Saturday Substack Free Write
Windy City. After organized curiosity.
Join me Monday evening at 8:30 ET for a Substack Live with Jarrod McKenna. We will be talking about the Christian Season of Lent and our current moment.
Saturday Free Write
Windy City. After organized curiosity.
Dear Becoming Ones—
I am writing from the Windy City tonight, after a day of organized curiosity—what the academy likes to call research. I call it listening for what is trying to be born.
Tomorrow, after we do the counter-hegemonic thing of going to church, we will gather around a table. Soup. Homemade bread. Bodies. Stories. After we eat, I will tell the story of how I came to this research project—not as abstraction, but as wound and witness—and then we will share an experience with food.
Because food is never just food. It is memory. It is migration. It is mother tongue. It is border crossing.
We come into this world needing to be fed.
We leave this world needing to be fed.
My friend Steve—culinary mystic, prophet in an apron—said that to me once, and I felt the truth land in my body like communion. We arrive helpless, mouths open. We depart the same way. The lie of American individualism is that we can feed ourselves alone. We cannot. We never have.
Last night, and again tonight, I sat at a table with a ninety-nine-year-old man who has spent his life as a pastor. Ninety-nine years of baptisms and funerals. Ninety-nine years of sermons that tried to hold a country together that does not want to be held. I am learning to listen for the unspoken words—the tremor beneath the sentence, the grief under the joke, the silence that carries history like an undertow.
We are out of practice with one another. And this is not accidental.
We have been schooled in separation. Trained in suspicion. Catechized by screens. We doom scroll instead of breaking bread. We inherit algorithms instead of elders.
How do we begin to care for each other if we do not know how to care for ourselves?
How do I learn to hear what is not being said?
How do we name hope when it hides behind the theater of despair?
How do we remember that we belong to one another before we belong to any nation-state stitched together by conquest?
My new friend Ben needs help. As we all do. I watched, today, how care moves through a room like mycelium—quiet, underground, persistent. The dinner table is not quaint nostalgia. It is insurgency. It is the slow suturing of a social fabric torn by greed and whiteness and the myth of rugged aloneness.
Sitting together is not sentimental. It is political.
Today was my Saturday Free Write, though I usually write it in the early hush before the world barges in. Instead, I spent the day refining my research with my first friends here in Chicago. And later, in conversation with a rabbi. Torah and trauma. Bread and exile. Turning and return.
Metanoia.
Teshuvah.
Tawbah.
Different tongues. Same ache.
With Larry—fellow pilgrim of the unremarkable way—I moved closer to the question that won’t release me. They have lived in co-housing their entire married life. Community not as theory but as daily negotiation. Dishes. Disagreements. Shared gardens. Shared grief. I am grateful to glimpse what it means to root one’s life in proximity.
Because I cannot unsee violence.
I cannot unsee how we are formed by it. How we perform it. How we call it civility. Becoming sober of mind has meant learning to live with complex trauma—what the DSM refuses to name while our bodies scream its truth. Healing often costs money people do not have. So we trade books. We share PDFs. We build underground libraries of survival.
I have read my way through inherited violence. I have listened my way through generational grief. I have traced the folds of harm through the church, the academy, the movement. No institution is innocent. Baldwin was right: the crime is not only in what was done, but in what is refused acknowledgment.
I am called to be rooted somewhere.
But where do you plant yourself on stolen soil? Every inch of this country is layered with colonial violence, genocide, erasure. Friendship, New York—once called Bloody Corners. We rename places as if language alone can absolve us. It cannot. The land remembers.
Today on the CTA train, I watched the violence of the mental health system play out in fluorescent light. Unhoused neighbors riding the rails to stay warm. America’s surplus bodies moving in loops. I remembered my first mental health crisis. The depression that took me to the underside. The intervention that saved me.
Chicago is beautiful. Chicago is brutal. The city’s sound scrapes against my nervous system like metal. Today I realized something simple and devastating: I am in a season of hermitage. Not withdrawal as defeat, but as strategy. Fugitivity is not disappearance—it is re-gathering. It is learning how to breathe outside the master’s tempo.
There is a slow civil war happening in this country. Not always with guns—though those are plentiful—but with narratives. With distrust. With the corrosion of social trust. We are living in a loneliness epidemic, yes—but also in a crisis of imagination.
We must study the neuro-epigenetics of trauma. We must understand what violence does to the body across generations. But we must also remember something older than science: roots matter. Soil matters. Proximity matters.
Can we take a chance on each other right now?
Can we risk loving one another like kin, not consumers?
Can we turn toward one another while the empire trains us to turn away?
We come into this world needing to be fed.
We leave this world needing to be fed.
Maybe the revolution begins there—
at the table,
with soup,
with bread,
with trembling hands passing the bowl,
with stories told in the borderlands between grief and grace.
Maybe this is how we suture the torn fabric—
one meal,
one listening,
one act of turning at a time.
Paz,
Roberto