More on: Essays

I offered what I could from my human heart to hers. May you be blessed with protection. May love shine its face on you. May peace turn toward you.

Great Expectations is far more than a novel of politics, or even a novel of history or race or society. It is, subtly and surprisingly, a novel of religion—not of spirituality, but of religion: the repeated motions performed by a community that express a shared conviction about how we ought to live as composites of the fixed and the fleeting.

Most days, belief in anything beyond the day before me felt unfathomable. But my disorientation presented me with an opening, a paradoxical invitation to entertain what I would typically have considered beyond the barometer of belief.

As children, we did not say God in anger. God was ____, was holy, meant revelation, infinity, abyss, also ______ too powerful to utter.

You must take the first step without seeing the whole staircase, the whole street. But somehow you make it across.

i. MANY PEOPLE DIE in the book of Genesis, and we are, for the most part, told where the bodies are buried. We know what happens to the corpses of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Leah, Rachel, Joseph. We sometimes get details about the procurement of a burial plot or the reconciliation of estranged brothers…

My mother and I are driving five hundred miles to see a replica of a mystery.

One of the habits I have developed without meaning to, without wanting to, is this: I routinely lower the volume on my heart.

On my first morning, I read from John’s Gospel, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” It felt like a prophecy, the way my life would go. Something I could accept, because it would make meaning.

Watch the author discuss this essay in his InStudio interview. OUR FIRST TIME WAS IN NEBRASKA. It was winter. Holiday Inn Express. We fucked once in the shower and again, later, while watching a documentary about glaciers. I remember snow fell from the night sky and we watched it from our bed. I remember the…