About

I'm Damion. I make things by hand and mean them: essays, small liturgical booklets you can print and fold, and the occasional tool.

I'm a catechumen in the Episcopal Church — a learner, formally — and this site is written from inside that rather than from the far side of it.

What I read shapes what I make. Mostly the Christian East: the Desert Fathers, who went out past the edge of the settled world and wrote down what they found there; the Orthodox tradition that has kept their practice in living use; and the saints, less as examples to admire than as company — people who did this before and are not done with it.

Common prayer on top, wild ground underneath.

Why Episcopal

Because what is held in common is the prayer, not the opinion.

Many traditions gather around a statement of belief and ask you to agree to it. Anglicans gather around a book — the Book of Common Prayer, common meaning shared, held between us. You are not asked what you have settled. You are asked to say the same words as the person beside you, who has almost certainly settled them differently, and to keep doing that.

It makes for a wide room. There is space in it for incense and space for silence, for the person who arrives certain and the person who arrives with nothing but questions. No one is asked to pretend the questions are closed before they are. Seeking gets to be actual seeking, and it gets to take years.

And it is old. The creeds, the sacraments, the shape of the daily office, the calendar half this site is about — none of it was invented recently, and none of it is kept under glass. Cranmer's whole project was carrying the Latin hours into English so that ordinary people could pray them. The tradition survived by being translated, not by being sealed.

That is the argument this site makes, in a small way: take what was handed down, and hand it on in the frame we actually find ourselves in.