The Tower
“They conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; love for life did not deter them from death.” Revelation 12:11, NJB
“We will overcome by the blood of the lamb and the word of our testimony.”
I remember standing on the second balcony of Southeast Christian Church and singing the triumphant chorus from Jeremy Camp’s “Overcome.” The A/C was always turned up a little too high in the summer, but I didn’t mind much, even though it made my feet cold. Star Wars sandals are little protection from overzealous air conditioning.
I knew that when I sang to God, He was happy with me. Christians were in a cosmic battle of good and evil, and somehow my participation in corporate worship helped us push back the powers of darkness. My partnering with the Divine gave me comfort. Still, I worried about many things — whether I would go to heaven, whether I would ever get married, whether I would stay healthy… mostly not things any elementary school kid should concern themselves with. But I had certainty about one (and only one) thing: Jesus was the anchor for my soul. He loved me and wanted me to love Him back. I remember struggling with the minutiae and inconsistencies of my belief system. Why did our political opponents call us cruel? Why were we taught to oppose Muslims when their beliefs were so similar to ours? Why was I given a mission to “defend God” when God was the most powerful, fundamental being in existence?
I was always assured by my religious leaders: it’s because we were going to overcome. God was going to win. It was inevitable; this definition of love would win the day.
Over time, I progressed in my faith from Padawan to Jedi Knight. I joined the high school worship band to put my piano skills to good use. And then the guitar, and then my voice, too. I also furthered my education both theologically and academically. I decided that maybe I could trust science and accept that evolution probably happened, but my theology was just as strict and evangelical as it had ever been. I sensed a definite line between “right” and “wrong,” and I was struck with unimaginable guilt whenever I felt that I had crossed that line. As I debated Calvinism vs. Arminianism, Catholicism vs. Protestantism, and other such high school Christian debate topics, I never doubted my theological correctness… even as my positions shifted. I had to be right. My entire worldview hinged on my correctness. I needed not only for Christianity to be the objectively true religion; I needed my personal interpretation to be right.
Because if I was wrong, I was a party to some heinous shit.
If evangelicals were wrong about queer people, we had indefensibly marginalized them. If evangelicals were wrong about conservative immigration policies, we had failed to love migrants as Jesus did. If evangelicals were wrong about abortion, capitalism…
I didn’t just think I was right, I needed to be right. Because if we were wrong, we were egregiously wrong. If our strict definitions around love, God, and theology were flawed, we might be in direct opposition to the Gospel that we held to so dearly. So I dug deeper. I figured that if all truth was God’s truth, then I would find Him in all things as I built my fortifications of belief. Not only was the foundation laid, load-bearing parts of the architecture were constructed and cemented into the ground.
My tower was being constructed.
The Tower is a symbol of unexpected, destructive change. The Tower is not a particularly positive card to see as your “future card” in a tarot reading. It speaks of impending doom; it is the most dreaded card in the tarot deck.
According to occult-world.com (no doubt a reliable source), a potential inspiration for the tower is the Harrowing of Hell, when Jesus descended into Hell after His death on the cross to redeem all those who had died previous to His permanent victory. According to this reading, the “Tower” represents a fiery tower in Hell, and in its destruction, the people flung from it receive vindictive judgment. This offers an insight: maybe their fall from the Tower, however destructive, is how they find salvation. But for that salvation, hell must be harrowed. Maybe one requires a fall from the heights of pride to be grounded again. Gold must be melted in a furnace, a crucible, to be formed into a work of art.
In 2016, in the second year of my studies at a Christian university, I made a gay friend (please clap).
I had been the recipient of homophobic bullying my entire life due to being bad at sports — because that was all it took back in 2007 — and I had many queer work acquaintances, but I had never had a friend in an explicitly Christian space come out to me about their sexual or gender identity. I was faced with an option: fall or fortify. If I were to continue to dig in my heels, I would be either alienating a friend or losing the integrity of my belief system. But, if my tower was to fall, the cognitive dissonance could cease.
But to begin forcible tower maintenance, I would need probable cause.
My middle-aged college mentor and I met at the local Chinese buffet, Bibles in hand. He was a music and Bible scholar in his own right; there was no one whose opinion I trusted more than him. We had decided that by the time we left, we were going to have a formed and defensible theology on gay marriage, premarital sex, etc. We needed to know our personal belief. Not church tradition, not a parroted status quo, but a belief based on both the through-line of scripture and an exhaustive examination of the text. In retrospect, our hubris here was astronomical, but also par for the course for evangelical praxis. Just two white dudes figuring out God with facts and logic. We had to be correct. We ended up becoming queer-affirming that day, coming to the realization that much of the mainline Christian world (and many individual Catholics) had come to many years previously. This event put a foundational crack in my tower. It would fall, I would fall, and the destruction would be more than I ever could have expected, but without the fall, I couldn’t have been refined.
In later (less bloated) posts, I will discuss my educational journey and evolving understanding of the will of God, but as I followed (what I believed to be) the will of the Divine, I ended up with a double major: Worship Arts and Media Communications from Asbury University. My entire baccalaureate post-secondary educational journey revolved around making music, especially music for God. I knew that good music could change the world, so shouldn’t music about God, the Guy Who Saves The World, be the most powerful kind?
My studies led me to a Nashville music production internship and a small group of progressive evangelicals at Gracepointe Church. I met some incredible, meaningfully Spirit-filled (not that kind) Christians who helped expand my view of the Divine. Stan Mitchell, founding pastor of Gracepointe, was still with the church at that point, and he shared with us a vision of God: God is a mountain. God cannot be viewed from one particular perspective, and God cannot be conquered. God is to be enjoyed, not mastered. No one person or belief system has a monopoly on the Divine. This vision was a major paradigm shift for me, and I carried this revelatory perspective back home to my fellow artists at Asbury. We wrote an album about it. To this day, I consider this the most important project I have ever partaken in.
Even so, even with all the cracks in my tower, even as I was primed to destructively fall and break things, I endured. I got a job leading worship at a Vineyard church even as my personal theology — and politics, while I was at it — had become extremely progressive. I saw myself as willing to grapple with hard questions without solid answers, as I wrote in the song Mountain, “I’m done with being right.” But my tower was about to fall. My doubt would ultimately be “turned to testimony” (shoutout to the Asbury Worship Collective), but I could not have anticipated the twists and turns my life would take in the coming years. I could not have anticipated the level of destruction that was necessary to give rise to my eventual rebirth. Just as Christians affirm in the Paschal mystery: in order for resurrection, a death is necessary.
I never was a successful evangelist. It never quite sat right with me, asking someone to change their entire life for the sake of my own tradition. I felt more comfortable letting God handle it — I would share my faith and let God minister to them directly. Or at least, that’s how I saw it at the time. For a few years after college, I was in an ill-fated engagement with a cradle Catholic. Her faith meant something different to her than mine meant to me, and I don’t think we ever fully understood each other’s perspectives. One night not long into our engagement, she told me that she would never feel comfortable with our potential future kids in any non-Catholic religious institution. I thought about it briefly, but seeing how much more progressive (and emotionally healthy, in my mind) she was, I thought that made sense. I decided that when RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) classes began, I would convert so we could get married in the Church. Through this action, comically, my new fiancee was a better evangelist than I had ever been.
However, I was losing myself. In my attempt to find the truth, I was beginning to sever my connections. The crumbling had begun, and it wasn’t pretty.
The destruction of my tower was not a controlled demolition.
“Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.”
— Matthew 16:25, NJB
As I began to dive into Catholicism, my ex-fiancee discouraged me from attending mass. She was uncomfortable with my desire to fully give myself over to this expression of faith. She scheduled outings during our weekly RCIA Zoom meeting sessions. She would openly discuss my Catholic prep classes as “my thing,” but didn’t she know I was doing this for her? To make her happy? To join her family? At this point, I became disillusioned with everything: my faith, my relationship, and my job. Music wasn’t paying the bills, so I ended up pouring coffee at Starbucks.
One night, my then-partner asked to read my tarot. She was getting into spiritual stuff and I was happy to oblige. At that point, I was actively suicidal. I saw no hope, no future for me. I had become estranged from my family and I had alienated most of my friends. My life, as I knew it, had been gently, slowly, sweetly killed. When she drew my future card, what we saw was shocking. The Tower. My destruction was imminent and inevitable. But at that point, I welcomed it. I needed it.
Everything I had known had been torn down. I had been meaningfully made aware of how the beliefs I grew up with not only didn’t “work” for me anymore on a personal level, but were also often weaponized to harm people. At a young age, I had internalized dangerous false beliefs rooted in fear. My negative emotions and declining mental health needed to be dealt with. I needed out of a failing relationship.
My tower was foundationally compromised. It all came tumbling down,
tumbling down,
tumbling down.
Back in my elementary days (rocketing back to Star Wars sandals, Jeremy Camp, and frigid A/C), I was a fan of the 2004 animated TV show Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go. For whatever reason, in the COVID era, I was reminded of this semi-obscure 52-episode permanently unfinished Disney animation. One lazy afternoon, during a half-assed Wikipedia deep dive into this cartoon of my youth, I came across one of its inspirations… the classic 90s mecha anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion. I had one high school friend — coincidentally, the same one who got me interested in Arch Linux — who I knew enjoyed the show, but beyond “baka Shinji” references and “best girl” waifu wars, I knew nothing of Evangelion. The most anime I had watched at this time in my life was a season of Sword Art Online, One Punch Man, and the Studio Ghibli dubs that every Zillennial has had permanently etched into their memory.
But I stumbled upon this concept in Evangelion: the Third Impact. In the feature-length epilogue End of Evangelion, all humanity is melted down back into pure souls and brought into oneness again. Everything is destroyed so that — maybe — something better can be built. I thought this sounded like the coolest thing I’d ever heard, so I became an obsessive super-fan.
I watched the 26-episode show and the End of Evangelion movie. I then made my remaining friends watch it. Evangelion helped me have hope. It got me through a destructive era of active suicidal ideation. A seminal piece of art made by the at-the-time depressed Hideaki Anno, End of Evangelion is about how although he could understand that suicide was not his best option, he found that his ultimate salvation, his hope, was fundamentally theoretical. He would choose to endure for the potential of future happiness, even if he hadn’t found his joy yet.
“Anywhere can be paradise as long as you have the will to live. After all, you are alive, so you will always have the chance to be happy. As long as the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth exist, everything will be all right.”
― Yui Ikari
The A/C unit blew cold air over my face while Kitty drooled on my t-shirt sleeve. It had been a week since I had moved into my cousin Louise’s living room. From my point of view… my life had ended. My relationship with my fiancee had imploded. The last two years of my life had felt like a waste. I had lost my faith, my friends, and most devastating to me… my integrity. I used to believe I was following some “plan for my life” that God had ordained in prehistory, but now I was crashing on a couch, petting a slobbery cat, and still making $12/hour as a barista.
But where I mourned the rubble of a ruined tower, there lay precious gold ready to be melted down in the crucible, to be re-formed into something glorious. God, the goodness of reality itself, the anchor for my soul, had never left me, my comprehension had just changed. I needed to once more let go of “being right.” I needed to find my love again. Where there had been youthful zeal, there was now the bitterness of negative experiences, but maybe a wiser, quieter, better-informed passion could be rekindled. It would take work… smelting takes a lot of crucible heat… but after painful destruction, construction can begin.
“The evil you planned to do me has by God’s design been turned to good…”
— Genesis 50:20a, NJB
Like I wrote in the preface to my previous post, we live in a challenging political moment (no duh). As Musk’s minions destroy our social safety net and Trump’s tax plan bleeds the middle class dry… the tower falls. It has become clear to more and more people that the American dream is a farce… maybe it was never real in the first place, as it was built on the backs of marginalized people from the foundation of the country. Perhaps the tower needed to fall, maybe this was inevitable. Maybe God’s crucible has been waiting to purify the rubble for centuries. (Or, as a friend of mine put it, this is probably the karmic destruction we have brought on ourselves. Two sides of the same coin.)
So as the American tower crumbles into pieces, we are faced with a crossroads: resurrect a zombie of our checkered past, or dream a better world into being.
I am committed to rebirth. We have been called to imagine a better reality for ourselves and those around us. I believe that through education and political action, this is possible. It will take courage, and my primary goal of this writing project will be putting words to principled, realistic utopianism. I make no apologies for imagining a better world.
The end and the beginning are one and the same. Good will — eventually — overcome. What was intended for destruction can and will be repurposed for the end goal of perfect love.
As the Christian tradition enters into the Lenten season where the Paschal cycle is venerated, we focus our intentions on death and rebirth. Is the nation dying? Yes. But a rebirth is inevitable. The left has been presented with an opportunity to ensure a kinder future. I don’t know what it will take to get there, but if I have any faith left, it’s faith in the Paschal mystery as described by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians.
