“What I Thought Would be Exile Turned out to be Home … if the Trump Era has a bright side” – a Reader writes:

A reader writes:

I’ll keep it brief – this isn’t a note asking a spiritual question, or requiring your considered opinion. It’s simply to thank you for your writings & ideas, which I’ve encountered exactly when needed, and which have made more generous my approach to faith, mystery, and work over the past twenty years.

You’ve walked a difficult line for a long while. It must’ve been lonely, often. In an age of retrograde Christianity one becomes a target by expressing support for, say, civilization, which is frankly hated by many people I love. Watching the Islamic State blow up cultural sites in Palmyra a few years ago, I couldn’t imagine a Christian analog doing something similar here. Now it feels inevitable. It is happening already. I spent most of my life among those now lighting the fuse.

If the Trump era has a bright side, it’s that many of us felt liberated from a Church we’d stuck with past its ruination. Church becomes an evening beer in the alley with a lawn-mowing neighbor. Or a walk down the creek a few blocks from home. Or receiving an idea for a luminous scene in the novel at hand. Or writing this note to you.

What I thought would be exile turned out to be home.

Thanks for your note. Wow, it strikes me that some readers have walked with me for over twenty years already!

It’s heartbreaking to see what so much of (white) Christianity has become in the United States (and some other places too) … many of us have felt as you have, that we were exiled … but that became a better way to live. Thanks for writing.