Horror starts, like charity, at home. – Donald Davie

“Choose a piece of art that tells a story,” I was told.

I looked around my living room, searching for something that would fit the bill.

The painting I bought for Sean’s birthday? No.

The print given to me my a mentor? Also not quite right.

And then I saw it…the vase made by my grandmother.

Henrica Julia Volrada Elisabeth (Lily) ter Kuile-Nypels was an artist across multiple disciplines: a painter, knitwear designer, garden designer, and a potter. She still has pieces that come up for auction now and then, and one of the things I love about my husband is that he’ll scour the interwebs to find a small teapot or strange animal-shaped piece for me.

Moeka, as we grandchildren called her, said dismissively that she was “not a cuddle grandma.” She had little interest in snuggles on the sofa. What she cared about was the standard of our creative work.

Outside her basement atelier hung framed drawings made by her grandchildren—and it was a big deal if you made something that hit the big time. I was immensely proud to have one or two hanging there. My cousin Hendrik had SEVEN.

Because I grew up in England and my grandparents lived in Holland, we’d often spend two weeks at their home in the summer. They were wealthy, with a smaller second house on the property reserved for guests. That’s where we’d stay, but instead of sharing meals with my grandparents—and I thought this was completely normal until I was well into my 20’s—at lunch and dinner time, one grandchild would walk over to the big house to join them to eat.

Moeka wanted things done her way. That made her an excellent artist and a wonderful organizer of practical jokes; but quite a formal grandparent. And at the end of her life, she became an absolute terror to the people who cared for her. I think she went through forty two home health aides in the span of three years. Forty two. Truly shameful.

She had a searing tongue. My sisters and I still quote some of her most memorable snobby quips. Having grown up as one of the few families that would go to the Alps during the winter months, she’d say to us, “Well, these days, even the milkman goes skiing!”

And yet, my grandmother was also the only adult in my family I remember really sharing her spirituality with me as a child. She’d take me for a walk around her beautiful woodland garden and ask if I could see the fairies.

I told her I could.

Perhaps the memory I treasure most is the one time she met Sean, just before she died. Unlike my grandfather who’d accepted my uncle’s coming out in his twenties with grace and love, my grandmother had not reacted well. Sure, it had been the 1980s, but she still used outdated language when I was a teenager—so it was with some hesitancy that I brought the man I loved to meet her.

Sean didn’t speak Dutch, of course, though he’d learned a few phrases to greet her with. It was only a short trip, and so we sat down for tea on the terrace. Everything went well: there was laughter. Moeka and Sean talked about the garden. I enjoyed my favorite Dutch baked good: a stroopwafel.

And then it was time to go.

Moeka followed us down the stairs with some effort—she’d had a stroke a year or so before. And when we turned to say goodbye, standing in front of the rounded wooden door, my feet on the courtyard’s gravel, she suddenly grabbed both our hands, and with tears in her eyes, said urgently:

“Stay together. Promise me you’ll stay together.”

For anyone who has been together for over a decade, you’ll know of the inevitable ups and downs in a relationship. And whenever things get tough, I hear Moeka’s voice—the biggest gift she gave me.

Stay together. Promise me you’ll stay together.

I shared this story at The Jar last week: an event where a group conversation starts with a reflection about a piece of art. My friend Guy Ben-Aharon offered these reflection questions after I shared about Moeka. Perhaps they can bring you some rich conversation, too.

1. What is trait or behavior you’ve inherited from a family member that you’re ashamed of? What is one you’re proud of? Tell us a story about one of these.
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2. Tell us about a person in your life who you love, but who is “tough.” When was a moment when they made your life harder? When was a moment when you felt loved by them?
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3. What are two phrases you grew up hearing as a child, one that you still live by, and one that you’ve had to unlearn?
   

I’m very grateful Moeka was my grandmother. I can still hear her calling up from her atelier when I’d walk into the big house, “Yooooouuuhooooouu!"

I hope she’d be grateful that I’m her grandson, too.

“In all that is possible there is nothing more wondrous than what is.” - Al-Ghazali

I am disappointed in myself.

Last week, I watched the front door of my apartment building swing open. A couple walked in, carrying houseplants. The pink moving truck was parked outside.

Five years ago, I would have jogged up to them, introduced myself, and welcomed them to the building. But no longer.

As they moved boxes toward the cladded elevator, I walked past them, head-down, without saying a word.

This is not who I want to be. And a few years back I wasn’t!

I organized two “meet your neighbor” events on the roof of our Brooklyn apartment building. I put up posters, recruited co-hosts, planned the food and drinks, and knocked on doors to make personal invitations. About a third of the building showed up. A real win!

I was such an eager neighbor that on at least two occasions I introduced myself to guys walking through the lobby—not realizing that they were there to deliver sushi.

So, what’s changed? Why can’t I now name a single person living on our floor?

Is it that I want to live anonymously and be left alone? No. Definitely not. (Though I’m learning that some move to a big city for this very reason.)

Is it that I am just an asshole? Sometimes, sure. But not all the time!

Or am I tired of being the one to host the building meetup? That’s part of it, yes. Community leadership fatigue is real. But there’s more to it than that.  

I think it’s also about a lack of shared expectations. I suspect that folks in my building think very differently about what we owe each other as neighbors. Indeed, do we “owe” each other anything at all?!

My friend Jack Holloway suggested that I’m living with an expectation of a Kantian categorical imperative: the sense that there is a right way for things to be. Neighbors should introduce themselves, should seek each other out socially—even just a little, and should be on hand to help in times of need. To live without making these efforts is surely wrong. Especially when we know from hurricanes and pandemics how massively important geographic proximity becomes in times of crisis!

But for Nietzsche, this categorical imperative is not only wrong, it is “dangerous to life.” For him, every person should be a law unto themselves. We should each choose our moral commitments for ourselves and not simply melt into the prescribed principle that Kant fanboyed over.

And Nietzsche certainly seems to have won out in my corner of Brooklyn. 23% of Americans don’t know any of their neighbors. Even among those who know at least some, a majority (58%) say they never meet them for parties or get-togethers.

Sadly, I’m now drifting toward those statistics myself.

Trying to create a “law unto myself” to keep organizing meet-your-neighbor events got kind of depressing when others didn’t pick up what I was putting down. How can we hold onto a relational worldview when everyone around us seems to be a Nietzschean individualist?

I may be making too much of all this, but I find myself asking—is it wrong to feel like I am owed something by my neighbors? Just as I, too, owe my neighbors the same.

Luckily, this week is the one week in the year where millions of people do the unthinkable: walk up to neighbors’ houses, knock on the door and say hello.

Well, they’ll say “Trick or treat!”—but the point stands.

Halloween is one of the last in-tact social scripts that invites neighbors to connect. We all know we owe the kids who knock on our door some candy.

And isn’t that a wonderful thing?

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.” — Melody Beattie

How do you say goodbye to a home you’ve loved?

Waving fondly from the car window wasn’t going to cut it for Lauren Grogan. “I wanted something tactile and symbolic. I didn’t want it to just be words!” she explained to me on Friday.‍

Lauren and her husband Michael Plank are two of my favorite spiritual innovators. They lead a rural Presbyterian congregation north of Albany, New York—while also co-founding a CrossFit gym. So cool.

Their old home, which belonged to the church, is steeped in history. Every pastor since 1928 has lived in this house. A covert interracial wedding took place in the library in the 50s. There’s even kids graffiti in the garage from 1939. Lauren and Michael loved this place. But it was time for their family to put down roots in a bigger space as their two kids grow up.

“The fireplaces in the old house on Maple Street were magical,” explained Lauren. “I knew saying goodbye would involve the fireplaces somehow. There’s something so primal and essential to our humanness about fire. I knew we needed to have one last fire.

So, after the endless packing was finally done, and there really was nothing left to do except feel sad, Lauren took a shower, fed the family, and took everyone back to the old house one last time. She packed champagne and a fire shovel.

First, she took her husband and kids around the whole property and to each of the rooms in the house.

“We walked around and told stories,” she shares. “‘I remember this’, and ‘this is where that happened.’ Harvey is ten now and I learned totally new things about him! We went to the kids’ room and he told us, ‘when I couldn’t sleep, I would run my fingers over these bumps in the wall.’ And I knew exactly what he meant—I did the same thing when I was little!”

After walking through all of the rooms, Lauren and her family gathered around the fireplace to build one last fire. They burned old decorations that they’d put up in the kitchen for a taco party seven years ago and never taken down. “That’s kinda the person I am…” she laughs. “They were greasy and burned great!”

“We talked about singing songs but really struggled to find a song".” That was until Harvey suggested a household favorite, Family Tree by Hudson Valley singer-songwriter Tom Chapin. They sang together and looked into the flames. Champagne was sipped. And together they remembered the life they had shared in this place.

As the fire died down, Lauren took out her shovel and performed the final goodbye ritual.

Each member of the family shoveled embers from the dying fire and put them in a metal bucket. “We scooped up that fire and took the coals to our new house.” There, they used the very same coals to light a fire in their new backyard fire spot.

Earth to earth. Fire to fire.

Lauren had to say goodbye to her home. But she brought her hearth with her. And her hearth made this new house a home.

“I just knew it. I felt it in my body. This is the way. This is the tactile ritual that is going to transition us.”

And it did.

“Ritual offers us the two things required to fully let go of the grief we carry: containment and release.” - Francis Weller

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There I sat, in a circle with sixty other men. Stark naked.

I didn’t know I’d be putting my bare ass on a towel when I signed up for this men’s retreat. Nor that I’d be lined up to have ice cold showers and carry heavy pieces of wood back and forth—though, perhaps, I should have seen those coming.

But that circle changed my life. Wonderfully so. Sitting amidst those nude dudes broke open the pernicious patterns of patriarchy and transformed my capacity to have real friendships with straight men. And like all good stories, this one ends with a wedding.

Hesitation and homophobia

As a gay teen, I’d followed the cliché: falling for what I couldn’t have. The straight guy. As a young man in my twenties, I’d started to develop friendships with straight men but always felt an impermeable membrane between us. Theologian Mary Hunt describes it as the modus operandi of male-male friendships, that they are always seeking mutual enhancement. “Power meets power and produces more power,” she writes.

By my mid-twenties, I was tired of that enduring separation. I’d realized it wasn’t all their hesitation or homophobia that kept these connections shallow–it was also my fear. My well-earned sense from childhood that these guys weren’t safe to connect with. That they didn’t like me. But that was no longer true! Now there were men who wanted to be my friend, but I kept getting in the way. That’s why I signed up for this men’s retreat, even though there was another session specifically for gay, bi, and trans men, too.

In particular, back in 2013, I was growing my friendship with a straight guy called Dan. We’d been in each other’s orbits for about five years, especially as climate activists, but that year we took a trip together. A new depth of shared experience.

Dan made me laugh. We drove way too fast across Iceland to get to a rafting trip on time. We watched puffins while sitting in a naturally-heated rock pool. He was fearless and smart and I liked him a lot. And I didn’t want things to get weird.

So I went looking for help. I wanted to be pushed out of my comfort zone and to find a better way to relate to Dan and other men like him. I knew I needed a container: some place or process that would hold and guide me towards calmly and confidently just being myself.

I signed up for the men’s retreat.

Witnessing the impossible

There we were: no clothes on, sitting mostly cross-legged on the floor, aged from our early twenties all the way up to mid-seventies. Across the room sat a father and son. Next to me, a burly man in his fifties. My eyes darted around the room, trying to rank myself among this group of strangers. Holding my shoulders back. Sucking my belly in.

We were told the purpose of this session was to talk about our bodies: a conversation I’d never had with straight guys before.

One by one, each man spoke for a few minutes. Some of the leaders of the group went first, setting the tone. One talked about his hairy back, another about his weight. I breathed a little deeper. Soon, men were sharing all sorts of experiences of body shame: the size of their penis, the lingering physical impacts of cancer. Their disordered eating. Aging bodies. Erectile dysfunction.

Walking in, I was worried that being around so many naked guys would be a turn-on. I remembered my boarding school's open showers. But this was different. All my energy was in my heart. I felt pure and deep compassion. Now and then, tears came as these guys told their stories.

Not only was this a new experience for me. Deep down, I hadn’t assumed something like this was possible.

Surrounded by guys who, only a few hours ago had been bro-ing out, shouting as they lifted heavy things through a forest; here I was, watching a straight, middle-aged man weeping in his neighbor’s tender arms, talking about how he never felt good enough.

To be clear, these were not Brooklyn hipsters processing their recent ayahuasca retreat. These were suburban hockey dads, more than a decade ago. Therapy-avoidant straight dudes, married with kids, whose idea of bonding was debating their picks for a fantasy football league.

So, what made it possible for such a countercultural experience to happen?

Containers for transformation

The answer is that the retreat had a strong container.

Let’s get clear about that word “container”, because creating containers is one of the most important skills in building transformative relationships, and therefore in the work of social and cultural change.

My friend and social critic Erica Williams Simon describes a container as a space for sharing and growth. Crucially, “that doesn’t mean you’ll feel comfortable all the time, but you should always feel safe, even when in some discomfort.” Containers work their magic precisely when they take us beyond our own desire.

That’s a really important and nuanced point, so let me say that another way.

I live in a culture where I am constantly catered to: choice reigns supreme. That means that I can often avoid doing the hard thing, because the easy thing is also on the table–even when my values or my integrity tell me that the hard thing is what I should do.

A container gives me the focused time, space, and just-enough social pressure to do the hard thing that I know, deep down, is right.

That’s why exercise classes work. It’s why canvassing during election season is better in a group than alone. And it’s why initiation ceremonies have been a staple of human culture for tens of thousands of years.

But whereas containers came as standard in much of social history, we live in an age of institutional decline and community decay. Author and educator Martín Prechtel puts it this way, “We don’t have a village, we only have a public.” In an age of social media, we have endless opportunities to perform, and very few places to transform.  

Transformation was possible in that circle, because, unlike most group events where connection forms slowly under the guidance of one or two leaders, this men’s retreat had twenty five participants among thirty-five staff.

Think about it. That’s more staff than participants!

And most incredibly, only four of the thirty-five were paid to be there as facilitators. All the others had paid to come back as staff–spending their dollars for the privilege of cooking, cleaning, organizing logistics, and leading smaller exercises for us new folks.

We didn’t walk into a workshop. We walked into a village.

It was an existing community, with existing norms. Like sitting naked in a circle talking about body shame. This was a strong container in which there were clear shared intentions, high trust in the facilitators, compelling modeling of expected behaviors, and strong leaders who weren’t afraid to course-correct participants when they went off-track.

That circle of naked guys was a container for my transformation.

A toast: to friendship! (With straight dudes)!

While sitting butt naked on the floor, looking around at all these straight guys in every shape and size, I finally got to see how profoundly normal they all were. In this moment, there was nothing to be afraid of. And really, nothing to desire either!

The container put me face-to-face, or perhaps just as importantly, cock-to-cock, with this group of heterosexual men and melted away the distance that had previously felt so insurmountable.

Since that retreat, Dan and I have traveled together often. Riding roller coasters in Dollywood. Bathing in the hottest, smallest hot tub I’ve ever seen in Japan. Our friendship has grown into a beautiful, brotherly bond. I love Dan deeply and uncomplicatedly.

And I know he loves me too.

This year, he honored me by asking me to be a Best Man at his wedding. Both at the bachelor party, and then again while toasting him on his wedding day, I felt immense gratitude. Grateful to have him as a life-long friend. And grateful for that circle of guys who helped me know that this kind of friend-love is possible.

What makes a miracle?

In the 1500s, this was a strategic question for the Catholic Church.

Religious reform had swept across Europe: Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and other Protestants had ushered in the Reformation—and Rome was reeling. Across the continent rulers moved to undermine the Vatican’s power. So, the Pope needed a way to bring the masses back to Mass. (har har…)

The Church turned to miracles.

Catholicism could use local miracles to re-establish legitimacy as the “true faith” among people who now had an alternative option and local leaders could legitimize their own authority by seeking affirmation from a central institution.

You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

But here’s the fun bit…

In his book, The Rationalization of Miracles, Paolo Parigi explains that the Catholic Church judged miracles in the sixteenth century less on the content of the miracle, and more on their social form.

This “reorganization of magic” meant that miracles were only deemed true if they knit together believers of different kinship groups or across social status.

In an age where literally millions of people had been killed in the Wars of Religion (including nearly a third of the entire German population!), a miracle was an event that healed divides.

A miracle was an event that healed divides. Isn’t that cool?!

And doesn’t that make Dolly Parton officially a miracle?!

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Ritual Tip: Meal blessings

Blessing a meal is one of those miraculous practices that binds us together. But how do you do it? Try one of those simple spiritual technologies to create a moment of connection…‍

1. Hold Hands

Before eating, simply reach out and hold hands with your neighbor and all say: “It is good to be together!” Super simple. Super lovely.

2. Shared Silence

Invite everyone to take a shared breath in, and take just a few moments of quiet. Then, invite everyone to eat by saying, “May our meal be blessed!”

3. Sing!

My very favorite song to bless a meal is this one, but it is a little tricky to learn. So here’s a simple one I grew up singing :)‍

4. Read A Poem‍

Find a piece of poetry you like, or turn to some old favorites like Wendell Berry, Starhawk, or John O’Donohue.