The Man was burning, and I felt nothing.
Around me 70,000 people danced, shouted and wept beneath the black Nevada sky. Flames roared over the wooden effigy that gives the nine-day festival its name, techno beats pulsed like a heartbeat beneath the desert’s silence and fireworks cracked above Black Rock City, Nev., the festival’s temporary annual home.
This was my fifth pilgrimage to Burning Man. I’d shed tears beneath LED cathedrals alongside strangers who became lifelong friends. I’d biked in a tutu at midnight through phosphorescent avenues of the playa and watched sunrises from atop a 1972 double-decker bus turned 80,000-watt Stradivarius of sound pulsing beneath my feet. I even wept at the Temple, leaving behind prayers to friends who died too young and dreams I’d buried too soon.
From every corner of the playa, a mantra echoed—whispered by greeters, shouted from art cars, scrawled in neon across domes and yurts: “Welcome home.”
For years, Burning Man felt like my spiritual homeland—yet somewhere between my fourth and fifth year at the burn, something shifted. The illusion of radical inclusion, communal creativity and unbridled freedom began to crack. That night, as the flames swallowed the Man, a question broke through: Is this all there is?
The answer to this question didn’t lead me to abandon spirituality, but to reimagine it. It pulled me, unexpectedly, to the living heart of a loving God—to a different kind of homecoming.
My own search for belonging reflects a hunger shared by many in our fragmented world: a yearning for meaning beyond the next festival, the next viral moment or the endless scroll. It’s a journey from the restless ache of hyperindividualism to the enduring embrace of something ancient and communal. This isn’t simply a conversion story. It is an exploration of what happens when the loudest answers fall silent—and what enduring truths might emerge from the dust of disillusionment.
The Gospel According to Larry Harvey
To grasp the magnetic allure of Burning Man, you must understand its architect, Larry Harvey. He was more than an organizer. He was a philosopher in a cowboy hat, a modern-day Emerson who conjured a city from rebar and dreams, challenging the very foundations of contemporary life.
Like the Transcendentalists, Harvey championed the sovereignty of the self, the sanctity of nature and the divinity of human creativity. From the ashes of a wooden figure burned on a San Francisco beach in 1986, he built not just a festival but a temporary city in the Nevada desert—ephemeral and visionary. Black Rock City became more than an art event; it was a civic experiment, a temple of secular mysticism.
Harvey’s Ten Principles read more like a liturgy of liberation than dogma: radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, self-reliance, self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, immediacy—beautiful and haunting, fragile and fleeting, full of fire.
His vision was vast and luminous. Burning Man did not ask us to believe in anything; it invited us to become something. Its secular rituals were spiritually provocative—designed to vanish, confronting us with impermanence but never leading us beyond it.
That confrontation has value. Yet, without a source greater than ourselves, radical self-expression eventually circles back to the self, collapsing into radical isolation. The journey that begins as a pilgrimage risks ending at the mirror, where the soul—made for communion—finds the silence of its own reflection.
The Playa’s Liturgy
By my third burn—the year Larry Harvey died—I saw what I hadn’t before: Burning Man wasn’t antireligious. It was deeply, undeniably religious. The Temple stood hand-carved, sanctified by collective grief. Rituals marked the days—sunrise meditations, fire dances, dust baptisms. Vestments, processions, pilgrimages. Mantras scrawled in neon and ash. Even orders—sound camps and art collectives with their rites and hierarchies. And a sacred fire calendar: the Man on Saturday (ego sacrifice), the Temple on Sunday (a communal funeral pyre).
It was beautiful. It was sincere. Yet I found myself yearning for more.
The cracks emerged. The Temple, once a sanctuary of silence and sorrow, grew louder each year—in sound and ego. Profanities against leaders stood beside murals of ex-lovers. Camps turned cliquish. Narcissism dressed in feathers paraded as self-expression. Tech moguls funded million-dollar art while volunteers sweltered in 115-degree heat. Consent was preached, but the aftermath told a quieter story—of broken hearts and bruised trust. Drugs, once sacrament, became escape. Even “leave no trace” bent under convenience—bikes abandoned at the fence, gray water dumped when the exit line stretched for hours.
Worst of all, I was not immune. I curated my grief—posting tears, filtering mourning, captioning (and later hashtagging) my pain. I realized I wasn’t praying. I was performing. The rituals that held up the ethos buckled beneath the weight of a culture centered on self.
The Cracks Between Glitter and the Grave
I used to cry when I left the playa because I didn’t want to return to the “default world,” a place dulled by consumerism, cynicism and spiritual vacancy.
I’d leave the desert convinced I had changed, only to slide into old reflexes—sitting in a San Francisco coffee shop, Kendrick Lamar in my AirPods, scrolling Instagram and swiping for my next girlfriend on Bumble. I spoke loftily about community while withdrawing from the people who needed me most. The chase for awe cost more than tickets and time. It cost presence, attention and fatherhood. Two children had a dad who could set up a camp in a sandstorm but could not sit for bedtime stories, who could dance until dawn yet miss Saturday soccer.
Why did our high ideals dissolve the moment the lights went out? If we could build heaven for a week, why couldn’t we live it all year long? Perhaps because memory itself cannot nourish virtue. You can remember how a song made you feel, but you cannot live on a memory of bread. To be sustained, love needs form, habits, a table where you return whether you feel like it or not.
Burning Man felt transcendent, but it did not transform me. It stirred hunger for beauty, community and meaning, but could not feed it. It gestured toward the divine without revealing it. It was a spark, not a lasting fire.
With nothing to steady me, I ran on the fumes of self-will, straining against an untamable world. And Burning Man—with its liturgy of self-reliance and self-expression—only fed the fire. To cope, I reached for self-destructive comforts: sleeping with people I didn’t love, performing confidence over a gnawing loneliness, proclaiming freedom while tethered to whiskey. Alcoholism crept in, unraveling friendships, draining money and pulling me toward recovery.
We long for redemption. We ache for communion. We want to transcend from within. But even at our best, we cannot give ourselves what we cannot generate. Better parties won’t do it. Better intentions won’t do it. The question finally shifted from “Why can’t we make Burning Man last?” to “What are we still searching for in the dust?”
The Awakening
It didn’t happen overnight. I didn’t trade my goggles for a rosary. But a restlessness gnawed at me—a hunger that the desert couldn’t still. I felt wired for purpose, made for experience and encounter.
I began to read: Augustine, who said our hearts are restless until they rest in God; Aquinas, who insisted love must have a source deeper than the self; Chesterton, who laughed me into truth. I also read the modern gurus. “You are not in the universe; you are the universe,” promised Eckhart Tolle. It sounded profound, but if I am the universe, who will love me when I fail? When I die? When I break?
Burning Man taught me to live honestly within myself, to unapologetically speak what felt true. But had I ever asked where that fire came from? What if the impulse to be seen and known was planted in me by my Creator? What would happen if I brought my whole self—not the curated version—to him? What was I afraid he’d see? Or had already seen?
One evening, wandering past a chapel tucked between office buildings, I felt a pull. I stepped inside. No music. No elaborate art. Just a red sanctuary lamp, a crucifix and a Presence. A voice that spoke not only of beauty or virtue but of grace.
I sat and wept—not in grief, but recognition. For once, I stopped performing, stopped striving. I surrendered to Someone greater, steadier, more powerful than me.
Sacrament Versus Spectacle
I saw the contrast clearly. Burning Man is a spectacle of human yearning. The church is a sacrament—a vessel of divine grace that transmits the sacred.
At Burning Man, we burn the Man. At Mass, we behold the man—Jesus, risen. One is catharsis by fire; the other communion by flesh. One consumes; the other feeds. Even the aesthetics invert. On the playa, we decorate ourselves because we are the center. At Mass, we kneel because we are not.
Listening to Kendrick Lamar that day in the coffee shop, I heard him confess, “I got power, poison, pain and joy inside my DNA.” That’s the human condition in a line—the brilliance and the brokenness braided together. It’s Augustine remixed: the fire of Pentecost flickering beside the ruins of Eden. He knows something is wrong. But knowing is not saving.
What I began to experience in church was not metaphor. It was the real presence—the Eucharist—Christ himself. Not a symbol, but substance. The church did not merely call me to expression; it called me to communion. It invited surrender, letting grace displace every throne where I had installed the self.
And unlike the desert, the church did not demand transformation in a week. She offered a path, a rhythm, a liturgical year that shapes souls slowly, through seasons of feast and fast, joy and penance. Confession replaced catharsis. Penance replaced performance. I did not need a bigger sound system; I needed a savior. And I needed a people—not a vibe I constructed, but a community that knows my name on ordinary Wednesdays and not just at sunrise.
I came to believe I was made for more than the light within. I was made for the Light himself.
The True Homecoming
I was baptized at the Easter Vigil on April 19, 2025. It began in the dark. We lit the new fire. The paschal candle was raised. One flame became many as the light passed from hand to hand. The ancient proclamation sounded: “This is the night.” I remembered the Temple burning—how we cried, danced, wailed. But this fire did not consume. It revealed a peace I had always longed for.
I know the church is no stranger to hierarchy, spectacle or hypocrisy. She is not a utopia. She is a home—one with rules, limits, old wounds and sinners but also sacraments, grace and a table that always has room. Every structure and scar is ordered toward a life where I can abide in Christ and experience him living through me.
Later, I received the Eucharist. The body. The blood. The Word made flesh. Not metaphor. Not symbol. A person. A presence. The echo I once heard in the desert—now real. Afterward, someone hugged me and whispered the words I hadn’t heard since the playa: “Welcome home.”
Looking Back. Looking Onward.
I cherish what I learned in the desert. I honor the people who live out Harvey’s principles with sincerity and kindness. I don’t mock the playa; I give thanks for it. Like the Israelites, I had to wander before I could be found. Burning Man unsettled complacency and awakened me to life’s fragility and beauty. My faith is deeper for having passed through that city of dust and light.
Grace did not erase what the playa gave me; it purified it. I learned that transformation is not self-manufactured or crowdsourced. It is given, one ordinary confession, one ordinary Mass at a time.
But now when I go to Mass and hear “Welcome home,” I don’t weep because something is ending. I weep because something has begun. Larry Harvey once said, “Out of nothing, we created everything.” But the truth I’ve come to know is even better: Out of love, God created us—and he is not dust, not spectacle, not a symbol to be burned. He is Father and Savior, a real presence waiting in every tabernacle to embrace us once we’re willing to let go.
The Temple burned. The church remained. And I—weary, wondering, forgiven—was home.
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