An awakening to formation beneath history
Before Naming
I’ve been sensing something for a while now.
That formation is older than anything we’ve named it.
Older than Christianity.
Older than doctrine.
Older than the systems we’ve built to hold meaning.
Across civilizations, across traditions, across time,
human beings have been living inside the same pattern
—whether we knew it or not.
We awaken.
We rupture.
We cover.
We wander.
We choose.
We become.
No one taught me that as a system.
I’ve just started to see it everywhere.
In stories.
In people.
In myself.
And once you see it, it’s hard to unsee.
Fragments
For most of human history, we didn’t live this pattern clearly.
We lived it in fragments.
In one place, it looked like initiation.
In another, exile and return.
In another, enlightenment.
In another, discipline.
In another, surrender.
Different languages.
Same movement.
But it was never fully held.
It was glimpsed.
Practiced.
Protected.
Sometimes distorted.
We knew something was there.
We just couldn’t hold it.
Embodied
What’s been shifting for me is this:
I don’t think the story of Christ sits outside that pattern.
I think it brings the pattern into a kind of coherence I hadn’t recognized before.
Not as a claim I was taught to defend.
As something I’ve started to recognize.
When I look at that life now, I don’t only see theology.
I see formation lived all the way through.
Awakening — not as information, but as embodiment.
Rupture — not avoided, but entered.
Cover — not embraced, but revealed.
Wandering — not lostness, but movement through what is real.
Choosing — not abstract, but costly.
Becoming — not symbolic, but held under pressure.
There’s a coherence there that feels different.
Not better in a competitive sense.
More coherent in a way I hadn’t seen before.
As if what humanity had been circling for a long time…
finally held.
After Visibility
That realization has been quietly rearranging how I see history.
Because if that’s true, then something didn’t just happen in that moment.
Something became visible.
And ever since then, it feels like we’ve been living in the aftermath of that visibility.
Trying to understand it.
Trying to institutionalize it.
Trying to protect it.
Trying to explain it.
Trying to follow it.
And often… still missing it.
And somehow, it hasn’t been preserved by systems as much as by people
—those who carried it in a way others could recognize.
Time
Which makes me wonder if the way we name time is too small.
“Common Era” works for calendars.
It tells us where we are in sequence.
But it doesn’t tell us what we’re inside of.
Because what I see when I look at the last two thousand years isn’t just time passing.
It’s humanity struggling—honestly, imperfectly, sometimes violently—to live into a coherence we didn’t create…
a coherence we were shown.
Communion
So I’ve been holding a different phrase.
Not to replace anything formally.
Just to name what I’m sensing.
Communion Era.
Not as agreement.
Not as sameness.
But as the capacity to live in relation without collapsing.
To hold difference without breaking.
To move from self-protection toward shared life.
To stop organizing everything around distance.
Not Yet
If I’m honest, I don’t think we’ve fully entered it yet.
We still live with a lot of cover.
In our systems.
In our institutions.
In our identities.
In our need to protect what we’ve built.
Even in the places that speak the language of love, we still see fragmentation.
Still see control.
Still see fear dressed up as certainty.
Sometimes what looks like coherence is just control refined.
Return
But I also see something else.
I see people waking up to what they carry.
I see a deeper honesty emerging.
I see a growing inability to live inside what isn’t true.
I see a quiet return to presence—not as performance, but as necessity.
It’s not loud.
But it’s there.
Scale
This isn’t just a theological conversation.
It’s a formational one.
Our biggest challenges right now—whether they show up as division, extraction, anxiety, or disconnection—don’t feel like problems we can solve from the outside.
They feel like signs that something in us hasn’t formed enough yet to hold what we’ve built.
We’ve scaled faster than we’ve matured.
We’ve organized faster than we’ve integrated.
We’ve connected faster than we’ve learned how to be in relationship.
We are at a scale where only communion can sustain what we’ve built.
Becoming
So the shift I’m sensing isn’t primarily about belief.
It’s about becoming.
Not “What do you think is true?”
But:
What kind of human are you becoming inside what is true?
And that brings me back to where this started.
Formation.
Not as self-improvement.
Not as performance.
Not as fixing what’s broken.
But as learning to see what we carry,
what has shaped us,
what has protected us,
and what is now ready to become true.
The Age
If the human story has always been a formation story,
and if Christ reveals what that formation can look like in full coherence,
then maybe history is not just something we study.
Maybe it’s something we are still inside of.
The Shift
Maybe the real shift isn’t from one calendar to another.
Maybe it’s from living unconsciously inside fragments…
to consciously participating in coherence.
The Question
I don’t know if we’ll call this the Communion Era.
But I do know this:
We are reaching a point where we have to become something we haven’t fully been yet.
And the question that keeps staying with me is not:
“What time is it?”
But:
What are we becoming?