“Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply. I call that kind of deep and calm seeing ‘contemplation.'”

— Richrd Rohr

The other day, I had every intention of writing about another topic that has been weighing on me, and a topic I’ve not written about, including my struggles with and mistakes in. That topic was on the myth of intelligence and the control of knowledge; however, something hit me, and I needed to pivot. This felt clearer and more poignant in the moment.

The Fundamental Question of Safety & the Crisis of Coherence

The question of whether or not we are safe is perhaps a question every human has and does understand, and yet one we can so easily forget. Some time ago, around the time I realized I needed to shut up in AA, I also realized how much I complained and blame-shifted. The problem was not just moral failure; it was a crisis of coherence, a failure to align my spiritual aspirations (the “Upper Story” of faith) with the observable facts of my life (the “Lower Story” of reality), a dichotomy Francis Schaeffer spoke of that leads to profound intellectual and emotional fracturing. From the moment of sobriety in my second rehab, it felt like I had to piece together life and reality one thing at a time. For multiple reasons, I didn’t trust anyone, and myself least of all.

The Embodiment of Trauma & the Hidden Self

In four years, good Lord, how much has changed, and I weep with how grateful I am. It’s still a little overwhelming to consider how much work it took to get here: the many things, people, stages, meetings, early morning practices, and the like. There was a lot to figure out. My PTSD was one of those things that sank deep and filtered into everything. As Bessel van der Kolk notes, trauma isn’t just a past event but an ongoing neurological imprint that reorganizes the mind’s ability to manage perceptions, fundamentally changing our capacity to think.

In the last year, depression and ego are among the things I needed to figure out what was under it all, and these things take time. In real life—that is not a curated recovering pastor brand—recovery and relationships, friendships and family, Missoula and more are happening here, and I’ve been figuring out how to manage myself in all of it again. I don’t regret confessing such a thing… It’s been a long journey, and in the last few months, there’s been some good, painful growth in the mix of everything.

And what just hit me was how fundamentally deep this question is: “Am I Safe?”

I couldn’t help but spin and unravel everything from a free office chair a stoner friend gave me out of the kindness of his heart: for a split moment, a lot more people than that came up. Some years ago, I was finally diagnosed with PTSD, and it’s been a lot of work since: God, the books (The Body Keeps The Score and many more), podcasts, meditations, therapy, prayer, journaling, so much writing… sorry: That is so not the point, and yet it is.

I forgot this so easily because I struggled believing I was safe, and in so doing became unsafe. It took so much work to get to a place of “normal” acceptance and maturity today. There was also the habit of being too hard on myself I had, which drove things like perfectionism.

Pivot and trust me here: this isn’t just me. We all get things like this and have struggled with them. For me, in this complicated life and recovery journey, it’s astounding how much it connects with everything.

“Beneath the surface of the protective parts of trauma survivors there exists an undamaged essence, a Self that is confident, curious, and calm, a Self that has been sheltered from destruction by the various protectors that have emerged in their efforts to ensure survival.”

— Dallas Willard

The Genesis of Shame, Control, & Scapegoating

In fact, this is: It’s not about me, or you. It’s about an “us” we’ve never been able to escape as humans, and about the desire to feel safe from others. When we make it about some egoic “us” that we can control, we will forget this about others. And this is where, from bottom to top and sideways, humans can play games and shift blame, we believe and hope, we love and hate, we sin and forgive, we heal and hurt. It is here somewhere, I think… IDK, that the line of good and evil that runs in all of our hearts also crosses with this line, or maybe more like a Venn diagram. But let’s process this idea from another line, and one for my any silly “followers” may be a review:

In Genesis 2:25 (ESV), the last line before the serpent enters the narrative, Adam and Eve are “naked and were not ashamed.” It’s the final picture of what Creation was. Then, in “the Fall,” themes of nakedness are throughout, and their “eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7). They cover their nakedness, and when exposed by God’s all-exposing and accepting presence, they blame-shift and scapegoat each other, the snake, and even God. God warns Eve that she and the man will be in a constant struggle for control and status because of this:

“I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” (Genesis 3:16)

Set aside right now any of your church theologies and assumptions: humor me, please. I want to try to do a “Paul” thing and try to talk to “everyone,” which means Protestants, business people, AAers, professors, and Missoula witches. What we’re going to cover tracks, however you look at it; you just have to keep looking at it, and maybe into it: double-dog dare ya’all. And if it helps, I weep for how much I’ve failed in this so much. It’s more complicated, deep, and nuanced than we all want to admit in public. If you track it to the end, well… enough hype, eh? Let’s be like Nike and just do it:

The Command to Oneness: The Path of Discipleship

“The Father and I are One” (John 10:30). This was a statement that got the Jews on Jesus’s bad side, leading them to pick up stones (John 10:31), because they thought it was a claim to divinity. It was also His invitation to us, to be one with him, one with the Father, and the way to do that was to be one with one another. His one command was that, the “new commandment” to “love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (John 13:34). And He said if we wanted to abide in him and bear fruit (John 15:5), and have the Holy Spirit, we must abide in him, and to do that we have to follow His commands, which would definitely mean his “new” command.

This is the path of discipleship, and Jesus clearly taught that it involves dying to self (Luke 9:23). In the Old Testament, God invited his people to be one as he was one, and from the beginning of Genesis 3, when shame entered the story, the invitation has been the same. Atonement was not penal or about getting into the afterlife but about bringing heaven to earth now, defining the Kingdom as the range of God’s effective will, where what He wants done is done. And hell was our manufacturing.

“The goal of Christian spirituality is conformity to Christ – not togetherness, or meditation, or acceptance. The issue is discipleship. Discipleship is learning from Jesus Christ how to live my life as He would live it if He were me.”

— Dallas Willard

The Logos & the Allegory of the Cave

In the Gospel of John, Jesus clearly has the boldness to say, yes, he is it, and doing it, and inviting others to be his disciples. John not only includes seven metaphorical “I Am” statements that have predicative nominatives, like “I am the Bread of Life” (John 6:35), but also seven more absolute “I am” statements that do not, where Jesus simply says “I am” (e.g., John 8:58, 18:5). And John uses Creation language from chapter one, verse one, and throughout to reconstruct proper human cosmology again.

Knowing John was familiar with Jewish and Greco-Roman education, which would have included Plato’s allegory of the cave to Dionysus and Greco-Buddhism (there was cultural syncretism between Hellenistic philosophy and Eastern spirituality in Gandhara predating Christ, from the 4th century BC ), it’s clear John knew what he was doing. I’ll just reference David W. Wead’s The Literary Devices of The Gospel of John as evidence, and this super outdated infographic I made over a decade ago that I have every intention of still making one day when I get through the commentary on John, which I’m only just getting back to. John knew what he was doing… and I think he was also trying to talk to everyone.

Imagine being completely “one” with your dad, but it’s more than that, and we know it, so let’s just get to it: with our parents and family. Imagine having no baggage and being whole, completely. Imagine no family drama or relational conflict, and instead imagine, dare to dream about complete harmony, love, understanding, empathy, trust, freedom, and the Disney fairytales of “happily ever after.” How’d that kind of life be for you?

That’s what Jesus meant by “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30), and He was inviting others to it with Him. And that was 2000 years ago, and I got rather tired of all the excuses available to me, and those were out there.

This truth hit me so hard I couldn’t unsee it, and kept smacking me until I gave up and started to trust it: So much worse am I than the apostle Paul, who said in Philippians 3:12-14;

“Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

I intellectually “got” this, but on Easter of 2024, surrendered to it… and was a bitch about it for a bit, but it’s real and true. It is the Way: scripturally, historically, and psychologically: it’s just a lot to wrestle with. I thought I was a sucker for the unknown until the Unknown, the I AM, confronted me in my arrogant bullshit and made me start shutting up and growing up. It was far from just PTSD, but for the sake of this post, it was a lot of it. And I “needed” it all of it out and wasn’t going to be content with just managing or coping with it. The objective of this apprenticeship was “conformity to Christ,” learning how to lead life as He would lead it if He were me: “Christ in [me], the hope of glory.“

“You are a child of God, and always will be, even when you don’t believe it.”

— Richard Rohr

Dying Daily: The Surrender of the Fragmented Self

The apostle Paul, whose writings predate John by a couple of decades, matters in the context of Paul’s early pioneering and psychological development, as well as why John, after the Synoptics and Paul’s work had a chance to do what it did (1 Cor 3:6: “One plants, one waters,” etc.), John wrote what he did.

Christianity was a “mystery” religious movement: There is no mystery anymore. The unveiling (apocalypse) has been happening for almost 2000 years, and we just need to acknowledge to have it. We can’t take it literally without dealing with that, and teaching mystical truths and practices, or acting like Gnostics, or tribal camps and mimetic scapegoating in a top-down religion. The “Us” vs. “Them” myth, especially in 2025, has fallen apart: from couples to parenting to business leadership to spirituality vs. religion, and other things. Dualistic thinking, categorical labeling, and identity warfare are exposed, and many of us across this imaginary line can nod our heads to it. It was the same thing 2000 years ago in Corinthians. Our world is just catching up and growing up, finally: Coming from me, the irony is thick.

The Apostle Paul claimed, “I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day!” (1 Corinthians 15:31)^. and that now, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). These are connected, and they take some love and faith to make a reality in life.

Paul, like all the Gospels, spoke the same language of society and grabbed onto the true words, and used the upside-down ones on purpose (as an example of what I mean, think about how we treat the word “love” in today’s society). It is the same thing as Dallas Willard’s teachings in The Divine Conspiracy, or what’s left over after deconstructing and embodying Francis Schweaffer’s accurate characterizing of much of Christianity as an Upper vs. Lower Story myth, as a reference.

Richard Rohr’s book, The Universal Christ, is a solid book that will also invite most Christians into what we’re scraping the surface of. Paul spent time with these people, years in some cases (18 months with Corinthians), and it was after all of this that he wrote letters to them. Paul himself spent three years in Arabia (there were some cultural concepts he had to bump up against there), and then fact-checked his Gospel with the Apostles to make sure. In my opinion, there’s some unfair criticism of Paul: the criticism should be pointed toward the misuse of his writings. Paul was doing the best he could with what he had, and did a freaking amazing job of it, since we’re still debating about him.

Individuation is what sanctification is in the Scriptures: the individual becoming a whole person, holy like God is. It’s a lot more than some set of commands and a few topics in the culture wars. It’s subconscious and personal. It’s mimetic, psychological, and relational; if you’ve dared to listen and consider enough, you might also see enough of this that you won’t be unable to see it. It felt like my eyes were opened as scales of my pride and insecurity began shedding.

We can be one with God. This is the heart of all mysticism and religious pursuits. And it looks a lot like being one with all people. Trauma, ego, shadow, love, truth, and the depth of human psychology are more biblical than Calvinism. You have to believe Calvinism in order to be “saved,” and that’s one hell of a traumatic, unbiblical stance….

Go ahead, “prove me wrong.”

“Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.”

— Bessel van der Kolk

The Only Point is the Safety Found in Authentic Connection

At the heart of all of this, folks, is this question: “Am I Safe?”

With God, you and I, and every “us” and “we,” each tribe and tongue, have always been safe. Humans get afraid and have tended to mess it up for a really long time: 2025 and counting. John told the Greco-Romans two millennia ago what God’s grand judgment of us was, “this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (John 3:19). If God ever had an egoic problem with us, it was we had problems with Him, His other children, and His Reality.

But humanity is on the cusp of figuring its crap out. If you tracked up to this point, and these words made enough sense, the Awakening is here. We can keep our heads up, pay attention to fruit and bear good ones (Luke 21:29-33; Galatians 5:22-26), and don’t need to hide our light. We can keep owing debts of love (Romans 13:8). We can be brave, think wisely, and love well (Romans 12:1-3). We can disagree and love our neighbors. We can forgive and drop our masks, lower our bridges, and serve others. Healing for every human heart and the nations is available right now.

It is by no means an easy or singular thing. It will take work coming back into the Light when some things have been hidden in the depths of Plato’s caves for too long. It just takes a little leap.

As an aside, to every friend, family member, AA fellow, and everyone’s story that is connected to mine, to all the mirrors and eyeballs and the souls behind (you know who you are): I’m so sorry for all of my past tension. I love you desperately. It’s been one heaven of a journey. Thank you to everyone who helped me feel safe, and to those who had to put up with me not making them feel safe. There’s so much I’m sorry for. A part of me feels like I needed to share with everyone, “I’m safe,” in more ways than one.

“There is not a gay or straight way of being faithful, nor a Black or Caucasian way of hoping. We all know positive flow when we see it, and we all know resistance and coldness when we feel it. All the rest are mere labels.”

— Richard Rohr