About
Welcome.
My name is Carolyn and I recently completed a graduate degree at the University of Oxford and continue to live and work in this enchanted city of spires. My Substack posts are a sensory nexus where I collate what I am seeing, hearing, and learning, or the podcasts, books, poems, and articles that form the backdrop melody of my intellectual and spiritual life.
Specifically, they hold resource recommendations, images of my 1000-year-old surroundings, and unpolished musings on the sustained relevance of religious imagination in contemporary life. Really I just needed a place to house all the words and scenes that render me in a state of wonder and curiosity.
I consider these posts as a kind of pilgrim jottings, field notes along the way that are less about my actual experiences and more about those forming my journey. The authors, poets, and thinkers mentioned here have become like friends to me, spiritual guides gently and slowly prodding me towards what is good, virtuous, and beautiful.
The Green Door Tale
Several years ago, I experienced a crisis of faith, or what I now realize was a typical deconstructionist moment so common these days for those raised in religious communities. I decided to intellectually dissect my beliefs to understand (1) the seeming feud between faith and reason, (2) the troublesome, even violent parts of scripture and Christian history, and (3) the simplistic answers and spiritual flatness endemic in many church communities.
Around this time, I embarked on a trip with my twin brother to L’Abri, or a ‘shelter for honest questions’ founded by Francis and Edith Schaeffer, located in a gorgeous manor house in the shire-esque southern countryside. Here I stumbled upon the rowdy works of G.K. Chesterton, the Inklings (a twentieth-century literary group in Oxford) and their influences, all of which graciously wooed me off this cliff of spiritual doubt. They removed the contemporary Western straight jacket I strapped around Christianity, helping me to see it afresh as the vibrant, peculiar, and joyful force that it is, robustly and positively shaping history.
I became ravenous for authors which did not attempt to outline, rationalize, or systematize, the spiritual life. Writers like George MacDonald and poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins have opened my eyes to the necessity of clothing Truth in beauty, narrative, and myth if we hope for it to truly take root. Ray Vanderlaan, Marty Solomon, and other teachers dedicated to studying the cultural context of the bible have given me permission to ask difficult questions when reading biblical texts. Only when we do this can we lay aside cold and doctrinal interactions with the bible and behold it with awe and imagination.
On this same trip, I stumbled across this green door at the back of the manor house property. Once you go through it, the trees form a circular shape that seems like they are pulling you in, inviting you to something hidden. The door has to come to represent a deep and bone-warming welcome ‘into the heart of things’ as C.S. Lewis has so eloquently put it. The bundle of longings and questions that we are, is invited inside.
After a lifetime of attempting to know my way towards God with a smug certainty and theological arrogance, He has welcomed me to humbly enter into His mystery, to commune and participate in his cosmic story.
The Content of this Substack
This Substack will delve into the need for ancient answers to solve our contemporary problems and the spirit of apocalyptic negativity at large. It will deal with the question of the good life and how we can put away our modern cynicism and revitalize the worldview of the ancients and medievals, who were aware of the "secret festivity" of the cosmos around us, as G.K. Chesterton would say.
To feast with family and friends according to a sacred calendar
To tell and listen to captivating and vivid stories of goodness
To regularly experience the magic of nature
To create a warm and welcoming haven of hospitality
To order one’s habits and rituals around adoring God together
These are a few of the ingredients that just might make us healthy, sane, and alive again to the reality of Divine Presence.
I hope these authors can convince you of the same, and we can say, like Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.”
Cheers,
Carolyn
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well"
- The Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot
