A Year of Theological Severity

I didn’t plan to write an entire body of work in a year.

I only wanted to see if the soul could survive the page.

Back in April, I had a loose idea for a story about faith and failure. I thought it would be one piece, maybe two. Then, something in me broke open — or perhaps tightened — and for the next several months, I wrote with the velocity of someone trying to outpace a confession. By November, I was staring at more stories than I knew what to do with. They weren’t drafts of the same idea; they were separate architectures, each testing what belief could look like after certainty had collapsed. I don’t know if it was inspiration or compulsion, but I know this: the stories came out like liturgy — each one a prayer said in a different emotional key.

The Premise

Every story begins with a small, private question: 

What if theology were treated as physics instead of faith?

What if grace, judgment, sin, and mercy weren’t moral abstractions but natural forces pressing on people the way gravity presses on bodies?

This is what I believe. But writing and beliefs have rules. That idea became my only rule:

I would no longer write “about” belief. I would write under it — as a pressure that shaped the characters whether they acknowledged it or not.

To do that, I had to strip out the sermon.No explaining, no defending God, no apologetics disguised as metaphor. The stories had to function as literature first — lucid, concrete, unsentimental — but the air around them had to hum with moral electricity.

It was a strange directive to live under: write as if the divine exists, but never let the text prove it.

The Process

I wrote in phases, though I didn’t recognize them as such until later. I look at my work and I think of them as albums; each story as song titles that work together thematically.

At first came what I now think of as the FINDING — voice work. I was testing how far I could push realism before it started to feel metaphysical. Characters in these early pieces still believed in causality, in narrative sense. I didn’t yet have the heart to tell them otherwise.

Then, almost overnight, the writing hardened into the EXECUTING. I stripped adjectives, collapsed scenes, and demanded the sentences carry theological weight through syntax alone. Every story became a courtroom transcript between flesh and eternity. It was exhilarating and sterile — like writing inside a church made of glass.

I swung the pendulum the other way with the EXPERIMENTING and PLAYING. Those were my carnival months: surreal conceits, talking animals, internet preachers, saints with TikTok handles. I wasn’t mocking belief — I was stress-testing it, seeing if theology could still hold up when it looked ridiculous. Sometimes it did. Sometimes it didn’t. But that risk was the point.

By midsummer, the tone shifted again. I was tired of irony. I wanted to speak softly. Then  PREACHING emerged — not in the sense of sermonizing, but in tending. These were stories written from compassion, not authority: paramedics, mothers, tired men who still prayed over empty tables. Their faith wasn’t triumphant; it was stubborn.

Then came the PUSHING. The floodgates opened. The grotesque returned. I wanted to see if belief could still roar. Out came flies, floods, preachers who bled miracles into the mud. It was fun in a terrifying way — the baroque fever dream of someone trying to build a church out of roadkill and moonlight.

And then, abruptly, silence.The stories thinned. The voice cooled.The last months were what I now call the RECKONING — minimalism as mercy. The characters no longer sought revelation. They simply lived after it. The prose stopped performing; it started tending. By the end, I felt less like an author than a medic at the scene of something sacred that had already happened.

The Lesson

What I learned in this compressed year was not about productivity. It was about obedience.

Each story seemed to demand a pull theology’s threads. Some required tugging; others required silence. My only job was to listen. 

The process was physical. I wrote standing up, pacing, muttering lines until the rhythm matched the moral tension. I realized the best theological writing doesn’t argue — it endures. It lets belief and doubt share a body long enough for both to ache.

The biggest surprise was how funny some of it became.Even amid judgment and grief, absurdity kept sneaking in. Maybe because theology, at its core, is ridiculous: a finite species trying to make sense of infinity with language built for grocery lists.

I learned to let the comedy breathe alongside the dread. Irony without cynicism, questioning without blasphemy — that’s the line I tried to walk.

The Shape of a Year

Looking back, I can see the architecture.What looked like chaos was actually liturgical order: ignition, discipline, mutation, release, compassion, conflagration, and afterlight. Seven emotional temperatures of the same faith.

If I were to map it visually, it wouldn’t be a timeline — it would be a circle, a kind of creative liturgical calendar. Each phase feeds the next, then loops back on itself. I didn’t grow from one to another; I rotated through them like seasons.

The year, in other words, wasn’t developmental — it was devotional.

The Outcome

I don’t know yet what happens to all these stories. Most are out for submission; some will never leave my desk. That feels right. Not everything written under theological pressure survives daylight.

What matters is the fidelity to the process.To stay in the work until the voice stops justifying itself and begins to testify.That’s what I mean by theological severity — not piety, but accountability.

In a world addicted to comfort and performance, I wanted to make art that didn’t care whether it was admired. Art that knelt, not posed.

If there’s any coherence in what emerged this year, it’s that I crave silence more than ever, because that’s when God still speaks, quietly — through syntax, structure, and the tiny mercies of attention.

A year of theological severity taught me that literature can still kneel — not to preach, but to look at the world and whisper, “I see you. I will not turn away.”

That’s all the testimony I have left to give.