pour out your heart like water

felix, 22, he/er. wannabe mystic, vaguely quanglican. normal about john the evangelist. dms always open.

[theopenaltar]

Introduction

Updated May 21st, 2026.

I'm white of largely Scottish and German heritage, and I'm from the United States on Myaamia land.

Ich spreche (ein bisschen) Deutsch und ich würde gerne in Deutschland für mein Masterstudium!

I believe in God, and I consider myself a Christian; these are the only two things I know for certain. My main goal is to experience God's love and presence wherever it can be found as opposed to strictly following the lines set by sect or specific doctrine: that said, I find comfort in the Quaker tradition as an operational framework for my personal practice, plus some Episcopal flair.

Most of my content I post with my Quakerism (and broader Christian) beliefs in mind. That said, I do strive to make interfaith posts as well, as all traditions have something to learn from.

I am queer and explicitly affirming of queer people of all faith traditions, no question.

Anyone of any or no faith is free to follow, so long as they're respectful—Pagans, atheists, Satanists, or even just for aesthetics or fandom purposes. I believe all faith traditions hold pieces of truth.

On that note, spam liking and reblogging is okay and encouraged—I'm honored that my posts can speak to you in that way.

You are also free to follow if you disagree with me in any way, and I encourage all forms of friendly, respectful dialogue on this blog.

I am open to DMs and asks of any and all kinds, especially prayer requests!

I follow back from @halaagmod, my main blog!

[eesirachs]

how to look into the catholic church, if you feel the tug of it—

look for communities near you to visit; morning masses have nice women who love to greet new neighbors. this is a book on how to visit, and this is my guide on it. the task is copying those near you. you need to find ethical relationship—going out is important. if you can't, though, try virtual masses (like those in my city through catholictv). follow the mass with a lectionary, the usccb daily readings, or the ordo

visit adoration, quiet times of reflection in front of the body. in various communities there are hours of this, or, it never ends

learn to pray chaplets or the rosary. visit churches half an hour before mass to recite the rosary with others. you can count on your fingers until you get one yourself

learn the nicene creed, which outlines the catholic faith in its gist

read vatican encyclicals like pope francis' delixit nos (he likens faith to his grandmother's cookies) or pope leo's recent magnifica humanitas (the rhetoric here is of loving the neighbor ethically, lornfully)

reach out to other catholics, like me 𐔌՞. .՞𐦯, pilgrim yourself to shrines, or visit festivals or feast days near you, (like the north end's st anthony's feast)

remain both generous and critical in one breath. name the violence of this church

lastly, look into ocia or rcia, rites of initiation guided by deacons or fathers to come home to the church

[orthodoxadventure]

The Myrrh-bearing women at the Lord’s Tomb. Fresco from the Church of Saint Demetrius in Markov Monastery near Skopje, Macedonia, circa 1376

[orpheuslament]

John sleeps. 

He’s the youngest, the sweetest, the one who picks up flowers to put them in your hair, who joins in every time Mary starts to sing, who kisses the back of your ear when you’re stressed.

He’s also the one who drinks too much wine very early in the evening & passes out accordingly. & hey, you say, it happens. He looks at you with half-lidded eyes & a lopsided smile. He’s tired, he says, & you put a hand on his forehead & let him go. The remaining eleven will tease him mercilessly once he wakes, but for now they’re too busy passing bottles of wine around. 

Before God took him by the hand this cherubin-faced fisherman would spend the hours down the dock with his father. Sunrise to dawn, the sun hitting his naked back, turning soft skin into gold. Sharing with his brother jokes only they could understand. Calloused hands where there should only be gentleness. But then again, only time for resting was time for prayer, & you swear you can see him: fresh-faced & even younger, on his knees asking for his neighbours to have something to eat that day, for the ache in his father’s back to diminish, for his brother to sleep soundly for one night.

The wind makes the curls in his head dance, & there’s a phantom ache somewhere inside you, a divine calling to let your fingers card through them. Wake him up. Ask him to pray with you. Kiss the palm of his hands. Rest your head on his shoulder.

There are so many things a body can do when it loves. So many things this skin will long for once it is all done. 

Tonight the light disappears down the garden, as it always does. Tonight you get to carve the edge of his nose for the last time. Tonight, alone & frightened, you have nothing but the memories of warm bodies against your own, & it should be enough. The soft caress of a memory, it should be enough. 

Tonight, the night you know will be the last night, he’s there, peaceful & beautiful & surrounded by the golden evening light. 

It should be enough, it isn’t. 

But you know that, just like the rest of you, he doesn’t get to sleep much these days. 

John sleeps, & you let him. Your only wish that God doesn’t wake him before you’re gone. 

⁠— John Sleeps, Dante Émile

[eesirachs]

I’m very lonely. Is God lonely too?

the first question this god asks, in the hebrew bible, is אַיֶּכָּה, 'where are you?' he will spend the rest of the bible repeating it

[prayerandlipstick]

• full of grace •

[theinwardlight]

Photo: Third Haven Friends’ Meeting House, Maryland

[luvgloriouslove]

“Where there is love, nothing is too much trouble and there is always time.””

— ‘Abdu'l-Bahá

[maybenotcowboycore]

Before they took Eve out of him, Adam was something both. He was Adam but he was also Eve. “Male and female He created them.” He was both then. Even if it was only one rib of Adam that was Eve, how could Adam have ignored such a part of himself? How could all of womanhood have been stored in one man’s rib and he not notice? He had no concept that she would one day be somebody else. That womanhood was his. His originally. His at the formation of man. A grain of womanhood, inside his chest. A man seeded with a feminine side so powerful it would grow the vast diversity of women. There’s no way he didn’t notice. There’s no way he didn’t see that seed, that rib, as part of who he was. After all, he was made in God’s image then.

When God said “Let us make man in our image,” He made Adam in all his bothness. Adam’s rib was like God’s rib. Adam’s womanhood was like God’s womanhood. Adam’s rib was taken out of him. Did he miss it? Did he feel an emptiness there? Or was seeing it grown into a unique creature of glory all its own so divinely delightful he had no time to mourn his little rib. Did the first man ever miss his bothness? God never took out His own rib. That womanness is still in there. God’s bothness is intact. Where is God’s rib now?

[gayleviticus]

i saw a post today on r/openchristian where someone asked if people there believe in the trinity and there was a reply that was like 'how could anyone? have people not read the scholarship?'

and i think it crystallised something about progressive christian spaces that has bugged me - and it's not 'people spout heresy' 'people say things i dont agree with', but rather than i think for progressive christians (esp online) there's a bit of a 'problem of theological method'. and by that i dont even mean like, people are using methods of interpreting scripture i dont agree with.

but i think there's a bit of an issue where, for example, conservative evangelicalism explicitly teaches people to read scripture in a v specific way. inerrancy is a clearly defined doctrine. lots of resources model prooftexting and mustering up the bible as evidence for certain positions. there's lots of apologetics that teaches tactics for deflecting errors or inaccuracies in the text. bart ehrman and his ilk are peddlers of lies.

and i think when people step out of that bubble, there isn't really an obvious alternative method for them to read scripture theologically. and so people might often turn to the kind of secular historical-critical work that was forbidden in evangelicalism and go ham with that.

i don't have anything against secular historical-critical academia; i think at best it deepens our understanding of the human side of the Bible and at worst it makes conjectures that are perfectly reasonable from a purely naturalistic perspective if not from the eyes of faith. but it's not an approach designed to nurture faith or approach the Bible as a theological text; Bart Ehrman is not the arbiter of people's faith.

i think progressive methods of reading scripture theologically certainly exist (whether orthodox or not), but i think compared to say, evangelical inerrancy, they are much more implicit and subtle. they aren't as explicitly defined and taught to people, and people can use similar phrasing to mean quite different things.

and i feel like within progressive christian circles that can sometimes put people talking past each other, because one person is reading scripture totally metaphorically, one person is reading it according to a historian who said the last supper is fictional and Paul never existed, someone else is still using an evangelical inerrancy framework, someone else is interpreting through the ecumenical creeds as filters for the core literal non-negotiables of the christian story (what we could call creedal orthodoxy perhaps).

and in a way i think this can be harder to navigate even than like, catholic vs protestant discourse, bc in those debates there's more meta-language around differences in perspective (e.g. sola fide, sola scriptura). but i feel like progressive christian circles lack this kind of consistent meta-language that can lead to people talking past each other entirely

(heck, even 'progressive christian' is vague - i've always used it as the broadest possible umbrella term for christians w left-leaning politics, and 'liberal christian' more for people who deny supernatural elements of the religion etc. but some people will do the total inverse and swap the terms around)

edit: while i'm making this post i'll plug the podcast 2 feminists annotate the bible, which imo does a great job of modelling (if not explicitly teaching) a good solid progressive approach to the bible that isn't just relentlessly ceding ground to secular scholarship but also genuinely tackling the text while respecting it's value. (probably what we might call an inclusive creedal orthodox approach). i think it's pretty goated

[entanglingbriars]

The historical-critical method is much older than its infiltration into lay Christian thought. Traditionally the way it worked is priests and pastors in seminary learned about the Bible from several hermeneutics including historical-critical and then very carefully used almost none of that knowledge in ministering to the flocks (this also happened in progressive Judaism btw).

What absolutely no one did was try to integrate theology into a historical-critical reading; everything was kept in nice little boxes. In the past few decades the secret's gotten out with the result for academics being that people rush up horrified/delighted by the things they've learned and we've looked at them nonplussed because we didn't realize anyone still thought Paul wrote I and II Timothy and Titus.

[teardownthewall]

This is admittedly why I’ve struggled to find a church I vibe with. I care deeply about my church being queer-affirming and progressive, and I’m also in the minority of Christians who believes you don’t have to throw out scripture or view it all as metaphorical to believe that God can sanctify a same-sex marriage as much as one between people of different sexes. It bothers me that I have trouble finding a community, not just one or two like-minded people, who I can love God and love people with.

I’ve tried a lot of progressive churches and heard them preach well-meaning but outright incorrect messages in an attempt to make Jesus more relatable, and I’m like ???? He’s already incredibly relatable, you don’t have to do that.

But on the other hand, the biblical inerrancy taught by evangelicals is nonsense, and it’s led to people genuinely believing they can read the Bible out of context with no additional history and get everything they need. I simply haven’t found that to be the case.

This feels like a general problem I see between more progressive/left-wing vs. right-wing efforts and movements. Tradition and orthodoxy will always be easier and will always lend themselves to more solidarity, though usually at the cost of minority opinions being heard and valued. It is hard to find that same solidarity, or even agree on using the same working vocabulary, in leftist spaces even though I agree more with them on the whole. Herding cats is worth the time if you like cats enough, but it’s quite difficult to get the same momentum that you would if they were a team of sled dogs going in the same direction.

[movie-gifs]

CONCLAVE 2024 | dir. Edward Berger

[taqwatawheedtales]

اَمِين يَا رَبَّ الْعَالَمِيْن ❤️

[edinburgh-by-the-sea]

sea fog comes, like a river rolls a stone, it's rolling me

[queerprayers]

last chapter of john is soooo good. they've realized it's god because they just caught soo many fish (153). simon peter puts his clothes back on and immediately starts swimming. jesus has been plotting for maximum drama and confronts him sitting at a fire. he asks him if he loves him the exact number of times he was betrayed and it hurts peter's feelings :( then he tells peter he's going to die. so peter turns to another guy (A/N: the one who cuddled and started drama at the last supper) and is like "what about him?? does he get a death prophecy?" and jesus is like "none of your business if i make my boyfriend live forever..." and then the gospel writer is like well lots of things happened. i don't have time for all this. the end

[windsswept]

“If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.”

— CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain (via sinceritism)

[eesirachs]

Why does God feel so different in the OT in comparison to the NT?

it's like teen-you vs now-you. he's this nascent, young god in the old testament

[lena-oleanderson]

transgender jesus poem (working title) some explanations below the cut

this is very much a work in progress but if i only posted fully finished poems here, i'd post twice a year.

anyway i was reading about the resurrection some time ago, and how there's some debate over the nature of the resurrected body of christ - as in is it the same body that died and was buried and then rose up, or is it a new, transformed body, the way paul talks about the spiritual body as opposed to the natural body (you know, the one that's put on immortality and incorruptibility and whatnot). as i understood it, the debate is mostly whether jesus gets his spiritual body at the resurrection or at the ascension. and i guess the how exactly did this body change debate made me think abt the trans experience and then i read about the transfiguration, where jesus takes a few apostles up a mountain and glows divinely, and that, too, is a kind of bodily change, if temporary. and i guess luke 24 is one of my favourite bits of the bible because the guy has just fully risen from the dead and while everyone is like hey what the fuck we like. saw you die. you're not a ghost, are you? jesus is like relax, it's me. look at my hands. touch me. you got anything to eat here? and then they get him some broiled fish

and i don't view transition as a kind of death, personally, but it is often a kind of resurrection still. it's a change - but when i hold my friends' hands, i know it's still us, and we are not dead, we are alive. and we're going to get something to eat.