Anne Snyder: From Comment Magazine, welcome to The Understory, where the future quietly takes root. I’m Anne Snyder. Welcome to the first episode of a limited podcast series that seeks to draw you in to the thematic pillars of The Understory Festival, a three-day gathering hosted by Comment Magazine from May 28th to the 30th at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. My name is Anne Snyder, Editor-in-Chief of Comment, and I had the joy of bringing this festival into being alongside my longtime friend and Comment Executive Editor, Tiffany Thompson. If you were among the thousand people who joined us in person, wandering between the main nave talks and more than 50 breakout conversations, art-making outside in the gardens, and town hall-style debates down in the cathedral crypt, I hope these episodes let you slow down again with some of the ideas, encounters, and moral imagination that animated those days. If you couldn’t be with us, consider these episodes a prelude — the main-stage distillation of a teeming three-day world. A fuller unfurling is on its way to the public square in the coming weeks: photos, videos, essays, and glimpses into new collaborations and festival-inspired building and creating now unfolding far beyond the cathedral.
The inaugural Understory Festival grew out of Comment‘s manifesto and its ongoing exploration of the Christian humanist tradition, a tradition that asks what it means to be fully human, calls us to build rather than merely critique, insists that institutions matter, prizes encounter across difference, remains attentive to the movement of the Spirit in the world, and recognizes that truth is often apprehended through multiple forms of knowing.
And so for this first episode, we return to the threshold — to the opening night of the festival itself, and the hopes, questions, and longings that set those days in motion. From that first night beneath cathedral vaults lit up with forest imagery: this is The Understory. Welcome to The Understory.
Anne Snyder: It is quite a surreal thing to stand here tonight and to see all of your faces gathered from so many different walks of life and vocations, so many different geographies and traditions, cultural contexts, and ways of knowing. For a long labour now, the dream of seeing you all in this extremely hallowed space has been like a roving candle — far off, far away, constantly far away, yet somehow urging me on through what has felt less like a clear path, frankly, and more like an intricate, often foggy, meandering maze. Tonight, that far-off candle — 1,021 of them, I’m told — seems to have caught flame and sort of leapt in front of me, right in front of my face, into a single blaze, alive. Thank you all very much for coming.
This is a festival, not a conference. It was conceived out of a growing sense that time itself, at least in our part of the world, was gathering towards a reckoning — that the hungers and frustrations rising from a thousand different quarters were beginning to converge into a roiling starvation for something deeper, truer, and more answerable to our exhausted hope than any narrative or movement currently on offer. It was born also of a recognition that accrued for me across many miles and many years of encountering community after community of character: that there is a scattered, diverse, as yet uncohered, and largely invisible constellation of people who share a stubborn commitment to the demands of love and human dignity and have a particular need of one another — maybe right now.
So I did what I do when I don’t have answers, but I sense something important circling just beyond the reach of human language. I gather. I gather people — and the communities and institutions they tend — across the lines that usually sort us, in the hope that together, in a fresh configuration, we might listen, reason, confront, and imagine a better future under the light of God’s love for all of his image bearers. And in the company also of a great cloud of witnesses whose own discerning courage in days past is not ours merely to admire, but to receive and carry forward. This Understory is an event planted in the soil of history where we might begin to recognize, in the face of those seemingly different from us, a deeper set of shared longings, and find in the finding a new language by which to be seen together and a clearer story to live and to tell.
So gather we have — and on what extremely historic and magnificent grounds. This cathedral has seen many things: the funerals of American presidents, the prayers of a nation after September 11th, the last public sermon of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who would not live the week. It is the sixth largest cathedral in the world, and, being American, one of the world’s youngest. Like all cathedrals, it is a masterpiece of architecture — what one French writer once called a museum of the imagination. Stone and glass and wood stretched to hold a pregnant mystery, flying buttresses thrust upward against gravity by a holy yearning not unlike our own.
My own experience of this cathedral has been smaller and quieter than what these pillars were built to exalt. Way down in the crypt — as I hope many of you will discover while exploring the quieter corners of this place in the coming days — there sits a small, cave-like enclosure tucked away for private prayer. It’s called the Chapel of the Good Shepherd. Inside, when you step in and hook left, set into a small cavern in the wall, you’ll find a very simple sculpture: Christ as a shepherd holding a little lamb, the lamb limp in his arms, gazing at the tired little creature with a tenderness whose longing and tears seem only barely concealed in stone.
Some 16 years ago, I lived a few miles north of here in an apartment on Connecticut Avenue, and in the early mornings before work, I would jog to this cathedral as a kind of private pilgrimage, drawn to the way the sunrise illuminated a grandeur unlike the marble monuments. In those days, before an earthquake cracked the spires and sent the gargoyles tumbling, I would come up the grassy hill, sweating in shorts and a t-shirt, open the heavy glass door, slip into the cool quiet, and bring the prayers of a very ordinary life before this image of Christ, the Son of God, holding a lamb — holding me. I would come in need, asking this Lord that I loved to help those that I loved, asking him to heal wounds that I could not mend, perplexed before a world too wickedly complicated and overwhelmingly broken to carry whole. Back then in my youth — and what some friends here would say was a very awful moral earnestness, which probably hasn’t totally changed — there was some full feeling that was composed of part spiritual longing and, I think, some sort of part metaphysical conviction. I believed — I wanted to believe, but I deeply believed — that beneath the world’s fractures there existed a hidden unity, a coherence held in God and glimpsed in moments through beauty and philosophy, friendship, and love. I would learn soon enough that such unity would not be fully grasped this side of heaven, much less mastered by analysis or achieved by effort. But that little chapel down below became a refuge in seasons of grief and discernment, a place to be held in the mystery I could not comprehend, to sit still before the image of God who came down to become one of us, who suffered with and for us, and who holds all things together in love.
Some of us who have said yes to be here in these days come to that confession with great joy. Some who have come, come with questions or wounds or distance. Some may not share it at all. But over these next few days, we are gathered here to ask — and hopefully to experience — what it means to live truthfully, in light of such a vision, in private and in public. We are gathered to meditate upon that life, to study the vision of reality revealed through it, and to debate the implications of that vision for the times in which we live: times of division, defacement, and disenchantment. And we are here, finally, to reckon with what we have made and unmade of this image — of this vision of God and the human person, and of what here, in this space over these next few days, I’m going to suggest may be the reality of God and the human person.
It feels significant now, so many years later, that my favourite place in this majestic cathedral is underground.
So much of the inspiration for this festival has come from the growing intuition that something real and raw is stirring beneath the surface of the big narratives that organize so much of our public imagination these days. Beneath our disordered politics and an endless churn of reaction and performance, a subterranean ferment of souls and communities exists — scattered across social class and race and ethnicity, vocation and region — who no longer recognize themselves in the dominant stories available to us. These are people who have learned to remain human amid a public culture that worships celebrity and rewards caricature and ideological certainty, including, quite tragically, within significant parts of American Christianity. These are people who are not animated by the will to dominate or destroy or withdraw, but by the harder, slower, unglamorous work of cultivating forms of common life across deep difference. These are people who move toward the stranger rather than away from them, having discovered that the fullness of truth simply cannot be received without the presence of those profoundly unlike themselves. Often difficult to categorize politically — including within the moral and theological camps that have so hardened our imaginations and frankly too often calcified our hearts — they remain, these people remain committed to the irreducible dignity of the human person, to the possibility of democratic friendship, and to the stubborn hope that love might reemerge as a public force.
The word for this festival — understory — came to me as a gift a little over a year ago. It is a blessedly unburdened, unbaggaged word that has turned out to evoke, across a surprisingly vast landscape of context and concern, a surprisingly powerful resonance among people who might otherwise never recognize themselves as participants in the same story. Layered between the canopy and the forest floor, the understory names the tangled, shade-tolerant life of saplings, fungi, ferns, and wildflowers. Receiving only a fraction of the sun — sometimes as little as 2% — it is here in this hidden layer that the forest future quietly takes root. We naturally, just given where we are in our height as we walk, we measure a forest by the height of the trees. But the understory operates by a different logic. Where the canopy competes upward for light, the understory practises coexistence under constraint. It shelters seedlings, holds soil in place, cycles nutrients, and stabilizes the forest microclimate. The understory is the forest nursery, its root network, and — crucially — its memory: a hidden ecology of layered time on which the visible life depends. Slow to reveal itself, living beneath the level at which most human attention is drawn, it is nonetheless completely essential.
So I’m just going to name it. There is something totally jarring — I admit it — about gathering an understory inside a cathedral, especially one in a nation’s capital. Where the understory names that which is emergent, verdant, improvisational, accustomed to growing on very little light, a cathedral, by contrast, emanates notes of permanence, inheritance, authority, public witness — stones arranged towards transcendence across generations. One is organic, porous, and subterranean. The other is architectural, weight-bearing, and visible across centuries. One grows through improvisation and mutual dependence; the other through discipline, structure, and inherited form. But as I’ve lived with this crazy — sometimes discordant — combo for the past year and a half planning this, an understory in a cathedral, I have learned, not always so easily, that the tension itself may just be part of the invitation.
If you study history, you start to notice that when civilizations exhaust themselves and the old legitimacies begin to crack, renewal rarely emerges from the centre fully formed — perhaps especially when the centre remains deeply confident in its own powers of verbal articulacy, analysis, and diagnosis. More often, renewal — and deep mischief; maybe a certain sainted British author would say deep magic — have been quietly taking shape for years in overlooked communities, underneath the official story of the age. Small circles of people tending to memory, beauty, learning, prayer, conscience, and the everyday acts of care that sensitize your skin, literally, to the needs and hopes of others, that raise you up for the moments when history suddenly asks something of you.
The desert mothers and fathers, withdrawing into the deserts of Egypt and Syria in the third and fourth centuries as the Roman world convulsed around them, cultivated forms of prayer, spiritual friendship, and moral discernment that would later echo through monasteries, rules of common life, and the deep grammar of Christian memory. In 12th-century China, the Neo-Confucian thinkers of the Song Dynasty sought to recover social coherence, not through force, but through the patient cultivation of virtue, beauty, ritual, and humane learning — an attempt to re-knit a fractured society through moral formation, not political domination. In Mexico City of the late 17th century, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz transformed her convent library into a centre of poetry, philosophy, theology, and scientific inquiry, defending a woman’s right to learning from the far edges of the Spanish Empire with a wit fierce enough to survive centuries. We might be able to use her right now, actually. In 18th-century London, formerly enslaved Africans gathered into the Sons of Africa, the first Black political organization in Britain, writing letters, publishing narratives, and pressing the conscience of an empire with a moral clarity the empire itself could not produce from within. From 1938 to 1947, in country houses across England, shadowed by fascism and war, J. H. Oldham — a hero of mine — convened the Moot: poets, theologians, sociologists, scientists, civil servants, and public thinkers who were just asking together, often through great risk and logistical complexity as the war took off, what moral and spiritual vision might still regenerate a civilization exhausted by its own failures to understand the true nature and destiny of the human person. Howard Thurman, in mid-century San Francisco, did not merely diagnose the sickness of segregation — he built a living countersign, literally 80 to 90 years ahead of its time in its insight as to the truth of things. In 1944, his Fellowship Church became the first intentionally interracial, intercultural church in the U.S., a spiritual commons practising forms of belonging the wider nation could scarcely yet imagine. In communist Czechoslovakia, amid surveillance, censorship, and fear, dissidents gathered in apartments, underground seminars, and networks to keep alive traditions of conscience, philosophical inquiry, and spiritual seriousness that totalitarianism could neither absorb nor extinguish.
These are just a few examples from a robust global gallery of inspiring humanist seedbeds that my colleagues at Comment and I have had the delicious joy of curating for you over in the North Transept, as you seek to encounter both horizontally with one another in the coming days, and vertically through history — a history of previous understories, you could say. And in all of these examples, what you see is that renewal — often in the cause of justice, and just as often in the patient, trying preservation of mercy — you see that renewal still required structures capable of carrying that moral imagination across generations. Cathedrals, after all, are not dropped from the sky as finished monuments. They are slowly gathered into being, through decades and more often centuries, lifetimes of anonymous labour, disciplined craftsmanship, shared devotion, and the accumulated faith of people who believed beauty and truth were not luxuries, but sacred obligations owed to the future.
I honestly just wish that the relationship between the understory and what you might call the overstory just weren’t so painful — frankly, downright bloody sometimes. So often these days, the distance between what is living and what is governing feels almost unbearable. Ordinary working people speak and feel unheard and alienated from the institutions and elites that shape public life. Artists and caregivers, scholars and social workers, stay-at-home mothers and fathers, teachers and hospice chaplains find themselves starved within systems shaped by a cultural consensus increasingly unable to recognize forms of value that cannot be measured or monetized. Entire communities carry historical memory and moral wisdom born of generations of suffering and powerful grace under pressure, only to see that wisdom placed on performative, check-the-box display while remaining locked out of the deeper structures of cultural and economic power. The prophetic and the institutional have drifted into mutual suspicion. The moral clarity sought by activists and the necessary realism practised by reformers clash in cycles of accusation and disillusionment. And within the church — though that may be a multi-millennial problem that we just have to accept with a kind of this-world grief — there is an aching disconnect between where the Spirit seems to be moving and the capacities of our ecclesial forms to receive, discern, and faithfully carry that movement forward.
But beneath all this mutual estrangement between the understory and the overstory right now, we may be arriving at a threshold — a moment in which the failures, excesses, and hope fatigue of our time are giving rise to a more chastened hunger, not simply to dismantle what has failed or retreat from public life altogether, but to recover some living relationship between moral imagination and institutional life, between rootedness and renewal, between what is formed in hiddenness and what must eventually answer before the world.
And so this Understory Festival, this gathering, is in some sense a risky, costly — for all of us — experiment in reunion before healing has taken place. An encounter between institutional leaders and artists, theorists and practitioners, builders and critics, working-class organizers and cultural elites, everyday good Samaritans and the professionals paid to save the world. People formed by very different habits of perception and social worlds who nonetheless sense that something essential to our common life must not be lost. And so we’ve come to this cathedral — kind of a Mecca in the American context — renewedly open, exhausted no doubt, but cracked open at least a little bit, with interpretive charity given back to us, I hope, by an overwhelming experience of beauty these next few days.
So I hope, perhaps, that’s why this cathedral matters here — not as a denial of this pain or this wound, but as a vessel large enough to hold it. For all the ways institutions can become rigid, bureaucratic, or estranged from the lives they are meant to serve, this cathedral bears witness to another possibility. It is not only a monument to authority, but to longing: the accumulated labour, prayer, imagination, craftsmanship, and sacrifice of generations reaching toward transcendence together. In its stone and its silence, its scars and its ongoing repair, in its underground and in its overground, its understory and its overstory, its sins and its reclamations — it remembers something that I think many of today’s largest institutions have forgotten: that enduring structures are meant not merely to govern or impress, but to shelter meaning, memory, repentance, beauty, hope, and relational harmony.
And I hope these next few days that the cathedral might offer one other thing: a kind of cavernous ear for the cries, questions, testimonies, griefs, longings, and fragile hopes rising from beneath the surface of our common life. As the great Paul Gilroy once said, democracy, when it is mature, is not first a speech act — it is a listening act.
As perhaps a wink of providence would have it, we gather in the days just after Pentecost, when Christians celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit. Wind and fire, breath and speech, fearful disciples transformed into witnesses, and a bewildered crowd suddenly hearing the mighty works of God in each of their own native tongues — a miracle of intelligibility across the fractures of Babel. I’ll confess that has been my prayer and is my prayer and hope for these next couple of days. I honestly do not know what that will look like. But I have prayed and hoped that we, alongside each other in this extraordinary place, would be attentive to the feast and grief of God in all of its overwhelming poignance and abundance and love. And that somehow, in our thousand different lenses on this moment in the world, we would meet one another as equally enfleshed creatures — human beings created in God’s image.
If you’ll allow me, I’m just going to end with a bit of a personal note.
About eight weeks ago, as the weight of this gathering was pressing in on me and my wonderful Comment colleagues, I received a phone call from the husband of a truly incandescent Flannery O’Connor-esque, St. Teresa of Ávila soul who I’m also really lucky to call friend. Her name is Chelsea. Chelsea is one of those rare souls who has quietly embodied the very spirit of what we are attempting here over these next few days. Some time back, she gave me and our little magazine the highest compliment by once describing Comment Magazine as Charlotte Mason for adults — which, for the educators among you, you will really appreciate. Chelsea understood that human beings, most especially children, are not machines to make the most of, but souls to feed and to form. She understood that hidden people and hidden acts of obedience to a calling, over and over and over — hidden communities of sacrifice and care — are not peripheral to the renewal of the world. They’re actually the beating heart. She understood the understory. She also loved and appreciated institutions. She had a Kuyperian formation and married someone formed by the rituals of a Lakota tribe — imagine those two coming together. And together, the two of them have shown me what it is to merge fire and brick, spirit and structure, human and scale. She knew that the task of this hour was to re-soul that which we too often view as disinterested scaffolding.
A few days after her 40th birthday, eight weeks ago, with two children under age seven, Chelsea suffered a massive stroke. In a matter of seconds, a very brilliant, vibrant woman — a mother, friend, thinker, institution, encourager — was rendered entirely incapacitated. And in these foregoing weeks, I found myself drawn simply to be with her as often as I’ve been able to, by her hospital bed in Baltimore, and now in rehab, thankfully. Again and again — often carrying full drafts of the choreography of this festival and original works that so many of you scholars and artists and institution leaders have helped barn-raise with me and our team — leaving stapled corners of all the different pieces, the fragments, beneath IVs, drips, visitors’ Nalgene bottles, and drawings from her kids. Reading aloud passages from some of the films we’re going to show over these next few days, reading aloud descriptions of breakout sessions so crazily and abundantly imagined. It has felt at times like beholding an icon — a holy friend who I love and respect, who so selflessly poured into this festival before an event of blood vessels and neurological complexity took away her capacity to communicate, whose own moment of tragic precarity is, of course, also a sign of my own and all of ours.
And somehow, as I have communed with her, trying to listen to what she cannot say, I have imagined Chelsea dreaming with all of us still — dreaming of institutions re-souled, dreaming of hidden creators and common good actors honoured, dreaming of understories finding openings into the overstory, stretching toward the light, even while honouring the snag trees that are dying.
That is what I have been learning beside her bed: that truth only really matters when it becomes flesh and dwells among us — in presence, in attention, in accompaniment, in the stubborn refusal to abandon one another in our vulnerability.
You may glimpse a little bit of this dream that I have imagined — I’ve hoped she’s had — in the next segment of this evening’s programme. I hope it might serve as both atmosphere and anthem for these days ahead — in your grief, in your hope, in your exhaustion, and in your goose-bumpy unknowing before all that could yet be born.
In a world where so much feels exhausted, fractured, disfigured, and afraid — what is struggling to be born in our time?
