Changing the Name to The Lure
R.I.P. Everybody's Glowing. What's the Lure? Let Me Explain.
Hello everyone!
I’m changing the name of this Substack from Everybody’s Glowing to The Lure.
I’ll explain why but first, I have to say, if you’re reading this in your inbox then your cred and clout just went up tremendously. You can now tell everybody you’re an OG reader of this Substack because you can forever tell the readers of The Lure that you were reading this before it was even called The Lure! Seriously though, I really appreciate you all being here early as I’ve been trying to dream up how I can use this specific creative format.
I do a lot of stuff. I make short videos, long videos, podcasts, books, all that. All to try to help people cultivate a radical imagination around spirituality and society. But Substack allows me to just focus on writing and explore what can be expressed best in writing form. I’m able to go deeper in some ways but also be more specific. I’ve been working on a new book over the last couple years so that’s where most of my writing energy has gone. I should be finishing the book in the next couple months so now I’m excited about writing on here again!
I originally chose the name Everybody’s Glowing because it was the first name I came up with that excited me after a week of trying to think of a name for a Substack that I wanted to get started on as quickly as possible. Sure I could’ve just called it Damon Garcia’s Substack but that’s boring. Plus I wanted this space to feel more intentional than that, and to give me something to focus my ideas around. The idea behind “Everybody’s Glowing” was about helping people pay more attention to the world around them through a lens of compassion. And through that lens we could discover that every individual matters. And from that realization we could be driven toward building a world where everyone is truly free. Shortly after making the name official I considered changing it, but I just decided I could change it if I ever come up with something I like better. I just wanted to get writing. There’s no rules to this, you know. I can change this again later too. Look out. Anyway. Now’s that time!
So what’s the lure???
It’s still very much about learning to pay more attention to the world. But let me explain.
About a year ago my friend asked me what I think about people “hearing from God”. He was just beginning to explore spirituality so I wanted to give him a clear answer without all the theological jargon that I would typically depend on when answering a question like that. And as I formulated a response it clarified a personal conviction that I wasn’t fully aware of until I put words to it in that moment. I said, “I believe that everyone has equal access to God. Nobody has a special ability to hear from God more than others. Being super religious or acting extra good doesn’t make you closer to God. God communicates to all of us equally. But some of us are just paying more attention.”
And when I say “communicate” I don’t mean verbally. It’s more like a lure. And if we sense a verbal message from God I believe that verbal message we hear in our head is just our interpretation of the lure. God doesn’t lure some of us more than others. We all experience the lure. But we’re so distracted that we miss it most of the time. We have to learn how to slow down, pay attention, and become more sensitive to the lure.
And I want this newsletter to help readers cultivate a sensitivity to that lure. So we’re calling it The Lure!
I think of Moses noticing the bush burning but not being consumed. You really have to stare and pay close attention to a burning bush to notice that it’s not being consumed. I think of Jacob waking up from his dream and declaring, “The Lord is in this place and I was not aware of it!” I think of all the small ways the world calls out to us to respond in new and creative ways every day but we’re too distracted to notice.
I got this term “the lure” from process theology (hear me out, haters). Within process theology the idea is that God doesn’t act through coercion, but through persuasion. God doesn’t act against reality by physically intervening and forcing things to happen. Rather, God persuades us through a mysterious urging: the divine lure. We can respond to it or ignore it. But the lure remains, urging us to turn new possibilities into reality. And when we respond and put hands and feet to the lure of God we act as God’s hands and feet in the world.
In her book On the Mystery, process theologian Catherine Keller (who’s awesome) explains that “the divine is within each of us, as an influence, an influx of desire—whether or not we share that desire as our own…Amidst the mess of our past stuff and present inclinations, God calls. Love lures and lets be. Our mess becomes our potential.”
The lure goes beyond religious identity and ideological commitments. This is about our common experience of the world.
The lure is just a small part of process theology and this isn’t a process theology newsletter now. This idea just really resonates with me and can obviously be found outside of process theology as well. You may hear my explanation of the lure and think to yourself, “I don’t even know what process theology is but this is what I’ve always believed!” And that makes sense. It’s pretty intuitive. It speaks to how we actually experience the world and it prioritizes experience over a more systematic theology that’s harder to resonate with. I like a lot about process theology, and have for many years, but I wouldn’t call myself a process theologian. But I wouldn’t really call myself any other type of theologian either. I’m just a normal dude. And like any other normal dude I get inspiration from a lot of different places and if it resonates then it resonates. And I also want this newsletter to be a source that you can pull inspiration from when it resonates with you, and feel free skim through the stuff that doesn’t.
Catherine Keller continues:
The lure is not like a memo dictating to us our best course of action. We are called to improvise. We are invited to risk the adventure.
So let’s risk the adventure together.
Welcome to The Lure.
-Your same ol’ homie, Damon
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"Our mess becomes our potential."
holy shit bro
I'm a 5th gen. Seattleite, raised with a deep knowledge of the Pac NW. And from early childhood, a sense of what I'd now call nature mysticism. My family was not religious. As a young adult in the late '60s, I was very involved in political and labor union activism, what in theological language is called the prophetic--standing up to repressive powers. That was before the Dem party was usurped by neoliberals, a term meaning support for the current trickle up econopathy.
In my late 40s, (1995) I went back to the U of WA, botany major, forestry minor. Almost all plants, especially trees, grow in symbiosis with fungi on their roots, making cooperation by far the most common mode of life, not competition. But I was shocked to discover people born and raised in Seattle can't even identify the dominant tree species, Douglas-fir. Same in the San Francisco Bay area where they can't ID Monterey cypresses. Colonist attitudes--living on top of the earth with no roots in it, thus no feel for it.
I realized speaking about ecological issues required appeals to morals and ethics. Historically, those are derived from religious and philosophical traditions, so I thought I should try to at least pass as a member of some faith. To my surprise, I was hit by a series of mystical encounters, including seeing and hearing various religious entities. Which reconnected me with a very powerful experience I had at 16, where I was taken across the universe. (If you're interested, I'll give a full account later--too long here; begins with generic Light and Love.)
I tried being Tibetan Buddhist but I could never convince myself I wasn't real and the aim is to escape physicality by merging back into the One. Another set of encounters...and I converted to to Eastern Orthodoxy. The Orthodox have transcendence down. The here and now? Not so much. I ended up going to the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley,CA. a consortium of various religious traditions. While there, several other encounters; again, involving both visions and voices. In the long run, I decided I didn't really fit with any organized religion because trying to do so required repressing important parts of myself. Later, I made peace with enough of it to identify with process theology.
As you can see, the main takeaway is that I'm saying what you mention as gentle and non-verbal is sometimes quite loud and very visible. Of course whatever IT is is not straightforward as if a set of precise rules to obey without question. Religious trad talks about discernment; it's also about intuition, a function of the right hemisphere of the brain. Another relevant subject that I'd be glad to write about with details, if you'd like. Now an elder in my 70s, I have found that my spirituality is much like the post Einstein and post Heisenberg reality of quantum physicists--about relativity and uncertainty...yet somehow also about meaning and creative participation.