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Dear G,
It has been seven months since we began talking about God nonstop. Technically, God’s name entered the chat when I was trying to tell you about the light in Arizona.
But really, we had been walking towards one another on our Godjourneys for a long time.
You know this: Over the past five years, my life has changed and changed in ways that can sometimes be disorienting. I’ve lived in four cities, in at least ten apartments. I’ve had about that number of jobs. Who’s at the center of my life has changed a lot over this time, sometimes because of friend break ups but also, often, because of banal things: busyness, distance.
In September, having just moved to another new place, I began needing to trust that there was something inside, or behind, or coursing beneath the surface of life that would remain if everything else fell away. I was not concerned with whether our spirits persist after we die. I was scared of the possibility of a future in which I would feel like there was nothing/no one I loved enough for me to get out of bed, as had happened in the past. This was the fleshy pink center of my Godwanting.
Your own Godjourney was accelerating around then, too, because of wanting to figure out how to be a good uncle to your sister’s baby without getting fucked up by proximity to her very dogmatic religious community.
“God” became a recurring feature of
the Google Doc through which we’ve remained tethered since you moved from Philly to Brooklyn and I moved from Philly to Minneapolis, then Tucson.
To feed our convos, I started mentioning my Godjourney offhand in every conversation to see whose ears perked up, and asking all of those people how they define “faith.” I chose “faith” instead of “God” for a few reasons. It seemed less likely to ruffle feathers as an entry point if an interlocutor had a very rigid definition of God. Also, in what I felt to be its forward-lookingness, “faith” still dealt directly with what I was worried about. This perception of “faith” as future-oriented was soon unseated.
*
September, 2025
Lesson: Faith is waking up one day to realize every beautiful thing in your life. - M
Object: Dried rose
M said this to me when we were sitting beside each other on the curb near the gas station, drinking chocolate milk. The gas station is where I first met M, one hundred degree September afternoon. She was sitting in the shade by the door, asking if anyone could spare change. When I asked if she wanted a snack or drink, she chose chocolate milk. I had to ask the cashier to unlock a literal chain coiled around the refrigerator door in order to buy one for her and one for me. When I handed M her bottle, we bonded over the drink’s delightful efficiency as a drink. (In addition to being sweet, it packs a hefty punch in terms of both carbs and protein.)
M started talking about God pretty much right away. She explained she was an angel rather than a human, something she had to remind herself when she was being harassed for living on the street. When I asked what faith meant to her, her answer reoriented a lot of things for me–specifically, it reframed faith as a practice of gratitude. That felt, and feels, much more accessible than Trusting the Future™.
M’s friend, sitting with us, gave me this rose, then in tender bloom.
*
October, 2025
Lesson: God is inside all of us, and the world is a series of doors. - Sadi
Object: Rock from Sabino Canyon
My old classmate Sadi is actually the person who introduced me to the phrase “God journey” (which I then smashed together here), when she visited Tucson in October for a translation conference. As we sat eating lunch in the grass, she explained that her own God journey–which has involved traveling to shrines across Pakistan to archive Sufi and Bhakti oral poetry–has led her to the understanding that “God is inside all of us, and the world is a series of doors.” The phrase “God is inside all of us” reminded me of something I am still learning, something I have to remember again and again: that devotion to community does not foreclose, and in fact depends upon, nurturing one’s inner life.
I collected this rock on a hike at Sabino Canyon in October as part of a closing ritual with my Minneapolis therapist, who I continued seeing for my first few months of living in Tucson. To culminate a therapeutic relationship, that therapist asks people to go to a place that’s sacred to them, leave one rock, and take another. They instruct people to write a burden they want to leave behind on the rock that stays in the place, and write one reminder they want to carry forward on the rock they take.
On the rock I took with me, I wrote two things. On one side, “Prayer is more than an order of words”–my favorite T.S. Eliot quote, which reminds me that effort can look like many things, including, counterintuitively, releasing conscious attention to something troubling me.
On the other side of the rock, I wrote something that sustains the possibility of my inner life. No one else knows what it says.
November, 2025
Lesson: “No need to ruminate about that, it is God’s plan!”- Us
Object: The “God’s Plan” playlist
The phrase “God’s Plan” feels tinged with menace after Pete Hegseth’s words about a “Holy War” in Iran, but between us, it began as a way to obstruct rumination. There was some bullshit happening in each of our lives in November, and saying, “No need to ruminate about that, it is God’s plan!” as a joke-not-joke was a way to defuse and redirect thinking we knew wasn’t going to lead us anywhere.
On the phone, we said it to one another in singsong voices. Walking alone through our lives, we muttered it through gritted teeth and grinned. Then one of us (you, I think) typed it into Spotify.
The “God’s Plan” playlist began with songs about faith, then swelled to include any notable song that referenced God, then swelled again to anything we listened to obsessively during and after you visited me in Tucson for my birthday (such as “Ten Drunk Cigarettes,” whose lyrics we were, in your words, “Put on this earth to learn”).
*
Godjourney:
Trying to figure out the nature of God, the nature of faith, and how articulating those things can orient us to ourselves, one another, and the world. Godjourneys may be undertaken both alone and in partnership.
Godwanting:
A combination of loneliness and longing that becomes beautiful in the moments it pushes you outwards, in moments it “re-tethers” you to reality, to others.
To quote a poet we abhor but nonetheless bop to,
I believe in you, and it makes me believe more in the world.
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