Before
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Baseline. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
Apologies (or you’re welcome) for the unplanned break. My creative project, as it were, of the last many weeks has been confronting some chronic pain—first in my knee, then migratory—using the principles outlined by Dr. John Sarno. Because this is a (searching and relentless) emotional process rather than a physical one, and given some other commitments, the newsletter fell a bit by the wayside. I’ll be back in the new year on a regular schedule, probably once a week. And there is so much to write about that confrontation with pain. But I wanted to share this in the meantime.
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I was first seduced into Anglo-Catholicism (a branch of Anglican worship characterized by a 19th-century revival in the Church of England of certain Catholic practices and ideas, and more recently a refuge for people drawn to those things but substantively excluded from the Roman church because of their queerness) by its pageantry and sensory richness—the songs, the smoke, the shuffling priestly dances.
But one of the things that kept me going to church as long as I lived in Los Angeles (and then whenever I visit) was that all this exuberance met its equal in the penitential seasons, Lent and especially (for me) Advent, when the church on Hollywood Boulevard would be stripped of much of its decoration, and the ministers and choir would enter quietly at the start of Mass instead of processing down the aisle with a full pipe organ blaring, and a place that normally operated within the notion of God as a universal, teeming presence in the world turned its attention to how the human relationship with the divine is also shaped by absence, distance, and even alienation. Because my own iterations of faith have been always nuanced and often tentative, I felt drawn to the state of divinity as an imminent but unfulfilled idea.
The other night I went with some friends to what I thought would be mostly a concert of music by the English Renaissance composer William Byrd, but was actually also an elaborate evensong liturgy. As we wandered into the Church of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, an Anglo-Catholic joint on the Upper West Side, I felt that old sense of relief: One gajillion red Starbucks cups be damned, it’s not Christmas yet. No pine boughs, no trees, no wreaths, no poinsettias, no red and green, and no carols—not until the sun falls on the 24th. Instead we sang “Lo! He Comes With Clouds Descending,” which puts a sheen of magisterial triumph—“Thousand, thousand saints attending … God appears on earth to reign”—over Christianity’s perpetual plea. “O come quickly,” the last verse repeats three times, punctuating each one with an exclamation point. “Everlasting God, come down!”
Yesterday morning I woke up thinking, in that unarmored haze of half-sleep, about how little we know of the world that awaits us even a year from now. The hottest year on record again, very likely, with some of the hottest tempers. Less still do we know how it will look a bit later, assuming the current trajectory continues—after it’s been reshaped in its economies, its politics, its ways of making things, its essential beliefs, and its aggressions, by a technological force that, if geopolitics-scale lunatics, novel pathogens, or aliens don’t get us first, will upend the nature of being human and of living on Earth. You don’t have to look around any corners to see this happening; it’s right in front of us.
It occurred to me that, for the first time in human history, we’re on the verge of coming face to face—not just in narrative, but in material, shared reality—with a force as powerful as God. There’s no pessimism per se in standing before this future with a sense of terror. Find me a prophet whose feet rested on shaking ground and whose eyes beheld a fire of surpassing brightness, whose ears were filled with a sound like rushing waters, for whom that experience wasn’t terrifying. You might believe that this relationship can produce good things, too—abundance, deliverance, enlightenment—and I neither can nor want to rule out that possibility. But the only thing that would spare you the terror as long as we’re waiting to see, I think, is madness.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.