I named this podcast after Paul Tillich, the theologian who formed my chaplaincy more than any other. Tillich described his entire life as lived on the boundary, on the line where two territories meet and where you cannot stay comfortably in either one. The boundary between faith and doubt. Between the sacred and the secular. Between the ancient tradition and the modern world that has largely stopped believing it. On that line you are forced to make a decision, not once but every day, because the doubt does not go away and the suffering does not go away and you have to decide what you are going to do with all of it.

What Tillich taught me is that faith is not the absence of doubt. It is the courage to believe in spite of it. Making meaning in the face of meaninglessness is not a coping mechanism. It is a participation in the creative life of God himself, because God is the one who ultimately makes meaning, and Jesus Christ is the meaning he makes for us.

I spent two years as a hospice chaplain sitting with people who were dying. I spent a year as a hospital chaplain watching tragedies happen to good people every single day. I spent time as an executive director of spiritual engagement for a child welfare agency where I became a whistleblower and found Father Flanagan as the answer to a question the system could not answer on its own. In all of those rooms I asked the same question of everyone I met: what is the story of your life? This podcast is what happened when people answered it.

Every Wednesday I tell a story. One person, one encounter, one thing I learned that I could not have learned any other way. Names and details are changed to protect the people in them. The truth of what happened is not changed at all.

Every Friday I offer a short catechism lesson drawn from the Sunday scriptures and from the story of the week. The story opens something. The catechism names what it is.

Every Sunday I preach a sermon that brings the story and the catechism together into one proclamation, rooted in the propers of the traditional Latin Mass of the Roman Rite.

This podcast also exists to support Father Flanagan House. The one thing missing from every treatment team surrounding at-risk children is a chaplain. They have psychiatrists, social workers, occupational therapists, and case managers. They do not have someone whose only job is to be present, to listen without an agenda, to sit with them in their darkness until they remember they are not alone. That is the gap we are trying to fill, and we are trying to fill it by training ordinary Christians, both ordained and lay, to bring the skills of a chaplain into the homes where these children are living.

Every success I ever had as a chaplain came from following the advice my uncle gave me the first time I walked into a hospital room. He said: go in, sit down, shut up, and do not make it about you. That is the whole curriculum. Everything else is learning to do those four things more consistently and more deeply until they become second nature.

If any of this is worth something to you, please consider supporting us with five dollars a month. Our goal is one hundred monthly donors.