An Introduction

Self judgment, Grace, and Trying New Things

One of the many adornments done at Saint-Hugues church by the celebrated sacred artist Jean-Marie Pirot, best known by the name Arcabas. In this piece, Arcabas has painted an Archangel on his bicycle, going to tell the good news.

A primary antagonist in my life has been a chronic and crippling self-judgment that I am not intelligent or insightful enough to speak about those things that I love most. The pain of this comes from the fact that I have always desired to generate—art, words, stories—and yet never felt like I was the man for the job.

My incorporeal enemy met its match at the end of my undergraduate program, when a professor, unbeknownst to me, read a portion of my paper in front of my literature class, writing at the top of my title page, “you are SUCH a good writer.” For this professor, this encouraging note and accompanying public reading were most likely routine and unspectacular, and yet for me, they were means of grace, delivering me from myself and my own self-judgment.  

I am starting this substack as a spiritual discipline to write, even if no one reads a single word of it, in order to explore what I love most: God, the Church, Holy Scripture, beauty, and anything else that grabs my attention. I have been writing in private for many years, always starting and never finishing, feeling as though my projects were always deficient in one way or another. I have come to realize that when you are writing about God, at best, you are writing incomplete thoughts. 

Enjoy,

Beau