What is The Chapter House?

The following was shared recently with a nonprofit board of directors in response to a request for a vision for a retail space I started building.

The Chapter House was born from refusing to give up.

Many of you have heard the story already: Laura and I have moved almost every year since shortly after becoming parents for the first time. We met at Duke and didn’t leave North Carolina until after an ordination dust-up on her part, and a professional blacklisting on mine.

2016 was the best and worst year of my life. To hedge in any way from the truth would be a disservice to us all, but I am the kind of person who can feel a lot of things all at once. Combat does that to you; forces you from euphoria to horror in half-breaths. To survive euph-horror, you learn the precise weight, density, and value of so-called “feelings.” Every year we moved was for the right reason—but every time, it was tragic as well. We continue to feel it in our bones. Every summer, our bodies keep the score even if the goalposts keep moving.

From North Carolina to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and the Hasidic neighborhood in Baltimore. Then a church home for COVID and becoming parents again—before “giving up” and finding something in Walkersville we really thought was our resting place, our promised land. Just three weeks into planting ourselves there, our roots found poison in the soil, so we fled... right into feelings of exile amid the humid darkness of a congregant’s basement.

When we were allowed by the Powers That Be to return, the trauma was too much. So we ‘gave up’ and tried our ancestral home of California, where my own people started calling enforcers on me as I struggled to be recognized by the law of our land. Other weary travelers begged us to stay, but the right decision again proved the most bitter.

We arrived here in 2023—a place that feels even more like home than the one I remember.