I will say that there were times I didn’t want to leave my truck to go inside, but that every time I left a session I felt like the weight on my shoulders was a little bit less. I can’t talk about the actual sessions much since I took an oath of ultimate double top secret secrecy. The first two things I noticed upon entering the room was that the facilitator, a man named Dave, was about a hundred years old and anytime someone spoke he had to turn toward them and hold his hand around his ear to help him catch the sound and also that every single person had moved their chair so that they could be facing the entrance. So I went even though I didn’t want to go. Looking around, I also realized that my best judgement didn’t seem like it had landed me in the best of circumstances. There were all kinds of reasons I listed out for why I shouldn’t have to go. I’d have rather walked into a mafia den or one of those prisons in the wilderness where they keep members of MS-13. I have never been so terrified to go to a place in my entire life. One day my therapist gave me a flier for group sessions run at a local Baptist church for people who had been sexually abused as children. But here’s a small portion from the final third, in which Some Guy reckons with life after his big ‘experience on the canal’: Any further introduction would spoil it, and I won’t attempt to excerpt any of the passages about the Supernatural, as the context for those is essential. It’s a bunch of things: a ghost story, a conversion story, a sociology of sawmill culture, an excavation of heartbreak, but mostly it’s an account of a trip to the afterlife. If you make it all the way through, however, it will be the best thing you read this month, possibly this year. The title of the essay is “ Anti Majestic Cosmic Horseshit,” which should give you a sense of both the scope and tone of what’s on offer, i.e., potentially not for everyone. It’s super long, and there’s no name attached to it (the author is Some Guy) other than the name of the newsletter by which it arrived, Extelligence. Which is probably why this first piece left me in tatters on the ground. But trying to put words around an encounter with the living God in a way that’s intelligible and/or interesting to those on the outside of the experience is a nearly hopeless task. I like to think we publish some solid examples. People write beautifully all the time about the Sacraments and the Church, about ministry and congregational life, about the Bible, about the Trinity, Justification, you name it. I’m not talking about religious writing or theological writing.
Spiritual writing is basically impossible to do well.