Sam Sukumar

I have lived many lives inside this one.

Born in Tamil Nadu, formed in contradiction — Tamil, Christian, Catholic, secular.
I learned early that truth rarely lives in one place. It lives between things.

Between languages. Between worlds.
Between what you were given and what you choose to carry.

I moved through cities following invitations — each one arriving not through plan but through presence, through proximity, through the pull of a particular person in a particular place.

I learned to inhabit each city not by mastering its culture but by finding the human behind it.

Christ was the mirror I carried — not a filter, but a three-way glass.
I saw the world through Christ. I saw Christ through the world.
And somewhere in that triangulation, I began to see myself.

What I couldn't see then was that people were offering me covers.
Shelter. A place to be held rather than only to illuminate.

I moved through it all lit from within, genuinely connecting, genuinely offering —
and entirely blind to what I was being given.

I said no when rooms wanted yes.
I handed mirrors to people who hadn't asked for them.
I spoke truth into spaces that weren't always ready to receive it.
I was raw in ways I didn't yet recognize as rawness — offering what I had with an intensity I mistook for clarity.

Then life clarified me — not all at once, but in three ruptures, each one reaching a different depth.

I had drifted out of coherence to keep love alive, mistaking control for kindness and surrender for peace. Chicago came after. Synthesis. A different quality of presence beginning.

The city where I started learning that truth without a vessel isn't wisdom.
It's just force.

A pontine glioma. An 18% five-year survival prognosis.

I didn't panic. I didn't immediately build.
I began to question — quietly, steadily — what legacy meant, what my choices had been serving, what a life faithfully lived might actually look like.

That discernment moved slowly.
A career high came after the diagnosis.

Then deliberately, I stepped back. Not in defeat but in clarity.

I chose stewardship over the modern leadership agenda.
Presence over performance. The slower work over the visible one.

I believed I was Noah — the one called to build before the waters rose, to hand his children a vessel and say: this will carry you when I cannot.
What I didn't yet understand was that the building was happening to me.

I wasn't constructing the ark. I was becoming it.

Then COVID arrived. And something shifted again.

Surviving it — alongside everything else — produced a new spirit of stewardship.
A less covered way of living. I began to return, to remember,
to embody what I had been discerning for years.

L.I.F.E. didn't emerge from the fear of dying. It emerged from the practice of staying alive.

Then 2023 came. And I crossed the prognosis.

The covers built for a man expecting to die no longer fit the man who kept living.
They fell away — not all at once, but steadily, the way scaffolding comes down when the structure beneath it has learned to stand.

The extraction economy made its terms clear.
What it asked of me and what I had become were no longer the same thing.

A year of discernment followed. And at the end of it, seminary.

I have been building new covers since.

Not just for legacy. Not just for my children's inheritance.
But for a life that has been given back — and needs a shape capable of carrying it.

Writing became part of that.

Not as output or expertise, but as metabolization — the ongoing work of turning experience into memory, memory into meaning, and meaning into something that can be carried together.

The Pulse I live by is the rhythm of a vessel doing its work:

Now I am entering a longer season of formation with the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago,
walking toward vocation within the ELCA.

Not to become certain. Not to arrive.
But to be shaped for service — to learn what it means to carry life in proximity to the neighbor,
in the company of grace.

I don't yet know the final shape this calling will take.