close to him and where you felt far away, and talking with him about both. Read Gerard Hughes’s God of Surprises or Joyce Huggett’s Listening to God.¹² And if you want to go deeper, find a spiritual director and ask about making the Exercises in daily life.

Next in Praying Like Jesuits: “The Magnificent Obsession”.

1. https://wildfiresfestival.com/wildfires/

2. D. H. Williams, Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999). Williams, a Baptist minister, then taught at Loyola University Chicago. See the review in First Things, https://firstthings.com/?p=13650

3. Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978); John Mark Comer, Practicing the Way (2024), and https://practicingtheway.org/about. Lectio 365 is the daily devotional app of 24-7 Prayer.

4. On his imprisonment at Alcalá and Salamanca, see “Ignatius Loyola”, New World Encyclopedia, https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Ignatius_Loyola; on the charge of sympathy with the alumbrados at Salamanca in 1527, see “Alumbrados”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alumbrados. Ignatius tells the story himself in his Reminiscences (the “Autobiography”).

5. Joyce Huggett, “Why Ignatian Spirituality Hooks Protestants”, The Way Supplement 68, https://www.theway.org.uk/back/s068Huggett.pdf. All quotations from Huggett and her friend come from this article.

6. David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), chapter 1. On the four marks as a standard definition, see “The Advent of Evangelicalism: Exploring Historical Continuities”, Christianity Today, June 2009, https://christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/juneweb-only/126-12.0.html.

7. Quotations from the Spiritual Exercises follow the public-domain translation by Elder Mullan, SJ (1914), cited by the standard paragraph numbers (SpEx).

8. George A. Aschenbrenner, SJ, Stretched for Greater Glory: What to Expect from the Spiritual Exercises (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2004).

9. James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009) and You Are What You Love(Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2016).

10. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.1.1, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960).

11. “Jesuit prayer app is a hit with Evangelicals”, The Tablet, December 2022, https://www.thetablet.co.uk/news/16268/jesuit-prayer-app-is-a-hit-with-evangelicals.

12. Pray As You Go is free: see Jesuits in Britain, “Jesuit prayer app Pray As You Go turns 20”, https://www.jesuit.org.uk/news/jesuit-prayer-app-pray-as-you-go-turns-20-serving-a-global-community-of-over-half-a-million. Gerard W. Hughes, God of Surprises (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985); Joyce Huggett, Listening to God (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986). ↩

Anyone who has spent time in church has met the list. God first, family second, and then work, or church, or yourself, depending on who was preaching. It turns up at men’s breakfasts and fits neatly on a coffee cup or T-shirt, which perhaps ought to have been our first warning. It is also, I believe, impossible to live, and it always has been.

To be fair, the list began life as a correction, made with good motives. An earlier generation of Christian leaders put God first and ministry a very close second, and their families paid for it. Spouses ran households alone. Children grew up with the sense that the church needed their parent more than they did. As the damage of this ranking manist the deck was reshuffled, and family moved up a place. Marriages benefited, for which we should be grateful. But the new arrangement kept the old one’s deep and fundamental flaw.

It still ranked, and ranking does not work.

Life does not come in boxes

The church seldom invents its anxieties; instead it borrows them, usually a decade after everyone else. The priority list belongs to the world of the colour-coded diary, and shares its touching faith in neat quadrilaterals. Life, though, does not come in such boxes. A sick child, an overflowing inbox, a deadline, and the morning’s prayers all arrive on the same Tuesday, in no particular order and often all at once. Nobody lives by a ranked list. We live the day at hand as it comes.

And what exactly do we mean when we say God comes first? A strong feeling that he is first place? Or do we mean actions that prove it: an early quiet time? Our tithe? Turning up on Sunday? At best, a ranking is a rough way of sharing out our time, money and energy. At worst, it is a rather good way to kid ourselves and gives us an alibi for self-deception. We tell ourselves our work is for God and keep working too hard because we are frightened, insecure, or carrying wounds we would rather not look at. We say God comes first, and then use God to get what we want: success, security, children who turn out well. Augustine spotted this trick sixteen centuries ago: we were made to enjoy God and use things rightly, but we keep getting it backwards.

So what really comes first for us? Something always does, and more often than we care to admit it is ourselves. Underneath, at the bottom of who we are, are our drives for life. The Trappist monk Thomas Keating called these drives our “emotional programs for happiness”: security and survival, affection and esteem, power and control. We lay them down in early childhood, around needs we could not meet for ourselves, and they keep running long after we learn to say the right things in church. Whatever we recite on a Sunday, these needs tend to run from Monday onwards.

Which brings me to my point. Our lives are already perfectly ordered.

Every life is arranged, with a regularity that would put most church programmes to shame, around what we most want and what we most fear. Augustine put it in four Latin words, pondus meum amor meus: my love is my weight. We fall towards what we love as surely as a stone falls to the ground.

Subscribe now

Seek first: how Jesus orders a life

This, I think, is why Jesus speaks as he does in the Sermon on the Mount. He starts by making a diagnosis: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21). Our hearts have already followed our treasure. Then he names what lies underneath this, the fretful and stressful business of what we shall eat and drink and wear, which is Keating’s security programme in a first-century dress. Only then does the invitation come: “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33). Jesus does not demote food and clothing. He gives them back to us as gifts, not as things we must clutch to stay alive.

Someone will point out that Jesus named a first and a second commandment. But look at how it happens. A scribe asks him, “Which is the first commandment of all?” (Mark 12:28). He wants a ranking. Jesus answers with love of God and love of neighbour, and then adds, “There is none other commandment greater than these.” These, plural: the two cannot be prised apart. Love of God, of neighbour and of self turns out to be one movement of the heart.

Love, for love, by love: what Ignatius offers

Ignatius of Loyola understood this better than most. His Spiritual Exercises, a handbook for a month of guided prayer, open with what he calls the Principle and Foundation. Put crudely, it says we are made in love, by love and for love. His own words are rather plainer:

Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul … desiring and choosing only what is most conducive for us to the end for which we are created.

What Ignatius does not give us is a list. Family, work, church, health and reputation all sit together among “the other things on the face of the earth”. Each is to be used insofar as it helps us toward love, and let go of insofar as it gets in the way. He calls the freedom to do this indifference, a word that sounds faintly emotionally repressed to modern ears. He actually meant something warm: not being held hostage by any one attachment, so that we are free to want what love asks of us. We might use the more modern word, differentiated, what Ignatius meant.

The Foundation’s first gift, I think, is permission to be honest. In prayer, before a God who looks on us with love, we can name our desires, our fears and our attachments without dressing them up. Ask yourself what comes first, and you will probably get a pious answer. Ask what you are most afraid of losing, and you are more likely to get a true and honest one.

And the Exercises begin with being loved, long before they ask anything of us. The more we discover how much God loves us, the freer we become to give ourselves back, and the order we had hoped the list would supply begins to grow from that centre instead. Scatter iron filings on a sheet of paper and no amount of tidying will make a pattern. Slide a magnet underneath, and they arrange themselves.

Back to Tuesday

What does this look like on an ordinary Tuesday in our week? Not, I think, a newly ranked schedule.

Take the school sports event, and the church prayer meeting that clashes with it, as it always seems to. A rule settles that in a second. Love may go one way this year and the other way next, and the child, who is nobody’s fool, will know whether a parent came because the list said so or because they wanted to be there. And when, on a family evening, a hand creeps towards a smartphone, love asks what anxiety and desire is doing the reaching.

So at the end of the day, rather than asking whether we kept our ranked priorities, we might borrow a better question from the Examen, the short evening review that Ignatius taught: where did love move me today, and where did fear?

George Herbert, the deeply Anglican of poets, ends his poem Love (III) with a guest who has run out of excuses for refusing God’s hospitality. Love will not take no for an answer, and the poem ends: “So I did sit and eat.”

That seems to me where a rightly ordered life begins. Not with a list, but at a table. We were never meant to rank our lives. We were meant to be loved into order.

When I was young, a promise was held out to me as it was to so many: if you want to, you can be anything you want to be. That was the dream. I reached for it with both hands. I had to.

I grew up in a house of violence and abuse, chronic and sustained, and my parents were its source. Their lives were coming apart, and they tore ours apart with them, in ways a child could neither understand nor stop. So I did what many children in that place do. I defined myself against them. Whatever they were, I would not be.

There were many doors for escape that opened as the years went by. I don’t fully know why I took the ones I did, only that they fitted me, and they still do. Books were the first. They offered an immediate escape from the world I was trapped in, into places I would never reach and lives I longed to live: poems and stories of rugged individuals who made their own way in the world and found freedom and purpose on the far side of their circumstances. Somewhere in those years I heard William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus.”1 It reached through my circumstances and spoke to me as if I had written it myself:

I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

I believed it. I needed to. For a boy in that house, self-creation was not pretentiousness. It was a lifeboat.

Then, at seventeen, a different offer arrived. It is the oldest offer Christianity makes, and in one form or another it stands near the start of the great Christian catechisms. The Westminster Shorter Catechism says that our chief end is “to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.”2 The Catholic catechism puts it as a question and answer:3

Why did God make you?
God made me to know him, to love him and to serve him in this world, and to be happy with him for ever in heaven.

To learn that God is God and we are not, and to order our lives around that truth. And for that truth to be the most freeing, life giving disposition for our lives.

Subscribe now

Scandal: The oldest offence of Christianity

Many people assume the scandal of Christianity is to say that you will not go to heaven unless you pray the right prayer. I have come to believe the real scandal is very different and for many much harder to hear.

You are not free to be whoever you want to be.

That is the dream I was raised on, turned upside down, and it is what the catechism answer means. In one sentence the catechism tells us that we did not make ourselves and were not made for ourselves. This has never gone down well. In the Garden of Eden the serpent offered its exact opposite: “You will be like God.”4 We have been reaching for that demonic promise ever since.

But the same answer holds an offer the self-made dream never could. The only real freedom is found in discovering who we are in Christ, and no one in this life has fully plumbed the depths of who they are in him.

The scandal of Christ is old. What may have changed is the intensity of our reaction to it.

Try hearing it now. You are not free to be whoever you want to be. God is God and you are not. You were made by God and for God, to know him, love him and serve him. That may make us uncomfortable now in a way it perhaps did not in the past. We might find it hard to imagine sharing it with friends and family as good news, because we can already hear how it would land with them.

Serve? Who decided that? My life is mine to shape: my choices, my identity, my story. The sentences of the cathechisms do not sound like an offer. They sounds like a hostile takeover, as if someone larger had walked into the house you built and started giving orders.

Here is a diagnostic for us. Notice your own reaction, and the reactions of the people you know to this catechetical understanding. For all of us, the response to that sentence tells us more about ourselves than it does about God. Whatever offends us is the diagnosis.

Self-made: The fortress we build

For many of us, the making of ourselves has been vital. It was for me, when I was trying to escape my childhood. Many people have been crushed by identities pressed on them from outside: by families that could not let a child grow, by class, by institutions, and by churches that used God’s name to control. The modern insistence on authenticity is often a protest against real harm, and those of us in the Church should be the first to confess how often we caused it.

But somewhere along the way the protest became a programme. Freedom from false identities turned into an obligation to manufacture a true one. Look within, find your desires/passion/bliss, re-name yourself, and build a life that expresses what you find. There is a word for this: the autopoietic self, the self that makes itself.

The trouble is that a self-made self has to be defended. If I built it, I must also guard it, because no one else will vouch for it and underwrite it. So the self-made life becomes a fortified, its walls raised in opposition and kept standing by vigilance. It needs to be seen, affirmed and followed to feel real. Our hunger for validation is less a moral failure than the pertual watch we must keep on battlement walls of our identities. And the watching over ourselves never ever ends.

I can see those walls all around me in the lives of others. Almost no one builds them out of wickedness. We build them because we are afraid. I see them in the wider Church, which has learnt to build platforms and brands like everyone else.

And yes, I see them in myself.

I would love to tell you that I said yes to God at seventeen and the self building stopped. It didn’t. I received the offer declared in the catechism and then spent many years trying to secure myself within that through control, anxiety and vigilance. I had surrendered to God, but I kept the habits of a boy who had learned that safety was something you built yourself and defended at any cost.

I was like an adopted child. A child who comes into a new home after great loss rarely feels at home straight away. The house may be safe, but the body, mind and spirit has not yet been told. So it was with me. I stayed hypervigilant, always trying to be useful, trying to prove my worth, believing that if I cared enough for others, I would be safe in this new wonderful place.

God was patient with me, and kind, and worked alongside me the whole time. But I was still living in the fortress from my childhood, and it took me years to surrender, to heal and to be free: to let go of the self I had built to keep me safe, and receive the self God had made.

Henley’s Invictus poem told the truth about my circumstances. But he did not tell the truth about me. I was not the master of my fate, and every time I tried to be, I did myself more harm. The safe self I was building kept me trapped. It stayed centred on my parents, on the past, and on everything my childhood had lacked. A self defined against them still had them at its centre. And while I stood guard, I could not open the door to the one thing I most needed: to discover who I had always been meant to be in Christ. Safe and at peace.

I suspect I am not alone. Plenty of us have said yes to God and kept the keys to our fortresses of self-creation.

Ignatius opens his Spiritual Exercises with what he calls the Principle and Foundation, the ground on which the whole of the Spiritual Exercises stand: “Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.”5 In 1985, Jacqueline Bergan and Marie Schwan turned this into a prayer that begins:6

Lord my God, when your love spilled over into creation,
You thought of me.
I am from Love, of Love, for Love.

Those three prepositions hold the whole Christian account of what a person is. From Love: I did not begin myself. Of Love: what I am made of was given, not chosen. For Love: my telos, the end I was made for, lies beyond me. Self-creation reverses each one, such that I come from my own choosing, I am made of my own choices, and I live for my own fulfilment.

God-made becomes self-made.

So when the catechism sounds like a threat, it is because we can only imagine God as a rival, a bigger self competing for the same ground, so that every inch he claims is an inch we lose. Henley names this god exactly. He thanks “whatever gods may be” in passing, then defies them. He even borrows Jesus’s own words, “strait is the gate,”7 only to declare that they do not matter. We picture a rival God because we have taken his place, and the gods compete.

But the Creator is not one more power jostling for space in the world.8 A plant does not compete with the sun. The more light it receives, the more fully it becomes a plant.

I am not saying that people who struggle with who they are are simply proud, or that receiving your identity means accepting whatever others impose upon you. Inhabiting and receiving the Principle and Foundation frees us for faith and life in Christ, and from every other claim on our lives, because it answers to God alone.

Subscribe now

Recapitulation: The Son in the far country

And here the scandal becomes the most beautiful thing I know. The catechism’s offer is not a takeover after all. We are not being controlled or used. We are being invited into a relationship with a Person. Self-creation makes us captive to ourselves, and it forces every relationship to bend to the will of the self we have made. Losing ourselves in God does the opposite. It opens us to him, to others, and at last to who we really are.

The Nicene Creed confesses the Son as “God from God, Light from Light.” He has nothing he has not received. He is from the Father, of the Father and for the Father, so “from Love, of Love, for Love” describes Christ before it describes any of us. Irenaeus of Lyons said that Christ recapitulated humanity, summing up our story again in himself.9 Where Adam grasped at equality with God, Christ did not count it something to be grasped.10 He is the one human being who has fully known, loved and served the Father, the catechism’s answer made flesh.

It cost him everything. In Gethsemane the Son, who had received all that he was from the Father, prayed with sweat falling like drops of blood, “not my will, but yours, be done.”11 The next day he went further into the far country than any of us will ever go, to the place where he cried out that God had forsaken him.12 There is no abandonment he has not entered. The far country is where we went to find ourselves, and it is where we lost ourselves. And the moment we realise where we are, lost in our self-creations, we find he is already there, waiting for us.

Some years ago, while I was praying the Spiritual Exercises over many months, I sat one morning in the early hours in the chair in the corner of my study where I usually prayed. I was meditating on the parable of the prodigal son, and for the first time I felt, deep down inside who I am, that I was safe. At home. Held. Owned by the Father’s love.

In that prayer time, I turned the story over in my heart and mind. And it was as if the Father said to me:

You are the son of a prodigal son. Your father abandoned you in a far-off land. I send my Son to find and rescue you. It just took you a while to find your way home.

Christ had walked all the way into the far country my father left me in, and at seventeen he found me there. Then Jesus began to bring me home. But the road was long, and I walked it still braced for danger. I had never been safe, so I tried to make myself safe. I worked too hard. I held on too tightly. I carried the anxiety and depression that come from trying to control everything. He walked every mile of it beside me. Picked me up when I fell down. Rescued me again and again, when I was in danger. It took me a long time to arrive home to the Father’s house, to the Father himself, and to the self he wanted to give me that I could never make.

So I wonder what self you are carrying. What walls have you raised, and what are they keeping out? Think of the people you love, working so hard to define themselves, assert themselves and hold it all together, and how fragile it all is. Think of what it is costing all of us, as a society that has asked every person to be their own maker and their own guarantor.

Perhaps that is why this old, offensive sentence matters more now than it ever has:

God made me to know him, to love him and to serve him.

Earlier I said we might find it hard to imagine sharing it with friends and family as good news. But it is good news, though never a comfortable one. To be from Love, of Love, for Love is not a sentiment to admire. It asks for everything. Ignatius begins the Exercises with the Principle and Foundation, and ends them with a prayer that erupts in response to accepting an identity received from God.13

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will.

That is the scandal: the gates of our self-made fortress opened, the defences laid down, the keys handed over, and our whole selves abandoned to Jesus. And that is its beauty, because the One we abandon ourselves to thought of us before we were, and has already come all the way into our far country to bring us home. The invitation is to hear it, to receive it, and to share it.

So I end where I began, with a boy, a dream and a poem. Henley was right about the night. He was wrong about the captain. I am not the master of my fate or the captain of my soul, and I no longer need to be. I was never free to be whoever I wanted to be. But I am free to be a son of the Father.

I am from Love, of Love, for Love, and I have come home.

A monk named Father Boniface had been teaching my friend Kristie about spiritual direction. Unable to keep it to herself, she told me, you need to hear what Father Boniface said.

Kristie asked him whether we have guardian angels. If we do, he replied, and their role is to protect us, they are doing a terrible job.

I laughed out loud.

He is right. If the angel’s job description is to keep you breathing, the results are pretty poor. People die all the time. Christians die. Good people die, at the wrong age, in the wrong way, with their prayers still going up to heaven. Angels have been relegated to tinsel on a tree, a silhouette on a card, a soft-focus figure at the shoulder of a sleeping child. Or as an emergency service, on call for the near miss on the motorway and irrelevant to everything else. We shrank them down until they fit in our hands as decorations, or in our pockets as lucky talismans.

Then Father Boniface said something stunning.

The angel is not guarding your life. The angel is guarding the story of your life in Christ.

I have not stopped thinking about this since Kristie told me.

Scripture has been saying these same things the whole time, and it says them plainly for us to perceive.

Gabriel stands at the threshold of the Incarnation and speaks God’s future into the ear of a young woman. Then he waits. He waits for her yes, because the story cannot continue without her consent. Angels come to Jesus in the wilderness when his fasting is over, and to the garden when his sweat falls like blood, and they do not lift a finger to stop what is coming next. Instead, they strengthen him to go through it. And on the third morning two of them sit in an emptied tomb and ask the women, why do you seek the living among the dead?

Here an angel corrects the story the women are telling about their own lives. They have the facts right but the story wrong, and heaven has come to tell them so.

The real role of an Angel. Announce, atend/escort and interpret. None of that is a Christmas decoration, or charm against harm. All of it, however, is participation in a particular story.

My Guardian Angels

Acts 12 is a strange story, and a key to understanding the nature of angels.

Peter is in prison, and the church is up all night praying. An angel comes, wakes him, strikes the chains off his wrists, and walks him out through doors that open on their own. Peter arrives at the house where they are praying and knocks. Rhoda knows his voice. She is so overjoyed that she forgets to open the door and leaves him standing in the street. The others inside tell her she is out of her mind.

It must be his angel.

They can imagine an angel standing so close to Peter that you might mistake the angel for the man.

Earlier in the same chapter, James, the brother of John, has been killed by the sword.

The angel opens Peter’s prison. The angel does not open James’s. Luke sets these two a few verses apart and offers us no explanation. Scripture refuses to turn angelic protection into a guarantee of survival. Whatever the angel is guarding, it is not the body.

I was fifty, and some months into praying the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, when I found myself invited by the Lord to remember the day I became a Christian.

October 5th, 1986. I had gone to church that morning to keep my mother company. My father had abandoned us. She was distraught and mostly in bed. One small brother was asleep beside her. I did not know where my other brother was. Home was dark, the future was terrifying, and I had no way of saying so to anyone.

In that Sunday service, the first I had ever been to, I watched people sing as though the words were true. Tears, smiles, hands lifted. As if the Jesus they sang about was there with them. I had no language for any of it. I only knew I wanted more. When I heard about their evening service, I decided to go back.

At dusk I walked the mile and a half to the school hall. I had walked that road hundreds of times on the way to my own school further along. Cracked paving slabs, kerbs, hedges, street lights coming on as the sun set.

In that prayer, the Lord seemed to ask, what do you remember?

I told him. I remembered being lonely and alone. The house behind me was filled with a darkness I carried along the road, as if it billowed around me and was what made the sky darken.

Then the view widened. Not a different memory. The same one, seen now from further back and above.

The road was lined with angels. They stood the length of it, a phalanx on both sides, turned towards me, the way people in a movie line a route for someone coming home from a long way off. They were guarding one frightened, abandoned adolescent all the way to the door of a school hall, where Jesus was waiting to meet him.

I received this insight as a grace, not as an aerial photograph of heaven. Ignatius is careful here, and so am I. He taught people to pray with their imagination, but he warned them not to mistake the doorway for the room. The vivid picture is not the point. Chasing a feeling makes faith fragile, because the pictures always fade. What matters is what is left the next morning.

What grew in me was gratitude. I was not the hero of a private epic. I was a boy being gathered into a story bigger than my abandonment and despair. My loneliness, trauma and suffering had been real, but they had never been the whole truth.

That is the shape of the Gospel. It is a story we are put inside. Creation, Incarnation, Cross, Resurrection, Re-Creation. We are re-membered, joined into Christ. We practise dying and rising with him in the small Paschal mysteries of an ordinary week. Surrendering. Repenting. Forgiving. Loving when it costs. Beginning again on a Tuesday. At the table and altar he hands himself over under bread and wine, and our lives are taken up into his body.

He comes into our story. Our story is gathered into his. That night when my family lay dismembered, torn asunder, Jesus gathered me into his own life. I was re-membered into him. And the next morning I was his, and he was mine.

Perhaps that is what the angel is guarding. Not our escape from death, but our participation in His.

Which leaves a question.

What story am I telling with my life, and what am I asking God to come and bless?

Because of life's pressures, most of us are running a small one. Get through the week. Keep the plates spinning. We ask God to bless this, and he is so kind to us, and he does. But a larger story is already underway. The whole of heaven and earth leans towards it. This story wants more than our recognition or even admiration. It wants us inside it, to take part.

Say yes to that story, and you will spend the rest of your life finding out what has been going on behind you and around you.

The road was never empty.

Sometimes an article finds the conversation it was written to make possible.

After a short summer pause, SpEx begins again with one of those conversations.

In early June, I published How ‘Inclusive’ Church Excludes. It has since become, by a considerable margin, the most-read, most-shared and most-commented-on piece I have published here.

One of the most unexpected responses came from Dennis Sanders, host of Church and Main. Dennis is an openly gay minister and lead pastor of First Christian Church of St Paul, an open and affirming congregation within the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

His podcast explores the intersection of religion and public life, with particular attention to mainline Protestantism. For readers outside the United States, “mainline” refers to the historic American Protestant denominations—such as Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians and the Disciples of Christ—which once occupied the centre of American Protestant life. Unlike the evangelical world, many are now more progressive and wrestling with major questions about identity, mission, and their future.

Given the title of my article, and the different places from which Dennis and I approach some questions of inclusion, I wondered what kind of conversation awaited me.

I need not have worried.

Dennis had read the article with real charity. He was gentle, kind, thoughtful and deeply hospitable. He did not reach for the thought-terminating instruction to “just be kind and inclusive”, or treat me as a problem to be defeated. Instead, he modelled precisely what I had hoped the article might make possible: a patient conversation willing to remain with the deeper questions.

Inclusion into what?

We discovered that we shared more concerns than either of us might have expected. The Church does not include people into “inclusion”. It welcomes us into Christ: into relationship with Jesus, into his body and into the life he gives. Jesus cannot simply be recruited to endorse demands and commitments decided elsewhere.

And yes, that does not settle every disagreement. But it does give Christians somewhere genuinely Christian from which to start and collaborate constructively.

It was a privilege and a delight to talk with Dennis. I found our conversation generous and illuminating, and I hope you will listen.

Listen to When Inclusive Church Excludes on Church and Main

You can also read—or revisit—the article that began the conversation:

Read How ‘Inclusive’ Church Excludes

New articles return next week, beginning with a rather different question:

Do we have guardian angels? And, if we do, what exactly do they do for us and why?

Thank you for reading, and for being here.

P.S. The photo Dennis found to use of me isn’t exactly my favourite—it’s from my Father Christmas phase. 🎅

Before SpEx goes quiet for a few weeks, something a little different.

I was recently invited onto the ‘For the Journey’ podcast with Rev. Bill Haley for a conversation about faith, formation, leadership, the Church, and some of the experiences and questions that have shaped my own journey through all of those things.

Much of what we talked about sits behind what I’m trying to explore through SpEx.

Writing forces me to slow down, sharpen an idea and work out what I actually think. Conversation does something different. It allows the connections between ideas, experience, faith and practice to emerge in ways they sometimes don’t on the page.

So, instead of another essay/article this week, I thought I’d share the conversation.

Listen here:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1919912/episodes/19547053

And with that, I’m taking a summer break.

SpEx will be quiet for the rest of August while I take some holiday.

I’ll be back at the beginning of September with more questions, conversations and essays exploring faith, formation, leadership, neuroscience, culture and the strange business of becoming human in Christ, all through the lens of all things Ignatian.

Thank you for reading SpEx, and especially to those of you who have replied, asked questions, shared things, and joined the conversation.

See you in September.

Jason

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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?

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.”

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.