She encountered a preacher and now he’s paying child support. That’s revival with receipts. No altar call, just a court summons. And the guy at Burning Man? Patchouli and stale beer, sure—but his fridge had PBR, and that was enough. She took the beer and left the creepy promise, “Thanks for the Beer!”
We keep chasing spectacle like it owes us something. But catharsis is a sugar high—it spikes, crashes, and leaves you craving more. The preacher, the burner, the charismatic pitch—they all promise transformation but deliver theater. The real work is in the boring bass beat of daily life—morning yoga and meditation, bible reading, and prayer, then brushing your teeth. Your grass won’t lay itself down because you danced while The Man burned.
This post is a triumvirate. First, Burning Man is a denuded revival. All the ecstasy, none of the altar calls, ushers, guilt trips or offering bag hustle. Just dust, music, and the illusion that catharsis equals transformation. You burn the temple, cry in the dust, and call it healing. But revival without repentance is just theater. Then there’s my church. They landed on “Encounter Jesus” like it was a breakthrough. Like bumping into the Messiah at a farmer’s market and chatting about heirloom tomatoes. It’s Esalen with a cross. And finally, the myth of measuring up. The charismatic pitch: shout loud enough, praise hard enough, and God will favor you. CHEEEEZZUUUUS! PRAISE THE LAWD! As if grace is earned through volume and holiness is a performance metric. Spoiler: you can’t measure up. That’s the point. Grace isn’t a reward—it’s an unearned gift.
Burning Man
Quoting Wikipedia, “Burning Man is a week-long large-scale desert event focused on “community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance” held annually in the Western United States.[1][2] The event’s name comes from its ceremony on the penultimate night of the event: the symbolic burning of a large wooden effigy, referred to as the Man, the Saturday evening before Labor Day.[3] Since 1990, the event has been at Black Rock City in northwestern Nevada, a temporary city erected in the Black Rock Desert about 100 miles (160 km) north-northeast of Reno. According to Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey in 2004, the event is guided by ten stated principles: radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy.[4]“
It is theater sold as church without all the annoying church stuff. A cathartic bacchanal pitched as a purification ritual. There is even a human sacrifice in the form of an effigy burned on the penultimate night of the event. Every year the effigy gets bigger, the chase after a lasting catharsis leading to better behavior more desperate, and people pretty much remain unchanged. Burning Man tries harder each year but ends with the same soiled desert sand needing restoration.
Burning Man is a rave in the ruins, a masquerade of meaning where the dust does the preaching. It’s not a sermon—it’s a signal jammed with LED noise and whispered longing. The cathedral is scaffolding, the hymns are bass drops, and the confessions happen in body paint and borrowed names. You don’t kneel—you improvise. You don’t repent—you remix.
It’s a place where grief wears goggles and dances until it forgets what it came for. Where intimacy is bartered, not built. Where the sacred isn’t sacred—it’s just well-lit. Everyone’s chasing a feeling they can’t name, hoping the next installation will finally say it out loud.
St. Esalen
My church was part of the charismatic storm that blew through this country in the 1960’s. It was an ecstatic time where baptism by the Holy Spirit thrived. Charismata were all the rage. A real Christian had spiritual gifts. The true believers spoke in tongues. I guess I’m not a true believer.
Founded in 1962 by Michael Murphy and Dick Price, Esalen was a countercultural crucible—part spa, part think tank, part spiritual speakeasy. It became the birthplace of the Human Potential Movement, where the soul wasn’t saved—it was stretched, massaged, and re-scripted. Charismata? Esalen had its own: Gestalt therapy, hot tubs, yoga, psychedelic integration, and Alan Watts sermons at sunset. The theology? Evolutionary panentheism—God not as a distant judge but as slumbering spirit unfolding through human consciousness. My paternal Grandma was a fan of Alan Watts. Whacka Doodle Doo!
Then there’s my church. They landed on “Encounter Jesus” like it was a breakthrough. Like bumping into the Messiah at a farmer’s market and chatting about heirloom tomatoes. It’s Esalen with a cross. A spiritual drive-by. No embodiment, no accountability—just vibes and a tagline.
I BEHAVE! Mostly
No. You don’t. At least, not enough. Most of us are good. We mean well and try to behave. But . . . humans are chaos engines with a conscience duct-taped to the dashboard. We take God’s name in vain, lie, steal, covet and worse. Sometimes our motives for sinning feel righteous.
“Try harder” We do. Some of us try very hard. And yet and still . . . bad shit happens to good people. Too, we drift between behaving and not behaving. Read Deuteronomy again. Israel isn’t the only culture that vacillated between following God and pissing him off.
And God—being God—doesn’t flinch. He watches us build golden calves out of algorithms and outrage, then asks again: “Will you walk with me?” Not march or perform. Walk. But we prefer spectacle and prefer loopholes where we can tithe with one hand and swipe with the other. We behave just enough to pass inspection, then blame the devil for our search history.
Comply or Die
Islam is misrepresented. The loudest voices—zealots with cameras and hashtags—get the spotlight. News outlets and influencers post videos of Sharia enforcers bullying the rest of us, demanding compliance, punishing deviation. They don’t represent Islam. They represent control.
Like toxic abusers, they shift the goalposts. Every time we try to meet their demands, they escalate. Our fealty is never enough. Our compliance is always lacking. We must try harder, they say. But the game is rigged.
This isn’t faith—it’s performance under threat; coercion dressed in religious garb. The tragedy is that millions of Muslims who live with dignity, humility, and grace get erased by this spectacle. Islam, like any faith, is vast. It contains poetry, hospitality, scholarship, and quiet resistance. But the algorithm doesn’t reward nuance. It rewards outrage. And so the bullies become the brand.
Sunday Morning
Sunday should be named Hangover Day. We get home at 5am, spent. The ecstasy we felt through liquor, illicit meds, and dancing starts to rise out of our stomachs as our bodies begin to protest. Church? Sunday Supper? Are you fucking kidding? Only a masochist would subject themselves to deafening music and an accusatory sermon. The idea of a big dinner subjecting yourself to kin sickens you. Sunday is sleep and plenty of fluids. It’s not repentance—it’s recovery. Not spiritual warfare—just hydration and silence.
Catharsis is ephemeral. It has a half-life. So an ecstatic bacchanal promising catharsis will have a diminishing return. Meaning you have to go bigger to get the same release. The end of Burning Man isn’t the culminating burn. It is the cleanup and journey from Black Rock to our regular lives. Home, with its overgrown grass and dusty coffee table, will be there when we get back. Burning Man chases change in catharsis only to find dirty dishes.
Toi, fais ta vie, mon cœur. Moi, je fais la mienne. You live your life, my love. I live mine. Serenity isn’t found in the cycle—ecstasy, collapse, apology, honeymoon, tension. That cycle can look like revival or Burning Man. But it’s still a loop. Real peace lives in the steady heartbeat of daily life—of brushing your teeth. Not by chasing catharsis through an altar call, zealous adherence to the law, or burning the temple. But by showing up, rinsing, spitting, and doing it again tomorrow.
Give five minutes to dust the coffee table. Fold the towel. Brush your teeth. That’s the altar now. That’s the sacred act. No spotlight, soundtrack, or sermon. Just grace, in its quiet form. The kind that doesn’t ask for Hallelujah! or Amen! The kind that endures.