“That’s What I’ll Do, I’ll Tell You a Story”

Akhaten, Gethsemane, Les Misérables, and the Terrible Theology of Infinite Consumption

Greetings Friends its been a while, I am writing this while recovering from what doctors have treated as a TIA or mini-stroke.The weeks have gone slowly, the scans have been reassuring, recovery has been encouraging, and for all of that I am profoundly grateful. Yet something fundamental has shifted. A neurological event has a way of interrupting the illusion of infinite capacity. Suddenly, my body begins speaking truths my soul has been trying to outrun. I have realised, with terrifying clarity, that I am embodied, finite, fragile, and limited (I know right!). I am not a machine for mission output. I am now accutly aware that my identity become tangled with usefulness, creativity, leadership, responsiveness, multitasking, and carrying the emotional weight of systems, and at this time that interruption feels apocalyptic. Apocalypse in the radical etymological sense: unveiling. Something hidden becomes visible. Revelation.

During recovery my imagination has kept circling around an odd constellation of stories: Doctor Who’s “The Rings of Akhaten,” Christ in Gethsemane, and Les Misérables. Which probably tells you exactly the kind of theologian I am. often theology arrives not as doctrine but as resonance and sometimes a story stops entertaining us and starts exposing us.

In “The Rings of Akhaten,” the Eleventh Doctor stands before an ancient god that feeds upon memory, grief, worship, and story. Faced with cosmic darkness, the Doctor does what he always does. He tells a story.

Yet this is not an adventurous story or even a hopeful one. It is a story composed from accumulated suffering. The Doctor offers the god his trauma: wars, loneliness, survival, regret, death, centuries of memory pressing down upon one exhausted being. He attempts to stop the darkness by feeding it the entirety of his pain.

For years I heard this speech as heroic. Now it sounds terrifyingly familiar.

Beneath the grandeur of the monologue lies a spirituality many ministers, carers, activists, leaders, creatives, and overfunctioners already inhabit: the belief that your worth is measured by how much pain you can carry. You become the emotional shock absorber for systems. You absorb institutional anxiety. You hold communities together. You remain permanently available because everything feels as though it will collapse if you stop moving. You become what the Doctor is often called: “the lonely god.”

And slowly suffering begins to feel vocational.

Not because anyone explicitly teaches this, but because systems quietly reward it. The person who says yes one more time. The person who survives one more crisis. The person who answers one more late-night message. The person who carries one more impossible burden. The Church, like many institutions, has a habit of canonising exhaustion. We praise sacrifice, overwork, availability, and self-erasure, often without noticing what we are doing. Eventually some of us begin unconsciously believing that depletion itself is holy.

Perhaps this is where two ancient theological ideas become both illuminating and dangerous.

In Christian theology, kenosis refers to the self-emptying of Christ described in Philippians 2. In Jewish mystical thought, tzimtzum describes God’s self-withdrawal or self-limitation in order to create space for creation to exist. Both are attempts to describe a God who makes room for others. A God whose power is expressed not through domination but through restraint. A God whose love creates freedom rather than control.

They are beautiful ideas.

But they possess a shadow side.

Because from the inside, healthy self-giving and unhealthy depletion can initially feel remarkably similar.

The person practising kenosis and the person being consumed by a system may tell almost identical stories. Both speak of service. Both speak of sacrifice. Both speak of making room for others. Both speak of carrying burdens because those burdens matter.

The difference often only becomes visible over time.

Kenosis creates life.

Depletion creates exhaustion.

Tzimtzum creates space.

Depletion creates absence.

One remains rooted in belovedness.

The other gradually reduces identity to usefulness.

The god in this story is not transformed by the Doctor’s offering. That may be the detail that troubles me most. Akhaten receives centuries of grief, memory, trauma, and sacrifice, yet remains exactly what it was before: hungry. The Doctor empties himself, but nothing new is created. No relationship emerges. No freedom appears. No life flourishes. The appetite simply continues. There is no moment when the god says, “You have given enough.” No invitation to stop. No assurance that value exists apart from usefulness. The more I sit with the scene, the more I wonder whether this is the difference between kenosis and depletion. One creates space for life to emerge. The other slowly consumes the giver while leaving the system that demanded the sacrifice fundamentally unchanged.

This is not kenosis nor the divine space-making of tzimtzum.

This is depletion.

Perhaps that distinction is one of the most important theological questions facing ministry, leadership, activism, and care work. Not whether we are called to give ourselves away, but whether the giving is creating life or merely feeding an appetite that can never be satisfied.

That is the theology beneath the Akhaten speech. The Doctor confronts darkness by effectively saying: take my suffering, surely it is enough. It is beautiful. It is devastating. Because the god only grows hungrier, taking more and more.

But perhaps the most disturbing thing about Akhaten is not the Doctor. It is the singing girl.

Merry Gejelh, the Queen of Years, appears at first like a sacred child at the centre of a beautiful religious ceremony. She sings. The people rejoice. The aesthetic is transcendent: colour, music, ritual, devotion. But slowly the horror underneath the ceremony becomes visible. This child is functioning as a sacrificial buffer between the people and the devouring god. The entire society has normalised the idea that one chosen figure should carry the spiritual and emotional burden of everyone else in order to keep catastrophe at bay. Sounds familiar, right?

And perhaps that is what makes the episode genuinely apocalyptic. It unveils the mechanics of sacrificial systems.

No one in the story believes they are evil. No one says, “We are feeding a child to a monster.” Instead they speak the language every consuming system eventually learns to speak:
this is sacred,
this is necessary,
this keeps us safe,
this is how the world continues.

That is what makes sacrificial systems so terrifying. They aestheticise consumption. They make exhaustion appear meaningful. Beautiful. Holy.

Merry is honoured.
Celebrated.
Revered.

And still she is being consumed.

The more I sit with the episode, the more I suspect Akhaten is a monstrous god-image. A deity sustained by endless emotional sacrifice. A divine presence that consumes rather than restores. A god who always demands more: more availability, more sacrifice, more self-erasure, more exhaustion. And if we are honest, many Christians have inherited versions of God that look disturbingly similar. Not necessarily the God revealed in Christ, but a sanctified version of the devouring system itself. A god who blesses burnout. A god who equates exhaustion with holiness. A god who loves usefulness more than belovedness.

And for me at this time, this is where the reflection becomes uncomfortable, because the temptation is to rescue Christianity too quickly. To neatly contrast the Doctor with Jesus. To claim that the problem belongs entirely to science fiction while Christianity provides the answer. But given my recent experience, I can no longer think the tension resolves that easily, because Christianity itself has often helped produce this spirituality of holy exhaustion and self-sacrifice.

The language is already there in our sacred texts: take up your cross, pour yourself out, lay down your life, die to self. These are sacred texts. Beautiful texts. Dangerous texts. History shows how easily sacrificial language becomes machinery of consumption. Women told their suffering is holy. Clergy praised for destroying themselves slowly for the institution. Carers taught self-erasure is love. Marginalised people instructed to endure endlessly. Leaders celebrated for surviving impossible burdens while their bodies quietly collapse underneath them.

And suddenly Akhaten no longer feels alien. It feels familiar.

This is what makes Gethsemane frightening again. Not because Jesus suffers, but because of what Christians have often done with that suffering. Jesus sweats blood in the garden while His friends sleep nearby. He is abandoned, arrested, humiliated, and executed. Yet over centuries Christians have often read this story as though its central lesson is endurance. Hold on. Carry the burden. Remain faithful. Suffer well. Last a little longer. But is that really what is happening in the garden? or have we transformed Gethsemane into a test of endurance because that interpretation serves the needs of sacrificial systems?

The question that keeps troubling me is whether faithfulness and endurance have become confused in our imagination. We celebrate the people who carry the heaviest loads the longest. We admire those who absorb the most pain. We tell stories about perseverance and sacrifice until it begins to sound as though God’s primary concern is discovering how much suffering people can bear.

Yet when I read the Gospels, I am not convinced endurance is ever the goal. The woman who reaches for Jesus’ cloak is not praised for enduring her condition longer. The blind are not praised for enduring blindness. The hungry are not praised for enduring hunger. Again and again the Kingdom appears as an interruption of suffering rather than a validation of it.

Perhaps that is the terrible tension connecting Gethsemane and Akhaten. Not that the Doctor gets it wrong while Jesus gets it right, but that Christians have repeatedly interpreted Jesus through the same sacrificial logic that drives the Doctor’s speech. We have sometimes imagined holiness as the ability to absorb more pain, carry more responsibility, and survive one more season. We have mistaken depletion for discipleship.

The resurrection does not resolve this tension as neatly as we often pretend. Christians sometimes rush too quickly toward Easter, as though Sunday somehow justifies every Friday that came before it. Yet the wounds remain after resurrection. That matters. The risen Christ still bears the marks of what was done to Him. The garden remains part of the story.

And perhaps that is why I find myself asking a question I once thought had an obvious answer. Is faith really a test of endurance? Is God waiting to see how long we can carry the burden? Or have we created religious systems that survive by convincing people that lasting one day more is the same thing as faithfulness?

One Day More…. It has become a prophetic earworm I can no longer unhear. Beneath the swelling music and revolutionary optimism, I hear something else: the voice of every system that survives by asking good people to hold on just a little longer. Not forever. Just one day more.

One Day More unsettles me more than the barricade itself. The song captures a temptation that runs through ministry, activism, caregiving, and perhaps even Christian spirituality itself. The temptation is not to embrace destruction. The temptation is to endure because relief is almost here. It will be okay if we can just get past next week. It will be okay if we can just get through this season. It will be okay if we can just survive this crisis. Easter is coming. Resurrection is coming. Sunday is coming. We only need to endure Friday a little longer.

The problem is not that these promises are false. Easter does come. Crises do end. New life does emerge. The problem is that the horizon has a habit of moving. The Easter that promised relief gives way to another challenge. The season ends and another begins. The crisis passes and another appears. The rest that was postponed until tomorrow is postponed once more. What began as a temporary act of endurance slowly becomes a permanent way of being.

This is how depletion disguises itself as faithfulness. Not through dramatic acts of martyrdom, but through a thousand sincere decisions to hold on just a little longer. One more sermon. One more meeting. One more pastoral conversation. One more strategic plan. One more act of emotional labour. One more day more.

And eventually the question is no longer whether resurrection is coming. The question becomes whether we have turned resurrection into a horizon that justifies endless Good Fridays. Whether we have learned to live in perpetual anticipation of relief while quietly accepting that more will always be required.

The tragedy of the barricade is not simply that they die. The tragedy is that they are singing about tomorrow while being consumed today, and what will remain is empty chairs and empty tables.

What makes this especially troubling is that “One Day More” sounds magnificent. The barricade glows with transcendence. The sacrifice feels meaningful. Audiences leave inspired by people marching beautifully toward destruction. Western culture, and often Christianity itself, is deeply addicted to beautiful martyrdom. We romanticise collapse, especially meaningful collapse. The exhausted pastor. The activist who burns out for the cause. The leader destroyed by the institution they tried to save. We know how to honour people after they fall. We are far less skilled at preventing the collapse.

Perhaps that is because sacrificial systems survive by aestheticising exhaustion. Consumption wrapped in transcendence is always harder to recognise. Akhaten glows beautifully. The barricade sings magnificently. The cross becomes jewellery.

And somewhere inside all of this sits a terrifying question:
what kind of God requires people to become fuel?

My stroke has thrust that question into the open. Not abstractly. Physically. My body, my mind has become apocalyptic the object of revelation. The consumption hidden beneath the rhetoric of vocation, sacrifice, mission, and faithfulness has been unveiled. I now ask whether the Kingdom of God truly depends upon our nervous systems remaining permanently activated. The mythology of “one day more” has been interrupted.

Perhaps that is why Clara’s leaf matters so much in “The Rings of Akhaten.”

For most of the episode, the economy of Akhaten is built around the past. The Doctor offers memory. The god feeds upon grief. The entire confrontation revolves around what has already happened, what has already been lost, what has already been sacrificed. The Doctor stands before the god carrying centuries of accumulated suffering and effectively says: “Take this. Take everything I have endured.”

The logic is familiar. It is the logic of burden-bearing. The logic of sacrifice. The logic of proving worth through what one has survived.

Then Clara offers a leaf.

Not a weapon.
Not a victory.
Not another sacrifice.

A possibility.

The leaf is powerful precisely because it represents something unrealised. It is connected to a future that never happened, choices never made, paths never taken, lives that might have been. Unlike the Doctor’s memories, it is not defined by what has already occurred. It is defined by what remains open.

The more I sit with that image, the more it speaks to my own recovery.

A TIA has a way of trapping the imagination between two futures. On one side lies fear. The possibility that this event is the beginning of a long decline. The memory of my grandfather, whose world gradually narrowed into nursing homes, silence, immobility, and dependence. The fear that what remains of life might slowly be consumed by deterioration. On the other side lies another temptation: retreat. To step away from vocation, responsibility, ministry, creativity, and risk. To respond to vulnerability by withdrawing from the very things that have given life meaning.

Fight or flight.

Sacrifice myself to the machine.

Or abandon the journey entirely.

Both futures are understandable.

Neither feels like Clara’s leaf.

Because the leaf refuses the binary.

The leaf points toward possibilities that have not yet been imagined. It reminds me that the future is not limited to the two stories fear presents. I do not yet know what ministry looks like after this interruption. I do not know what leadership, creativity, preaching, streaming, writing, or ageing will look like in the years ahead. I do not know what new limitations I may discover or what new freedoms may emerge because of them.

But perhaps that uncertainty is not something to be feared.

Perhaps it is the gift.

The Doctor offers Akhaten the weight of everything that has been. Clara offers the mystery of everything that might yet be.

And for the first time in the story, the future becomes larger than the appetite of the god.

Perhaps that is the invitation recovery is placing before me. Not to prove that I can endure one day more. Not to surrender to the fear of decline. Not to spend the remainder of my life negotiating between sacrifice and retreat. But to become curious again about possibilities I cannot yet see.

The god of depletion always speaks in binaries. Keep going or give up. Fight or flee. Consume or be consumed.

The leaf speaks a different language.

It whispers that there may be futures beyond the horizon that neither fear nor courage can currently imagine.

And perhaps that is what resurrection has always been: not the reward for surviving Friday, but the appearance of a future nobody standing in the shadow of the cross could possibly have predicted.

As you can imagine, i have some big decisions to make

Thank you for taking the time to stand with me here in this time of recovery, and thank you to all you have reached out with messages of love and practical support.