I took my family to Ireland for three weeks in 2024. I’d been twice before — for a month in a house swap when I was seven, and for a month a decade later travelling with friends on the Irish Experience for my Grade 11 English credit. I wanted to retrace my steps with my wife and kids — and we sure did, all the way up to recreating photos and visiting dozens of precise spots that had been seared into my soul on previous trips.

Ireland is a primordial part of my being. When I still had an afro, I would describe my ethnic background as having Bajan hair, a Polish nose, and a Celtic heart. There’s something about the place that beckons me, something about the land that places my whole past and future before me — like I’m feeling 30 years back, 50 years forward, and 1000 years in either direction all at once. The yearning of my heartspace is fundamentally Irish — a longing for Mhuínse (and we almost went there too — believe me I looked it up and tried to make it happen).

So much of this trip was retracing my steps with my heart as a homing beacon. But the place that most captured my heart was a place I’d never been before on the Antrim coast.

Northern Ireland was an afterthought in my trip planning. Why bother leaving the South? I suppose I was also scared off because it was a different place during the Troubles, so we did not visit in 1994. But Keith from theirishroadtrip.com — who became a dear but distant partner in planning this trip — made a compelling case for an Antrim Coast road trip, and I figured we could make a day trip from Dublin to Belfast, up the Antrim Coast road, and back. What seemed like a detour to the Giant’s Causeway ended up causing me to mark my map for the place I most want to return.

After an early morning departure from Dublin, first breakfast at Insomnia, and second breakfast (or was it lunch?) at a Belfast McDonald’s, we set off further north — on the left side of the road, and in miles per hour — making for Dunluce and the Giant’s Causeway, after which we’d head back on the inland highway and stop for dinner in Belfast en route back to Dublin (we fell in love with the Zizzi Italian restaurant chain). I marked OpenStreetMap with a couple dozen spots along the coastal drive so we could visit as many as time would allow. Dunluce is hard to forget, with jagged ruins like teeth on the edge of the cliff, and the legend of the kitchen that fell into the sea. Carrick-a-Rede was also worth a stop, and we just did quick drivebys at many other stops like Dunseverick and Carrickfergus. There was too much ground to cover in one short day trip from Dublin, and the drive itself was half the draw. But at Kinbane, we stopped and left the car to walk, because we couldn’t see the castle from the road.

My kids say there’s been a different theme for each of our road trips — waterfalls through Western Canada (“another waterfall??”), museums through the US northeast (we started with a blitz of Smithsonians and cemented the theme by watching Night at the Museum in the evenings), and, well, playgrounds through the Maritimes (the kids were younger and many things were closed during the pandemic). In Ireland, the theme was castles.

Castle after castle, we’d constantly ask each other: Which is your favourite castle now? What are your top three? How do your rankings compare with Keith’s? Muckross Abbey was otherworldly, like a place from the Ocarina of Time or Breath of the Wild, or really like Rivendell or Lothlórien or someplace Elvish. Bunratty Castle was a childhood favourite — I’m a McNamara and I remember flashes of exploring it from my visit at age seven. (It’s what I always think of when I think of a medieval castle.) But nothing compares to the experience of first laying eyes on Kinbane.

From the parking lot, you can’t see the castle. You take a walking trail a brief way round the rocky cliffside and towards the water. There are ruins somewhere ahead, but you can’t see them — until, suddenly, you can. As you round the bend, you see it all at once: the path dives down steeply, and far below and a bit back up the other side, on a narrow extension of the rocky coastline, lie the ruins of Kinbane Castle. Scotland visible in the distance, the rocky edge of Ireland holds the little that remains of the castle. To experience the transformation of a rather ordinary coastal trail into a bridge to the ruins down below and out into the water felt like walking through a portal. It’s like a rocky hand is stretching out into the sea — relaxed, palm facing upwards — and the ruins of Kinbane lie out towards the end of Ireland’s index finger. As you step round the bend, past the palm of the land’s hand, you must first descend steeply along the base of the finger and across the joint below, before beginning a much smaller but still steep ascent towards what’s left of the castle at the upper joint. Like the hand of Ireland delicately balances Kinbane on its finger to show you something precious and fragile.

After our high school trip to Ireland, my best friend and bandmate wrote in our song, Halton’s Post, about our visit to Kinsale at the opposite edge of the island, almost kitty-corner to Kinbane.

And in Kinsale, on the lonely coast of Ireland
Just past the harbour, where a dozen bright sails soar
Once stood a castle, but now lies only ruins
It strikes me odd that only cold wind calls it home

Except, it wasn’t actually a castle in Kinsale — it struck me odd as I realized on this past trip that it was a British fort. Yet at Kinbane Head lies the trace of a castle on the lonely coast of Ireland. To reach Kinbane Castle, you must first round the bend, and then descend below, before you can rise up the other side. Down below, at the edge of the finite, once stood a castle, practically hidden from the mainland. Now, at this place that feels like a secret, lies only ruins. Only cold wind calls it home — yet, with just one look, I felt like I belonged there too.

Keith may have ranked it #22, but Kinbane is first among castles on my list and in my heart.

(Photo credit: Chris Brooks CC BY-ND)

The way to make better recordings is about learning to use the gear you already have, rather than buying new gear to try to improve your sound. Yes, I get that Graham Cochrane was trying to sell me courses instead of gear, but I bought access to the courses and they are so worth it – and he’s right about this.

I took this advice to heart, and it’s been freeing.

In 2006, I purchased a lot of gear to try to build a home recording studio — a desktop computer, an audio interface, studio monitors, and so many microphones. I used some of it, but then a lot of it sat dormant for a long time. I acquired another round of gear in 2014/2015, got a new audio interface, a MIDI keyboard, and a digital piano.

Yet, I was pretty frustrated with the recordings I was making during this time, especially compared to the high school recordings I was making with Cakewalk 8 from 1998 and RadioShack microphones plugged into the 1/8″ line input on my 2001 Win98 desktop’s built-in sound card.

The problem wasn’t the gear. It was that I didn’t know what to do with it.

Now that I’m focused on improving my audio production skills, I’m making use of old gear.

See, the Recording Revolution advice only half applies to me — I use free/libre software, so I don’t have to buy new software or plugins. In fact, I can use very new software on very old hardware.

This came together for me last spring when I wanted to try recording drums for the first time in a long time. My ~2015 audio interface only has two inputs, but my 2006 Presonus Firepod has eight — and I have six drum mics. But of the 30 computers I have in my house from the past 30 years, only one of them has the right type of firewire port — my 2006 home recording studio desktop. So I took that Intel Pentium D 2 GB of RAM device (stealing a third GB of RAM from a defunct computer) and reinstalled Xubuntu Studio with 64-bit 24.04 LTS. Then, I used that 2006 desktop and 2006 audio interface with 2024 software, like Ardour 8, and recorded drums for two songs. And it worked! (I’ll have some videos out soon.)

This philosophy fits will with my nostalgic approach to hardware. In my studio, I have a reading light from childhood repurposed as a backlight with an LED blub, a 1999 ThinkPad 240 repurposed as a digital picture frame, my 2006 desktop for drums and my primary laptop from 2017, a second and third monitor both from 2006 (though the third I just added in 2025), furniture spanning the last 35 years, amps from the 80s and musical instruments spanning the past 30 years (with the exception of my hundred-year-old violin). Also, I’ve learn that I can often use less of my gear, but use it well to get better results – like focusing on using my large diaphragm condenser well instead of fiddling with ribbon mics and pencil condensers or using multiple microphones when one will suffice.

I’ve realized I don’t need to buy new tech or music equipment. I don’t need new gear to sound better. I just need to get better at using the gear I already have. I’m focused on learning so I use my gear well, and I’m focused on habits so I’m doing it often. I’m using my existing gear, and using less of it, and getting better results.

I wanted to be able to do that one day.

Rockin’ the Suburbs was Ben Folds’ solo debut, after his band broke up (though, at least they didn’t re-form without him…). About 15-18 years ago, my band fizzled out, and two other things happened around the same time. First, I got engaged, married, and started a family, which meant less time for my own music for a while. Second, I went through a significant conversion on software freedom, leading to my commitment to a free/libre software/culture approach to music.

That was a long time ago, and I’ve barely produced any of my own music since. What have I been up to musically? Well, a lot, actually. But very little of it was my own. And part of the problem is that I set a pretty intense standard for myself: I want to use free software to produce freely licensed music.

That’s not as easy as it sounds.

Taking a free culture approach to music means, for example, no royalties. In effect, that means no collaboration – because it’s very unlikely I’d ever find another musician to collaborate with who shares the same commitment. Legally, in practice, it’s not a “per song” question, but that means avoiding the automatic copyright assignment that is a standard part of membership with a PRO – and thus avoiding songwriting or performances from musicians who haven’t made the same rare decision. While I can collaborate without permission with other free culture artists – like Brad Sucks or Josh Woodward – that’s not the same as making music together.

The Rockin’ the Suburbs approach started to become very interesting again. What if an entire album is a solo effort?

There’s still a second problem though – the software tools. Back in 2007, I left Windows and swore off proprietary software, as much as possible.

From 1999-2008, I was using Cakewalk as my recording and arranging software. Leaving Windows and proprietary software meant finding an entirely new software ecosystem. I did find Ubuntu Studio, and later KXStudio (as I switched to Debian), but there was a steep learning curve. In hindsight, I realized the problem was that I was going through two major transitions at the same time: an entirely new software stack, as well as a new musical style (more folk than rock). For a long time, I just felt lost and incompetent. Though, around 2015, I went through a bit of a revival and growth spurt in my learning aided by libremusicproduction.com (now librearts.org), but I still wasn’t very good at recording or mixing. It was frustrating, because I was getting decent results as a total amateur with no professional gear in high school, but I couldn’t get anywhere with more experience, and more gear.

I had a lot going on in my life over the past 15 years, and I took on a lot with the standard I set for myself. No music collaborators? Okay, I’m the songwriter, vocalist, guitarist, pianist, violinist, bassist, drummer, and more… Free software? Okay, I’m going to have to figure out how to score, record, edit, mix, and produce my own music – nevermind lighting, filming, editing, etc for any video. And in 2025, I’m still fighting it…

But maybe, I just needed time. I think I’m finally getting the hang of it – and I’ve got a theory of change to build enough experience and competence out of my home studio over the next 2-3 years to start recording and producing the music I’ve been writing for the last 20.

Discovering Recording Revolution during the pandemic was a game-changer, especially because of the software-agnostic approach and home studio focus. I can easily apply what I’ve learned from Total Home Recording and Mixing University directly in Ardour, even though the courses use Pro Tools. I’ve been using Ardour since 2008, but now I feel like I’m really starting to actually use it — and over the past 6 months, I’ve upgraded from 5.x to 7.x now to the latest 8.x.

I’ve been settling into my software stack. KXStudio and the Liquorix kernel have helped optimized my Debian system for audio. DrumGizmo gives me powerful sampled drums, and I’ve only begun to explore the array of other LV2 synths and samplers. One thing that did work very well for me from about 2008 or 2009 onwards was Rosegarden for music notation for strings (especially since it was easy to score against an audio file). However, MuseScore is definitely the modern standard, and I’ll be exploring that soon.

During my 2015 growth spurt, I also ordered one of the first MOD Duo devices, but never got around to experimenting with it for more than a day – in part, because the software wasn’t very good yet. Well, I finally spent some time with it over this past Christmas break, and figured out how to upgrade the firmware a decade forward and the game changed again. This embedded computer runs all the free software plugins I’ve been playing around with on my laptop for the past 10 years, but in a stomp box – making it easy to connect my Telecaster or my violin, etc. In Recording Revolution terms, I’ve found a core tool to create an infinite studio rack. For live performances, I’ve realized I can pack the tools I use on my laptop into a stomp box. I’ve had this little device full of free software sitting on a shelf for a decade, and now I’ve finally started to unleash its power.

Enamoured by the Boomerang looper pedal, I found SooperLooper and a SoftStep to be an incredibly powerful combination. I can use my SoftStep2 with my MOD Duo as well to provide additional controls. On the video editing side of things, I’ve been using Kdenlive and am still getting to know it better.

I’m finally getting the hang of these tools and building meaningful competency. But it takes creating a lot of not so great stuff before you get good. Maybe it’s a strange way to tell you, but I have a theory of change to do just that: I’m going to produce 50 songs in the next 2-3 years, not all of which I’ll share, but all of which will be incremental steps towards using these tools better, and developing these skills further – so that, one day, after working for 25 years, I can produce an entire album on my own.

This is also a step forward. I’ve written string arrangements for performance and recording with others, but this is the first time I’ve written a score for home studio production. It’s also the first time I’ve played cajón, and the first time I’ve recorded piano. As part of my renewed commitment to creating music (and combating the taste gap), I’m intentionally selecting specific covers to prepare for recording my own songs. From arrangement to performance to recording engineering to mixing and video production — all using free (libre) software — there’s a lot still to learn. This is a big step forward.

Audio

Created using Rosegarden (arrangements), Ardour (recording/mixing), and Kdenlive (video editing).

The Original

In a way, I had never really stopped. But in a way, I had never really started.

Origins: Subcreation from the Beginning

My parents had started me in violin at age 4, but it wasn’t until Grade 5 that I really took to it and it no longer felt like a chore. I recently booted up an old Windows 3.1 desktop from my childhood, and in Lotus Organizer, I had started creating music goals each year in the middle of elementary school. By the end of elementary school, it wasn’t just violin, but my goals started to become oriented around music arrangement and my band. In high school, I went from arranging covers in Grade 9/10, to songwriting in earnest in Grade 11/12 — which is also when I ran my first “concert series” (high school Battle of the Bands).

Through undergrad, my band Fishkiss was writing and performing, and I invested in a ton of home studio equipment and began recording and producing a 10 track EP, but the band was always a joint effort between me and my co-writer, and things fell apart in the middle of the still unfinished project. I started to find my own songwriting voice, but original music has been on the back burner since then.

History: Songwriter, Sideman, Strings

Yet, even as the band fell apart, music took off for me. I started to see my music career as three distinct efforts: songwriting, sideman and strings.

My sideman work took off, as I started playing violin (and other instruments) with many of the songwriters I met through the Toronto music scene. I’ve been privileged to play across Canada from Powell River to Halifax with artists I both admire and consider good friends, and to accompany them from the stage to the studio, from basement taverns to breakfast television.

Meanwhile, a life-changing concert series fell into my lap as I had the opportunity to take over and develop the Hart House Chamber Strings Pops Concert from 2007 to 2017 at the University of Toronto, bringing in dozens of independent songwriters and composing string arrangements for live performances with the string ensemble. For a decade, December/January meant hours and hours of work contacting artists, selecting and arranging music, and rehearsing with a 30-piece community string ensemble.

The experience was always magical, whether playing double bass, viola, or especially when playing my own songs. I graduated from running Battle of the Bands at my high school to being the artistic director for an annual concert, and while it felt like people were doing me a favour to have an orchestra willing to play my arrangements every year and the opportunity to compose for some of my favourite songwriters, the University of Toronto gave me the Student Engagement in the Arts Award in 2012 for the first 5 years of concerts.

What a blessing, to spend a decade making music with all of these people, and to develop as a sideman and in composing string arrangements. There are so many memories layered upon memories across the country in this decade of music.

But although this was music that I loved and was privileged to be a part of, it wasn’t my music.

Destiny: To break out into song… even if it takes years

My songwriting journey started as a partnership. It took a while for me to find my own voice. During a decade of playing music with other people, I did very little with my own music. I did write a handful of songs worth keeping, but only recorded a couple of them — and it took 8 years.

Three things held me back: songwriting, production, time.

On the songwriting front, I quickly realized I was playing with songwriters much more experienced and developed than I was. This was great in terms of learning and influence, but paralyzing in terms of confidence. Ira Glass articulates this so well:

Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?

This was true for songwriting, but also for production. When I listen back to the high school recordings I made with no professional audio gear, I still love so much about them, but I hit a wall from 2007-2017 and felt horrible about anything I was recording in my home studio. With limited time — these 10 years including becoming a husband and father — having to book time in a studio slowed down my creative output even more.

I wasn’t writing much, and I was taking forever to record what I was writing. I had limited time, which meant less recording if I had to get to a studio first.

This year was different.

A couple Christmases ago, I had started producing music from home for the first time in a decade. It was rough, but I was creating again. See, in 2015, I had another round of spending and finally dove into GNU/Linux audio deeper — I discovered Libre Music Production, KXStudio, the power of MIDI, and even gave a talk (and awkward performance) on my free software live music setup at a conference. Then, I discovered Recording Revolution, which was exactly what I needed to figure out how to properly use the software and hardware I already had (especially because Graham Cochrane teaches in a software agnostic way).

During the Spring lockdown this year, I took some time to go through some Recording Revolution courses, and I noticed something amazing. The taste gap is real and my home mixes were bad — but I figured out why. And actually, the recording I had done… wasn’t that bad at all. I just didn’t know how to mix or how to arrange for my own style of songwriting. For the first time in forever, I had some confidence and I felt like I knew what I needed to do next.

During a live Q&A, I asked Graham Cochrane from Recording Revolution about how to break through the taste gap. I think I knew the answer already, but hearing him say it himself made a difference: record more music. This is exactly what Ira Glass continues on to say:

The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while.

This was the year that the dam broke. I’m creating now.

At the end of 2019, I performed three of my songs live as part of a TOB talk.

I started off this year with a deadline to perform on solo violin, and figured out a live looping setup and composed a solo violin piece, Earth and Air:

And began to experiment with the live looping rig for other songs:

After taking those Recording Revolution courses, I decided to start recording a bunch of covers to “do a lot of work” and get better at home studio production before I turn to my own original tunes.

I started making music with my kids and we covered My Names is Jonas (Weezer) and Light (San Holo):

And I covered Sam Tudor’s Turtle Song as a one-man folk orchestra:

Besides those Christmas carols two years ago, this is the first time I’ve produced music from my home studio or used MIDI drums. Recording violin, cello, banjo, using SooperLooper, MIDI keyboards — these are all things I’ve rarely if ever done before now, and now I’ve done it for several songs with several more on the way. This doesn’t seem like much objectively, but it’s the paradigm shift that matters. This is the start of an exponential growth curve — networks collide. There is a crack in the dam.

Finally, one of the simplest yet most satisfying recording projects was revisiting an old recording session I had long since abandoned and left for dead. I tried recording The World Has Turned and Left Me Here on May 21, 2009 — and hated the results. Yet, this October, I took a look at the session again, applied my new skills to edit and mix the old session files, and layered vocals on top… and surprisingly, it turned out alright. Maybe it wasn’t that I didn’t know where to start, but just that I didn’t know how to finish. Maybe I wasn’t as terrible as I thought I was.

Even more encouraging than all of this? In the past 14 months, I’ve written four solid songs — whereas normally I might get one every four years. I’m writing on guitar, and piano. After I practice with a dozen covers, next up are my original songs. This year I mapped out a 10 song EP, and took the first critical steps towards preparing to record it in my home studio. (And for this phase of life, working from home is the solution for limited time as well.)

For 20 years, I’ve been creating music. Yet, while I had never really stopped, I had never really started either. Now, in the year 2020, all the stars aligned — approaching 2.0, I’ve found a way to begin.

I am so excited for what I have to share.

First, my high school band covered this song. (I have a performance on a VHS tape I’ve been meaning to digitize…) Then, when I was trying to get familiar with home recording in Ubuntu Studio back in 2009, I decided to record it for practice. And… it was crap. This attempt, and several others at the time, were so incredibly discouraging because, despite getting decent results a few years earlier, I just couldn’t get anything to sound anything but terrible during this phase. I abandoned the project and never finished it.

But this Spring/Summer during the pandemic, I went through a couple Recording Revolution courses and learned a ton about home studio audio production. I figured out what I was doing wrong, but more importantly, I also figured out what I had been doing right – even though it may have been incomplete.

As I was journeying back through old recording projects, Graham Cochrane (Recording Revolution) posted this video:

Graham found that, sure, his old recordings were bad in so many ways… but there were also gems in there, there were also ways in which they were good.

When I looked back at my 2009 session files for The World Has Turned, they sounded rough and messy. I had poorly recorded drums with bad timing, and bass and electric guitar that sounded like mud. But… this time, I wasn’t discouraged. I spent some time applying drum editing techniques to fix some of the timing issues in my performance, and I used EQ to make the best of a beat up drum kit that was miced awkwardly in places. I started applying mixing techniques to clear up the mud in the bass and electric guitars, and redid the static mix. And… it actually wasn’t that bad after all. The reason it sounded terrible wasn’t so much that I did the wrong things, just that I didn’t know what to do next.

So, in October, I layered vocals on top of the instrumental parts I had recorded way back on May 21, 2009. I spent some time with the mix, orchestrated a gang vocal cameo from NMG Studios (who are already Weezer blue album fans), and this 2009/2020 performance didn’t turn out half bad.

Hello World.

The Original

In addition to being another mix for me to try after taking some Recording Revolution courses, this is the first time I’ve used melodic MIDI instruments in Ardour — Yoshimi and amsyth plugins are powering six different parts (as well as the amazing DrumGizmo for the drums). Also, filming outdoors in the urban wilderness was a great physically distanced pandemic activity for the Fall.

NMG Studios is Noah, Mara and Gabriella making music with help from their dad. Here’s our second video:

The Original

I think about it every day, like this is where it all went wrong. I need to put it back somehow. I need to put it in this song.

Some normal activity was blocked for Sam, and some normal activity was blocked for me. I needed to put it into a song. The lyric attempts the impossible — to stop time – and Sam Tudor succeeded in stopping time for me. So I took a day in June, and recorded a one-man folk rock orchestra cover. Now, I’ve finally had some time to mix the audio and edit video – and I can return to the world of time.

(This also marks the first time I’ve used my cello for recording.)

The Original

Thanks, Sam.

Enter NMG Studios: Noah, Mara and Gabriella making music with help for their dad. My kids are in Suzuki violin, but turning to some fun covers are a great opportunity to give them experience recording and filming, while allowing me a chance to practice my skills.

This is our first cover: My Name is Jonas.

I process through songwriting — an attempt to stop time with the lyric, and to model the harmony of creation with music — and to orient the desire of the human heart towards a desire for God. This talk includes a couple songs I have yet to record as well.

The Newman Centre uploaded video, and I’ve transcribed the talk below:

Introduction: A Paradigm Shift

How many of you grew up in a Christian home? How many of you would say you had open, honest, healthy dialogue about God’s glorious, stupendous, wonderful, magnificent plan for erotic love? Right.

Most of us, I think, have an experience learning about human sexuality in a kind of “corner’ of our religious though. I think about it through my experience attending curriculum night when my son was in JK a few years ago. He was taking me around the classroom, and he was showing me all the things — all of the stations, he was like, this is the pretend kitchen, this is the blocks thing, we’ve got sand over there, he’s showing me everything — and there’s this one table that he didn’t say anything about, and I said, “What’s that over there?” And it’s got this Ikea leaf over top, and a rock and a candle, and he’s like, “I– I don’t know what that is…” It was the prayer table.

Right, and, that “off in the corner” kind of thing — I mean I think that’s the way in which a lot of people in our society and in our culture think about religion, as some kind of side topic or something. But I mean, I think if you’ve grown up with or grown into the faith then we have an understanding that religion is a kind of ultimate, like, it exists at an ultimate level that kind of explains everything. Yet, human sexuality and our understanding of marriage still usually exists off in a corner, as sort of one area of our thinking. I mean, marriage is a sacrament, it’s one of the sacraments, so there’s some bridge, some connection to our religious thinking, but for John Paul II, his theology of the body — which was a giant Bible study on the theme of human sexuality, of being created in God’s image and likeness, male and female — is a lens for understanding the entire catechism, a lens through which, a perspective through which he understood the whole faith.

I think that makes sense. It makes so much sense to me now. But I didn’t encounter this idea until 11 years ago, when I first really heard the message of the theology of the body. That’s part of the reason that I spent 8 years doing a Master of Theological Studies — I’m done, but technically I don’t graduate for a month, so I don’t know if that means I’m done or not — but that’s why I spent 8 years of school studying theology, that’s why I went to the Theology of the Body Institute three times to take course. I just couldn’t get enough.

My wife and I, a couple years before we were married — this was part of our journey towards marriage — we attended one session on the theology of the body during World Youth Day 2008 in Australia. We were like, okay, we’ll go one night and we’ll kind of learn about this stuff. We went all three nights. And then, Christopher West — one of the more popular presenters of the theology of the body, who makes John Paul II’s dense theology accessible — he was coming to Toronto a year later, and it was like, great, I’ll go to this weekend thing, an intro to the theology of the body, I’ll get my fill and then I’ll be able to move on, and focus on other things, after I know all this stuff. And I left there with a sign-up sheet to go take a week-long course at the Theology of the Body Institute, and I came back from there and went to the Regis College open house, and that’s been my journey over the last 12 years!

I want to share a bit of that paradigm shift, that different way of seeing human sexuality and the human body, that changed my life and changed my faith, and give you a bit of that perspective.

The Theology of the Body has been called the “John-Pauline lens” for the entire Catechism, and I think that makes sense, because if you go to the catechism, right at the beginning of Chapter 1, it begins, “Man’s Capacity for God,” and the first section is “The Desire for God.” Right at the start of Chapter 1, it says:

The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for.

Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 27

And then, quoting from the Second Vatican Council, it continues:

The dignity of man rests above all on the fact that he is called to communion with God. This invitation to converse with God is addressed to man as soon as he comes into being. For if man exists it is because God has created him through love, and through love continues to hold him in existence. He cannot live fully according to truth unless he freely acknowledges that love and entrusts himself to his creator.

Gaudium et Spes, 19

And I want to dive deeper into love and into communion, because our experience, being created male and female in the image and likeness of God, isn’t just some corner of our human experience. St. John Paul II saw that as central to the human experience, and insofar as it’s central to our experience of desire, it’s central to our experience of desire for God. Insofar as we long for communion and love, that is an experience placed there in our lives by God as a sign meant to lead us towards Him.

This was a promo video from the Made for More event that Christopher West and Mike Mangione put on all across the world. They were in Toronto back in May. I think it’s a great summary of that John Pauline lens, that perspective that we have been created this way for a reason, and if we think carefully about our human experience, that placed deep within us is that desire — and even human desire, Pope Benedict said, every authentic human desire is ultimately a desire for God.

Orienting Our Desire… (eros)

When we say “love” in English, we use that word in a lot of different ways. Right, we say, “I love pizza. I love my friend. I love my wife. I love philosophy.” We use this word in a lot of different ways. The Greeks, they had four words for love that I’ve found very helpful thinking more carefully about love.

• storge: a kind of affection, or love of the familiar, the kind of love you feel after spending a lot of time with someone, getting to know them
• philia: the love of friendship, the kind of shoulder-to-shoulder love of journeying through life together
• eros: erotic love, romantic love, desire, that desire for union with another
• agape (or caritas in Latin, “charity”): selfless or altruistic love, willing the good of the other as other, choosing to act in someone else’s best interest, that kind of love — the word most commonly used in the New Testament for love

Benedict says, in his encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (caritas / agape), he says that God’s love for us is “totally agape,” but he says it’s also totally eros — that God loves us with eros.

Now, I’ll unpack that a bit in a second, but of those four loves — storge (affection), philia (friendship), eros (desire), and agape (selfless love) — which of those four are not a part of our childhood experience? Eros. Eros isn’t something that we experience as children. Now, of those four loves, which is the most powerfully felt, which pulls on us and tugs on us the strongest in our experience? I think that’s also eros.

As children, it makes sense that our understanding of the faith would not include eros. It would be hard for it to include eros because it would be hard for us to understand a love that we haven’t experienced. But I think as adults, it’s crucial to be able to integrate our experience of eros with our understanding of the faith.

So, Benedict says God’s love for us is agape, but it’s also eros. He says that God loves us with eros. Now, think about what we learn about God’s love in Scripture. Scripture starts with a marriage, it ends with a marriage, right at the centre you have a book of erotic love poetry. All through the Old Testament, one of the most common analogies used is the spousal analogy — God as a lover longing for union with his beloved, the people of God. Christ’s ministry starts at a wedding. His call for us to “love one another as I have loved you,” how did Christ love us? As we see in the New Testament — as we see in the Gospels, as we see from St. Paul — Christ desired union with us so strongly, He gave up his body for his bride, the Church. He laid down His life in order to bring us back into communion with God.

This longing for communion and love, this desire is central to the human experience. It’s central to God’s desire for communion and relationship with us.

I’m trying something new today, by trying to play some of my own songs, because for this Mentorship Series there was an encouragement to bring personal testimony into it. For me, I process this through music. The first song that I think I’m going to play is a song called Anaximander. Anaximander was an ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher. He posited that the stars were holes in the firmament through which we could see the fires of heaven. And I thought that was a just a beautiful analogy for the way in which John Paul II understood being created male and female, in the image and likeness of God, as a sign or an icon of a deeper reality of our call to communion — an icon like a window through which we can see something of the mystery of the truth.

Anaximander

Stay where you are, eastward from here.
I will find you, even if it takes years.
I can see you ’til I open my eyes;
There was a time when we stood side by side…

And all the stars aligned as you stepped outside
And I could see for miles into the past.
Who knows which stars still shine?
All we have are signs they’ve left us, their protests against the night

In a garden, at the edge of the town,
Ancient trees know the secrets around.
In your image, the likeness of light;
Anaximander had something right

And all the holes aligned on the firmament’s divide
And I could catch a glimpse into the fire,
To see the other side…
Holes to Heaven guide us through the night;
I’m focused on your eyes

And all the stars aligned as you stepped outside
And I could see for miles into the past.
Who knows which stars still shine?
All we have are signs they’ve left us, their protests against the night

Amidst all these stars, I see what you are…

So, I think that experience of love — that longing and that searching, that ache, that desire for union with another — has been placed there in the human heart to lead us to God. We know how that goes astray in our world, in our culture, this side of the Fall. We know that, so often, we take that desire to the wrong places.

As Benedict says, rather than that desire for union being purified by agape, by willing the good of the other, rather than being fuel to love someone rightly and fully with eros and agape, too often that eros is not connected with agape, is not connected with the good of the other — it goes in the opposite direction.

Christopher West uses an analogy that I find helpful. Let’s use our imaginations. Let’s pretend that I have a piece of paper, and it’s the most glorious, beautiful painting you’ve ever seen. Can I have some ooooo’s? Can I have some aaaahh’s? Okay, our imaginations are functioning. This is human beings, created male and female before the Fall — God’s original plan for human love.

In the Fall, we turn away from God and God’s love, and we turn away from God’s original plan. That piece of paper? It gets crumpled up and twisted. There are three options we have.

Too often, Christians pick up that crumpled piece of paper, and they go, “Ugh,” and chuck it away. “There’s something wrong with that, I want to be far away from that.”

Our culture picks up that crumpled piece of paper, and says, “Yo, check this out, take a look! Look at that! Look at that!” John Paul II says, hey, you’re right not to throw that out, but you’ve gotta untwist it. You have to take that crumpled piece of paper and untwist it. That’s not how it was meant to be. That’s not God’s original plan for human sexuality, that’s not how human beings flourish.

So, we still have the creases in the piece of paper when it’s uncrumpled, but we can see something of that original purpose, of that original intent. John Paul II says that, “the human heart becomes a battlefield” (TOB 32:3) in our journey towards chastity — which just means sexual self-control, which is just about orienting our desires toward our design so that we can reach out heavenly destiny. Too often we fail in that battle, but that battle, it’s about a choice about accepting the help from God to live out our human sexuality as it was meant to be, in a way that leads us towards communion with each other and communion with Him, or not.

… according to Our Design (Genesis)

When Jesus is asked tough or controversial questions about human sexuality — when he’s asked about divorce — He points back to the beginning. He says, “In the Beginning, it was not so.” So, John Paul II follows Him back to the beginning, and he starts the Theology of the Body by looking at our design, God’s original plan for human love, before it’s twisted and distorted by sin.

In the beginning, we see, in Genesis 1, human beings created in the image and likeness of God as male and female (Gen 1:27), and in Genesis 2 that gets unpacked. We see the objective truth in Genesis 1, the kind of statement of fact, but in Genesis 2 we see that played out in the human experience.

John Paul II points back to three original experiences in Genesis 2 — “original” not in the sense of having occurred a long time ago in history, but “original” as in foundational, at the heart of the human experience before it’s twisted and distorted by sin. John Paul II says in the Theology of the Body, “the inheritance of our hearts is deeper than the sinfulness inherited.” (TOB 46:6) We’ve got to go back to the beginning and look back to those original experiences to see how we’re truly meant to live out our human sexuality.

He breaks them down into three experiences.

The first is original solitude. Adam — adam in Hebrew is just “human”, it’s not “male” or “female”, it’s just the first human — he is alone. He experiences the solitude in the beginning. John Paul II says, first we see that in the sense that he’s apart from the other animals, there’s something different about him as a human being, there’s something different about being a human being. It’s the discovery of the original person, a human being who’s called into a special partnership with God, who has a self-awareness and a rationality and a special role in creation. The first human sees himself as apart from the other animals. The second sense of solitude is being without spouse, that we aren’t meant to be alone as human beings, but we’re created for communion, we’re created for relationship.

This being without spouse leads into the second original experience, original unity. After Eve’s creation is where you see the Hebrew ish and ishah, where “male” and “female” enter the picture, and you see that original unity of husband and wife — “Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bones… Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Gen 2:23) — that ecstasy, that joy, that communion, that union, the marriage and the marital embrace. John Paul II says, yes, we see the image of God in each individual human being — we can see an image of God in each other of us as individuals — but he says, “Man becomes the image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion,” (TOB 9:3) as in that moment when the two become one flesh.

Because, we don’t believe in a solitary God; we believe in a God that is a Trinity, a God that is a relationship of eternal self-giving love. Where do we see that image? We see that image in our human sexuality, being created male and female. Okay, now it’s not that the divine is sexual, but rather it’s that the sexual is divine, in some sense, that our created experience of sexuality — which differs from the Trinity — tells us something about the true meaning of love, of being called to be in relationship with another. If God is love, and God is an eternal exchange of love, between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit — as I think it’s Augustine says, between the lover the beloved and the love in between — where do we see that image in the human experience? It’s in the call of the two to become one flesh, it’s in that experience of original unity.

And then finally, that leads into the experience of original nakedness, where, in their experience of original unity — which is an answer to the original solitude, that two persons are meant to come together as one — that they were naked without shame. (Gen 2:25) John Paul II says, how can we possibly understand this in our experience? He says we can look at our experience, and look at it as a kind of photographic negative, to see what our experience is like to try to rediscover something of the original design.

In our experience of nakedness and shame, we feel a kind of protection that’s necessary from exploitation. We feel a vulnerability and we wonder if the other will receive us rightly. We wonder if the other will fully recognize our dignity. Whereas in our fallen world, there is too often a link and a connection between nakedness and vulnerability and exploitation or objectification — treating someone else’s body as an object when revealed to us — in the beginning, it was not so. He says, if they were naked without shame, there must have been no fear of that exploitation. There must have been a kind of perfect nature or character to that original union, where there was no threat from the other, no need for defence. There was no need for shame. There was safety in nakedness.

John Paul II says that they must have seen each other with, what he calls, “the peace of the interior gaze.” (TOB 13:1) That is, if in our fallen world, the experience is too often seeing the naked human body as an object, the peace of the interior gaze is seeing the naked body as a subject.

The thesis statement of the Theology of the Body is that:

The body, in fact, and only the body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God…

TOB 19:4

… that the body makes visible the person. If I pick on Krishna for a second, if I say, “look at Krishna,” we can only see and relate to Krishna through his body. The body makes visible Krishna’s person. And how much moreso does the whole human body make visible the whole person.

John Paul II says, in the original experience without the fear and threat of sin, the body reveals the whole person. The body was seen not as an object, but as a subject. The peace of the interior gaze is looking at the body and seeing the other person as God sees them, seeing the body as a sign of the person.

The body makes visible these invisible realities. It’s what he calls the spousal meaning of the body, that these original experiences tell us that we are created for relationship.

Think about your body for a second. Think about your belly button. What does your belly button tell you about what it means to be human? Your belly button tells you that you came from somebody else. Go down a few inches and think about your body. What do our bodies tell us here about what it means to be human? Our bodies tell us that we were created for somebody else. A man’s body doesn’t make sense on its own; a woman’s body doesn’t make sense on its own.

That we are created male and female, in the image and likeness of God, tells us that one fundamental thing about what it means to be human is that we’re created for relationship, not just any kind of relationship, but for communion, for mutual self-giving, as John Paul II puts it — for making a sincere gift of self to the other, and receiving back a sincere gift of self in return, this mutual self-gift. That is at the core of what it means to be human. That’s why we read in the Second Vatican Council, in Gaudium et Spes paragraph 24 that:

Man… cannot find himself except for a sincere gift of self.

Gaudium et Spes, 24

That is, something of God’s original plan for human love, the original meaning of the human body, and our ache and longing and experience of human desire is, at its core, a sign meant to lead us towards loving each other rightly, to come into communion with each other, and ultimately, to come into communion with God — the kind of union that God wants to have with us.

This is my attempt to make sense of that.

In the Beginning

Stay a minute, hold me in your arms and I’ll be replenished;
You’ve no idea of the power in your stare.
Stay a minute, you hold my heart inside your hands, you don’t know it;
You’ve no idea of the longing in your absence.

But if our hearts align, barriers at the side, we might realize our worth.

In the beginning, there was nothing that could come in between us;
I had a vision of your body and your soul.
Then, in an instant, you were gone, all I had left was an imprint;
A fragment idea, a desire to be whole.

But if you hearts align, barriers at the side, we might synchronize our worlds.

How can the fire keep burning, if I can’t remember what ignited it in the first place?
Show me forgiveness and learning, let me back into the garden where we lay.
How can the fire keeping burning, if I can’t remember where it started in the first place?
Show me forgiveness and learning, let me back into the garden where we lay.

‘Cause if our hearts collide, barriers at the side, we might realize our worth.

In the beginning, there was nothing that could come in between us;
I had a vision of your body and your soul…

… to reach Our Destiny (Sign)

I find it helpful how Christopher West summarizes the Theology of the Body, saying it’s about orienting our desire according to our design so that we can reach our destiny. That is, taking our experience of human desire, and orienting it according to our design — looking back to God’s original plan for human love — so that we can reach our destiny. That is, our human sexuality is a sign of our heavenly destiny. We turn to the sacrament of marriage, and to the vocation of celibacy, to enter into this mystery.

In every sacrament, we see something of the mystery of God being revealed and made visible. Just like, through the body, the mystery of who we are, created in the image and likeness of God, is made visible, well so too in the sacrament is the invisible made visible, in some way.

He says that the vocations of celibacy for the sake of the kingdom and of marriage “explain or complete each other,” (TOB 78:2) they tell us something about our heavenly destiny. Marriage tells us something about the nature of love, that the call to love is the call to make a sincere gift of self to the other. Celibacy, for the sake of the kingdom — that’s not a rejection of human sexuality because it’s a bad thing, but a reverence for it because it’s a good and holy thing — that tells us something about our heavenly destiny.

On rejection versus reverence, I think it’s helpful to think about Lenten resolutions, and I’ll throw in another helpful Christopher West analogy in there. He says, “I like beer. I don’t like pickles. I’m going to give beer up for Lent, not pickles.” When we give something up in that way, it’s not because we reject it as a bad thing, it’s because we recognize it as a good thing. That’s the approach to celibacy for the sake of the kingdom, that is, in our heavenly destiny, communion ­— the communion of saints, the communion with God — it’s not a sexual communion. Our human sexuality, marriage, is meant to be a sign of that ultimate union and communion, which is a spiritual communion. So, the vocation of celibacy for the kingdom reminds us that marriage is not an idol, it’s not the end goal. Rather, it’s an icon, it’s a window, a window to see through. It’s a sign of our heavenly destiny.

We see this in the sacrament of marriage, especially in Ephesians 5, where St. Paul links the marriage of creation with the marriage of redemption, where St. Paul puts together that “great mystery”, which John Paul II calls the “great sacrament,” that Christ, as bridegroom, gave up His body for His bride, to bring us in communion with God, that He love us so much that He laid down His life for us, to bring us into the marriage of redemption, the heavenly marriage, that union, that communion. I’m going to let Jason Evert explain this one.

Human Love and the Desire for God: The Mystery of the Whole of Human Existence

One of the greatest 8 paragraphs that I’ve ever read in my life is Pope Benedict’s, just a weekly Wednesday audience in November 2012, called, “The Year of Faith. The Desire for God.” In it, he quotes from the catechism, where I started, “the desire for God is written on the human heart,” and he says that, in every authentic human desire, we see that desire for God and that, especially we see that…

… in the experience of human love, an experience that in our age is more easily perceived as a moment of ecstasy, of leaving oneself, like a place in which [we] feels overcome by a desire that surpasses [us]. Through love, a man and a woman experience in a new way, thanks to each other, the greatness and beauty of life and of what is real. If what is experienced is not a mere illusion, if I truly want the good of the other as a means for my own good, then I must be willing not to be self-centred, to place myself at the other’s service, even to the point of self-denial. The answer to the question on the meaning of the experience of love then passes through the purification and healing of the will, required in loving the other. […]

Thus the initial ecstasy becomes a pilgrimage, “an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God” (Encyclical Deus Caritas Est, n. 6). Through this journey one will be able to deepen gradually one’s knowledge of that love, initially experienced. And the mystery that it represents will become more and more defined: in fact, not even the beloved is capable of satisfying the desire that dwells in the human heart. In fact, the more authentic one’s love for the other is, the more it reveals the question of its origin and its destiny, of the possibility that it may endure for ever. Therefore, the human experience of love has in itself a dynamism that refers beyond the self, it is the experience of a good that leads to being drawn out and finding oneself before the mystery that encompasses the whole of existence.

Notice, he doesn’t say that the experience of human love gives us a good foundation for marriage prep, or a good dating guide. It’s not just in a corner over there, but rather it brings us before the mystery of the whole of human existence — that, especially that experience of human love, among all other human experiences, brings us, in a special, profound and holy way before that mystery.

I process this through music because I’m a musician, but I think music makes sense in this context. St. Augustine says, “singing is a lover’s thing.” He says, our hearts are restless until they rest in God. That restlessness, that ache, that longing — that’s why so many songs are love songs, because through music and through that search for beauty, we’re ultimately digging into that desire, that desire that’s been placed there in our hearts by God to lead us to Him.

I’m going to try one more song, one last song. I’m going to do something risky, and play a song I’ve never played before — because I finished half of it last night. This is my latest attempt to make sense of all this.

Break Out

I have seen all the animals
And I’ve given each a name,
But I long for someone who sees who I am
And I’ve yet to find one who feels the same.

I have wandered through the city,
And I’ve journeyed through the plains
For the missing piece, the one who calls me by name;
Flesh and bone, we’re not alone, you feel the same…

I will give you all that I am
For just one moment in your land
I was meant to live by your side
Would you be my sister? Would you be my bride?
I will give you all that I can
Won’t you be my light?

I am broken, but I want to be whole;
I am restless inside the ache.
It’s the shape of someone who knows who I am;
It’s the shape I see when I see face to face.

I have named all the negatives,
All those things that weigh me down.
Oh, please tie them up, and send them far away
Sacrifice and die to self and rise again…

I will give you all that I am
For just one moment in your land
I was meant to live by your side
Would you be my sister? Would you be my bride?
I will give you all that I can
Won’t you be my light?

I was meant to live by your side
Would you be my sister? Would you be my bride?
I will give you all that I can
I would give my life

Oh, I am just an aching for you…
Ah, I am just an ache now…
Oh, stretch me ’til I break out…
Oh, I am just an aching for you…
Oh, stretch me ’til I break in two…
Oh, I am just an ache now…
Ah, all of creation too…
Ah, take me to the morning view…
Ah, I can see right into you…

Oh, I am just an ache now…
Ah, stretch me ’til I break out…