Learning to live, together.
ScrollYou scroll through dinner. You don’t return the call. The days are fine, and they’re going by, and underneath it you know you’re not really living.
You want life. Real life. You can feel it — somewhere over there.
The Machine keeps you behind glass, by yourself — scrolling, self-improving, always looking for the next win.
No good life was ever built alone. It won’t start with an app. It starts with the person next to you.
What this is
We’re not a church, a class, or an app. We meet to study and to do, together, the things that actually make a life worth living — whether your concern is this life or the next.
We start at the beginning with the basic human work — and it’s the hard part: getting honest, turning from what’s deforming you, learning to pay attention, learning to be with people. The Christians called it the purgative way; in Zen it’s keeping the precepts. It’s the ground a real life grows in.
We draw on two disciplines that have carried people for millennia — Christian and Zen. They’re not the same: different ends, different maps of what a human being is. We don’t blur them. But down where we start, at the foundation, they’re doing one thing — clearing the ground, turning a person around.
We begin in September with John Mark Comer’s Practicing the Way — a plain, practical doorway. No seminary, or even faith, is required to walk through it. A starting point, not a creed, and we’ll read it honestly, arguing where we disagree, toward a rule of life we make, and live, together. From there the road widens — the desert fathers, the Benedictines, the Ignatian exercises, the Zen teachers. No one book, and no one tradition, owns the Way.
You
The point isn’t you: care for the person beside you is the center of the Way. Christians call it charity; in Zen it’s the bodhisattva’s vow. Same direction: toward each other, and toward a world that abandons everyone.
Somewhere we learned to be afraid of each other. We screen the call, cross the street, keep our distance — from the hungry, the sick, the poor, the ones who make us uncomfortable. We’ve made the other a problem to be managed instead of a person to be met.
Both traditions refuse this, completely.
Christians have always known the face you turn from is Christ’s own — whatever you did to the least of these. The Zen teaching is that the stranger is already buddha, and the wall between you was never real.
So the problem was never in them. It’s in what closes in you when you turn away. The one you shut out is the one you were looking for.
So we don’t care what others say you are — the smart one, the screwup, the drunk, the loner, the one who made it, liberal, conservative, rich, poor, none of the above — because you’re far more than that. Without exception.
All are welcome.
Believers and non-believers both. Our first concern is the person next to us, not whether they share our views. We don’t want rooms full of people who think the same things. It’s not meant to be comfortable.
If you’re serious about one path, this is meant to support that — not to pull you off it. No proselytizing.
What’s said here stays here. You don’t have to believe anything to start. You just have to show up — and keep showing up.
How it works
For adults in the thick of work, family, and everything else — people who can’t get away to a monastery, and shouldn’t have to.
About
I started Come & See because for years I chased some big questions: What is this life? How do I not waste it? And how do I become a good, whole human being in a world designed to keep us anxious, distracted, and alone?
The market tries to answer by telling us to do more and more. “Produce and win,” it says, “or you’ll lose.” But the Christian tradition and years of Zen practice both refused my questions. Stop trying to fix yourself, they said in their various ways, and learn to love. And you can’t love by yourself.
I’m not here as an expert with a method to hand down. I’m here doing the same work as everyone else in the room. My simple belief is that there’s a better way to go about this, and we can figure it out together.
Come and see.
Join the waitlist. We’ll be in touch before we start in September.
Start with the person next to you.