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

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

The problem is one of theological maladaptation.

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

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

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Two Visions

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

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

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

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

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

What Practices Are Actually For

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

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

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

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

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

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Charisms: And how to form a rule of life

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

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

Not by starting with habits.

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

Discover Your Charism

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

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

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

Notice Your Vocational Rhythm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am full of Easter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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If I Had Been There

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

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

I would have cried out as they scourged you,

the cry would have risen from within you and me together

your flesh opened, and something in mine

splitting with it too.

Your body, my salvation.

not distant, but breaking open around me.

Each lash gathers me.

my sin, my fracture, my hidden violences.

drawn into your torn body

as though you would not suffer

without taking me into it.

I would have knelt when they crowned you,

and felt the thorns find me too.

piercing through every false self

I have worn.

Your blood, not spilled away,

but falling toward me.

on me.

inibriating me.

washing what I cannot cleanse.

I would have begged to carry your cross,

and found I was already within its weight.

your Passion not beside me

but enclosing me.

Within your wounds.

I would not stand outside.

I would enter.

Held there.

Hidden there.

Kept there.

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

I would come close.

not brave, but compelled.

and fall at your feet,

your blood marking me,

your suffering sheltering me.

Your Passion, my strength.

not something I endure for you,

but something you endure

to hold me.

And when the spear opened your side,

I would not move toward it.

I would be drawn in.

Blood and water pouring,

and I

carried into that opening.

where mercy flows

without measure.

Baptised not in symbol,

but in the life that cannot be taken.

O good Jesus,

hear me.

even here.

Because even here,

I would not know how to remain

unless you kept me.

I would take you down from the cross,

but my hands should tremble.

knowing the body I hold

is the body that holds me.

Guard me within your wounds.

not as refuge from the world,

but as the place where I am remade.

I would wash you with my tears,

and find they are gathered into yours.

my grief taken up

into your offering.

I would wrap you for burial

slowly, reluctantly.

because leaving you

would feel like losing

everything.

And in the tomb,

I would not simply stay.

I would be enclosed.

Within your death.

hidden with you.

waiting without knowing how to wait.

Do not permit me

to be separated from you.

even here,

especially here.

The silence.

The sealed stone.

The cooling body.

Enemies pressing in.

doubt, fear, ending.

and I with no strength to resist them.

Call me.

from within this darkness.

Call me

not away from you,

but deeper into you.

And then.

the stone moves.

Not gently,

but as rupture of creation.

And you.

alive.

not returned, but risen.

From the hour of my death.

deliver me.

because something in me has died here,

and something else

is being born.

And I.

undone, but gathered.

Not outside your life,

but drawn into it.

into the place where all things

are being remade.

And I come.

because I must. to your feet,

to kiss, to worship.

not reaching toward you,

but waking to the truth

that you have taken me

into yourself,

and will not allow me to go.

—

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

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

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

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

And you find yourself wondering instinctively:

What planet are they on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ontological Questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ontological Meltdown

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ontological Harm

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

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

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

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

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Ontological Deconstruction

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

So why bother?

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

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

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

Christian Deconstruction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Given not Created

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Allah is the greatest.

I testify that there is no god but Allah.

I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.

Come to prayer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But others sense something more.

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

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

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

It is about how we ourselves understand the sacred.

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

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

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

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

And there is another sacredness worth remembering.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps the real invitation is simply this:

• to sit with what we feel,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

UK Cathedrals Hosting Iftars

The most frequent and notable hosts include:

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

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

Has everyone become radicalised?

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

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

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

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

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

Disagreement has been replaced with competing moral certainties.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our identity crisis is really a crisis about reality.

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

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

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The Deeper Crisis of Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• They offer moral certainty.

• They divide the world into heroes and villains.

• They promise redemption through struggle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Faith promised success.

• Faith promised a breakthrough.

• Faith promised fulfilment.

• Faith promised therapeutic well-being.

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

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

• Political movements.

• Identity politics.

• Gender issues.

• Climate change.

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

But their centre has fundamentally shifted.

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

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

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

Reality is grounded ultimately in Christ.

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

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

What spirit is shaping the way we see the world?

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

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

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

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

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

Something painful is happening in many friendships.

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

You may have felt it too.

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

The same headlines. The same events.

Yet we seem to inhabit completely different realities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It may be a crisis about reality itself.

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

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

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

A New Series: When Reality Fractures

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

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

• Why identity has become the central battleground of our age

• Why ideological movements increasingly function like substitute religions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have All Your Friends Become Radicalised?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Grateful for the gift, troubled by the architecture

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

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

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

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

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

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

Metaphysics by Another Name

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is ontology.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Divine Forgery: The Memory Problem

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

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

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

1. The “Software and Hardware” Quote

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

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

2. On the “Music” of our Actions

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

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

3. The “Tune” of Identity

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

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

What do his claims, phrases and metaphors actually mean?

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

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

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

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

Is that me? Or is it a divine copy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is to survive into eternity with God.

The Promise of Persistence, Not Preservation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Creeds: You Are Not Your Story

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

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

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

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

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

What is the Son in relation to the Father?

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

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

When the Nicene Creed says:

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

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

When it says:

“of one substance with the Father…”

It is protecting ontology, so when it says:

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

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

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

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

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

Identity Crisis and Narrative

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

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

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

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

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

That is a burden narrative cannot sustain.

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

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

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

My question is not about his intention.

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

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

But here is where recovery risks becoming restriction.

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

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

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

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

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

This is where John Henry Newman becomes indispensable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hylomorphic Dualism: A Positive Alternative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this hylomorphic account does three key things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are rarely, it seems, sinners.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trauma Identity Trap

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

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

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

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

The Trauma Identity Trap

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

This awareness does matter.

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

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

A culture obsessed with healing often struggles to become well.

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

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

Christ, the True Victim

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

And what does he do with this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Naming Sin Heals

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

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

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

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

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

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Sin and Freedom: The Ignatian Insight

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

Success. Approval. Security. Comfort. Control.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anamnesis: Remembering Properly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He is the Pied Piper to the human heart.”

— The Reed of God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drifting and Shifting

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

The Arc of Desire

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

The Drift into Stagnation

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

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

The Subtle Shift

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

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

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

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

Love as the Engine of Formation

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

The Architecture of Affection

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

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

You are what you love - Augustine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Into my beloved grandson.

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

Why We Resist — Even When We Want God

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

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

• a restlessness that makes it hard to remain

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Love Is the Risk We Avoid

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

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

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

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

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

But love never works like that. Ever.

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

So instead, we often choose to keep love manageable.

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

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

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

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

That is why true love always demands something.

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

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

“Love so amazing, so divine,

Demands my soul, my life, my all.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anxiety and depression became the atmosphere I lived in — subtle at times, suffocating at others. My prayers thinned into silence. My hope flickered dangerously close to extinction. And in that desolation, death didn’t feel like rebellion. It felt like rest. Like sabbath. Like the only open door I might choose.

“I have often been so depressed that I could not even pray. I wanted to die.”

— Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love

Beneath all of it — even beneath the longing for death as escape — was something deeper: a cry for deliverance. A desperate yearning to be rescued from the chaos planted in me when I was still a child. To be met by Someone who could see the whole story of my life and say, It will all be okay. What I mistook for a desire to end was, at its core, a longing to know my end — and to be carried there, not alone, but with love and mercy.

The psalmist says, “If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.” And I did. Depression and anxiety led me into the shadowlands — the space between what is and what I wished was. A place where sorrow hangs heavy, and rescue and resolution feel far away. In those shadowlands, suicidal ideation became a kind of siren song — promising relief, an end to the ache, a way out when nothing else seemed possible.

“The mind can descend far lower than the body, for there are bottomless pits.”

— Charles Spurgeon

I have known those depths — the kind that swallow words, faith, and hope. My life felt like it was always winter: frozen in grief, heavy with silence, untouched by a spring that never came. And yet, even there, I can now see that another song was already sounding.

As a child, caught in the chaos of abuse and absence, I was drawn to Aslan — to the hope of a Lion who rescues, who speaks peace into fear, who ends the long winter. I see now that my moments of longing to die were really a longing to be delivered. What I needed was not escape, but rescue. And it is Aslan’s voice — steady, wild, and full of kindness — that has called me out of the shadowlands and back into life.

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”

— C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

And maybe that is what faith is — not the absence of sorrow, nor even the absence of the desire for death itself.

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You Are Not Alone

As a pastor for over twenty-five years, I spent thousands of hours listening to people share their trials — and the toll those experiences had taken on their hearts, minds, and souls. Over time, I began to notice a quiet refrain, spoken in different ways but echoing the same pain. Often it came with hesitation, preceded by the confession that they had never told anyone this before. Then the words would follow:

“I just want to go to sleep and never wake up.”

“I wish I had never been born.”

“I’ve thought about ending it all.”

“No one would miss me if I were gone.”

“My family would be better off without me.”

“I’ve been thinking of ways to end my life.”

These were not rare admissions — they were heartbreakingly common.

Suicidal thoughts often arise from a desire to escape pain, not necessarily from a desire to die. They are frequently hidden; most people who struggle with them do not share them, even with close friends or family. One of the simplest ways I learned to bring relief was by letting people know they were not alone — and that they were in good company, mine included.

Suicidal thoughts are far more common than we tend to admit. They are not limited to those with visibly tragic lives. Even people of deep faith, strength, and apparent stability can find themselves in that dark place. Around one in five people will experience a mental health illness in their lifetime, and suicidal ideation is a common companion to many of them.

And I suggest suicidal thoughts are a normal dimension to faith, not an aberration of it.

Suicidal Ideation and Faith

The Church must learn to be a place where the cross is not just preached but shared — where suffering isn’t explained away but held with reverence. Suicidal ideation is not always about wanting to die — it’s often about not knowing how to keep living. These moments, as dark and terrifying as they are, can be a kind of participation in the mystery of the cross.

When someone says, “I can’t do this anymore,” they may be closer to the cross than they know.

To be a Christian is to be one who has come to the end.

— Fleming Rutledge

The Scriptures are full of those who came to that edge. Job cursed the day of his birth. Elijah begged for death beneath a tree. Jonah, Jeremiah, and even Paul. And Jesus Himself — on the cross, in the dark — cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The cross is the point at which God says, ‘Me too.’

— John Stott

That cry was not weakness. It was participation. And when we find ourselves in places of despair, where death seems like the only relief, we are not stepping away from faith — we may be entering the very heart of it. Suicidal ideation is not a sign of faith lost, but of suffering felt — a form of communion with the Crucified. The dark side of the cross is not failure, but the place where love bears unbearable weight.

God is not found in the way we think strength looks. He is found in weakness, in vulnerability, in the crucified Christ.

— Jürgen Moltmann

This is a theology that doesn’t fix suffering but walks with it. Like Jesus on the road to Emmaus, God often meets us in our despair, unrecognised at first, walking beside us in our unspoken grief.

The mystics and Church Fathers knew this terrain well. St. John of the Cross wrote of the dark night of the soul — not as punishment, but as purification. A place where all false comforts are stripped away, and we are left with the raw presence of God.

Christ passed through every stage of our suffering so that He might be with us in every moment of ours.

— Gregory Nazianzus

The Church’s role is not to rush people out of that place, but to remain with them in it. Like the women at the foot of the cross, we are called to stand near — not to offer answers, but to bear witness to their pain. To hold space for lament. To walk with those who can no longer walk alone.

We should also guide them toward help—therapy, medication, community—as gifts of God’s grace, not sources of shame for struggling to cope. The cross is not meant to be carried alone but to be shared.

There is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still.

— Corrie ten Boom

What if, instead of seeing suicidal ideation as a departure from faith, we saw it as an invitation? Not an invitation to death but to meet Christ in death’s shadow, to be drawn into His suffering, and by grace to be drawn out again.

God is not absent in our despair, but present in it.

— Rowan Williams

This is not the spiritualising of pain, but is the sanctifying of it. Saying: You are not alone. You are not broken beyond repair. You are wanted and held. And the voice of Jesus calling you out of the darkness does not shame or accuse. It’s the voice of the Good Shepherd — calling you by name, reminding you: This moment and overwhelm is not the end of your story.

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The Cross of Approbation

Jesus has kindly invited me into — and patiently guided me through — many experiences of his cross:

• The cross that saves

• The cross that I share

• The cross that I choose

• The cross that heals and restores

Each has brought real transformation and real respite from the desire for death. And yet, another dimension has come into view.

The cross of approbation.

Approbation is when someone with authority openly says; This is good. This is accepted. This belongs

This is the cross where my Christian life — and even moments of suicidal ideation — are no longer something merely to endure or manage, but are drawn into a deeper and more radical truth: even here, I belong. Even now, I am wanted. The cross of approbation is where God says Yes to a human life - my life - at its lowest point

The resurrection does not correct the suffering of the cross; it confirms it. Easter is God’s approbation of a life fully lived in trust and self-giving. The Father’s Yes is spoken over the Son — not because the suffering was good, but because the Son was.

If God can say Yes to his broken, bleeding, abandoned son on a cross, then my life is not disqualified by pain, weakness, or despair. This does not glorify suffering, nor does it say pain is good.

Instead, it says: My being is good — even when I and if life feels unbearable.

God’s Yes, HIs blessing, comes before my healing, before my strength, before my usefulness, before my understanding. It is an ontological blessing — a blessing spoken over my being itself.

I do not earn this, yes. I do not prove my way into it. I do not lose it when I fall apart. I receive it before I do anything right, I believe correctly, or I am healed or whole.

Because: It is good that I am here.

“If an individual is to accept himself, someone must say to him: ‘It is good that you exist.’”

— Joseph Ratzinger

The abuse and abandonment of my parents carved a void within me — a hollow where the most basic affirmation of identity should have taken root. Instead of It is good that you exist, I absorbed something closer to: your existence is about me and my needs.

Suicidal ideation often lives in our voids. It is not dramatic or impulsive; it is the grim logic of a soul never told enough that it was good to be. As my life’s demands increased, childhood absence became more visible, and the void began to ask whether it might finally be filled by ending life.

But here, at the cross, there is an inversion by God.

God does not look past the void to find a more acceptable version of me. He looks directly into it — into the exact centre of that hollow place — and affirms even that.

Instead of disappearing, I am invited to enter the tomb with Christ. I bring the void — the wish not to be — and place it where it belongs: inside his death. Christ carries it all the way down and leaves it there. What rises is not an improved version of me, but a resurrected one.

This is an Easter exchange.

In Practice

If the desire to disappear returns, I will not argue with it or shame it. I will offer it to the Lord. I will name it as participation, not failure: “This, too, I give you to you.” I will choose to die with Christ, rather than without him. I will let the Father’s Yes to my existence be my truth.

It is good that I exist.

And it is so very good that you do too.

A year ago, I wrote about Jesus — who he was, and who he is — as my anchor in life and in the growing chaos around us. Over the past twelve months, the world has not calmed. If anything, it has become more unstable. Ideologies harden, propaganda multiplies, and the pace of opinion accelerates faster than wisdom can keep up. There is more noise, less depth, and a growing sense that the ground beneath us is shifting further.

And yet Jesus remains. Utterly. Radically. Different.

He is my place to stand when everything else feels uncertain. He is the measure by which life makes sense, the source of identity and meaning when borrowed certainties begin to fail. He is not an escape from the storm, but the liferaft within it — and the quiet assurance that the storm does not have the final word. He is my hope not only for this life, but for a life yet to come.

This Christmas, I find myself returning to Jesus — not sentimentally, but deliberately, and desperately. The King of creation comes into the world, unlike any other. Not as power and ideology expect. Not as culture demands. As the world seems to devolve, I find that he does not recede. He becomes clearer and nearer. More sharply opposed to what is distorting our culture and our times. More compelling, not less.

So I offer this updated reflection on the Christ of Christmas, as we step once more into the liturgy that receives him tomorrow, on Christmas Day.

—

Jesus was unlike any other leader,

past or present.

Not simply better. Not merely wiser. But wholly other.

Fully God.

Fully human.

He lived without disguise,

died without resistance,

and rose without revenge.

And yet it is not only this that arrests me now.

He did not rape, torture, or kill.

He did not abuse the vulnerable.

He did not lie to survive,

cheat to win,

or steal to secure himself.

He did not manipulate crowds,

coerce loyalty,

or terrorise enemies or take hostages.

He raised no armies.

He incited no violence.

He had no political sponsors

and no machinery of power behind him.

He did not court the rich

or flatter the influential.

He stored up no wealth

to insulate his life

or guarantee his future.

Instead, he took the lowest place.

He knelt.

He washed feet.

He touched the unclean.

He ate with outcasts.

He crossed boundaries others fortified—

religious, ethnic, social, and gendered.

He honoured women.

He welcomed children.

He demanded the protection

of their dignity

and their bodies.

How utterly different.

And this difference matters so much now as it did then.

For we live in an age where identity is forged through opposition,

where belonging is secured by enemies,

and meaning is sustained by grievance, offence and denial of reality.

An age where politics has learned to behave like a religion,

and ideologies demand devotion, loyalty, and purity tests.

Many now turn to movements

to tell them who they are,

who they must fear,

and who they must oppose.

Intensity is mistaken for truth.

Outrage becomes a moral currency,

as identity politics creates people as tools of cultural warfare.

But Jesus does not offer an identity

constructed against others.

He does not gather followers

by naming enemies to be defeated

or tribes to be defended.

He does not baptise our causes,

sanctify our anger,

or lend divine authority

to our resentments.

He will not be reduced to a symbol,

deployed as a slogan,

or conscripted into our campaigns.

He is life.

He is truth.

He is reality itself—

the ground beneath my feet

When every ideological platform begins to crack.

Those captivated by ideologies

promise clarity but deliver captivity.

They offer belonging

at the cost of complexity,

certainty

at the price of love.

Jesus refuses our categories—

left and right,

progressive and reactionary,

pure and impure.

He stands before us,

not as an idea to agree with,

but as a person to follow.

Not as an identity to perform,

or someone to baptise, and recognise our self creations

But as a life to receive.

To follow him is to be loosened

and delivered from every false certainty

and re-anchored in love.

To belong to him is to be freed

from the exhausting labour

of self-justification and self-generation.

This is why he unsettles us still.

He cannot be captured by our movements.

He will not be weaponised for our causes.

He remains stubbornly,

mercifully,

real.

And in a world addicted to ideology,

He offers something rarer,

and far more costly still:

a life,

a way,

a truth

that we can actually stand on.

This Jesus captivates me. This Jesus consumes me.

To see him as he is leaves me only one response:

my soul,

my life,

my all.

Every December, our house turns into a kind of liturgy.

My wife hands me the Christmas boxes from the loft with a reverence that borders on priestly. This is her annual re-ordination into the quiet vocation of making our home coruscate with the lights and glimmer of Christmas. The tree goes up first, of course, but the real ritual begins only when she unwraps the ornaments one by one, pausing over each to welcome them back—as if, in her hands, an invocation takes place and they are transubstantiated into the real presence of others.

Out come the decorations our children made when their hands were still tiny. Out come gifts from friends who are now beyond our reach—some separated by distance, others by passing into eternity—yet they return to us faithfully every year as we open those boxes. Here is the bauble from the saint who became a second mother to her; here is the crystal star from that special Christmastime holiday we still talk about.

She pours a glass of wine, puts on the latest predictably sentimental Hallmarkeque Christmas film, and lets the soft absurdity of its plot wash over her. And when I walk into the room, I often find her in tears—not of sorrow, but of reunion. For in this simple ritual, she is gathered back to so much: to our children as they were, to friendships that shaped us, to the parents whose love formed her. Our whole story—dating, marriage, decades of life—is now mapped onto a fake tree in our lounge.

And this year, with our grandson tottering into the season, she is already shaping memories not yet fully formed—new ornaments from his favourite cartoons, ready for his small hands to hang. Even he, without knowing it, is entering our remembering.

What astonishes me every year is how viscerally she remembers—and how, in remembering, she is re-membered: put back together, stitched across the years, gathered again to the people who have made her life what it is.

And then we are re-membered, as she sends us photos of her progress, culminating in the final revealing of the shimmering Christmas tree. We are gathered up again as a family, rejoined across space and time by the quiet procession of WhatsApp images—the tree appearing like a small annunciation on our screens—until the day we will sit together in our pyjamas beneath its Christmas morning light.

And in this small domestic liturgy, something profound is revealed—something about the very reality of life, creation itself, and our place within it.

The Ache of Impermanence

The most precious moments of our lives do not remain with us as possessions. They move away from us. They slip behind us into the past. We cannot hold them by force; we can only hold them by re-membering them.

That ache you feel at Christmas—the sudden tightness in the throat when a child’s decoration appears in your hand, the person not present that you miss, the loved one passed away and beyond arriving in person again—is not merely nostalgia. It is the human condition breaking through. All that is beautiful is temporal. All that forms us eventually becomes memory. And unless we choose to remember, it simply dissolves into time.

We feel this most sharply in December because Christmas is, in its essence, a season of re-membering:

• We remember childhood wonder,

• We remember those who are gone,

• We remember who we used to be,

• We remember the world as we once hoped it might become,

• We remember the sad and broken moments of our past and the present

And in remembering, we are confronted by a universal truth: everything must be remembered, or it is lost.

The philosopher and novelist David Eagleman famously said, “You die twice: once when your heart stops, and again the last time someone says your name.”

There is something hauntingly true here. Human life is fragile enough that even existence depends on memory.

And yet—this is not the whole story. For there is a God who remembers us.

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The Cosmic Revelation Hidden in Our Remembering

We think remembering is something the mind does. But remembering is something the soul does first. It is not just psychological; it is spiritual. It is one of the truest and most faithful acts a human being can perform.

All of creation is upheld by the God who remembers. The biblical Hebrew word for this—zakar—does not mean mere mental recall. It means to call into the present with faithfulness, to hold someone within covenantal love.

God remembers Noah, and the waters recede. God remembers Israel and brings them out of Egypt. God remembers Hannah, and life comes forth. God remembers His covenant and acts.

The whole story of Scripture hangs on the God who remembers.

And at the centre of it stands a dying thief whispering, “Jesus, remember me.” Christ remembers him into life: “Today you will be with me in paradise.”

A dying man held by the dying God—and carried into eternity.

Our remembering, then, is a participation in God’s remembering. It is sacramental. When we remember, we join the divine movement by which God gathers all things into Christ. This is why the Eucharist is commanded to us as remembrance: “Do this in remembrance of me.”

Not because Jesus fears being forgotten, but because in remembering Him, we are remembered by Him. We are re-membered—put back together, reintegrated, healed—through participation in His life, His story, His body.

And this is why Christian remembering is never mere recall. To remember is the opposite of being dismembered. It is the gathering of what has fallen apart, the stitching together of what time has torn, the rejoining of what sorrow has separated.

When we remember Christ, we are not looking back at a distant event; we are letting ourselves be re-membered—joined again to Him who died and rose to gather all things into Himself. In remembering Him, we are remembered by Him—and nothing in us is lost. In Him, we are never forgotten.

Christmas: The Season of Being Remembered

Advent is, at its core, a season of holy remembering. In Advent, we practise the sacred art of remembering so that we are not dismembered by the pace, loss, and fragmentation of our age. We remember Christ’s first coming to recognise Him now, and we re-member His future coming so that our lives might lean forward in expectation.

Advent is not nostalgia but preparation—an opening of the soul so that Christ may re-member us into His life once more.

We decorate our homes with memory because we are creatures who become ourselves through remembering. But at Christmas, something even more astonishing occurs: we discover that God remembers us.

He remembers us in our frailty. He remembers us in our sin. He remembers us when the world forgets us. He remembers us when grief strips our names from others’ lips. He remembers us when we scarcely remember ourselves.

Our worship is not sentimentality; it is participation in His remembering. Every carol, every candle, every prayer is a joining of our fragile memory to His eternal memory.

One day, when Christ returns, we will not simply be recalled—we will be re-membered in the fullest sense: made whole, gathered, restored, stitched back together with all the saints into the new creation. Nothing lost. Nothing wasted. No second death.

So this Christmas, see the Gospel shimmering between the branches and be remembered as you remember.

Historian Tom Holland has a provocative message for the Church today:

“Christians need to keep being weird.”

He isn’t talking about eccentric behaviour, tribal subcultures, or religious quirks. This is no call to ‘fire tunnels’, ‘grave soaking’, or ‘snake handling’. There is just the plain weird, ie bizarre stuff Christians do, then there are the really weird things that stand in contrast to the world and reveal Jesus.

Holland means the deep, civilisation-shaping strangeness that made Christianity explode into the ancient world with moral and spiritual force. And it is the Christianity our world has been losing, and itself in the process.

Christianity was “weird” because it claimed that:

• God became human, and the crucified One rules the world.

• The poor and powerless bear divine dignity.

• Enemies are to be loved, not eliminated.

• Forgiveness outranks revenge.

• Reality is sacramental, not secular.

• Every human—from womb to grave—is precious to God.

• Resurrection is the true horizon of human hope.

This is the strangeness that reshaped the moral imagination of the West. This is the weirdness that rewired the ancient world’s moral operating system. But in our moment, this weirdness is being replaced by something else.

Christians—progressive, conservative, nationalist, and therapeutic—are often absorbing the ontologies of the surrounding culture, and not the strange world of the Gospel.

Yes ontologies. Let’s do some theology together. I’ll walk you through it.

Ontology = Your mental Lego instruction booklet for reality. It tells you what pieces exist, which ones fit together, and what counts as an actual piece vs. an imaginary one.

Ontology is what lets you answer the question: What’s really real here? Even when everyone else is arguing about something completely different. BTW, this means that Christian weirdness is not primarily political or moral.

It is ontological.

Because it begins with the collapse of our understanding of what is real. To explain how this is the case, I’ve found Richard Beck’s framework invaluable (and written about it before):

Ontology → Existential → Moral.

In other words, who God is (ontology) shapes who we become (existential formation), which shapes how we live (moral vision).

If ontology is about what’s real, and the existential is about what that reality feels like when you’re actually living it, then the moral is about what you should do in response.

And I can guarantee you this: look at what anyone believes and how they behave, and you can use this framework to map and discover the “why” of who they really are.

And the clearest diagnostic tool of all for this is worship. Worship reveals the ontology we actually inhabit. Let’s do a worship walk-through together to see what I mean.

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Ontology: The Source of True Weirdness

The deepest weirdness of Christianity is ontological: the world is shaped and sustained by the Triune God.

True Christian ontology affirms:

God is real and active, Christ is the centre of reality, the Spirit fills and animates the Church, Creation is sacramental, Salvation is participation and not self-construction.

Sacramental worship is the embodiment of this ontology.

Some more theology here. Sacramental worship simply means, we do not create meaning, but rather that:

We enter into God’s reality, and he creates ours

Perhaps one of the weirdest things to believe in a postmodern, secular, therapeutic, consumerist world is that I am not free to decide who I want to be. My identity is not self-made. God created me, and He keeps giving me my identity as I surrender myself to Him (Gal. 2:20). Christians are God-made. Or they are not Christian. Full stop.

Progressive distortions: Masquerades

Progressive Christianity often retains Christian moral intuitions but embraces an ontology shaped by expressive individualism, i.e being true to yourself by expressing your inner feelings, desires, and identity, and letting nothing outside you define who you are. It’s the belief that the real you is found inside, and your main job in life is to express it openly and freely.

They may stand among “Christians,” but what they worship is little more than a secular anthropology masquerading as faith — a hollowed out ontology of the self, thinly lacquered with the moralistic clichés of justice and moral virtue. And if you think that harsh, please read on.

Conservative nationalist distortions: Idolatries

When Christian ontology is replaced with civil religion:

The nation becomes sacred, history becomes destiny, political identity becomes the covenant people, and worship becomes a patriotic liturgy.

This is idolatry disguised as Christianity. Their worship reveals it, and where the flag displaces the altar, and the story of the national identity and destiny eclipses the story of salvation.

Therapeutic-consumer distortions: Lifestyles

This is the most pervasive collapse in the Western Church, infecting all kinds of faith. God becomes:

• Distant (Deism: God made the world… then ghosted it)

• Non-Trinitarian (Modalism: God isn’t three distinct persons — He just changes outfits of father, son and spirit), therapeutic (here to help me cope)

• A lifestyle genie, summoned for personal benefit and provision

Sacraments and Worship become inspirational metaphors for mood regulation, spiritual upselling and self-help coaching, symbolic reminders and spiritual entertainment.

God becomes a consumer vending machine

This is also a total ontological collapse and not Christian.

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Existential Weirdness

Remember, the existential is about what that reality feels like when you’re actually living it. Christianity forms a radically new kind of existential person:

Humble, repentant, beloved, surrendered, hopeful, re-ordered toward God, shaped by death and resurrection.

This weirdness appears nowhere more clearly than in worship, where the self is de-centred and re-centred in Christ. Let’s run this again against progressives, nationalists, and consumerists.

Progressive distortion: Self-made

When the self is self-created:

Repentance is oppressive, confession is replaced with affirmation, surrender is replaced with authenticity, liturgy/worship becomes self-expression, the cross becomes a symbol rather than a call

Worship again reveals the shift here to a mode of self-creation:

What we call “God” is only our own self-made image reflected at us

Conservative distortions: Defended self

When fear and tribal identity dominate:

Worship becomes performance, holiness becomes boundary policing, certainty becomes the liturgical/worship centre, and repentance feels unsafe, grace feels threatening

The existential core becomes:

Belonging to the tribe rather than belonging to Christ

Therapeutic-consumer distortion: Curated self

The Moralistic Therapeutic Deism self is:

Comfort-oriented, self-optimised, preference-driven, emotionally protected, allergic to sacrifice.

So worship becomes:

Inspirational pick-me-up, spiritual retail therapy, personal enrichment session, an experience to be rated: “Did it help me?”

The cross is not denied….

It is just ignored

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Moral Weirdness

And lastly, Morality. Christian moral weirdness only emerges from a Christian ontology and a cruciform self. Remember the moral is about what you should do in response to what is really real (our ontology).

Before Christians were strange, Israel was strange. In an ancient Near East shaped by child sacrifice, fear, scarcity, and vengeance, Israel alone worshipped a God who forbade killing children, protected the vulnerable, cancelled debts, and insisted that abundance came from faithfulness, not fear. Even in exile, they were commanded to seek the welfare of their captors—a posture incomprehensible to surrounding cultures.

Christians inherited—and intensified—that strangeness. To Romans, rescuing abandoned infants looked irrational; caring for plague victims at the cost of one’s own life looked reckless; dying rather than renouncing Christ looked absurd, as did refusing abortion and infanticide. They lived as though the cross had remade reality: every child mattered, every body bore dignity, and death no longer held the final word.

So today, when Christians resist irreversible medical interventions on children or refuse to treat bodies as raw material for self-creation, we appear strange again. Christian ontology recognises that bodies are gifts—not canvases for ideology or material for cultural experimentation.

But this is simply the ancient strangeness of a sacramental vision in which life is a gift, children are entrusted, enemies become neighbours, and the vulnerable reveal God’s presence.

This was not sentiment. It was ontology becoming moral action. Their behaviour flowed out of who they were in Christ, not out of moral striving. This same holy strangeness is needed today.

Same Moral Vision, Different Ontologies, Very Different Destinations

At this point, someone/you may ask:

But don’t many Christians with different ontologies share similar moral visions?

Yes.

Christians often hold similar moral aspirations—including care for the environment, solidarity with the vulnerable, peace-making, and compassion.

But what I’ve been insisting on in this article is that sharing a moral vision does not mean sharing an ontology.

And it is the ontology—not the ethics—that ultimately determines:

How we sustain the moral vision, where we believe history is going, what kind of people we become, how we respond when moral ideals cost us something, and the long-term direction of our lives, churches, communities, and societies.

Two moral visions may look similar on the surface, but if one is grounded in expressive individualism, another in nationalist civil religion, and another in therapeutic self-care, the long-term consequences are drastically different.

The telos—the ultimate horizon of meaning—shifts. Telos is the purpose God made something for — the “why” behind its existence, the direction God is guiding it toward.

And over time, communities that start in what looks like a similar place end up in entirely different worlds because the ontologies beneath their ethics lead them there.

This is why the ancient Church could share certain moral concerns with Stoics, Jews, or philosophers, yet be completely alien in its understanding of reality, worship, body, dignity, death, and hope.

Ontology shapes destiny.

It really does. And all this begs the question, what is Christian ontology? Well, that requires a longer answer another time. But for now, I’ll note that different traditions (Catholic, Orthodox, Reformed, Pentecostal, etc.) express this in diverse ways, but the best of them all orbit the same centre:

Christ is the ground of being and the One in whom all things hold together.

Recovering Christian “weirdness” means recovering and maintaining this ontological centre.

When a Christian community’s ontology drifts from this centre—toward the sovereign self, the sovereign nation, therapeutic self-making, ideological capture, unchurched solo faith —its faith ceases to be recognisably Christian, no matter how similar the moral language.

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Worship as the MRI of the Church’s Soul

You can tell exactly what a Christian community, or an individual Christian, believes by looking at their worship. Ask:

Who—or what—is at the centre? What kind of self is being formed? What moral universe is being imagined? What loves are being trained? Where is the cross? What do the sacraments and worship mean? When, how, where and with whom do they worship?

And remember:

Worship reveals your ontology.

Ontology forms your ‘self’

Your ‘self’ generates your morality

Lose a true Christian ontology, and everything else collapses into activism, tribalism, ideology or self-help and formation towards something that is not Christian, in this life and the one to come.

The Weirdness We Must Recover

Tom Holland’s plea is right. If Christianity stops being weird, it stops being Christian. This weirdness once transformed the ancient world.

It can do so again.

But only if we resist the gravitational pull of our age and return to worship the God who makes us strange in all the right ways.

It seems to me that… as Christians, Jesus must be our addiction. Is he?

— Sr. Ruth Burrows1

Sister Ruth Burrows’ question lands with a kind of holy provocation. It jolts us because it holds up an uncomfortable mirror to our lives. The word addiction typically evokes pathology and loss of control. Yet what Burrows is naming is something far deeper — the truth that every human being is ordered toward attachment, that we all live by what captivates our hearts. The question is not whether we are addicted, but to what — or to whom.

Modern psychology and neuroscience confirm what Scripture and the Christian tradition have always intuited: the human person is, by nature, a creature of habit, desire, and imitation.

We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become. If we love things, we become a thing. If we love nothing, we become nothing. — St Claire of Assisi

The neural architecture of our minds literally conforms to what we love. Repetition carves pathways; attention sculpts identity. We become what we behold. Sin, in this light, is not primarily a breaking of rules but a distortion of desire — an addiction of the soul. It is love turned inward, seeking satisfaction in things that cannot finally satisfy.

You are what you love. But you might not love what you think. — James K.A. Smith2

We often think of addiction as a pathology—a dark corner of human experience reserved for those who’ve fallen too far. But Augustine, and more recently James K. A. Smith in You Are What You Love, drawing deeply on Augustine, suggest something far more unsettling and universal: addiction is not the exception to being human—it is its pattern. The only question is not whether we are addicted, but to what—or to whom.

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Re-alignment: An Augustinian recovery manual

Augustine said the human heart is restless until it rests in God. Smith picks up that thread for our current secular age, reminding us that we are not primarily thinkers but lovers. Desire moves us long before doctrine defines us. The habits and practices we give ourselves to—what Smith calls “liturgies”—form our loves and aim our lives toward some vision of the good.

That restlessness—the deep ache for meaning, belonging, and joy—sits at the heart of every human addiction. Whether through substances, possessions, approval, or distraction, the pattern is the same: our longing for the infinite misplaced within the finite.

Our addictions are not merely chemical or psychological; they are indeed liturgical. Each repeated act—scrolling, clicking, sipping, shopping, hustling—trains the heart’s attention and affection. What feels like freedom becomes our formation.

We don’t just have habits; our habits have us.

And the tragedy of addiction is that it takes a legitimate longing—for connection, peace, transcendence, love—and bends it inward, away from its true end. Augustine named this curvature of the soul incurvatus in se—love turned in on itself.

Neuroscience now confirms what Augustine intuited: the brain wires itself through repetition. What we do with our bodies and attention rewires what feels natural. In that sense, Smith’s theology of worship becomes an Augustinian recovery manual. Christian liturgy - worship - is divine rehab—a counter-formation that retrains our desires through grace-saturated repetition. Prayer, confession, Eucharist, silence, Lectio, prophecy, scripture, song—each is a practice of holy re-addiction, re-aiming our restless cravings toward the only one who can bear their weight. Jesus Christ.

The freedom Jesus offers isn’t the shutdown of desire—it’s its re-direction, its a remix. Freedom isn’t escape; it’s re-alignment. Christ doesn’t call us to go numb but to go deep—to crave what is holy, to hunger for what heals. True freedom is not detachment but devotion: a love that knows where to gravitate. In Him, our stories are rebooted; the soundtrack of our souls are retuned. To follow Jesus is to imagine, retell, and relive the greatest love story ever told—the divine romance where meaning, adventure, and purpose all find their rhythm in God.

To lose ourselves in love, and there, to find ourselves again.

So the question is never whether we are addicted, but whether our addiction leads us deeper into life or further into illusion. The task of discipleship—and recovery alike—is to be re-formed by grace, until our loves are reordered and our cravings find rest and order in God.

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Stoking the Fire: Inflamed by Love

Christianity does not meet our predicament with moralism or stoic restraint. The Gospel does not propose the suppression of desire, but its reorientation. Saint Ignatius of Loyola spoke of the soul as inflamed by love — drawn by the Creator toward its true fulfilment in Him. The point of spiritual discipline is not to extinguish our passions, but to order them properly — to direct their fire toward the One who can bear its heat.

Our contemporary culture often offers a counterfeit salvation. Currently in vogue are Stoicism, mindfulness, and detachment, which promise peace by managing desire and reducing its intensity. But Christianity dares to do something riskier. It insists that desire is not the problem — rather, it is disordered desire. The answer is not less passion, but rightly ordered passion; not the cooling of the heart, but its purification in divine love.

And what have we become in our Age of Anxiety? Restless, medicated, endlessly distracted. Our culture of ceaseless motion and nervous energy has become the perfect ecosystem for addiction. Anxiety is the air we breathe — the low, constant hum beneath our striving — and it fuels our compulsions. Yet if we notice closely, anxiety can become the spark to ignite a deeper awakening — a yearning for the One who holds our being itself in love.

Where anxiety makes us fear being used up and disspiated in existential dread, the white fire of God’s love consumes us in order to transmute us. In the presence of the One who is Being itself, our anxiety is not suppressed but sanctified — dissolved into the radiant peace of loving participation with Christ. What once burned as restlessness becomes the holy fire of transformation, where our being is eternally remade in God’s own life.

This is what God’s love does to us. It reveals the truth: that we were made for a greater dependence, a deeper trust, a more beautiful addiction.

When our addictions are named and brought into the light, grace can begin its work. Beneath every false attachment lies a genuine hunger — for intimacy, for security, for transcendence. These are not to be denied, but redeemed. The Christian path is the conversion of desire, not its denial. It is the process by which Christ becomes the organising principle of the heart, the centre around which all loves find their proper orbit.

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True Addiction: The Demands of Love

To be “addicted” to Christ, in the way Burrows describes, is to allow Him to occupy the deepest circuitry of our attachments — to become the focus of our craving, the end of our seeking. It is to let the fire of divine charity burn where our lesser passions once raged. Again, as Saint Ignatius would say, it is to live enflamed with love for the Creator and Lord, so that every affection, every impulse, finds its completion in Him.

This is not the pathology of religious scrupulosity, nor the neurotic need to please God. It is holiness in its most luminous and glorious form: the transfiguration of love. For when Christ becomes our consuming desire, the false gods lose their grip. Our compulsions fade not by willpower but by displacement — overwhelmed by a greater affection.

Isaac Watts, in words that have outlived their century, distilled the very heart of Christian faith:

When I survey the wondrous Cross,

love so amazing, so divine,

demands my soul, my life, my all.

What kind of love could so confidently command the whole of our being — not by threats or divine decree, but by the sheer gravity of its beauty? For every love we harbour already exerts its own dominion over us: our desires are not neutral; they bend the soul toward what it adores. Yet this Love, disclosed in the crucified God, undoes all our false adorations. It does not compete with them, but transfigures them — consuming the counterfeit in the white fire of the most and really Real.

The love that meets us in Christ is unlike any other. It does not seize; it invites. It asks not for submission, but for surrender — the kind that frees rather than binds. In gazing upon the Cross, we begin to see that divine love does not compete with our lesser loves; it purifies them, placing them in their proper order.

To discover this, Love is to awaken to the truth that we were made for nothing less. And to love Him in return is to find, at last, that in losing ourselves, we are found.

That is the addiction Ruth Burrows speaks of — not the slavery of compulsion, but the freedom of love. The soul, inflamed by divine love, finds itself at last rightly attached — and finally, truly free.

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Do you remember your first time?

The moment it dawned on you that Jesus is alive—and risen from the dead?

I remember mine. I was turning seventeen. My dad had abandoned us, my mum was lost in depression, and I was trying to care for my baby brother while keeping us from losing our home. I’d open letters from the bank before heading to school, doing what I could to hold things together. It was a dark and lonely time.

Then, one evening, I went to church. I heard someone speak about Christ—alive, risen, present. And somehow, I knew it was true. I met Jesus that night. Gave my life to Him.

Nothing around me changed, but everything had changed.

Space and time seemed to open around me—or perhaps I was finally able to see how Jesus had been present all along, holding me in the midst of everything I faced. The challenges were still there, but He was with me in them. I still remember that first morning after I met Him, waking with a question that rose with my mind into waking consciousness and prayer: Lord, what do You want me to do with my life?

That’s what the resurrection does when it’s real. It breaks in and rearranges us. It’s not a metaphor meant to comfort or inspire; it’s the eruption of a new reality—one that overthrows every other power that has claimed us.

But I wonder—does it still arrest us like that? Has the reality of Christ’s resurrection lost its weight, its power to seize us with awe, with its sheer possibility and truth? Too often, I know it has for me. The risen life becomes a familiar idea, a doctrine to affirm—something safely removed from experience—when it was always meant to be the pulse of our existence.

Familiality breeds contempt

Over time, we’re prone to reducing the resurrection to moral and existential terms: a symbol of hope, a call to social justice, a story to inspire emotional resilience. We talk about Jesus as if He were mainly an example of how to live or love better. We use Him to steady our emotions, sanctify our politics, or decorate our spirituality.

And so, without meaning to, we turn the resurrection into something manageable—something useful. We make it serve us, rather than letting it undo and remake us. The Risen Christ becomes a resource, not the revolution of all things. I have done this to Him and more, despite my first encounter with Him.

Yet the early Christians knew otherwise. They weren’t comforted by resurrection; they were undone by it. It dismantled their worlds and rebuilt them from the ground up. Empire, family, death, power—all were suddenly reframed in the light of the One who had walked out of the tomb.

For the early church, everything flowed downstream from the resurrection—and from their lived encounter with it. Jesus turned their lives upside down, and in turn, they outlived, outdied, and ultimately reshaped the world around them.

Now, everything seems to flow the other way. Christ becomes our resource rather than our reality—a symbol for justice, an ethical example, a banner to baptise our politics, even a kind of spiritual genie to help us get the life we want. But He was never meant to be the means to our ends. He is the beginning and the end.

And perhaps therein lies a diagnosis of our condition. Has Jesus become for us a means to other ends, rather than being the End Himself? Do we now invoke Him as a kind of identitarian totem—a moral emblem to sanction our virtue, a political symbol to baptise our power, or a spiritual instrument to secure our desires? When Christ is reduced to utility, even sanctified utility, the living God is traded for an idol made in our own image.

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Disturbing the disturbed

We know what it feels like when the ground gives way beneath us. COVID, climate change, war, migration, cost of living, identity politics—the fracturing of meaning and trust—all of it has reminded us how fragile our worlds really are. We live, as some call it, in a “metacrisis”—a convergence of breakdowns across every system we depend on. Strangely, our age is already an apocalypse, revealing the instability of everything we once assumed was solid.

So why does the resurrection no longer shake us like that?

How have we learned to live through every other kind of upheaval, yet remain untouched by the one that changed the universe?

At this disturbing moment in time, the resurrection should disturb us more so—it should recreate us. It is not simply hope for a better future and for things returning to what we preferred; it is the inbreaking of a new reality into the ruins of the current and the old. The early church knew this. They didn’t strip mine the resurrection for resources for daily life—instead, it became a new reality they lived from within.

Perhaps what we need most today is to be shaken again, not by catastrophe, but by wonder—to feel the ground move under our feet because Christ has risen. To stop using Him to stabilise our lives, and instead let Him make them entirely new.

To rediscover the resurrection is not to revisit a belief but to be drawn into a way of life. It is to see that the story of Jesus—His dying and rising—is not only His, but ours. We are folded into it by Him when we accept His invitation. Every loss, every joy, every longing becomes part of His recapitulation of all things in His life, death, and resurrection. The resurrection is not a past event to believe in, but a present reality to inhabit.

If Christ is risen, then nothing —not even death —defines us. Fear does not hold us. Our world, however fragile, is already being remade.

The invitation

The invitation is not to believe harder, but to belong deeper—to live as people who have already passed through death into life, whose hope is not an idea but a Person.

Maybe that’s where renewal begins again for us: in recovering the astonishment that God has not abandoned His world, but stepped into it; that love has walked through death and come out the other side.

Christ is risen.

And if that is true—if it really is—then everything, everything, must be rearranged around Him.

Right now—His heartbeat, His breath—Christ is risen and right here. Not hovering somewhere near, but closer than your own pulse, nearer than your next thought.

The risen One wants contact. He leans in, pressing His life into yours, reaching into the clutter, the ache, and the beauty of your days. He doesn’t stand at a distance; He inhabits your story. Every fear, every longing, every dream—He gathers them into His own wounded, resurrected life.

He wants to take your heart and mind, your soul and skin, your weary emotions and stubborn circumstances, and fuse them into the pulse of His death and resurrection.

Until you can whisper with Paul, not as theology but as testimony: I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.

“And I said: now I begin (Nunc Coepi); this is the change of the right hand of the Most High.”

— Psalm 77:10 (Vulgate)

There are days when you wake already late for your own life.

Before you’ve even opened your eyes, the noise has started — the emails, the worries, the low-grade self-critique. You think, I was supposed to be different by now — more centred, more prayerful, more of whatever it was I once hoped for in God. But here I am again: tired, doom-scrolling, trying to find the will to be different, to remember why I wanted to be different, and wondering what happened to my commitment to change.

That’s the psychological moment where most of us give up — the delay between the self we hoped to be and the one who actually showed up. Our brains hate that gap. We feel the dissonance and call it failure. We hit what psychologists call a delay gap—the moment when our internal ideal (who we wanted to be) collides with our actual experience (who we are right now).

The brain feels dissonance.

The instinct is to close this gap by avoidance: give up, numb out, find something easier. So we retreat — into distraction, overwork, Netflix, TikTok (choose your preferred social media drug), doom-scrolling — anything to hide the ache of being not there yet.

The spiritual life isn’t the absence of that distance; it’s learning what to do when you feel it. Psalm 77:11 - Nunc Coepi. Now I begin. Not “when I feel holy.” Not “once I get it together.” Just — now. From this exact disappointment.

This gap is precisely the threshold moment—where discouragement is closest to discovery. That gap is the threshold, and the doorway grace is standing in.

If we can stay there, if we can resist the guilt and shame of “I should be further along by now,” something sacred happens. The noticing itself becomes the beginning. The very recognition that I am not where I want to be means awareness has returned. The light is on again, and God is so very near.

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Origins of Nunc Coepi

Nunc Coepi is Latin for “Now I begin.”

It comes from the old Latin translation of Psalm 77. In the Hebrew text, the psalmist says, “This is my grief — that the right hand of the Most High has changed.” But when St Jerome translated the psalms into Latin, he heard something different in the Greek: a shift, a turning. “And I said: now I begin (Nunc Coepi); this is the change wrought by the right hand of the Most High.”

That phrase — Nunc Coepi — took root in the Church. The saints carried it like a coin in their pockets.

So Nunc Coepi isn’t about starting over from scratch; it’s about starting again from here. It’s a way of saying, “Even this moment — especially this one — can be the first step of grace.”

The Moment of Noticing

Nunc Coepi—“Now I begin.”

One of the reasons the saints still move us is their growth — their lived, tangible experience of God. We imagine they got there by being better at faith than we are — steadier, holier, more disciplined.

But they weren’t. They were just like us.

The difference was what they did with the gap — that aching distance between who they were and who they longed to be.

They didn’t give up. They began again.

That’s the Ignatian move: the refusal to dramatise the drift. You notice you’re off course; you begin again. You fall asleep in prayer; you wake and begin again. You overreact, regret it, and — begin again. You watch your once-fierce and firm convictions fade, your discipleship lose momentum — and still, you begin again.

You fail — in a hundred small, forgettable ways, or maybe in one spectacular, unforgettable one — and still, you begin again. Because of where you are. Despite where you are. That’s the grace of it.

The noticing is already the turning.

The danger is that we interpret that moment of awareness as the end of something: the collapse of resolve, the evidence we’ve failed again. But the saints knew better. The moment you wake up inside your own distance is not the end of devotion — it’s the start of it.

Francis de Sales whispered Nunc Coepi every time he stumbled. Ignatius built it into the muscle-memory of the soul: begin again, begin again, begin again. The practice isn’t about perfection; it’s about participation. It is the prayer of the tired heart that has learned, finally, that failure is not the end of prayer but its beginning.

To say Nunc Coepi is to stand in the ruins of your good intentions and breathe. It’s to trust that God isn’t waiting at the finish line but standing in the debris saying, “Good. You’ve noticed. Now let’s start here.”

A Prayer of Nunc Coepi

Lord, here and now, I begin again.

Not from strength, but from grace.

Not from what I have achieved, but from what You have done.

When I look back, I see my faltering steps,

but when I look to You, I see mercy waiting.

In this moment, O God, I start anew —

in trust, in love, in surrender.

Take my past and transform it,

take my future and guide it,

take my present and fill it with Your light.

Teach me, Lord, to begin again and again,

until my whole life becomes one unbroken “yes” to You.

Nunc coepi.

Now I begin.

Amen.

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Watch a progressive Christian and a Christian nationalist argue, and it feels like they live on different planets. Their language, values, and priorities couldn’t be further apart. Progressives talk about justice, inclusion, diversity, and care for the environment. Nationalists talk about order, authority, family, and preserving the nation’s moral and religious fabric. Both are convinced the other side represents everything wrong with Christianity today.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: they have more in common than either would want to admit.

They are, in fact, two sides of the same coin.

By progressive, I mean Christians who put their energy into inclusion, social justice, and liberation from oppression. These are real gospel concerns, echoing the prophets and Jesus himself. But when justice becomes the whole message, Christ is often pushed to the margins or completely and functionally expunged.

By nationalist, I mean Christians who tie faith closely to the identity of a people, culture, or nation. They want to preserve moral order and defend tradition. Again, not without its own biblical resonances. Yet here too, Christ gets eclipsed — the gospel shrinks into protecting “our way of life.”

So while they appear to be enemies of each other, progressives and nationalists actually mirror one another. They are two faces of the same coin — united by the same underlying problem: a Christianity that has lost its grounding in Christ himself.

They both suffer from what I call Christological heart failure.

Before going further, a caveat. This is not a sociological study of “progressive” or “nationalist” Christians. I’m well aware these are wide and varied groupings, with many exceptions, and that real people rarely fit neatly into such labels.

But I am using the terms progressive and nationalist quite deliberately, because they are the words most often used in the culture wars — the shorthand we use about each other, often with a good deal of suspicion or contempt. My point is not to caricature either camp, but to ask what happens when Christianity itself gets reduced to these labels, and Christ is left behind.

What follows is not a taxonomy of political tribes. It is a theological reflection on what happens when our faith loses its grounding in Christ.

And the real difficulty here is not simply politics or culture. It goes deeper than that. It is ontological.

Displacing Christ: Moral, Existential and Ontological Levels

Ontology is simply a way of talking about being, what it means to exist. What makes us human. What grounds our identity, our belonging, and our destiny. This is not abstract philosophy for the classroom. Ontology asks the most basic questions: What does it mean to exist? What makes me who I am? What grounds my life? It is the soil in which our lives grow.

For Christians, ontology is not an idea but a person. Our being is in Christ. He is the one who takes up our humanity, shares our life, suffers our death, and raises us into God’s life. The early church grasped this instinctively: to be human was to be in Christ. Their worship, their ethics, their courage, and their hope all flowed from this reality. Everything else — justice, holiness, compassion, truth — was downstream from this ontological centre.

I’ll say that again:

Everything else — justice, holiness, compassion, truth — was downstream from this ontological centre.

So, although they seem to be polar opposites, progressives and nationalists share the same kind of Christological heart failure. Both reduce Christianity to moral projects and existential anxieties. Both displace Christ from the centre. And once ontology is gone, ideology rushes in to fill the space and take people captive.

Richard Beck offers us a helpful framework for making sense of these dynamics. He describes three layers of religious and Christian life.

• The moral layer concerns itself with rules, boundaries, and purity. It is where we ask who is right and who is wrong, who belongs and who does not.

• The existential layer is about meaning, belonging, and identity. It is the space where we seek reassurance and security — the sense that our lives matter and are held together.

• The ontological layer goes deepest of all. It is about being itself. Here, salvation is not moral improvement or existential comfort. It is the transformation of our very humanity in Christ — being healed, transfigured, and drawn into the life of God.

Beck is right to observe that much of modern Christianity rarely ventures beyond the first two layers. We fixate on moral disputes or existential anxieties. Yet if the ontological centre is neglected, something else will always scuttle in to take its place: causes, nations, lifestyle therapies.

Of course, Beck’s framework has its limits. It is just that — a framework. It cannot account for every nuance of theology or history. Yet it is a helpful tool because it names what many of us can see but struggle to articulate: when faith is cut off from Christian ontology, it becomes brittle, anxious, and endlessly reactive.

And this is precisely what shows up in progressive and nationalist Christianity.

• For the progressive, ontology gets relocated into the psychological self. Who I am is who I declare myself to be. Salvation is reduced to inclusion and affirmation. Justice becomes the main language, but often at the cost of naming Christ crucified and risen.

• For the nationalist, ontology gets relocated into tribe and territory. Who I am is who my people and nation say I am. Salvation is reduced to cultural belonging and victory. The language of providence and order takes the place where the story of the cross and resurrection should be proclaimed.

So while they appear to be bitter enemies, progressives and nationalists can often mirror one another. Both often operate at the moral and existential levels only. Both displace Christ. And once ontology is lost, ideology steps in to take its place.

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Diagnostic Symptoms of Losing Ontology

When faith is unmoored from ontology — when Christ is no longer the ground of our being — the damage shows quickly. You can hear it - diagnose it - in how people worship, in the testimonies they tell, and in what communities gather around. It’s easy to spot the symptoms.

Progressives: Worship Around Causes

Progressive Christians often find it hard to worship unless everything is framed around justice, inclusion, or ecology. Or they find it impossible to gather at all with others for worship around Christ. In progressive services:

• Christ’s death and resurrection are rarely proclaimed.

• Christocentric worship and prayer fade into the background.

• Gatherings become rallies for causes, and testimonies sound more like political statements or personal affirmations.

This produces communities passionate for activism but thin in discipleship. People readily become “dones” or “nones,” leaving church life behind once the energy of the cause burns out.

Nationalists: Worship Around Power

Nationalist Christians keep Jesus in their language, but their worship often tells a different story.

• Prayers are addressed to “God” in generic terms, blessing nation and tribe, but rarely naming Christ crucified and risen.

• Testimonies revolve around providence, protection, and success.

• Worship services retell national myths of dominance and chosenness instead of rehearsing the Christ event - the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

This produces a brittle faith, one that is unable to sustain people when suffering comes. When the myth of triumph all too often collapses under the weight of real life, many quietly walk away.

The Edge of the Coin: Consumer Christianity

Then we have Consumer Christianity, which isn’t another “face” of the coin. It’s the edge — the part that touches both sides and keeps the whole thing spinning. It seeps into progressive and nationalist churches alike, shaping them through a therapeutic lens.

Consumer Christianity primarily exists at the existential level. It is about meaning, fulfilment, and lifestyle management. It rarely asks who God is - unless wondering why God has not provided - or what it means to participate in Christ’s life. Instead, it treats faith as a tool for living a better life. We can map consumer faith this way:

• Ontology evacuated: Being is defined by self-fulfilment. The question is not “Who am I in Christ?” but “How is God helping me become the best version of me?”

• Symptom in worship: Services become inspirational talks and spiritual life hacks. The Christ crucified and risen is muted; God is cast as a kind of life coach or problem solver.

• Symptom in testimony: Stories focus on how “church has helped me” — to feel better, cope, succeed, or belong. What’s absent is talk of repentance, surrender, transformation, or being raised to new life in Christ.

• Effect: Faith becomes shallow and consumer-driven. When the church no longer “delivers,” people shop around or drift away.

And here’s the overlap:

• For progressives, consumer Christianity reframes justice and inclusion as therapeutic — church as a safe, affirming lifestyle choice.

• For nationalists, consumer Christianity reframes providence and triumph also as therapeutic — the church as provider of stability, family values, and personal success.

The edge holds both faces together. As I already mentioned, progressives and nationalists appear opposed, but both are carried along by consumer dynamics that reduce faith to what it does for me.

The New Coin: Participation in Christ

The alternative to progressive, nationalist, and consumer distortions is not another ideology. It is participation in the ontology of Christ.

Christian ontology is Christ himself. In him, our humanity is taken up, healed, and transfigured. He assumes our flesh, shares our suffering, bears our death, and raises us into the life of God. To be Christian is to participate in this reality: to live in Christ, to die in Christ, to rise in Christ.

This is what the early church referred to as recapitulation. Irenaeus saw Christ as re-living the whole human story — from birth to death — in order to heal it.1 Athanasius declared: “He became what we are, that we might become what He is.”2 Maximus the Confessor showed how Christ reconciles the fractures of existence — God and creation, heaven and earth, soul and body — in himself.3

Recapitulation is not an idea. It is the lived access point into the ontology of Jesus:

• Through baptism, we die and rise with him.

• Through eucharist, worship, and word, we feed on his life, and our humanity is joined to his.

• Through discipleship, we learn to live into his story of suffering, love, and resurrection hope.

This is the coin the church is meant to carry — not justice as ideology, not nation as ideology, not therapy as ideology, but Christ himself as the ground of our being.

Reconciling Antinomies

Participation in Christ heals the splits that progressives and nationalists embody.

• To progressives, recapitulation affirms the hunger for justice and inclusion, but anchors it in Christ’s embodied humanity. It says: dignity is real, but it is received, not constructed. Christ takes up the excluded and the broken, heals their humanity, and includes them in his body.

• To nationalists, recapitulation affirms the concern for holiness and belonging, but transfigures it. It says: identity is real, but it is not bound by blood, soil, or tribe. In Christ, Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female are reconciled. True belonging is found only in him.

• To consumers, recapitulation affirms the longing for fulfilment, but redirects it. It says: life is real, but it cannot be secured by therapy or success. It is given through surrender to Christ, who calls us through death into resurrection.

In Christ, these antinomies are reconciled. Justice is not abandoned; holiness is not diluted; fulfilment is not denied. All are taken up and healed in the life of Christ.

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Ignatian Spirituality: Practising Recapitulation

Recapitulation is not an abstract doctrine. It is the reality of our being joined to Christ’s being — our humanity healed and remade in his. Christian ontology means we no longer define ourselves by causes, nations, or self-fulfilment, but by Christ himself.

The question is: how do we actually enter into that?

Ignatian spirituality, and especially the Spiritual Exercises, is one of the practical ways the church has been given to do this. Ignatius does not ask us to admire Jesus from a safe distance. He asks us to step into his story until it becomes our story. Through imaginative and sensory prayer, we walk with Christ, listen to him, and speak with him. The Exercises train us to live inside the Gospel, where Christ’s life becomes the measure of our own:

• In the Incarnation meditations, we are invited to wonder at the God who steps into our flesh. Our humanity is taken up into his, and his story of becoming human becomes the truest story of what it means for us to be human.

• In the Passion meditations, we remain with Christ in his suffering. There, our own wounds are drawn into his, and his surrender shows us how to meet pain, loss, and death with trust in God’s love.

• In the Resurrection contemplations, we are caught up in his joy and hope. His new life becomes the horizon of our imagination — a future already breaking into the present, reshaping how we live today.

In this way, the Exercises give us more than information, cognitive beliefs, piety or discipline. They give us participation. Christ’s story becomes our story. His imagination becomes our imagination. His life becomes the measure of our lives.

His ontology becomes our ontology.

Ignatian spirituality is therefore a kind of school of recapitulation. It positions us for an encounter with Christ directly, so that our being is steadily reshaped into his. It is one way the church learns to live the truth: not cause-driven, not nation-driven, not consumer-driven, but Christ-driven.

Conclusion: Choosing Your Grounding

In the end, the question is unavoidable: where will you ground your being - your identity and reality? You may choose justice, nation, or lifestyle. Each has its appeal, but each will eventually fade. Or you may want to choose Christ.

And here lies the scandal of Christianity. Christ is not a means to some other end — not a tool for a preferred politics, an ideology, or a lifestyle.

He is the end. He is the way of life itself.

To follow him is not to secure something else we already desire, but to be drawn into his life, his death, and his resurrection, until they become ours.

Attachment has become one of the defining notes of our age. We hear of the need for a non-anxious presence in leadership, of attachment therapy in counselling, and of the psychological turn that has placed bonds and belonging at the centre of our well-being. The language of attachment is now woven through our conversations about health, growth, and human flourishing. Yet within Christian spirituality—most notably in the Ignatian tradition—attachment has long been central: the call to be rightly attached to God and neighbour, and to grow in holy indifference toward all that binds us wrongly.

The question that presses around us at this moment, then, is whether our modern understandings of attachment can be held within a theological (i.e Christian) frame: do they illuminate, or even deepen, the Christian vision of spiritual formation? And how might the God who made us for attachment be the very one who heals and perfects it in Christ?

Cyd and Geoff Holsclaw’s Landscapes of the Soul answers these questions and is one of the primary reasons to read their book.

But there are even more.

Mortimer Adler, in his classic How to Read a Book, makes a simple but arresting observation: most books, if we are honest, are read once and left behind. They are useful, perhaps even enjoyable, but they do not stay and remain present to us. A few, however, become companions. We return to them again and again, finding new depths, fresh insights, and unexpected consolations. They grow us and grow with us.

Landscapes of the Soul is one such book.

This is not merely another manual on spiritual growth. It speaks in a different register altogether. Here is a book that will read you, even as you read it—laying bare the ways we falter and stall, and tenderly pointing to paths of renewal and breakthrough. For many, it may prove to be a most significant companion, disclosing why our longings for God so often drift into detours, diversions, and spiritual cul-de-sacs—and how, by grace, we might find our way again.

The Journey of Attachment and Repair

At the heart of Landscapes of the Soul lies a compelling premise: the attachment styles we form early in life do not remain confined to our human relationships—they profoundly shape how we relate to God. Whether we know it or not, the ways we learned to connect—or protect ourselves—in childhood echo in our prayer life, our worship, our expectations of church, and even in the very image of God we carry within.

To make this both memorable and personal, Cyd and Geoff Holsclaw give us four metaphors, drawn from the natural world, that describe the “landscapes” of faith. In the jungle, faith is anxious, always scanning for danger and fearing abandonment. In the desert, faith becomes avoidant, withdrawing from intimacy and keeping God at arm’s length. In the war zone, chaos reigns, trust is fragile, and relationships feel unpredictable and unsafe. Yet there is also the pasture—the lush meadow of secure attachment, where joy and peace take root under the care of the Good Shepherd. These images are not caricatures and clichéd tropes, but invitations: each of us will recognise something of our own inner terrain in them.

The book unfolds in three parts. Part One, “Good Roots,” describes God’s original design for attachment, showing how joy, intimacy, independence, and the triad of faith, hope, and love were meant to form the bedrock of our spiritual lives. Part Two, “Gone Wrong,” traces how those designs become distorted through anxious, avoidant, or chaotic patterns of attachment, and how these distortions spill into our life with God. Finally, Part Three, “God’s Repair,” offers the healing found in Christ: baptism as a new grounding in joy, walking with Jesus as intimacy and independence are restored, and even the trials and deaths we endure become occasions for deeper faith, hope, and love.

In all this, the Holsclaws integrate psychology and theology with remarkable clarity: attachment theory becomes not merely an explanatory framework, but a way of seeing how Christ himself repairs and re-forms our inner landscapes.

And for me, this is the most vital part of their work, the Christocentric beating heart to it all.

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From Roots to Repair: Mapping the Landscapes of the Soul

Let me trace the contours of the book’s main sections, before pausing to reflect on what they might mean for my own enduring passion—the Ignatian Exercises.

Part One: Good Roots

The first movement, Good Roots, draws us back to God’s original design for human attachment. At our very core, we are fashioned for joy: to see and be seen; to live in intimacy and trust, yet also to grow in independence and responsibility. These are not decorative extras in the life of faith. They are the very soil in which it is planted. The Holsclaws gently show how faith, hope, and love germinate and flourish in secure attachment. What might look, at first sight, like the language of neuroscience is in fact theology at its most embodied—an anthropology rooted in God’s intention, where humanity is envisioned as joyful, loving, and resilient in hope in God.

Part Two: Gone Wrong

The second movement, Gone Wrong, describes what happens when these roots are disrupted or distorted. Here, the metaphors carry their weight. The jungle of anxiety, the desert of avoidance, the war zone of chaos—these are not distant abstractions, but landscapes many of us will recognise in our own spiritual lives (and might require an illustrated version of the book :-). Each describes a way in which our survival strategies become our spirituality. The descriptions are unsettling precisely because they ring true and resonate as maps of our daily lived experiences with God.

Yet the Holsclaws never lapse into judgment or despair. Instead, these chapters are suffused and saturated with a pastoral tenderness, reminding us that Christ does not wait for us in some imagined neutrality of faith, but meets us exactly where we are—in the jungle, the desert, or the war zone. To notice and name these places is not to condemn ourselves, but to begin the journey toward healing.

Part Three: God’s Repair

The final movement, God’s Repair, turns our gaze firmly toward Christ, who mends what is fractured. The tone here becomes deeply theological. Christ’s baptism and ours are reframed as a new rooting in joy; walking with Jesus restores the balance of intimacy and independence; trials and testings shape faith, hope, and love; even death itself is transfigured—not as rupture, but as the passage into life. In Christ, the scattered and broken attachments of our lives are gathered up, healed, and re-secured.

Repair means that we are not left to wander in jungles, deserts, or war zones, but are drawn into pasture—the rich landscape of love, where the soul rests under the gaze of the Good Shepherd. In fact, reading A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23, by Philip Keller, might be the best devotional reading alongside Landscapes.

Principle, Disorder, Participation: An Ignatian Reading of the Soul’s Landscapes

How might Landscapes of the Soul stand alongside the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, giving them fresh depth and inviting us to live more fully into their vision? And just as much, how might the Ignatian way itself steady and undergird the vision of Landscapes? Two companions on the same road, each illuminating the soul’s terrain from a related but different angle.

Part One: Good Roots — Principle and Foundation

The launching point of Ignatian spirituality is that God loves us fiercely, passionately, and unconditionally. Because of this love, God’s desires and hopes for us are based on who we are: our gifts, talents, preferences, and joys. What God wants for us is the same as our deepest desires. - Fred Galano

The first movement, Good Roots, draws us back to God’s original design for human attachment. At our very core, we are fashioned for joy: to see and be seen; to live in intimacy and trust, yet also to grow in independence and responsibility. These are not incidental to faith. They are the very soil in which it grows. The Holsclaws gently show how faith, hope, and love germinate and flourish in secure attachment. What might appear as neuroscience is also deeply theological and biblical at its most embodied: a vision of humanity as God intended—rooted in joy, resilient in hope, capable of love.

Here, the Ignatian resonance is clear. The Spiritual Exercises begin with the Principle and Foundation, a reminder that we are created for God’s love, and that everything else in our lives must find its place in relation to this truth. The Holsclaws’ account of joy and secure attachment is a contemporary echo of this same foundation.

Part Two: Gone Wrong — Disordered Attachments & God In All Things

The second movement, Gone Wrong, draws us into the landscapes where our roots have been disrupted or distorted. The metaphors are so vivid, and they resonate. The jungle of anxiety, the desert of avoidance, the war zone of chaos—these are not distant abstractions, but terrains many of us will quietly recognise in our own lives. They describe the survival strategies that, over time, have often hardened into the shape of our spirituality.

Ignatius insisted that God is to be found in all things—in joy and in sorrow, in success and failure, in desire and in sin. Our attachments gather and form in these very places, clustering into jungles, deserts, and war zones. Yet the Holsclaws remind us that Christ does not wait for us in some imagined neutrality of faith. He meets us where we are, and in naming these landscapes, we do not condemn ourselves; we open the door to healing.

Ignatius spoke of “disordered attachments”—those loves and fears that pull us away from God. His invitation was to notice where consolation and desolation are leading: toward God or away around our attachments. The Holsclaws’ landscapes offer us much the same gift, furnishing a language and imagination for the hidden attachments that quietly govern our faith.

Part Three: God’s Repair — Participation in Christ

But Jesus doesn’t just show us the way to deepen our attachment. He is the way. In his full divinity, Jesus becomes our attachment figure, offering us deep attachment. “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me” (John 14:6, nlt).

The final movement, God’s Repair, turns our gaze toward Christ, who alone can mend our fractured attachments. At its core, the Holsclaws’ argument is that our insecure attachments—whether anxious, avoidant, or chaotic—are not repaired by self-effort, but by entering into a relationship with Christ. This is more than imitation; it is participation. In baptism, in prayer, in discipleship, Christ’s intimacy with the Father becomes our intimacy. Their vision of God’s Repair is, in essence, participatory: our fractured attachments are taken up into Christ’s secure attachment to the Father, so that his life becomes ours.

While the Holsclaws frame their insights primarily through attachment theory and pastoral practice, their theology is implicitly participatory in nature. What they describe as secure attachment in Christ is, theologically speaking, union and participation in the life of God through Christ.

Ignatius would also call this “participation.” The Exercises invite us to walk with Christ in his life, death, and resurrection, and to find God in all things. Likewise, the Holsclaws remind us that healing does not come through technique or willpower, but through being drawn into Christ’s story, where our own stories are re-membered and redeemed.

Here, I found myself longing for more—more theological exploration of how participation in Christ works itself out in our attachments. But that is my own impetus to continue to pursue, spurred on by this excellent book.

Simulation and the Shrinking Imagination

Ten minutes, maybe twenty—perhaps an hour. A reel of someone’s flawless kitchen, enviable holiday, sculpted body, picture-perfect relationship. Then a film trailer, bursting with visual spectacle and sonic overload, left you hypnotised. And just like that, you slipped into the current: an endless stream of soundbites, images, and videos, each one auto-playing, demanding nothing from you, not even a click.

You watched, swiped and scrolled as each headline or post delivers micro-hits of dopamine and cortisol, activating your amygdala and heightening vigilance, keeping you scrolling as your brain hunts for more perceived threats, while your prefrontal cortex, responsible for reasoning and emotional regulation, is quietly hijacked by the loop.

You stop scrolling, and there is — almost imperceptibly — a rupture in the seamless stream of images, headlines, and curated moments. It may be something physical — the stiffening of your back, the ache behind your eyes — or that small, quiet realisation of a thinning out of your being:

Why am I still here?

In that instant, a certain lucidity intrudes. The mind, a moment ago compliant to the dictates of the feed and its restless summons, begins to reawaken. The higher faculties stir; the appetite for one more flicker of novelty loosens its hold.

Then, almost without effort, your attention turns inward — to the weather of the soul. The climate is heavy: a mixture of restlessness, irritability, and fatigue. Your body keeps score, gives its testimony with candour — the knot in your chest, the weight in your jaw, the shallowness of your breath. To name these — I am anxious, I feel diminished, and sometimes, sordid and sullied — is already to lessen their hold. Light seeps in, and the interior noise begins to quieten.

And here you stand at a small but decisive crossroads. One path draws you back into the churn, into the mechanical liturgy of ceaseless content, each morsel promising more than it could ever bestow. The other invites you into something altogether different — the stillness of prayer, the patient company of Christ, the kind of attentiveness that welcomes reality as it is, not as it is packaged.

Such moments are thresholds: to turn aside from the scroll is to step, however falteringly, towards the Presence who is always near, yet waits to be noticed.

We live surrounded by spectacle and simulation. Movies so sharp they pull you into another world. Games that lay out vast landscapes, promising you can go anywhere. VR headsets that trick your senses into thinking you’ve stepped right into the scene. Social media feeds roll on without end, offering the polished highlights of other people’s lives. It all promises to make us feel more connected, more immersed.

But here’s the thing — the more these tools try to give us reality, the more they take us out of it.

A film hands you the exact face the director wants you to see, the colour scheme they chose, the soundscape they built. A game talks about freedom, but every choice has already been decided by someone else’s code. Social media lets you “follow” people’s lives — but only the edited, filtered parts they want to show you. We’re given endless images of life without ever having to live it. And the more we feed on those images, the smaller our own imagination becomes, and the harder it gets to be present, to live into the reality God has for us to experience.

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Ignatius and the Sanctified Imagination

Ignatius of Loyola first stumbled onto the deep spiritual power of imagination in a moment he didn’t plan for. Wounded in battle and stuck in bed, he found his mind wandering. At first, it was to the things he knew — dreams of glory, fame, romance. His version of doom-scrolling entertained him for a while, but left him hollow. Then he began to imagine something different: a life lived for God, marked by love, courage, and service. Those daydreams didn’t fade into emptiness; they left him with a deep, lasting consolation. And that’s when it hit him — God could speak to him through his imagination.

Out of that realisation came one of the most powerful tools of prayer the Church has ever known: Ignatian contemplation. In his Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius invites us to step right into the Gospel scenes with all five senses. See the dust rising from the road, hear the voices in the crowd, feel the rough weave of a cloak, smell the bread fresh from the oven, taste the salt of the sea air. When we let the story come alive like this, it moves from being words on a page to an encounter that stirs our heart, shapes our desires, and begins to change us.

Ignatius knew this was no mere visualisation technique. As he writes in Spiritual Exercises §2:

“It is not much knowledge that fills and satisfies the soul, but the intimate understanding and relish of the truth.”

In imaginative contemplation, “intimate understanding” happens when the Spirit takes our sensory imagining and fills it with divine presence. Christ is not a character in a storybook; He is the living Lord who addresses us now, using the landscape of our mind as His meeting ground.

For Ignatius, imagination wasn’t just a mental exercise. It was a holy place where the Spirit could meet us, speak to us, and draw us deeper into Christ’s life. Fill your inner world with the stories of grace, mercy, and truth, he would say, and your outer world will start to look different too.

This is why the erosion of our imagination in the digital age matters so much — because the space God can use to speak with us is the very space our screens are slowly crowding out.

How Simulation Stunts Imagination and Reality

Our brains have a network of regions — often called the default mode network or “imagination network” — that lights up when we construct mental images, remember the past, or imagine the future. It draws on the hippocampus (memory), the prefrontal cortex (planning, moral reasoning), and the parietal lobes (spatial awareness) to build “inner worlds” from incomplete information.

When we read a novel or hear half a story, this network works hard: we imagine faces, places, smells, and sounds that aren’t supplied for us. The effort strengthens neural connections, deepens memory traces, and trains the brain to link experience, meaning, and anticipation.

But high-definition simulations bypass this work. They give the brain everything: the exact look of the hero’s face, the colour of the sky, the tone of the music, the rhythm of the conversation. Your sensory cortex is flooded with finished data, leaving the imagination network mostly idle. Over time, this “low-use” state can weaken the brain’s ability to generate vivid inner imagery, much like an underused muscle atrophies.

The result? We become skilled at consuming other people’s worlds but clumsy at inhabiting God’s.

You know this if you’ve watched a truly scary scene in a film. Often it’s not when the monster appears, but when the floorboard creaks, the shadow flickers, the door slowly opens. The space left open is where your imagination rushes in, and what you imagine is usually worse than what the director could show.

That gap — the unseen—is vital to faith. Scripture tells us that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” A screen culture that leaves no unseen space trains us in the opposite habit.

Finished, hi-def worlds also change our expectations of real life. Real life has texture, imperfection, delay, and ambiguity. But when you are conditioned to the polished pacing of films, games, and curated feeds, ordinary reality feels disappointingly uncinematic. We grow impatient with the slow work of relationships, the quiet seasons of prayer, the unfiltered moments of beauty.

And here lies a deeper danger: these mediated worlds are not neutral. Every one of them carries values, longings, and visions of “the good life.” They catechise us — training our hearts and minds in the liturgy of consumerism. And with our imaginations weakened, we become passive to these scripts.

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Imaginative Prayer: Working with the grain

Ignatian imaginative prayer doesn’t fight against the way the human mind works — it works with the grain of it. God created us as narrative beings. Neurologically, we are wired to make sense of life through story and to inhabit those stories in our minds.

The brain’s default mode network — the same system that lights up when we daydream, recall memories, or imagine the future — is designed to take fragmentary experiences and weave them into coherent meaning. It doesn’t just store events; it arranges them into a narrative arc, deciding what matters and what doesn’t.

This is why we remember moments in scenes, not bullet points. It’s why our dreams are visual. It’s why, when you tell someone about your day, you instinctively set the scene before recounting the action. And it’s why God gave us the Scriptures not as an abstract list of propositions but as a library of stories — salvation history told through the lives of real people in real places.

The Spirit meets us with the grain of our story

When we enter the Gospels in Ignatian prayer, we are stepping into the very format God chose for revelation. The Spirit meets us in that space because it is His medium: the narrative of salvation, from creation to Christ to new creation.

As I noted in a previous article:

Desire and imagination are indeed the forces that determine what we choose and act around for the creation of our lives. The Spiritual Exercises are about becoming free by exploring what we desire, with our imagination, into a different self. One that is God-created instead of self-created.1

Here’s where recapitulation comes in — a word the early Church loved because it captures the scope of what God has done for us in Christ. In the Christ event — His life, death, resurrection, and ascension — Jesus takes the entire human story into Himself. He does not merely fix a broken part or offer a moral example; He gathers it all up. The first Adam’s failure and exile. Israel’s vocation and struggle to be God’s covenant people. The long ache of humanity’s wounds, sins, and estrangements. Even the tangled threads of our personal histories — the triumphs, the betrayals, the wasted years, and our unhealed pain.

The Church Fathers called this participation — sharing in the life of Christ here and now. As Athanasius wrote, “He became what we are that He might make us what He is.” In imaginative prayer, that participation is tangible: we stand in His presence, He speaks, we respond. And this encounter is as real as the sacraments, because the same Spirit who meets us at the Table meets us in the landscape of our redeemed imagination.

So we can pray in confidence: This is not pretending. This is presence.

Recapitulation is the ultimate realignment of our lives with the grain of God’s intent. To pray imaginatively, then, is to step into scenes where this reality is alive and unfolding — to see ourselves not as spectators of a sacred drama, but as participants whose lives are now woven into Christ’s.

Ignatian prayer makes this theological truth experiential and real to us:

• We bring our own life into the moment — our fears into Gethsemane, our grief to the cross, our hopes to the resurrection morning.

• The Spirit joins our personal “story threads” to Christ’s story, until His narrative arc becomes the shape of our lives.

• In that union, healing happens. The old story is gathered into His, redeemed from the inside out, and returned to us renewed.

And our imaginations are developed; they come alive, as we come alive in Christ.

Imagination as Participation, not Pretence

Many modern Christians have been trained to distrust the imagination, fearing it might distort the “truth” of the Gospel. But when the imagination is sanctified, it does not compete with truth; it participates in it.

In fact, without imagination, truth remains a sterile abstraction.

In Ignatian prayer, the imagination doesn’t create a fantasy Jesus — it becomes the God-given faculty the Spirit uses to bring the real, risen Christ to us. We are not “pretending” to be at the Sea of Galilee or the empty tomb. We are allowing the Spirit to collapse the centuries, bringing our presence into His presence, our today into His eternal “now.” By the Spirit, it is as if I were there with Christ and Him with me.

I had such an experience when undertaking the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises:

A few years ago, in a time of prayer, in my mind's eye, I saw Jesus. He stood before me with his head jauntily cocked to one side. Winking at me, he asked a rhetorical question, his voice full of mirth, knowing my answer before I gave it.

'Follow me?'

My answer was a silent yes; no words were required; he already knew my answer.2

This was not mere fantasy, but an experience of the deepest reality of God in my life.

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Why We Need This Now

Screen culture leaves us spectators. Certain forms of Christian cognition can leave us as mere analysts of the Gospel. But the Spiritual Exercises call us into the dust and sweat of the road, the breaking of the bread, the agony of the garden, and the joy of resurrection morning.

They reclaim the imagination for its true purpose: to mediate between what is unseen and seen, between God’s eternal life and our everyday reality. And in that space, the Spirit makes Christ real to us — here and now.

Or, as I wrote in another article:

“We are invited… to sit before God with his word, and… enter into salvific experiences of the risen Jesus, personally present right now in the Spirit to you and to us all.”

So this week, in place of the scroll and atrophy of your imagination, why not try some Ignatian prayer and compare the experience?3

Something to try

• Pick a Gospel story where Jesus meets someone in need.

• Enter the scene: what do you see, hear, smell, and feel?

• Be there: where are you standing? What’s going on inside you?

• Let Him speak: listen for His words to you.

• Respond: speak to Him, then stay with Him.

The imagination is never neutral. It will either be colonised by something or claimed by Christ. The Spirit is ready to make it the latter.

Drawing on Christian traditions, especially Ignatian spirituality, he offers a counter-narrative: true identity is received, not constructed, and freedom is found not in limitless autonomy but in attachment to God. Through practices like the Examen and imaginative prayer, we can recapitulate our stories into Christ’s redemptive narrative. The conclusion is urgent: the gospel doesn’t ask us to find ourselves, but to lose ourselves and be found in Christ.

Seamus Wray, Chicago, 2020

…there has been a shift “from a world in which beliefs held believers to one in which believers hold beliefs.”1

We live at a time when we believe we should have no story, except the story we chose when we had no story - Stanley Hauerwas

For much of Christian history, belief was not a private preference but a public truth accepted in all dimensions of life. People lived within a created and ordered world—God’s world—where truth, goodness, and identity were received, not constructed. And most definitely not self-made.

Faith was something that held you.

The self was not a personal project, but a gift that required reception from outside of the self. Belief wasn’t something we chose—it was something that chose us.

But today, something profound has shifted.

We live in the age of the cult of the self-made self, where beliefs are curated, identities are performed, and meaning is something we construct rather than receive. We are overwhelmed with a vapid parody of the real drama of human becoming. And its effects, unsurprisingly, are both spiritually vacuous and psychologically ruinous.

Pick and Mix: How Did We Get Here?

The modern West has undergone a Psychological Turn, where inner experience is seen as the highest authority. Human meaning, identity, and morality are now largely understood through psychology—a field only emerging in the late 19th century—rather than theology, philosophy, or tradition. Instead of beginning with God, nature, or inherited wisdom, we begin with the self. Who I am is who I feel myself to be; truth must align with authenticity, and identity must reflect personal desire.

Several cultural forces have shaped this moment. Rationalism, secularism, and consumerism have pushed the sacred to the margins, hollowing out the self. Into this vacuum, psychology has entered—sometimes as a healing force, sometimes as a replacement—offering meaning in a world where transcendence is now quiet.

But in collapsing identity into mere affect, we risk creating a kind of emotional cul-de-sac: a self so turned inward that it can no longer hear the call of anything or anyone beyond it—not even the voice of God.

As Vincent Miller observes, belief itself has become commodified. Spirituality is now bricolage—a consumerist mix of quotes, mindfulness, affirmations, and rituals, chosen for comfort or appeal.

We no longer inhabit a tradition; we shop for one.

Faith becomes a collection of fragments, assembled to support the self we wish to create. Beliefs are picked, mixed, and discarded as needed to sustain our self-made identities.

This is not about the maturing of faith, which lets go of simplistic external beliefs to integrate more mature notions from within. Instead, it is a pastiche, mood-driven disorder. This amounts to nothing more than an ontological homelessness. Severed from any transcendent source, the self becomes not luminous but weightless—without inheritance, without anchor, without purpose.

This is the cultural air we breathe. But it comes at a considerable cost.

For in truth, no one is self-made, in the deepest, metaphysical sense. We are, whether we like it or not, contingent creatures—dependent, received, and radically given.

The Destructive Power of the Psychological Turn

We are now told—often with striking conviction—that identity lies in the swirling shallows of inner sensation. Truth has become a matter of subjective resonance; authenticity is the new cardinal virtue, and constraint, the unforgivable sin.

Where freedom once meant the capacity to live well within limits—shaped by virtue, truth, or divine order—it is now framed as liberation from any external claim. Tradition, authority, biology, religion, even community—these are increasingly seen not as sources of wisdom or belonging, but as oppressive forces to be cast off. The only valid authority left is the self.

Anything that provokes inner discomfort—particularly if it challenges our sense of identity or desire—is treated as an affliction to be cured. Traditional virtues like humility, obedience, or chastity are recast as repressions. In their place, self-expression, self-assertion, and self-construction are crowned as moral goods. To yield to anything beyond oneself is considered inauthentic, even weak.

Belief in God, once a matter of truth and trust, is too often reduced to a therapeutic tool—something to help me feel better, be more fulfilled, or escape discomfort. God becomes a mirror for the self, rather than a source from beyond it.

This modern autonomy is celebrated, yet it comes at a cost. If I alone must invent, express, and sustain my identity—if I must continually justify my own worth—I live under constant pressure to perform.

And we see the fruit of this. Rising anxiety. Widespread burnout. A quiet, persistent despair beneath many lives, both public and private. The myth of the self-made person exacts a heavy toll. For without a deeper source of meaning or belonging, the self becomes both bricoleur, as Vincent Miller suggests, and prisoner, locked within the fragile architecture of its own making.

What appears liberating is deeply destructive—spiritually, psychologically, and relationally:

• It isolates. We become authors of our own meaning, no longer participants in a shared story—God’s story—with others. Identity is self-scripted, not received in relationship.

• It destabilises. Identity becomes a fragile performance: carefully curated, easily threatened, and always in need of affirmation.

• It fragments truth. When every personal story is sovereign, truth becomes a contest. We are left vying for attention, competing for narrative dominance.

• It burdens the soul. The demand to invent, project, and sustain a coherent identity weighs heavily. The result is often anxiety, shame, and quiet exhaustion.

Christianity tells a different story—one of grace, not self-construction but co-construction with a God who made us and loves us.

Follow The Desires of Your Heart

It does little good to rail against the freedom the modern self demands. That is like shouting into the wind. We might make some headway by highlighting the harmful effects of this vision of freedom, but we are quickly pulled back into our narcissism and addiction to self-creation.

Instead, we might heed St. Ignatius and follow our deepest desires—even those that appear disordered at first. Ignatius believed that our most authentic desires are planted in us by God. Beneath superficial wants and distorted cravings lie holy longings: for love, meaning, service, and union with God. These are not distractions from the spiritual life—they are the spiritual life. To follow them is to cooperate with grace.

This means walking fully into our desires for freedom and asking what we are truly seeking. Ignatius teaches us to pay attention to our desires because, when rightly discerned, they lead us toward the life God desires for us. But to follow these true desires, we must be free—free from disordered attachments, compulsions, and the exhausting pressure to curate a self. Without this interior freedom, we chase what we think we want, yet remain restless, fragmented, and burdened.

In other words, if we dare to explore our desires for freedom, we may find God asking: Are you truly free in your pursuit of freedom? And in that question, we might encounter not only God himself but also his invitation into the freedom he longs to give us—as his beloved creation. There is a profound, identity-shaping discovery to be made in that encounter. It is to receive and carry within us a dignity that is not earned, and a calling that is not self-appointed, but lovingly given, where:

• We are created, not self-assembled.

• We are relational, not solipsistic.

• We are iconic, not consumable.

This is not psychology. It is metaphysics baptised in the Holy Spirit’s fire.

In other words, we are not just talking about feelings, therapy, or self-help. We are talking about the very nature of human existence—who we are before God—and this truth is not a cold, stultifying abstraction but alive, burning, and personal through the presence of the Holy Spirit. It's not therapeutic; it’s cosmic reality on fire.

In this reality, we are not free to become whoever we choose, but in Christ, we are free to become who we were truly meant to be. And no human being has yet exhausted the limitless depths of their identity in Christ.

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Participation not Performance

Here, Ignatian spirituality offers quiet wisdom. In a world of noise, speed, and striving, it invites us to listen—to notice where God is already at work in our desires and disappointments.

We are not called to construct improved versions of ourselves. We are invited to become who we already are in the eyes of God.

As Irenaeus taught, in Christ humanity is recapitulated—gathered up, healed, and made whole. Our fractured identities are not erased, but gently rewritten by love. This is no small claim. Modern attachment theory only confirms what the mystics have long known: identity, peace, and wholeness arise not from autonomy, but from secure love.

Ignatian practice—through the Examen, imaginative prayer, and spiritual direction—nurtures this attachment to God by helping us revisit and reinhabit our lives in prayer. We do not recall our stories alone, but with God. In this sacred re-telling, our memories, wounds, and longings are drawn into Christ’s own story—redeemed, reframed, and made whole.

As Christ gathers all of humanity into himself, so too in prayer we begin to see our lives folded into his redemptive pattern. The soul is trained not to invent itself, but to receive itself—moment by moment—from the gaze of divine love.

One way to understand the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises is as a school of freedom. That and wider Ignatian spirituality, with its deeply incarnational grammar of prayer and discernment, offers a quiet rebellion against the cult of the self-made self. Its concern is not self-optimisation, but inner indifference—a freedom from disordered attachment, so that one might be fully available to the love and will of God.

In Christ, the human story is not erased but retold. He gathers our fragments into himself, as the incarnate Logos—not to offer a new brand, but a new nature.

We are not summoned to “find ourselves.” We are called to lose ourselves and be found in him. For the gospel does not call us to become better versions of ourselves—it calls us to become new.

Epilogue: The Collapse of the Self-Made Soul

The self-made self is a fiction with a high body count. It exhausts the psyche, erodes the soul, and disintegrates community. Its gospel is anxiety. Its sacrament is branding. Its eschaton is burnout.

But Christ offers a better way: not freedom from truth, but freedom in truth. Not a curated identity, but a crucified and resurrected self. This is the quiet miracle of the gospel: that in losing ourselves, we find ourselves. That in laying down the burden of self-construction, we are free to live out who we were meant to be.

In Christ, you are not curating a self. You are receiving a life. Not freedom from all constraints, but freedom for the glory of becoming fully and joyfully human in Him.

We are not our own. And thanks be to God for that.

Bibliography

For further reading relating to issues, concepts, and topics above, see

Theological & Philosophical Foundations

Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies – The foundational source for recapitulation.

David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss – A deep dive into metaphysics, divine gift, and critique of modernity.

James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love – Explores liturgical anthropology and how desire shapes our being.

Vincent J. Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture – Dissects the commodification and bricolage of belief.

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age – The definitive cultural history of the modern self.

Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self – Engaging commentary on expressive individualism and identity politics.

Ignatian Spirituality & Practice

Aschenbrenner, George A. Stretched for Greater Glory: What to Expect from the Spiritual Exercises - accessible guide opens the heart of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises and shows how the exercises are not a psychological fix, but a spiritual formation

St. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises – The cornerstone text for Ignatian formation.

David L. Fleming, Draw Me Into Your Friendship: The Spiritual Exercises—A Literal Translation & Contemporary Reading – A faithful modern rendition of the Exercises.

Margaret Silf, Inner Compass: An Invitation to Ignatian Spirituality – An accessible guide to Ignatian discernment and freedom.

Psychology & the Modern Self

Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic – A seminal critique of therapeutic culture.

Dan P. McAdams, The Stories We Live By – A deep exploration of narrative identity from a psychological perspective.