I spent about 30 of the last 40 years in therapy with several Jungian analysts. Ha, reading that sentence makes me think of the book “We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy--And the World’s Getting Worse” By James Hillman

Sheesh, Jim, all that therapy and you still act confused.

I finally graduated about 3 years ago, but I’m thinking a restart might be in order.

Of all the conversations, dreams, and guided active imaginations, one brief exchange stands out above the rest. My analyst listened as I described a particularly challenging person in my life. After listening intently and asking a few questions, he said, “You know, Jim, most people are doing the best they can with what they have and who they are.”

Needless to say, this was not the therapeutic wisdom I expected. Yet he was right. More often than not, when I face dilemmas involving people, that little exchange comes to mind. Whether it’s a reminder to be compassionate and kind to others or a moment of grace to give myself a break, the wisdom in that exchange lingers.

At the heart of this series, revisiting Everyday Spirituality is the obvious truth that we are all human, and to be human is to be vulnerable and broken. Yes, there are other aspects of our existential condition, but brokenness sits at the center.

To get at this idea in a more tactile way, I undertook a brief practice, a hobby of the Japanese practice of Kintsugi, and I made a short video about it. See below or click here.

Kintsugi is a Japanese technique for mending broken pottery with lacquer (or epoxy) mixed with gold, silver, or platinum dust. Rather than hiding cracks, it highlights them as part of the object’s beauty. Originating in Japan in the late 15th century, the stories about its origins vary. One tale involves the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, who was displeased when a damaged tea bowl returned from China, repaired with unsightly metal staples. Japanese artisans supposedly developed a better method, turning the cracks into a feature rather than a flaw. Another story tells of a servant who accidentally dropped a teacup during a diplomatic tea ceremony. Before risking his life, he offered to repair it, returning with a gold-veined cup that appeared more beautiful because of its imperfections. Whether true or not, these stories illustrate why kintsugi has become a powerful metaphor for resilience: the break is not hidden but celebrated.

The philosophy behind it draws on wabi-sabi, the aesthetic that finds beauty in imperfection, transience, and age, and treats damage and repair as part of an object’s history rather than as flaws to be erased.

Another way to put it is that we find beauty in the brokenness. The Kintsugi technique does not merely repair but makes the cup or bowl even more beautiful than before the damage.

The theologian Makoto Fujimura suggests that this describes the human condition as the sacred moves to make a new creation of us. Drawing parallels with the Christ narratives, he suggests that honoring the brokenness makes it integral to the new creation. The new humanity, if you will, is whispered at the margins of our life experience. We move through our pain into a new place, a new way of being in the world.

Fujimura frames it like this: The Kintsugi maker (God) searches for broken pots, not to fix them, though mending is in order, but initially to behold their potential and admire their beauty. I find this a delightfully refreshing perspective on God, as one who seeks the broken pots out of a desire to behold their, our?, beauty.

We might think of this quote in more contemporary phrasing as accepting ourselves — our flaws, our darkness, our contradictions... that is the hardest thing a human being can do.

As the poet songwriter Leonard Cohen once said, the cracks are where the light shines through.

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is an author, photographer and storyteller. Like all of us, he’s a broken man hoping the beauty shines through anyway.

If you’d like more on Kintsugi check out this video as well.

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The storm brought much-needed rain to our parched, drought-stricken New England summer. Then, 24 hours later, we settled in for two days of wet weather, with 5 more inches. Temperatures dropped to 64. Last week, we sweltered in the mid-90s. “Even the weather is captured by the cultural complex of extremes,” I thought. (video below)

In classical depth psychology, a complex is a cluster of feelings and memories organized around a wound. It gets activated by a specific situation and hijacks your response before your better judgment can get a word in. You know you’ve touched a complex when you find yourself overreacting to a minor comment as though your life depended on it. The last time you lost your cool, well, that’s a complex bursting forth.

Thomas Singer and Samuel Kimbles took Carl Jung’s idea about individuals and asked what happens when we apply it to groups. Jung spent a career mapping the personal complex, that stubborn cluster of memory and emotion that hijacks a person’s behavior without asking permission first. Singer and Kimbles wondered if nations carry the same kind of luggage. They called the result a cultural complex, defined as an emotionally charged gathering of ideas and images that cluster around an archetypal core. In plain English: a cultural complex works the same way a personal one does, except the patient is an entire nation.

It has a history and old injuries that were never properly examined. Nobody set the country down for fifty years of Tuesday afternoons on a couch. So the wound just waits, like a splinter under the skin, until something touches it.

Watch what happens at a football game when a player kneels during the anthem. The reaction is almost never actually about the player’s knee. It is about a flag that has absorbed a century of unexamined feeling, war dead, and immigrant hope, and Jim Crow and Iwo Jima all folded into one piece of cloth, and when that cloth gets touched wrong, the response arrives before anyone has time to think. That is the complex talking, not the citizen. Singer and Kimbles would say the symbol has been activated. I would say it looks a lot like a man snapping at his wife over a dish left in the sink, when what he is really furious about runs deeper. Same wiring, bigger flag.

That is the trouble with a cultural complex. It does not ask you to think. It grabs you and beckons you to salute, or else.

That aspect of American civil religion baffles me. How can a symbol meant to signify “we are together” almost instantly become a message of “agree with me and hate the others”? This isn’t patriotism; it’s a complex emotional reaction. Singer’s entire effort has been to help us see that a country can be as unconscious and reactive as a person on a therapy couch.

Reinhold Niebuhr articulated a similar idea fifty years before Singer coined the term. In The Irony of American History, Niebuhr’s central point was that America was not uniquely evil; rather, the issue was almost the opposite. He argued that our greatest threat isn’t enemies but our belief in our innocence. A nation convinced of its inherent goodness might justify almost any action as virtuous. An unexamined wound doesn’t remain silent; it seeks someone to blame.

In stormy times, the whole task of life and faith is to discern which things deserve our devotion. For me, that’s not an uncritical process. Discerning who we are and who we have been as a nation is the ultimate act of patriotism. I’m struck by how we are increasingly moving into two camps. One heralds all the virtues of our 250 years, while the other sees only a horrific and brutal history. The truth is, we have been a heroic and inventive nation while simultaneously enslaving people and demonizing others. Both can be true. Both are true realities of the uniquely American experience.

Years ago, I faced a challenge in a congregation I served about the proper place for the US flag in worship. Many meetings were dominated by ideas, opinions, and mostly strong emotions. Members from different perspectives passionately shared their views on whether the flag should be in that space. At the time, I lacked the tools to grasp the underlying forces at play. Now, I recognize it as a manifestation of complex emotions triggered in people, almost as if they could not control themselves. That small debate offers a glimpse of the larger discussion still to come. If I had to revisit that experience, I’d lead the congregation through a more thoughtful approach centered around a spiritual trek into our individual and collective complexes.

In the storms of our current crisis of democracy, we are all circling a question. What to do with our own national unexamined grief? Yes, grief lies beneath this national identity. Like a parent who lost a child and never said goodbye, or a middle-aged worker experiencing the injustice of economic dislocation. Grief over losses of many kinds lies beneath our collective complex. There’s a blue and purple bruise hanging over it all.

We live in times when claiming any word can be fraught with discomfort or outrage. Patriotism and Christianity are two examples for me. These words can be tied to forces of cruelty and ignorance. But they are also connected to liberation and graciousness. Yes, there may have been times when embracing these words was easier, but those are not our current times. We live in a storm, and what’s required is to give those words new meaning.

The rain last Saturday night broke the drought. It also dropped the temperature by thirty degrees in a day, which felt less like relief than a small violence. That’s what a real storm does. It doesn’t ask permission, and it doesn’t clean up after itself.

We cannot simply opt out of patriotism, nor can we take an easy path with it. The goal isn’t to defend or dismiss the flag, but to reflect on it as you would an old wound, asking what it’s protecting and what it fears. This process is slower and less satisfying than choosing a side. But sorting through is what love actually asks of us, in a marriage and in a country. Some nights, it looks like standing in the rain with the person you married, soaked through, fireworks echoing around, and staying anyway.

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is a writer, photographer, and storyteller living in Rhode Island. This Substack is published weekly (mostly) on Wednesdays, and focuses on culture, politics, religion, and the inner lives that shape them.

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Unfinished thoughts will collect some random notes on projects and ideas, kind of behind the scenes in my brain. (A frightening prospect) I’ll include what I’m reading and watching as part of it. But mostly, I plan to collect shorter musings that don’t seem to fit into the now-weekly format of my Wednesday newsletter.

Feel free to upgrade to a paid subscription to support my work. I truly appreciate your generosity. The first edition is free to everyone…enjoy.

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Frederick Buechner turns 100

On July 11, the sage from Exeter, New Hampshire, would have turned 100. I submitted a short reflection for this milestone, and it’ll be included in the Buechner Review. I’ll let you see it first here:

When I was a seminary student, a friend casually handed me The Alphabet of Grace. I opened it and heard a voice I had never heard in the classroom. Here was a man writing about an ordinary morning of breakfast with children or the city street outside his window as if it were scripture. For Buechner, it was scripture. He was not explaining faith so much as noticing it. He paid attention to the world with a reverence I thought was reserved for ancient texts. The alphabet of grace, he insisted, was written everywhere, if you had eyes to see it. That was the window he opened for me, the window between everyday life and faith. He showed me that an ordinary, unremarkable, grocery-list life was itself a kind of holy text. I spent decades in the church, eventually becoming a bishop, bearing the responsibilities of the institution and its associated doctrines. Yet beneath it all, the voice I first heard at twenty-three continued to sustain me. Buechner’s writings over the years encouraged me to listen intently, be vulnerable, and embrace the beauty of the broken.

The rest of the Buechner 100 Review will appear on July 11. You can preview it here.

The Sin of Optimization & Efficiency

The word “sin” has kind of fallen out of favor. People who grew up in oppressive homes dominated by an unhealthy spirituality might have experienced the word as punishment, criticism, perhaps even abuse or trauma. But its original meaning connects to some things in modern life. Essentially, the word means missing the mark, as an archer aiming an arrow but missing the target.

I’ve been wondering if the way we are missing the point of life these days might be due to our obsession with productivity, optimization and efficiency. Senator Chris Murphy gave a great commencement address in which he critiqued efficiency as the idol of our time.

I can’t help but wonder if our hyper drive to succeed is taking us away from ourselves and our souls. We might get more done, but is this any way to live?

Creativity and Making Meaning

Last month, I worked on an essay I never published, though I may in the future. The premise grew out of a line from a book I was reading, Art & Fear, by the painter David Bayles and the photographer Ted Orland. While humming along through the chapters, I suddenly came across this line. “The meaning of the world is made, not found.” Buried in the middle of a paragraph about Hamlet, I read those words maybe 17 times. They lit upon me like a revelation, as if a chorus of bodhisattvas or angels, or both, had begun singing a magical tune.

Since then, I’ve been diving into the idea that the meaning of life isn’t something to be found but something we make. Or, more precisely, maybe it’s in the making that we find meaning. I’m not sure, but I think I’m on to something.

Carl Jung, or was it Joseph Campbell, one of those mythmaking dudes, wrote about building your own mythology, a narrative around your life. Mine is made up of life events, quirky movies, a Herman Hesse novel, songs from the 1970s, and the poetry of Mary Oliver, Basho, and Rainer Maria Rilke, plus some great meals along the way.

I’ve spent much of my life searching for the meaning of life, as if it were something out there. But maybe the search has been misdirected or ill-informed. Maybe meaning is found in the making of… essays & books, photographs, journals with poor line drawings, and leading communities on travels and discovery.

There’s an essay here, maybe something more, but I’m still basking in the glow of that heavenly chorus and processing the synapses firing in my brain.

Watching, Reading, and Listening

Sports

Following the World Cup has been a delight, though I have to admit I haven’t had the stamina or the attention to sit in front of a TV for 90 minutes. The highlight reels have been a joy. The same goes for the beauty of the WNBA. Yes, I’m thrilled for the Knicks, but I gotta tell you, women’s basketball is so much more fun to watch. The passing game alone is a dance of beauty.

Trash, yes Trash!

This small book by a Montreal garbage collector and part-time philosopher is highly recommended. ‘Trash! A Garbageman’s Story’ is a memoir by Simon Paré-Poupart, a French-Canadian who has spent 20 years working in waste management in Montreal. It provides a candid, street-level view of the city’s blue-collar work scene and critiques the widespread overconsumption and wastefulness of contemporary society.

Robert Plant

Led Zeppelin never caught my attention in the 1970s. Maybe I was jealous of that frontman, able to romp all over the stage shirtless. But in the last 20 years, Robert Plant has continued to create unique music. Last November, Lisa and I traveled to the Schubert Theatre in Boston to hear his band, Saving Grace. What a night. Along with his work with Allison Krauss, Plant revisits musical genres from blues to Appalachia to rock ‘n’ roll with a freshness I haven’t often found. Along the way, he gave voice to a depth of soul at the heart of the human experience. OK, his early lyrics, like many 22-year-olds, focused on love lost and lust, but in recent times, he’s voiced notes of grace and wonder. Also, how can a 78-year-old man be so cool? He reinvented the old blues/Zeppelin tune Ramble On during an appearance on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show this past May. Enjoy!

More to Come

Unfinished Thoughts will appear monthly for paid supporters only, starting next month. The weekly, mostly weekly, Notebooks of James Hazelwood (Wednesdays) will continue for all subscribers.

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James Hazelwood is a writer, photographer and storyteller. He now makes dinner and takes out the garbage on Tuesday nights. www.jameshazelwoodphoto.com

Like a lot of teenagers, I grew up on a steady diet of grilled cheese sandwiches and chocolate milkshakes. My vegetarian aunt and a rotating cast of health-conscious girlfriends were convinced I wouldn’t see thirty.

Tonight in our house, I made dinner. Check it out in the video below or click here.

Today I love food. And the longer I sit with that love, the more I’m convinced it’s not a hobby. It’s a spiritual practice hiding in plain sight.

I enjoy a full range of tastes—sweet, bitter, sour, salty, and umami, the five flavors our tongue detects. Is there anything better than biting into a juicy orange, eating roasted chicken with rosemary, or just indulging in mint chocolate chip ice cream? Not all creatures enjoy this; cats can’t taste sweet, and neither can most birds except hummingbirds. This might explain why housecats lurk beneath feeders, perhaps plotting revenge.

I do not doubt that the experience of taste is a profoundly spiritual encounter with God’s holy creation. The late Eugene Peterson said it better than I can: wonder is the only adequate launching pad for exploring a spirituality of creation, the quality that keeps us open-eyed, expectant, and alive to a life that always exceeds our calculations. We find wonder in many places, but taste, to me, the most delightful of our five senses, is in a category all its own. How can you not believe the holy is present while you’re savoring some of the bounty of God’s creation?

All the major religions of the world have something to say about food, which tells you something. The Hebrew Bible reads like a spice rack left open: cinnamon and myrrh in Exodus, dill and cumin in Isaiah, the wandering Israelites pining so hard for Egyptian cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic that you can practically hear their stomachs growl across three thousand years. Isaac asks his son Jacob for a savory dish before he passes on the family blessing. The risen Jesus eats breakfast fish with his disciples, because apparently, resurrection doesn’t cancel breakfast.

All this attention to taste and food is making me hungry. How about you? Maybe we should pause and eat something.

Breaking bread together is an act of holiness. Not just in a Buddhist center or a Christian cathedral. Did you know that when you sit down and eat a meal with another person, you are engaging in a spiritual discipline? It’s true. One act connects you to ancient traditions of hospitality, thanksgiving, and the goodness of the earth.

Christians have a sacrament for this, Holy Communion, our way of saying God is present not just in the bread but in, with, and under the whole meal and everything happening around it. The baby screaming in the corner. The old widow with wrinkled hands. The tattooed guy kneeling next to the banker in the blue blazer. The whole thing. I’ll push this further than some of my fellow theologians are comfortable with. I don’t think the holy stays parked at the altar. I think it shows up...

- around the Thanksgiving table

- in the dugout eating a hot dog

- during coffee with a friend

- at the company picnic

- across the table at the farmer’s market

- on the playground with kids

- in the college cafeteria

- with screaming toddlers at breakfast

Every one of those is a moment where the holy breaks in, whether anybody bothers to notice or not.

Leah Chase, the chef who fed Freedom Riders and reshaped American history out of a gumbo pot at Dooky Chase’s in New Orleans, understood this without needing a seminary degree. “You have to be in love with that pot,” she said. “You have to put all your love in that pot.” And, more plainly still: “Food builds big bridges. If you can eat with someone, you can learn from them, and when you learn from someone, you can make big changes.” That’s not a recipe tip. That’s theology with a wooden spoon in its hand.

According to a Harvard Business Review survey, only about ten percent of us love to cook, and forty-five percent flat out hate it. The rest of us are stuck in the lukewarm middle. I drift between loving it and tolerating it, depending on the season, mostly enthusiastic in summer and fading fast by February. My wife, fortunately, lives solidly in the loves-it camp. I won’t try to talk you out of whichever camp you’re in. But cooking, whether it delights you or merely gets endured, is a natural expression of everyday spirituality.

The three monotheistic religions, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, all carry dietary rules with deep roots, and all three lean hard into food as gift and hospitality as grace. Traditional African religions place a high value on welcoming the stranger. In Buddhism, Hinduism, and the spiritual traditions of the Indian subcontinent, hospitality and almsgiving are themselves acts of devotion. The Lord’s Prayer asks for daily bread, and Martin Luther, who never left a phrase unexamined, explained in his Small Catechism that daily bread really means everything that supports the body: food, clothing, shelter, good government, good weather, faithful neighbors, the whole catalog of what keeps a person upright and well. Bread, in the end, is code for everything.

Chef José Andrés, who has spent decades feeding people in the aftermath of earthquakes, hurricanes, and wars, put words to this same impulse: “We all are Citizens of the World. What’s good for you, must be good for all. If you are lost, share a plate of food with a stranger... you will find who you are.” Feed the stranger, and you might just find yourself and your spirituality all at the same time.

None of this needs to be solemn, by the way. Anthony Bourdain, who spent a career insisting that food was never supposed to be a chore, put it this way: “I always feel a little guilty when I hear people complaining about the stuff they do in the kitchen. I’m like, what’s the matter with you? It’s food! It’s supposed to be fun!” He’s right, and so is Leah Chase, who insisted that everyone can cook if they try and put a little love into it. Somewhere between Bourdain’s mischief and Chase’s love affair with the pot, you get the whole picture. Cooking is serious enough to count as devotion and light enough to remain a pleasure.

So here’s the invitation. Next time you taste something good, pause for half a beat before the second bite and notice what’s happening: sunlight, soil, somebody’s labor, somebody’s love, arriving all at once on your tongue. Next time you cook, even if you’re squarely in that lukewarm forty-five percent, remember you’re joining a long line that runs through ancient, sacred meals and Leah Chase’s gumbo pot. Every culture, every scripture, every grandmother who ever fed a stranger has been telling us the same thing in a thousand languages. The holy isn’t hiding from your dinner table. It’s sitting right there, waiting for you to pass the salt.

Now, what’s for dinner? See what I made here.

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is a writer, photographer, and increasingly responsible for half the meals at home. www.jameshazelwoodphoto.com

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I consider the thank-you one of our smallest daily liturgies. We treat it as a transaction, almost an automatic reflex. The gratitude goes out, and the matter is closed.

This week’s video can be viewed here

This might be a common exchange at cash registers and around dinner tables. But anyone who has practiced gratitude knows a stranger truth. The one most changed by the thank-you is seldom the one who receives it, though the thank-you can be appreciated. The one offering gratitude is most affected. This is my hunch. When we give thanks, we are altered. The alteration is the point.

Pema Chödrön, an American Buddhist nun whose writings have quietly supported many through difficult times, emphasizes that practice isn’t about fixing the world or improving circumstances. Instead, it’s about facing life as it is, without defenses. She uses the term ‘maitri,’ meaning loving-kindness, to describe the warmth we first extend to ourselves and then to others. Gratitude is also part of this family of practices. It doesn’t depend on life being perfect; it simply involves recognizing what already sustains us.

The phrase ‘sustains us’ more accurately captures the Buddhist concept of gratitude than our typical greeting-card expression. Interdependence teaches us that nothing exists in isolation: the bread on the table embodies the rain, the fields, a stranger’s effort, and an unbroken chain of human labor. Giving thanks in this context is not mere politeness; it’s an acknowledgment of reality. It’s a recognition of how deeply we are supported by things we did not create and can never fully repay.

People who are aware of being carried tend to be humbler. Here’s how it works, as far as I can tell. The ungrateful self is grasping, always convinced it is owed more and constantly comparing what it has with what it thinks it deserves. Gratitude interrupts this cycle. For a moment, the self ceases to be the center of everything and becomes a receiver, a guest. The small king of our desires is temporarily dethroned. Although uncomfortable, this also offers a form of freedom. We cannot feel grateful and entitled at the same time.

Many traditions have recognized this, integrating gratitude into daily practice. The observant Jew begins the day with Modeh Ani, expressing thanks before any other activity, before thoughts or grievances form. Christians call their main meal the Eucharist, from the Greek word for thanksgiving, to rehearse gratitude as a core act. Muslims incorporate praise and thanks to God, using phrases like alhamdulillah, meaning ‘praise and thanks be to God,’ into everyday speech. Meister Eckhart, the 13^th-century Dominican mystic, said that if “thank you” is the only prayer you ever utter, it suffices. Despite their many differences, these traditions share a common emphasis on gratitude.

Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Roman Catholic Benedictine monk with years of dialogue with Buddhist teachers, clearly expressed this reversal. “It is not happiness that makes us grateful,” he said. “It is gratefulness that makes us happy.” Consider that carefully. Most of us live in the opposite direction, waiting until life provides something to be grateful for before feeling grateful. The contemplatives, however, turn this around—practicing gratitude first, with happiness as the natural consequence.

Recently, scientists have caught up with monasteries. Researchers encouraging people to keep gratitude journals, listing things they did not have to earn, report clear improvements in well-being, sleep, and feelings of warmth in relationships. Studies show that gratitude works.

What I find most helpful in Chödrön’s writing is her refusal to confine gratitude to days when all is well. She focuses on the moment when everything falters. Even then, she emphasizes the importance of staying open rather than shutting down. Gratitude in these moments isn’t denial; it doesn’t deny the loss. Instead, it rejects the idea that loss is the only reality. Expressing thanks, even in darkness, for the hand still holding ours is one of the bravest acts, and it transforms the person who chooses to do it.

I keep restarting a practice of gratitude. I’m trying to offer thoughtful, sincere thank-yous instead of quick ones. While the world hasn’t changed, just read the news, my perspective shifts, albeit slightly. I’m less a creditor and more a guest in unarranged circumstances. This practice isn’t about changing the world but transforming myself, as gratitude subtly influences us when expressed.

More to come,

James Hazelwood is a writer and photographer. His book, Everyday Spirituality, didn’t win any prizes, but a few people thought it was pretty good.

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As we make our way into this series, each week I’ll bring you both a video as well as a written reflection on the subject matter. While the video and the essay will dance together, each is distinct. The videos are intended to be accessible to a broader audience, those less inclined to dive into the written word. The written reflection provides a little more substance and hopefully delivers it in a tone that is thoughtful.

All of this work reflects an update on my book, Everyday Spirituality. There are places where my thinking has evolved (i.e. I’ve changed my mind), and other aspects that require further investigation. You either read or watch or both.

The Breath We Hold in Common

A song and a word. When I first heard the hymn “Breathe on me Breath of God,” I was a young man attending a worship service before my embrace of the faith of Yehshua, that wandering Rabbi from Galilee. On that same Sunday, I heard these words from John’s story of Jesus ‘ life: “Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” ²² When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

In a rather irreverent moment, my friend seated next to me leaned over and said, “Wasn’t the guy just in the tomb for three days? His breath must have smelled awful.” I busted up laughing, much to the displeasure of the rather stoic Minnesota Lutherans around us.

That memory remains with me to this day. Every time I hear the hymn “Breathe on me Breath of God,” a small cross crosses my face.

And yet, breathing is a central defining element of spirituality in all the religions of this world.

Sit with a Greek Orthodox monk reciting the Jesus Prayer, repeating “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me’ with each breath. Join a Hindu practicing pranayama, a Buddhist meditating on breath, a Sufi murmuring dhikr, a Catholic using rosary beads, or a Jewish swaying in prayer. Strip away the theology and doctrine, and what remains is similar, namely a slow, deliberate, repetitive breath below resting rate.

For most of human history, breath has defined the spiritual practices of people around the globe. We now have instruments to measure it, and the measurements are remarkable.

In 2001, Luciano Bernardi and his team published a study in the British Medical Journal. They observed healthy adults while the participants recited the Latin Ave Maria and a yoga mantra. Both activities slowed breathing to six cycles per minute. Rhythmic breathing boosted heart rate variability and baroreflex sensitivity. This helped stabilize blood pressure. The researchers found that these religious recitations yield health benefits.

Six breaths a minute is a target for slow breathing practices. A healthy adult breathes 12-20 times a minute, but slow breathing cuts this in half. Research shows that breathing at five to six breaths per minute synchronizes heart rate and breathing, making the heart work better. This type of breathing strengthens the nervous system and helps it switch between rest and effort. It also lowers stress and anxiety by increasing parasympathetic activity, which controls rest and digestion. Studies have shown that slow breathing lowers cortisol, improves attention, and reduces symptoms of PTSD and stress.

None of this requires belief. The nervous system does not check your creed before it calms down. But the convergence raises a question that science alone cannot answer.

It is tempting to read these findings reductively, as though the mystics were merely primitive biofeedback technicians who happened to dress their nervous systems in religious language. That reading is too thin. The traditions were never only after a lower cortisol level. They were after God, or emptiness, or union, or the quieting of the self just enough to hear something beyond it. What the research suggests is more interesting than reduction. The body was always part of the prayer, never merely its vehicle.

The Hebrew ruach, the Greek pneuma, the Sanskrit prana, and the Latin spiritus are all words that express both breath and spirit. In tradition after tradition, the same word carries breath, wind, and spirit together, refusing to separate them. The ancients did not distinguish between a spiritual practice and a physiological one. They breathed slowly because it drew them toward the divine, and it happens that drawing toward the divine, in this particular bodily idiom, also steadies the heart and quiets the alarm systems of a frightened animal.

Perhaps the deeper finding is that these practices endured because they worked on both the soul and body, allowing practitioners to feel the difference even without instruments. Monks, yogis, and worshippers with beads spoke from personal experience, and only now have we developed machines sensitive enough to confirm that.

Slow rhythmic prayerful breathing. It is a small, humble doorway, available to anyone, requiring no equipment or orthodoxy. The great spiritual traditions left us this gift. Science has merely allowed us to legitimize and verify what was always there all along.

Try it. Two small breaths in, and one long out. You might feel better, and in time closer to the Great Spirit that surrounds us all.

Next Week…Gratitude

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is an author, photographer and teacher. His book, Everyday Spirituality, forms the basis for this new series, now streaming on Netflix, ahead, I mean, YouTube.

That spirit of attending to the world around us served as the driving force behind my book, Everyday Spirituality. Struggling with all the traditional ways of engaging in spiritual practices, I needed a different approach.

That book spoke to many other people seeking a new way to connect with the sacred in life. Still to this day, that book represents my best work.

But it needs a new vehicle for its message. In an age of short attention spans, increasing use of video and a whole new segment of the population seeking something beyond the chaos of our modern world, I thought it might be time to bring the message to a new format. (wow, that’s a long sentence)

So I’m launching a new version, or rather a new interpretation of the ideas in the book.

Begininng today, I’m introducing a new video series on Everyday Spirituality. I’m taking the ideas and translating them to a new format. One that I hope communicates the concepts but in a way consistent with video. Each week I’ll bring a focus to one of the 27 ways we all can practice Everyday Spirituality.

Click the image below to watch the introductory episode. Or Click here

More to come next week

James Hazelwood is a storyteller using words and images to convey meaning in an unstable time. He is the author of several books including Everyday Spirituality.

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But one story stands out to everyone. Victor’s profile features his description of gardening, particularly a compost pile that captured his imagination. In fact, the process of turning dead leaves and discarded plants into rich, nourishing soil became the metaphor he needed. It’s an example of how each of us needs to find a symbol or a new story that connects our inner experience with an outer reality. When that happens, tremendous healing can occur.

Victor’s Story

“These two ladies. They came in and started talkin’ bout gardening. I thought, man, I ain’t doing no gardening. ..But, then I started workin’ in the compost and seeing what change happens. I thought, this is me.” Victor’s road to redemption through compost and strawberries.

When the women walked into the supermax with their gardening program, Victor Fabian had already decided they would not last.

“I thought these were going to be like little old ladies tryin’ to be do-gooders,” he says now. “And it was a joke.” He and the other men figured they would laugh the program right out of the building. After twenty-five and a half years inside, Victor had seen plenty of well-meaning programs come and go.

Kate Lacouture and Vera Bowen — later joined by Emily Cotter — had come from Garden Time with a different idea. They had built a program specifically for men like Victor, men who had served long sentences and didn’t qualify for the other reentry tracks. Where the system had run out of categories, they showed up with seeds.

“They stuck it out,” Victor says. The strawberries went in. So did the berries and the vegetables. Victor, who had initially signed up mostly to eat something fresh, found himself drawn into the whole operation, including planting, watering, and especially composting.

The compost is where the story turns.

“I got into the compost, and the compost basically gave me insight that was incredible,” he says. “It was like I couldn’t even believe I had that inside of me.”

He began to see himself in the pile. “I kinda related to dirt,… the feeling of the human mind being incarcerated, having the upbringing of so much negative impact.” Then he watched what came out the other side of the composting process. The results were Strawberries. Herbs. Vegetables. “I seen all this good produce that came from the compost. I just felt like that was the full potential I was able to reach inside of me.”

He settles on a word that feels almost sacred: inoculate. “So it was kind of like, I don’t know, like, inoculate or something.” This realization deeply affected Victor. He saw dirt transform into healthy, life-giving soil that produced fruits and vegetables to nourish both his and others’ bodies and souls, as if his inoculation offered protection from disease or encouragement for growth, all through his experience with composting.

Victor was released in 2024. Amos House took him in and gave him room to set down what he calls “the anxieties I was carrying.” From there, he entered job training at Garden Time and worked there until he could open his own commercial cleaning business, STR8 Clean. The Rhode Island Freedom Collective recently recognized and celebrated Victor for launching his own cleaning business, Str8ght Clean. His dedication, hard work, and commitment to building a better future are an inspiration to our community.”

But the cleaning business is only part of the work. The rest is the branching out from the compost and the seeds planted in him.

“I came over here, and I tried to reach my full potential as a service,” he says. “Having those different branches — branches of good fruits, of good deeds, of good actions.” He helps people prep for job interviews. He cuts hair. He talks to kids about the choices that pulled him down when he was young, hoping a few will take the right turn he took left.

“The seeds we plant right now are basically what’s going to come to fruition,” he says.

Kate, Vera, and Emily did the same thing for him. They didn’t lecture the men in supermax. They brought soil and seeds and stayed long enough for something to grow.

What grew, in the end, was Victor, an inspiration to the community.

The rest of the profiles can be viewed online here

What’s Next?

Just before the pandemic, I wrote and published a book, Everyday Spirituality. It is without a doubt my best work, and continuing sales seem to reflect that others value it as well. This summer, I’m working on a video version of the book. Not simply reading the book, but developing a whole new understanding, more like a reinterpretation of Everyday Spirituality. Look for the introductory episode next week.

More to Come

James Hazelwood is a storyteller focusing on the pursuit of meaning in a somewhat upside-down world.

The Pledge was written in 1892, largely credited to Baptist minister Francis Bellamy. Its original version read: “I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands—one Nation indivisible—with liberty and justice for all.” Notably, it made no mention of God. When Franklin Roosevelt signed the U.S. Flag Code into law in 1942 to standardize the wording, it still omitted any reference to God. It wasn’t until 1954 that the phrase including ‘under God’ was added, a change rooted less in theology than in Cold War influences.

Around 1952, the Knights of Columbus and other groups began lobbying to add “under God” to the Pledge. In February 1954, Pastor George M. Docherty of Washington’s New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, with President Eisenhower present, advocated this change during a Lincoln’s birthday sermon, arguing the original Pledge was too generic and could be recited by Soviet schoolchildren. Adding God created a boundary that godless communists could not cross. Congress approved the change within six months, and Eisenhower signed it, praising the “spiritual weapons” securing America’s strength. This led to “In God We Trust” appearing on all currency in 1955 and becoming the national motto in 1956, replacing E pluribus unum—“out of many, one.”

In 1950s America, this change caused little controversy. Embedding God in patriotism was widely accepted. The God was non-specific, a national deity blessing the flag without challenging religious loyalties. Even then, there were limits: Congress rejected an amendment declaring submission to “Jesus Christ,” seeing it too extreme. America wanted God on coins and pledges, not a specific God with explicit demands.

In The American Religion, Harold Bloom asserts that Americans who practice as Baptists, Methodists, Mormons, or atheists aren’t practicing traditional Christianity but a form of Gnosticism centered on self-discovery. According to Bloom, Gnosticism holds that the true self is a divine spark, independent of institutions or creeds, existing before Creation and seeking direct union with God. Bloom emphasizes that key moments in American religion are revivals and the writings of Emerson and James, not church councils or confessions. He argues that Americans are convinced of their separateness from Creation, describing a culture ‘furiously searching for the spirit,” but the spirit they seek is ultimately themselves.

Bloom is a frustrating writer with an arrogant style, quick to criticize, and often mistaken about traditions. His portrayals of “Baptist” and “Mormon” are imaginative yet selective. His core idea remains valid: if American religion focuses on the individual self with personal access to the divine, then a God aligned with national symbols is predictable. “Under God” resonated during the Cold War as it depicted a deity supporting national pride, serving as a mascot that magnifies the inner spirit into a nation. Bloom’s post-Christian America doesn’t need to choose between worshiping God or the nation because, in the American Religion, those acts have subtly merged.

But, what do we mean when we use the word God?

Perhaps ‘God’ is best understood not through dense theological terms but through simple, everyday language. Rather than relying on scholarly concepts like omnipotence (all-powerful), immutability (unchanging), and aseity (existing on its own), let’s frame the idea around small prepositions: God is with us, for us, and among us. This is the heart of Rob Bell’s book, What We Talk About When We Talk About God. In the book, he seeks to make the word “God” feel meaningful again.

Bell leans into the preposition “ahead.” God is ahead of us. Note the forward-leaning emphasis. He pictures a God who is always pushing creation forward, calling us out of tired old certainties toward a kinder, more alive way of living. Or, as one of my seminary professors described it, God is not pushing us into the future but, in the future, pulling us toward Godself.

There may be a fair critique of this approach as a “detheologizing” of faith, draining the meaning from ideas like Jesus, sin, and salvation. But Bell shows the same trust in personal growth and wonder that Bloom describes. Is this getting at what is meant in the Pledge of Allegiance, “One nation under God”? A God who-is-ahead is caring and morally serious, a huge step up from the bland national mascot America adopted in 1954. Even so, this is still a very American God, one who resists any middleman and keeps reassuring us that the path we’re already on is the right one. The problem, as you can see, is how easily these ideas of God can be manipulated.

God becomes a divine figure who exists to justify our desires. Each individual can conjure up a deity that blesses consumerism, military might, or simply the internal pleasant feeling as I pursue my happiness.

The Pledge story reveals how a generic, demand-free God becomes intertwined with national identity during a time of fear, and how easily people recite the words because others do. Beneath our differences, Americans worship a God who ultimately reflects the self, a God that can be readily used for the tribe’s purposes without resistance. Even among the well-intentioned, a generous reinterpretation of God can still keep the focus on the self, blessing our momentum instead of challenging it.

Christian Nationalism, in this context, is not an external influence on American faith but a natural extension of it. When the ‘under God” phrase in the pledge reflects a sense of national chosenness rather than divine sovereignty, the progression from “God blesses America” to “America is God’s instrument” is seamless…and dangerous.

When we recite the pledge or note the divine reference on our money, what are we saying? What is the nature of this deity we hold so close? Perhaps my secretive questioning 50 years ago merits a broader conversation. When you read those references to God, what comes to mind for you?

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is an author and photographer living in New England’s smallest state. He tells stories about culture, religion, politics, and the best coffee houses. www.jameshazelwoodphoto.com. (All photos are by me unless otherwise noted)

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Jesus, as a cloud surfer, seems to be the historic artistic depiction. Come on, there’s got to be more to this event.

Depth psychology and contemplative theology uncover that the Ascension isn’t an escape from earthly life but a transformation of divine presence within human consciousness. It’s not about Jesus leaving; it’s about him being present everywhere and always, in ways we’re still discovering.

Edward Edinger, that rather sober and stoic Jungian analyst, viewed Christ’s entire life as a blueprint for our own human maturation, sometimes called individuation, which is Carl Jung’s concept of a lifelong journey toward wholeness. For Edinger, the Ascension signifies the completion of this cycle. Jesus embodies the totality of God in human form. The Crucifixion broke the harmful inflation where one perceives oneself as divine. Always a dangerous trajectory. The Resurrection is about resilience in the face of powers beyond our control. The Ascension, then, is a reuniting of the disparate parts of ourselves.

The Ascension of Jesus can be viewed as a broadening of the incarnation. What had been localized in one charismatic figure becomes democratized throughout the community. The disciples must stop looking for God solely in their teacher and discover that same fire kindling within themselves. This is collective maturation, which is a terrifying, exhilarating move from spiritual childhood to spiritual adulthood. Obviously, humanity is still working on this project.

Jung considered this progression essential to Christianity’s strength. He described the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit as a “broadening process of incarnation.” If Jesus had stayed physically present, always available to resolve every dilemma and answer every question, his followers would have remained immature. The Ascension encourages the community to undertake the challenging task of discernment and embrace the unsettling freedom of living without the Master’s direct physical presence.

What happened in Christ’s life happens always and everywhere. We all face our crucifixions, like those shattering moments when our carefully constructed identities collapse. We all hunger for resurrection, for meaning restored after devastating loss. And we all must eventually live through our own ascension, the moment when we can no longer locate the sacred solely in external authorities, such as gurus, traditions, or institutions.

But this psychological reading might lead us into mere metaphor. Eugene Peterson spent his career resisting interpretations that treat Scripture as an allegory for inner development. For Peterson, spiritual theology must be “very specifically focused in Jesus as the Christ, Jesus born, crucified, raised”—not Jesus as an abstraction. The Ascension isn’t just about our journey; it’s about what God has done in Christ to reconcile the world.

Peterson taught that in Christ’s ascent, the Spirit takes us into the humanity of Jesus, bringing us with him—all our humanity—to the Father. This keeps the Ascension tethered to actual history, to the doctrine of the Trinity, and to the particular Jewish man from Nazareth who walked dusty roads and died a criminal’s death.

Author Frederick Buechner approached the mystery with his gift for earthy lyricism. For Buechner, the Incarnation’s shocking claim is that God enters fully into matter that “all ground is holy ground because God not only made it but walked on it, ate and slept and worked and died on it.” The Ascension might seem to contradict this, suggesting the spirit’s escape from flesh. But Buechner saw it differently. Christ doesn’t abandon his humanity when he ascends; he takes it with him, transformed yet still fundamentally embodied. And he doesn’t remove himself from earthly concerns—he distributes his presence more widely through the Spirit.

The community is now his body. The Ascension is God’s ultimate vote of confidence in embodied existence, the commissioning of ordinary believers to extraordinary work.

Amy-Jill Levine, the Orthodox Jewish scholar who teaches the New Testament, adds crucial context here. The early Jewish hope wasn’t for individual souls to escape to heaven but for God to restore creation—to raise bodies and renew the earth itself. Through this lens, the Ascension validates embodied existence rather than negating it. Christ’s glorified body becomes the first fruits of a general resurrection and the renewal of all creation.

Levine’s scholarship also corrects the notion that Jesus transcends his Jewishness to become universal. Jesus lived, taught, argued, and died as a Jew. His ascension doesn’t erase that but fulfills the Jewish hope that God’s glory would one day fill the whole earth. The particular Jewish Jesus becomes universally available through the Spirit without losing any of his historical specificity.

The Ascension represents the withdrawal from dependence on an external savior to the discovery of Christ’s presence within the community and the human soul. The Ascension is God’s affirmation of embodied life. It’s not escape but transformation, not abandonment but a new mode of presence.

Perhaps the Ascension is best understood as a hinge connecting Easter to Pentecost, resurrection to the birth of the Church, the particular to the universal. The disciples stand gazing upward, and the angel’s rebuke: “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” The Ascension isn’t an invitation to escape by staring at clouds. It’s a commission to turn back toward the world, to become Christ’s body in the ordinary mess of human community.

The upward journey, it turns out, sends us downward. And that paradox might be the only holiday gift worth celebrating, even without the bunny or the turkey or the man in the red suit.

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is a photographer and writer, scratching his head through conflicting forces in a world busy being born.

The writer Derek Thompson recently offered what he called a unified theory of the Tragic Twenties (as in the 2020s.) His diagnosis is worth sitting with:

Thompson’s diagnosis is accurate and sobering. But diagnosis is not a cure. I suggest three things that might help.

I. Life Is Difficult

That is the opening sentence of M. Scott Peck’s 1978 book The Road Less Traveled, a work that managed to land Buddhist insight about the nature of suffering in the middle of American individualism’s relentless cheerfulness. Peck’s argument was deceptively simple: because we refuse to accept that life is genuinely hard, we are perpetually ambushed by its difficulty. Our denial of suffering does not spare us from it. It only leaves us less equipped to bear it.

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung made a similar observation when he wrote that “neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” What he meant is that when we refuse to meet our pain honestly, it does not disappear. It goes underground and finds other, more destructive, ways to surface. A grief-phobic culture is not a happy culture. It is an anxious one.

I have officiated at enough funerals to know how poorly we handle this grief. I once stood beside a seventy-five-year-old mother, grieving at her forty-seven-year-old son’s wake, when a visitor leaned in and said, “At least you still have two other children.” The impulse behind such words is not cruelty. It is discomfort, the same discomfort that underlies every forced smile, every hyper positivity post, every cultural message insisting that you should be happy, always, or else something is wrong with you. After all, we are the country built on the pursuit of happiness.

Ironically, I suggest that the first step toward a pursuit of, let’s call it contentment, is to embrace that life is difficult, life is hard, life endures suffering.

II. Community Helps

We are not built for solitude. Even those of us who tend toward introversion, who recharge in quiet alone time, still need other people. We simply prefer them in smaller numbers and at lower levels of intensity.

The sociologist Robert Bellah warned in Habits of the Heart that American individualism, taken to its logical conclusion, produces a kind of radical isolation that hollows out the self. Without communities of memory, without people who know our stories and hold us accountable to something larger than our preferences, we lose the thread of meaning. Thompson’s diagnosis confirms what Bellah feared: the self-isolation of modern life has not made us freer. It has made us more adrift.

For years, I have carried a variation of James Carville’s famous political shorthand. The insight that cut through the noise of the 1992 campaign was “It’s the economy, stupid.” My version is “It’s community, stupid.”

Despite its many faults, religion can foster a sense of community. The healthiest religious communities I know embody two key values: they are welcoming and actively serve others. (Spoiler alert for what’s coming) Healthy faith communities are places where people feel they belong and where they help others.

Community can also be found in music ensembles, neighborhood groups, reading circles, recovery programs, or anywhere else people show up regularly and begin to know each other’s names. The problem today is that many of the mid-twentieth-century structures that hosted this kind of belonging, the Grange halls, the bowling leagues, the civic clubs, have declined or disappeared. Some of them needed to go. But the need they met did not disappear with them.

My mother, now ninety-one, relocated to a new community fourteen years ago. She adopted a rule: visit each interest group and club at least once, then select the ones that truly suit her. This kind of intentionality does not come easily; it requires effort. Nevertheless, it is precisely the kind of determination the present moment calls for. The community you seek will not come to you; you must go out and find it.

Dorothy Day, who spent her life building exactly this kind of community at the Catholic Worker houses of hospitality, said it with characteristic plainness in The Long Loneliness: “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.” She was not speaking of sentiment. She was speaking of a practice, daily and concrete, chosen again and again, especially when it is inconvenient.

III. You Gotta Serve Somebody

Bob Dylan was onto something in the song with this title. The title captures a truth that social science has now documented with some rigor: service to others is among the most reliable routes to personal meaning and well-being.

The psychologist Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps and went on to write Man’s Search for Meaning, argued that the deepest human drive is not pleasure, not power, but meaning. And meaning, he found, is discovered not through self-satisfaction but through self-giving. “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances,” Frankl wrote, “but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” I would suggest that much of the meaning in life involves serving others.

No one claims a cruise vacation is life-changing. However, many return from a week spent building Habitat for Humanity homes, teaching reading, or sitting with the dying and report how impactful the time was.

For years, my wife and I led groups to a remote mountain town in Honduras, where we spent a week building a church for a community in Yuscaran. We slept in rustic cabins, ate together, and worked alongside people whose language most of us barely spoke. On the last day, the conversation always returned to the same point. A teenager once voiced what everyone in the room was thinking: “We came here thinking we were going to help people, and it turned out we were the ones who got helped.” Every head nodded in agreement.

The Good Samaritan in Jesus’s parable is not the one who felt moved by compassion while safely on his way. He is the one who got off his donkey. The hero of the story is the one who served. The research bears this out: volunteering regularly is associated with lower rates of depression, greater life satisfaction, and even longer life expectancy. Serving others does not diminish us. It is, paradoxically, among the most effective things we can do for ourselves.

A Choice

The age of despair is real. Derek Thompson named it, and the data confirms it. The faces around us reflect it. But despair, for all its weight, is not the last word available to us.

Carl Jung believed the second half of life was an invitation to move from building the Self to building the Soul. That requires a maturity that comes, in part, from honestly facing life and seeking a more generative posture. We, as a culture, are in what might be understood as a collective second half. The old structures are not coming back. The question is whether we will build something better in their place or simply scroll until we forget the question was ever asked.

We have a choice. We can wallow, or we can get off our donkeys.

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is a writer and photographer living in New England’s smallest state, where he is seeking community and service amid difficult times. www.jameshazelwood.net He is the author of Weird Wisdom for the Second Half of Life, from which this article draws.

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One cloudy February afternoon, some friends and I took the number 64 bus from central Rome into the suburbs. I’d read about the Catacomb of Domitilla in an art history travel guidebook. The bus dropped us off in a modern neighborhood. After several wrong turns, each blocked by construction detours, we found our way down through layers of Roman tufa into underground chambers where early Christians buried their dead. The ceilings were low, and the air was cool and damp, heavy with centuries. And there, painted on the curved ceiling of a burial chamber, was an image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, carrying a lamb on his shoulders and surrounded by twelve disciples, in a fresco that also depicted the Last Supper.

This painting revealed something older than the Gospel of John, older than Luke’s parables. The young man in the fresco stood in a perfect Greco-Roman contrapposto, with his weight on one leg, mimicking a pose familiar from classical sculpture. His tunic was simple and almost archaic. The way he carried that ram did not resemble Jesus comforting the lost sheep. Instead, it resembled Hermes Criophorus, the ram-bearer, the Greek deity who guides souls to the underworld.

The Christians who commissioned this third-century fresco weren’t trying to hide their pagan borrowing. They were doing something far more interesting. They were speaking a visual language their neighbors could understand, translating the radical claims of their upstart religion into the grammar of images that Romans already knew how to read.

The Borrowed Image

The Good Shepherd motif was widespread in early Christian art, especially in funerary contexts, yet it had deep roots in Greco-Roman culture. The kriophoros, a figure carrying a ram, appeared in Greek sculpture as early as 500-450 BCE, often depicting Hermes. In Greek contexts, this shepherd symbolized protection, guidance, and the promise of safe passage.

Early Christians adapted the existing image of Hermes Criophorus, transforming the ram-bearing god into Christ, who protects the dead and leads them to eternity. The theological shift was profound, yet the visual vocabulary remained strikingly similar. Same contrapposto stance. Same lamb draped over the shoulders. Same young, beardless face. Same promise of safe passage through death.

Standing in that catacomb, I grasped what art historians call “syncretism”, the deliberate adaptation and reinterpretation of images from different traditions. The pagan depictions of shepherds on sarcophagi represented humanitas or philanthropia, virtues valued by both pagan and Christian groups. Early Christians didn’t create an entirely new visual language. Instead, they repurposed existing symbols of care, guidance, and transition from Roman funerary art to reflect their own cosmology.

But the borrowing went deeper than mere aesthetics. To understand why early Christians turned to Hermes when they wanted to depict Christ, we need to understand who Hermes was in the Greek imagination.

Hermes Psychopompos

Hermes served as a psychopomp, a deity who guided the souls of the deceased to the afterlife. His role wasn’t to judge the dead, but simply to accompany them on their journey. Hermes escorted souls to the River Styx (no, not the 1970s Rock band), where Charon would ferry them across into Hades. He was the divine companion at the moment of greatest vulnerability and fear.

The word itself—psychopompos—means “soul-guide.” In Jungian psychology, the psychopomp represents a mediator between the unconscious and conscious realms, often appearing in dreams as a wise figure or a helpful animal. This is where the resonance with Christian theology becomes almost uncanny. Jesus, too, claims in the Gospel of John to be a shepherd who knows his sheep, calls them by name, lays down his life for them, and leads them to eternal pastures.

Both figures occupy liminal space, the threshold between life and death, between the known world and the unknown. Hermes was understood as a god of boundaries, and his association with the underworld reflected his role as guardian of the boundary between life and death. In Christian theology, Jesus performs a similar function, becoming the one who descends into death and emerges alive, and promising his followers that where he goes, they can follow.

The structural similarities: divine son (Hermes is Zeus’s son, Jesus is God’s son), shepherd imagery, psychopomp function, and boundary-crosser between realms. It’s as if early Christians looked at the available mythological vocabulary and thought, “Yes, this Hermes figure is the closest approximation we have for what we’re trying to say about Christ.”

The Demigod Pattern

There’s another layer worth exploring, namely, the pattern of the divine demigod, the offspring of a god and a mortal. This is standard fare in Greek mythology. Examples include Heracles, Perseus, and Achilles, all born of divine fathers and mortal mothers. Their dual nature gave them access to both worlds. They could walk among mortals and also traffic with the divine.

Jesus fits this pattern as well. Son of God, born of a mortal woman. Divine nature, human flesh. The early church councils would spend centuries articulating the precise mechanics of this relationship. The Nicene creed (C.E. 325) states as ‘fully God and fully human, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father,’ yet the underlying structure echoes the Greek demigod tradition.

Jung called this the archetype of the Divine Child, the miraculous birth, the one who mediates between heaven and earth. It’s a pattern that recurs across cultures, not because one tradition borrowed from another in a simple, linear way, but because it speaks to something persistent in the human soul, namely, our hunger for a bridge between the transcendent and the earthly, between what we experience and what we intuit must lie beyond it.

The early Christians weren’t naïve about this. They knew they were working within existing patterns. Paul explicitly references Greek religion in his speech at the Areopagus in Acts 17, pointing to the altar to an unknown god and declaring that what the Greeks worship in ignorance, he proclaims to them in truth. It’s a rhetorical move that acknowledges continuity even as it claims superiority. We’re talking about the same God you dimly perceive, but now we’re naming him clearly.

Why the Image Faded

It might surprise the current churchgoer that by the fifth century, the Good Shepherd image had largely disappeared from Christian art. I say this because the image is still widely used in US American Protestantism, even though most modern people don’t own sheep. Yet Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church and The Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd are popular names for congregations founded in the late 20th century. Additionally, every year, in the weeks following Easter, a Sunday is dedicated to the imagery of God as Shepherd, including a reading of Psalm 23, “the Lord is my Shepherd.” But the fifth-century Church emphasized Christ’s majesty in response to various doctrinal controversies. The humble shepherd seemed inadequate to convey Christ’s divine power. Instead, Christ enthroned, Christ triumphant, and Christ as Pantokrator became the preferred images. The vulnerable, boundary-crossing shepherd gave way to the imperial ruler. Ah, the wonders of Christendom.

Something was lost in that transition. The early church’s willingness to work with ambiguous, liminal imagery that could be understood by both people within Christianity and those outside gave way to a desire for clear doctrinal content. The thinking went that it was better to show Christ as king and teacher than to risk the Good Shepherd being misread as just another Hermes.

But religion works not by inventing entirely new languages but by taking the deep grammar of human myth-making, the patterns Jung called archetypes, and inflecting them in new directions. The shepherd who guides souls and the divine child born of god and mortal are patterns because they map onto persistent human experiences of transcendence, vulnerability, and transformation.

The Christians didn’t steal Hermes’s image. They recognized that the language of the psychopomp, the soul-guide who accompanies us through the valley of the shadow of death, was already embedded in human religious imagination. They simply claimed that in Jesus, this archetypal pattern had been made flesh in a new and definitive way.

Walking out of the Catacomb of Domitilla in February, I reflected on how modern viewers often overlook how religious images borrow from and transform shared archetypes. We prefer clear distinctions: Christian versus pagan, never blending. But the Good Shepherd fresco shows sacred language in borrowed forms. Early Christians had no problem depicting Jesus in the imagery of Greek gods, recognizing that Hermes and Jesus both address our need for guidance through death and act as boundary-crossers who show the way.

In that sense, Jesus as the Good Shepherd now makes sense to me.

As I write this essay, news outlets are filled with stories about the US President claiming he’s in talks with Iran to end the war he started. Meanwhile, Iran and other countries insist that no negotiations are taking place. The consensus among financial media is that the president’s recent statements aim to stabilize oil and stock markets. It seems everyone, on all sides, loves fake news and accusing others of spreading it. Is all this fakery wearing you out? I think a new diagnosis is needed for our time. TFS – Trump Fatigue Syndrome.

Aesop’s fable is often seen as a lesson about lying. However, there’s a deeper interpretation more relevant today. The boy who cried wolf isn’t just a liar; he’s an archetype who uses disruption to provoke reactions, knowing that overturning expectations triggers responses, and he can’t resist repeating it. In mythology, he’s a trickster. The story isn’t only about lying; it shows what happens when the trickster’s impulse becomes compulsive, and the community’s capacity to respond wears thin.

The trickster is among the oldest and most universally recognized figures across cultures. He appears as Coyote in Native American oral stories, Loki in Norse mythology, Hermes in Greek myths, and Br’er Rabbit in the American South. Even the satan figure in the biblical tradition can be viewed as a trickster. These figures are not exclusively villains. They challenge authority, see through existing structures, and enjoy revealing what others prefer to hide. He often works through indirect actions, misdirection, and sudden truths. When at his best, he acts as an undercover truth-teller.

Coyotes are often depicted in stories not just as mischievous figures but also as a source of fire for humans. He embodies the trickster as a culture hero, with chaos fueling gifts. Hermes, the messenger of the gods, also served as the patron of thieves and the guide to the underworld, a figure whose power depended on his ability to traverse the borders between realms that are usually kept separate. Loki spent centuries within the Norse cosmos, daring to do what others wouldn’t. He reveals the gods’ vanity, solves problems with innovative ideas, and disrupts rigid hierarchies. For a long period, his tricks were effective. The gods relied on him, even amid their anger, because he was indispensable precisely because he defied the rules.

But the trickster’s effectiveness relies on a key condition: the tricks must, in some way, stay connected to reality. Coyote’s chaos creates something. Hermes’ thefts serve a purpose. Trickster’s cleverness, even if maddening to those he outsmarts, ultimately brings wisdom to the community. The trickster earns his license to disrupt by being correct about something. He sees what the respectable cannot afford to see, and he states it.

Loki’s story ends in disaster, not because he was always a villain, but because his tricks lost their connection to any meaningful truth. The mischief that once fixed problems started creating them. The gods’ patience, which had worn thin, finally broke. He had worn out his welcome in the cosmos itself.

The biblical tradition has its own version of this story. The figure known in Hebrew as ha-satan , which is better understood as the adversary or the accuser, not the devil in a red suit. We see this adversary at work in the book of Job, not as the devil of later Christian imagination but as a member of the divine court, a heavenly prosecutor whose role is to challenge and test. Ha-satan’s first trick succeeds: he persuades God to allow Job’s suffering as a test. His second trick is also permitted. However, the book does not give him a third. There is a point at which even a legitimate challenge to the status quo becomes mere suffering, and the challenger loses his authority.

These stories follow a similar pattern. The trickster starts with a real insight. He or she recognizes that something is wrong, that it needs to be broken apart, and that comfort must be disturbed. The disruption is genuine and sometimes essential. But without wisdom to guide it and the ability to shift from exposing issues to healing, the trickster becomes something else: not a healer but a pathogen.

This is the framework that David Brooks accurately identified during a recent appearance on PBS’s Amanpour and Company. Reflecting on the Trump era, Brooks shared an analogy that resonated with me. He compared Trump to a doctor who, when faced with a simple acne problem, suggests decapitation as a cure, saying, “You know what will cure acne? Decapitation. We’re going to chop your head off, and that’ll cure your acne.” Trump, in this analogy, is destructive by nature. While the diagnosis might correctly point to societal issues such as the failure of the establishment, the ideological insularity of universities, and the lack of accountability within the administrative state, simply recognizing these wounds isn’t enough. The trickster identifies the wound but often prescribes harmful solutions, like decapitation, which can be worse than the original problem.

What Brooks refers to is not just a disagreement over policy. It is more like what mythographers see as the trickster’s fatal mistake. They reach a moment when chaos, lacking wisdom, turns into destruction. The boy on the hillside is correct in thinking a wolf might come. He is wrong in that his cry, disconnected from reality, is worth making. He is also wrong to believe that the village’s nervous system can be continually used as a tool of his boredom. Eventually, the community stops reacting not because the threat is fake, but because the trust that makes a response possible has run out.

We are living in this moment. It’s not just a political crisis; it’s a crisis of cultural attention. When everything becomes an emergency, nothing truly is. When every rule-breaking act is presented as courageous truth-telling, the framework collapses. The trickster’s power relies on surprise, on the audience’s capacity for shock, and on the existence of a stable order that makes disruption seem meaningful. Tear down that order, and the trickster has nothing left to oppose. He’s left shouting into the ruins.

The ancient stories suggest there’s no clear ending to this kind of moment. Loki does not repent; he waits beneath the earth for the world to end. The boy on the hillside does not survive to learn his lesson. What comes after is not the trickster’s doing. It is the community’s action. The people who kept their tools, trust, and willingness to believe, eventually, respond and rebuild.

The sheep in Aesop’s story are already gone. The real question is what the village will do in the morning.

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is a writer and photographer exploring the intersection of culture, spirituality, and the nutritional content on FDA food labels. His website seems lacking, www.jameshazelwood.net

On Sunday, while sitting in worship, I was lifted from this doom and gloom by a song - Anyway by Martina McBride.

While I wrestle with the idea that God is great, as my personal theology leans more toward mysticism, I understand the core message. Especially the contradiction between our general view of the sacred realm and our daily lives filled with grit and grime.

The song’s premise isn’t optimism. That distinction is important. Optimism suggests things will work out. “Anyway” makes no such promise. Instead, it faces head-on the possibility of failure: the dream that may never come true, the love that might not last, the prayer that could fade into silence. And it encourages action regardless.

Some songs entertain, while others strengthen. Martina McBride’s “Anyway,” released in 2003, belongs to the second category. It arrived at a time when country music was filled with celebration and bravado. It offered something rarer and more nourishing: a quiet, steely theology of perseverance amid futility.

Times are, in fact, tough. They are always tough for someone, somewhere, and often for everyone simultaneously. Economic worries, broken relationships, creeping doubts about whether any of it matters. These are not new griefs, but they are renewed in every generation. What “Anyway” offers isn’t a solution but a guiding principle. When the outcome is uncertain, when effort might be wasted, when love may be unreciprocated, the song’s answer is consistent and clear: Do it anyway.

Perhaps the deepest gift of “Anyway” is its implicit argument about where meaning comes from. The song suggests that meaning isn’t in the outcomes. It lies in the act itself. The song, the dream, the love matters not because of the intended result or outcome; it matters because we act and press on. There is freedom here, namely that a life of wholehearted effort in an indifferent world isn’t a tragedy but a form of grace.

“We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.” – Carl Jung

I’m not a country music fan, and I’m not one for sentimental preaching, but this week I needed a reminder that there is value in pressing on. We are all stumbling forward, despite the failures and misfortunes, what Shakespeare called the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. But we persevere. Somehow, this week, I found strength in that conviction. Maybe you will too.

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is a writer and photographer living in Rhode Island, where the snow is finally melting around the house. www.jameshazelwood.net

Sigh!

In the opening pages of A Terrible Love of War, the late Jungian analyst James Hillman recalls General George Patton surveying a battlefield scattered with churned earth, burned tanks, and dead soldiers. Patton lifts a dying officer, kisses him, then surveys the carnage and confesses: “I love it. God help me, I do love it so. I love it more than my life.”

This scene from the 1970 film illustrates what Hillman devoted his last significant work to understanding: the profound pull of war within the human soul. Despite our moral condemnations and humanitarian ideals, we remain attracted to this destructive activity.

Twenty years after Hillman published his meditation, the world provides ample evidence for his thesis. The Russia-Ukraine war has now entered its fifth year, with over a million casualties and no clear end in sight. In January, U.S. forces attacked Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro. Just days ago, a major military operation began against Iran, marking the most aggressive escalation in the region in decades. These are not isolated incidents. They are signs of an archetypal pattern that Hillman would call, at its deepest level, an influence on human existence.

Hillman structures his book around four provocations: War is Normal, War is Inhuman, War is Sublime, and Religion is War. The first assertion hits hardest because it affronts our progressive sensibilities. We prefer to think of war as an anomaly, a failure of diplomacy, a breakdown in rational discourse. Hillman refuses us this comfort.

Look at the historical record, he urges. Since the beginning of recorded history, hardly any generation has avoided organized armed conflict. We define peace as the absence of war, not the other way around. This linguistic fact reveals our deeper assumption: war is the default condition, and peace is just the gap between conflicts.

The current global situation confirms this. Ukraine’s war is a “war of attrition,” with shifting borders causing a slow, inch-by-inch struggle. Russia controls about twenty percent of Ukrainian territory, and diplomacy remains stuck despite summits. The hope for a peaceful solution clashes with the martial spirit Hillman links to Ares, the Roman god of war.

Hillman’s most unsettling argument concerns the connection between war and belief. Whatever the object of belief be it the flag, the nation, the president, or a god, an energy drives it. Decisions become quick. Dissent becomes difficult, and doubt, which hampers action and questions certitude, becomes traitorous. This mindset is clear today. President Trump’s impulsive and ambiguous decision-making makes sense from this perspective. War increasingly follows its own logic, defying rational rules of international relations. War results from irrational emotional energy. In this way, Hillman seems to suggest that war is our most ancient religion, a god we worship.

His most controversial claim is that we actually love war. Not consciously, not rationally, but at some depth of the soul that our daylight consciousness refuses to acknowledge. After World War II, a French woman confessed to the philosopher J. Glenn Gray: “You know that I do not love war or want it to return. But at least it made me feel alive, as I have not felt before or since.”

Soldiers share similar experiences, citing intense combat, deep bonds formed under fire, and a strong sense of purpose rarely found in civilian life. Hillman quotes one veteran: “I felt like a god. I was untouchable.”

This terrible love explains why antiwar movements, despite their moral clarity, often fail to prevent the next conflict. We can understand intellectually that war is inhuman, destroying lives, communities, and ecosystems, yet we still find ourselves attracted to its spectacle. How else can we explain our endless consumption of war films and war games? Hillman compares our viewing of war, whether real or cinematic, to watching pornography. We are all voyeurs.

Hillman does not call for pacifism, seeing it as naive. Instead, he stresses understanding the war god as key to controlling excessive violence. In Roman mythology, Mars represented not only bloodshed but also discipline, restraint, and the virtues that distinguished soldiers from murderers. Hillman warns that when the martial spirit is driven by narrow beliefs, it results in domination, intolerance, and repression. A proper understanding of Mars could reveal wisdom on when to fight and when to stop.

This distinction feels urgent as American forces engage in what some analysts describe as an open-ended regime change operation in Iran, and the Ukraine conflict shows no signs of ending. The question isn’t if nations will continue fighting. We know they will. Instead, we must stay aware of war’s seductive pull.

Hillman died in 2011, before the current conflicts began. He argued that Western civilization, despite its claims of peace and human rights, has actually fostered the most enduring war machine of any culture worldwide. The reasons for this, he believed, are rooted not in politics or economics but in the religious and psychological depths of our collective soul.

If Hillman is correct, our traditional methods for preventing war are not enough. Diplomacy, economic sanctions, and international organizations all have roles, but none address the core issue. That core issue is rooted in the archetypal truth that war is a fundamental part of our souls and maybe the universe.

In the trenches of World War I, Hillman observes, French, German, Russian, Italian, English, Scottish, Irish, Austrian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Canadian, and American soldiers, to name just a few, engaged in killing each other while invoking the same God. Each believed God was on their side. Each was certain of the justice of their cause.

Bob Dylan sang about this phenomenon in his 1964 song, With God on Our Side.

Or maybe the Joan Baez version is easier on the ears, for some.

More to Come,

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James Hazelwood is a writer, photographer, living in New England, doing dishes and the laundry helps him keep his sanity - for now. His website is www.jameshazelwood.net

I was there last week, walking those streets and taking photographs. I found myself drawn not only to the spectacle but by something harder to name. There is a particular feeling that overtakes you in a crowd of masked strangers. Part of it is the festivity, the giddy looseness that carnival always promises. But beneath that is something older and stranger: a recognition that the person you usually present to the world is also, in some sense, a costume. And that the mask you wear every day to your job, your family, your social media followers may fit you no better than the one a stranger rents for Carnival.

Carl Jung had a term for this. He called it the Persona.

Jung borrowed the term from the ancient theater, where persona referred to the mask worn by actors on stage to show which character they were playing. For Jung, the persona signifies something universal: the face we create for public life, the role we play in the ongoing theater of social life. “The persona,” he wrote, “is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.”

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This is not a condemnation. Jung was mindful of this. A functioning persona is essential to healthy living. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to navigate the world with coherence or kindness. We adjust ourselves differently at a funeral than at a birthday party, with a child than with a colleague. We modify, adapt, put on, and take off appropriate faces. This is not deception; it’s social intelligence, the foundational grammar of being a person among others. The problem, Jung emphasized, occurs when we forget that the mask is just a mask. If we become so identified with the persona that we mistake it for our true self.

“A man cannot get rid of himself in favour of an artificial personality without punishment. Even the attempt to do so brings on, in all ordinary cases, unconscious reactions in the form of bad moods, affects, phobias, obsessive ideas, backsliding vices, etc.”

The symptoms Jung described, the anxiety, the exhaustion, the feeling of being trapped in a role, are the psyche’s way of signaling that something real underneath the performance exists and that it cannot be silenced forever.

Jung spent his early years in Basel, Switzerland, a city famous for its own version of Carnival. The Basler Fasnacht, held every year on the Monday after Ash Wednesday, is Switzerland’s largest carnival and the oldest Protestant carnival in the world. It begins exactly at 4:00 a.m., when the city’s utility company turns off all the lights. In that sudden darkness, thousands of participants wearing elaborate masks and playing piccolos and drums emerge and start moving through the streets. People who have experienced it describe the experience as disorienting, uncanny, and strangely sacred: the city’s usual face is turned off, and something older and less controlled takes its place.

Jung himself almost certainly experienced Fasnacht firsthand, and scholars of depth psychology have long recognized the link between the festival and his evolving ideas. The philosopher Bernardo Kastrup described it as “a living evocation of the mythical world of the obfuscated psyche.” The festival’s darkness, its anonymity, its intentional disruption of normal social roles, worked on participants like a ritual loosening of the persona. Something that can’t be expressed in daylight is spoken. Something that can’t be felt in one’s professional costume is experienced.

What the carnival tradition, whether in Basel, Venice, Rio, or even the drunken version in New Orleans, seems to understand is that the mask can be both a doorway and a disguise. When the usual persona is set aside with social permission, something else emerges—grief, longing, wildness, or tenderness—that the everyday face has been hiding. Paradoxically, the mask can let you tell the truth.

Which brings us to this moment, as the stakes of persona have never been higher or more visible.

We are engaged in a uniquely historic experiment in shaping personas. Social media platforms act as factories for creating identities. Instagram and similar sites motivate us to develop a polished public image and reward us for doing so. We select our best photos, craft our most memorable quotes, and present the version of ourselves we hope to become. The technology is new; the psychological pattern is as ancient as masks. Yet, there is a crucial difference: the feedback loops are now immediate and relentless. The platform evaluates our persona’s success through likes, follows, engagement rates, and shares. We quickly learn which version of ourselves connects with the audience. As a result, we adapt and refine ourselves accordingly.

The result is a strange doubling of the self. There is the person who woke up this morning, anxious and imperfect, drinking coffee and avoiding a difficult email. And there is the persona that person presents online: confident, purposeful, thriving. The gap between them isn’t necessarily dishonest. It might be aspirational, like the face we hope to grow into. But when the gap becomes a chasm, and the performance is the main focus while the person beneath it is starved for attention, something has gone wrong. The mask has become a trap.

Jung’s warning resonates strongly: those who reward a particular persona with money, admiration, followers, and engagement create an environment in which that persona can consume the person entirely. The “social strong man,” he observed, is often in private life “a mere child where his own states of feeling are concerned.” We might say the same of the social media influencer who performs contentment for millions while quietly falling apart, or the political leader who has maintained a persona of strength so long that vulnerability has become physiologically impossible.

It is worth pausing here to note that this is not only a modern problem. The question of the mask, of the gap between the public face and the hidden self, runs throughout human history. And it runs, with particular urgency, through the pages of the New Testament.

Paul’s letters are filled with symbolic language, not just words, but images. When writing to the churches at Ephesus and Colossae, he repeatedly uses the metaphor of removing old garments and putting on new ones: shedding the old self and embracing a new identity. In Ephesians, he emphasizes the need to “put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life” and to “put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” In Colossians, he encourages believers to “put off” anger, malice, slander, and especially falsehood. “Do not lie to one another,” he writes, “seeing that you have put off the old self.”

The resonance with Jungian language is powerful enough to stop you. Paul isn’t, of course, referring to the persona in Jung’s technical sense. But he’s describing the same human challenge: the gap between the face we present and the self we truly are; how social performance and self-protection can turn into a kind of spiritual armor that we no longer know how to remove; the cost, in both psychological and theological terms, of mistaking the mask for the face.

St. Paul’s view is mainly about community and relationships: you can’t uncover your true self in isolation. The new self isn’t found by being alone in a room; it’s shown in the presence of others doing the same work. Within a community that, as he writes to the Colossians, is marked by “compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience,” one can be embraced. The place where you can finally remove the mask is also the place where your unmasked face will be received with love.

Today is Ash Wednesday, marking the start of Lent, the forty-day season of stripping away and confronting what is truly there. The worship liturgy features a gesture almost too blunt to be comfortable: the placing of ashes on the forehead, accompanied by the words that cut through every mask we’ve ever worn: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

What the ashes reveal, in the language of depth psychology, is this: the persona will not save you. The performance cannot shield you from what awaits us all. Beneath the professional mask, the digital persona, and the face we wear for parties, there is something inherently human. We are fragile, mortal, and recognized by a God who is not impressed nor interested in performances.

This is the invitation Lent offers in its most honest form: not to become a better version of your current self, but to put that persona aside for a while. To ask, who am I when no one is watching? What do I truly believe? What do I genuinely love beyond what I advertise loving? What would it mean to be known, not as the curated self, but as the real self?

The carnival tradition has always held that before you can unmask, you must first be allowed to mask, to play, to inhabit roles, and to discover through the costume what the ordinary face hides. Venice in February is a city-wide permission structure for this ancient game. The masks are stunning, the pageantry is remarkable, and behind it all is the old intuition that we are all, all the time, performing something. Carnival simply states this aloud, with better costumes.

But tradition also recognizes that carnival ends. The lights turn back on. The masks come off. And what follows is the slow, challenging process of learning to be present without them.

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is a writer, photographer, and former bishop of the New England Synod of the ELCA. He publishes the Notebooks of James Hazelwood on Substack. www.jameshazelwood.net

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The photographs accompanying this essay were made in Venice, Italy, during Carnival, February 2026. A More Complete display will appear on my PhotoStack Page next week.

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When I served in ministry, I often told people that the US congregation, especially in the mainline tradition, might be that one place where people can engage across their differences. Organizations like Braver Angels have promoted this work for decades. However, Burge, author of the new book The Vanishing Church, argues that moderate congregations are becoming increasingly rare. I should note that by moderate, he means—and I agree—that these are not places of muddle or mush. Rather, they are salad bowls of the full spectrum of opinions.

Burge’s research is thorough and aligns with other recent studies on the decline of religious participation in America. I found this book easier to read than Christian Smith’s Why Religion Went Obsolete. While Smith explores every possible cultural change in America since the 1960s, Burge keeps his focus tightly on congregational life. He also shares personal anecdotes, including the story of a congregation he served, loved, but eventually had to close due to a lack of members.

Like many analyses of American religion, Burge’s analysis is clear. Specifically, the middle way is struggling in American society these days. Christianity, but also Judaism and Islam, tend to lean two ways — more to the right and to the left. Finding a place that wants to engage with people of varied backgrounds is increasingly rare. This makes it difficult for those who want to have civil discussions about the challenges we face as a democracy in a faith-based context.

What I found particularly insightful from Burge is his clear explanation that people’s political views are no longer influenced by religion. Instead, they are shaped by political ideology. This became clear years ago when a pastor I knew shared a conversation he had with a woman in his church. She was upset with his preaching, saying it was too political. They discussed it for a while, and then he asked her to read a portion of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Afterwards, she paused and said, “Oh my, I realize it’s not you I disagree with, it’s Jesus.” Increasingly, people are letting politics shape all aspects of their lives.

Burge concludes his book with some hopeful observations. First, he states that most Americans are pragmatic and moderate in their views, backed by supporting data. However, the problem is that they have adopted a “go along to get along” attitude. In other words, moderates might be the majority, but they are not speaking up, leaving the public square open to be dominated by extremes. Second, he argues that a common issue among more nuanced individuals in our country is our addiction to perfection. The saying, “perfection is the enemy of the good,” is far too influential. Finally, he encourages people to remember the phrase, “don’t dehumanize the other.” This means recognizing that, despite disagreements with someone who proudly wears a MAGA hat or loudly chants at an opposition rally, those are still people. They probably formed their beliefs based on their experiences, context, or life events. Yes, we are all influenced by our media choices, but beneath each person is a narrative that explains their belief system. That could be the starting point for conversations across differences. Instead of challenging the other’s beliefs directly, a better approach might be to ask, “Tell me how you came to believe that way.”

Burge has written a helpful book and offers a hopeful view that a moderate approach can be revived. I cling to his optimism, but I’ll also approach it with the kind of Christian realism I wrote about last week.

More to Come,

James Hazelwood writes about culture, religion, politics and the inner workings of the human soul. He also makes beds, does dishes and shovels snow in Rhode Island www.jameshazelwood.net

A couple of clarifications are in order, since it seems some of you may have subscribed to one newsletter when you intended to subscribe to the other.

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All in all, thanks for reading. I’ve got some great stuff coming this year. More on that later.

Oh our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis

The images from Minnesota of federal agents flooding a major American city, citizens killed by their own government, and authorities blocking local investigators from the crime scenes feel like dispatches from a country we no longer recognize. Governor Tim Walz declared January 9 “Renee Good Day” and demanded the feds withdraw. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, reviewing the video of Good’s killing, told ICE to “get the f@*% out of Minneapolis.” A federal judge found the government violated ninety-six court orders in a single month. The Minneapolis Police Chief noted grimly that two of the city’s three homicides this year were committed by federal agents.

If you want to understand what is happening in America, you could do worse than turn to a theologian who has been dead for over fifty years. Reinhold Niebuhr, the mid-twentieth-century Protestant thinker who warned against the idolatry of national self-righteousness, has never been more relevant than now.

The Making of a Public Theologian

Reinhold Niebuhr was born in 1892 in Wright City, Missouri. After studying at Yale Divinity School, he began his pastoral work in Detroit in 1915, where he spent thirteen years witnessing the harsh realities of industrial capitalism. Beneath the shadow of Henry Ford’s factories, Niebuhr saw workers exploited and discarded. These experiences shaped his entire theological outlook and dispelled the optimistic Social Gospel theology in which he had been trained.

By 1928, when he joined Union Theological Seminary in New York, Niebuhr had begun developing “Christian Realism,” a political theology grounded in three biblical convictions: humanity’s sinfulness, humanity’s freedom as beings made in God’s image, and the binding claim of the command to love God and neighbor. Over the next three decades, he became America’s most influential public intellectual. His face appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1948. Martin Luther King Jr. cited his work in “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Presidents from Carter to Obama acknowledged his influence.

The Architecture of Christian Realism

At the core of Niebuhr’s ideas is a paradox: human beings can strive for justice but are also prone to injustice. In his 1944 key work The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, Niebuhr provided what might be the most insightful one-sentence defense of democracy ever written: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

His 1932 book *Moral Man and Immoral Society* made a key distinction: individuals can sometimes go beyond self-interest through love and reason, but groups almost never do. Collectives like nations, corporations, or movements tend to combine individual selfishness into a “collective egoism” that is far more resistant to moral constraints than any person’s conscience. This idea became his main theme: the danger of self-righteousness. “Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people,” he warned, “but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.”

Readers of this Substack will notice a link with Carl Jung’s ideas about the collective in both the individual and society.

The Irony of American Righteousness

Later, Niebuhr used his theological ideas to analyze American identity. He argued that the United States had developed an “innocent self-image” that made it blind to its own moral faults. America thought it was immune to the corruptions affecting other great powers.

The irony of American history, Niebuhr argued, is that the nation’s virtues turn into its vices. The work ethic that built prosperity becomes worship of money. The faith that held communities together turns into theocratic pretension. The confidence that led to victories in war gives rise to imperial hubris. “No laughter from heaven,” he wrote, “could possibly penetrate through the liturgy of moral self-appreciation.” When political rallies resemble worship services and when a partisan victory is declared to be divine approval, we have entered territory that Niebuhr mapped decades ago.

The Present Crisis

What would Niebuhr say about our era? He would see it as the very form of idolatry he dedicated his career to opposing. The merging of national pride with religious faith exemplifies what he called the “egotistic corruption” of faith. This is the idea that God has uniquely blessed America with a sacred destiny.

Bob Dylan captured the spirit of this idea in his song ‘With God on Our Side,’ where he laments how people justify every major war by claiming God is on their side.

“Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values,” according to Niebuhr. Every political stance is temporary, partial, and susceptible to corruption. To declare any party, platform, or leader as God’s will is to commit the fundamental sin of idolatry.

Watch the videos from Minneapolis: federal agents acting with impunity, government officials lying about what the footage clearly shows, authorities invoking security to justify killing citizens who were recording their actions. This is what happens when power convinces itself of its own righteousness. Niebuhr predicted with eerie accuracy that if religious groups abandon humility and claim divine sanction for their political views, “the national community will be forced to save its unity through either secularism or authoritarianism.” Those are indeed the options now confronting us.

Proximate Solutions for Insoluble Problems

Niebuhr famously defined democracy as “a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.” This straightforward formulation offers both warning and hope. The warning: human problems are never permanently resolved. The hope: even without final solutions, we can develop workable arrangements that balance competing interests and limit concentrated power.

What would Niebuhr advise for our current times? First, humility truly involves recognizing that we are limited, flawed, and self-deceived. Second, engaging without self-righteousness means making difficult choices among imperfect options while acknowledging that choosing involves us in the complexities of power. Third, a revival of irony, not cynical detachment, but the ability to see tragedy in victory and grace in defeat. Finally, forgiveness: “the recognition that our actions and attitudes are inevitably seen in a different light by friends and foes than we see them.”

Niebuhr reminds us that the greatest threats to democracy often don’t come from its obvious enemies but from its corrupted allies. Those people who claim to uphold Christian values while abandoning Christian virtues, disguising their thirst for power with faith. In the face of such corruption, neither despair nor triumphalism helps. Only steady, patient, humble efforts of democratic citizenship guided by faith but aware of human sin can protect what Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth.”

“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,” Niebuhr wrote. “Therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.”

In Minneapolis, people continue to show up despite record-setting low temperatures, gathering at memorials that grow larger by the hour and holding smartphones to bear witness. They know that the struggle itself, carried out with humility and love, is what redeems the flawed and broken effort. The choice remains ours. It always has.

Recommended Reading - The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr

Recommend Film - An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is a writer, photographer, and storyteller living in Rhode Island. www.jameshazelwood.net

“You have a good president now,” he said. “Trump. He is saving your country.”

I waited for the joke, expecting an ironic smile. It didn’t come. He was genuine. Over the next hour, as we crossed borders, he explained his view: Trump knows how to get things done. He doesn’t bow to the establishment. He says what he means.

During my flight from Amman to my next destination, I sat next to a talkative Kurdish businessman. Same conversation. Same conclusion. “Your president,” he said, “he knows how to deal with power. He understands strength.”

A few days later, in a coffee shop in Istanbul, I struck up a conversation with a man who was working as a tour guide between clients. When the topic of American politics came up—it always does these days—he shared his opinion. Trump, he said, can’t be bought off. “He’s already rich. He doesn’t need anyone’s money.”

Three men. Three countries. Three very different economic situations and national identities—a Palestinian under occupation, a Kurd betrayed by every major power in the region, and a Turk under Erdoğan’s increasing control. Yet, they share this surprising common ground: admiration for Donald Trump.

I pushed back, as one does in this part of the world. I challenged their assumptions and offered counterarguments. They engaged thoughtfully, conceded a point here and there, but held their ground. They weren’t defensive. They seemed genuinely curious about my perspective, even as they remained unmoved by it.

At the end of my conversation with the tour guide in Istanbul, after I had voiced all my objections and nearly fallen into despair, he laughed. Not cruelly. Almost tenderly.

“I hear this from Americans a lot these days,” he said. “All this angst about what’s happening to your country. I just laugh, because now you get to experience what we’ve been dealing with for a hundred years.”

This essay isn’t really about Trump. Or rather, it isn’t only about him. It’s about a phenomenon that extends beyond any single person, namely the enduring appeal of the strongman leader, and what that attraction reveals about masculinity, the human mind, and the challenges facing democratic societies.

Why do men (and yes, this is an essay primarily about men) around the world, across different cultures, religions, and economic backgrounds, feel drawn to figures who project dominance, break norms, and promise to cut through complexity with the sharp edge of willpower? What is it about the strongman that connects with something deep inside the masculine soul?

To understand the appeal of the strongman, it helps to consider the work of Robert Moore, a Jungian analyst who dedicated his career to exploring the deep structures of the masculine psyche. In King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, Moore identified four core archetypes of mature masculinity. Each has a shadow version: an immature, destructive form that emerges when the archetype is wounded or underdeveloped. (Archetypes are inherited, universal patterns within us that shape human experience. We recognize them through the images and instinctual responses they evoke across all cultures and individuals.)

Most relevant here is the King archetype and its shadow. The mature King represents calm authority, the ability to bless others, and the power to bring order to the realm. We see this in the school principal who leads with fairness and dignity. Or the respected football coach who leads young men with integrity and likability. But the shadow of the King is the Tyrant—grandiose and terrified, unable to bless others because he can’t tolerate their vitality. He dominates because he can’t lead. He destroys because he can’t create.

Moore’s provocative insight was that what we often call “patriarchy” is not mature masculinity but its opposite—wounded boy psychology masquerading as strength. “The tyrant hates, fears, and envies new life,” Moore wrote, “because that new life, he senses, is a threat to his slim grasp of his own kingship.”

Apply this framework to the strongman phenomenon, and a troubling picture emerges. The strongman presents himself as the wise King, who will restore order, protect the nation, and embody the strength the people need. But look closer, and you’ll see the traits of the Tyrant: grandiosity, intolerance of criticism, paranoia about rivals, and the desire to dominate instead of uplift.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of fascism, has documented this pattern over a century of strongman rule. These leaders “use masculinity as a symbol of strength and a political weapon. Taking what you want, and getting away with it, becomes proof of male authority.”

This is the seduction: For men who feel threatened, displaced, or humiliated—whether by economic forces, cultural change, or geopolitical instability—the strongman offers a fantasy of regained power. He acts out what they cannot. He says what they dare not.

But here’s the trap: the strongman can only offer a fake initiation. He cannot guide his followers into mature masculinity because he’s never completed that journey himself. He can only lead them deeper into grandiosity and rage, into the endless hunt for enemies, into the illusion that strength equals domination.

The three men I talked to during my recent travels were not, as far as I could tell, “authoritarian personalities” in any clinical sense. They engaged in real debate. They welcomed pushback. They joked about themselves. So, what were they really saying when they praised Trump?

“He knows how to get things done” reflects a weariness with systems that seem to accomplish nothing. Many of us have experience with endless negotiations, bureaucratic paralysis, and talk with no action. For people who have watched Western powers make promises and break them for generations, the appeal of a leader who cuts through the diplomatic fog is not hard to understand.

“He can’t be bought” expresses disgust with widespread corruption. In places where political leaders routinely enrich themselves at the public’s expense, the idea of a leader who is already wealthy and, at least in theory, immune to bribery makes sense, even if it might be naive in practice.

And beneath it all, perhaps there’s a desire for recognition. For decades, American presidents have lectured the world on democracy while backing authoritarian regimes, called for human rights reforms while arming dictators, and promoted international law while exempting themselves and their allies from its rules.

How, then, shall we respond?

There is both a personal and a communal response. First, it starts within ourselves. You’re probably tired of me saying this, as I have for many years: the work begins inside. We each have a responsibility to become mature men and women. You can’t lead others—children, students, parishes, employees—unless you’re doing your own work. The man or woman who hasn’t wrestled with their inner tyrant is poorly prepared to resist the outer one.

Second, within our communities and political systems, democratic institutions exist precisely to check the tyrant. This was a core belief of the American democratic revolution in the 18^th century. Founders intentionally designed a system with checks and balances. Their religious and philosophical convictions led them to a deep understanding of human behavior. People without accountability are tempted to abuse their power. Civic education, coalition-building, and the work of maintaining institutions that can outlast any single leader—these are the unglamorous tasks of democratic resilience. They rely on the belief that ordinary people, working together, can govern themselves.

The strongman isn’t going away. He’s an archetype, a pattern in the collective psyche that shows up whenever fear and woundedness create the conditions for his appearance. The question isn’t how to eliminate him. It’s how to outgrow him and help others do the same.

The Christian tradition, at its best, offers resources for this work. Walter Brueggemann, in his classic The Prophetic Imagination, provides a framework that speaks directly to our moment. He describes what he calls the “royal consciousness”—the dominant culture’s way of maintaining power by numbing people to suffering, denying death, and blocking any imagination of alternatives. The royal consciousness asserts that the current arrangement is the only possible one, that nothing can ever change, so why bother hoping for something different?

The strongman embodies the royal consciousness. He presents a view of the world in which only his future seems possible, enemies must be defeated rather than understood, and complexity is seen as a weakness. His power relies on keeping people numb, tired, cynical, or too afraid to imagine anything different.

Against this, Brueggemann introduces the prophetic imagination. The prophet’s task is twofold: first, to criticize, not complain, but to guide people through genuine grief for what has been lost and broken. Second, to energize and awaken hope by imagining alternatives. The prophet insists that the future remains open and refuses to accept that the strongman’s version of reality is the only one.

This isn’t naive optimism. The prophets were wilderness people. They had experienced devastation and betrayal firsthand. What they offered wasn’t cheerfulness but clarity: a refusal to accept numbness, a willingness to grieve, and the steadfast conviction that God’s future isn’t dictated by the tyrant’s current rule.

The servant-king model that challenges worldly ideas of authority. The reminder that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. These are not naive prescriptions for a world without power. They are guides for navigating power without being consumed by it. This is the recipe for outgrowing the tyrant within and resisting the one without.

More to Come,

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