“The Five People You Meet on Substack” is a little play on the Mitch Albom title. It makes me smile because I keep meeting people here I’m genuinely happy to have crossed paths with. I couldn’t tell you how many subscribers most of them have. I could tell you who wrote a sentence I thought about all week, who trusted me with something they’d had a hard time saying out loud, and who made me laugh on a day when I needed it.
This week I shared one of my favorite lines from Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower in a Note.
“I just want you to know that you’re very special… and the only reason I’m telling you is that I don’t know if anyone else ever has.”
I keep thinking about the end of that line. How often has someone made my day better and gone on with theirs without any idea what they did for me? I’m so happy I get to cross paths with so many extraordinary and beautiful human beings here. If you haven’t heard lately how special you are, I want you to hear it from me. Thank you for all the ways that simply being yourself has touched me and made my life better. Some of you did that in an exchange you’ve probably forgotten. I haven’t.
For years, the Bible was more useful to me for calf raises than for reading. I’d spent enough of my life standing in front of people with an open Bible, telling them what their lives meant. When a person came to me with a marriage coming apart or a loss they could barely speak about, I believed that part of loving them was helping them see what God was doing. I could listen with real care and still miss what they were telling me. I already knew what kind of story they were in.
So it surprised me when I wanted to read the Bible again. I found myself drawn to the parts I’d once hurried past on the way to the sermon. A man who has lost nearly everything refuses his friends’ explanations for his suffering. A teacher asks what anyone gains by spending a life accumulating things they’ll have to leave behind. A man facing execution asks why he’s been abandoned. I used to feel responsible for giving people an answer to each of those moments. Now I want to spend some time with what the people in those stories are actually up against.
I wrote about that return in . It’s the personal story behind
takes up the moment when continuing to believe means lying to yourself. You can get there long before you can say it out loud. You still know how to speak in a way that puts the people you love at ease. You may even know exactly what they’ll say if you tell them the truth. One of the hardest parts of outgrowing a theology is realizing how much of your belonging depends on people believing that you still believe.
In , I take up a promise I once preached myself. Jesus would return and set the world right. What remains of Jesus when we stop waiting for him to rescue it? I find myself paying closer attention to what he did in the presence of suffering, whom he was willing to be seen with, and what he asked of the people who followed him. Those questions reach into how we live together now, when the people who need us can’t afford to wait.
Leaving religion can bring relief and still leave you exposed. The old framework told you what your suffering meant, whose judgment counted, and where your life was going. When it falls away, you can find yourself making ordinary decisions with very little practice trusting your own judgment. And there are plenty of people who make a living stepping into that opening.
In , I ask what happens to our judgment when someone else makes a living telling us what to see. The question gets uncomfortable when the person is someone you admire, especially someone who helped you see through an authority you once trusted. I have to ask it of my own work, too. What happens when someone who found my writing liberating reaches a conclusion I disagree with? Can I give their judgment the same room I asked them to give mine?
looks at what happens when despair becomes a business model. After you’ve heard enough false assurances, “nothing matters” can sound like the first honest thing anyone has said to you in years. It can feel like relief to hear someone say it plainly. And an audience that returns every day to be told that caring is naïve and change is futile is an audience a platform can keep selling to. I wanted to take seriously the experience that makes nihilism persuasive and ask what happens when someone has a financial stake in keeping you there.
Over thirty years of accompanying people after religion, I’ve sat with people who could tell me exactly why they left and were still at a loss about how to live. They had to grieve people who were still alive. They had to make choices their families might never understand. Some had spent decades working toward a life they were now free to question, and they had to figure out what they wanted to give the years ahead to. In , I write about how those conversations led me to recognize a dimension of human health that needed its own language and practices.
I published The Existential Health Dictionary** **this week to make that language available in one place. It’s an A–Z reference you can open wherever you find yourself. You might start with
I keep coming back to what it takes to live through the questions I once answered from a pulpit. How do you grieve when you can’t say where the person you loved has gone? How do you decide what deserves your devotion when you’re free to give it anywhere? How do you belong somewhere when belonging has cost you so much before? These are questions we answer over time, in the choices we make and the relationships we’re willing to risk.
My new book, , has held the #1 spot in Amazon’s Existentialist Philosophy category. This week I also led the first live session of the course based on the book. We began with a question I’ve had to ask myself. How much of my life am I actually living, and how much of it am I just keeping running?
During that first gathering, someone said, “This book is helping me discover new ways of participating in life.”
I’ve kept thinking about that word participating. When you’ve spent years understanding your life in terms of what God wants from you, it can be hard to know what you want to give yourself to once that framework falls away. Even the freedom to choose can feel empty when very little seems worth choosing.
You can find yourself in a conversation where you say something you’ve kept to yourself for years. You can take on a piece of work and discover, through doing it, that you care what happens. Each of those experiences gives you some firsthand knowledge of what matters to you. That’s a profound thing to recover when you’ve spent years looking elsewhere for that knowledge.
I wrote this book for people who know why they left religion and are now facing the harder work of building a life. After years of being taught to distrust your own judgment, even an ordinary decision can leave you second-guessing yourself. When life comes apart, you might still reach for the phone before remembering that the person you used to call is no longer someone you can talk to.
Underneath all of this is a question that can be hard to say out loud: Will anything ever matter to me as much as my faith once did? The Practice of Being Alive takes that question seriously. It explores how we learn to trust what we see, find people we can be honest with, and discover what matters by taking part in the life we’re building.
If that’s where you are, I hope you’ll pick up a copy. If you’ve already read it, I’d appreciate an honest review on Amazon. A few words about what stayed with you can help someone else decide whether the book speaks to what they’re going through. Find the book on Amazon.
One of the losses people talk to me about after leaving religion is the ordinary company of people they used to see every week. There was somewhere to go on Sunday. People knew what was happening in your life. And when someone asked how you were doing, you knew who you could give a real answer to. Sometimes those are the very people you find it hardest to talk to about why you left.
That’s part of why I founded the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality. I wanted there to be a place where people could talk about what they were going through while they were still figuring it out. In CNRS, someone might be learning to make a decision without asking for permission, while someone else is trying to understand what they still miss about church. People bring different experiences and convictions, and hearing how someone else lives with a question can give you room to think differently about your own.
If you join CNRS, you’ll receive two books I wrote exclusively for members, both included with membership and available only through CNRS. You’ll also receive the ** Daily Reader**, with a reflection and a practice each day to help you explore existential health in the middle of whatever your life already asks of you.
Members can take part in our ** Sunday morning community gatherings **and the workshops, support groups, book clubs, and discussion circles on our calendar. I also meet with members twice a month for group conversations. Those are a chance to bring a question you’re living with and hear how other people are working through their own.
This week, with** **’s help, we published the first Spanish-language edition of the Daily Reader alongside the English edition. I’m grateful to Diana for helping us make room for Spanish in the daily life of CNRS and for the perspectives of people whose experiences of religion, family, and community have been shaped in different cultural settings.
Talking about faith, family, or grief feels different in the language you grew up speaking at home. I want Spanish-speaking members to have that opportunity and to help shape the conversations we have and the questions we take up together.
I came to this work through American Christianity, and that’s one place to begin. It’s easy, though, to take a question that grew out of our particular history and assume it’s the one everyone else is trying to answer. Even the idea of “leaving religion” can carry an American assumption that faith is primarily a matter of individual choice. What does leaving mean when the practices you’re questioning also bind you to your family, your neighbors, or the memory of people you love?
That question gets at why I want existential health to develop through a global conversation. Wherever we live, we face uncertainty and loss, seek belonging, and have to make a life knowing it will end. The ways we live with those realities take shape in particular places, among people who teach us what we owe one another, how we carry grief, and what makes a life worth living. I want people in different parts of the world to help shape the field from the beginning, drawing on what they already know about living with these realities and bringing forward questions I might never have known to ask.
If you’ve been working through these questions on your own, I’d love for you to come spend some time with us at CNRS. Bring the questions that have grown out of your own life and the place you call home. They can help shape what we talk about and what we learn from one another. Explore CNRS and learn more about membership.
My friend Michael Love died this week. We’d been friends for six years, and I still find myself thinking of things I want to tell him. For a second I can imagine how the conversation would go. Then I remember.
I had the privilege of training Michael as a non-religious spiritual director through the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality. He preferred the word companion. Every other week, he led our Thriving After Religion Discussion Circle. You could be halfway through a thought you’d never said out loud, and Michael would give you the time to finish. I think that’s part of why people felt so at ease with him.
Michael also helped pioneer the work of religious deconstruction and reconstruction within the Unitarian Universalist church. He made room for people to question what they’d inherited and decide for themselves what they wanted to carry forward. Through his writing and booklets, he offered that same companionship to people he never had the chance to meet.
What I’ll miss most is the way he was my friend. We never ended a conversation without him telling me something he appreciated about me. There have been stretches in this work when the criticism was loud and I felt pretty alone. I think Michael understood how lonely it could get. He took the time to tell me what he saw in me and why the work mattered to him. I don’t know if he knew how much those conversations meant to me. I wish I could tell him again.
I’m grateful we had six years. I wish we’d had more. My heart is with Michael’s family, his friends, and everyone in CNRS who is grieving him. Read Michael’s obituary.
If you’ve ever wanted to open the Bible again and see what you notice when no one is telling you what you have to find there, I’d love for you to read along with me. In Reading the Bible as an Existential Book, we’ll spend eleven weeks with stories I once preached and the questions about grief, doubt, and how to live that I used to hurry past. The ** introduction is free**, and the full series is for paid subscribers.
When you subscribe ($50 annually), you also help me build the field of existential health. That means developing practices and training practitioners so that people rebuilding their lives after religion have somewhere to turn when the questions get personal.
