I suppose I can write this post as a report. About four years ago I gave up regular posting on this blog. At that point I was still working at First Things in the role of general factotum. I had really thrown myself into that job and was hoping to make something of it. I kept hoping to write some big article or set of articles, and was still invested in The Josias and the community surrounding that.
This blog was founded shortly after I finished college in 2011. The idea was to keep a digital journal and a repository of choice quotations from my reading. Initially it was called "Paraphasic Manifestos", and the blog posts had ordinals instead of titles. The heyday of the blog was in 2014-2015. During this period I was still teaching catholic theology at Loyola Academy in Wilmette, IL, and then I quit my job there after my second year, and spent six months reading and writing and trying to figure out what was next. I was heavily engaged in ecclesiastical news, and this was the period of the first Synods, when it was becoming clear that Francis intended to promote and encourage the progressive european wing of the episcopate.
I gave up posting here for several reasons in different waves. At first it was because I found that I no longer had anything to say on the topics that had been of interest to me here. Then, as I started to find my way (slowly, very slowly) out of the Catholic Church, it was because I was ashamed of much of what I'd published and afraid of being associated with it. After that I started to see the entire enterprise as somehow poisoned, and I started a new blog, which I used for about a year to share some translations and notes on abstract algebra. That was fun. When I finally decided to leave the Church and formalize it by telling people I was leaving, I looked back at this blog as a historical artifact. And because at that point I started admitting to people that I'm gay, I thought of it as a sort of unprocessed legacy—something that would have to be returned to and gone over at some point, to see how many terrible, malicious, and dumb things I'd said over the years, to figure out how much of value was left here and what it all meant.
I wanted to write this post as a sort of reckoning or personal testimony—how did I get to this point, how I finally decided to give up on Catholicism, how many different ways the struggle not to be homosexual colored my religious journey, etc. In a way I think maybe I should just begin here by acknowledging that I did say many terrible and dumb things over the years. In a way this blog was founded on the proposition that I would always be saying dumb things, that it would be some sort of word salad, or a 21st century realization of Prufrock's "It is impossible to say just what I mean!"
That phrase takes me back to when I was nineteen. A friend of mine, whom I'd admired and had a crush on my last year of high school, was having difficulties. He attempted suicide, or made a show of attempting it. He was miserable. I went to stay with him in Hyde Park for a few days. It was a bold and adventurous thing for me to do. I cared very deeply about him and wanted him to do well. In so many ways that summer I tried to tell him that I loved him, but couldn't do it. So many times I circled around that line from Prufrock, and hid myself in some elaborate guff from Kierkegaard or Levinas.
I remember the love letters I wrote him, which I knew were love letters but was terrified of admitting to be such, letters filled with an intense and embarrassing mix of yearning, tenderness and aggression. I remember choosing Gregory of Nazianzus as my baptismal patron when I entered the Church at age 21, because his oration for Basil expressed the nearest thing I could find in Catholicism to the sort of love I wanted. I remember... I remember... I remember...
I know that I cannot give a fair assessment of what I said over the years out of zealotry and spite and fear and resentment. I know how much pleasure I got from tracing out the geometric relations between the dogmatic figures of Christianity, and saying how this angle bisects that one, and how to construct such and such a figure in the plane by which gestures and positions. I know that to a great extent my devotion was driven by a combination of nostalgia, despair, and intellectual delight. I know that I deadened myself to my desires as much as possible in order to try and become a pure and spiritual being, and that my notion of the spiritual was suffused with a belief in the cruelty and absurdity of the world, founded in one way on my own self loathing, in another on a rigorously consistent view of Christianity.
I had imagined this first post taking the form of a memoir or narrative, but it is probably more fitting for it to be this way. So much of what I always wrote here was a jumble. More linear and interesting reflections will no doubt follow in time, but for now let this suffice as a beginning.