Come & See

We only master a trade, a sport, or an instrument by doing it.

By showing up next to others, in training, day after day, until our hands understand. A book or an app can’t teach that. Our lives are like this too.

So who teaches us, these days, how to live? For most of us, nobody did. Families are struggling, distracted, busy, broken. School didn’t. Work doesn’t. The phone sure doesn’t.

There’s an old word for that kind of training: formation — being slowly shaped, with others, into a whole person. Every healthy community used to have it. We’ve mostly lost it — and then we wonder why so many of us feel lost.

You can’t think your way into a good life. You have to practice it, with other people, over time. That’s what this is: an apprenticeship in how to live.

But the character a life needs to work is well known. It accrues to people who take on weight and keep showing up.

Here’s what that character looks like →

The point is not to polish your “best self” — that’s the Machine’s game, not ours — and work that ends with you is just another self-improvement project. It’s a dead end.

Here’s the hard part: you get a self worth having by turning toward others, not in on yourself. Perhaps more important than anything else is simply not turning away.

Christians call that charity. In Zen, it’s the bodhisattva vow. Different stories, same direction: toward each other, and toward a world that abandons far too many.

Somewhere we learned to be afraid of each other. We screen the call. We cross the street. We keep our distance from the hungry, the sick, the lonely, the poor, the strange, the ones who make us uncomfortable. (And, if we’re used to the screen, most people now make us uncomfortable.) People become problems, not persons to be met.

Both traditions refuse this, completely.

The one you shut out is often the one you were looking for.

So we don’t care what label the world has put on you — smart one, screwup, success, failure, drunk, loner, liberal, conservative, jerk, none of the above — because you are far more than that. Without exception.

Everyone.

• Believers and non-believers
• Church people, ex-church people, never-been-to-church people
• White collar, blue collar, no collar
• People who read theology for fun, and people who don’t read at all
• Adults in the thick of work, family, and everything else — people who can’t get away to a monastery, and shouldn’t have to
• People who’ve messed up and figure they’ve used up their chances

This isn’t a reading group. You don’t have to believe anything. You don’t have to have your life together — none of us do. If you can show up, you belong here.

We are not trying to fill a room with people who think the same thing. It’s not meant to be comfortable, yet it is meant to be satisfying, even fun.

If you are serious about one path — Christian, Zen, or another — this is meant to support that, not pull you off it. No converting, no pitching, no proselytizing.

We keep what’s said here between us. You don’t have to believe anything to start. Just show up — and keep showing up.

Our focus is practicing and doing together, because more knowledge never really changed anyone. Readings will be short, and not required.

I don’t yet know who is going to show up, so I don’t want to name a starting point. I want to hear from you — and we’ll decide together. We might begin by looking at how society makes a good life hard, and how we get trapped. I have my views, and I want to hear yours.

From there, the road can widen: the desert fathers and mothers; people today doing this work, like John Mark Comer, Father Jacques Philippe, and Father Timothy Gallagher; Franciscan and Ignatian practice; Zen teachers and texts. No one tradition owns the Way.

I started Come & See because life has been hard and finding a formation path and people was a godsend. And the simple fact is that most people are not going to go to church, don’t have a clear path to walk, and aren’t going to a monastery any time soon.

We all have big questions: What is this life? How do I not waste it? And how do I become a good, whole human being in a world designed to keep us anxious, busy, hungry, distracted, and alone? What can I trust?

I lived for several years in Zen monasteries, attended years of AA meetings, and am a member of the Parish of the Holy Eucharist here in the Portland area. I’ve taken vows in the Japanese Soto Zen tradition and continue training with Joshin Byrnes of Bread Loaf Mountain Zen Community. I started my life as an atheist and even now live in doubt and questions.

I’m not here as an expert with a method to hand down. I’m here doing the same work as everyone else in the room. My simple belief is that there’s a better way to go about this, and we can figure it out together.

I live in Freeport with my wife and dog, Monk. You’ll find us on motorcycles, writing and reading, working on the property, and exploring Maine. I’m a novice hunter and could use some friends and guidance there.

I’ve just started writing a bit about all this and about my life. You can read more in the writing here, or follow along on Instagram.

Come and see.

Yours,
Jonas Leddington