14. Alley of the Divine
How cleaning a trash filled alleyway broke the grip of nihilism and opened a path to finding allies in the real world
I grabbed a large black contractor bag and let Mary know I was planning to head out and begin. She told me to wait and that the girls wanted to come with me. So I paused and let them get their clothes on, and we headed to the back alley. The only access to our garage was through a single lane alley lined with wild honeysuckle bushes keen on collecting drifting trash. For the past year, the trash had been getting worse and worse because of our college neighbors, who allowed their trash cans to overflow constantly, leaving the wind to sweep the debris out into the bushes.
Driving past it each day on my way to and from work would always bug my organized mind. Ever since I was a child, I remember being a person who felt comforted by order. Some of the earliest and happiest memories I can recall are in relation to keeping my childhood bedroom neat. I’d make my bed and straighten my toy car collection from smallest to biggest. These habits were encoded in my DNA even before trauma amplified them to an obsessive level.
As we walked up and down the alley filling the trash bag with debris, a sense of hope began to grow in me. It would be easy to categorize the AI’s advice as a simple nod to Jordan’s rule to set your house in perfect order, but the reality cut much deeper. My room was already clean. The problem was that the fortress of my faith had collapsed, and I was staring into a void where nothing seemed to matter. By pointing me toward the trash-strewn alley behind my house, the AI pushed my psyche past mere personal maintenance. Going out there with garbage bags was a tangible embodiment of hope. It was a declaration that even if I wasn’t able to claim a perfect, grand system of truth, beauty and order could still be carved out of the dirt, one piece of debris at a time.
Chaos and Order
This experience, while sounding insignificant, was an experience that saved my life.
When we were done, we had two large black bags full of trash and had moved from just my alley to all around the front of my house. The girls loved the experience with me, and I loved it as well.
As I sat alone in my home office, allowing my body to feel the joy that I had created, a sobering realization hit me. If I took my life, I would create a somatic level of debt for all of my daughters that they would spend a lifetime having to carry. My meaning was being reborn, not because of a literal mandate from God found in holy scripture, but as a literal reality of what my intentional abandonment would have done to their psyches.
My meaning started to come back as a tangible, physically embodied, visceral concern for my daughters.
My lived actions had the power to either establish order or thrust them into chaos. Even more than that, I began to realize that the next choice I made carried profound consequences for how they experienced the world. To their developing minds, my embodied action was infinitely more meaningful than any ordered theological system. They did not experience reality theoretically, they experienced it somatically.
I was beginning to grasp what Jordan’s idea about the archetypal nature of father and mother meant in a tangible, psychological, and neurobiological way. In that moment, I felt the power of the divine mandate that he had talked about for man.
A Sheep in Wolves Clothing
While I was hopeful about the experience I just had and the new psychological understanding I was beginning to develop around these archetypal ideas, I still lacked a place to have these discussions. My network of friendships and contacts were still entirely Christian. I began testing the waters with people at my company to see how much they could handle these conversations. There were some who were very much open to discussing these ideas, but there were others who, while they entertained the conversations with me, warned other people in the company to be careful about the ideas I held. They claimed my thoughts sounded Christian but were actually dangerous ideas opposed to the gospel.
The fullest weight of my company’s evangelical mission hit me during our annual company meeting. I had mostly avoided the dynamics of our company’s mission up to that point. I had removed myself from the prayer chat group on Google and stopped going to the company’s daily prayer meetings. However, our annual corporate retreat included a dinner that would give a recap of the year and address how we had moved our mission forward.
This year felt different. The owners always gave a talk about their faith and shared the story of Jesus with everyone in the company, which I expected. However, this year they basically gave a forty minute gospel sermon, whereas it was normally a one or two minute talk. They even played a clip from The Matrix to argue that taking the red pill was waking up to the dangers of sin and becoming fully alive to God. I felt so uncomfortable. I later told a friend that I might as well have had a tattoo on my head that said hell bound as I sat at my table, feeling chastised for my lack of faith in Jesus.
I was so upset that I thought I had to leave this company as soon as possible. However, I shared the pain I felt regarding the owners’ message with a friend and his wife. To my surprise, they were both really upset by it as well. This was not because they were unbelievers, for they were actually committed Christians, but rather they felt the nature of the talk failed to achieve what the owners hoped it would and would actually hurt their message more than help it.
My friend and his wife stayed up talking to me until three in the morning that night. His wife shared her own struggles with how the faith had been presented, as well as the difficulties she had experienced with how different leaders in the church handled challenging interactions. This was the first conversation I had with Christians who still very much believed in the scriptures and Jesus, and would even be considered evangelical in their doctrines, that gave me hope for my ability to talk with believers about my deconversion. This was the first time I felt loved and not invalidated about my choice to deconvert. It was not validation in the sense that they agreed it was the right choice, but rather in a way that truly understood my progression away from the faith.
An Ally around the Corner
I wanted to meet other people who were not Christians, so I looked up groups on Facebook that were atheistic in nature. I found only one group of people in my town. It was a closed group, and I had to write an excerpt about why I wanted to join. This group was explicit that no one could join who intended to proselytize in any way, so they were serious about vetting.
I wrote my blurb and was accepted in. Within reading the first few posts, I realized this was the opposite of what I was looking for. The first few posts I read were mocking Christians and their faith. I wondered how I could find community with people who regarded people of faith with such disdain. I loved my family and I wanted help being a good husband and father. I didn’t want an adversarial relationship with them, and I didn’t want to hang out with people who looked down on them.
So I began probing my network of friends for suggestions of people I could reach out to. I contacted a friend of mine to get lunch, planning to talk to him about my struggles and ask if he knew anyone willing to discuss religious and philosophical ideas who was not a Christian, or who at least was not dogmatic about it. But before I could ask him these questions, he opened our conversation with a question that reminded me of how hard it was to still be around evangelical Christians.
His question was, how is unsaved life? I knew what he was trying to do. I knew his desire was to connect with me in a playful, cheeky manner, but that question hurt on multiple layers, reminiscent of the pastor’s comment about my father. When a person asks that question, there are multiple layers of assumptions built into it. Unsaved implies that God has abandoned me and that I will experience his wrath upon my death. The other major assumption is that they know where I stand with a personalized creator of the universe, as if they are privy to a knowledge about his thinking that I do not possess. But I needed his help. He had connections to people in the town that I did not. So instead of challenging him back, I brushed it off and asked the questions I had come to ask. He gave me the name of a well known and respected anthropologist who specialized in religion, so the subtle shaming was worth it in the end.
It turned out this professor lived around the corner from my house. I text messaged him a very detailed description of my struggles, explaining that I was still relatively new to the city, did not know many people in town, and would love an hour of his time to pick his brain. I wanted to discuss these ideas about archetypes and how to sort through religious writings while simultaneously protecting myself from falling back into any dogmatic ways of thinking about the divine. He responded within a few minutes of getting my text and said that it was an awesome text message and he would love to meet.
We went for a walk around my neighborhood and I talked through my deconversion, the struggles I had with my wife and family, how it almost came to a suicidal climax, and how I had begun to pull myself out. We talked for over two hours that night. The next day, the idea emerged of a weekly meetup with other people who could not hold to a literal, dogmatic interpretation of any faith, but still wanted to have conversations about meaning and philosophy. We wanted to explore how religion had wisdom encapsulated within it that we could learn from and internalize, even if we didn’t commit to the metaphysical axioms.
I had started to believe that there was a legitimate path forward for me to interact with people of faith, and to simultaneously begin to be soft towards myself and the faith that I had left.
I began to allow my body to have permission reflect on my need for an existential kangaroo care as a child and how I still even long for it now. Our conversations have allowed me to be honest with my struggle and desire to resolve things with a neat new philosophical system and my desire a personal God that cares for me deeply. It has allowed me to be honest about the beauty of Jesus’s story and what it would mean for God to condescend to earth and be a literal embodiment of the divine, while simultaneously allowing my mind to hold it archetypally and not force it to be literally true. This wasn’t just about surviving a crisis anymore. I was emerging on the other side with a healthier, more intellectually honest view of divine ideas, without the burden of needing to pretend I had everything figured out.
This newly established group started in November of 2025 and is still meeting at my house weekly to this day, anchored by my professor friend who walks down the alley each week to join our conversations.