I am now “retired” and living in San Diego. The words that I write in these pages, I pray, will have constituted one of the ways I have stumbled into a sacramental life in the autumn years of my life. (By the way, I think my favorite cover of “Autumn Leaves” is Eva Cassidy’s.)

I am, it turns out, a theologian. Theology, it turns out, is what I do. I don’t do theology part time, only when I am alone in my study, say. I do it morning, noon, and night. I do it while engaged in casual conversation or while watching a movie. I do it when awake or when asleep. I don’t know if that is a sign of disease or health, of a spiritual gift or spiritual possession—or simple idiosyncrasy. In any case, I do theology. Indeed, I set out to do theology; I do it on purpose, not spontaneously. It is work—and though it is strange work, it has all the deliberation about it that work always has.

The strangeness of this work is especially evident, it seems to me, in that, when I set out to think and write, it is toward something that from the beginning I know will always elude me, something I will not and cannot have thought or written. It is work poured out sun to sun, work, one might say, that is never done. And so, I pray that I will not, indeed that no one will, be able to sit on a theological text for long. I pray indeed that anyone setting out to do theology will be thrown off the bull, right out of the chute.

If I may name such a text, I might call it—according to the logic of Easter Sunday—an ana-text.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khN9wqIKbFg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6l-dD_-YD4

I might add this comment as a kind of epigram: There are lots of reasons why it’s hard for me to write theology (and, of course, that’s the only thing I write), but I think what’s hardest of all is that I truly believe that the gospel is not for me, but for those much more battered than I am, and that at best I am a kind of freeloader, who overhears the gospel proclaimed, and for no good reason will not walk away.