Why I Wrote Modern Jesus

I did not write Modern Jesus because Christianity had failed to move me. Some of my most vivid experiences of love and joy happened in Christian prayer. I prayed the rosary for years and lived with Franciscan friars while I considered religious life. Saint Francis still matters to me, and so do people I met in that community.

The impulse to write took shape during and after my year with the Franciscans. It was not a story about leaving one tradition for another: if prayer could open such joy, why could anger and restlessness still return so easily? What, beyond a powerful moment, actually changes a human being?

I had been asking some version of that question since my teens. I read philosophy and literature before I knew what I was looking for, then read across Buddhism, yoga, and Christian spirituality. A meditation on love gave me an early glimpse of an openness I could feel but could not explain. Later, Catholic prayer offered a home for that search.

In Tofino, I spent a period going to Mass several times a week, volunteering in a church community, and praying intensely. There was real joy in that life. There was also anxiety, agitation, and anger. I did not think the joy was false because the other states remained. I wanted to understand the relationship between them. Why did one state arise, and why did it fade? What fed the habits I hoped to leave behind? How could I tell whether I was becoming more loving, rather than simply becoming more interested in experiences of love?

Living with the Franciscans brought that inquiry closer to the shape of a whole life. Prayer was not confined to a private hour. It sat alongside service, simplicity, generosity, and the attempt to relinquish what I ordinarily treated as mine. I gave away much of what I owned. I prayed for hours each day. I was drawn to Francis because he seemed to embody a change that reached into action and possessions, not only feeling or belief.

I also left. In the Christianity I encountered, I found guidance for moral life, early prayer, and the education of emotion. When I tried to ask what happened in more sustained introspection—what to do with agitation, concentration, or the quieting of thought—I struggled to find practical guidance. The Christian contemplatives I read, including Merton, Augustine, and Aquinas, mattered greatly. Yet reading about the interior life could not substitute for learning how to meet it as it unfolded. I can see now that I gave too much attention to what disappointed me. Leaving the order did not end my affection for Francis or the friendships that continue today. It made the question more urgent.

When I later lived at Birken Forest Monastery, Buddhist practice gave me a more explicit way to investigate causes and conditions. What strengthened craving? What weakened anger? What did restraint do to attention? The practice did not make those tendencies disappear. It made them harder to overlook.

Centering Prayer and Buddhist breath meditation taught me that the deepest shifts were not produced by thinking my way toward them. They sometimes arose in stillness, in the space between thoughts, almost despite my urge to explain. Yoga had taught me that the body participates in this interior life too. Breath, movement, and attention alter its conditions. The traditions do not therefore mean the same thing. Their differences matter. But each helped me see a part of the question more clearly.

The book's title, Modern Jesus: The Antichrist, is deliberately unsettling. I do not mean that Jesus is the Antichrist. I mean that I can attend Mass, receive the sacraments, read spiritual books, and try to live morally while still avoiding the deeper change Jesus calls forth. A Christian life can acquire the form of following without its transformation. When change does come, it may feel as if it arrives from beyond us. Christians speak of grace and the Holy Spirit, and I do not dismiss that language. I want to ask how we become receptive to such change—and how we recognize it in our conduct, rather than only in a moment of feeling. A version of Christianity that lets me bypass that question can work against the path it names.

This is a human temptation, not only a Christian one. Meditation can become a possession. Spiritual insight can become a claim to status. I know how easily I can turn a path meant to weaken the self's grip into another account of what makes me interesting or right.

Marriage and fatherhood have given the question another setting. There is no monastery bell protecting time for silence when someone needs breakfast. Patience matters more than an elegant idea about patience. Love has to survive tiredness, interruption, and another person's needs. I am still learning what remains of monastic training in a household and a working life.

I wrote Modern Jesus from there: neither outside Christianity nor at the end of a Buddhist path, and certainly not from a place of completion. I wanted to ask what spiritual practice is for if it does not gradually make us less captive to ourselves and more capable of love. That is the inquiry behind the book, and the one I hope to keep open here.