Anyway
Week 10 of "Moral Imagination" — Ten weeks cultivating a biblically shaped imagination for the challenges we face
Serena wades in ahead of the race to warm up.
It’s early morning in Michigan. The lake is flat and gray and cold. Around her, other athletes are adjusting straps, shaking out arms, staring at the surface. Sophia, Malaya, and I are somewhere in the crowd just above the shoreline.
Serena lunges forward and starts to stroke. I watch her body find its rhythm. She knows how to do this. Her shoulders settle and her kick steadies and for a moment she is moving with elegance. I’m holding my breath in rhythm with her as tears gather at the back of my eyes. She’s come so far to swim in this gray lake on a still morning.
Then a rumble sounds from somewhere to the west.
Not loud. Not yet. But the officials hear it and the athletes hear it and everyone at the shoreline hears it, and within a few minutes the water is cleared. The word comes. First: hold. Then: wait. Then, thirty minutes later, after two more rounds of thunder and the first drops of real rain: the race is cancelled.
Serena changed out of her wet suit and found us.
We stood there in the parking lot, watching the first of several storms come through.
I did not see this coming. Not Serena as a triathlete.
When the year started, our family was figuring out how to survive a cancer diagnosis, a disrupted calendar, an unknown future. Serena started moving. First, it was bodyweight training, pull ups and dead hangs. Then running. Then she bought a bike. Then she was swimming laps.
She never explained. She just kept adding distance, complexity, challenge.
It was my friend John who named what I was watching. His sister died a few years ago. He told me: “When she died, I found myself doing two-a-days at the gym. I couldn’t have told you why. Engaging my body, pushing through barriers — it was a place that could hold the emotions I couldn’t name.”
I recognized it when he said it. Serena could not fix her mother’s cancer. She couldn’t accelerate the treatment timeline or guarantee the results. She couldn’t make the fear stop.
She trained for a triathlon anyway.
And then the thunder came and the race didn’t happen.
This series started as a response to something I couldn’t control.
This winter, Alex Pretti and Rene Good were shot and killed in broad daylight. Their deaths weren’t novel. There has been a steady stream of law enforcement shooting deaths over the last decade. But these two were different. There was no racial bias to complicate the conversation. These were, as far as we can tell, good hearted people attempting to love their neighbors. And American Christians justified their deaths, vilified their intentions, and supported the militarized surge that led to their deaths.
I concluded that Christian imagination had been captured by fear, suspicion, and ideology. Paul wrote, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your minds.” How conformed to this world are we if Christians can’t agree that shooting people in the street wasn’t the way of Jesus? That was the wound that started this series. A question about what recovering a biblically shaped imagination might look like. Could we find a way back to a shared moral imagination?
I set out to write a theological argument.
Then, nine weeks ago, Sophia’s diagnosis shifted. We moved off the treatment plan we had been pursuing for almost a year and headed into the unknown. Everything changed and nothing changed and I kept writing anyway.
Looking back, I see now this series was never an open water swim. It was a survival stroke. A man trying to make it back to shore after his lifeboat went down. I toggled between the raw vulnerability of being bolt awake at 2:00 AM and the ongoing need to say something about the cultural captivity of our Christian imagination. Could I write something hopeful? Could I lean into Scripture and the way of Jesus, in community?
I’m not sure I ever made it to shore, but somehow the series is at an end.
Here is what I’m learning.
One: Writing is a holy space. It’s a way I can move toward people. It’s like Serena’s workout, a space that can hold more than words can say.
I did not know that before this year, not really. I knew I liked to write. I knew I had a desire to connect. But I did not know that the act of putting words together and sharing them was a form of being present with and for others. Some of the best thinking in this series came not from me alone but from friends who read drafts and pushed back and reframed and sharpened. You cannot be holy by yourself. It turns out that is also true of writing.
Two: God is palpably present even when it feels like I’m drowning. Even when God is not doing what I want.
The question I asked at 2:00 AM in the first week of this series was, “What good is a God who doesn’t heal?” I haven’t gotten an answer. What I’ve experienced instead is God’s presence. Amid disorientation, pain, and waiting, God has been present. In the weeks I wrote from depletion and the weeks I wrote from rage and the weeks I could not quite find the bottom; God has been present.
And I’m learning that if God is present in pain, then maybe I can be too. Maybe I don’t need to escape, rationalize, control, distract, or fight. Maybe, just maybe, I can be present too.
Three: There is a fire in my bones that I cannot put out.
That phrase belongs to Jeremiah, who tried to stop speaking and couldn’t. I understand it differently now than I did a year ago. The urgency I feel to share life with God — to write about it, to name it, to press it into people’s hands — is somehow connected to the God who is enough. Even in cancer. Even in disillusionment. Even in the kind of betrayal that comes when institutions you have given your life to reveal their limits. The fire and the sufficiency belong together. I do not fully understand why. But I am learning to trust it.
This work has been God’s gift to me. I hope it has been a gift to you.
There is a passage in Hebrews I have been living inside this year.
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”
The writer is not describing people who ran when conditions were favorable. He is describing people who ran anyway. Abel. Abraham and Sarah. Moses. Rahab. People who died without receiving what was promised — who saw it from a distance and welcomed it.
They did not finish the race. They ran their portion of it.
That is what faithfulness looks like. Endurance. Presence. Showing up anyway.
Sophia was at the shoreline with me this morning.
We didn’t know that was going to be possible even a few weeks ago. She has limited energy. She is still in treatment. There is so much we still do not know. Sophia’s journey is different from mine. But she, too, is learning to show up, anyway.
She was there when the thunder came.
She was there in the parking lot when the race didn’t happen.
She was there.
In one sense her presence didn’t resolve anything. The diagnosis didn’t change in the parking lot. The cultural crisis didn’t soften. The hard questions are still open. Serena trained for months and stood at the water’s edge and the race was cancelled. We drove all the way to Michigan anyway.
And yet, in another sense this whole trip, this whole season seems to be about learning to be present. We’re learning to receive time, attention, and energy as the gift they are, anyway.
That is not nothing.
Something in me recognized it, standing in the rain. This is what the cloud of witnesses looks like in practice. Not the triumphant. The ones who showed up for a race that didn’t finish the way they planned, and were still, somehow, there.
In just a few weeks this newsletter will be one year old.
We started with eight subscribers. Me, a few friends, and a few folks who didn’t know why they had subscribed. I left Facebook because it was poisoning my soul. I wanted to write with and for people who were spiritually hungry, weary, and wounded. I didn’t know if anyone would read it.
More than six hundred of you are here now.
You have held Sophia’s story with me. You have wrestled with the hard questions. Some of you have written back to say you were finding yourself in the stories or in the questions. You’ve shared how these pages have helped you hold on when your boat sank, or when you stared out at the water in disappointment as a storm rolled in.
That is the cloud of witnesses too. Right here. This strange, quiet, digital chapel where we have been learning together.
The series is done. The questions are not.
Next week I will write about what comes next. I have a sense of it. Some of you may have seen the saints I have mentioned in passing — the desert mothers and fathers, the ones who went into the wilderness specifically to meet God in silence and solitude. I live in New York City. I am not a monk. My cell is a marriage, a family, a church, a city. But I think they have something to teach me. Something about how the hard season itself can become the teacher. Something about staying in the room.
For now, I am in a parking lot in Michigan with my family.
The storms have passed. The lake is calm again. The race is over in the sense that matters — we showed up, we were together, we are still here.
We did not choose this year. We ran it anyway.
That is still enough. It has always been enough.
A practice for this week.
Move your body through something small and hard. Walk farther than is comfortable. Swim. Run a block. Climb stairs. Do it outside if you can.
Finish it even if it doesn’t go the way you planned.
While you move, name one thing you are carrying into the next season. Not a resolution. Not an answer. One thing you know now that you didn’t know before.
That’s moral imagination. Not mastery. A different capacity than the one you started with.
The race is set before you. The conditions will not always be favorable.
Run anyway.
If you’re new here: I’m Jason, an Anglican friar teaching contemplative practice for people who can’t evacuate their actual lives. This is Week 10 — the final week — of a ten-week series on moral imagination. Thank you for running this portion of the race with me.
If this series has mattered to you, share it with someone who’s been trying to think faithfully in hard times and needs company for the road.
So deeply grateful for your writing. Can’t even express how much it has changed my thinking and perspective. Thank you for sharing your journey.