This is not a post about books.

Though if you hang on long enough, the New Yorker makes an appearance.

I don’t generally talk about politics or religion online, preferring small, face-to-face conversations for that but there are two things that have been occupying a lot of my brain recently, and the intensity has ramped up with events in Minnesota so I am spewing them out to you, gentle readers.

Part the first:

One of the things I’ve noticed in this second Trump administration is that my personal theology¹ has been shifting. I’m not an outwardly religious person - all of my church attendance over the last couple of years has been for funerals - but at times of my life I have been quite involved in the Episcopal Church. This was the tradition into which I was baptized, and I still hold a lot of the lessons I learned during times of involvement. Sometimes I think going back to attending the right church would be good for me. (I like the high church smells and bells but with the Rite II Star Wars eucharist².)

The Episcopal Churches that I’ve attended and the clergy that I admire have always focused on the living Jesus - the red letter words in the Bible, if you will. If you look at those, the big JC was focused on love, even when love is hard. Love thy neighbor, not just the neighbors you like. Look for Christ’s image in every person.

Episcopalians are not big on hell as a sulfurous pit of flames and eternal torment. I was raised to believe that hell is the complete absence of love and the inability to see beyond oneself to look for the love of God and Christ’s image in others. And this worked for me for a long time.

But now I want the pit of fire. I feel so helpless and so despairing that I find myself saying, “burn in hell” a lot (mostly inwardly) - and I mean this literal unending period of torment. And I hate having that feeling.

I’m not even sure about my thoughts on the afterlife - the last season of the television show The Good Place comes pretty close. Spoiler alert! After a period of contentment, one steps through a door and becomes one with the universe. The law of conservation of energy aligns with this - people have energy, and if energy can’t be destroyed, then it must be transformed in some way.

But now I find myself wanting the afterlife with the eternal torment, and I hate that about myself. I am not willing to love my neighbors - all of them - as myself.

I felt so despairing about this a few months ago that I contacted my college chaplain, Mike Kinman, and we talked on the phone for a while, during which he got me off the hell ledge - there are clearly a lot of people in power who have had a complete absence of love in their lives, and thus are already in hell - but that has faded as events continue.

And I hate it.

Part the second:

Hanif Abdurraqib wrote an essay for the New Yorker called In Defense of Despair. The esssay begins like this:

The Joke I tell that no one laughs at goes like this: I picked a pretty rough time to actually want to be alive; in retrospect, back when I wanted to die, things were not actually all that bad.

I can relate - I did laugh - although my worst personal black hole was during a global pandemic, so things were actually all that bad - but I’ve felt similarly during better times.

Things are bad. Really bad. And I’m despairing of finding a way out, or better yet, a way forward. But at the same time, I am enjoying parts of life more than I have in a long time. Work could be more stimulating, and last year at work was horrid, but I made it through and showed me I could make it through hard times without falling into the abyss. Life outside work (when ensconced in a news-free bubble) is going great. I genuinely like being alive and am doing endless squats in the gym to try to extend my life and mobility as long as possible.

That situation is causing me severe cognitive dissonance.

I don’t have a tidy resolution or a deep thought about how to deal with these quandaries, so I’m afraid this newsletter will end abruptly.

I lied - bonus book content:

I said this newsletter wasn’t about books but I’d like to share an observation.

People often tell me I should be a book reviewer because I read so much.

This is the sort of sharp-minded commentary I, a STEM major, provide.

1. i.e. the way I think about things, not the way I think everyone should think about things

2. “This fragile earth, our island home…”