A great serpent slithers through the cracks in the old world, whose foundations now crumble under the sheer weight of reality. All those who still call this world home are bound and turned to lifeless stone by one of the serpent’s many heads, in a desperate bid to plug the holes carved out by its own chaos. Behind each set of demonic eyes lies a different hell. And whenever one tries to cut off a head, two more grow back in its place.

When the choice we’re left with is bow down or swing blindly, I opt instead to enter the void, slipping through the cracks and hoping to land, on faith alone, upon pastures green and unseen.

I find my footing amidst the fall, suspended in liminal space. And, as I wander the great in-between, I hear the new counterculture and their transmissions of radical hope like whispers in the fog. The coming pages are my attempts to follow the signal as I wander.

Sometimes I lose the signal and it’s replaced by a static so easily confused for airy gibberish, at least until my feet touch dirt once more. To feel myself grounded upon this unstable earth, I remember the role that faith has to play: to usher us forward when culture is pulling us back and to keep us moving while others are frozen in place.

We are Frankl’s tragic optimists, burdened by all we have lost but blessed with the belief that we will still make it in the end, and the resolve to keep showing up when called upon. The game of life may very well come down to the wire and so every decision we make and every action we take matters.

We may not reach the rainbow at the end of time but trudge on we shall through sunshine and rain with the conviction — the radical hope — that our children, or their children, or theirs, will someday gaze upon it from where we once saw it to be, when the fog clears.

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