Substack prompted me to write a new description for it after I hit the “Change Publication URL” in the “Danger Zone” of the settings. I know what I’m doing, but my fingertips wouldn’t cooperate. So, I just wrote, “Everyday spiritual warfare.”

What do I mean by that?

Well, you’re in a battle, you know. Not a metaphorical battle on which you can just hit the pause button and go make yourself a bologna sammy. No, it’s a real-life struggle against malevolent intelligences who want to annihilate you and adorn their horns with your entrails. Metaphorically speaking. (Probably). You can’t outthink them, you can’t hide from them, and you can’t even bribe them with chocolate.

Man, it feels good to say that. Is this what coming out feels like? I can see why it’s so popular.

When I say “you” are in a battle, of course I mean “we.” I didn’t know it for most of my life. It took the dramatic end of my marriage, two years in a monastery, meeting a couple of possessed people, and a whole pile of books I’d never even heard of in my churchy life to realize we are living in a kind of simulation. Not the kind with some sort of celestial Silicon Valley overseers, but a vast shadowland of amusements and distractions, just outside of which reside these malevolent beings, tweaking things.

That’s why the original title of this publication was “Rise Above Today.” It was me grasping at explanations for why my life was occasionally at least an interesting dumpster fire, but for the most part was simply a gray tapioca goo. I knew I should do better - you know, “rise above” the troubles of today, and do it now, but…how? Why?

I didn’t understand what was really going on here. I didn’t realize that we are in a literal battle. Not a metaphorical struggle of some kind, but actual war.

I mean, sure, I said the words in prayer and on Sundays. The St. Michael prayer was cool. But it was all theoretical. For most of my life, it was a pretty formulaic thing: stay in a state of grace, confess when I fell, restore grace, and pray that I timed things right and was in a state of grace when I died.

This doesn’t require much actual transformation, which is what salvation is really all about.

What changed? I found myself face-down in front of my icon wall, carpet soaked with my own tears. My wife and kids were gone, and I had no idea if I’d ever see them again. All the BS I’d told myself about everything, all my good intentions, strategies, plans had led to a moment when the words, “Thy will be done” was the only play left because my will had reached its natural end. Thankfully, that happened before I died.

Still, it took a couple more years after that sloppy moment to fully embrace the words, “Thy will be done.”

Why is it so hard to get there? Because we’re asking the self to deny itself, which is almost unimaginable. It’s like the analogy of the fish who is unaware of anything outside of his aquatic existence. It’s almost unthinkable to expect a pious mackerel to one day pray that he one day run a half-marathon in under two hours. Why would he? How could he?

Similarly, because our prayers are always the product of minds, hearts, and wills entirely attuned to what we want, in the way we want it, and most definitely when we want it, the idea of truly handing it all over to the One who seems, most of the time, distant or even uncaring, is, well, unthinkable.

But that’s the battle, isn’t it? That’s what every Athonite monk, every desert dweller, and every stylite has been telling us for 2,000 years: “Crush your will.”

Once you realize that this life is a literal battle, and the stakes are literal eternal life or death, it changes how you look at everything. The bills, the work struggles, basically the entirety of pop culture, all become background noise. (Still gotta pay those bills, though). It’s easy to see why the ascetics run to the farthest quiet places they can find.

I used to take a cynical view of monasticism - who are these guys to lecture us about anything until they have kids to feed or a payroll to meet? Now I understand it - they’re not retreating from the battle, they’re rushing to the front lines and fighting mercilessly.

Does that mean that the struggle of those of us in the world is “less than?” Not at all. The monks have said as much many times. I come across this all the time:

"If I read a hundred prayers in the silence of Athos a day, and you, in the noise of the city, with work and family responsibilities, read three prayers, then we are in the same position."
- St. Ephraim of Katounakia

I’m still intensely interested in making sure I take care of my family, in whatever form that takes going forward, but above all the practical concerns of the world I’m now obsessed with bringing monastic principles to everyday life. That’s what this publication is about. I have no interest in becoming a monk (at least not if I have to be obedient, which I realize is probably a failing I should look into), but during my time at the monastery I got a tour through the trenches on the front line of the real battle. Seeing the raging horde of fiery, enraged monsters leaping from their own trenches, headed our way with malevolent business in their eyes makes me say, “Uh, guys…”

We’ll see how it goes.

On the morning it happened, I woke to the sound of deer munching grass just outside of my cell window. A doe and her two fawns. Four days later I was looking out the ground-floor window of an Extended Stay motel, where the tweakers roamed the parking lot and every single vehicle was banged up in some way. Tulsa’s new premiere porno shop, “The Love Store,” beckoned from across the street. The hallways of the hotel smelled like wet, smoldering skunks.

It was such a hard life pivot that even I, with my second-guessing, skepticism, and pessimism couldn’t deny that it was a God-breathed milestone moment, and I ought to shut up and enjoy the ride.

As I think about it now, I realize that was probably the moment I stopped playing lip-service to the idea that “God is in control.”

Why did I get kicked out? That’s a dumb story for later. Try as I did, I didn’t have any true hard feelings toward those responsible. In fact, I’ve been back a couple of times - once to help with the yard work, which was my obedience while I was there.

By luck and grace I found a new home that was just this side of intolerable. Small, affordable, with a great pool if you didn’t mind broken Modelo bottles. I may have been the only gringo in the complex, but at least the view out my bedroom window wasn’t a porno shop.

In the year after that departure from the monastery, life somehow became more monastic. I worked. I prayed. I prepared simple meals. I slept.

Repeat.

Day by grinding day.

The main difference between monastic life and post-monastic life has been the solitude. After I came back to Tulsa, I got the OK to work from home, which marked the end of even the most casual interactions with other humans.

In the monastery, I was never really alone - On any given day, you might cross paths with monks, travelers, the odd bishop or rock star. Meals, while silent, were still with other people. We on the kitchen staff (another one of my duties) could never keep silent, despite the increasing frequency of signs with ever-growing font sizes. (I blame my buddy and brother Seraphim, the iconographer.)

The place was crammed full of people on Sundays. I met some pretty cool people from around the country while I was there, including Lacey Sturm, of whom I was already a fan. (Totally fan-girled out, though. She’ll probably never go back to St. Iakovos for fear of running into Theodore the Weird Leatherworker.)

In my new place, before the custody schedule was ironed out, there were sometimes weeks where I might not have spoken to another person in real life. (Online chats were more like sending messages in bottles from a deserted island rather than human interaction).

Let me tell you - if you’re not called to it, and if you don’t have an propensity for it, solitude can drive you insane. There are so many reasons why we need other people - we’re simply made for community, for one. We need other people in various ways and degrees. We believing types take it to a whole ‘nother level: we believe we’re part of one Body. It’s more difficult to exercise the most fundamental part of our nature when we’re cut off from that Body - we can’t exercise charity. Love.

Solitude can force one deep within, and for many (most?) of us, that’s a horrible place to be, especially these days when so much of our lives are lived online. We see the front everyone puts up, and in our solitary moments wonder why we aren’t more like them. Worse - when we’re deep in ourselves, we lack the objectivity needed to discard bad thoughts and behaviors.

As with most things, the spiritual walk is done mostly in darkness and fog. You can see the winding path behind you, but almost never in front of you. So, when I think about the last few years of struggle, I can see the wisdom and practical value of it. In this midst of it, my prayers mainly when like this: “What the hell?”

I’d thought that the monastery would be maybe a three-month reprieve. The wife and I would take a breather and work things out. I’d finally get my career on track. The peace and solitude would be the Great Reset, and I’d come out stronger, wiser, and maybe even more financially stable.

Haha. No. In reality, it was less of a retreat and a preparation for another preparation. I know now that if I’d gone to live alone after the end of my marriage - going right from at least the appearance of a tranquil family home to bachelor pad - I would not have made it. Probably not, anyway. I don’t see how I would have survived the jarring delta-V of my life, but the last few years revealed that I have an absolutely psychotic substrate of optimism and - get this - resolve.

Who knew?

So, what’s all this about?

Well, for one thing, I’m back to writing. Hi, everybody. Sorry I’ve been gone for so long.

Another thing: an announcement: I’m changing the name and direction of this publication. Why?

Because I figured everything out.

I’m not going to make any promises about when and how much writing I’m committing to because my track record on that is awful. However, I will say that I’m committed to heaving the main topic of this publication - me and my feelings - off a cliff.

I started Rise Above during Separation 1.0 as a way to untangle all the reasons for how I ended up couch-surfing after I let my wife kick me out during what should have been our marriage and career reboot way out here in Oklahoma. I was working so hard! I’d always tell myself. And I was, but the work was more like juggling chainsaws. While on fire. Not terribly productive. No momentum. Burning.

Then things got worse and harder and so on and so on. I didn’t realize it at first, but my prayers were being answered. My only freestyle prayer at that point was Peter’s prayer: “Lord, help!” So, He helped. But not in any of the comfortable ways I’d been praying for.

Let’s just rip these scales off, shall we, Eustace?

The monastery, and then the Year of Solitude in Little Nogales, were the demolition phase. Now it’s time for the real rebuild. I know it’s that time because I can now acknowledge that I’m utterly and completely incapable of helping myself, and I don’t even mind saying so. More than that, I think I’ve squared that apparent contradiction between faith and hustle, which has torn me apart since at least 2007. You know what I mean - We believer types are called to give ourselves completely over to God, but at the same time we still have bills to pay and make a billion decisions every day.

We pray, “Lord, what should I do?” There never seems to be an answer. It makes us be even more “self-reliant.” Which results in more misery, and on and on it goes.

Hardly a recipe for love and the flowering of faith.

I guess the ultimate elevator speech for what I’m trying to explain is that God doesn’t usually give us what we ask for if we’re retarded.

Anyway, I did a lot of reading at the monastery. Life-altering, eye-opening reading. In places and environments that prevented escape or distraction when the wisdom of these books got too close to home. It was change or die.

None of my problems or psychoses are unique. I see the same things played out in so many people’s lives. The solutions are ancient and simple. That’s what I’ll (I believe) be talking about going forward.

So, if you start getting newsletters from a publication called “Warrior Monk Society” that you don’t remember signing up for, don’t worry. It’s just me. Writing under a banner that is totally evergreen, not at all cheesy, and will certainly always be relevant. Hah.

Not to worry, though - I’m not a preacher and have no intention of preaching to anyone. I’m still me, and for better or worse, that’s what you’re going to get.

Thanks for reading.

-Christopher

“Daddy, can we listen to ‘Enter Sandman?’”

Thus saith my 12-year-old girl on the way back from a recent custody exchange. Me, a man who is still trying to fit into this Good Christian Father skin suit after all these years, raised an eyebrow, prepared a lecture—then said, “Absolutely.”

She has night terrors to a degree that makes me think it’s more than just her imagination. As with most things, I can’t really get into it here, but suffice it to say that, in response, I set my alarm for 3:00 AM most mornings to be ready to pray with her, either in person if she’s with me, or via chat for when she’s not.

She commandeers my phone and starts hunting for Sandman.

“Don’t you think that’s a scary song?” I asked her.

“No. It calms me down,” she says.

I get it. There’s always a time and place for Enter Sandman.

As we rocked back to my place, I wondered at how quickly times change—and how substantially—usually without us even noticing. Like 20 minutes ago, she was a 50lb, curly haired, strappy sandled little girl sleeping in my arms. Now she rides stallions and thinks she can take a bad guy in a fight.

Life comes at you fast, man...

That’s why I’m going to avoid sharing “resolutions” in this end-of-year post. I’m old enough to appreciate the futility of planning too much.

Still, I have some thoughts. Just...lighten up. I’m winging it here.

Monkish Solitude

I’m sorry I haven’t been around much since my last post, in which I believe I said I promised to write at least once per month. I wrote that in the days after I’d taken it in the teeth at court. I was in that lull between the promise of pain and the delivery of it, like in that that serene moment after, say, you’re cutting a piece of leather but get some finger, too. (A recent experience). Maybe I’m just slow, but I could compose entire symphonies in that moment after my nervous system says, “Stand by for pain…”

In other words, that hit...inspired some thinking.

I’m almost done thinking, though. I’m all thought out. The thoughts have been birthed, grew up, died. The memorial is on Tuesday.

I’m sick to death of thinking. This, of course, is a challenge when you’re a monk living in solitude. And when you think of yourself as a writer.

No, I’m not back at the monastery. Yet somehow I’m living more monastically than when I lived in Cell #11 at The Great Sacred Monastery of St. Iakovos. At St. Iakovos, there was an excellent chance of running into a monk, and a greater chance of running into one of the many visitors to the place. Even at trapeza (meal time), which was conducted in silence except for the voice of the reader (often me), it was social. During my time there, I thought it was a great way to be alone without being totally alone.

Now, though, I work from home, and as far as I know, there are no monks here, save one: Me.

Technically, I guess that makes me a hermit.

I wonder if I should be concerned—surely this level of solitude can’t be great for a social guy like me. If I grocery shopped prudently on Sunday, I wouldn’t have to leave the house until Friday. In fact, if there is any indication of any socialization problems, it’s this: I get highly irritable when I have to leave the house (although much of that comes from the expectation that my truck will die any day now...)

Still, I’m not complaining. As I’ve thought from the beginning of this marital catastrophe, it’s a gift, if probably used. The solitude and isolation is great for thinking and rebuilding, and I’m all done with thinking.

Digital Marination

One pitfall of the isolation is the digital world. No, I’m not talking about porn. I’ve been blessedly protected from that particular pitfall. I’m talking about social media, on which I have a tendency to overdose.

Just a quick scan of my feeds:

• Evidently, the west is being destroyed by immigrants, which is being orchestrated by the Jews.

• Men and women are evolving into two separate, incompatible species

• Both blacks and whites are calling for segregation.

That’s just for starters. There’s a pretty big contingent of UFOlogists saying that aliens have been here forever, but they’re not really aliens—they’re “trans-dimensional beings,” and they’re not friendly. Also, in my churchy world, I’d say it’s pretty well-accepted that AI is really demons.

Good times.

I’m above it all, of course. It’s just entertainment. Black-pilling, doom-scrolling, rage-baiting entertainment. I don’t believe any of it, of course. It’s just the unregulated wild west marketplace of ideas.

That, of course, is BS. You cannot marinate in a culture and remain unaffected. Fr. Moses McPhereson recently said somewhere, “St John Chrysostom says, essentially, ‘if a sick person and healthy person hang out, what’s more likely, the sick person getting well, or the healthy person getting sick?’”

Long story short, if I have any New Year’s Resolutions other than my already well-entrenched mission and goals, it’s to put some psychic distance between me and online “culture.” The things I want to do depend on getting eyeballs on my “stuff,” which, when you’re poor, means using social media, but I need to treat it like a business rather than entertainment. How I do that is another story.

Angry Men

I came across a guy in one of the groups I occasionally dip into. Looks young-ish—maybe late 20s. He’s Orthodox, but he’s angry. He’s quite possibly got some mental issues, which I would argue are really spiritual issues. He uses the therapeutic language of our time, “trauma-bonding,” “neurological,” etc. Nietzsche seems to be his co-pilot.

We’re both members of a certain group with a specific purpose, but he’s militantly opposed to that purpose, which tells me that for all his purported resistance to it, he’s bitter that he can’t embrace or operate within that mission.

He’s conflicted, in other words.

He’s one of thousands of men I’m seeing out there. The pissed-off, frustrated, discarded, disaffected, and dismissed.

I could easily become one of them. Easily. In fact, after everything blew up, now almost three years ago(!), I went there. I’m still trying to pry (pray?) the clutches of those thoughts from my soul.

How did I avoid going full Red Pill or even agnostic? I’ll go ahead and say grace, because that’s what we’re supposed to do, but I don’t “feel” that, so I’ll also say, resolve. By that I mean a conscious decision and daily re-commitment to fight through the brambles, weeds, and hordes sharp-clawed demons.

Here’s the thing, though: If I’m being honest, (and I’m too exhausted to be anything but honest), I have only the vaguest idea what I’m striving for. Not really. I can say “theosis,” or divinization. Salvation? Sure, why not?

Again, this is the script we’re supposed to use. I’m still learning my lines.

Whenever I envision this struggle, it picture something like a rocky path winding through an ancient, untamed forest. I can see a light through the trees. It looks like there’s a mountain in front of the light (for some reason it looks exactly like Mt. Hood). I can’t tell if there’s a city out there, or God, or what. It’s just a brilliant light many, many miles in the distance.

I’m not sure what’s out there, but it seems good and it seems like I should probably try to get there.

Am I A Fat Russian?

I often think of one of the the final scenes in the movie 2012 (a guilty pleasure right up there with “The Core.”) One of the main characters is a fat, indulgent Russian billionaire. He’s the father of fat twin boys. He has a surgically enhanced 20-something girlfriend. Everything about the guy says wealth and excess. However, in his final moments, he pauses to look at a picture of his wife, apparently remembering better times, or maybe even questioning why he left that life.

The billionaire sacrifices himself in his very last moment. Sacrifices himself for his boys. The literal ark is leaving. He gets one boy on the ship, but it has pulled away too far for his second boy to reach it. He doesn’t think—he acts. He bends down, grabs his boy by the hips, and—in a move that probably tests his atrophied and flabby muscles to their absolute limit, or, maybe through finding power within himself that maybe he even didn’t know he had—he launches his second son up to the ramp of the departing ark ship.

The effort costs him everything. He saves his son, but loses his own life, plunging down into the bottom of the crevasse hundreds of feet below. If the fall doesn’t kill him, the trillion gallons of inbound tsunami water assuredly will.

For some reason I identify with that guy, although I am presently short on luxury cars and trophy girlfriends...

Hopeless thoughts? I don’t think so. In fact, despite the lack of feeling on the matter, I AM incredibly grateful for this struggle. I’m glad to be “awake,” as it were. If you were an alien dropping in to 2026 America, you might think that the entire infrastructure of our existence, our entire reason for being, is to be happy and entertained.

The struggle of these past few years had broken me of that. This life is a battlefield. You’re kidding yourself if you think the purpose of life is to be happy and content. We should be joyful, sure. Absolutely. And that’s surprisingly attainable. But if you find yourself content, maybe with a little nagging concern in the back of your mind that something isn’t quite right, well, prepare for incoming.

A Note From My Sister

Like I said at the outset (at least with this draft. Haha. Who knows?), I’m not going to give my list of resolutions or make any promises. I have a horrible track record with that. All I’ll say is that the flood waters are receding, leaving some really interesting shapes of things behind. These are the stepping stones I’ll use to cross the swamp.

I’ll share this, though: I resolve to start every day with prayer before I pick up that phone. That damned phone. I’m not saying I’ll pray before I make the coffee—let’s be real here—but once I get that pot brewing, I’ll prostrate before my icons of Christ, his Mother, and St. Theodore the Commander, put my forehead on the floor, and start they day properly.

One last thing: my sister is a fantastic writer. She doesn’t write here on Substack, but she is adept at slaying words and pinning their corpses to the page everywhere I’ve seen her do it. She even has a book published now. If you need some help with your resume or job search, check this out.

Word is, she has a fiction book in the works, too.

Her New Year’s reflection post on Facebook is pretty good. In fact, it’s penetrating. Perhaps your mileage will vary, but it’s worth quoting in full (or nearly so):

As this year comes to a close, I’m thinking about how much can change in twelve months.

Last night I was able to spend time with some peeps I love so, so much and haven’t seen in years. At one point, we started talking about life, work, and how none of us really knows what we’re doing. Not one of us! We all laughed when I said that I just fake it when I don’t know what I’m doing.

People are sometimes aghast to hear that. Or maybe surprised that I say it out loud. But I think this is information that everyone deserves to have and to use.

We all agreed that most people are just doing their best, figuring things out as they go. The most successful people aren’t the ones who have it all figured out...they’re just the ones who keep going until one day, they don’t have to fake it quite as much anymore.

This wasn’t an easy year for me. There were some heavy days. Weeks. Some days I just showed up and did the best I could with what I had. And still… things *changed*. Dreams took shape in really big and amazing ways. My work found its way, very publicly, into the world. New paths opened that didn’t exist this time last year.

If you’re ending this year tired, overwhelmed, or feeling like you’re unworthy—please know this: you are not behind, and you are not alone. No one else knows exactly what they’re doing. No one. Not a damn one of us I’m telling you, we are all living our lives on perpetually new sets of training wheels.

The year ahead will arrive whether you feel ready or not, and so many good things can happen simply because you kept showing up to your life...even if you have to do it scared. Maybe especially if you have to do it scared.

I am wishing you so much gentleness, courage, and unexpected joy in the year ahead. You deserve it.

Having no other place to go, but not wanting to bring further grief to the abbot, I drove out to the edge of the large property. There was a cozy little camping spot in the lee of a small copse of trees. I’d once seen a bobcat slinking into the woods from that copse. I’d seen skunks and raccoons there, and just across the strip of field from the copse was a wild forest where I’d seen the biggest buck I’d ever seen in Oklahoma. Maybe anywhere. I’d always wanted to camp there, and since that was likely one of my last nights at the monastery, time was of the essence.

The rain began immediately after I’d slid into my sleeping bag. So, instead of sleeping under the stars, I got no sleep on my back seat under a dome light.

I thought about what I was going to do next. My vision of the future was as dark as the forest outside, although just as the flashes of lightning revealed ominous shapes in the forest outside my window, I could imagine some monsters on the road ahead.

I took a walk the next morning. Technically I wasn’t supposed to be there, and technically I’d given the impression that I’d already left by hiding my truck overnight (with me in it), but I’d been walking my path every morning for the last two years, a cup of coffee in one hand, and a prayer rope in the other. Old habits died hard.

The sky was doing weird things. Post-storm, the clouds made epic constructions that could easily have been the abode of Titans. Towering, multi-colored cumulonimbus clouds that caught the sunrise from their pinnacles in the stratosphere, all the way down to Oklahoma.

This is what I saw when I rounded the corner of the monastery, facing the west gate:

I laughed when I saw it. Then I wept a little bit. Then I did both. That’s a portal, I thought, loudly.

It didn’t take much imagination to “read” the “sign.” The Elder had made it abundantly clear that it was time to move on, regardless of my (or anyone else’s) thoughts on the matter. Some questioned his methods or pronouncements. Others will swear his decisions are God-breathed. Some call him a heretic. Others call him a living saint. A mystic.

At that moment, I thought he was deranged, but I couldn’t deny the spectacle in front of me. It was easy to believe he had some kind of foresight It was time to go, and...it was going to be okay. I had, hopefully through grace and time, reached some new milestone.

These are melodramatic thoughts, I know. They’re my attempt to clothe immaterial, sentimental spectres in some roughly stitched animal skins for better visibility. They’re private thoughts. Don’t tell anybody.

I’m talking about this now because I just got kicked in the teeth. And to ensure the message was received, the messenger added a few hob-bailed boot kicks to my groin, and then pounded a sign into the ground on which I writhed that said, “Here lies Nancy.”

I can’t talk about it, but it’s related to my Situation. Maybe someday I’ll be able to. For now it’s only important to know that it foreshadows imminent future hits. The hell of it is I delivered most of the hits myself.

I was trying to process this, as they say, the whole remaining day after the beating. In the late afternoon, my son K came through the front door and beckoned me to come see something outside. This is what he wanted to show me:

Another rainbow. Another “portal” moment.

My whole body felt heavy, as though I had been sentenced to walk the earth under a hyper-localized extra G of gravity made just for me. Nerves buzzed. My eyes felt like they’d inflated by a couple of Pascals.

Nonetheless, I laughed. The meaning was undeniable, even to me, who can look into the sun and question its existence.

On both rainbow occasions, I thought of the “Cloud Gate” in Daniel Suarez’s very re-readable novel, “Freedom (TM),” where the protagonist Peter Sebeck is unwillingly tasked with finding a justification for humanity’s freedom. A psychotic game developer unleashed a daemon on the world that wreaked a lot of havoc and threatened to reorder society in the service of daemon. (A “daemon” is a program that runs continuously in the background, executing processes without user interaction, but it’s pronounced just like “demon.”)

It’s a believable story about reality becoming “gamified.” Sebeck is given a “high quest” in the game. He, like everyone else, has HUD glasses that augment reality in various ways. For Sebeck, he sees a long illuminated path in his HUD. He’s supposed to follow it to certain milestones and learn what he can in order to inform his big decision at the end.

I thought about that both times I saw these rainbows. They’re milestones. Portals, I suppose, to the next level. Seeing them in moments of maximum anxiety, in relatively quick succession, sends a message I’m eager to believe: It’s all going to be okay.

It’s been awhile since I last wrote, I know. I don’t know why it’s harder to write in summer. Current circumstances don’t allow for all the fun summertime stuff. No vacations. No road trips. Maybe a little pool time.

I work, I come home, I work, I go to my day job, I work, I come home, I collapse. The Situation generates malignant situations, single (impoverished) fatherhood is no joke, and praying that my truck stays on the road for just a little while longer takes up the rest of my time.

The writing on the wall is less like script and more like a living room wall-spanning jumbotron:

“YOU CAN’T DO ALL THE THINGS.”

This is distressing, because the remaining things are the distilled remainders of high ambitions. Things I believe I’m called to do. But here’s a lesson for all you creative and artistic types: Before you can do the Noble Things, you need to get some basics down first. Things like survival.

This has been a harsh lesson as well.

It’s been a busy summer.

So, of the remaining three projects I’ve been juggling, I’ve had to prioritize a side hustle that has the most immediate promise. Nothing else has the potential to close the gaps like this one thing. So, I’m all in on it.

It’s the engraving thing. It was never intended to be an income-replacement hustle, and it still isn’t, but for the time-being I can go from idea to sale in a fraction of the time it takes to, say, build a subscriber base.

I’m relaunching a couple of ecommerce sites. More on that soon. Here’s a snippet of what I’ve been working on:

I’ve lost a few subscribers over the last few months. A couple of them paid subscribers. I don’t blame them a bit. In fact, I want to tell all my paid subscribers that if you don’t think you’re getting any value here, my feelings won’t be hurt if you downgrade your subscription. I would.

Actually, really quickly on that point, a word: I don’t actually know what I’m doing.

When I started this publication, it was during Separation 1.0. I hadn’t yet taken it seriously, the problems in my marriage. Smashed on self-improvement blogs, men’s rights issues, and hustle culture, it seemed smart to catalog and isolate all the issues that led me to this place. “I can help other men!”

What a laugh. Even after the monastery, that substantially aged and theoretically wizened mission kept creaking along. However, I regret to inform you that mission has passed. Maybe someday it will be resurrected, but for now, I can’t keep up the act myself. I don’t know what I’m doing.

Here’s what I can promise, though: I’ll publish at least once per month. The marketing plan for the engraving biz involves a lot of social media work, so I should--if I can slay the fears that keep me from doing it--be publishing a lot more notes here. (Notes, as in this platforms version of X/Twitter). It’s literally life or death for my ability to provide for my family, so...you know, I should do it.

That’s it for now.

--Chris

PS--I hope this didn’t sound morose or depressed. I’m not going to lie--I’ve been in a better place--but I’m alright. Just tired. Very, very tired. However, I know it’s going to be okay because, hey, rainbows.

Two weeks ago I was thinking I'd write something light and short. I brainstormed it a bit and came up with the opposite of "light and short":

"How to figure out what to do with your life."

Dang it.

I've been working on this more or less every day for two weeks, laying down intricate plans and procedures, then immolating it all with a keystroke and starting over.

It's been taking forever because I was having a hard time believing my own advice. How am I, the guy who might be just now figuring it out at 51, going to explain how others should figure out what to do with their lives?

I guess you could say that I tried everything else, and this is what I've learned. Yeah, let's go with that.

This "Life Purpose" thing has been on my mind quite a bit for, oh, the last 35 years or so. However, it's even more relevant now because my 15-year-old son, K, lives with me in this weird phase of life. He is an absolute predator when it comes to learning new things—he hunts facts and concepts down all day long for weeks at a time. And now he's turning his deeply objective mind to "what he wants to do with his life."

So, in a way, this is for him, but it's most certainly for my other children, as well as for any man who struggles with the question, "What should I do with my life?"

If you're one of those people who always knew exactly what they wanted to do, sought AND obtained it, and have lived a life of peace and abundance for as long as you've been a conscious entity, this probably isn't for you. You can click over to an article about crypto or whatever.

Freak.

By the time I was 15, I'd been a reader for as long as I could remember. Unfortunately, my earliest formation was Stephen King and some truly awful fantasy series that, way back in parachute pants days, set me on a crass literary path. Still, it was at that time that I realized I wanted to be a writer. Perhaps not a "novelist" because that's a title for really, really super serious writers. But...definitely a "writer."

However, the odds always seemed horrific. This was long before the Internet and self-publishing opportunities like this. Publishing companies remained the uncontested gatekeepers of that dream. It was a massive enough barrier to entry that I, in my pre-hustle days, bravely retreated.

So, I piddled around and tried to figure out more practical paths forward. "When I'm settled and have the time, I'll write." Even then I knew, or at least had a dread feeling about, that "strategy." I remember that I basically had a prophetic vision that I would one day wake up and realize most of my life was gone, and I had no time to actually do The Thing.

That, of course, is exactly what is happening now.

It was all fear and insecurity. From the get-go, I let fear rule me. I wrote a little bit about fear here.

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That fear, and all the vices bred from indecision and "missing the target" of one's life purpose, inevitably—and totally predictably, in hindsight—led to the near-total crash-out of my life. I was always trying to do The Other Thing rather than The One Thing.

Learn from my mistakes, my brothers and sisters...

When I crashed—wife left with the kids, business cratered, new hustle was on life support—I went to live at a monastery. I thought, "Ah! This is the opportunity I need to rebuild!" I threw myself into my side hustles, trying to be productive around my day job and monastic duties.

I was in quicksand. No matter what I did, it just seemed to breed more busywork.

It seemed to me then—and many years prior to the monastery time—that there was a force holding me back. I would always dismiss the thought as something a lazy or stupid person would say, (“It’s not my fault! It’s a FORCE!”), but it was always there, and always impassable.

When I was finally kicked out (story here), I was nowhere near ready to re-enter the world, and despite the panic, I felt an absolute certainty that "it was time." I didn't make that determination, though. He did.

One thing seemed really clear: God didn't drop-kick me to the monastery in order to try to rebuild my business and my life in what I thought would be a few quick months. He punted me there to rewire my mind and soul in two ways: to learn from the suffering and to get an emergency infusion of monastic wisdom. Over nearly two years, He ground me down until I had the right perspective, the right priorities, and an appreciation for the process. The Path got a lot clearer at my half-century mark.

Perspective

Ultimately, the purpose of life is pretty clear: Union with God in this life and the next.

Our time here is finite. We're going to kick the bucket and enter eternity at any moment. Whatever we are is what we will likely be...forever.

Everything we do in life needs to flow from this understanding.

It is easy to forget this at the beginning of your life when you're trying to make the grade or get into a good college. It's especially hard when you have a family and the wolf is at the door.

Nonetheless, is there something more important than remembering your death and the one, true purpose of your life?

I struggled with this for many years. I still do, although far less so. My job, as I saw it from the first day of my marriage, was to protect and provide for my family. As life and marriage became increasingly more difficult, I'd beg God for direction, guidance, and eventually straight-up miracles. I could feel it all slipping away, which frustrated me to my core because isn't this my purpose in life? To protect and provide for my family? Wouldn't God honor that and help me out?

If you go to the Church Fathers or scripture to seek answers to the purpose of your life, you're pretty much going to get the same advice:

• Pray

• Fast

• Be humble

• Repent

• Accept whatever happens to you

• Love everybody

This is what has tripped me up for decades. "Yes, of course we should love God, blah, blah, blah. But I've got bills to pay. I can't spend all my time begging God for forgiveness or saying holy, holy, holy this and that."

Nonetheless, this is what you get from the fathers—from men who have set aside every distraction to seek union with God. (Theosis, we call it.) "Pray and fast" is kind of their only answer to the question of one’s life purpose.

The fathers are pretty clear about the application of this perspective in your life: If you're a monk, do monk things. If you're a husband in the world, do husband things. Either way, the way to integrate both paths is through simplicity and moderation.

"The more we have, the more complicated our lives become. The more things we own, the more we have to worry about their care and preservation. All of these issues, although not sinful or wrong, are distracting and keep us from pursuing the one thing which alone is needful. The simpler we can make our lives, the more we can lower our financial obligations, the freer we become, the fewer cares we have, and the more we can pursue God undistractedly!"

--Ascending the Heights, a Layman's Guide to the Ladder of Divine Ascent

I'd lost that perspective, and God evidently wasn't going to reinforce my delusions. Suffering was the natural consequence of desiring, fundamentally, things that were "not God," as needful as they might have seemed.

I needed to reprioritize.

Priorities

If you're anything like me and most of the modern Christian west, you think of your life as a linear path. "THIS is the path God has laid out for me. The slightest deviation will thwart God's plans for me."

You can see how neurotic this can make a person.

I can't say for sure that there is no one path, but I'm highly skeptical. What I'm sure of is that if you fall off the path, it doesn't mean game over. God factored in your stupidity long before He made you.

Need proof? Look at the entire arc of salvation history. If that isn't evidence that there is no path, or rather, that the path is crooked, loopy, completely absent, and may in fact involve numerous deus ex machinas, then I don't know what to tell you.

You're not wrecking God's delicate, irreplaceable plans for you if, say, you chose marine biology as a major instead of medicine. Your "path" isn't even wrecked if you choose the wrong spouse. (Crossing fingers). Even if you revel in objectively evil sins that cry out to God for vengeance, you're still not irredeemable.

Why? Remember the purpose of your life: union with God. "He who sits upon the throne says, 'Behold, I make all things new,'" after all. (Rev 21:5).

*Note: Renewal process may include painful realignment, weeping and gnashing of teeth, long dark nights of the soul, fire, bleeding wounds, bloody rivers, and locusts.

My point: God is always with you, even when you jump the fence to see what most tourists are not authorized to see; even when—especially when—you slip in the scree and go bouncing down the cliff.

So, it's best to get this straight in the beginning: God first, everything else second. Whatever else you do with your life, whatever ambitions you have or goals and objectives you may set before yourself, begin and end every day with God.

I need to keep it simple for reasons of time constraints and sanity. No matter what else is going on in life (household administration, custody battle, literally 50 clients on hold, or, occasionally, writing), I begin my day with a one-mile prayer walk and two simple prayers. I end my day with at least two other simple prayers. I do this no matter how I "feel." THAT is what prioritizing the holy things looks like as a man "in the world." It's the daily choice we make to seek God.

***

Great, so how does that help you to figure out what you should do with your life?

I'm getting to that. Although, to be honest, you're probably not going to like it.

Respect the Process

I'm going to tell you something I've found to be absolutely true. Your mileage may vary, but the revelation of it was comforting, if also a little bit frustrating:

You will never see a clear path from A to Z. This is a feature, not a bug.

When you're prioritizing God before all things, bracketing the beginning and end of your day with prayer, and suffusing it with prayers throughout, the practical life and career choices will more often than not seem utterly disconnected with the bright, shiny vision you have as your end goal.

Some (most?) of you see that palace on a hill the whole time. But there's a Valles Marineris-grade gulf between you and it, isn't there?

CAPTION: Thomas Cole's "The Voyage of Life: Youth." When I lived near DC, every trip to the Smithsonian Museums required a quick pop-in to view these paintings.

This is why a lot of guys consistently freak out and jump to a whole different Path again and again.

Moments of clarity and confidence in your purpose will be rare. They come in unexpected moments, like little packages of peace airdropped from the other side of the Veil. They can't be planned, only accepted. They leave silently, too. One moment you're feeling strong and confident, almost assured of victory. The next moment you think your objective is stupid.

In those long hustle-and-grind phases of life, we lose sight of the ultimate vision, often because we've lost perspective, and we tend to think we've left the path. So, we "pivot." But that path doesn't seem right, so we pivot again, all the while thinking that we screwed it up.

In reality, every moment, every U-turn, every unexpected difficulty, is adding another layer to the YOU who will live in eternity.

This has been one of the hardest things for me to grasp, much less believe in. My life is a sampler platter of random delicacies, much of it made of tofu and spam. There's no logic in it. No Unified Field Theory. It's chaos!

No. It's just the process. For reasons that will likely not be known until I behold the Beatific Vision, my salvation will be worked out in this way, in these circumstances, with these trials. It is uniquely for me, for whatever me God envisioned long before I was born.

Trusting in that seems absurd, which is why He covers life in the fog of war. It's so that we will keep moving forward. It forces us to trust, which is what this is all about. It reminds us, minute-by-minute, to inflate the words "Thy will be done" with a little conviction.

“Why do men learn through pain and suffering [and work. –Me], and not through pleasure and happiness? Very simply, because pleasure and happiness accustom one to satisfaction with the things given in this world, whereas pain and suffering drive one to seek a more profound happiness beyond the limitations of this world.

--Seraphim Rose

We are being built in this life, much like a 3D printer builds structures one layer at a time. As every new nanometer-thick layer is laid down, the shape begins to emerge. It's going to look weird for a long time. The finished product is hidden. Sometimes you'll be able to guess at the final shape, and sometimes you'll be right, but it's not over until it's over.

Slightly more practical

So, with your perspective set, your actions prioritized, and your comfort with the process established, how do you decide to set the "permanent" course of your life? I really only have one piece of advice:

MOVE.

Do things. Meet people. Put yourself in uncomfortable situations.

I realize that may not be terribly practical. It may be useful only to people who have no clue what they want to do with their lives. Nonetheless, it's universally true: motion creates emotion...or clarity. The chances of sitting around and figuring out a life plan from an inert position (even with AI) are slim. To see the path, you've got to start walkin'. When the scenery changes, opportunities emerge.

A few more suggestions:

• Choose a direction. Whatever the career or project, just aim for it. If your perspective and priorities are set, you'll be okay even with the surprise detours along the way. There will be detours.

• Be helpful. Figure out what people need and help them get it. You'll never lack something to do.

• Finish things. Don't jump from thing to thing to thing. See things through to the end.

• Close the gap between what you dream and what you must do, concretely, actively, every single day. "Someday" has a way of never coming even when, or perhaps specifically because, we "hope" for things.

The work we do may or may not be transcendently important. But work we must. Ideally, the "What" checks all the boxes: It's lucrative, fun, and meaningful. It seems harder and harder to get all three of those these days, though. Maybe if you're lucky you'll get two of the three. However, keep the perspective and your priorities straight, and you'll do just fine.

The old guys say that life gets faster the older you get. (Since it feels like life is screaming by at Warp Factor 9, I guess that means I'm an old guy now.) They'll also tell you that life goes places you never expected. And, at least according to the testimony of those who have either had near-death experiences or those holy warrior monks who have achieved theoria, don't worry--it's all going to be alright.

I'm sorry if this was a bait-and-switch. If you were reading this thinking that, finally, someone was going to tell you exactly what to do with your life and how to make it happen, my bad. All I can do is share my experience.

I think my experience is fairly common—even the people I know who seem to have it all together still struggle with that nagging feeling that something isn't right. Or maybe there's more? Or maybe they've made a huge mistake...

Here's what I wish I could have told my 15-year-old self, and what I'm trying to tell my sons now: You don't have to have it all figured out. In fact, it’s spiritually perilous to try to plan and control how your whole life will go.

Besides, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy,” they say. When your whole life is a battle (and it most certainly is), plans will consistently take withering fire. It’s better to cultivate a stance mindset of preparedness. An attitude of readiness. And resolution to endure through the cannon smoke.

Voice mode was down. When I switched back to text and asked about the problem, Grok noted that X's new AI "Ani" feature was also affected by the outage.

Figures.

Also: Gross.

At that very moment, potentially millions of men were "interfacing" with X's new risqué woman-simulacrum with overt pedophiliac features. Twitter/X/Elon is calling them "Companions.” They’re anime-inspired cartoon woman-children in skimpy costumes that they're more than eager to discard with the right prompts.

The first thing that came to mind when I saw the name "companion" was Inara Serra from Firefly. She was called a "companion," but she was basically a high-society courtesan—a prostitute. It's surely no accident that Elon, a confirmed sci-fi geek, knew exactly what he was doing when he called his new hooker mod (just $30 bucks a month!) a "companion."

We knew this was coming, didn't we? Even if the acrimony between the sexes wasn't at an all-time high, it's still a compelling product in its own right: "An always-on, always encouraging, always-available woman that I build to spec? Sign me up!"

And this is basically just Version 1.0. You will no doubt be able to upload your carefully crafted AI Companion to Turing-busting…er…“pleasure robots” in the very near future.

This is going to be so bad for men—and I mean that with genuine concern. During yesterday's hype-nami about the "Companions'" roll-out, even a gay guy was all a-flutter about “her.”

Why? Because it follows the same marketing formula that's made the quasi-homosexual "Red Pill" movement so successful: "You have a real problem. It's not your fault. Here's the drop-dead easy solution that requires no effort on your part to make all your dreams come true."

The Red Pill narrative goes like this: Women are vicious. Women are evil. Their nature is defective. They're good for only one thing, but they're only giving that one thing to the top 10 percent of men. Et cetera.

As one of the "discarded" men myself, I get why this ideology is compelling. But it's deeply flawed—I know too many good women, and I'm raising a couple of amazing ladies who are nothing like these vicious stereotypes. Yes, the culture sells a vision of empowerment that leads directly to the kind of character the Red Pillers are right to attack, but we dudes have our own nature viruses as well.

Regardless of the nuance there, men are going their own way (MGTOW). They're abandoning marriage and family because it seems pointless. Marriage, in its current state, feels far too risky—it's a contract that rewards the one who breaks it. There appears to be no benefit for men.

It's a virulent ideology in large part because there's so much truth to it. Anyone who has been burned by a marital explosion knows what I mean. Why on earth would any man in his right mind want to risk that again?

Fortunately for the survival of the species, hormones keep population levels from completely cratering. Red Pillers' mortal foes are boobs.

But this is going to, well, neuter men.

Enter Companions. (So to speak).

I don't know all the specs for these digital creatures—a real journalist would dive in and explore the new "tool," but there's no way I'm actually doing that. From what I can gather from X chatter, it's part of SuperGrok (the $30/month subscription), which is evidently revolutionary and smart and useful for every digital task. (I’m getting revolutionary innovation fatigue). And apparently, there are levels to the companions. On Level 5, your companion switches from a sexy maid costume to see-through lingerie.

How do you level-up? Interaction, basically. It gamifies seduction. You unlock achievements.

This is basically how "men" have been treating relationships for years. "What do you bring to the table?" they ask. Maybe it's an instinct with us—if we do X, Y, and Z, we get affection tokens. We work all day, get that paycheck, and instinctively expect some sort of respect or affection.

That...doesn't really work in actual relationships. We have to, like, talk and stuff. "Be present." Care about her stupid problems.

Companions remove all of that complicated lady-feelings stuff. We do the work, level up, and are duly rewarded. Presumably there is no downward leveling unless, perhaps, you let your subscription lapse.

I'll hand it to Elon—he knows how to sell directly to the ID. Guys are going to fall for this by the millions.

From a Christian perspective, this isn't just about sexual ethics—though it's certainly about that. It's about the fundamental nature of authentic relationship versus counterfeit intimacy.

God created us for relationship—with Him first, then with others. The entire arc of salvation history is about God pursuing authentic relationship with fallen humanity. When we choose the counterfeit over the authentic, we're not just making a lifestyle choice; we're rejecting the fundamental pattern of reality itself.

Authentic relationship requires vulnerability, sacrifice, and the risk of genuine rejection. It demands that we grow, change, and become more than we are. A "companion" that can be programmed, leveled up, and controlled offers none of these challenges, and therefore none of the actual rewards.

This is the difference between eros (desire) and agape (love). Eros seeks to possess and consume; agape seeks to give and serve. The companion model is pure eros—it's about getting what we want when we want it, without any of the costly work of actual love.

I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but it needs to be said because even the most rock-solid Chad is going to be tempted by this thing.

This isn't happening in a vacuum. We're in the middle of a broader crisis of authentic masculinity. The secular "NoFap" movement has been growing precisely because men are recognizing that pornography destroys their ability to form real relationships. It “erodes their power.” Studies show that regular porn use correlates with decreased relationship satisfaction, increased likelihood of divorce, and reduced empathy for women.

Just as we were seeing some progress—men recognizing that porn was sapping their power and motivation—this THING comes along that doesn't just ignore the perils of porn, it quadruples down on them. Loss of connection to an "other," impatience with loved ones, need for immediate gratification—companions amplify all of these problems.

So how do we avoid falling into this trap? Same way as every other gross violation of virtue and sins that cry out to God for vengeance:

1. Pray - Obviously

2. Log off - Limit digital consumption, especially social media

3. Lift heavy things - Builds strength and discipline: motion is medicine

4. Read a good book - Feed your mind with truth, goodness, and beauty

5. Get some sun on your face - God’s there, by the way.

Get back to the real.

Men need to take a stand against this right now. Start with yourself—refuse to let it entice you. Then help your brothers do the same. We're not just fighting for our own souls; we're fighting for the possibility of authentic human connection in an increasingly fake world.

Like a psychopath.

I asked him what was on his mind. He looked at me and gave me that grin that, to anyone who doesn’t know him, might be taken as, well, odd. That boy has a lot going on in there at any given time. He always has. He goes deep.

Today, he’s bored. It’s summer, so school (even homeschool) is out, and we live in a neighborhood that could not be more useless for an active young man. When I saw him sitting there on the couch, my heart broke. Again. Whatever the events that led to this time of divided family and weird living situations, I take full responsibility. His lack of activity—and opportunity—falls on me.

I didn’t want to give him another, “Just hold on—it will all work out” speech. They never really land anyway. So, I shared with him my vision. The thing that keeps me going. It’s more of an aspiration. A whispered hope. A thing that if I ever obtain it, I’ll know I’ve reached “base.”

But I didn’t speak it. I drew it.

I grabbed a marker and got to work on the big whiteboard in our living room. (This place is less a home and more of an incubator of entrepreneurial projects.) I drew—or attempted to draw—the vision in my mind of what success will look like. It’s not pavement-clawing supercars or 16-room mansions. No. For me, particularly in this stage of life and after all that has happened, success is a quiet cabin on a mountain somewhere. It’s surrounded by green forest and hard, gray outcroppings of stone and, ideally, a path leading down to a sandy beach near an ocean.

It’s a high place. A vast place. A wild place.

It’s a place where I can read and think and be with God.

This is what I sketched:

My mom is an artist. Her father was an architect. Her brother is an architect.

I am artistically retarded when it comes to hand-drawing things. Obviously.

When I got home from work tonight, my son had taken that vision and cleaned it up. Here’s his vision:

I know—I’m just the dad. I’d be amazed if he painted a rock purple and put googly eyes on it.

Except…

He took my vision and made it his—and made it better.

He was finishing up as I walked in around 9:30 last night. He looked up, blew the charcoal off the picture, and said, “I made something.”

I’d struggled to sketch my vision with four different colors, none of which represented nature very well. (Hot pink?) He sketched it with one—a graphite #2 pencil. I don’t know where he learned the technique that turned hard gray lines into diffused gradients, or how re used it to represent sunlight. Shadows? I didn’t even think of that. Somehow the shadows and textures of the mountain valley register somewhere under the consciousness.

He took my crude vision and refined it. Elevated it.

I’m reminded of something I heard frequently in the brief years when my wife and I worked together to build a homeschool consultation business. Anyone in that space will know what I’m talking about:

“They will love what you love.”

I’m reminded of this every day. Our kids model our behavior—the good and the bad. My oldest loves SciFi movies. My oldest girl loves books. My youngest…Not sure yet. I think she loves love. They all have an annoying sarcastic wit, and there’s no doubt where that comes from.

Fortunately, they are seeking the Good, True, and Beautiful, too. In their own ways. Their fledgling beliefs, however, rest on our love of the transcendent.

K is still working on his life’s vision. He is only 15, after all. But for now, he loves what I love. One might say he refined and elevated it. After all, he loves mountains and oceans, too. A quiet, secluded cabin? What’s not to love?

He’s still bored, but the vision took root. He knows we’re not just struggling to exist, but to reach that very attainable place where we can take a break—maybe forever—from the strife and division in our life.

He lives with me now. I’m glad to have him. It’s a strange season for us, we two bachelors building a household from the ground up. In many ways it’s fun. Yes, fun. Perhaps you’ve never known the joy and excitement of finding a big crockpot for $10 at a thrift store. I pity your diminished existence.

The downside—one of them, anyway—is that I still report to a day job. The ultimate goal is for me to build a career I can do from anywhere, on my own time, but until then, punch that clock, donkey.

This means that K is home alone for a long stretch of time. My neighborhood seems to be in a complete dead zone vis-a-vis bike trails, parks, etc. We’ve been looking for a summer job for him, but until he’s fluent in Spanish, that will be problematic. And besides, he is only 15. Unhirable.

That pushes him to the computer, especially since he’s using the time to learn Python and other programming languages. We have some video games on the computer—a conscious decision on my part because it’s been years since we’ve just been normal. Standing against the world as a general in the culture wars is exhausting. Besides—when the kids are here they keep stealing my laptop, a.k.a. my Everything Tool.

He’s a good kid. He’s been praying the St. Michael prayer for at least a decade. He reminds me to pray at the end of the day before he goes to bed. I’m perhaps more proud of him about that than anything else. However, I’m not naive. I know the boy is walking through a minefield. Many years ago, several lifetimes ago, during a time when everyone wore something called “parachute pants” for some reason, a young boy I used to be found a Wonder Bread bag full of porno mags in a neighbor kid’s tree fort.

The world has not become more virtuous since.

Nowadays, we have the Internet: 24/7 bacchanalia where amoral barbarians of every age prey on young souls, and here I am, his father, forced to spend most of my day working for food tokens while he faces these dangers largely alone.

The weight of his vulnerability keeps me up at night.

But when I finally sat down with him for The Talk, something unexpected happened. What I'd imagined would be an awkward, fumbling disaster became something else entirely. He listened. Despite having to navigate delicate territory, the conversation flowed naturally because it was necessary—it was one of those moments that had to be, so it was, and it happened.

I get why most fathers avoid the conversation. Discomfort, sure, but maybe it’s the acute awareness of their own hypocrisy on the subject. (It goes without saying, dads—break the chains if you’re wrapped in them.)

More action is required. A dad can’t have The Talk, clap his hands once, and be done with it. You need to trust your sons, but you also have to protect them from themselves. You may have learned how to avoid the pornographic pitfalls, but young men who aren’t yet bloodied in battle—young men with nuclear grade hormones and an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex—they don’t have the experience. At that stage of life, “Don’t look at porn” is mainly a battle of the will, and that’s a muscle still in development.

We are at war, and leaving our sons to fight it alone is nothing short of abandonment.

You’ve probably seen the statistics: The average age of first exposure to pornography is now 11 years old. (That’s about when I stumbled into it). By age 17, 84% of males have viewed pornography.

Even worse, it may be that ten percent (!) of women U.S. women between the ages of 18-24 “create content” on OnlyFans, the make-your-own-pornography-from-home platform. I’ve seen stats like this floating around for awhile. If it’s only half-true, does that make it better?

I worry for my sons because there’s a far-greater-than-zero chance that when they make it into the dating pool, they’re going to have to consciously filter out online prostitutes.

I worry for my girls because there will be enormous peer pressure to get into online prostitution. That, and there’s more than a chance that the boys they find will already have years of struggling with porn behind them.

I don’t think I have to bitch and moan about the state of the world. “In my day, that was unthinkable!” It’s obvious to anyone with eyes: this is horrific.

Young men exposed to pornography show increased rates of depression, anxiety, and social isolation. They struggle with unrealistic expectations in relationships, decreased empathy, and a distorted understanding of intimacy. The very thing that promises pleasure becomes a prison that steals their capacity for genuine connection and love.

I want my sons to grow up into happy, holy, self-disciplined men. I want them to understand that their masculinity is a gift—but it needs to be exercised and nurtured. I want them to know that they’re called to be protectors and providers—men who stand between the innocent and the chaos of the world.

None of that happens by accident. It happens when fathers do the hard work of actually fathering—when we stop outsourcing the most important conversations to the internet, to schools, to culture, and take responsibility for forming the hearts and minds of our sons.

Every young man deserves to know that his sexuality is sacred, that his strength has purpose, and that his life has meaning beyond his own pleasure or comfort. But if we don't tell them, who will?

I didn't press him about whether he's fallen or not. My point was to remind him of his calling and duty as a man—AND to remind him that forgiveness is always available. There is nothing that can separate him from grace unless he chooses it.

I explained that pornography isn't just "natural" or "harmless"—it is, as I’ve heard said many times recently, the “iconography of Satan.” It's designed to be addictive, to hijack the very drives that are meant to propel him toward authentic love and sacrifice.

We talked about what real masculinity looks like: not the aggressive, selfish dominance that pornography promotes, but the quiet strength that protects, serves, and builds up rather than tears down.

It's hard to tell with this kid, but I could tell that he appreciated it. It was an unusual break in the Dad/Son dynamic that fills the routine of our life together in this strange time. He’s a tight-lipped young man. Probably brilliant, maybe on the spectrum somewhere. He’s always observing and cataloging, and he doesn’t forget anything. (Believe me—I know. He’s brought up failures of my own from many years ago.) He doesn’t emote very much, and when he does, he seems nervous, as though it was a breach of his rigid external protective shell. However, at the end of this talk he seemed lighter and actually gave me a hug.

Dads, if you need a little motivation to have The Talk, consider this: Our boys appreciate—more than even they realize—our sincere, authentic efforts to form them.

Just do it

If you don’t talk to your sons about porn, literally everyone else will. The vast majority of people (it certainly seems) will say it’s no big deal, although that seems to be changing. Secular man-guru types are starting to tell men to quit porn because it “robs them of their power,” or somesuch. I’ve even seen chastity rebranded as “semen retention.” Yeah—another 21st century discovery of something old repackaged as a new discovery.

However, even the most vicious anti-porn crusaders aren’t going to have your sons’ best interests at heart better than you. Nor do they have the mandate. YOU are their father. Take the lead.

The conversation might be uncomfortable. You might fumble for words. You might feel like a hypocrite. But your son doesn't need a perfect father—he needs a father who cares enough to show up, to speak the truth, and to fight for his future.

Don't let fear rob your son of the guidance he desperately needs. Don't let the enemy win by default because you couldn't stomach fifteen minutes of discomfort.

Your son is worth fighting for. His future is worth protecting. His calling as a man is worth defending.

The question isn't whether you're ready for the conversation. The question is whether you love your son enough to have it anyway.

Cute. Witty. Shut up.

It stopped my idle scrolling cold today. I stared at it. I remember when I took the picture. I remember the warm summer afternoon and our walk back from the park. We did a lot of family walks back then.

I stared because things are so radically, terribly different now. Looking at that picture, I imagine that combat veterans feel something similar when they look at photos from their pre-war days.

What curiously happy people. What strange clothing. It’s looks almost as if they can’t hear the air raid sirens…

The picture shows my oldest and my youngest. She has always had a huge heart and she absolutely loved her big brothers. They were pretty much typical boys. “You want to hold my hand? Okay, that’s weird, but I love you too.” She initiated the hand-holding. He grudgingly consented.

Eight years later, those minor but substantial differences between them have sent them both on different vectors. Their minor personality differences grew and expanded until they’re almost too different to get along. They do their own things now, and they argue a lot more.

The sidewalk in that picture is just around the corner from our former home in Manassas, now more than a thousand miles from my new home, a little duplex in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Family walks are now a memory two years in the past. My oldest doesn’t like to stay with me because it’s away from his workshop. He undoubtedly learned that creative obsession from me. My youngest draws pictures of dragons and turtles and dogs and cows and big clusters of hearts and gives them to me—the highest and most sincere gift she can offer her Daddy.

So, what? Let’s take a moment to cry about it?

No. That’s not what this is about.

Life is a battle in a much larger, epoch-spanning war. Things change. There are casualties. People are taken out by enemy fire and, perhaps more often than not, by friendly fire. Homes are destroyed.

We can weep and grieve over these lost things, as I have, but no one and no place is supposed to be our refuge on this side of the Veil. To linger on these things—these dreams or ambitions or passing moments of beauty—is to go AWOL. I’m tempted to call them “idols,” but when it comes to the spiritual perspective on things, I’m in no mood today.

I miss my boy, my Joe-Joe (a name he asked me not to use several years ago. He’s not Joe-Joe, Joe, or anything else. He is Joseph. Period.) I’m sure that if my family’s American Dream had continued apace I’d be feeling something similar as he grows into a man with his own ambitions and internal drive and interests. It’s the natural way of things.

The youngest, my “baby girl,” which she has repeatedly said she loves to be called, will move down her own path soon. For now it’s dragon pictures and fierce hugs any time we pass by each other. But the clock is ticking. She will no doubt be stationed elsewhere long before I’m ready.

Nonetheless, pining away for that time now lost infinitely, takes me out of today’s fight, which is a whole lot more complicated, difficult, and yes, beautiful. As I wrote when I reshared the post to a group of people who struggle with their own battle losses, “I refuse to despair over things lost, or the painful and bitter changes of life.”

I do refuse. Not out of some white-knuckle desperation or allegiance to sentimentality, but because I’m a kind of veteran now, too, and I know a thing or two about war. You bury your dead and destroy your enemies. You fight for those you love. You can rest when you’re dead, so get in the fight right now.

My son Kolbe and I worked on it for a week. It didn’t take that long from start to finish, but you try moving, unpacking, building, and organizing while designing and manufacturing bespoke leather goods. I bet you didn’t think of that, did you?

I took this project on for several reasons:

1. It’s expensive out here in the world. I’m sure that it was expensive to run the monastery, too, but God took care of it, I assume. Out here, God expects us to do some of the heavy lifting. Ergo: I’m back into the leather biz.

2. Kolbe needs something to do. A summer job is a possibility, but he’s still young, so that’s probably not realistic. He likes to work with his hands, and this craft keeps them busy.

3. It seemed like a cool idea. Turns out I was right. Do you know how rare it is for my crazy ideas to work out?

What’s with the DEATH theme? Right here at the beginning of a bright and sunny summer? Call me dark, I guess. I’ve always loved the “Death to the World” aesthetic—that odd dichotomy of punk and Orthodoxy that just works. Before I became Orthodox I was playing with Dieselpunk and Latin, which I thought totally worked, but was evidently unmarketable.

Feedback on the bag has been good—much of it has just been startled gasps. Very satisfying.

I need to make some tweaks, but it’s officially for sale. I’m asking $150. If it’s not your kind of thing, please tell the Orthobro, RadTrad, Apostolic-Curious Goth or other high-T friends in your life about it.

Speaking of masculine stuff, did you catch the BBC article about Orthodoxy and Fr. Moses?

Here’s the link.

“Young US men are joining Russian churches promising ‘absurd levels of masculinity.’

I read the headline three or four times before I realized it was supposed to be a snarky insult.

Who is Fr. Moses McPherson? He’s an Orthodox priest down in Texas who does some great YouTube videos primarily aimed at young men who are trying to figure out life. (That is, of course, in addition to serving Divine Liturgy and offering the Holy Mysteries that save mankind. Obvs.) He might have come to your attention when he uploaded the “Hot/Holy Matrix” video. It infuriated joyless Orthodox and non-Orthodox alike, which is one of the reasons I love the guy.

(I also love that the one place you can still find the video is on a YouTube page called, “Orthodox Feminists of Twitter United.” It appears the YouTube page was created solely to expose Fr. Moses somehow, but everyone loves it.

Also, “Orthodox Feminists” delenda est.)

So, Fr. Moses was getting some traction outside of our tiny little Ortho-world. Attention all the way to ye olde England and the BBC. They sent a couple of women reporters to Texas to find out what’s going on.

I have a friend who goes to his parish. She’s a catechumen, which makes her sort of a rare specimen (men converting to Orthodoxy far outnumber women converting). She tried to warn Fr. Moses not to talk to them because she knew it could, and likely would, go sideways. I can’t speak to why he decided to talk to the BBC reporters, but he no doubt did so because he’s confident and secure in his faith.

My catechumen friend said this about the reporters: “The reporters (both broads bc of course) had that tight-faced forced smile painted on the whole time they were at our church.” I asked if they were uppity and crusty English broads. Answer: yes.

I read the article. As far as hit pieces go, it was weak. My impression: like so much mainstream news, it wasn’t hostile because of some conscious, malevolent hatred, it was biased because the subject was so far beyond the worldview of modern, liberal myopia that it couldn’t begin to comprehend the subject.

Maybe I’m being too charitable. I just think it could have been far worse.

Fr. Moses and others thought it was worse. Here’s his response to it:

1. The BBC article is a caricature of myself, and my parish.

2. No one is attending my parish for “masculinity”. Trust me, if you came and hung out, you’d find a wide variety of men, body types, and interests.

3. Young men are coming because they find the life of sexuality, materialism, and nihilism soul crushing and are looking for healing.

4. We provide healing through relationship with Jesus Christ cultivated by prayer, fasting, services, sacrifice, confession, and community.

5. We really have a strong Church family and people feel genuinely loved, and that they belong.

6. We have a “no politics” policy at the Church, and we are certainly not pushing a “conservative” vs “liberal” narrative.

7. If you want to know what I preach/teach, watch my homilies.

My friend Paul, who runs Maniphesto, had a long conversation with Jonathan Pageau about it:

Here’s why I’m the outlier on this issue: men are joining Orthodoxy because of the masculine vibe. This is undeniable—Fr. Moses, my priest, and many others are launching programs to handle the influx. It’s a good problem to have, but it is stretching things logistically. And yes, they DO come to Orthodoxy, at least initially, because it’s attractive space for men who yearn to be authentic men.

However, they soon find out that Orthodoxy is far more than a place for manly men to be manly—it’s a way of life. But that way of life is one of rigor, discipline, and self-abnegation, i.e. virtues that call their very souls from out of their worldly malaise. They come because they believe Orthodoxy is a place where their nature isn’t just alright, but appreciated. They stay because they discover that holiness is a battle. Eventually, they find authentic Jesus instead of the pastel facsimile they’ve been force-fed their whole lives.

I remember the first time I felt the masculine vibe in the Orthodox world. It was at Holy Transfiguration Melkite Greek-Catholic church in McLean, VA. I brought the family there one day in hopes of switching things up a little bit (read: “to stop fighting about religion for a change.”) I didn’t go there for a show, but let’s just say that the Melkite Divine Liturgy was the whole spiritual and sensory package.

At one point I looked over to the kliros, or the “choir” area to the left. Several men in black—readers, deacons, subdeacons, probably a priest or two—sang in that distinctive Byzantine style that, at that point, I’d never heard. It “hit” as the kids say these days. But the most interesting thing to me was how many of them held their children while they sang. These men, whose attire made it clear that they had committed to a certain way of life, held their children while serving the Lord.

“That’s the most masculine thing I’ve ever seen,” I remember thinking clearly. I believe I shared the thought with my wife. I don’t remember what she said, but it was probably, “Shut up, loser,” or something similar.

(I kid. At the time, she was more blown away than me. Our fighting briefly dipped to a historical low).

During the Melkite years, I was dealing with a lot of stuff—the end of my business, what I would later realize was the death of my marriage, raising young kids, replacing my career before I was too old, etc. In my desperate grasping for direction, or some kind of foundation, I began to devour all the self-improvement literature I could find. I joined men’s groups. I even started one at Holy Transfiguration which, to this day, is still going strong. Above it all, I was trying to answer the question, “How can I be a good MAN?”

I’ve since figured it out. Yeah. It’s pretty simple. Authentic masculinity isn’t about acquiring the right information—it’s about doing the hard things in relation to our duty to provide for, protect, and lead those in our domain. I—probably like most men—got lost in the theory of masculinity because of fears and insecurities related to our awesome (as in huge) responsibilities. We avoid the rigors of our duty because we are, for so many reasons, not confident in our ability to meet the demands of manhood that we are obliged to carry.

Want to be a man? Do your job. It’s that simple. Further explanation usually involves telling guys what they already know.

This realization was tough for me. I’ve failed on every battlefield. Worse—far worse—I blamed other people and other circumstances for far, far too long. However, it was Orthodoxy, which is to say authentic life, that set me straight and gave me the strength to stand up, gather the pieces, and get back into the fight.

Fr. Ambrose, my priest, once gave a homily in which he said, “There is no such thing as ‘Orthodoxy-plus,’” meaning, there are no add-ons to Orthodoxy. One shouldn’t—and can’t—add something to Orthodoxy to improve it. It just is. More to the point: one shouldn’t become Orthodox because that’s what real men do—you will become a real man by living Orthodox. Yes—through that boring, consistent application of ancient tradition and wisdom. Speaking of which, Paul from Maniphesto has a Substack page on exactly that: The Path of Manliness.

My second audiobook

In other news, I’ve published another audiobook. This would be my second. It’s “Lessons from Joshua, Judges, and Ruth (Truth for Youth).”

I joked on Facebook that narrating books by Protestant authors is my punishment for so, so many years of totally uncharitable apologetics. And you know what? I pretty much believe that. I was a total ass to my Protestant adversaries, although many of them became friends later.

How’s the book? Well, I can’t give it a wholehearted endorsement on theological grounds, but for the audience it targets it’s pretty good. I’ll write more on it later.

This one was a challenge for reasons entirely unrelated to the content. When Paul hired me to narrate the book, I was feeling pretty down about how I was doing so many auditions and getting zero responses. I sort of knew that every audition leveled up my performance and editing skills, but that didn’t console me very much. I was using precious morning monastery time to devote to a totally unprofitable project. So, when Paul found me in the midst of that particular existential angst, I was ecstatic: I was going to nail this one. The final due date was way, way in the future, and the book was only about three hours long.

I got sick the next day. It might have been Covid, but whatever it was, it laid me out. I took two days off from work (unheard of!) and oozed on the couch. I watched movies. So many movies. I barely had the strength to shamble to the monastery kitchen and make some soup. By day three I was able to go back to work, but as for recording, it was useless. My voice was phlegmy, hacking, wet, and gross. Every attempt to get some decent audio down was totally pointless.

When I finally recovered enough to get a little bit of audio, I recorded twenty chapters in a week. The deadline now loomed over me. And then the elder kicked me out of the monastery with no notice. I lost several precious more weeks packing, moving, and trying to rebuild a recording studio in a hotel room (total failure on that). I had told Paul, right after he hired me, that the deadline was “very comfortable.” Now I was telling him, “I’m so sorry—personal troubles…”

Lame. Unprofessional.

Obviously it worked out in the end. I was only about a week overdue, and so far I’m getting good feedback (which is why I only ask for feedback from people who will charitably lie to my face. Hah.)

Lesson here? Never delay what you know you need to do today.

Check it out. It’s definitely not Orthodox, nor is it Catholic, but it’s got some good lessons for your teens or even younger.

New structure

I read something from one of the new crop of Substack gurus about publishing here. He said he publishes every day, but he only sends an email on Fridays. I’m going to experiment with that because it solves a few problems for me.

First: I hate sending emails to people. I get so much garbage myself, and I hate adding to the clutter for others. If you want to read my meandering musings, feel free to stop by. I’ll probably highlight things worth reading in the Friday edition.

Second: One reason why publishing volume is so low is that I simply don’t have the time to put out quality long-form work. However, I have things I want to riff on several times per day. There’s this pressure—mostly self-imposed—to publish Hemingway-grade essays at least once per week. I just can’t do it, at least not in current conditions. Now that one of my kids lives with me full-time, I need to spend quality time with him before I go to my day job. I thought fitting creative work time into my monastery schedule was hard. It’s NOTHING compared to living in the world again.

I’m not saying that I intend to put out low-quality “ripped from the headlines” work all week long. No, that will likely be an unintended consequence. Haha. I’m just trying to relieve some pressure here.

Third, I want to remove myself from the center of this publication. “Chris’ Life Lessons” had its place, but it’s long past time to move the locus outward. Covering other things beside *just* my own personal reflections is necessary for me personally and professionally.

I have many more thoughts, but I’ll save them for later. I may not have been publishing much, but you better believe I’ve been thinking a lot. Working, too.

Right now I need to figure out how to keep these kids from climbing the walls while the pool is rained out. Oh yes, and make a bracelet for a customer. Oh, right, and make the final tweaks on that death bag. Hard to do in the midst of a half-moved-in duplex. Speaking of which…

I think that a conversation with a client at work the other day sparked the memory. He needed to raise his business debit card spending limit for the day because he was buying a cruise for his family. $10,000 up front. A wife and five kids. I held my tongue about the problems that arise from using business funds for personal reasons, as I'm sure that as a small business owner he knew all about it. It was likely more important to him to give something special to his family, and tapping into the business coffers was the only way to do it. I once bought a house that way.

He said, off-handedly, "I might as well spring for the all-drinks-included package."

I snorted. I got it. I downshifted from Professional Chris to Buddy Chris. "Vacations with kids aren't exactly relaxing for dads, are they?"

He laughed. That was good. They don't always laugh when I pierce the veil of familiarity.

Me: "Every time they ask for a refill or a side of fries or you drive by a water park or something, you see a P&L in your head, don't you?"

He laughed again. "Brother, you know it."

I've been thinking about that Virginia Beach Hilton ever since. I'd pay extra to get an ocean-facing room as close to the top floor as I could. After months or years of running my company without rest, I needed to see water stretching to a horizon. I needed to see to infinity.

Just off-shore, dolphins would play in the surf just a few yards from swimmers and surfers. We would watch pelicans and F-18s buzz the top of the hotel. The kids would bob in the rooftop pool while Mom & Dad sipped daiquiris on patio chairs. Later, some beach time. Sand castles and wave wrestling. Digging big holes for no other reason than to dig big holes before the tide came in and erased them.

When the sun sank low on the horizon, the wife and I would take the kids to the outrageously expensive outdoor restaurant at the hotel, load everyone up with artisan cheeseburgers. Pecan-crusted trout for Mom & Dad.

It was during one of those dinners where my wife gave me one of the two or three compliments I ever received from her. She looked across the table after helping my youngest cut something on her plate. Her eyes were filled with pride and admiration. She said, "You did this. You made this happen."

I distinctly remember looking out over the ocean, there, just over her shoulder. I don't remember what I said. Maybe I didn't say anything, because I knew how fragile and likely temporary it all was. All the success of that time felt like a fluke. It had almost nothing to do with strategy or executing plans. It was all tenacity and perseverance—acting on wisdom from my Dad. We would ask him, “Dad, how did you do it?” regarding his own business success. He would demure. “I’m just too dumb to quit.”

I'd fought like hell--and fought Hell--to reach my own modest level of success, but I knew better than anyone how much of that was likely God, not me. I'd stumbled through to that point. To me, it mostly felt like blind luck enabled by persistence.

Nowadays, almost as far from any ocean as you can get within the continental United States, the wife calls me a deadbeat. I wonder how I'm going to feed my kids next week.

This isn't that kind of a post, though. Quite the opposite. I might be delirious with fatigue, but in all the ways it counts, life is beautiful.

The new apartment is really a duplex in northeast Tulsa. The units house four families each. So far it's been quiet, but there are a few units down the street whose residents seem to want to make it sound and feel like New Tijuana. Some, or perhaps most, make the place smell like a dorm room.

It's a two-bedroom place. There are five of us crammed in here, and one injured morning dove my youngest is determined to save.

We use paper plates and plastic utensils. The ink was well-dried on the leasing contract before I realized the place doesn't have a microwave. That's alright—monastic living transfigured my ideas of what is "necessary." There are times I just want to push some buttons and get an instant whatever, but the slow pace of survival in this time is probably just what I need—it keeps things from getting too frantic. The kids disagree. They insist I get a microwave ASAP.

I’ll put it on the list.

I found a box of serving utensils that survived the family's Great Reset. Makes me feel like a French monarch.

I gave the kids the two bedrooms. I sleep on the couch. They have to double-up: boys in one room, girls in the other. The monastery lent us some of the twin beds in storage. That was definitely a gift from God.

A garbage bag hangs from a kitchen cabinet knob. The bag is from our camping trip in the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Preserve last year. I'll have to get a garbage can soon.

Put it on the list.

I'd been wrapping up an audiobook project when I was ejected from the monastery. I still have a few chapters to narrate and edit. The loss of my perfect little storage closet studio hurt. When I was looking for a new place, my main requirement was a secluded spot, preferably carpeted, where I could record. (It ranked several places above a microwave, evidently).

Yesterday, as I was unpacking and organizing, I spent hours rebuilding my "recording studio" in the back of the master bedroom closet. It seemed small but adequate, but after lining the walls with moving blankets, stacking boxes for a desk that could support a laptop, external monitor, mic stand, pre-amp, and a couple miles of cable, it feels more like a hastily constructed Apollo capsule.

Here's the good part: it APPEARS that the sound quality is far better in there. Have a listen: this is the first test-run using one of my favorite passages from "The River Why" by David James Duncan:

AUDIO SAMPLE.

The kids were playing hide-and-seek while I recorded that, which is pretty impressive, if you ask me. The place is tiny, but they still found cubbies to hide in. They rustled and giggled and slammed doors, but you don't hear it in that recording, do you?

Every day I note the oddities of returning to the world after two years in a monastery—the first time I loaded a dishwasher in two years, buying certain tools and utensils for the first time ever (a can opener, for one), rebuilding a spice cabinet.

For the first time in two years I came home from work to find my children waiting for me.

I have to confess that before everything blew up, I’d barely been domesticated. All of my wife’s requests for the stupidest things like organizing a spice rack, or having a proper laundry schedule, are now vitally important to me. Thankfully, that brutal year of 2021 where we switched roles—I becoming Mr. Mom at home, and she going to a day job—taught me a hell of a lot about domestic management. Granted, it was brutal in large part because I relied so heavily on her. (A text: “Hey hon—I hope work is going well. How long do you leave frozen chicken breasts in the bowl before changing the water?”) She would send lists—so many lists. Shopping lists, lists of good recipe sites, lists of kids’ homework and cleaning tasks. I hated it all.

The other day I was ecstatic to find a brand new croc pot at a thrift store for $25.

When I was at the monastery, I felt constant pressure to achieve, do, and rebuild. As for so much of my life, it seemed like a giant, invisible hand held me back. I theorized that it might be God holding me back, preventing me from rushing into something that would be very, very bad for me. Or, I cynically pivoted, maybe it was my own internal stuff continually hobbling me from Taking the Next Step.

It might have been both. I thought the monastery was a place for me to rebuild my career and emerge not in a broken down Ford F150 with 215,000 miles on it and a crunched up rear bumper, but in a Cadillac Escalade fit for a family of five plus doodle spawn.

When I was ejected, at first I thought it was a failure, perhaps a consequence of my failure to rebuild due to my laziness or something.

It didn’t take long to see it a different way. On Day 1 of my latest exile, sitting alone in that Extended Stay Hotel, the stink of skunk weed finding its way through the poorly sealed windows, I knew I was ready. I had innumerable challenges ahead of me—finding housing, rebuilding a career and a workable kitchen, just for starters. Two years prior, the workload would have crushed me.

Tonight had I had a family dinner at my own table for the first time in two years. I hadn’t realized how much I wanted that again. Sure, we’d had many meals at the monastery in the last 24 months. The girls always forbade me to be the reader at trapeza. I would sit there, always between my two girls, silently eating while the reader read stories about martyrs being flayed alive, or the dangers of gluttony.

It’s not quite the same.

I made a meal for my children tonight. Crockpot Tuscan Chicken over spaghetti noodles. The creation I made looked nothing like the recipe, but my children devoured it despite their barbarous palates.

We laughed and ate and laughed some more.

This exile might not be so bad, I thought…

Actually, I know it’s better than “not so bad.” It’s right in the groove, baby.

I made a list:

• Sausage

• Eggs

• Coffee

Just the basics for my first morning post-monastery and post-trapeza (meal time).

One problem: my extended-stay hotel had a kitchen, but didn’t have anything for me to, you know, cook with.

Better get a frying pan.

Oh, wait—I’ll need something to flip the eggs and sausages. Sigh. Add a spatula to the list.

Dang it. I’ll need two pans. And probably a pot for Ramen noodles.

In a spectacular instant of growth and maturity, I realized I’d probably need some dish soap and a scrub brush of some kind. Probably some scrubbing pads, too. If I learned anything from my “Mr. Mom” year of 2021, it’s that scrub brushes are great, but there’s nothing like a coarse green pad for the sticky stuff.

As I scrolled through the aisles of Target after work that night, I realized I needed something from every aisle.

That’s when it hit me: I think I’ve reached the bottom.

It wasn’t just the revelation of my utter poverty, it was my location. I checked into an Extended Stay hotel in Tulsa that morning. Residents milled around outside and chain-smoked. I had the impression that few of them had someplace else to be.

Many earnestly tapped away on their phones or made phone calls. This wasn’t the usual bored doom-scrolling. Whatever their calls were about, it appeared they were up against the clock. One guy held his phone in both hands before him, almost supplicatorily, cigarette burning down between his fingers, and then he’d raise the phone to his head, and then back down, rapid fire thumbs activated, delivering numbers, perhaps. Verifications.

A woman great with child just watched her phone screen. She waited for her Gabriel.

We have a tweaker here, too. You can see the whites of his eyes all around the pupils. He rocked back and forth in a lobby chair.

The man with four children, teen and pre-teen, got to me. He emerged from the lobby entrance. The kids, three girls and a boy, giggled and jostled. They were on some great adventure with their daddy. He looked around the parking lot, probably seeking his car, but I recognized those eyes—they appeared to search much farther beyond the parking lot.

Three days ago, I looked out my window as I’d done every morning for the previous 21 months to see a vast field and a shimmering pond in the middle of it. An extremely shy white heron always landed on the float in the middle of the pond at almost the same time every day. A pair of owls routinely flew their final sorties of the night on the south end of the property.

Bells would ring. Incense wafted through the air. Men (and the occasional women) who I considered brothers (and sisters) would rush down the silent halls to services.

This morning I didn’t open my curtains because they opened onto an asphalt parking lot, and beyond that, an establishment called, “The Love Store.” They evidently sell devices, lotions, and media designed to elicit sensations of “love.”

Talk about a change of pace.

I knew I would end up back in the world. Despite the attractions of the monastic life, I knew I wasn’t called to it. At least not that version of the life. I admire it. I revere it. But I’m not called to it.

However, neither am I comfortable living in a world where purveyors of pornography intentionally drop their shops into the center of hotel clusters.

The bottom ain’t so bad.

If you’ve ever written a manuscript and decided to scrap it and start over, you know what I mean.

If you’ve ever coded an app, deleted it, and then stared at a blinking cursor in an empty IDE, you know.

If you’ve ever returned a woodworking project to its origins of scrap wood because it just wasn’t quite right, made another pot of coffee, and returned to the plans, you’ve got it.

Starting fresh liberates.

I’m not a naturally optimistic person. I had to learn the skill. And it is a skill for most, I believe. There are very few things we are. We tell ourselves we are this or that. “I am an introvert.” “I am too old.” “I am too dumb…”

A German efficiency expert once told me to drop “I am” language. He was helping me to get on top of the massive pile of administrative work my business was generating. He said, “Don’t tell yourself that can’t do something—say that you struggle with something, and then get better at it.”

So, I learned not terribly long ago that I AM NOT a high-functioning hippy retard slacker from Portland: I merely struggle with optimism.

Problem sufficiently named, I took steps to correct things. Sure, my life was on a downward trajectory, but I pulled out of the nosedive. Might have lost the landing gears and some paint, though.

This is the cool thing about the bottom. There’s only one path out and it’s pretty easy to find.

I found a lot of what I needed in books, but the real transformation came with two meals per day and an obedience to mop the kitchen floors and mow the acreage. Optimism came from loving and missing four young souls who look to me as a lighthouse in their stormy lives. I learned optimism from reading holy books, but then thinking about what they had to say during walks under the stars.

I learned to seek Him who is love and truth. He removed everything so that I could see.

I have a lot of work to do, if only I can tune out the sound of the failing air conditioning unit in this hotel room filled with about a quarter of the remnants of my past life. (I’m writing this in between boxes of clothes and a mitre saw.) Tomorrow I’ll join the battle again.

Oh yeah, and I might just have three meals tomorrow. Because I can.

I have no outline for this.

It’s a free-form, off-the-cuff jazz performance.

I don’t know what I’m going to write, but I know what shouldn’t write.

Let me put it this way: I was betrayed by someone very recently. Someone I cautiously considered a friend, but who I should have known was unstable. Her actions caused me great personal harm and uncertainty in my immediate future. It reminded me once again that we believers have to find that delicate balance between radical, dangerous forgiveness, love, and all the God-breathed virtues, and basic prudence.

In other words, we need to learn how to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, and we suck at it.

Come to think of it, Matthew 10:16 should be in the Top 5 most practical verses in the Bible. It’s one of those verses in which all the wisdom of the entire thing is present in one verse multi-dimensionally.

As a result of the betrayal, I need to make some big decisions immediately. Wait—No, I don’t need to decide. I know exactly what I need to do, but it’s going to take massive action with a high proportion of success. There’s just no other option.

This pisses me off, but at the same time, part of me knew it was coming. I didn’t know exactly what “it” was, but I knew a big change was coming, and it was probably good. All throughout the trial of the last 24 hours, I did know it was good—just not expected. I had vague hopes of something like…I don’t know…Elon Musk seeing my little publication and tweeting about it, thereby giving me a big break. Instead, I got a pumpkin trebuched into my groin.

But!

It’s good. It’s good because it propels me toward a goal I thought was at least eight months off.

A temptation arises. When this person betrayed me (for totally psychotic reasons, by the way), she handed me the means of causing harm to her reputation, and the reputation of those who bought her lies and punished me for them. If I simply mentioned what went down, I’d add kerosene to an already burning bonfire surrounding my betrayers.

“Betrayers.” “Betrayal.” Yes, I know these are dramatic terms that imply I’m somebody worthy of being betrayed. The word works, though. It was a stab in the back. A sucker punch. A kick to the groin.

Anyway…

This is where all this monastic (stuff) comes in to play. I could easily share a whole library of text messages that would burn down the people who just handed me a lot of uncertainty (to say the least), but I’ve been reading at trapeza (meal-time) at the monastery for at least a year. The central message of all of it?

Forgive. Forgive and repent.

Damn it.

It’s a requirement of any serious Christian—even when the other person or party isn’t remorseful. After nearly two years here, the fork in the road is crystal clear: One way is Satanic self-regard and self-asserting human pride; the other way is peace and grace.

I’ve already seen the result of the peace-and-grace path. My accuser started her day by accusing me of some things. (I’m not talking about my wife, by the way. She’s been pretty quiet lately). I told her to lay off on the accusations because she was an “ignorant psycho.” But then I walked it back a bit and just spoke to her. I suggested rather than accuse.

And then a miracle happened: she admitted she had been wrong.

No offense, ladies, but you have no idea how rare it is for a man to hear a woman admit she made a mistake…

I told her she should tell the person she encouraged to harm me about her mistake. She did so.

Nothing has changed yet. My. future is still very uncertain. And whenever I’m in this boat, I tend to go on the offensive. I plan. I begin to think of ways I can neutralize threats. If he/she/they do X, I’ll do Y. That kind of thing.

I’ve learned through much bitter experience that this way leads to death. It’s like they say about knife fights: in knife fights, there are no winners…

It leaves me with the horrible conclusion that the ONLY virtuous thing to do is forgive and repent of anything I’ve done.

I tell you—the virtuous life sucks. I don’t mean to say, “Oh, what a burden I bear for being virtuous!” I don’t. But I AM saying that at some point you have to go from the knowledge of fire to the experience of it. This is where most Christians fail, I think. They readily—eagerly—acknowledge the wisdom and admonitions of their faith, but they don’t LIVE it. It’s head knowledge, not heart knowledge.

Living the faith is so, so much harder

So, we’ll see what happens next. This is still a developing situation. I can share this, though:

The light was perfect on my prayer walk this morning. I mean, nearly unprecedented, and that’s saying something. Oklahoma monastic sunrises and sunsets will blow your mind.

The storms were beginning to drift away, both literally and figuratively. Toward the end of their passing, the rising sun burned through the rain toward the purple clouds to the west creating the most perfect conditions for a rainbow. In fact, being an amateur meteorologist and cosmologist, I headed in the direction of where I thought a rainbow might appear, and would you look at that? There it was—an undeniable reminder from God Himself that he’s still there. More than there—he’s here to help me through this trial.

So, as I snapped pics of the rainbow on the other side of the monastery gate, I knew that the time to move on had arrived.

“Fear is a childish thing, and though it may be natural, it is unworthy of a mature Christian soul.

—St. John Climacus (The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 21: On Unmanly and Puerile Cowardice)

Deep water terrifies me. I’m not even talking about ocean-deep. It can be any body of water where I can’t see the bottom. It’s the gloom and the unknown coupled with restricted movement when you’re in it. I first registered this fear at Yale Lake, which is just south of Mt. St. Helens in Washington State.

Yale Lake is, (or at least was, because I haven’t been there in several decades,) the place to water ski. That’s where I learned, in a freezing rite of passage that all my uncles and cousins went through.

There’s really no way to ease your way into it. Sure, you can start on a dock, where you stand in your two skis, waiting for the boat driver, (usually Dad), to putter into position until the rope is just taut and straight enough until he guns it and yoiks you into the water and, hopefully, skimming across the surface in an upright position.

I don’t remember that ever working for me. I have a vague memory of getting pulled OUT of my skis and doing a header into the drink.

No, more often than not you just have to do it. You jump off the back of the boat, somewhere out in the middle of the lake, a place no doubt farther than you would ever imagine swimming to, and into the water—water made freezing with snow run-off—and somebody slides your skis over to you. You’ve got the triangle at the end of the ski rope looped around your arm, nestled in the crook of your elbow, teeth chattering as you slip the skis on and tighten them.

It’s an awkward, bobbing mess of kid, skis, and rope, but somehow it works. Dad putters out ahead a ways until the rope is taut, dragging you along until you get everything lined up and in place, skis in front of you (because you do not want them to trail behind you, causing enough drag to pull you under—fast.) You push against the now substantial half-MPH pace, until you’re ready to suck it up and shout, “Hit it!”

Then the engine roars, the rope fights to pull out of your death grip on the bar, and if all goes well—and everything is aligned correctly—you pop right up on top of the water and…you’re water-skiing.

Eventually that’s the way it works. When you’re learning, more often than not, you’re, well, yoiked! right out of the skis, or you lose the rope, or maybe you get skipped across the water for a hundred yards or so, swallowing gallons of boat fuel-flavored water, until you remember to let go of the rope.

I make it sound like a bad thing. It’s not. For me and my clan, water skiing was indeed a rite of passage, and when you’re finally able to get up and on top of the water in that broiling wake, you know you’ve taken your place as a junior member of the clan.

Eventually you graduate from training wheels (two skis), by dropping one and going slalom. Then, perhaps halfway through the summer, you learn to start with just one ski. That’s where the real fun begins. This is where you start to get a little cocky.

Slalom skiing means you can really slice that water on the outside edges of your arc. It’s boring to be just dragged behind a boat, obviously. You want to get out of the wake where, ideally, the water is like glass. This usually happens in the morning. If you survive the launch and get up on that ski, the first thing you do is head out to “open water,” i.e. that soft glass outside of the wake, a semi-permeable membrane between sparkly sun, cobalt sky, and puffy white clouds…and the murky depths below. If you’re in the zone, the violent grinding sound of the boat’s engine fades away and it’s just you and the gentle swishing of the ski cutting through the water. Back and forth across the wake you go. If the speed is such that the wake creates a little jump, you can fly over the churned-up water to the other side and land in more smooth, glassy water.

It’s heaven. I’d forgotten until now, writing this piece from a dusty Oklahoma prairie. Where did those days go?

There was always an element of danger, of course. When you bite it, it’s usually a spectacular thing. I would rarely reach the end of my “turn,” and, signaling to the spotter behind the driver, dramatically cast the bar it into the air, letting physics and momentum do their thing, giving me a few brief seconds of totally unencumbered travel across the surface until drag and friction slowed, slowed, sloooowed me down until I descended into the lake like a foundering ship.

That was the graceful ending, and like I said: rare for me. The end of my water skiing sessions usually went like this:

I would be hot. I’d be cutting across the wake and into the glass so fast that I’d clear the other side of the wake by several feet at least. When I got to the outside of my arc, I’d hold the bar with one hand, my body almost parallel with the water, as though I was cleaning my armpit with speed and friction. And then I’d snap back for another wake-jump and down-low pit-cleaning on the other side.

That’s how I performed some of my most spectacular crashes. It always happened in less than a second. Don’t stick the landing after a wake jump? Smeared across the water. Lose my grip on the bar on the outside of the pendulum? That’s a barrel roll across it, and usually getting the wind knocked out of me. Hit the water butt-first somehow? Well, the first three feet of your lower intestine will be clean as a whistle.

That’s how it happened one day as Dad took us into this one little inlet on the eastern side of the reservoir. I believe it was called “Siouxon.” I absolutely hated that part of the lake. I had nightmares about it for years, probably, in part, because as legend had it, that’s where a skier who had just finished a run was beheaded. The story is that she ended her run and was standing up in the boat, toweling off, as they headed deeper into the inlet toward a very low bridge that runs across it. She had water in her ears, and didn’t hear the driver shout for everyone to stay low. She was facing toward the back of the boat, so she didn’t see it. The driver went through fast and, well, chop.

I didn’t believe that her head still bobbed in those waters many years later, but I was still very young and inexperienced with death. Even in the hot, bright summer sun, with a billion incandescent reflections on the ripples of the water, the not-quite-secluded cove felt like a liminal space, one of those thin boundary zones between worlds.

Even that, though, wasn’t the real terror of the place. It was the stumps.

Yale Lake is an artificial reservoir. It was once a tree-lined valley. So, when it was flooded, the water rose up above the tops of many of the trees and submerged them, a la the Great Flood. Above the surface of the water, you can still see that tree-lined valley, but below it is an underwater forest of bare, dead trees.

The first time I saw the underwater forest, we were near the Siouxon beheading bridge. It’s a cramped little bay, and I was always impressed at how my dad was able to navigate it even while towing a skier. The skier has to be cautious—trees poked up around the edges of the inlet, and you didn’t want to hit one. So, you play it carefully there.

Why would one want to ski in that cramped environment? The water was always glass in there. The best skiing in almost any weather. It was worth the risk.

I was doing my best to stay upright on one ski while Dad made the turn to head back out into open water. I was in the wake, looking over the edge and into the smooth glassiness just a few feet away. Spectral fingertips reached for the surface out of the blackness below. Dozens of them—some just a few feet under that surface.

I immediately froze up. Fortunately, I was balanced alright, so I didn’t just…tip over. At least not right then. I was afraid of the very real possibility that I could submerge deep enough to hit one of those underwater trees—a nightmare even without fears of running into any severed heads.

But, if I have any superpower, it’s manifesting the worst case scenario by thinking about it hard enough. Eventually, I went down. Maybe my ski hit a stick bobbing in the water, or maybe the terror seemed so unavoidable, so definite, that I might as well just give in and let it happen… I could only watch as my ski went left, I went right, nailing the churning wake at around 25 m.p.h…

Dad and the boat motored away. From the surface of the rapidly calming water, that boat seemed so, so far away. Around me, just under the surface, I could see those skeletal Nephilim fingertips all around me, close enough to touch with my bare foot, if I so chose to touch. I did not, of course. In fact, my legs sized up, knees to my chest, trying my hardest to get on top of the water if that was possible, and I was desperately trying to make it possible. The life jacket helped a lot—I don’t know what I would have done if I’d had to tread water. The ski floated nearby—I grasped it, although the added bouyancy was negligible at best. I was probably doing more to save it.

By the time my Dad came around and picked me up, I was well-and-truly checked out. Over what felt like an hour, I had expected something to dart up from the gloom to grab me, pull me to the dark depths, and devour me even while I drowned, but was likely only a minute or so.

“Want to go again?” Dad asked, looking down from his perch at the helm.

“Let’s just go back,” I said.

I started this piece with a completely different outline. It was to be a short, personal story about overcoming fear, followed by three main sections outlining several critical points, and then wrap it up with a tidy how-to. Instead, I got 2,000-word essay on water skiing. Haha. Figures. This is always how it goes.

However, this is actually my point: The fear is something I had to uncover.

It’s not a particularly relevant fear most of the time, although due to its many lakes and rivers, Oklahoma has 56,000 miles of shoreline and 200 manmade lakes…

Despite this fear, I was a high-functioning waterphobe: I more or less went about my days playing in the water, not quite pushing the fear aside, but…disregarding it. I might have been terrified of the gloom of deep water, but I sure spent a lot of time either diving into it, skiing on top of it, or sailing over it.

You might say that’s the correct way to handle fear. That’s the very definition of courage, right?

Sure—as long as you’re acknowledging it. If you’re not, the fear metastasizes into other things.

• It might turn into arrogance because you want to hide your cowardice.

• There’s anger, of course—how many times have we blown up over things that we later considered trivial?

• The usual: we become workaholics because fear is a loss of control. Work is something we can control.

• Perhaps the worst metastisization of all: reflexive cynicism. Bitterness. Sarcasm. I call this “worst” because its so UNmanly. It’s pathetic. It’s attaching an ideology to your fear that justifies and dismisses it, thereby guaranteeing that you’ll remain locked in a fear state.

I’ve been thinking about uncovering hidden fears for the last several weeks. Why? It’s time. Long past time.

It’s been almost 21 months since I came to the monastery. Roughly 18 months more than I intended. I’ve been walking around the decidedly dry and landlocked monastery grounds (no water skiing on this pond!), prayer rope in hand, heart in the ICU, mind everywhere and nowhere. I work on creative stuff in the mornings when I’m able to, then I do my various monastery duties, and then I go work my Hell job for eight hours. If I have anything left when I get home at night, (I work the late shift), I put in another hour or so of administrative stuff. Life stuff.

It’s a daily 18-hour grind that doesn’t leave room for much else. All the money I make goes to the family I don’t have anymore, more or less. There is marginal forward motion—I landed another audiobook narration gig, for example—but the needle barely moves, if at all.

Why?

It says something that it took about 20 months to really ask that question. No, I mean really ask that question—to turn around and square off against the smirking bully lobbing insults at me, and shout: “Why are you here?”

That led to another question, and another, which eventually led me to a thing I’d been afraid to consider.

It was a fear.

No, I’m not going to tell you what it is. Sorry. As it happens, there are some things too personal to share in this publication. No, it’s nothing weird. I don’t have a fish fetish or something. It’s just a fundamental thing. Something that’s been with me for 51 years. Closer to me than a shadow.

Now I know its name. Now I know how to deal with it, which is what I’ve been doing lo these last several weeks. The results have been great: Peace, confidence, and healthy control.

I think, if I were to become a counselor or a man-guru or something, I would begin sessions with men with this: “What are you most afraid of?”

They would likely tell me something common, like, “I’m afraid I’m letting my family down,” or, “I’m afraid I’ll never find love again.”

Then I’d ask them again: “What are you really afraid of?”

That would make them pause because…what do you mean? I just told you my deepest fear.” But I know—oh boy, do I know—that when you begin asking those follow-up questions, it shows that the path continues just on the other side of this dead brush. That path rounds the bend and goes deeper into the forest.

I would advise men to keep asking the question until they get to the end. And there is an end. Some of these fears are rooted in the infinite, but it’s possible—and necessary—to find their here-and-now manifestations and curb-stomp them.

Thanks for reading. This publication is, like me, a work in progress, so I appreciate you making it to the end.

A like, share, or subscribe would mean the world to me, and it would bring me that much closer to my goal to help men rise above their fears, restore authentic masculinity, reclaim their God-given leadership roles, and rebuild their households, communities and the world.

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Lent begins now. Or rather, tomorrow after Forgiveness Vespers. The general buzz among my friends is wary resolve. “I hate it, but it’s good for us, so once more into the breach…”

Among the new folks—the recently baptized, Chrismated, or the catechumens—there are some romantic ideas about spiritual battle, as if they’re about to enter a kind of crusade or holy war. They’re not wrong, but the battlefield is (probably) nothing like what they expect. It’s not outside of us—a place we can enter and retreat from when the fighting gets fierce. It’s within, and therefore inescapable.

“Obviously?”

Maybe. But we do tend to load up our Lenten observance with a lot of “I’m gonna do…”

Me? I’m acutely aware that I’m in a time of transition, and whatever comes next is certain to be radically different than what was before. Some of it is obvious: divorce, career change, etc., but there’s also something more. Something I can’t yet see or understand. It’s like I can see a beckoning figure across a scorched desert valley; a silhouette on on the other side, buzzing and dancing as though through a heat mirage.

This Lent seems, to me, full of extra import. Laden with meaning.

Lent for me has always been a brief time of intense battle followed by a quick, complete, and decisive defeat. In the best times, I would enter Lent with lots of good intentions and resolve to “make the most of it this time.” My record is about two weeks before complete and utter collapse. I learned to hate Lent a long time ago. I’d blame it on various external factors, living, as I often thought, in a sort of perpetual Lent.

Poor me, I know.

I, like many others, had one wrong fundamental idea about Lent. I made it all about my effort.

I needed some wise counsel, so yesterday I drove two hours to meet with my priest for a little bit.

I had no agenda. Even if all we did was chit-chat about this and that, it would have sufficed. I wanted commune with a fellow warrior. Father is a few months younger than me, but in all of the ways that count, he’s “done life better.” I admire him as a veteran of the struggle. As if to validate my regard for him, he would reject such a positive assessment.

Our talk was mostly chit-chat, (Sam Houston, insane family histories, the dangers and the utility of imagination…) although I knew, even in the wandering midst of it, that the goods were gettin’ delivered.

I asked him if he had any advice for a guy who is inclined to write about spiritual warfare. Is there an Orthodox badge you have to earn or something?

He gave the same boring answer as always: “Be humble.”

He noted how all the Church Fathers began their discourses with some version of, “Forgive me, Lord, a filthy sinner…” It wasn’t false humility, (which is easy to assume of people who the ages know as sanctified), and it wasn’t despair. They were grounding themselves. Otherwise it would be far too easy to get lost in their own self-regard.

Noted.

The greatest Lenten danger for new Orthobros (and others) is thinking they’re not doing enough. They’ll laser in on this-or-that Lenten practice and treat it like a workout target.

It’s natural. I get it. We’re men of action after all. Even my men’s group, which is made up of serious, sober-minded, intentional dudes, uses trackable metrics to gauge our spiritual success.

We can lose ourselves in the metrics, though. Our weights and measures can get quite heavy indeed.

The things we give up for Lent are often, let’s face it, not such a big deal…until Lent begins. You know—no chocolate for 40 days. But then you’d murder a puppy for just one Hershey’s Kiss.

There’s one of your manacles right there…

The extra actions we add to our Lenten time—the kathismas on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or saying a rosary every day—these become lead blocks in our hearts. The billion distractions of the day, the unexpected and wildly bizarre fights with our spouses, emergencies with children… All these curve balls become cannon balls shot right through our good intentions.

The Evil One, whose supernatural intelligence and monstrous pride has and will contribute to the damnation of countless souls, will derail your Lenten plans with bitchy little tricks like getting your belt loop caught on a kitchen cabinet knob just as you’re in a rush to find your keys.

But we can’t just…do nothing…right?

Well, as we say over here in the east: “Talk to your spiritual father.” If no flesh-and-blood spiritual father is available, we have plenty of books.

Speaking of which, here’s a passage from “Unseen Warfare,” a veritable field manual for spiritual battle of every kind. This passage, from Chapter 4, seems particularly relevant at the beginning of Lent:

CHAPTER FOUR

How to recognize whether a man acts without self-reliance and with perfect trust in God

It often happens that self-reliant men think that they have no self-reliance whatever, but put all their trust in God and rest confidently in Him alone. But in practice it is not so. They can ascertain it for themselves, if they judge by what is in them and what happens to them if they fall down. If, when they grieve at their downfall, reproaching and abusing themselves for it, they think: 'I shall do this and that, the consequences of my downfall will be effaced and all will be well once more,' this is a sure sign that before the downfall they trusted themselves, instead of trusting God.

Sounds familiar…

This is the epicenter of all my struggles. I must do more. I must make the decisions. I must white-knuckle it and endure.

The results of that approach have never changed.

Confusion.

Loss.

Ruin.

So, I take comfort in the rest of the passage from Unseen Warfare:

If a man does not rely on himself but puts his trust in God, when he falls he is not greatly surprised and is not overcome with excessive grief, for he knows that it is the result of his own impotence, and, above all, of the weakness of his trust in God. So his downfall increases his distrust of himself and makes him try all the harder to increase and deepen his humble trust in God. And further, hating the vile passions which caused his downfall, he thereupon endures peacefully and calmly the labours of penitence for having offended God; and armed with still more trust in God, he thereupon pursues his enemies with the greatest courage and resoluteness, even unto death.

C.S. Lewis wrote, “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.” I might modify that a bit to say, “No man knows how self-absorbed he is until he tries to rely on God.”

It flies in the face of our romantic notions of spiritual battle. Many of us men, especially us new recruits, want to channel our natural aggression and need to act into a fight against the forces of Hell. In reality, what we need to do is divest of all these things. Empty ourselves. We need to approach the battlefield not laden with armor, but in sackcloth and ashes. Instead of swords in hand, we should wield our prayer ropes and rosaries.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

No, this is not going to be a rah-rah Orthodoxy victory lap. Most of my readers are Catholic, and I want to re-emphasize that I’m the least anti-Catholic Orthodox convert there is or has possibly ever been. And anyway, it seems that Catholic churches are seeing a big surge as well. I consider anyone who is seeking the true apostolic connection to Christ himself to be a friend and ally.

And besides—I bet the number of Orthodox converts will be a little bit like the population of Montana. I once read that the number of new residents surged after its gorgeous summer months, but declined by 200,000 or more after a normal (read: punishing) Montana winter. I lived there for about five years—I can verify.

It will be similar for converts to Orthodoxy: Initially, the beauty will crumble your walls like Jericho. But even the “do-it-at-your-own-pace” praxis of Orthodoxy will try your resolve, to put it mildly.

Then again…

That is what attracts a lot of these men. They’re turned off by guitar Masses, fog machines, and worship service spectacles. Far too often, the fundamentals of their respective “faith traditions,” (itself a mealy-mouthed phrase) are determined by celebrity priests and pastors rather than an ancient and well-defined Way. For a generation or three, men have been told that their inclinations toward strength, discipline, and sacrifice are wrong, impractical, or just plain weird. Sometimes its called “works-based religion.” (I’ve even been told by some on the Protestant side that “repentance is a work.”)

Orthodoxy is rigorous, even outside of the monastery. That’s what men love about it.

I remember the first time I made the connection between the unexpected beauty of the Divine Liturgy and its physicality. It was soon after we first started attending a Melkite Greek-Catholic church in McLean, VA. (Yes, I would die on the hill of calling Melkite Greek-Catholicism “Orthodox.”) The first thing you realize (after the beauty) is that this was a standing liturgy. You stand for hours, depending on the liturgy and where you’re at on the liturgical calendar. There were chairs, and nobody was going to smack you with a yardstick if you sat, but boy, you better be old or pregnant if you do.

Then there were all the prostrations, metanies, and signs of the cross. It kept you moving. Behind the iconastasis was a whirlwind of activity—priests, deacons, sub-deacons, readers, altar boys circled the altar, hoisted shiny liturgical implements, and made processions around the church.

One doesn’t just sit an passively receive at a Divine Liturgy—you participate.

The theology attracts men, too. It’s ancient, clear, and blunt. This isn’t about “finding your truth,” it’s about the Truth. It’s about sin, death, resurrection, and transformation. “Transformation” is perhaps the biggest attraction for men, although not the most obvious at first. When converts come into the Church, they’re certainly looking for something, a better way—THE Way—but in the west we tend to think of it as a way of fostering lasting moral improvement. “Being a better man” in the sense of controlling ourselves. What finally dawns on us is that it’s about far more than external behavioral changes—it’s an ontological change that doesn’t just make us act holy, but truly makes us become holy.

You might say it’s the same impulse that makes gym bros spend so much time working to transform themselves from flabby, uncoordinated flesh units into killers chiseled from granite.

The brotherhood aspect appeals, too. As a fairly social guy, I’ve always been part of a community of some kind or another. After-hours work crowds, Catholic men’s groups, the inner circle of my own company… But these days, men feel isolated. Alone. Particularly young men. I was fortunate enough to grow up before social media, so I still retain some sense of what normal human community looks like. Guys 30 years or younger? They’ve never been more cut-off and alone.

So, when they find an Orthodox parish with a lively community (that isn’t still comprised of the ethnic inner circle vs. everybody else), it’s like finding a piece of Heaven on Earth. They might struggle to “break in” to it, but they’ll keep coming back again and again, even if to just sit silently on the periphery.

I see it here at the monastery all the time. The awkward loners, the earnest-but-weird guys who wear holsters with crucifixes in them (maybe that’s an Oklahoma thing…) I make it a point to find the most quiet of them and start a conversation. I know exactly what they’re thinking and what’s holding them back…

As I said in the beginning, it’s tough, though. While the appeal of Orthodoxy attracts men for various reasons, its rigors will seem insurmountable to many. Even with the patriarchal (in the good way) application of the practice of the Faith. In other words, the bar is set very high: it’s holiness. Transfiguration. Theosis. Divinization—literally becoming small-g gods. The word to the noobs is, “You are called to this great, holy, impossible mission…but take it at your own pace.” They’re guided, ideally by experienced spiritual fathers who often become more father-like than anything they’ve ever known.

They’re encouraged to reach high, with God’s help, but not to expect to become a ghost repeater of divine light in their first week.For some, that’s a challenge they can embrace. For others…Well, maybe they were just here for the falafels.

It says a lot about our culture that this rigorous, fasting-for-half-the-year way of life has such broad appeal. My unscientific, in-the-trenches read is that we’re still on the upward-trending side of the bell curve.

Is this where I insert a call-to-action? I suppose it’s the natural spot, but that’s another thing about Orthodoxy that seems counter-cultural (and perhaps therefore appealing?) to inquirers: we’re not very evangelical. It’s not a numbers game for us. If there’s any celebrating to do regarding the sudden surge in membership, it’s only because so many have found some light in the darkness.

Nonetheless, I’ll say this: If you have questions—about the veracity of your own “faith tradition,” your lack of faith, or even just what this weird religion with insanely bold claims is all about, then “come and see.” Lent begins now. It’s a fantastic time—THE time—to check it out.

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If you don’t have eight minutes to watch the video, here’s the synopsis: The Emperor Theodosius the Great is recognized on January 17th. We read about him at trapeza (mealtime) here at the monastery the other day. He’s described as being holy, pious, humble, and repentant.

He was also a mass murderer.

“Sure,” you might say, “Lots of saints have a past…” I would agree. But this man was a zealous defender of Christianity and opponent of Arianism YEARS before he rounded up “several thousand innocent people” and had them slaughtered in a Thessalonica stadium. He repented, and even became a miracle-worker later, but still… That’s kind of a tough one to square for we soft moderns.

I wasn’t reading at trapeza that day. I blessedly got to have a semi-warm meal for a change. (The reader eats after everyone else. During winter in this airy monastery, warm meals are a bit of rarity. Just establishing my ascetical bona fides here…)

I remember sitting there listening to Seraphim read the text, noting that Theodosius had murdered all these rebels. Ok, that’s not so unusual. “Saints have pasts,” after all. Then, this:

“So great were the repentance and the humility of Theodosius that they enabled him to work miracles. It is said that, while travelling incognito in the Holy Land dressed as a simple pilgrim, he came to the doors of the Basilica of the Resurrection which opened of their own accord at his prayer, revealing the church within all lit up as on a feast day.”1

Hold on. The blood of innocents is on his hands, and but he’s using holy Force powers to open doors?

Yes.

This is where I’m going to try to shamelessly back off from anything that might sound like preaching. I’m not qualified to do so. (There’s a Twitter/X debate is about how all these new converts should shut up until they’ve properly installed and field-tested their phrenomas. I agree.)

It was a powerful reminder that no sin is too great to be forgiven. More than that, a great and public (repentant) sinner doesn’t have to hide in the shadows, keeping one’s face hidden from the world so as not to disturb the happy pastel Jesus-fish image of modern Christian pretension. The critical thing is to truly repent, and if that requires a time of solitude and reflection away from the world, so be it. But another way to think of it is that we are in battle. Our wounds, while self-inflicted, are our battle scars. We’re not dead or out of the battle. We’re battle-tested.

Our sins don’t disqualify us from continuing the race. Believing so is a form of pride. When we fall, sometimes we think we’ve used up all the grace allotted to us. One might even be tempted to think that there’s nothing left to do but kill time until perdition. This is the opposite of the truth. Our falls are permitted to teach us reliance on God.

Get back in the fight.

Traycee seems to be the one who ticked that milestone early yesterday morning. So, thank you, Traycee!

Since then there have been a few more, and I’m ecstatic to get subscribers who aren’t “just” supportive friends and family. (The loved ones in my life are the real deal. The “help you hide the bodies” kind of real deal. I can count on them to be supportive of anything, which makes honest feedback questionable. ;-)). It’s vindicating and humbling.

So now what? Does membership in The 300 mean that you now have a mission? No. I think the Persians are mostly neutralized. It does mean that you have my gratitude, and as I forge ahead here, I’ll be thinking of the 300 people who took the time to hit that subscribe button because they saw something of value in these ramblings.

I do have a question, though. Why are you here? Why did you voluntarily request to receive more email? Was it even voluntary—did you lose a bet or something?

In all seriousness, I would love to get your thoughts about why you subscribed, what you get out of it, and what you’d like to read more about. Constructive criticism is also most welcome. This isn’t an ego-stroking thing, although it is a bit business-related. I intend to make a living with the written word, and this publication is a key part of that.

Going forward, I want to get away from it mainly being about me and my thoughts about my struggles and my perspective. If it’s even half as tedious to read about as it is for me to write, then it must be excruciating. Stories from my life will always have a place here as long as they help to illuminate some higher principle. For example, “How St. Nikolaj Velimirovic’s admonition to guard one’s tongue helped me to stop calling everyone in Albuquerque retarded—and saved my job,” is illustrative of my point here.

I’m increasingly interested in—both theoretically and as a guide to life—spiritual warfare. We are surrounded by both a cloud of angelic witnesses and diabolical powers in this, the most epic war in existence. But we still have to pay the bills. Finding that epic/mundane balance is fascinating to me, and will be at the heart of what I do—mostly—going forward.

I’ve mainly been writing for men, but if I’m reading Substack’s meager stats board correctly, then roughly half my audience is women. This is very interesting to me, and I’d love to know why that is. My theory is that given the state of men and masculinity right now, women are interested in, and seeking out, resources and ideas to help the men in their lives. If I’m near that mark, great! I hope this has been helpful. If I’m off the mark, what is it about my man-centric writing that keeps you here?

Whatever the case, thank you for subscribing. I am whatever is the most powerful adjective to emphasize gratitude. ;-)

I’m sure (well, I hope) that someday 300 will seem like a silly metric over which to take a victory lap, but for now I’m pretty happy about it.

I’m extremely hesitant to give you homework, but if you would be so kind, I’d appreciate if you could check some of the poll boxes below. I’m genuinely curious about who you are and why you’re here. The “Why do you subscribe” poll is half-silly because it only gives me five options and it appears you can’t add your own answers, so if none of those options apply, please feel free to leave a comment. If you’re shy, you can always send me a direct message.

Thanks again!

-Chris

I tried to make it my career. I sucked at it. I was glad to finally call a tactical retreat.

However, what I’m doing now still requires that I “get out there” and continue to share and engage “content.” The difference now, and the thing that enables me to do it consistently, is that I’m doing it for “fun.” Or rather, I’m pursuing the things I enjoy.

In other words: exactly what the gurus said I should be doing all along. Sigh.

This is sort of my humble justification for spending so much time on my naughty pleasure: Twitter/X.

To wit, I unexpectedly went viral the other day. Very small ‘v’ in that “viral,” though.

This always happens: I’m feeeeeling creatively dry, but I know I have to keep the algorithms happy, so I’ll throw them some chum. In this case, I posted on X about a book I recently acquired: “Unseen Warfare: As edited by Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain and revised by Theophan the Recluse.” I might have seen it before, but it’s been coming up a lot lately, so I went searching for it and lo and behold, my home church bookstore had a copy.

Here’s a snippet. It’s from Chapter 15: “War should be waged ceaselessly and courageously.” It’s an imperfect recording—the second or third attempt to create a sample to pitch to the publisher for an audiobook project—but I need to move on to other things here, so…yeah.

All I did was mention it on X. “Finally picked up this gem this weekend. So far, so great.” I added a dimly lit picture that I didn’t even bother to edit.

Evidently, I stumbled into something important to the great Orthodox underground, although a few Catholics gave it a like as well. (I believe it was originally written by a Catholic, so it gets ecumenical points).

As of right now, this simple post has earned 195 likes, 13 reposts, generated 11 comments, and was bookmarked by 24 people. It also coincided with a shout-out by a huge Orthodox/masculinity account, and together that landed more than a 100 new followers.

These are not big league numbers. So why does it matter?

Well, it matters to my ego, for one. These are big numbers for me. It’s nice to get some validation while I toil away in this solitary exile.

It’s also important, I believe, because people are waking up to the battle. Sure, it’s easy to be deluded by the echo chambers of social media, assuming that “everyone” is all on the same page, even though “everyone” inhabits a very small island in a very small world. This can lead to tragic consequences—for example, teenagers hacking off bits of themselves to become something “everyone” says is their true identity.

I’m not deluded. I know that the actual number of people who would look at a book with such a horrible cover and esoteric title and say, “YES! That’s for me!” is roughly .00000000037 percent of the planetary population. (And that’s probably generous.)

Nonetheless, the topic of “spiritual warfare” seems to cross political and denominational lines. More generally, you hear “everyone” saying that they can “feel” something coming. It’s a sense of foreboding. Wars and rumors of wars. After the recent U.S. election, both sides are more than expressing a sense of something, they’re arming up and ratcheting up the bellicose rhetoric.

For many of us, the conflict isn’t about a national or international conflict. It appears that the veil is slipping, or the winds of of chaos flutter it about, giving us glimpses of who or what is really running the show.

The other reason I think this book is so beloved by a shocking number of people is that people are looking for ways to close the gap between high-falutin’ theology and everyday life. Something is shifting. The armies of Heaven and the armies of Hell seem to be doing a lot more training maneuvers…and yet. And yet we still have to go to work.

As one version of a common trope puts it, “For the last 4 years the world has felt like it’s on the verge of utter chaos but we still keep having to go to work. This sucks. Worst apocalypse ever.”

I’ve felt the strain for years—God calls me to deeper communion with Him, but I still have bills to pay. You might say that resolving that conflict is the whole point of this publication.

“Unseen Warfare” is, I’m told, a sort of field manual to resolving that conflict. It is allegedly a field manual for spiritual warriors who live in the world. We’ll see. Seems kind of strange to be giving a book report for a book I haven’t yet read, but I hope this bears out. (I’ll let you know). Most of what I read at the monastery was written by monks for monks. “Translating” that to practical wisdom for the Everyman is turning into a bit of a vocation for me.

One thing seems certain: war is coming. The thesis of this book is that it’s already here, and has been here since a snake sold a woman an apple with a hidden subscription to a horrible destiny. For a certain subset of a subset of people, this book is the field manual for the current and impending conflict.

Thanks for reading! And special thanks to Traycee, my 300th subscriber! I’ll write something about that soon, but I did want to acknowledge the milestone achieved this morning around 5:45 AM before one of you wises up and unsubscribes.

That reminds me: please do share, like or subscribe. I’m going for it, and every bit of encouragement helps. If I could do this for a living, I might even be able to afford an editor!

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Theologically, it’s a dumpster fire, but if you’re looking for solid catechesis in Hollywood blockbusters, I don’t know what to tell you. However, it did have some memorable imagery beyond the pottery—for example, when people’s souls leave their bodies.

I was thinking of this movie the other day after I read the following piece from Archimandrite Aimilianos’ “The Way of the Spirit.” (I have decided to harness the seemingly disparate and random way my mind makes connections rather than seek help for it). In it, he talks about that moment, that precise moment, when the Christian begins to detach from “checkbox faith” to living, enlivening, or, in a word, “infinite” faith.

The whole thing is great, if a bit “chewy,” theologically speaking, but this part stands out:

I now have some degree of self-knowledge, some sense of who I truly am. I realize that within me there is a divine element, which broadens and expands like a cloud in the upper atmosphere. At the same time, however, I am confronted with the truth about my life, and I recognize that I am dust. As I cross into the realm of infinite spirit, I catch a glimpse of myself from the perspective of eternity. I see my sin, my selfishness, my passions, my pettiness, my mortality. I weep over all of this, but I also rejoice in the knowledge that my real, deepest self, the breath that God once breathed upon me (cf. Gen 2.7), will remain with me always, and that God is able to draw it back to Himself at any moment He pleases.

In this way, I come to experience myself as something strange, different, and new. I experience both my spiritual existence and my sinful self, which nevertheless loves God. And through these ravishments and ecstasies, these experiences of God's absence and presence, through the manifestation of my spiritual being, we begin to understand who we are.

Do you get what he’s saying here? Rather than despairing about one’s sinfulness, fallen nature, low status or whatever, one begins to be aware of a thread that extends from one’s being into, and over, the horizon. The infinite.

Joy follows.

I budgeted my time poorly last week, so I don’t really have the time right this moment to share some of my own personal experience on this subject, but that’s alright: I want to pry myself away from what has become the basis of this publication: awkward self-disclosure. I will say this, however: I can verify that this is a real phenomenon. There comes a point when the ping-pong ball hovers somewhere between “I am garbage” and “I am God’s special-special flower.” It’s a holistic understanding of ourselves: Yes, we are dust, but we are God-breathed dust, and that will, with His grace, elevate us to little gods he always intended us to be.

“Forgive me, Lord, for I am sinful and retarded.” And that’s okay. It’s better than okay—it’s cause for joy because it’s the beginning of wisdom.

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