And you accepted it without asking for a receipt.
Hey friends~ This is the final letter of Season 2. You can also find a spoken word version on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and YouTube.
I hope you enjoy!
Now…
Before you read another word. I want you to stop for a moment
Think about the last time you felt something you couldn’t quite name. Not happiness exactly. Not really peace. But, something deeper than both. Maybe it was a particular quality of morning light through a window you’ve looked through a thousand times. Maybe a song that found the exact frequency of an old memory. Or the way your child looked at something totally ordinary as though it were miraculous (because to them, it was).
I get this particular feeling most profoundly in the inexplicable pull of standing at the edge of something vast like an ocean or a mountain range or even a clear night sky. That unexplainable feeling of being simultaneously totally insignificant and somehow, impossibly, right where I am meant to be.
Have you felt that? Whatever that feeling was… hold onto it. Because what I want to suggest is that the thing you felt in that moment is closer to the truth of God than anything you will find inside a building built to house it.
The Architecture of Awe
I’ve visited hundreds of old churches and temples on my travels. Just ask my wife and kids. I gravitate to them like a moth to a flame. From Greece to Thailand to Brazil, there isn’t an old church I haven’t passed by, poked my head in and snapped off a few dozen photos. Maybe it’s the smell of ancient wood or the incense burning. Perhaps it’s the time worn cobblestone steps or the spectrum of light from stained glass windows. I’m not sure what exactly attracts me.
I’ve stood inside St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. I’ve stared up at the rafters in Notre-Dame de Paris. I’ve walked the corridors of La Sagrada De Familia in Barcelona. And I want to be honest about what I actually felt in those places because it wasn’t entirely what I was supposed to feel, and I suspect I’m not alone in that.
Many of these institutions are staggering human achievements. The scale is a kind of violence against your sense of proportion. St. Peter’s rises 448 feet toward heaven. Its nave can swallow entire city blocks. The marble floors beneath your feet were laid by hands that have been worm food for over 500 years now. Michelangelo’s dome is so vast the mind refuses to process it as a single object. It breaks into pieces and you reassemble it slowly, like a sentence in a language you kind of, almost, speak. I remember standing at the center of that nave with my daughter, craning upward, feeling genuinely undone.
There are moments in a life that rearrange something in you permanently. That was one of them for me.
The city of Paris has some amazing churches. Notre-Dame and Sainte-Chapelle are different in character but identical in intent. (Sacre Coeur in Montmartre is a little smaller in scale, but unarguably my personal must visit). But, Notre Dame…The light through those ancient rose colored windows. That specific blue, that particular gold. The ominously perched gargoyles. They are genuinely otherworldly. The stone has absorbed eight centuries of prayer, suffering, celebration and candlelight and it gives something back when you stand inside. Particularly now that this ancient church has almost burned to the ground and has been rebuilt through an enormous collaborative human effort.
I was not expecting the feeling I had when visiting these Paris landmarks and I’m still not quite able to explain it.
My favorite of them all is La Sagrada De Familia in Barcelona.
It didn’t feel like a building to me. It felt like stepping into something alive. I remember standing there, unexpectedly overwhelmed, tears streaming down my cheeks for reasons I couldn’t quite explain. I’m not a card carrying Christian (I’m still seeking), and yet something about that space reached me anyway. Maybe it was the scale, the way it made me feel impossibly small, like a single thread woven into something much larger. Maybe it was the way the light filtered through the stained glass, bending time and color in a way that felt more like nature than architecture. Or maybe it was the quiet weight of human devotion. The fact that construction on this cathedral was first started in 1882 and has been carried forward by generations of architects, craftsmen, and laborers ever since, with completion still projected more than a century later. It wasn’t just one person’s vision. It was the work of thousands of human hands, across time, building something they would never see finished.
I lingered far longer than I planned to, not wanting to leave, not because I understood it, but because I felt it. And when I finally walked away, it wasn’t with a sense of religious awakening necessarily but with a deep, humbling respect for what human beings are capable of when they choose to create something greater than themselves.
Engineered with Purpose
Here is what I keep returning to in these places…uncomfortably. The architecture itself is specifically, deliberately, mathematically designed to make you feel insignificant. The ceilings soar to heights no human can occupy. The columns dwarf you. The distances humble you. And the message is implicit, ambient and inescapable:
You are small. God is large. And the institution standing between you and God is the only reliable passage from one to the other.
The gold that lines those walls was paid for. The power that raised those spires was borrowed and enforced. The well orchestrated grandeur is a very expensive, very beautiful argument that that particular institution is the rightful intermediary between all of humanity and the truly divine.
And like all arguments made in marble and precious metals, it is very difficult for anyone to counterpoint from the pew.
The Shrinking Operation
The great American storyteller, Mark Twain, saw what happened with devastating clarity. Early humans encountered something they couldn’t quite explain. They were inspired by the terror and beauty of existence itself and did what humans have always done. They told a story. Stories are how we survive. There’s nothing wrong with stories. Stories are the foundation of this project.
The problem is what happened next. Every time, in every culture, in every corner of the world, the pattern follows the same arc. The story becomes the institution. The institution acquires power. Power requires control. And control, when applied to the infinite and unexplainable, always demands the same first move:
- Make the divine manageable.
- Give the unknowable a name.
- Give it preferences and rules.
- And appoint someone (priest, rabbi, imam, monk, elder) to stand between the believer and the thing itself.
The Abrahamic traditions — Judaism, Christianity, Islam — each began with a genuine and shattering encounter with the unknown. Each produced extraordinary philosophy, art, and moral architecture. And each one, over time, in it’s own way, built institutions that assigned to God an increasingly specific identity:
- A chosen people or path
- A body of law governing the smallest details of everyday life
- An authorized class of interpreters who alone held the keys.
In each case, God became tribal before God became universal. Devoted followers were issued a passport and told where they belonged.
Which meant, by definition, where they didn’t.
Zoroastrianism, older than all of them, pictured the cosmos as a battlefield pitting good versus evil. Humanity was drafted into the fight. It was a compelling story. Also, almost inevitably, the story produced sides. And sides produce enemies. And enemies produce the very violence the tradition claimed to oppose.
The louder religion talked about its God, the smaller that God appeared.
East vs. West
Now turn East. And notice something different though not (if we’re being honest) entirely different.
Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism each began from a more humble premise. They didn’t start with a God issuing commandments from above. They started with a question:
What is the nature of things, and how do we live rightly within it?
Lao Tzu warned us at the very opening of his text, that the Tao that can be named isn’t the eternal Tao. He grasped immediately what Western institutions spent centuries refusing to accept – that the infinite can’t be captured in language without being diminished by it. He left us some space to explore.
The Buddha sat under a tree until he understood something about the nature of suffering. What he understood wasn’t a rulebook but a way of seeing. Confucius concerned himself not with the cosmic but the intimate. He emphasized the ethics of how we treat each other in the ordinary course of daily life. In his view, the sacred lives in the quality of attention one person pays to another.
These are more expansive starting points. Maybe, wiser in certain ways. But institutions are institutions, and institutions answer to gravity. Buddhism developed its own hierarchies, its own orthodoxies, its own sectarian conflicts (sometimes really violent ones which is a total headscratcher). Confucianism was used for centuries to justify rigid social stratification, keeping women and lower classes in their assigned places. Taoism developed temples, priests, rituals, and the full machinery of organized religion as reliably as water finds its way downhill. The insight at the beginning was more open. What humans built on top of it followed the familiar pattern.
In other words, the problem was never the tradition. It was never even the story. It was the human tendency to take whatever was luminous and living and turn it into a policy and procedure manual.
Every tradition, East and West, ancient and modern, has produced both its mystics and its bureaucrats. Its poets who glimpsed something real and its administrators who filed the paperwork and called it sacred. Twain had contempt for the bureaucrats. He had considerable respect (though he rarely admitted it) for the mystics. Because the mystics, in every tradition, always said the same thing in the end:
The thing we are pointing at can’t be contained. It can’t be owned. It can’t be administered. And anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something.
What We Actually Mean When We Say “God”
Ok, let’s peel it back. Past the doctrine of whichever tradition shaped you. Past the fancy churches and temples, however magnificent, but built specifically to house what simply can’t be housed.
Scientists believe the universe is 13.8 billion years old. It contains two trillion galaxies. Every atom of every star emerged from a single point smaller than anything science can describe, in a moment before time itself existed. And through an almost incomprehensible chain of contingencies playing out over millions of years…
Here you are. Conscious. Wondering. Alive against all probability.
If something underlies all of that, a force, an intelligence, a creative principle at the root of reality, it is so vast that every human attempt to describe it is, by definition, a major reduction. The mystics always knew this. The great poets knew it. The physicists, in their own language, are arriving slowly at the same wordless brick wall. And yet the version of this being that most of us were handed as children fits comfortably inside a building. It has a biography. It has enemies. It bores a striking resemblance to the most powerful human beings of whatever era was doing the describing.
Does that not strike you as suspicious? It struck Twain as the central con of civilized life and he found it running, in one form or another, in every civilization he visited.
The Question You Haven’t Been Asked
What do you actually believe?
Not what you were told. Not what you repeat in the company of people who already agree with you. Not the inherited framework from whatever tradition or absence of tradition shaped you.
The thing that you’ve never fully examined because examining it feels dangerous, or disloyal, or simply too large and frightening to begin.
What do you really beleive when:
- You stand under a night sky full of stars and feel something open in your chest that no doctrine put there?
- A stranger’s suffering moves you to empathize without explanation?
- You hold something newborn and feel the full improbable weight of it?
- You sit with someone at the end, in the stillness of that room, at that hour and understand for just a moment that something about this can’t be accidental?
Ask yourself, is the thing you feel in those moments honestly served by the institution you were handed? Or has the institution (whatever form it takes in your life) been standing between you and that thing your entire life, calling itself the door while quietly being the wall?
Twain asked that question with savage wit because he believed most people were too polite, too afraid, or too habituated to ask it of themselves. He was probably right. He usually was. And that question doesn’t get easier or less urgent with time. If anything,
In a world still waging ancient battles with increasingly modern weapons, it gets more necessary.
Where God May Actually Live
The God that the great cathedrals were trying to gesture toward — the real one, the vast and wordless one — is not hiding in the marble floors and stained glass windows. It’s not unlocked by doctrine or rationed out through rituals and ceremonies. It was never inside the building at all. Neither was it inside the monastery, the temple, the mosque, the zendo, or any other structure built to contain what is by nature uncontainable.
It is in the beauty of falling snowflakes and the way light shimmers on water. The smell of rain on hot pavement. The moment a piece of music reaches into you and finds something you didn’t know was waiting for it. It’s in the face of someone you love when they don’t know you’re looking. The laugh that comes from somewhere deeper than happiness. The dream that leaves a little residue you can’t quite shake by lunchtime.
Like we learned in Season 2 from our guest Richard Anderson, it’s in a hummingbird on a scorching afternoon, flying directly into the face of a man holding a garden hose and the man, impossibly, understanding exactly what that creature needed.
These aren’t small things dressed up as spiritual experience. These are THE thing itself. Unmediated. Undoctored. Requiring no building, no intermediary, no approved vocabulary, and no particular day of the week. Just you, and the moment, and the quiet overwhelming evidence that existence is not an accident and you are not incidental to it.
The great cathedrals make you feel small in the presence of God.
But what if that’s backwards?
- What if you are not a visitor to the sacred but a full expression of it?
- What if, in the most literal sense, you’re made of the same thing as whatever made all of this?
- What if you are what 13.8 billion years of universe looks like when it finally becomes aware of itself.
That’s a thing that doesn’t require a ceiling high enough to humble you into believing it.
Go Find it
Here’s my invitation. It’s just an invitation. Because unlike every institution that has ever claimed to hold the secrets to the mystery of life, I have none to offer and no interest in pretending otherwise.
Today.
Not someday.
Not after you’ve resolved your theology or chosen your tradition or found the right building to worship in…
Find one small thing that in the ordinary moments of life. A flower pushing through a crack in the pavement that has no business growing there. The way your coffee smells before that the first glorious sip in the morning. The way an old song arrives and suddenly you are twenty-three again and everything was still possible. Maybe a stranger’s kindness that asked for nothing in return. Or a child’s laughter that contains no irony whatsoever.
Stop there. Don’t try to explain it away. Don’t photograph it, post it online and mosey along. Don’t immediately reach for something religious or philosophical or scientific that would allow you to file it neatly away. Just let it be what it is, for as long as you can hold the stillness.
Which will probably be about…five seconds. Try for six or seven.
That’s the practice. Not Buddhist or Jewish or Taoist practice. Just the oldest practice there is. It’s the one that predates every institution ever built around it.
It’s the practice of paying attention. Of being present to the extraordinary fact of being here at all. It’s what feeling alive and deeply grateful feels like.
And It’s available to everyone, at any hour, in any language, without a paid subscription, on any day of the week including all the ones that were never declared holy.
Every tradition — East and West, ancient and modern — has produced people who understood this. Every faith has at some point arrived, by different roads, at the same clearing. They disagreed about almost everything except the one thing that mattered:
The divine is not a possession. It can’t be owned, branded, franchised, or defended.
It can only be encountered.
Directly.
Quietly.
Personally.
In the ordinary moments that most of us are too busy, too distracted, or too well-instructed to stop and notice.
I love the big, beautiful cathedrals and temples we visit all over the world.
They’re magical and surreal and…really, really photogenic.
But like Twain, I’m arguing that the emperor has no clothes. That the vast and beautiful and terrible truth of existence is being dressed in borrowed robes and handed back to us as something smaller and meaner and more manageable than it actually is.
Mark Twain and I aren’t arguing against wonderment and awe. We’re arguing in favor of it.
So… Go find the wonder. It’s been there all along in the quiet places, the unremarkable moments, the early morning bird at your feeder that caught your attention for some reason you will ever be able to fully explain.
That reason is enough. It’s always been enough.
You just had to stop outsourcing the search.
The Story of Us has never required a middleman.
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