Contemplative. Conversations: The Long Road Home

Part Four: The Veritas Dialogues

Photo by Hans on Unsplash

*A Note to the Reader

In recovery I learned the only way to get to the truth is to walk through the lies. The lies you tell yourself.

Yeah, it sucks.

There is no pretending.

No skipping the hard parts.

These fictionalized early morning/late night diner dialogues are me practicing that.

My shadow always shows up. My authentic self tries to push back. & sometimes I invite, or he invites a few voices I’ve carried with me, like Lewis, Tolkien, & Merton…to see what they might add.

This one is about the long road home.

Existential subjects like faith, grief, doubt, & what it feels like when your beliefs breakdown & you’re left popping the hood to see why the engine light is always on.

Some call it wrestling with God. Some call it deconstruction.

For me it’s normative, or maybe just my neurodivergence. I think we’re all trying to figure out what the experiences in our lives are trying to teach us.

So anyways, here we are again. A booth in the early morning hours.

Overpriced coffee. The frigid Lake Superior misty winds punching at the windows. My notebook app, wide open.

I am waiting. This time at a diner in Duluth, Minnesota. The lake wind howls & growls outside. It’s a reminder that my own drama is quite insignificant in the grand scheme of life.

Then the door flings open against the wind, & like always, my shadow struts in like he’s there to collect the rent.

The Conversation

Shadow: You keep coming back here, but you know how this goes. Faith doesn’t hold. Doubt wins. God doesn’t answer.

Self: Do you ever shut up? I love that you think you are always right. But hey, I’m still here, doing life. Punching back at it, before the next swing hits. I’m surviving, trusting, believing.

Shadow: Survival isn’t faith. It’s stubbornness. You’re clinging to a mythology you outgrew years ago.

The door opens again. C.S. Lewis walks in, book under his arm, face lined with grief but carrying a strange steadiness. He sits across from me.

Lewis: Faith is never tidy. When Joy, my wife died, I thought God had betrayed me. My prayers hit the ceiling & came back like punches. Yet even in my anger I discovered something: I was still holding on. My rage was a prayer. Wrestling with God is not the opposite of faith. It is faith.

Tolkien enters next, brushing snow off his coat, eyes carrying a whole weight of Middle-Earth. He sets his hat on the table.

Tolkien: Every true story bends under the weight of our sorrows. Heroes do stumble. The light fades. Hope seems lost. But those are the very moments when small acts matter most. A deep breath. A small step. A word of encouragement. Even in the darkest chapters of our lives, the thread of hope weaves on.

Merton comes in last. Quiet. Contemplative. He carries silence the way others carry weapons. He slides into the booth, folding his hands. He and I have spent much time together.

Merton: Deconstruction is not the end. It is the grace of clearing away our illusions. The false gods must fall before we can see the true God, in all His mystery and majesty.

Shadow: To use your simple metaphor, maybe the Service Engine light is all there is. In my experience, when you tear your beliefs down, all you discover is the silence of an empty room.

Self: I’ve sat in that silence. I know it. Hospital rooms. Jail cells. Gravesides. Nights when I thought my prayers were a waste of breath. But it wasn’t void. It was something else. Maybe presence without words. Absence of evidence, is not evidence of absence.

Merton nods.

Merton: Yes. The silence is not absence. It is a deeper kind of presence, stripped of our projections.

Shadow: Grief destroys faith. You know that. You’ve seen it. You’ve lived it. Why bother with belief? Live your life, & do what you want to do.

Self: Grief broke me, yes. But like I’ve said before, it also broke me open. My faith was too neat & tidy before. Too contingent on me getting my way. It was fragile. Grief left it raw, and in the rawness, I found God in a way I never had. Not as an explanation. Not as an answer. But as a presence that refused to leave. I found my home.

Lewis: When Joy died, I wrote pages that shocked even myself. I accused God of cruelty, of silence, of indifference. I thought I was finished with faith. Yet I discovered something strange: even my accusations were a kind of reaching. Anger became another form of prayer.

Tolkien: Grief is part of every great journey. In the tales I told, despair itself could become the doorway to hope. Out of sorrow comes longing. Out of longing comes the call home.

Merton: Grief is the teacher none of us chooses. Yet, it tears away illusions. It reminds us that life is fragile & love costs everything. But it also awakens us to the God who is not afraid of our pain.

Shadow: Or grief just leaves people bitter. You’ve seen that too.

Self: Yes. I sure have. But bitterness is not the only road. Sometimes grief cracks the heart wide enough for grace to get in.

Lewis: Doubt kept me honest. Without it my faith would have become brittle, a shell that could not bear the weight of reality.

Tolkien: Doubt belongs to the hero’s road. Without it the story has no depth. Despair is not the end but the valley before the mountain.

Merton: Doubt is holy when it dismantles the gods of our own understanding. Deconstruction is painful, but often it is God’s mercy.

Shadow: You make doubt sound noble. Most people drown in it.

Self: And I almost did. But I learned to let doubt sit at the table. To let it speak. To stop pretending it was the enemy.

Lewis: Yes. Doubt sharpens faith. They are not rivals. They are companions.

Tolkien: Even the darkest chapters are not wasted. They belong to the story.

Merton: And the story is larger than us.

Shadow: You talk of survival like it is something more than stubborn refusal to die. But tell me, how do you survive when the roof caves in & faith collapses on top of you?

Self: Foe me, by showing up, by breathing. By telling the truth even when it is ugly. Recovery taught me that. Faith, I think, is not the absence of struggle. It is the refusal to quit.

Lewis: For me, by writing. By grieving. By naming the pain instead of denying it.

Tolkien: I work it out by telling stories. Stories remind us all that even the smallest act matters. Even when you cannot see the ending.

Merton: By sitting in silence until silence becomes presence.

Shadow: And when none of that works?

Self: Then you sit anyway. You refuse to run. You face it.

The waitress came back to our table. The pot clinked against the rim of each mug, & she moved on without a word. Outside, snow swallowed the streetlights until the whole world looked blurred. Inside, the booth went still. Nobody reached for their coffee. The silence wasn’t empty. It felt like it was waiting for something.

& then suddenly the booth fills with a presence that does not come through the door. It rises from within and beyond, steady, unforced, clear.

Holy Spirit: You are not alone. Not in your grief. Not even in your doubt. Nor the wrestling. You will not be forgotten. You are loved. Even here. Especially here.

No one speaks.

Shadow drops his smirk. Lewis closes his eyes. Tolkien steadies himself with one hand on the table. Merton folds his hands in prayer.

I do not write anything down. I just sat there breathing.

The time has passed & clock over the counter ticks past 3:00 a.m. The lake wind rattles the glass. Somewhere in the silence, I realize this is enough. I don’t need certainty or answers. Just the quiet presence that somehow keeps me going. The very essence of faith.

The diner in Duluth, felt like holy ground.

And I remember Merton’s words: “We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone, we find it with one another.”

Until next time, for what it’s worth.

Shalom,

Jeremy E.