It’s my first time here, walking up this hill. Drawn higher by golden rays, the view below unfolds. To my left, ancient and rugged, the valley of rocks with the last rays of the evening sun, ignites. The strangest feeling stirs - an invitation to meet a part of me I haven’t known before. Cascading hills extend my gaze, unfolding dimensions within. The landscape’s layers of tonal values reflect in levels of depth awareness. And along these lines of beauty, messengers traverse - shifting shadows coming from afar, stirring waters deep within, deep and hidden waters, I haven’t known before. There are things we fear to feel - loss - the pristine beauty of a moment, fading into memory, fragile and half-forgotten, loss - the touch, the smell, the bodily presence of one I loved - departed. But along these lines of beauty, they come visiting again - shifting shadows coming from afar, stirring waters deep within, deep and hidden waters, I haven’t known before. Should we welcome them, these currents would heal us. Should we allow them to wash over us, cleansing us, assuring us that we may feel it all, that we may feel it deep.
On Thursday, September 10, we open enrollment for our first course on thedepth.community — Into the Deep: The Art of Meaning Making. Five weeks, together, on how we actually make meaning — and how to do it more deliberately, and more beautifully.
We’re at 28 of 40 on the waitlist already. Everyone on it gets two things when doors open: first access, and the early-bird rate — the first 15 seats only. Everyone else finds out when the general list does, a day later.
This first cohort is capped at 30 and runs only if we reach that cap. If any part of this has been calling to you, the smart move is to get on the list before the 10th.
(Already on it? You’re covered — watch your inbox that morning.)
Andre & Mary-Anne
Having spent the last couple of days with family, including our two grandsons, I’ve become keenly aware again that meaning, value, and relationship are intertwined. Meaning can be viewed as the unique shape and value of a relational movement.
Relationships are more than the movements between us – they are the movements we are made of. That’s a big shift in perception. So much of our culture encourages a way of perceiving our world in which there are basically two types of “stuff” – things and the relational movements between things. In philosophy, we often refer to substances and accidents. But there is a more intuitive and true way to perceive our world, namely: everything is relational, everything is movement. Things and people are embodiments of those relational movements. In us, these movements take shape and a more durable form, but all we are, are the stories and interactions that made us. We are not things that relate — we are relationships that take shape.
There is a whole branch of philosophy that favors this way of viewing the world. Process philosophy considers events and the intertwining of events as the process that produces everything that exists. Being and becoming are not two different modes of existence; rather, my being consists of my becoming.
So what does this have to do with enjoying my grandkids on the beach? Everything! For these events continue to create me, and I am thankful for it. Instead of considering myself as a changeless being that was created by God sometime in the past, who now happens to have some interaction with others, I consider myself as being in the process of being created by a God who takes the form of every relationship I’m in, inviting me to become more than I have been. It’s a view that helps us see the value and meaning that is possible in the simplest interactions, a view that helps us recognize God in all his disguises.
We’ll explore this creative process of meaning-making in a five-week cohort journey. You can join the waiting list here.
]]>The short video below is a reminder of how you can participate in creating a meaningful life—even amidst the crushing waves.
We’re starting a new 5-week adventure designed to help you navigate life’s events with intention and deep creativity. Instead of merely reacting to what happens, learn to interpret your experience and coax beauty from them.
👉 Click here to learn more and join the waiting list for the 5-week journey
Friend,
We’ve been building something, and it’s finally ready to show you.
Creating meaning does not always have to be a deep spiritual process. Every experience is an interpretation, a way we meet our world and understand it. A simple conversation over a cup of coffee can be a beautiful, satisfying event or just another forgettable activity. Our experiences will either grow in depth and value or become ever more bland.
That single idea is the spine of a course we’ve been developing for years and are finally ready to teach properly: The Art of Meaning Making, a five-week course starting September 10 on thedepth.community. Not a course about what to believe. A course in how meaning gets made — how raw experience becomes feeling, how feeling becomes thought, what we gain and lose each time we interpret. And how to do all of this more deliberately, and more beautifully, in an ordinary week — in conversation with a small group of people asking the same questions.
There’s nothing to commit to today. We mainly wanted you to know it’s coming, and that it’s the clearest, most useful thing we’ve built.
(If you’d like first access and the early-bird rate when doors open, the waitlist is here — but that can wait.)
With you in it,
Andre & Mary-Anne
The paragraph below is part of a chapter that contains one of the most inspiring and poetic visions of what God could mean. The chapter comes at the end of Elizabeth Krause’s book The Metaphysics of Experience, as a crescendo to her exploration into the nature of reality. It is a dense paragraph that we’ll unpack line by line. Patience carries a reward. Maybe it can only be appreciated fully in the context of the rest of the book, but I will nevertheless attempt to whet your appetite by exploring just this one paragraph.
Yet the infinite beauty of his conceptual structure is the immortal appetition of the universe, actively luring finite creatures up the ladder of love. Beauty diffuses itself, not through acts of efficient creation but through its infinite evocation of novel instances of itself: universes of creatures stirred by the creativity to become God-like by temporalizing the eternal togetherness of primordially ordered form in their concrete immediacy; universes of self-creating creatures whose response to the divine seduction is the incarnation of beauty.[1]
the infinite beauty of his conceptual structure
It is an ancient intuition that our world has a mind-like structure. Everything that exists gives us a glimpse into what is possible for our universe. And what we see is a world that displays both pattern and progress. The fact that our world has developed from a barren ball of rocks, volcanoes, and lifeless oceans into the abundance of life we witness today, shows that possibilities are structured to favor beauty, diversity, and consciousness. Where is this realm of possibilities, and how are they structured to give preference to some more than others? Krause terms it a conceptual structure that favors infinite beauty. Ancient poets referred to the Logos, the logic and the conversation that gave shape to the world we are part of.
is the immortal appetition of the universe, actively luring finite creatures up the ladder of love.
This conceptual world, this divine mind, is intimately related to our actual world. Imagine a mind that can see all possibilities and can arrange even the most contrasting into a pattern of beauty. What isolation and waste this would be without finding a way to give these ideas actual material. A divine mind without flesh “is merely thought thinking thought… devoid of physical experience.”[2] This dimension of God lacks actuality. Simply imagining what is valuable and meaningful does not satisfy. Only when possibility is actualized, when beauty is exemplified, when the logos becomes flesh, does God break free from conceptual isolation and enter real relationship – actual love. Consequently, creation must be lured toward this goal. Beauty awakens desire. Creation finds direction. The beauty of what God imagines is the source of desire that animates our universe. Beauty stirs the appetite of matter to become more than what it is, and the result is a divine romance, an intimate universe in which the ordinary becomes more God-like, and God becomes more material.
Beauty diffuses itself, not through acts of efficient creation but through its infinite evocation of novel instances of itself:
If God were to singlehandedly create (efficient creation) whatever God imagined, it would not be the relational and free universe that exemplifies spontaneity, so essential to beauty. The power of the sublime is not violent; neither does it enforce its own rigid designs upon creation; rather, beauty evokes and seduces the actual world to transcend itself, to fall in love and intertwine itself with the possible world. The ultimate romance happens between what is and what could be. There is a mutual interdependence between the realm of possibility and actuality. God’s act of imagining ultimate value becomes an actual adventure of self-discovery in the process of creation. God finds a body; God becomes; God unfolds. The abstract, impersonal, unconscious aspects of God now become intimately intertwined in this process of incarnation. You, too, are a novel instance of God’s unfolding.
The abstract, impersonal, unconscious aspects of God now become intimately intertwined in this process of incarnation.
universes of creatures stirred by the creativity to become God-like by temporalizing the eternal togetherness of primordially ordered form in their concrete immediacy;
Our temporal and finite existence is where the eternal and timeless thoughts of God find real value. In the immediacy of your experience, abstract ideas become actual relationships. And every experience is an opportunity to partake of something divine; simultaneously, it adds a richness to God’s becoming – flesh to God’s imagination. The timeless vision (eternal togetherness) of the most valuable possibilities (primordially ordered form) becomes a finite temporal event, and in so doing embodies something of God’s mind. Your present moment has eternal value and consequence.
universes of self-creating creatures whose response to the divine seduction is the incarnation of beauty.
Can you see the mutually beneficial relationship happening here? The nature of reality is an intimate affair – we naturally strive to become, and in our becoming, beauty finds a moment, a place, an existence that is not merely conceptual, but tangible. You are part of the incarnation of beauty, a novel instance of God. What you experience is never in isolation – your joy is God’s joy, your pain is God’s pain, your existence is an extension of God’s existence. And similarly, God invites you to partake of the infinite beauty of who they are.
[1] Kraus, Elizabeth. The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead’s Process and Reality (American Philosophy) Kindle Edition.
[2] Ibid.
]]>I pull over near the cliff edge on a quiet stretch of road, drawn by the flash of a whale’s tail in the bay—a quick tease before it vanishes into the blue. These colossal Southern Right mamas travel thousands of miles through stormy seas just to give birth in our quiet waters here in Hermanus. Exhausted by a challenging week, I am grateful for the interruption and decide to stay a while. Before me, the sea ebbs and flows, whispering playfully to the mountain at my back. I’m struck by the contrast: how restless these waters are compared to the ancient steadfastness of the peak behind me, its roots anchored deep within the earth. Yet my eyes are drawn back to the water. I stare so intently into the swell that I expect the sea to split open and reveal every secret it’s been keeping.
And then, there she is—a nursing mama proudly presenting her newborn calf.
Had I the courage, I’d throw off my clothes, leap from the cliff edge, and plunge into the cold deep after them—hungry for one more glimpse, one brief touch of sleek skin. How can something so colossal move with such elusive grace? How can a force so commanding feel so profoundly gentle? I crave the quiet wisdom nurtured in those depths—the thought of stepping into that world both thrills and terrifies me. It’s no wonder we strap air to our backs and press glass to our faces—desperate to borrow just a few minutes in this intriguing place.
Most mornings, we wake up and look through familiar eyes at a familiar world, rarely stopping to think about the vast, unseen depths animating our daily lives. What frightens us about this inner landscape is its utter unpredictability: Will I be able to breathe here? Or will I be swept away by a flood of chaotic thoughts, unresolved memories, and unanswered questions? It can feel volatile, unrefined, even dangerous.
And yet, something keeps calling us to make friends with the mystery down below. Because deep down, we suspect that the face staring back at us from those waters is actually our own.
Exploring our inner world is a lot like learning to swim for the first time. At first, you kick and splutter, convinced that the second your head goes under, you’ll drown. But the harder you fight the water, the heavier you sink. It’s only when exhaustion forces you to stop fighting that you finally feel the water beneath you. You notice how light you’ve become—as if something in the deep was holding you up all along.
There is unimaginable beauty hidden in the depths of our being—a pure, undefiled wisdom and a raw, unfiltered way of experiencing life. It is a playground of quiet possibility. Perhaps the best way to touch this wisdom isn’t by forcing our way in, but by simply letting go—releasing our grip on certainty and learning to rest in trust. Trusting that, even in the depths of our being, we are held.
“He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
— Colossians 1:17
Can you feel the gentle whisper of the Spirit drawing you? Not only as the call of beauty, but the quiet assurance that we are never alone when we venture, even into our darkest places. The more we make peace with our inner depths, the more we can bring that richness back up to the surface and embody it in our everyday lives.
Looking out over the water one last time, the thought of visiting my gentle friends in their dark, wild home sends a quick ripple of fear through my body. But in a flash, I snap back—grounded once again by the solid, unyielding mountain behind me. It reminds me that I don’t have to choose between the two. I live right here in the middle: between mystery and knowability, the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal. All of it held together in the One who enfolds us all.
Who am I
Beneath this frame?
A hidden world
So hard to name
It is not far
I need to travel
For this riddle
To unravel
Just diving in
And letting go
I greet the
“I”, I’ve yet to know
I still the noise and wait…
My mind at rest
but heart awake
A silent call
Through playful lips,
Through my indifference
Gently rips
I find You in the space between
What is known
And things unseen.
Your breath
The whisper of possibility
Flirting with flames
Of longing in me
Like water dancing
Upon its wave
This wild abyss
Will not behave
Oh untamed river
of latent meaning
What will be
Desire’s leaning?
Imagination caressing
Depths unspoken,
Words are clothed
The silence broken.
Dear friend,
We’ve been doing a lot of thinking — about what we are doing, who we are doing it for, and what we want the next chapter of this work to look like.
You’ve been patient with our inconsistency. The occasional long silence, followed by a burst of content. The different platforms that never quite talked to each other. The sense that something rich was happening somewhere, but it wasn’t always easy to find. I want to address all of that — and tell you what we’ve done about it.
First, a little honesty about where we’ve been.
Mary-Anne and I have been doing this for a long time. Somehow, we’ve ended up with a body of work that spans several books, a decade of online courses, and communities of people in various countries we genuinely love. We are grateful beyond what I can easily express.
But over the last few years, something has been shifting underneath the surface. The people who have found our work most meaningful have changed. The questions they bring have deepened. And the pipeline of opportunity that used to sustain us — invitations from church communities, ministry networks, charismatic circles — has dried up, partly because our message has genuinely outgrown it.
This is not a complaint. It is, I think, an invitation.
The people we find ourselves in conversation with now have outgrown their traditions. The God they encounter has become bigger and more beautiful than the religion of their upbringing, but they haven’t abandoned the longing that religion was trying to address. They are people in significant life transition — not sure what they believe anymore, but sure that they are not going back to what they believed before. They are intellectually serious, spiritually hungry, and tired of being offered easy answers to hard questions.
That is where we are now. And it has taken us a while to say that clearly.
We are delighted that many of our friends have traveled this journey and been on this adventure with us. It is a rare gift to have friends that find a rhythm of change that keeps us together.
What we’ve actually done.
We have spent the last several months rebuilding — quietly, thoroughly — and I want to show you what has changed.
We now have three sites, each doing one thing well:
alwaysloved.net remains our central home — the place where André and Mary-Anne’s work lives together, where you can find our books, our story, and the full breadth of what we offer. We’ve rebuilt it from the ground up. It now has a clear “Start Here” path for people who are new to our work, and it actually feels like someone lives there.
maryannerabe.com is now a proper home for Mary-Anne’s music and other creative work.
thedepth.community is the most significant thing we’ve built. This is where we have merged Mimesis Academy and Journey with Reality into a single platform — one community, one place, built for people who want to go deeper. Not just deeper into content, but deeper into the kind of life that content is pointing toward.
TheDepth is built on three membership tiers for people who want to explore books together, join live conversations, and find fellow travelers who take the questions as seriously as they do. It is not a course platform. It is a community. The courses live there too, but the community is the heartbeat.
What hasn’t changed.
Our experience of the intimate nature of our universe has deepened, and our passion is still to include others in it, using whatever language will draw them. As our concepts of God have been undone, so our experience of God has become more real, more incarnate, more here and now. Jesus demonstrated that the fullness of God can find a body in human form (Col. 2:9). That should not be theorized – it should be experienced. In essence, our message is still an invitation into that place of encounter. And the two of us are still doing this together. Thirty-five years in, that turns out to be the most important thing we have to offer: not just ideas, but evidence that these ideas can actually be lived.
An invitation.
If you’ve been with us for a while, I want to say thank you — genuinely. You have kept us going through seasons when we weren’t sure how things would work out, and we don’t take that lightly.
If you are new here, welcome. The best place to begin is alwaysloved.net — look around and decide for yourself whether this is a place you want to stay.
We’ll be back next week with something to read — not an announcement, just something we’ve been thinking about that we think is worth your time.
With gratitude,
André and Mary-Anne
]]>My latest article, “Girardian Perspectives on Power and Kenarchy in the Apocalyptic Age,” has just been published in The Kenarchy Journal.
Hey everyone,
I am excited to share that my latest academic paper has just been published in the newest issue of The Kenarchy Journal (Volume 8.5).
This article represents a deep dive into themes that have long preoccupied my thoughts: how we understand power, why our modern political and social narratives feel so deeply fractured, and how the anthropological insights of René Girard intersect with a theology of kenosis (self-emptying love).
We live in an age where the old ways of uniting communities—usually by finding a common enemy or a “demonic other” to blame—are breaking down. Our accusatory narratives aren’t bringing us together anymore; they are just escalating our divisions. In this paper, I explore how the revelation of Christ fatally wounded these ancient power structures, leaving humanity with an urgent, apocalyptic choice: do we continue down the path of self-destruction, or do we embrace the kenotic imitation of Christ?
You can read the full abstract below to get a better sense of the scope of the study.
Abstract: Girardian Perspectives on Power and Kenarchy in the Apocalyptic Age
There was a time when we could veil our violence as sacred, uniting our society against a demonic other. That epoch has come to an end, for the aura of religiously justified violence has been eroded beyond repair. Our sacrifices and myths no longer have the magical power to unite our communities. We are no longer fully convinced of the guilt of our victims, the innocence of our community, or the divine inspiration of our myths. As a desperate last resort, we may multiply our sacred sacrifices and flood our communities with bewildering narratives, but the miracle of unanimous condemnation of an evil other escapes us. Our accusatory narratives only serve to further divide us and energize an escalation toward extremes.
According to René Girard’s anthropological insights, archaic human society was founded upon the magical efficacy of sacred violence, where communal unity was achieved through the expulsion of a demonic other. The transformation of primal, uncontrolled violence into ritualized sacrifice marked the very genesis of civilization and religion. Warriors became worshippers, and savages became civilized through this process. However, it’s not only in the birth of cultures that violence shapes our humanity, but in their disintegration also, as worshippers are tempted to become warriors once again.
As a critical framework, Girard’s mimetic theory has become indispensable for analyzing contemporary acts of violence, yet popular analytical readings often miss the theory’s profound historical trajectory. This study argues that the power of archaic structures was fatally wounded by a seed of awareness planted in human consciousness through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. The Christian revelation unveils sacred violence; we can no longer be unconscious of what we do. The historic trajectory of mimetic realism—from an unconscious concealed event of violence, becoming ritual, developing into religion and culture, complemented by sacred narrative (myth), culminating in its exposure by Christ—has stripped archaic power structures of their efficacy, limiting humanity to an apocalyptic choice between self-destruction (profane violence) and the kenotic imitation of Christ.
Read the Full Paper
The Kenarchy Journal is an open-access platform dedicated to the politics of love, combining rigorous academic research with grassroots relevance.
If you want to read or download the full paper (Pages 50-62), you can access it directly via the links below:
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View the Journal Page: Kenarchy Journal Vol 8.5
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Direct PDF Download: Read the Full Article Here
As always, I would love to hear your thoughts. If you read it, please come back to this post and leave a comment. How do you see Girard’s “apocalyptic choice” playing out in the culture around us today?
Thank you for your continued support of my work and writing!
Warmly,
Andre
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]]>When we hear what we don’t need to hear,
we grow dull of hearing, to the melody we are part of.
When we see what we don’t need to see,
we slowly lose our vision of the beauty that beckons us forward.
When we think instead of feel,
we grow callous to the reality we are immersed in.
And slowly but surely, we become spectators of the adventure
we are meant to participate in.