What does it take to get your attention to something new? How many friends need to recommend a book or movie before you buy it or see it? Sometimes it’s the overwhelming numbers and the omnipresence of promotions that make you join in with the crowds. Sometimes it’s the strength of a single convincing review from a friend that will send you off looking to have the same epiphany.

When it comes to discovering new voices to pay attention to, new writers giving voice to something I should give thought to, then diverse sources seems to work for me. If several different people, who I would not normally connect together, in a relatively short frame of time, all recommend or mention the same source, then that piques my curiosity and I go take a look.

That’s what happened recently, with discovering Paul Kingsnorth. Never heard of the chap before. Not even once that I can remember. Liam Thatcher was the first highlighting seven minutes, of a much longer interview, on Christ and Creation. I listened and found it interesting.

Then came Rod Dreher. Twice in fact. Now, I could be wrong about this, but I’d never connected Rod Dreher with his repeated calls on the threat of ‘soft-totalitarianism’ and Liam’s kind and thoughtful engagement in central London. So that piqued my interest some more. Then came Alan Jacobs quoting Kingsnorth’s newsletter. That’s the serendipity of the internet or the providence of God. Definitely intrigued now, I subscribe to the newsletter. Of course I did.

And I am glad I did.

Firstly, there is the joy of reading someone who really knows how to write. Kingsnorth knows how to construct sentences and paragraphs and essays. Wordsmith gets close. Wordwizard gets closer. Either way, reading is a joy. Trying to then write about it, an exercise in humility.

Secondly, there is that feeling you get when you discover others who are writing about the things you are thinking about. You realise there is some heft, validity, weight to the thoughts that have been tumbling around inside your old noggin that just maybe weren’t quite so stupid after all. In my case I have been thinking about communities that are rooted and demonstrate something of the prophetic power of the church in our fragmented and consumerist world.

Those things are good but they can’t sustain you long. There has to be something in the words that have some substance behind them. And they do. It’s a fresh stream into which I plunged my weary thoughts and then am brought up gasping from the revitalising shock of it all. Refreshing, stimulating, invigorating stuff.

My imagination was fired first by the title of the newsletter: The Abbey of Misrule and by his own sense of the need for it. Abbeys, were communities of faith first and foremost but they were also so much than that (at their best). They were places of order, creation, knowledge, enterprise, healing, prayer, education, hospitality, sanctuary and so, so much more.

Modernity is a permanent revolution. We were all really born for an age of walnut trees and shaded pools, but instead we find ourselves in the Machine’s maw with the jaws closing, and it is hard to know whether to fight or run, or whether either is possible, or whether all of this is just words, of the kind I should have stayed away from. But these are our times, and those of us cursed to think too much must work out how to live in them. We must work out, if only for our own peace of mind, what we think about the breakdown of forms, the widening gyre, the solidity melting ever faster into air. We have to work it out so that we know where we stand, and what we will not stand for. Where the lines are, and whether to cross them and what we will do if one day the times come for us as we sit beneath the walnut tree, armed with a vaccine passport and the latest official upending of reality, and demand a public pledge of loyalty.

Under the spreading walnut tree

Then, there is the spirit with which he wants to write and think.

I will attempt to write here without becoming evil. I will try to fight for what I love and not against what I don’t, avoiding too many abstractions, trying to keep my feet on the ground. I will hope for a good conversation with those who subscribe, and welcome disagreement and alternative views. But I will deny commenting rights to anyone who attempts to bring those fragmentary oppositions into this space. We’re going to try and practice kindness and mercy here. It’s an Abbey after all.

To all of which, I say, Amen.

But we live in an uprooted time.

Because we are all uprooted now. The power of the ‘global economy’ – another euphemism for the Machine – demolishes borders and boundaries, traditions and cultures, languages and ways of seeing wherever it goes. Record numbers of people are on the move as a result, and as the population increases and climate change bites, those numbers will rise everywhere, churning cultures and nations into entirely new shapes or no shapes at all. Even if you are living where your forefathers have lived for generations, you can bet that that smartphone you gave your child will unmoor them more effectively than any bulldozer. The majority of humanity is now living in megacities, cut off from non-human nature, plugged into the Machine, controlled by it, reduced to it.

The Great Unsettling

I feel that regularly as a leader in an international church in a capital city. Almost no one in our community has roots in here. We are a community of immigrants, exiles, expats and refugees. Some seeking success and others seeking security. Some here as a temporary stop and others here to forge a new and better life. There are few that see the place in which they live as their community, few who have put down roots and seek to bring hope and renewal to that place. For most their home is simply the place where they sleep and little more. If they belong to a community at all it is not connected to the actual physical place in which they live. A city is home to the rootless but maybe that gives greater power to those that put down roots.

At this moment, Kingsnorth (whose books I shall soon be buying in abundance) is diagnosing the problem and for what it’s worth, so far I think he’s right.

When a plant is uprooted, it withers and then dies. When the same happens to a person, or a people, or a planetful of both, the result is the same. Our crisis comes, I think, from our being unable to admit what on some level we know to be true: that we in the West are living inside an obsolete story. Our culture is not in danger of dying; it is already dead, and we are in denial. I’ll write more about that next time.

He’s wise to not offer easy solutions. We love solutions, give me the quick-fix, tell me what to do! But it won’t work like that, the machine is too powerful just now. But our times require of us to seek out places to bring renewal, to be places of life to the people, the communities, the culture, the earth.

Maybe it’s not just our times that require something new, maybe the one who has gone ahead of us, is calling for it too.