Hey Last Piners,

The longest night has come and gone and slowly but surely the light returns and maybe, with it, hope returns to our hearts.

I went to church tonight.

It's not a frequent occurrence for me, not since I was a kid. Even most of the weddings and funerals I've attended in the last few years haven't been in churches.

And honestly, that's been fine.

Like many of us, I have a complicated relationship with religion and faith.

When I was a kid, I actually wanted to be a pastor. We went to what was probably a pretty decent church in my hometown. My mom, brother, and I went every Sunday while my dad sat at home and watched TV. I was worried he'd go to Hell and every once in a while I'd make a longshot argument that he should come with us. It was always futile.

As I got older, though, things changed. We briefly switched to a megachurch one town over. As an example of the kind of church it was,they hosted a hell house one Halloween, and it was a truly horrifying and disgusting experience.

We didn't go there very long — their intolerance and threats of hellfire were, I think, a bridge too far for my mom. But even that short time there had a major impact on my brain. I started feeling guilty more and more. I was afraid. Why? I couldn't identify it at the time, not really. But I think I understand it now. Lots of things were changing, some of them taking decades to really recognize.

When my parents divorced and we moved to my mom’s hometown three hours away, my mom had a hard time finding a new church and my brother and I just … stopped going. And, at least for me, it wasn't like an empty space that needed to be filled. There didn't really seem to be a space there at all.

(No, the emptiness would come a little later, and never really go away. Maybe I'll talk about that a different time.)

Two weekends ago, M. and I went to see the new Knives Out movie, Wake Up Dead Man. I was really taken with it. It's a layered film exploring demogagoury, faith, community, and storytelling. It also helped heal my relationship with faith, at least a little.

Maybe that's why I agreed to go to Christmas Eve mass. I don't know. It was a nice service at a welcoming, affirming church. It felt good to be in community with others, even as all the pressures of the world were mounting around us, even as war and genocide and tyranny continue on the rise. I was maybe a little disappointed that some of those things weren't named explicitly, but the heart of the sermon was in the right place.

And something became clear to me.

I don't know if I believe in God or not. I don't think I do, and that younger version of me who wanted to be a pastor feels very distant. But I do know that I believe in love, and the radical power of love to heal us.

And to be clear, I don't mean some hippie dippie version of love or tolerance. I mean radical, transformative love. Compassion. Loving-kindness. Willingness to fight for love in its many forms: justice, solidarity, liberation. That is love. And we are going to have to fight for it.

But I do really believe it's worth fighting for. It feels like there isn't a lot to have faith in right now, but I have faith in that. Can I prove it? Probably not, and there is regularly more and more evidence that in my darkest, most cynical moments makes me want to abandon it all.

But that's the point of faith. Choosing to believe, because believing makes us better.

From Last Pine with love,

jex.