2. She showed us that leaving a church doesn't mean leaving God. Her book 'Leaving Church' became a lifeline for millions of people stepping away from religious institutions, who yearn for a more spacious relationship with the divine.

There's a certain kind of writer who can name the ache you've been feeling for years but couldn't quite say out loud. Barbara Brown Taylor is that writer for a lot of us.

Hi friends — the newsletter re-launch is ever closer! Adventure Time and Midnight Gospel animator Andy Ristaino keeps delivering the goods. I’m curious: which of these rough banner layouts do you like the best? And whaddaya think in general?

Do you carry a father-wound? Does relating to the Divine as Abba—as strong, kind, masculine love—heal it, or salt it? I'd love to hear. Happy Father's Day. Happy turning of the light. If it feels welcome, may you feel the Prodigal Father running toward you, arms wide-open.

Nearly every tradition has recognized this and called the sun ‘Father’: the visible Source that pours itself out endlessly and is never the poorer for it. The inner Work I practice names this Common Father, a Holy Sun, the Absolute from Whom everything proceeds and toward Whom we consciously labor..

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and unjust alike.”

But this longest day, with the light pouring down like it has somewhere to be, I find myself reaching for a riskier, more traditional image: God as a good Dad. Abba. The one Jesus ran toward, Who delights in his children.

The Sun at Its Height, the Father at His Depths Today the sun stands still at the top of the year, and we call it Father’s Day. This confluence between Solstice and one of the most complex holidays of the year should pique our attention.

Which is only the strange Seer of Patmos saying, in his own key, what he saw: the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. Not slain at Calvary as an emergency repair. Slain from the foundation—the wound coeval with the world, the self-giving older than time, kenosis as the act of creating.

It begins in the Trinity—in that primordial self-emptying by which the ineffable Unity submits to its own restraint, so that anything at all might come to be. Creation through self-limitation, reaching all the way into the cosmogonic heart of God.

Trinity isn’t like a record on a turntable, spinning forever in place. They are a parabola—a great arc that descends all the way down into matter, into time, into the particular constraint of a body and a death, reaching its lowest and densest point in Jesus...

(And this image is a teaser — a little invitation to embrace what makes us all odd and holy.) Feeling so grateful for each of you. We’re on this ride together, and the best is yet to come. Not subscribed yet? Come join us! mikemorrell.org/bonuschapter

𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗶𝗻. Without me explaining anything: which do you prefer — 𝗜𝗺𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗔 𝗼𝗿 𝗜𝗺𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗕? Whichever one moves forward will be rendered in full-color against a lush backdrop. For now, I just want to know which sketch resonates more — and 𝘸𝘩𝘺?

Fresh beard trim, who dis?

And he insisted, with that trickster’s glint, that the Christians had been carrying this secret all along and forgotten what it was for. They’d been using their two-way radio as a tea cupboard!

Hegel’s endless derivatives and dialectical deadlocks offer us nothing genuinely new. It takes a third — the hand on the tiller, a heading, a reconciling force — for anything to actually go anywhere. Gurdjieff called this ternary dynamism the Law of Universe Creation, or the Law of Three.

He would spend his life claiming he’d recovered an ancient teaching about how reality actually moves: that nothing new ever arrives into being from two forces alone. Two forces lock, like wind against a sail, and the boat just rounds up and stops.

Keep traveling forward in time and eastward in distance, up to the rough country near Kars, hard against the Armenian border, where in the 1860s or 70s a boy named Georgij Ivanovič Gurdžiev was born into that same Anatolian crossroads, of Greek and Armenian and Sufi and folk-Christian whisperings.

Distinct language, a cousin faith, and yet — listen — the same intuition the Cappadocians had: that the Real is not a static One but a turning, a giving-and-receiving, and we become most ourselves not by clutching in place but by entering the motion.

One hand turned up to receive from heaven, one hand turned down to pour into the earth, the body itself becoming the hinge between the realms, turning and turning around a still center.

The ground floor is relationship. Love comes first, and makes the lovers. Now walk a few centuries forward and a little south and east, to Konya — Rumi‘s city, where I have also stood. The whirling one witnesses isn’t performance; it is a doxology from head to quickly-moving toes.

Not a mask over some truer, impersonal stuff, nor an individual, walled off and alone. But a face that exists only in the turning-toward-another—being itself as communion. As one of their great modern interpreters, the late theologian John Zizioulas, puts it: To be, truly, is to be in communion.

The Greek world had a perfectly good word, hypostasis, and an old theatrical word, prosopon — “mask,” the face an actor held up on stage. Borrowed, hollow, a role played and set down. The Cappadocians took that thin word and transmuted it. They made person the most real thing there is.

Go back to the 4th century, to Cappadocia—that lunar landscape in what’s now central Turkey, all wind-carved tufa cones and cave churches. Here 3 friends and kin— Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus, the ones we now call the Cappadocian Fathers—did something revolutionary:

Here is something that delights me, and that I came to feel in my own body when I traveled there, to one of my ancestral homelands: an awful lot of our deepest intuitions about a God-in-motion seem to leak out of the same stretch of dry Anatolian highland.

Do you ever wonder why ‘love’ — the supposed sweetest thing in the world, that feeling (or pledge) which people rearrange and in some cases forfeit their very lives for — doesn’t live up to its promise?

Remember this gem? What does it say?

"No subject in human life shows up one’s limitations quite as much as 'love.' Its universality exposes the limits of one’s vision, even of one’s soul. The monk grasps love from his perspective, the romantic from another; even whores and libertines have their insights....

I’ve rarely met someone who exemplifies our North Carolina state motto (of all things) better: 𝘌𝘴𝘴𝘦 𝘲𝘶𝘢𝘮 𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘪 — 𝘛𝘰 𝘣𝘦, 𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘦𝘦𝘮. cc @avlblade.bsky.social