Someday I hope to finally get around to writing an account of the events — and the life — that spun me around so forcefully, so completely, in 2017. I noted around that time a quote from Charles Taylor about the feeling we get when we succeed in articulating something we’ve been through, something that reflects our deepest orienting beliefs about life.

…If we succeed in formulating it, however partially, we feel a release, as though the power of the experience was increased by having been focussed, articulated, and hence let fully be..

It would not be an overstatement to say that much of my reading life is spent chasing that articulation. Occasionally, I am gifted a taste of it. The latest example is from Cavanaugh:

The best remedy for idolatry is an uncontrollable encounter with the incarnate God in the chaos and vulnerability of those who are marginalized by the idolatrous systems that eat people alive.

It has only ever been to the credit of these chaotic and vulnerable encounters, to the lives that provided them, that I have ever seriously changed.

But there is a flipside to these encounters and articulations, a “negative slope” as Taylor puts it. If the positive slope is something like Marilynne Robinson’s wild strawberries, the negative slope is “an exile, a seemingly irremediable incapacity ever to reach this place.”

If I have a desire to write about or share anything, it is this.