I did the premiere as I had planned at the Less Wrong European Community Weekend 2025 in Berlin. It went okay but not perfect: I learned I need to professionalize the process of finding volunteers to sing at Sermons castings, and that I need to remake the printout booklets. This weekend I was in Berlin again and visited the Occulture Conference and the Church of Interbeing. These have several things in common:

• Both are series of events that happen infrequently but regularly in Berlin, are well-organized, English-speaking and popular with people I like very much. (At Interbeing I met a genius singer-songwriter who offered excellent heartfelt chants of love. At Occulture I met a fellow brain cancer patient who talked about how experimental meditations had helped him defeat it.)
• Both include playful exploration of ritual as an art form rather than as a religious practice.
• I am friends with friends of the organizers of both, and wasn’t refused outright when I pitched to both the idea of casting the Seven Secular Sermons at them.

That said, now that I go about thinking how those Sermons castings would go, I am more impressed with the differences between them. Occulture is dark& edgy, Interbeing is bright&friendly. Even family friendly in fact: I’m sure my kids would love it and be very safe there. Occulture is very much an adult space, with open fires, noisy loudspeakers, visible skin and some of the attendees on psychedelic drugs. Interbeing is more like what I originally envisioned, but Occulture would be a great place to experiment, to do the thing really strangely, in costume on stilts. And experimenting is Good! The problems at the LWCW2025 showed I cannot perfectly plan everything in my imagination but need to instead try different ways of doing it, and learn empirically what works.

In one of those poetic serendipities, I was recently gifted a picture that I’m using for my profile picture in various apps now:

Imagination running wild, I now envision I’m going to have T-shirts made with this: a white one where the black part of that picture is printed, and a black one where the white part is printed, to wear at these two castings. This is admittedly pure fantasizing: I will need to put in more serious work to make those events actually happen before I get to fun flourishes like this.

But I do have the necessary time for this; time is just about the only thing I have in spades, since I’m single and get to spend way too little time on my job (strictly limited by the doctors and health insurer) or on parenting (strictly limited by the mad mother I share custody with; she gets much more of my scarce money as long as she forces her share of the childcare to remain nominally marginally higher than 50%). And what better way to spend all that time on than this way?