I spent much of the next two decades trying to get back there.

I grew up in the Mormon desert of southern Utah. Religion gave that experience a name, and I believed it. Later, alcohol and drugs gave me something that felt remarkably familiar: I could breathe again. Life became bearable. In recovery, I learned to reach for that relief through spiritual practice. The means changed, but I kept looking for an experience powerful enough to resolve my life.

I have been sober since March 2013. But sobriety left me with a problem I was slow to recognize: I could feel spiritually connected while remaining almost unreachable to the people closest to me. I could explain my conduct and rise above my discomfort without hearing what it had cost my wife. I mistook that distance for development.

Writing slowly made the distance harder to keep up. In my poems and dreams, women appeared whose lives contradicted the spiritual explanations I was so good at producing. One made art. Another had her art erased. Another dissolved while I looked away. I could discuss the symbols, but staying with what they stirred up in me was another matter. The images kept coming back.

On January 24, 2025, I woke with a sentence and wrote it at the top of my dream journal: the gods aren’t real.

I no longer believe in the gods in any conventional sense. The experiences I had attributed to them still belong to my life. So do their consequences. Losing the explanation left me with a question: what had I actually been seeking?

That question led me through Jung and James Hillman to feeling, and eventually back past Plato into Homer. I began studying the Greek of the Iliad and the Odyssey, using AI and a database to follow words across the poems. I wanted to understand how Homer described what people undergo, what they endure, and what remains in them afterward.

His gods feel intensely. They love, rage, grieve, and desire. Intensity of feeling alone does little to set them apart from us. Mortality changes the conditions: a loss can be permanent, the future can stay radically uncertain, and our power can fail altogether. What happens to feeling when those conditions meet?

My essay The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel, now published in Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, argues that this is where value takes form. Homer’s language of endurance helped me approach a question in Jung’s Answer to Job: what does Job possess that Yahweh lacks? I propose that value, formed through mortal experience, helps explain why the divine would need to become human.

This matters to me every time a difficult conversation begins. I spent years trying to reach a state in which certain things would stop hurting. Now I can sometimes hear my wife’s pain without immediately finding an explanation that gets me out of feeling it. I can acknowledge what I did and stay present for what follows. The past stays past, but its place in our relationship changes.

Some wounds remain. My relationship with my parents is still difficult. I no longer expect a final resolution to make that history disappear. The pain itself tells me something about how much the relationship matters.

Learning to feel became more urgent than learning to transcend. Writing is where I continue that work: returning to what happened, finding what I missed, and trying to say it plainly enough that someone else might recognize something of their own life.

Read The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel, free and open access (https://doi.org/10.1080/19342039.2026.2670265)

I follow Homer’s language of feeling and endurance into a conversation with Jung’s Answer to Job. The argument turns on three conditions of mortal life—permanent loss, radical uncertainty, and utter powerlessness—and on what the soul may acquire through bearing them.

Peterson, Cody. 2026. “The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel: A Homeric Response to ‘Answer to Job.’” Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche 20 (3): 103–117. https://doi.org/10.1080/19342039.2026.2670265

Read the essay free at Taylor & Francis