What's Next?

(That's a wink toward my fellow West Wing fans!)

Having blogged for over 10 years, and having just finished a weekly series on the Gospel of Luke that took up most of the past year, I’ve been taking my time deciding on the direction I want to take with Notes from the Hermitage in the coming year. I don’t want to jump on some topic that others here in Substack are already doing just to join the club. And I also don’t want to be so singular that no one will read my work.

I’ve been considering a few possible ‘next steps,’ building on the work I’ve done this past year on Luke. Chief among these are looking at two other metaphors for Christian life (now that we’ve thoroughly discredited the idea of a ‘kingdom’ in any human terms) — ‘eternal life,’ as described in the Fourth Gospel (attributed to John), and life ‘in Christ,’ as St Paul would have it.

I like both of these, but I don’t know that I have the bandwidth to do another in-depth, week-by-week study of a biblical text just now. And yet, the challenge of digging into what a life shaped by a commitment to the being and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth would look like in today’s world is really up my alley. And setting these three concepts — kingdom of God, life in Christ, and eternal life — side by side really intrigues me. I suspect they may point the way to a new understanding of a post-church way of doing Christianity (which I happen to think is long overdue).

And then there’s the reality of my upcoming health challenges. I have two major surgeries planned for the first half of 2026! I’m getting older, and these procedures are the direct result of advancing age. Pain, surgery, rehab, returning to work, (and deciding how long I keep working) — these are going to be the lived reality of my next several months. And the tools that I have for interpreting these experiences are the message of wisdom, compassion, suffering, and redemption, that I encounter in Holy Scripture.

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So here’s what I’m inclined to do: starting with the Gospel of John, I will examine the notion of ‘eternal life,’ doing so through the lens of my own humanity and mortality. The goal will be to dig into Scripture, not just as an intellectual exercise, but as a way to interpret one person’s experience of the conditions of human life. That approach should map over to the Epistles of Paul and his exploration of life ‘in Christ’ as well. And that should get me well down the road of 2026 - at least past the first surgery in February.

And there’s another section of the Bible that may come into play - the Book of Psalms, those glorious Hebrew texts that raise the human experience to heights of anguish and exaltation.

So there’s a lot going on right now, and I promise to keep you posted. Let me know what you think, and what interests you. Thanks.

(Oh, and I promise never to charge for subscriptions, or resort to AI to write my posts. Just sayin’….)