For Pete Holmes, losing everything was the fastest way to find it.
"WHAT IS FIRE?" ASKS PETE HOLMES.
It sounds trippy, but it's not. Not to Holmes anyway, who's been asking the question for a while—so much that it's become sort of his shorthand for the big, esoteric questions about the universe.
You probably do. The feeling Holmes is talking about is not uncommon, but it is hard to describe. But that's a big part of how he's become one of the most popular comedians of his generation—by giving words to things that are hard to express. He's a comedian—a successful one by any definition of the term, with his show Crashing gearing up for its second season on HBO and his You Made It Weird podcast consistently ranking as one of iTunes' most popular.
And like any successful comedian, brutal honesty is his bread and butter. And the brutal, honest truth is that Holmes is laying his life bare with his comedy—be it podcast, stand-up or HBO show—and for every one of the many laughs his work provokes, there's another moment that profoundly aches.
As often as not, the two moments are linked; even simultaneous.
"I have no problem thinking of myself in Christian terms," Holmes says.
That probably comes as no surprise to anyone who's paid much attention to his career. Holmes can discuss the evangelical subculture and its attending worldview nimbly. He was raised in a Christian church. He went to a Christian college, even briefly wanted to be a youth pastor—the whole deal. But then life threw him a curveball via the disintegration of his marriage.
Holmes married young and moved to Chicago in an attempt to break into comedy. At first, he had almost no luck. Meanwhile, his then-wife started having an affair (If you've seen the first season of Crashing, you've seen the only slightly fictionalized depiction of all this.). Their marriage ended shortly thereafter, and his faith wasn't far behind.
Holmes talks about the time in his life when he was enchanted by the positive vibes of megachurch prosperity preacher Joel Osteen's best-seller Your Best Life Now, saying it had "changed [his] life." And after the divorce? Not so much.
"After my wife left me, I tried to listen to Your Best Life Now again, and it might as well have been in Aramaic," Holmes says. "I couldn't hear it because I experienced pain for the first time in my life.
Instead, Holmes started dabbling in other communities. He started making friends with atheists and dating non-Christians. He didn't reject his faith entirely, but the substance of it became fair game for interrogation.
Holmes has this story about The Book of Eli. Maybe you've seen it. It's a middling post-apocalyptic flick in which Denzel Washington spends a lot of time rescuing Mila Kunis. To get at why this story matters, we'll need to venture into some spoiler territory, so consider yourself warned.
The Book of Eli is actually about Washington's character protecting Earth's last copy of the Bible.
Holmes doesn't defend the movie's quality ("It's like a 38 percent on Rotten Tomatoes," he says), but he can't deny that it started something fresh in him.
After seeing the movie, Holmes remembers going back to his office and weeping alone.
The Book of Eli sparked a renewed spiritual odyssey that inspired Holmes to explore the works of famed mythologist Joseph Campbell, spiritual author Ram Dass, Franciscan friar Richard Rohr and Rob Bell, who has since become a close friend and frequent colleague of Holmes'.
So what is Holmes certain of now? Less than ever, to hear him say it.
If you're familiar with Bell's work, that answer probably doesn't come as a shock to you, but Holmes found it enlightening.
So Holmes isn't looking at God as some- thing you order on demand anymore. A better metaphor might be that he's looking at God as a forest to be explored. Or maybe that God is the metaphor.
"A great quote that I love is, 'God is the name of the blanket we put over the mystery to give it shape,'" Holmes says. "We're trying to talk about something undiscussable, and I love it. Ram Dass says the truth isn't in these discussions. It's in the spaces between the words that we get a transmission. Christians call this grace, where something is happening beyond our thinking mind, and I became fascinated with that.
It's a little hard to explain but then, that's Holmes' specialty.
Alexa Edwards lives in Austin and writes about faith and culture.