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Introduction
Life unfolds in fragments. We spend too much time trying to piece things together to create the illusion of some overarching scheme to our existence. Life is made up of bits and pieces, routines and rituals, catastrophes and epiphanies. These mundane, everyday experiences are the relationships that form you, and the unexpected moments when the whole axis of your life shifts. We tend to think these unexpected, life-changing events will arrive with more grandeur, warning, or significance, but it can be throwaway comments, casual encounters, or unplanned, inconvenient situations that become points of departure and arrival. These are the moments when life comes into focus.
I have gathered some fragments of my life in this book. Stories, essays, ideas, and thoughts—particularly about what I call my theological life. I have lived much of my adult life in the realm of the gods, talking about, thinking about, and practicing religion. Philosopher Mark C. Taylor says religion is the most interesting where it is the least obvious. I think I know what he means: theology is what is left when everything else has been taken away. My very human existence, all of it—the moments, the shoes I wear, the religion, the sex, the art I create, the doubts that haunt me, and the moments of great revelation that guide me—this is my life.
Sigmund Freud wrote about what he called the palliatives, or the ways in which humans have attempted to ease the pain of existence: sex, drugs, art, and religion. It makes sense that these forces shaped my life the most, and so form the basis of the stories told here. The “Sex” section centers on the biological: family, life, death, and of course, sex. “Drugs” contains essays about the ephemera of life—things that stimulate, captivate, or interest. “Art” is the creative bits and pieces of life, and “Religion” is the spiritual or immaterial. It makes sense to start to with sex because, well, that’s how we all begin our journey into this world. We are all accidents of birth thrown into the world by the most primal of acts, and it was a primal act that began my theological life.
