Dear Friends,
As promised, we continue with Part 2 of my deep conversation with Addison Hodges Hart—a dialogue that richly illustrated how journeys of faith, even when they spring from shared longing and similar heartbreak, can split, circle, and echo, producing not static harmony but true spiritual polyphony. If yesterday’s reflection explored where our roads ran parallel—peeling back dogma, enduring heartbreak—today I want to honor where the trails forked, why, and how those divergences themselves become notes in a holy chord.
If Addison’s story is one of gravitation toward deeper tradition and ancient continuity, mine is nearly the mirror image in motion and timing. I began by marching backwards—deliberately immersing myself in the pre-Christian terrain of Torah observance. While Addison was heading through the layers of Anglo-Catholic, Catholic, and then Orthodox tradition, I was earnestly practicing the Sabbath, studying the biblical holidays, and living by the tangible, physical markers of clean and unclean as articulated in the law of Moses. I eagerly adopted forms and rhythms more ancient than Christianity itself.
And then, just as Addison reached further back—finding home in Orthodoxy and the church’s earliest roots—I found myself, after years of stripping down, suddenly drawn into wholly new territory: I rushed ahead, leaping beyond the margins of the Christian canon, compelled by the claims of later revelation—encountering Mohammed, The Báb, and Baháʼu’lláh as continuations (not contradictions) of the divine voice I had first heard in Genesis.
So while Addison’s arc led him ever deeper into the wisdom of the fathers, mine took me from inherited Protestantism to something older than that, and then toward horizons many Christians have never glimpsed. Our journeys, in this sense, are almost counterpoint—one seeking the ancient anchor, the other trusting the Spirit on untried waters.
Dissonance as Polyphony: Listening for the Deeper Harmony
What could have been the final break between two seekers—instead, in conversation, became a source of unexpected harmonics. Addison, rooted in Orthodoxy, reads the four gospels as a living model of how unity doesn’t require uniformity; each witness brings its own lens, its peculiar genius, and together they more fully honor the truth than any single strand.
So too, he and I discovered that honoring honest divergence—his draw to historic liturgy and mysticism, my movement toward post-biblical revelation and new forms—does not shatter our kinship, but deepens it. In wrestling with dogma, enduring loss, and remaining open to more than we thought possible, we both step into the lineage of seekers who, over centuries, argued, wandered, wept, learned—and then learned again.
This, I suspect, is what the best tradition does: it makes room for questions, new departures, and wild returns, trusting that God’s truth, like Bach’s best fugue, shines brightest when tension and difference finally resolve.
Embracing the Ghosts: When Mystery Breaks In
As our conversation drew to a close, Addison lifted a final, bracing note: his “Christian ghost stories.” Not tales designed to terrify, but stories attentive to what he calls “inbreakings”—moments when the supernatural, the enigmatic, the unexplainable, step across the fragile boundary into our ordinary days. These stories, threaded through faith and literature, are a reminder that the sacred is always nearer than we presume, and that our most precious dogmas may only ever gesture in the direction of Mystery.
What do haunted tales have to do with faith? For Addison—and for me—they recall what the church at its best once knew: that not everything can (or should) be systematized. That conversion, repentance, healing, and awe—the “thin places”—often come not through argument or clarity, but through unexpected encounter with the unknown. These ghost stories serve, not as superstition, but as reminders: the world is charged with a Presence that escapes every attempt to control, dissect, or possess it.
To be a “pragmatic mystic”—as Addison calls himself—is to live openly in the space between certainty and surprise, mindful that the veil between seen and unseen is porous, and that wonder is itself a form of faithfulness.
What ghosts—memories, losses, mysteries, or revelations—still visit your spiritual household? How have moments of strangeness or awe reawakened in you what creed and ritual sometimes lull asleep? Share your stories below, and, as always, listen for the harmonies even in the things you don’t yet understand.
With gratitude for mystery—and for friendships that survive it, —Wade Fransson
Remember: You are created in the image of God, and the questions, differences, and even the mysteries that haunt us are part of the divine harmony we’re slowly, together, learning to hear.
