What would you say you *do* here...now?

Keeping the woo

Hey, look at that—new subscribers. Six Seven Eight Nine Ten of you in one day. That’s some kind of record. Welcome! We call that “viral” around here.

Although…I’ll be happy when, one day, people find me through sources other than Steve Skojec’s Stack. (Thanks, Daddy).

I’d been thinking about updating my pinned post—the one describing what this thing is about—for awhile now. Maybe do a little re-introduction. This seems like as good a time as any…

Hi. I’m Christopher. At the monastery I currently call home, they call me Theodore. Day job: banker. Side hustles include narrating audiobooks and occasionally writing. I have four amazing kids for whom I’m fighting to become the father they deserve. I’m technically married.

Ostensibly, this thing was about learning from personal and professional mistakes after the crash of my business and marriage, but ever since some guy on Twitter(X) took a shot at self-improvement bros who start blogs with names like, “Rise Above,” I’ve been standing over here in the corner hoping nobody would notice. I know, I know. I shouldn’t worry when anons with the numbers “69” in their handles come at me, but he wasn’t entirely wrong. Twitter et al. are littered with men popping off with life lessons they should have been applying well before their worlds imploded.

That anon prompted me to ask myself a tough question: what was I bringing to my readers?

I had no idea.

So I thought about it for half a year or so, scribbled occasionally, and threw myself into narration, my day job, fatherhood, and working to ensure my wife’s attorney didn’t add a new pair of cojones to her trophy wall.

Somewhere in there I figured something out. Well, “figured out” is a bold term for what really happened. It was more like dropping all the pretentiousness and neglecting to care about all the things keeping me bound up like a mummy in a straight jacket.

Or…

Or rather…

I got serious.

How do I put this? It’s a strange thing to cross over from wry, sarcastic observer of life’s absurdities and fully embrace absolutely insane ideologies. Why, or how, strange? Hmm…

Let me put it to you this way: I have come to believe that a monk once stopped a storm surge from washing away his island with an icon of the Theotokos (St. Herman of Alaska). I have no problem acknowledging that a man visiting a deceased hermit monk snapped a picture of the monk standing in his cell eleven months after they put him in the ground (St. Iakovos of Evia). I have been down the hall from a growling, demon-possessed woman but still went to work later that day as though nothing strange had happened.

For that matter, the possibility that extra-dimensional beings are really interested in New Jersey seems not-so-extraordinary these days…

It kind of puts wry sarcasm in its place.

In summary, when I started this thing, I sought to untangle the misconceptions, modes of thought, presumptions, and freaking insanity that led to the loss of nearly everything. I did not expect the resolution to include total epistemological upheaval.

(A nice consolation prize: I don’t have to rename this thing. “Rise Above” is a perfectly acceptable name for a publication about transcending the crude sub-reality of our time.)

I blame Rod Dreher for a lot of this. His books “The Benedict Option” and “Live Not by Lies” had a profound impact on me, but the latest one, “Living in Wonder” broke me wide open. Maybe it’s what happens when you live in an Orthodox monastery for a year-and-a-half, but reality, for me, lost absolutely all sense of, well, reality.

As I emailed him the other day, (yeah, we email. No big whoop), “You have a gift for capturing the alt-geist,” which I thought was a pretty clever coin-of-phrase. I meant that he has a talent for pinpointing and articulating what’s going on underneath the surface of what most people call “normal” life. See, I’m sitting here going, “There’s a lot more to reality than we realize…” And his new book starts with the line, “The world is not what we think it is.”

Bruh, as my oldest now says, despite all good-parenting to the contrary.

I was reading the book on my lunch break today. He was talking about metanoia, which means to “change one’s mind,” or “repentance,” and how necessary that is to recapture a sense of enchantment or, to the point of the book and the necessity to avoid utter insanity, realize there’s more to life than we realize. Far more.

That’s where I’m at now. If you’re reading this, welcome. I hope it resonates better with you than it did with the girl at the Wendy’s drive-thru.

Practically speaking, I’m still in the midst of a battle. A few of them, actually, but it’s all the same war. I have to fight to get my kids back while keeping my cojones right where they belong, build a whole new career at an age when most of one’s peers are looking forward to retirement, and keeping my faith when everything I see with my eyes or hear with my ears tells me not to go overboard with that woowoo stuff.

If that’s your jam, welcome.

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