Well, welcome, everybody!
This is the beginning of No Sermons, the cleverly named podcast-based discussion group that's community chat enabled and everything, for people who are religious or not religious or anti-religious but who are interested in spirituality, whatever they may call it. You’re reading more or less a transcript here, of the inaugural podcast episode, also available here on Substack and also through Apple Podcasts and shortly Spotify. That’s going to be my general practice, because experience has shown me that when I do these things, readers are not usually listeners, and listeners are not usually readers.
And it's put together by me with a bunch of friends, some of whom are religious types and some of whom are not, some of whom are interested in spirituality and some of whom say they aren't, but I think they are, and all of whom share what I at least have noticed in my time on earth among humans, which is that everybody, if pushed hard enough, does have instinctively spiritual things to say.
You are welcome in this. You're a human on earth. You have things to say, and we want you and your thoughts.
There's going to be group chat. It's already enabled. There's going to be writing things. I can write some of them. If there's something you want to write, write it and we'll put it up. There'll be podcast content. But I don't have to do all of it. If you've always wanted to be on a podcast, the mic is yours, or we can share a mic with you.
This is not the Duncan Fisher show. It’s a place for us all to talk about the spirituality things we really want to talk about.
Full disclosure here, yeah, I'm a religion guy these days. My career has been in pharma for a long time, doing clinical trials and science comms, and before that I was a college prof. I'm taking a later in life direction change and getting official about spiritual things I've always wanted to do. I'm on my way to ordination as what they call a deacon in the Episcopal Church. I'll explain that down the road if it comes up. I'm also a card-carrying Franciscan, and there’ll be more explanation about that if it comes up. And none of this is very important. It doesn't give me any particular religious advantage over anybody else. It's just where I happen to have parked for some things that I want to do. One of those is hospice work. I spend much of my time helping people die, and I can talk about what that's all about if it comes up too. But I've got deep roots in spirituality way back in time, long before I ever got involved in anything official, stretching all the way back to being a teenager in the 70s where I was unchurched and spent a lot of time in the occult. That's what you did in the 70s, if you were hip. I did a lot of ghost-chasing and things like that, and I know what it's like to want to find spooky spiritual things that are pretty far afield, and I respect it and I'm there too. ‘Spiritual’ can mean a lot of things.
I myself am pretty uninterested in the superficialities of religious life, to say this differently, though I do love the tradition I’m in. But make no mistake. Churches are not salvation in themselves. No faith community is, whether it's Christian or something else. These are just signposts, so to speak. And rather than argue about the various kinds of signposts there are, I think it’s better that we just talk about what's really driving our religious and spiritual impulses from inside us.
That's how I come at these things, and that's why there will be no sermonizing here, and there will be no proselytizing; there will be nothing but welcome.
And that's the way it should be. One churchy thing that I will say, and then that's the end of it, is that Richard Rohr, the Pop Franciscan at the moment, had a mentor in Fr. Richard Keating, in the contemplative prayer circles among the Franciscans. And he was asked about the movement in contemporary life where people say all the time, oh, I'm spiritual, but not religious. And he said, I think that's a good thing. He called it a healthy impulse. And he said it probably reflects the movement of the Spirit to make itself more accessible to us the way we are. Well, that's the way I see it, too.
And that's why we welcome you — all of you — whatever your spiritual inclinations or orientations. We just want to talk together.
By the way, this is not a commercial undertaking, and it never will be. Nothing will ever be monetized here, or put behind a paywall, or anything like that. This really is just a community of people who want to talk about spiritual things.
Now down to business.
I'm composing this from my truck outside McDonald's in the Rocky Mountains. I'm feeling sorry for myself because my feet are cold. I live halfway between the U.S. and the U.K., and right now I'm in the Rockies and it's cold here in December.
I'm outside McDonald's because I like to sit in public places and learn people's stories.
I was just chatting with a man who's got scissors and glue and calipers and knives on his table. That’s one story. I'm surprised they let him do that, but there he is. He's making a little scale building. It's beautiful, a kind of Victorian structure about a foot high, and it's a module that fits into a bigger project that he says is going to be a historial police station in New York City. I asked him where this project resides and he didn't know what I meant. I asked where the rest of the project was. He said, oh it's in my van, and when I get an apartment I'll put it in there. I can see his van from my truck. It's got it's got a skeleton crawling over the top of it, and it's got faces painted on the grill; he’s also got incoherent looking political writing in magic marker on the side of the vehicle.
I'm probably looking at the benign face of some form of psychosis. But he's friendly with it. He's genuine with it. He's generous with it and he's producing something beautiful, and heartfelt, and it's lovely that he'll share.
Across from him was a young man talking to a girl. They were nose to nose, speaking softly. He reached over and touched something on her face, and commented on it; she tucked into him and talked softly back. This is another story, a very beautiful, very private, very spontaneous, and very generous moment.
Across from them, another story. Here was an older man, by himself. He looked to me like a retired lawyer, very well put together and well rehearsed in who he was. He was looking kind of distant. I got the vibe off him that he might have been grieving somebody. At his age, that's not unlikely. And again, he didn't know it, but he was sharing something with the world in that moment.
I wasn't going to intrude in any of these stories, but these are the micro-impulse moments I’m talking about. They’re all over the place. I see them as tiny postcards of selfhood, spontaneous and beautiful. I want to know more about them. One reason for that is that if you talk to people about them, and get them talking the way they want to talk, their talk turns spiritual.
They may not think about it this way, at least at first But every single time, if you give it time, people in these moments will start ruminating on things like, why am I here?
Does this matter?
What matters?
Is this all going to be okay?
How long is this going to last?
Am I okay?
That, by definition, is deeply, deeply spiritual. It runs as deep as human beings go. You get down to the sand bed of their river if you’re patient with it, and you hear them talking from their hearts. These are the same hearts they had when they were three. They’re the hearts to which they want to return. I don't mean intellectually, I mean spiritually. If you get deep enough in people, you learn that we all try to come back to who we really are, and always were, before we built all the things that we think of as our identities.
We guard those identities, but our true selves leak out.
You'll hear people at the moment of candor say, ‘Oh, I'm an agnostic about these things’, or, ‘I don't know what I believe’. Or they may tell you that you'll think they’re crazy, or something. To me, that is the signal that they're going to say something really important. They put in disclaimer language because they've been guarding it.
Real life, as we like to call it, discourages talking the way we want to. That’s because bosses and teachers and colleagues and citizens need us to do our jobs. But our true selves leak anyway. You’ve seen people talking about ghosts at the water cooler. You've seen people grieving at their keyboards. You’ve seen people quit their jobs, and not give an explanation. Sometimes they need to.
Our true selves leak through the culture more all the time. Richard Rohr atually said long ago that we're going to see more and more ghosts and ghost hunters around. We're going to see more and more UFOs. We're going to see more and more apparitions and angels. And we have.
Like I like to say, I think that's healthy. The world is not set up for us to talk the way we want to talk, but we do it anyway. Good!
Well, that's why we're here at No Sermons, where there will be no proselytizing, and there will be no botheration about ways of talking. But there will be space to talk. And peace, so people can listen. Here we can understand and be ourselves. Nobody will ever tell you what you have to believe, or tell you to DO anything in particular (and I’ll moderate them out if they try). We’re just here to talk about those spiritual or religious things, however they seem at the moment … and that’s it.
Welcome, my friends. I look forward to meeting you and growing with you and learning from you.
Be good.
Duncan+