Afternoon all. Here we are again, in the section of the Abbey which is conducted by you, my loyal readers. I am still in the thick of my Book of Wild Saints as I write this. The deadline for delivery of the manuscript is the end of this month, and I feel it breathing down my neck. I am loving it, though. It is a real departure, and my first Christian book. It’s going to look beautiful, too: the cover, by Ewan Craig, is a work of art in itself. But you’re not allowed to see it yet, I’m afraid. Be patient.

Speaking of works of art, the above image is of the Alfred Jewel, an astonishing piece of Anglo-Saxon metal-and-glass work, probably created in the 9th century for King Alfred of Wessex, a great reader, writer and translator, and pioneering Christian king. It’s one of the images I’m using in the slide show I’ll be giving this coming weekend, to accompany my talk on pilgrimage in England. There are a few tickets left for the British Saints Convention where I’ll be speaking, if you feel inspired to make a last minute trip. I’ll also be in conversation with Rowan Williams, and there are plenty of other good things on offer too.

I’m told that just a few places remain for the November event in sunny Florida at which I’ll be appearing, too. More about that here.

I’ll be back here next week with some exciting news on another subject, and some updates about what will be happening at the Abbey from the summer onwards. But for now, my friends, the floor is yours. The world is going mad, but the birds are still singing. Wherever we look, there’s plenty to say. Say anything you like.

All my writing at the Abbey of Misrule is currently free to read. To help keep it free, and support those who can’t afford to pay, please consider a donation or a paid subscription. Thank you!

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I began this Substack five years ago this month. In that time, I have published hundreds of articles, talks, reports, essays and podcasts here on a bewildering range of topics, from Irish holy wells to the future of the nation state, and from robot monks to transgenderism. Subscribers have come and gone, and continue to do both. There are now nearly 85,000 of you reading this.

So I thought it was time to provide a user’s guide to the Abbey of Misrule, and my work more broadly. Here is a map to help you navigate what you will find here, and in a few other byways on the web in which my words can be found.

The Abbey, phase one: The Machine

I began this Substack to write a series of analytical essays about what I call ‘the Machine’: a system of technocracy that impacts our culture, economy, ecology and spirit. I wrote thirty essays in all, over two years. Later I took these essays, edited and rewrote them, and turned the whole thing into a book. It was published last year as Against The Machine, and became a New York Times bestseller. As part of the promotion for the book, I recorded six podcast conversations with interesting thinkers, which I called ‘The Machine Sessions.’

The Abbey, phase two: the Christian Mysteries

When my work on the Machine was done, I began to turn my attention to the other central interest that was consuming me: my newfound Christian faith. I was baptised, late in life, just a few months before I began writing here, after a long process of conversion which I detailed in an essay for First Things, called The Cross and the Machine. This became one of the most widely-read essays I’ve ever written.

Since then I have written a number of essays here about my personal Christian journey, and Christian culture more widely. In my fiftieth year I made a pilgrimage to fifty of Ireland’s Holy Wells, and wrote about each one. Later, I began a weekly series of pilgrimages to other Christian sites, which is currently on hiatus, but will resume later in 2026. I began a Christian book club, ‘The Scriptorium’, which will also return this year. I have also been writing a series of lives of people I call ‘wild saints’ - Christian wilderness ascetics - which will be published as a book in 2027.

Here a few of the key essays and series. Many more can be found in the archive.

My Books

I’ve been a writer for thirty years, and this Substack is just one (and the most online) of my projects. Over that time, I’ve also written ten books, which these days I divide into a few categories:

My Website

The books above can all be found on my personal website, which is the only other place you will find me on the internet. It is also home to:

Audio and Film

Finally, there are also a couple of places in which I have collected various interviews, podcasts, talks, short films and other audio-visual things I have been involved in over the years. Visual things can be found on my YouTube channel, while The Chantry is the section of the Abbey in which audio of talks and interviews live.

I support my work online at present with voluntary subscriptions or donations. This opens up my work to those unable to pay for it, and makes it free for all. But this is only possible with your support. Everything I have written here, right from the beginning, has been made possible by the direct support of my readers.

If you’d like to help me keep writing, and help others to keep reading, you can press one of the buttons below. I really appreciate your support.

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Today is England’s national day, and by tradition I usually feel I ought to write something about my homeland on this date. This year though, I haven’t been able to manage the kind of essay I wrote two years ago. I’m busy finishing up my Book of Wild Saints, I’m still not fully recovered from my winter burnout, and my spring garden is calling me in my spare moments. There is wood to be cut and beehives to be set out and weeds to be uprooted and endless wooden structures to be endlessly painted. Nature moves fast in April.

Besides, how much can be said about England in these times? Almost too much is being said everywhere, it seems to me, and the world is moving so fast and so unpredictably that an old man like me is not sure what he can add.

I don’t know much about the future of England - who does? - but I do know quite a lot about its past. So instead of an essay, I am going to offer up three prophecies from English history, all of which relate to the country’s Christian soul (more about that here). All of them are still ongoing concerns. History is always being written.

1. The Tree

In the winter of 1066, the King of England lay dying. Edward, last monarch of the House of Wessex, had no children, and had not named an heir. He was better suited to a monastery than a royal palace, as his nickname, ‘the Confessor’, suggested. He would later become the only English monarch to be canonised by a Pope. But now he lingered between life and death. And as he did so, he was granted a vision. He later related it, we are told, to his attendants, and it was recorded for posterity:

Edward died on the 5th of January 1066. A year and a day later, on 6th January 1067, Duke William of Normandy - known to posterity as ‘the Conqueror’ but to his contemporaries as ‘the Bastard’ - had himself crowned King in Westminster Abbey, which was surrounded by a phalanx of Norman knights to ensure that the populace did not rebel against its new foreign overlords.

William’s reign was revolutionary in numerous ways: he oversaw a massive transfer of land from the English nobility to his Norman cronies; he instituted what would later become known as feudalism; he introduced many Norman innovations to England, including castles, hereditary monarchy and the legal ownership of wives by their husbands. He unleashed mass violence on any parts of his new country which resisted his military rule. If you want to know more about what this looked like, I once wrote a book which told the story.

He also changed English Christianity, which may be what this curious prophecy refers to. William’s invasion of England was blessed by the Pope - controversially - and he carried the Papal banner on the battlefield at Hastings, which put the willies up some of the Anglo-Saxon soldiers. This was a period when the Pope was working to centralise and more tightly control the Western church, and the Normans, in England and elsewhere, are sometimes referred to as his ‘shock troops’. William’s reign coincided with that of Pope Gregory VII, perhaps the most revolutionary Roman Bishop in history, who was intent on asserting the power of the Church over the claims of the Holy Roman Empire in the West. Gregory introduced numerous innovations, such as priestly celibacy and the notion of ‘secularism’, a radical idea designed to distinguish church from state and holy from profane, which the West still uses to define itself today.

As part of these reforms, the Roman church wanted more control over its outlying provinces and their practices, and in England the Normans were its vehicle. William’s reign saw the mass demolition of wooden Anglo-Saxon churches and their replacement with the great stone Romanesque buildings which can still be found all over England today (here’s one I wrote about earlier.) It saw the end of the period of the wild saints, the importation of continental religious orders like the Benedictines to replace indigenous monastic practices, and a far greater degree of oversight from Rome. Within twenty years of the Conquest, there were no Anglo-Saxon Bishops left in the country.

Is this what the prophecy is referring to? The wild card is that, just twelve years before the Normans raged across the English Channel, the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western Christian churches had taken place. The Christian tree had been cut in two, and its two halves carried far away from each other. They have not been re-united yet.

2. Greeks Bearing Gifts

There is a prophecy you will often come across if you begin to research the saints of England, and Britain. It’s from the Greek saint Arsenius of Paros, though I’ve not been able to find the original source for it. It is very simple, and it seems very true:

I relate to Christianity through the lives of the saints - certainly not exclusively, but as a reliable and regular guide. It seems to me that if a religious practice can reliably create holy men and women, then this is evidence of its truth and efficacy. I’ve spent quite a few years now looking into the saints of England and Ireland especially. England has a great wealth of holy men and women, most of whom are unknown today. Once upon a time, their shrines and relics were embedded in the landscape and in the lives of English Christians. The Taliban-like violence of the Tudor ‘Reformation’ put paid to the holy landscapes of England, but saints don’t need shrines to be examples and intercessors, after all.

Will the English begin to rediscover their history through the lives and adventures of their saints? Perhaps when the chips are down we will turn to them again. The hour is late.

3. The Once and Future Saint

Finally, since this is the day of England’s national saint, let’s talk about England’s national saint. George is a very curious saint to be representing the English, given that he never visited the country, had no connection with it and is also the national saint of numerous other nations, cities and principalities. I have written before about how this happened and what it means, so I won’t repeat myself.

What I will do, though, is repeat something I have also written before: that England’s true national saint is not George, but Edmund the Martyr. This early medieval Christian king, murdered by Vikings, was one of the greatest saints of medieval England, with his shrine at Bury St Edmunds becoming one of the major pilgrimage sites of Western Europe. That shrine was also destroyed by the English Taliban, and the saint’s bones scattered to the four winds.

But where did they go? Nobody knows. Rumours abounded that Edmund’s relics were spirited away before the Taliban could get their hands on them. It has also been suggested that they lie still under the ruins of the Abbey at Bury St Edmunds: excavations are soon to take place to determine whether this is true. Other legends suggest that Edmund’s bones lie in France, awaiting the right time to return, or that they lie quietly in Arundel Castle, kept hidden from public view.

Which brings us to our final prophecy: that when the relics of St Edmund finally return to Bury St. Edmunds, the spiritual regeneration of the English nation will begin. This is one of those ‘ancient prophecies’ that seems to have very dim origins. I haven’t been able to find out where and when it originated. But I want it to be true. If there is one thing England needs, it is spiritual regeneration. The good news is that the saints are still waiting, quietly, for us to begin.

I’ll be talking about some of the saints of England, and that spiritual regeneration, at the British Saints Convention next month in Walsingham. Come along and join in.

All my writing at the Abbey of Misrule is now free to read. To help keep it free, and support those who can’t afford to pay, please consider a donation or a paid subscription. Thank you!

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Dear Readers,

Welcome to the April Salon. I don’t have much to report this month. I am deep in the last stretch of my Book of Wild Saints, and it is taking up most of my time and attention. The last few weeks have seen me writing about the lives of Petroc, Anastasia of Padan and Joseph the Hesychast, amongst others. If you don’t know their names - well, that’s one good reason to buy the book when it emerges next year. But first I have to finish it, which is one reason I am quiet here at the moment.

If you’d like to hear me telling some stories of the saints before 2027, you could come along next month to the British Saints Convention in Walsingham, Norfolk. I’ll be giving a talk I’m calling ‘An English Pilgrimage’, in which I’ll be sketching out a modest proposal for a few sites in England whose saints might help revive the spirit of the nation. If I get my act together, I might even do a slide show, which for me is cutting edge technological engagement. Rowan Williams and Martin Shaw will be talking too. Last year it was a really excellent event. If you get yourself a ticket, I can promise you will not regret it.

Also on the menu for me, much later this year, is a very different event, in Florida of all places. The Art of the Tamada, like the British Saints Convention, is raising funds for work I heartily support, but in all other ways it couldn’t be more different. I’m betting it will also be fun, though. You can find out more here.

With that, I must turn my attention back to St Guthlac of Crowland, and his battles with demons in the Anglo-Saxon fens. So it’s over to you, readers, to start a conversation about anything you want to talk about. Don’t be shy.

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I have barely a month to go before I am due to submit the manuscript of my Book of Wild Saints to my publishers. This, plus the fact that I am still recovering from the severe burnout that hit me over the winter, means I am publishing little original writing here at the moment. This will change when summer comes; in the meantime, I greatly appreciate the support of all of my readers.

Today - Easter Sunday for us Orthodox folk - I am republishing this piece I wrote last year. New subscribers may not have seen it; and perhaps some of you old timers might appreciate it again.

What is this force, this force that through the green fuse drives the flower, that through my bones drives a weariness more often now, that through the rocks drives the water? Is it time, merely? Encroaching death? But then, what force spawned life so that death could end it, what force calls the flowers from the warming Earth each spring?

Everything rises today.

Life as you grow older feels like a series of questions without answers, and you know there can never be answers this side of the tomb. Existence is an apophatic theology. It becomes the question you never thought to ask as a child, because as a child everything is alive, everything immediate, everything now, nothing lasting.

What is this place, and who am I?

The wintry fever approaches steadily, and you will never have an answer, not really.

Nobody has seen the Father but the Son.

Today is Easter Sunday, the day of the Great Rising. What is the story that Christians are telling about today? That a man rose from a grave? Yes, of course - but more than that, much more than that. Other people have risen from graves, at least if you want to believe the Christians - and not just the Christians. People restored to life: it’s hardly common, but neither is it unique, it seems.

No, it is not simply the rising, it is who - or what - is risen.

The April weather in the Irish west was astonishing this year, for a while. Two whole weeks of unseasonal heat brought the land out from the finalities of winter. True, the frost still came at night, but by the afternoon I was digging the garden with my top off. Everything on our land awoke. Our field, in which we planted 800 trees nearly a decade ago and which is now becoming a forest, hums with insects heading for the poplar blossom and the whitethorn. The pond is full of frogspawn and the soil is warming. Crocus and cowslip defeat the couch grass in their quest for the light. Sparrows gather moss and straw, the hazel poles are budding. We have set up a beehive in a grove by the hedgerow, and now we wait in the hope that some worker will seek it out and beckon the swarm to follow.

But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you.

As the land has sung itself back into life, it is as if I have awakened too from some numbness that overcame me. It was not simply the numbness of winter. For a while, I have felt closed off from my land; somehow an alien as I walked through it. Maybe I was reading too much theology. I always knew that the Holy Spirit sung itself through bud and blossom, but knowledge is not experience. Back in the day, when I was a pagan and a pantheist, I felt the force of nature as an overwhelming power within me. Then I became a Christian, and something retreated.

What was it?

I wondered this, and I concluded that I had misdirected my worship. I had worshipped the trees rather than their creator. I think that this was a category error; still, I missed the feeling it gave me. I missed the sense that the trees were my sisters and the birds my brothers. Those who have never felt this may call it ‘pagan’, as if that meant anything, but they would be wrong. It is not ‘pagan’ to feel, as Adam did, as Eve did, that this place was created to be our home. That we were intended to be at one with it before we broke away and began instead to worship ourselves.

The heavens declare the glory of God; the sky proclaims the work of his hands. Daily they speak, they never become silent.

Something has happened to me this Easter, though; that old feeling has come back. Now I walk through my growing forest and I feel again that green force that I once felt, and I am overjoyed because I missed it. Is it different now? Yes, and no. I feel the land breathe within me and to me, I see that everything here has its own life, I feel the inscape of it all, but now I feel something beyond it too; something that made it, that sings it every hour, though for this force there is no time.

In his hand are all the corners of the earth.

I give thanks for this now, in sun and in rain. It is such a joy to have it back; to have it gifted to me again.

Maybe there were some things I had to learn before I could be trusted again with all of it. I don’t know. Nobody knows, really.

The force: the force that stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind - this force, we Christians believe, is the force that created all things. It is God Himself, it is Christ. This force, we are taught, this force that drives life through all things, itself took human shape once; itself came down to us. This force experienced all of our joys and limitations, all of our potential for evil and stupidity. The force that created us inhabited us, and now all is changed.

This is the force that rises today. Christ is the force that drives life. He is the force that rekindled it when death had claimed it.

It’s hard to grasp this notion sometimes: that the creative force that sung the entire universe into existence walked among us, died and rose again, and in that rising inverted everything: power, love, death. But this is the story. Humans are made from soil and the breath of God. A human is humus, and the same breath we are born from is the wind under the wings of the rook as it glides over my garden.

Life has never been other than a mystery. But we know this. We are taught it, and we feel it if we stand still in sun under trees.

Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them; let all the trees of the forest sing for joy.

We were made to be gardeners, but where are we now? Building wolves from scratch, flying plastic pop stars into space, mining the hills and the oceans to feed the addicts we have made of our children. There is poison in the waters of the springs on the mountain. We kill whatever does not make us rich and satisfied and comfortable, we mewl for more and spit and strike at those who point to the fouling of our own nests.

Who knows what grows in the hedgerows now? Who knows where the hedgerows have gone?

But everybody knows what the American President said yesterday. Boo to him! Hurray for him!

Everything is wasted now. All the time, all the soil. Don’t look at it. Don’t look at the empty estuaries and the scars where the forests used to be.

Maybe if you don’t look at it, it won’t be real.

The earth is defiled by its people; they have disobeyed the laws, violated the statutes and broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse consumes the earth; its people must bear their guilt.

I feel now like a man who lost a jewel in the grass, but who has unexpectedly, years later, found it again. The jewel is not the same, though. The weather has done something to it. It was buried, and now it has been claimed again from the dark soil. When I hold it up to the light, it shines differently. The colours are other, somehow.

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Humans are idiots who ruin everything; but also, we are all we have. And look at what we can do when the force sings within us. When we stop trying to pin and label it, and start singing with it instead. When we stand quietly in a young wood. When the machines we have confused with reality are switched off and left behind. When the peace of the Spirit inhabits our hearts and is poured out again as some great, uncontrollable love.

Today, anything is possible.

There has been death, and there always will be. But there is life too; there is something eternal now. There is a promise. Because of the rising.

We can go home, if we want to.

There is a path laid down.

We can step out into the fields under the sun, we can feel the insects entangled in our hair. We can feel the force of Christ singing in everything He made.

It is still possible to listen; and then, on our knees, to give thanks.

We are not here for long, and yet none of it will ever end.

The great mystery is to be experienced, not explained.

I think you know what I mean. I think we all know it.

Today is the day we can choose to remember.

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The poetry extracts which top and tail this piece of writing are from ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,’ by Dylan Thomas, and ‘The Great Hunger,’ by Patrick Kavanagh.

Hello readers, and welcome to the March Salon. The green shoots are budding everywhere around here. I hope that applies to you and I too. I am certainly feeling better, health-wise, than I was in the winter, though I am still up and down, and taking things steadily.

Right now, most of my energy is going into completing my Book of Wild Saints, which will be published next year. I have another couple of months to complete it. After that, I hope to be able to unfurl more on here. All being well, I plan to revive the Sunday Pilgrimage and the Scriptorium later this year. There are a few more plans, too. Thank you for reading in the meantime.

As usual, the Salon is your chance to shine. But first, a few bits of news from me.

Okrutni bogowie, and other stories

My book Savage Gods is now available in Polish: you can see the smart new translations, hot off the press, sitting proudly on my desk in the photo above. Savage Gods is a crisis memoir: at least, that’s the closest I have ever come to describing it. It’s my weirdest book - my weirdest non-fiction book, anyway - and every time I look at it I have two simultaneous feelings: that I don’t ever want to go through that again; and that I wish I could write another book like this. Of course, there is a relationship between difficult times and good writing, just as there is a relationship between troubled authors and brilliant prose. Not always, of course, but often. There’s a reason so many of us end up divorced alcoholics, if we haven’t died of TB at 45.

Certainly the strangeness of what I was going through when I wrote that book - a spiritual crisis, essentially, which I was only able to fully understand in retrospect - created the form in which it was written. Savage Gods is so uncategorisable that I couldn’t get any of my previous publishers interested in the thing, and a few of them openly hated it. In the end, I found some small, more adventurous outfits to take it up. I now think it’s probably my best non-fiction book, even though I don’t particularly want to read it again, in the same way that Bob Dylan never wants to listen to Blood On The Tracks. But while I don’t want another spiritual crisis, I would like to access the kind of screw-it-all freedom I felt when I wrote like that. I’ve never managed another book like it.

Anyway, the book is out there now, which means that my crisis is always going on somewhere in the world. You can buy the new Polish edition here. There is also an Estonian edition out there, for all the Estonians reading this. You can also buy the funky-looking American edition, which is on sale from Two Dollar Radio. The British edition is currently out of print, but I plan to remedy that later this year: keep an eye out here for news about that. It’s tied up with an exciting project I have been planning for some time, and am able to start working on again now that I am feeling more human again.

Contra-Machine Army

Speaking of translations, Against The Machine is spreading around the world almost as fast as a sinister AI system. Already on sale in the UK, the US, Canada and Australia, it is now forthcoming in translation in Polish, Dutch, German, Croatian, Estonian, Romanian and - a first for me - both Chinese and Arabic, with some other languages potentially on the way. In the US, the book is approaching 50,000 copies sold and is on its sixth printing, while in the UK around 15,000 have been shifted, and a paperback edition will be appearing this September.

Obviously this is all good news for my monstrous ego (and therefore bad news for my soul), but even important is what it may suggest: that good numbers of people are interested in refusing the spirit of the age - or at least, trying to understand it.

English Pilgrimage, Floridian Feast

I have two events coming up this year, on two sides of the Atlantic, which will both be helping to support charities whose work I’m very happy to promote.

• First up is the British Saints Conference, in Walsingham, Norfolk, in May. A gallery of speakers, including yours truly, Martin Shaw, Rowan Williams, Marcus Plested and doubtless some others, will be telling stories about the saints of Britain. There will also be music, art, conversation and a Divine Liturgy on the Sunday. It’s all organised by St Seraphim’s Trust, which I’ve written about here before. I love St Seraphim’s, and I am always very happy to be asked to be involved in anything they do. I think they are doing work that will be very meaningful for the future of Orthodox Christianity in England.

  My talk will be entitled ‘An English Pilgrimage.’ I’m going to be wandering through the saints and sites of early Christian England, and looking to the future. Find out more, and buy tickets, here.

• Secondly, we have something very different. This winter, I am going to be in the US at an event which will support the work of the First Things Foundation. FTF - no relation to First Things magazine, by the way - is run by my friend John Heers, and it does incredible work around the work in needy communities. You can read about it here. The Art of the Tamada, in Florida this November is a weekend-long celebration, in which we’ll all be learning the art of Georgian feasting and toasting. The little film above gives a taster of what to expect. I’m not quite sure what to expect myself, but it’s going to be fun.
  
  You can find out more and buy tickets here. It’s not cheap, but remember it’s a charity event, and the money will go a long way to help those who need it most.

Founding and Funding

Finally, I’ve just sent out an invitation to the Abbey’s Founder Members to join our first get-together of the year. Founder Members of this esteemed community are entitled to four online gatherings a year, with me and other Founders, as well as a steep discount on my online writing course, and a few other perks too. Why not join us? All the details are here.

In 2026, as you may know, I’m experimenting with a new funding model: all my writing at the Abbey will be free to read, and in return I ask for subscriptions or donations from those who can afford it, to support those who can’t. If you can help keep this experiment alive, please click away:

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But enough about me: what do you have to say? This is your chance to start a conversation about any topic you like. Raise an issue, ask a question, seek help, meet each other or ask me anything you’d like. Fire away. And thank you as ever for reading.

Today is St Patrick’s Day, so I am reposting a piece I originally wrote four years ago, which many of my new subscribers may not have seen.

If you appreciate this piece, and others like it here, please support my writing by taking out a paid subscription or making a donation. This will allow me to keep offering my words for free, and will help those unable to pay. Thank you!

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Today is St Patrick’s Day. It’s a national holiday here in Ireland, during which there is a lot of drinking and parading and the wearing of green leprechaun hats. I’m too old for that sort of thing, and the leprechaun hats don’t suit me anyway. Instead, this morning I was in church listening to two Irish friends singing an old hymn about the saint they learned at school, in harmony with a Romanian nun. It’s an experience I recommend. This evening, I’ve been sitting by the fire reading about St Patrick. Now I want to write something impulsive about the saint. I think he has something still to say to us.

I’m not Irish, I know: but then, neither was he.

In fact, Patrick - Patricius to his friends - was British like me, and like me he grew up in a time of imperial decline, though he had no idea how quickly the empire of which he was a subject would collapse, and all its assumptions drain away. Patricius was a British subject of imperial Rome, born around the year 400 into a middle class family, and trained for comfort and success. All of that went out of the window when, at the age of sixteen, he was kidnapped by Irish slave traders and sold to a petty king named Miliucc, who sent him out to the hills to work as a lone shepherd.

Frightened, lonely and confused, a child in an alien land with no help, family or friends, Patrick did what a lot of people do under similar circumstances: despite being a self-declared atheist, he started praying.

The most entrancing and readable account of Patrick’s life I’ve come across is in Thomas Cahill’s excellent book How The Irish Saved Civilisation. Here he explains the end result of Patrick’s time alone in the hills, with only sheep and God for company:

Patricius endured six years of this woeful isolation, and by the end of it he had grown from a careless boy to something he would surely never otherwise have become - a holy man, indeed a visionary for whom there was no longer any rigid separation between this world and the next. On his last night as Miliucc’s slave, he received in sleep his first otherworld experience. A mysterious voice said to him: “Your hungers are rewarded: you are going home.”

Patrick did indeed get back to his family in Britain, but nothing was the same. He had met God, and they didn’t understand him any more. Patrick took himself to Gaul for a theological education, and after being made a Bishop, he was sent to spread the Christian message to the pagan kings of Ireland, as the first Christian missionary since St Paul, 400 years before.

Patrick’s time in Ireland, in Cahill’s telling, was transformative, and not just for this country. He converted the warring tribal kings to the Christian faith, and thousands of their people too, and he did it not with force (one former slave versus a nation of battle-hardened warrior kings would not have been a fair contest) but with love. ‘His love for his adopted people shines through his writings’, writes Cahill. Indeed, Patrick, after a while, went native. When he travelled back to Britain later in life to plead for some of his converts who had been taken in slavery by British pirates, his former countrymen no longer trusted him as one of their own.

Patrick’s greatest achievement in Ireland, in his lifetime at least, may have been the abolition of slavery, a cause about which he was understandably passionate, and for which he made a radical Christian case. Cahill calls him ‘the first human being in the history of the world to speak out unequivocally against slavery’:

He worries constantly for his people, not just for their spiritual but for their physical welfare. The horror of slavery was never lost on him: “But it is the women kept in slavery who suffer the most - and who keep their spirits up despite the menacing and terrorising they must endure. the Lord gives grace to his handmaids; and though they are forbidden to do so, they follow him with backbone.” Patrick has become an Irishman, a man who can give far more credibility to a woman’s strength and fortitude than could any classically educated man.

During his lifetime, Patrick was unknown outside Ireland. He lived around the time of St Augustine, the great influencer of the Christian West, but his understanding of his faith, suggests Cahill, was quite different:

Patrick’s emotional grasp of Christian truth may have been greater than Augustine’s. Augustine looked into his own heart and found there the inexpressible anguish of each individual, which enabled him to articulate a theory of sin that has no equal - the dark side of Christianity. Patrick prayed, made peace with God, and then looked not only into his own heart but into the hearts of others. What he saw convinced him of the bright side - that even slave traders can turn into liberators, even murderers can act as peacemakers, even barbarians can take their place among the nobility of heaven.

What made Patrick this way? Ireland, I think. Places make people, and there is something special, something unique, about Irish spirituality, and especially about the early centuries of the Christian faith here. During the first five centuries of Irish Christianity, over 200 saints emerged from this tiny island. For comparison, the next ten centuries produced just three.

The shape that Christianity took in Ireland is not the same shape it took amongst civilised Roman Christians like Augustine. It was wilder in some strange way: embedded in the land, emerging from it in a shape that was in no way a betrayal of its teachings, but was in no way either a mirror of the civilised, imperial centre.

Irish Christianity today - despite its centuries of centralisation by a Rome that still behaves like an empire, despite its great diminishment - away from the centre, out in the mountains and the fields, still lives as something quiet, grounded, unique. I feel it every time I go out. Anyone can. It lives on Croagh Patrick, Ireland’s holy mountain, up which people still walk barefoot every year on the same day:

It lives in the wells in remote fields, and in the ruined chapels and blasted skelligs, and on the holy islands with broken towers, abandoned for centuries by people but perhaps not by the Spirit:

It lives in the the caves that saints once slept in, around which some power still hovers:

It lives in the land. It is waiting for something. I don’t know what.

It is patient. It is patient like Patricius was. He left us an island whose monks, as Cahill demonstrates, took into themselves, copied and kept alive all of classical and Christian learning in the face of barbarian fires. He left us a leafy, wet, strange and magical Christianity, entwined with the spirit of this Atlantic island.

And he left us a hymn, a song which to me speaks of the mystic, green spirit of true Irish - and British - Christianity still. St Patrick’s Breastplate, they call it; or sometimes The Deer’s Cry. It is a prayer, an incantation, a chant. Sixteen centuries later - well, it is still quite something. Try saying it aloud to yourself today, and then see what power swirls around you.

I arise today 
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.

I arise today
Through the strength of Christ's birth with His baptism,
Through the strength of His crucifixion with His burial,
Through the strength of His resurrection with His ascension,
Through the strength of His descent for the judgment of doom.

I arise today
Through the strength of the love of cherubim,
In the obedience of angels,
In the service of archangels,
In the hope of resurrection to meet with reward,
In the prayers of patriarchs,
In the predictions of prophets,
In the preaching of apostles,
In the faith of confessors,
In the innocence of holy virgins,
In the deeds of righteous men.

I arise today, through
The strength of heaven,
The light of the sun,
The radiance of the moon,
The splendor of fire,
The speed of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of the sea,
The stability of the earth,
The firmness of rock.

I arise today, through
God's strength to pilot me,
God's might to uphold me,
God's wisdom to guide me,
God's eye to look before me,
God's ear to hear me,
God's word to speak for me,
God's hand to guard me,
God's shield to protect me,
God's host to save me
From snares of devils,
From temptation of vices,
From everyone who shall wish me ill,
afar and near.

I summon today
All these powers between me and those evils,
Against every cruel and merciless power
that may oppose my body and soul,
Against incantations of false prophets,
Against black laws of pagandom,
Against false laws of heretics,
Against craft of idolatry,
Against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts man's body and soul;
Christ to shield me today
Against poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against wounding,
So that there may come to me an abundance of reward.

Christ with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ on my right,
Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.

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Sometimes it is difficult for me to write anything, because all I want to do is to be quiet. I have wanted this for years, and sometimes I achieve it, but it is fleeting. Maybe less fleeting by the year, though. Maybe the pull is growing, and the will and the ability. Growing slowly, like moss on a stone.

‘If anyone wants to learn the will of God’ said the Russian Orthodox priest Father Alexander Men, in one of his Lenten sermons1, ‘let him seek silence.’ Christians have known this forever. They have fled to deserts and caves, monasteries and sketes. They have taken up residence on the tops of pillars and in the boles of hollow trees. They knew that the voice of God was both still and small2 and could only be heard in silence, would only settle in a peaceful heart.

Silence - or at least, quiet; peace – is the natural environment of the Spirit of God, it seems, and we live in the world which appears purposefully designed to make this a great struggle. The roar of traffic, the planes crossing the skies, the hum of the electric wires, the black rectangles in our pockets which fragment our attention, stimulate our passions and take us anywhere but the place where we stand. Whatever the world is it makes silence, or even quiet, almost an impossibility. That means we cannot hear God. And when we cannot hear God, we are lost.

Most of us will never get the opportunity to live in the bole of a hollow tree, and probably wouldn't much like it if we did. But it is possible to be distracted by outward appearances. If you live in the middle of a city, a desert or a forest may seem an attractive haven of peace, but of course it is possible to flee to the wilderness and take your restless, neurotic, world-tangled heart with you. Probably it is quite common. Silence, a peaceful heart, the landing strip of the Holy Spirit, is not achieved simply by fleeing external noise, though this certainly helps. Most of the noise comes from within.

Last Sunday was the second Sunday of Lent in the Orthodox Church. Each Lenten Sunday is built around a different theme, usually around one of the Church Fathers or a story from the Gospels, each designed to take us deeper into what is sometimes called the ‘bright sadness’ of the Lenten descent. The second Sunday is dedicated to the memory of St Gregory Palamas, the fourteenth-century monk who is celebrated in the Orthodox Church for his defence of the spiritual tradition of ‘hesychasm’, which today forms the core of the contemplative spirituality of the Christian East.

Hesychasm is one of those Greek words often encountered in Christian Orthodoxy which has no direct English translation; it is usually rendered as ‘stillness’. Hesychastic prayer is the pursuit of inner stillness, not for its own sake, but because this is the opening move of the entire purpose of Orthodox Christian spirituality, which is to seek theosis. This is another one of those Greek words, usually translated as ‘union with God.’ Theosis, according to the hesychasts, is achieved in silence, through solitary prayer and living, the aim of which is to offer up a peaceful heart for the Holy Spirit to dwell within. ‘The Holy Spirit is extremely meek,” wrote the Coptic monk Matthew the Poor. ‘He finds no rest in cries and confusion, or in a heart that is cruel, unjust, wrathful, irascible, or proud.’3 Hesychasm seeks to create the conditions for the Spirit to settle in our hearts; something He can only do if our hearts are at peace.

St Gregory Palamas is celebrated for the intellectual battle he waged in the early 1300s with an Italian Orthodox monk named Barlaam, who had visited Mount Athos, seen the practice of hesychasm at first hand and been scandalised by it. Barlaam, it is said, had been trained in the Western Scholastic tradition, and was horrified by what today he might call the ‘woo’ of Eastern Christian mysticism. He nicknamed the hesychasts omphaloscopoi, our third Greek word of the day, which translates as ‘navel gazers’. Barlaam thought that the hesychasts were deluded and blasphemous; a position I still hear occasionally today from some Protestants. St Gregory took him on, and his defence of hesychasm won the day in the East. In the process, he helped cement its place at the heart of Orthodox spirituality, where it remains today.

The practice most commonly associated with the hesychastic tradition is that of the Jesus Prayer, which all Orthodox Christians - and plenty of non-Orthodox ones for that matter - are familiar with, and which many of us practice daily, either in the boles of trees or in suburban homes before work or after dinner. It is not, of course, necessary to live in a desert or on Mount Athos to pursue inner silence, though again it may help. It is probably not true that it can be found as easily in the midst of a megacity as it can in a forest, at least for most of us: the temptations, and the distractions, are simply greater, which is why people flee in the first place. Still, the principle is clear, and is much enunciated by the Fathers of the Christian Church: the Spirit of God will only settle in a peaceful heart. Outer peace makes it easier to achieve inner peace, but it doesn’t create it. Inner peace is achievable in central London, just as neurotic self-obsession is possible in a desert cave.

This subject has obsessed me for years: the subject of silence, of stillness. I once wrote a book about the need to pursue it, and the difficulty of pursuing it as a writer. That book, Savage Gods, was a work of neurotic self-obsession if ever there was one, but it worried away at a question that had grown in me for years. It first arose, I think, when I began practicing Chan Buddhism at the age of forty: a practice which turned out to be a gateway drug to Eastern Christianity, just as soon as I was able to ask Christ to open the gate for me. Buddhism, like hesychasm, begins with the search for inner stillness, which it sees as a necessary precursor to understanding the delusions we tend to call ‘reality.’ This is entirely in accordance with Christian teaching, and indeed with modern understandings of human psychology.

The thing is, once you begin to examine those delusions, you see that one of the most pernicious is the construction of a self-identity. This is necessary to survive in the world, probably, but soon enough it becomes a yoke around the neck. This construction labelled ‘Paul Kingsnorth’, for example, now has a public reputation as a writer with certain opinions and a particular history. His future work, and indeed his income, is in some way reliant on keeping this fiction going. It is not a ‘fiction’ in the sense of it being a deliberate falsehood, but it is a construction, which means it is a story, which means that the actual me has ended up stuck inside it, as we all do with our stories in the end.

Things are particularly bad for this ‘Paul Kingsnorth’ character, because he makes his living writing articles like this one. Not only does he need to do this to eat, but more existentially, he has written for so long that he now sees the world almost entirely through the lens of the written word. Even if he wasn’t getting paid to write things down, he would be writing them down anyway, which would just continue to encrust the artificial world around the artificial self, and make it harder to escape from both.

Whether we are writers or not, we create these personal fictions we call ‘identities’, and the older we get, the harder it is for that simple, primal stillness which is the precursor to true prayer to break back through. Back when I practiced Buddhism, I remember seeing with crystal clarity, at a level far deeper than the intellect, that if I wanted to progress spiritually I had to stop pumping out all these words. This was not because language itself was inherently bad - it is hardly avoidable - but because of something at once fuzzier and clearer, which even now I find it hard to explain. It was that words were part of the fiction of the world. It was so clear then - and it remains clear now - that spiritual progress, that work of theosis, requires us to drop all of our illusions. To smash through the cement of words and concepts and identities and opinions. To see ourselves naked before God. To make ourselves simple again.

Jesus, in more than one of the Gospels, talks about children, and what they have to teach us. In Luke’s Gospel4, when the disciples attempt to shoo away groups of parents who want him to bless their babies, Jesus rounds on them. ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them’, he says, ‘for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.’

In Matthew’s Gospel, meanwhile, the disciples are jostling amongst themselves to achieve Jesus’s favour - or perhaps they are just anxious for some clear guidance. ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ they ask Him.5 In response, Jesus calls a child over to them. ‘Truly I tell you,’ he says, ‘unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.’

The ‘kingdom of heaven’, then, belongs to those who ‘become like little children’. In fact, unless we ‘change’, and learn to ‘receive the kingdom of God like a little child’, we will ‘never enter it.’ Jesus says this twice, and very emphatically. What does it mean?

Simplify, I think. To become childlike means to return again to the state in which God created us. To drop those self-created ‘personalities’. Children do not have strong opinions about the world. They do not - yet - have self-created egos which will trap them. They tend to move through the world wide-eyed, and to accept its magic. To become like a child is also to become like the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, a pair of striking images which Jesus uses elsewhere to urge his followers away from complexity and towards simplicity;6 away from words and towards experience; away from noise and towards silence.

I have been struck repeatedly over the years by the fact that some of my favourite Christian saints were ‘uneducated’ people, in the world’s terms. The holiest of them, those who practiced straightforward Christian love with no frills, so often seem to have barely attended school. Some of them could barely read. I don’t think this is a coincidence.

In his little book Do You Know Yourself?7, a collection of talks on Christianity and psychology, the late Fr Symeon Kragiopoulos, a Greek Bishop with a reputation as a ‘profound anatomist of the soul’, anatomises those of us who have what he calls ‘complications’ within: a description which I would guess applies to most modern people, and perhaps most pre-modern ones as well. ‘Someone who has complications within him, who has been blocked internally … can't live the spiritual life,’ he writes, starkly.

‘The harm that has happened to humanity,’ he goes on to say, ‘and particularly to contemporary humanity – that is, to us – it's so great that in our effort to disentangle the complications that exist inside us we tangle them up even more.’ Humans, he says, begin life with ‘this blue sky in their souls, this clear heaven, this purity and holiness.’ In the beginning we are children, as Jesus tells his disciples to be again. But we complicate everything as we grow, with our stories, with our egotistic scrabbling, with all the stuff of life from which there is no escape. We build necessary shells to protect ourselves, and ‘the heaven of [our] souls is clouded and darkened.’ This is what it means to be ‘Fallen.’

What can help us, then? Christianity we say - if we are Christians, that is - but Fr Symeon is not convinced. ‘I'd dare to say that even Christianity is getting tangled up inside us and is itself getting mixed up,’ he says. Those of us who call ourselves ‘Christians’ do not have the simple, childlike souls we are called to embrace. ‘In the final analysis,’ he says, ‘while a person is Christian, while he believes in the Gospel, while he believes in Jesus Christ, while he confesses and receives communion, he is blocked.’ The blockage comes from the fact that so many of us are influenced more by ‘the spirit of western Christianity, which we perhaps call Christian civilisation, than by the Christianity of the Gospel and the Fathers, by that Christianity that really redeems a human being, that cleanses man and releases him from all those parasites and from all those pitfalls and makes it pure and clean.’

All of which, I suppose, takes us back to where we started: the silence. I have just written 2,500 words of noise to try and get at the matter of silence, and of course have not achieved it, because it is not achieved this way. Lent is a strange journey of deepening: I have learned this very slowly over the years. I am far from being any kind of ascetic, and my Lenten discipline regularly disappoints me, but even so, something seems to happen every year. This year, I have not wanted to say much for weeks. Even when I write, I write about silence. Something is calling me away. I am still not sure where to go, or how.

It took me a long time as a Christian to even begin to understand that much of the work, at least for beginners, is simply in shutting up. There is no point in worrying about whether you are silent or childlike or holy enough, or in trying to make yourself some kind of holy ascetic through force of will. Force of will doesn’t get you that far. You can run off to the forest or the desert if you like: some people are called to that life and some people are not. But we are all called to make a desert of our hearts. The Holy Spirit will alight there, we are told, when it finds a peace to welcome it.

However, we do it, so much of the work, I think now, is struggling to allow silence a place to grow. When we do that, much of our overcomplicated, worldly nonsense just falls away, even if only for a second. The cement cracks, our stories shatter, and we begin to see how to walk away from ourselves. In the silence, perhaps we discover how to be children again.

Father Symeon should have the last word, I think, because I have written too many already:

‘Spiritual work happens secretly in the heart. Externally, let everything else threaten us. Like the sea: The wind blows, waves rise. But deep down it’s all quiet, peaceful, serene.

This is how a man who trusts in God lives. There might be a wild rage out there, but deep down nothing hinders the soul from having a mystical communion with God, a mystical love for God. Quietly and mystically, in a special way that the heart perceives, the Lord is whispering: “Don’t be afraid. I am here. Keep walking this path. Keep loving me, keep believing in me, keep following me”.

It’s not enough to suffer myriad things in life. When, though, you believe in God and accept all these - whatever it is that happens to you - gladly, for the love of God, God will make a saint out of you.’8

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High on the sea and dreaming, I saw fire and serpents. High on the sea and dreaming, I heard the song of a man I knew but whose face I had never seen.

A merchant I have been always, on sea and land and river. Trade is the way to wealth, and wealth makes life. Tell me that this is not so, and I will finger you for a rich man. Only the rich can disdain wealth, and I was never rich. My father was a poor man and ours was a poor life. I told this to my mother once, and she scolded me. God loves the poor, she said, and punishes the rich.

I have been selling since I was knee high. I have a knack for it. Now I haul pilgrims to the Holy Land and relics back to England, or I haul pottery from France to Scotland, or trinkets to wherever I can sell them for the best price. Why would God love the poor, I asked my mother, when it takes so much work to amass any wealth at all? Does God love idleness? My mother said nothing much in return. I was fourteen.

Now comes the song.

It is not a heavenly song. It is the song of a man like me. It has come to me in my sleep, more than once these past weeks. At first I thought it was mermaids or Sirens or somesuch. The sea is full of terrors. Some sailors are unlucky, but my luck has always held me. I have never seen a monster in a storm. I have never sailed on a ship which foundered. Not yet.

The deck will rock you to sleep or toss you awake, and in the rocking sometimes comes the song. It is a gentle song. I cannot hear what is sung, or who is sung to, but the voice is of an old man singing, I think, to his god. Old men are short on time in that way. They are at the threshold. They need their gods to sing back. They need to be heard now, for they have much to say and who knows if anybody hears them at all?

Last night, though, I heard something else.

It was a dream, of course. These are all dreams. They mean nothing. The rolling of a ship’s deck can produce the most fantastical pictures in the mind of an exhausted man, and if that man has also been on the ale or the rum or whatever spirit is at hand from whatever land he has been to - well, then the pictures can get even stranger. Sometimes it is a regret to wake from the lands a ship’s deck can take you.

Wild honey and acorns, said the voice from across the waves.

Now I was in a forest of high green trees, trunks as old as our land. A green darkness, a green darkness and the voice.

Wild honey and acorns.

In the wood, a clearing; in the clearing, a man. A stocky man, short, bearded. A man who seemed as if he could break you if he chose, but would never choose. Hair becoming white. A man singing to himself, or to someone I could not see.

Sainte marie uirgine
moder ihesu cristes nazarene
onfo schild help þin godric
onfang bring heilich wið þe in godes riche

Singing to his god, he was, as I knew he would be, as I knew he had been for many years, somehow, though I knew nothing of him at all.

Sainte marie xristes bur
maidenes clenhad moderes flur
dilie min sinne rix in min mod
bring me to winne wið þe selfd God

Who are you? I asked him. The man looked up and I saw him and how he lived there. He sat on the ground in a holed coat of coarse cloth. There was a fire before him. Around the fire were curled three snakes and a mouse. They slept, as if he had sung them into drowsiness.

I thought you would come, he said, looking up at me. I was still on the ship somehow, but I was in the wood also. It was summer, but winter too. Dreams are like this.

Who are you? I asked again.

Wild honey and acorns, he seemed to reply. Crab apple and balsam, nettle and the water from the spring.

And snakes, I replied.

And rabbits and donkeys and pigs! he said, smiling into the fire.

A dream cannot be reasoned with. I am not sure what else happened. You will know what I mean. A dream can be a feeling as a much as a story. You wake with the taste of it still on your lips. This time I woke and wished I was back in the forest. The sea was grey like Scottish granite, and a storm was coming.

But the next night I was there again, and so he was he. Sat by the fire with his snakes and his mouse and his songs to the saints and martyrs.

Sainte Nicholaes godes druð
tymbre us faire scone hus
At þi burth at þi bare
Sainte nicholaes bring vs wel þare

I wish I could sing, my dream had me say.

A mouse will sing through you, said the old man.

I would like to fly and not sail, I replied.

You cannot fly if you are burdened. You must be weightless.

This forest is a vast place, I said to him.

You will come to know it, he said. And you will sing to it, my man.

Who are you?

It is time you got off the boat, boy, and gave up the selling. It is time you walked away from the sea. Walk and walk until you find your place.

I love the sea.

You do not. You are tired of it and you are called. You are called by the singer, the great singer. He is looking for you, he is hunting.

I am not a rabbit.

You are prey and will be caught and then you will be born.

I think some wave must have hit the ship with force then, for in the dream everything shook and of a sudden I was high in a tree and then falling. But he caught me and I was back.

The singer seeks you, he said again. The great singer.

I feel sick, I said.

You will be, until you leave the sea and come to the woods.

He poked at the fire with something. I saw how rough his hands looked. Sailors hands, they were. Scarred hands, just like mine. I would know them anywhere.

Who are you? I said, one last time.

You know me well, Godric, he said. As well as you know yourself. I looked into his eyes then, for the first time and the last, and I saw that I did know him. The hands, the weathered face, the beard, the voice even. I knew them all, I saw then, as well as I knew anything on this Earth at all. I knew them from the inside.

I seemed to be floating again, above the ground. I seemed to be flying away

Come home, Godric, said the old man by the fire, the old man with the snakes and the mouse, with the honey and nettles, with the voice that sang in tones I had heard all my life.

Do not delay now. Come home.

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Lent comes round again

Hello readers, from the first day of Orthodox Lent. The longer I have been an Orthodox Christian, the deeper the meaning of Lent has become. I look forward to it every year now - because of, and not despite, the fasting rules which the Orthodox Church, alone amongst Christian confessions, still maintains in full. Deepening is the meaning of Lent: deepening your faith and your relationship with God. It isn’t really about ‘giving things up’, though it entails that. It’s about shedding unnecessary skins. Each Lent, I walk a little further away from ‘the world’ and its concerns, which also means walking a little further away from my false image of myself, and all of my selfish concerns. Walk far enough away, and there is nothing left to shelter you but the Presence who lies outside the world, and is waiting for you to come home.

Last autumn, in my little podcast series, I interviewed one of my very favourite Orthodox writers, Father Stephen Freeman, a man who combines wisdom, knowledge and down-to-Earth humour in just the right proportions. Here is an essay on Lent which he wrote a few years ago and has just republished. It is well worth a read, wherever you find yourself. I’d welcome your thoughts and stories on all things Lenten below the line.

Venturing into the world

I’m feeling a lot more human than I was at the turn of the year, for which I give thanks. I surprised myself by managing to write my recent 3000 word essay about my AI campaign, and though it tired me out, it didn’t knock me out, which is progress. I’m not feeling fully human again, but I am much better than I was, and I’m confident that I am on the road to recovery, though I’m still going to assume it will take me all year, and I’m taking it slowly.

I’m going to be a lot less public this year than I was in 2025, but I have committed myself to a couple of events in the first half of the year, one here in Ireland, and one in Britain.

• Coming up first is the second instalment of the British Saints Convention, taking place in Walsingham, Norfolk, in May. The brainchild of my friends Mariamni and Marcus Plested, who together steward the wonderful St Seraphim’s Trust in Walsingham, it will be a weekend-long gathering themed around the saints of Britain, and the landscapes they made holy. This ancient and holy isle is brimming with saints waiting to be rediscovered in an age which needs them. There will be talks, stories, poetry, conversation and music. I’ll be speaking, as will Rowan Williams, Martin Shaw, Marcus Plested and others. Marcus’s Substack The Orthodox Station gives a bit of a taster of what to expect. You need to buy tickets in advance, and they are limited.

• On a very different note, I will also be appearing, in June, at the Borris Festival of Writing and Ideas, in Carlow, Ireland. This is a literary and cultural shindig held in a big house, and I’ll be on stage talking about Against The Machine: the only time I plan to do so in public this year, and only the second time in Ireland. Details and tickets are here.

AI and wood shavings

One of the few interviews I’ve agreed to so far this year was with Mortise and Tenon magazine in Maine, USA. I did so because it’s not just another Substack or website, but an actual magazine about actual hand-made things. M&T is a beautifully-produced family-run periodical by and for hand-tool woodworkers, and it combines practice with philosophy. I was interviewed by them about the Machine and its impacts for their forthcoming issue: you can read about that here. You can only read the full conversation by subscribing to their print journal, though. Take out a subscription before this Friday, 27th, and it will start with this current issue. American woodwork-lovers can do that here, and those outside America here.

What I didn’t expect when I spoke to M&T was how much enthusiasm they would show for my Writers Against AI campaign. Not only have they changed their masthead to incorporate the logo, but they have created an entire website dedicated to the campaign. It features my essay, and a selection of other writers who are already resisting AI in their work. Have a browse - you can find it here - and do spread the word. It is a great landing site for AI refusers. Maybe you have some other names to suggest to them too.

Substack and the Machine

On the subject of websites, I’ve decided I’m not engaging any more with the ‘Notes’ function here on Substack. When I first started writing here five years ago, Substack was a simple, clean online place for mostly thoughtful and often dissident writers and readers. It was blogging, essentially, only a version that writers could make a bit of a living from. These days, Substack is becoming just another social media site, with notes and tweets and hot takes and arguments and culture war drivel flooding through the cracks. It’s a shame, and if it continues I might be heading somewhere else, or nowhere at all.

In the meantime, though, I’m neither going to post any ‘Notes’, nor engage with or read them in the future. I have also shut down the ‘Chat’ facility attached to the Abbey, because it was being spammed, probably by AI bots. Such is the spirit of the age, my friends.

Lonely as a cloud

The antidote to that spirit, of course is - reality. Nature, creation. The outdoors. Wind, rain, animal life, soaring birds, wet grass, and more rain. The good news is that reality is still out there, and isn’t going away. On that note, I am very taken by reader Kamil Trzebiatowki’s new short film about his walking pilgrimage through Britain. As this year progresses I hope to get out there again myself, and restart my Sunday Pilgrimage series here.

You can watch Kamil’s film, and read more about his wanderings, here. He also has a YouTube channel. They may help inspire you as the darkness of winter continues. His next project is a series of films inspired by one of my childhood heroes, the legendary English hillwalker, artist and author Alfred Wainwright. Now there was a man who would have had no time at all for books made by AI.

That’s enough for this month. Enjoy your own winter wanderings, and please do open a conversation below about anything you’d like.

When I was a child, I didn’t know any writers. Neither did my parents. I didn’t grow up in that kind of world. Before I was a teenager, I’m not sure I knew anyone who had been to a university, even; not that I was paying much attention anyway. I didn’t think those places were for the likes of us.

I was a reader though, thanks to my mum and dad. My mum used to read to me every night when I was young, and both my parents encouraged my love of books, which they shared. We didn’t live in the kind (or the size) of house that had a lot of bookshelves in it, but the public library solved that problem. Like most bookworms, I worked my way through it, discovering whole worlds I had never imagined were out there, both real and fantastical, and sometimes both at once.

This was in the suburbs of Greater London back in the seventies and eighties, which now seems like a very long time ago indeed. No personal computers, no mobile phones, no CCTV cameras, no 5G towers, obviously no Internet. Back then, our analogue tech was confined to buildings, and when you went out you were out. People looked at each other in cafes, and talked on buses. Books and the telly were where you got your stories from. Often the telly had got them from the books first.

Maybe the book was the only technology I ever really fell in love with. It is a technology, of course; so are words. Language - languages, since we have so many of them, though fewer than we once did - are one of the key markers of our humanity. We speak, we tell stories, we write the stories down and thus we are able to share them with people we will never meet and who will never meet us, but who will know us in some way by our words. Humans are storytelling animals if we are anything at all. All of our religions begin with stories, and all of our nations and cultures. Our personal biographies are stories we construct. We tell stories by naming everything else that lives. We tell stories about progress and decline, good and evil, kings and peasants, fairies and ghosts, detectives and serial killers. We sing stories to music, and record them and play them back again and again. We fight over stories, and we send our sons out to die for them.

I never imagined when I was a child that I would or could ever be ‘a writer.’ From where I was reading, in the small front bedroom of our 1930s semi, writers were mythical beings, like wizards or emperors. You knew they were out there somewhere, but you never met them. Still, I dreamed of one day having a book out with my name on. Perhaps if I became really famous, it might even have one of those instantly recognisable little Penguin logos on it, like so many of the paperbacks I read as a child, though this was too much really to hope for.

Well, here I am, four decades on, author of a book with a Penguin logo on - and, indeed, several books bearing the colophon of Faber & Faber, the other publisher which I dreamed (this time as a teenage author of terrible poems) might one day accept me into its hallowed halls. Here I am, and here we all are, but everything has changed, and is about to change further and faster and forever. Stories will keep being told, of course. It’s just that their authors might no longer be human.

I am talking, of course, about the rise of Artificial Intelligence. I have written before - here and in my recent book - about some of the implications of this rise as I see them, and I won’t rehash them now. But if you want a very recent software update, as it were, you could do worse than to refer to the writings of Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic AI. Anthropic is a Silicon Valley corporation dedicated to building intelligent machines, and Amodei has written two interconnected essays about them which are worth reading if you want to understand what is happening, and who is driving it.

The first, written in 2024, is entitled Machines of Loving Grace, and it is a paean to the wonderful, transformed world that AI could bring us. It is long and detailed, and if you swapped out the talk about computers with talk about pistons and steam, it could have been written by H. G. Wells in about 1890. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, you can skip to the conclusion, which informs us that ‘the defeat of most diseases, the growth in biological and cognitive freedom, the lifting of billions of people out of poverty to share in the new technologies [and] a renaissance of liberal democracy and human rights’ are all within our reach. If we can just trust AI systems to do most of our work for us, these things can be achieved - hold your breath - ‘within the next 5 to10 years’.

Here in 2026, though, Dario is sounding a more sombre note. He still believes everything he wrote two years ago (or says he does), but two years is a long, long time in the world of AI. So, last month, he wrote a new essay - The Adolescence of Technology - this time taking a detailed look at AI’s possible downsides. His aim is to ‘map out the risks that we are about to face and try to begin making a battle plan to defeat them.’ That’s right: a battle plan. Why, you might ask, do we need to plan for battle against our potential saviours? And why is one of the people who is building them telling us to sharpen our swords? Are we facing a war against the machines already? Have we gone from H. G. Wells to Yevgeny Zamyatin in two short years?

Again, Amodei’s essay is long, but the conclusion is very different. He believes his company may only be a year away from a situation where its AIs are able to build new AIs themselves, autonomously, with no human instruction or intervention. These self-replicating AIs will be ‘smarter than all Nobel prize winners’, and will not be especially motivated to obey the humans around them. This is not a futurist fantasy: his company is already halfway through their construction, and working hard to complete it.

What will the results be? Amodei puts it like this:

Suppose a literal ‘country of geniuses’ were to materialize somewhere in the world in 2027. Imagine, say, 50 million people, all of whom are much more capable than any Nobel Prize winner, statesman, or technologist. The analogy is not perfect, because these geniuses could have an extremely wide range of motivations and behavior, from completely pliant and obedient, to strange and alien in their motivations. But sticking with the analogy for now, suppose you were the national security advisor of a major state, responsible for assessing and responding to the situation. Imagine, further, that because AI systems can operate hundreds of times faster than humans, this ‘country’ is operating with a time advantage relative to all other countries: for every cognitive action we can take, this country can take ten.

Any half-decent national security adviser, suggests Amodei, would advise his boss that they are facing ‘the single most serious national security threat we’ve faced in a century, possibly ever.’

Let’s pause here, and remind ourselves that the man issuing this warning about world-ending machines is currently engaged in building them.

Faced with this kind of thing, it can seem almost irrelevant to worry about the future of storytelling. Who cares about novels if the entire world is about to be consumed by killer machines armed with Nobel Prizes? But this would be to miss something important: Amodei is telling a story. It is the same story that Silicon Valley tells about everything. It is the story of Progress, carried forward by interconnected, and increasingly biologically-embedded, digital technologies. It is the story of how we use our big brains to create bigger brains, which then solve all of our problems. Ultimately, we will become happy immortals living in a world of plenty. There will be no poverty or grief. There will be no death. The Earth will be healed. All we need to do is to trust the machines.

I dug into this story at great length in my recent book Against The Machine: indeed, the whole book is an attempt to unpack and challenge it. But whichever side you find yourself on, the fact is that both Amodei and I are telling stories; or perhaps different versions of the same one. His is culturally dominant right now, and has all the money and power behind it. It is manifesting in your life and mine every minute, whether we like it or not. Even books with Penguin logos on them don’t stand a chance against a story like this. It is the tale of our century.

But that doesn’t make it true.

My 2021 novel Alexandria is set a thousand years from now, in a world where Amodei’s hopes and fears have both come true. A wild and empty land - empty of humans, at least - is the setting for the tale of a small band of post-civilised humans in the re-flooded fens of eastern England. They are not survivors of some climatic or nuclear apocalypse. They are some of the few remaining people who have refused to leave what Amodei refers to as their ‘physical limitations’ - otherwise known as bodies - and be ‘uploaded’ into an immortal post-human paradise. They have banded together and created their own earth-bound stories to keep them, as the kids would say these days, Touching Grass. They have their own gods and their own tales, and the Machine is their deadly foe.

Overseeing this world is (what appears to be) a vast, super-intelligent AI named Wayland, which sees its task as compassionately removing humanity from the Earth. Given the human body’s propensity for destruction, it reasons, the proposal makes perfect sense. A world without human bodies is a world without war, genocide, ecological destruction, rape and murder. Disembodied human mindfiles, by contrast, could live forever in the cloud, and never suffer. For the sake of progress, evolution, compassion or whatever you choose to call it, the body - biology itself - should be excised from the Earth. This is a story too.

Alexandria, along with three of my other books, was one of many thousands pirated by Amodei’s Anthropic corporation in one of the biggest acts of mass corporate copyright theft in history. With deep irony, but with no permission, Anthropic have been using Alexandria to train their AI systems. A class action lawsuit, filed against them on behalf of a group of writers and publishers, was settled in September 2025. Anthropic agreed to pay out a total of $1.5 billion: the largest copyright resolution in American history. This is peanuts to Anthropic, of course, whose valuation is currently approaching $350 billion. But sometimes the little guy strikes back, and wins.

Where do we stand then - writers and readers both? Where do our stories stand?

One thing that is very clear is that AI systems will soon be able to write serious novels, poems, screenplays and indeed essays, and that they may be indistinguishable from work written by humans. Maybe plenty of them will be better. The list of ‘professional’ jobs that currently face the chop from the advance of AI is long and daunting, but every form of writing is very much amongst them.

This, of course, is just the latest phase of the long Industrial Revolution which began, at least in Europe, in the eighteenth century, and is still playing out. Over that time, the Machine has destroyed more livelihoods and lifeways than we could count, from handloom weavers to farmers. Now the same Machine - bigger, faster, digitised - is coming for the bourgeoisie, which is why we are suddenly seeing articles all over the legacy media about the terrible impact of AI on jobs and careers. You never saw those articles when the blacksmiths went out of business. But capitalism has no mercy, even for its own satraps.

I don’t much care about jobs - even mine. Not here, anyhow. I am not writing about economics; I am writing about stories. Telling stories is neither a job nor a career, and any writer who thinks otherwise is probably no good. Telling stories is what all humans do; it’s just that some of us do it more than others. Some of us become obsessed with stories and are thus able to see them everywhere and begin to understand how they work.

The world emerging now is brim-full of non-human, and inhuman, stories. It began with crappy deepfake videos and is very quickly accelerating into a landscape of ‘storytelling’ that is artifice all the way down. If machines can produce our food and light our houses and employ us all in whatever it is we do, then they can certainly tell our stories for us, and perhaps they will need to. The rise of the Machine was never going to stop where we might want it to. In the end, it will consume and colonise everything, including our bodies; including our tales.

Nothing is sacred now, and nobody will be immune from the coming age of machine stories. Not the established storytelling institutions of the state: witness the BBC resurrecting the much-loved crime writer Agatha Christie to ‘teach’ their online writing course. Not the rich and the powerful: the audiobook version of Melania Trump’s autobiography sounds like it was voiced by her, but is in fact entirely narrated by an AI, which I’m sure will disappoint all you avid lovers of great literature.

There are, of course, writers out there championing all of this. They believe that AI will ‘help’ their creativity. I’ve met some of these people. I don’t understand them, and I don’t think they understand what is going on. They don’t see that they are food, and so are all of their words.

If AI doesn’t kill us, it will certainly render us incapable of understanding what reality is. The age of AI, in the words of Gabriel Rossman in a powerful essay for Compact magazine, is a ‘great oxygenation event for the intellect.’ Having outsourced our physical labour to machines (and poor people in poor countries, who we never have to meet or think about), we are now outsourcing our intellectual labour to them too. Every teacher and academic knows that some students are now using AIs to write their essays: one university professor I know has his students write their submissions by hand, to avoid the possibility. Another recently told me that his students can no longer read entire books: they have to be assigned short extracts instead, because they can’t concentrate on a whole novel. He is a professor of English Literature.

There is one question that both of Dario Amodei’s essays struggle to answer: the biggest question of all. If the machines can do our research and write our stories, and build our houses and think ‘smarter’ thoughts than we can and all the rest of it - what is our role? What is the point of humanity at all? For the subset of us who write and tell stories, another question emerges too: can we even find the space, away from the buzzing of the Machine, to incubate the stories we want to tell? Stories descend when you make the right space for them within you. Writers are vessels. How can we possibly tell real, human, stories if our heads are full of digital noise? Will the ‘writers’ of the future even know what stories are, away from the enabling, imprisoning Panopticon of the digital world?

More to the point: what can we do?

Once I wanted to be a writer, and now I am. And as a writer, I want to take a stand, however small, against the Ignorance Machine of Artificial Intelligence. Despite the rush and the pull of this insane age, we are not powerless. We remain human, and we have choices. The deskilling and the dehumanising impacts of AI can be both resisted and refused, at least in our own lives. Nobody can make us use these things - not yet, at least. Nobody can stop us reading or writing real stories. We can decide, as much as it is within our power, what to engage with - and what not to.

I have decided, as a writer, not to consciously engage with AI in any way in the course of my work, and I want to give other writers - and readers - who share these views a chance to demonstrate it, and band together in refusal of the machines and in celebration of raw human creativity and the power of stories. This essay, then, is the launch of a campaign of refusal and resistance. I have no funding and no plan, and I don’t intend to run anything - but I don’t need to. Like the Internet itself, resistance to AI is decentralised. Each of us is a campaign hub. Saying no to AI and yes to human stories can happen anywhere. It costs nothing. You can start right here, right now, if you haven’t started already.

In the war against stories, I am taking a side. If you take the same side, then we’re in it together. Let’s gang up. There’s strength in numbers.

A Manifesto

I’m calling this the Writers Against AI campaign. It is built on a simple three-point manifesto. To support the campaign, a writer must make three pledges:

• I will not use AI in my work as a writer.

• I will not support writers who use AI in their work.

• I will support writers, illustrators, editors and others in related fields whose work is entirely human-made.

The first of these points draws a line for our own creative work. We say, as storytellers: we will remain human. With the second, we refuse to lend our voices or our money to anyone who uses this technology to replace human creativity. Finally, we commit to doing something positive: supporting, financially and morally, other creators who are drawing the line too, and refusing to be dehumanised.

If you are a writer who agrees with these pledges and who wants to sign up to this campaign - well, that agreement is all it takes. You’re in, and there’s a very simple way to show it. Colorado craftsman Justin Clark has created a set of logos that can be downloaded and used by any writer who wants to adhere to these three points and resist the use of AI in writing and publishing. Justin is not a writer - or, indeed, a graphic designer - but he responded to my call for logos back in September, and I think his creations are striking and powerful. It’s not just writers this thing threatens, of course. All craftspeople are under attack. But we have an advantage: we have both hands and hearts.

You can find Justin’s campaign logos on this page. They are free to use and anti-copyright for any writer who supports the aims of this campaign. Put them on your website or blog, or print them in your books if you like. You don’t have to ask permission: you just have to commit to the three pledges, and use your words to support them.

‘But what about readers?’

But, I hear you cry, I am a reader, not a writer, and I hate AI too! What can I do? Never fear, because you are also catered for. Justin has also produced reader-themed versions of the campaign logos:

They can be found, and downloaded, in the same place. Print them out and stick them in your books, or on your website, or on the self-driving car windscreens of any AI developers who live in your neighbourhood.

What happens next? The answer is: you do. I have said my piece here, with this essay and manifesto, and Justin has done his work with these striking images. This is the firing of a starting gun. How far the race is run is now up to you. If you want to join the campaign, all you need to do it take this little manifesto and these images far and wide. Use them in your own work. Write about them. Badger others. Above all, continue to write stories with only your hand, your heart and your human brain.

Together, we can all take a stand. If we don’t, our children and grandchildren will not be visiting public libraries to seek out battered old paperbacks containing human-produced magic. They will be listening to AIs reading them AI-created stories through their neuralink brain chips.

Nothing is off limits now - unless we place limits around it. At the very least, we can all plant a seed. Isn’t that how we learned to love stories in the first place?

Today is the feast day of St Brigid, one of Ireland's three patron saints. But who was Brigid - and why do we hear less about her these days, and more about the ‘Goddess Brigid’ who seems to be taking her place? This is a slightly rewritten version of an essay originally posted here in 2024. I think it’s more relevant by the year.

I’ve been spending a lot of time these past few months with St Brigid of Kildare. Last year, my priest asked me to take on the intimidating task of writing an Akathist hymn for her1. An Akathist is a long hymn of praise dedicated to a particular saint, the formula for which is long-established, traceable as it is to 6th-century Byzantium. There are not many Akathists to Western saints, given how new the Eastern Orthodox tradition is here, and since St Brigid is one of Ireland’s three patron saints, it seemed about time to give her her own Akathist hymn, to be sung on her patron day - which is today.

I can’t say how well I did at this endeavour, but I like a challenge, and when a saint prods you in this way, it is not right - maybe it is not possible - to refuse. Regardless of the result though, this project meant that I had to go back to the sources for the life of St Brigid, which gave me an interesting insight not only into what the life of this early Irish saint may have involved, but also of how it was seen by others - then and now.

You don’t have to read many lives of early Christian saints, be they in Ireland, Egypt or anywhere else, to notice some themes emerging. These ‘lives’ are not biographies in the modern sense; rather they are stories of spiritual warfare. They are an attempt to demonstrate the holiness and importance of the saint in question, and through them the truth of the Christian faith. Sometimes this spiritual warfare is spoken of in terms of the inner struggle, but more often - overwhelmingly so in the life of St Brigid - they manifest externally as tales of miracles and magic.

Brigid was a Christian nun, Abbess and, interestingly, Bishop (at least technically, if not in practice) who founded a monastery at Kildare in Ireland in the sixth century, and was an influential figure in the Irish Christianity of the time. There are several sources for her life, the most comprehensive of which is the Vita Sanctae Brigitae, written by a monk named Cogitosus around the year 650, about 125 years after her death. The Vita tells of Brigid’s early life: she was, we learn, the symbolically-intriguing daughter of a slave and a king, adopted and raised by a druid, who prophesied her future greatness. A saintly figure from a young age, her love of Christ led her early into the monastic life (she refused several offers of marriage, going so far as to pluck her own eyes out when one suitor told her how beautiful they were) and set out instead on a monastic life.

As a nun and Abbess, Brigid became renowned for giving everything she had (and sometimes things that other people had) to the poor. This was a pattern begun in childhood, when she had given her mother’s entire store of butter to a poor family and her father’s jewel-encrusted sword to a beggar. She once said she would give the whole of the Kingdom of Leinster to the poor if she could. The force of her personality, her love for the weak and the work done by the monastery she founded had her considered a saint in her own lifetime, as did her miracles, of which my favourite is the turning of water into beer: a very northern European version of Jesus’s wedding gift. After her death, the ‘Mary of the Gael’ became the centre of a cult across Ireland and further afield. Her miraculous help with childbirth, her protection of flocks and herds, and the healing power of her wells testified - still, in fact, testify - to her continued presence in the landscape.

That, at any rate, is the Christian version of her life. But there is a neo-pagan version too, which is gaining in popularity as Irish Christianity withers. This has it that St Brigid - if she even existed - was a Christianisation of the pre-Christian ‘Celtic’ goddess Brigid, said to have been the goddess of fire, smithwork and poetry, amongst other things. St Brigid’s Day is, we are told, the same date as the old pre-Christian festival of ‘Imbolc’, which was reworked by the Church as a means of suppressing or appropriating the old religion. Mother goddesses are more fashionable these days than Christian saints, and so it goes with the grain of the times to tell a tale of a female goddess displaced by a male God.

You can find versions of this story all over the web. It is harder, in fact, to find reliable information about the Christian saint than to find unreliable stories about the goddess she supposedly supplanted. Here, for example, you can learn all about this ‘ancient Celtic goddess’, who seems to have cleaved to some surprisingly modern values:

[Brigid was] a triple goddess – the goddess of healing symbolised by the element of water, goddess of the alchemical force of fire, and goddess of poetry. In this respect she represents every woman and our unique talents, skills and qualities. Too often we put ourselves in boxes, limited by cultural stereotypes in an effort to fit in. Brigid urges you to develop and express all your gifts.

This Brigid appears to be the goddess of the therapeutic age. The same website informs us that her namesake and successor, St Brigid, followed in her footsteps, being as she was a feminist, a lesbian, an abortionist and an ass-kicking social justice activist, who may have looked something like this:

Elsewhere, the organisers of a series of nationwide events to celebrate the saint’s life inform us that the ‘values championed by St. Brigid’ included ‘faith, spirituality, biodiversity, sustainability, arts and culture, social justice, peace, hospitality, and education.’ No mention here of Christ, the Church or the gospels, which you might imagine would be found somewhere amongst the ‘values’ of a Christian nun. Perhaps they ran out of space.

‘The study of the past with one eye upon the present’, wrote the great English historian Herbert Butterfield, ‘is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word “unhistorical.”’ He was right, of course, but he was also a Dead White Man, so nobody’s listening. Where I come from, the practice of rewriting history to promote the ideologies of the day is so common as to be barely worth mentioning anymore. This is how we now know that black people built Stonehenge, Horatio Nelson was gay and St Brigid performed abortions in her nunnery, amongst many other politically useful revelations.

There is nothing new in this, of course. History is always a battlefield: control the past and you control the present. Those who tell the stories set the tone, as we can see all around us today. The people who are currently rewriting St Brigid’s story for the age of therapeutic individualism are only doing what they imagine the Christians did to their ‘triple goddess’ in the first place. And to be fair to them, Christians throughout history have hardly been shy when it comes to doing the same thing for their own purposes.

Awkwardly though, the ‘goddess Brigid’ story appears to be built on sand. It seems that there is no evidence for the existence of a ‘pre-Christian goddess’ called Brigid in Ireland from any source before the tenth century - which is long after the attested life of the saint. The sole reference to such a deity is one mention in the Sanas Chormaic, or ‘glossary of Cormac’, a list of Irish historical figures from the early middle ages. Historian Phillip Campbell, in an essay which aims to challenge the new myth of ‘Brigid the goddess’, says this:

Given that the Sanas Chormaic was composed around 908, we must first note that a goddess named Brigit is not attested until roughly 383 years after the historical Brigid died. Perhaps the Sanas Chormaic reflects beliefs from a much earlier period, but it is just as likely that it represents, not paganism as it existed in the 5th century, but paganism as 10th century Christian authors imagined it may have looked. By Cormac’s time, pagan symbols and early Irish concepts were no longer comprehensible to Christian authors, at least in their original context.

There is no proof outside of the Sanas Chormaic that any deity named Brigit ever existed. The goddess may be a purely literary reconstruction, similar to the Anglo-Saxon Eostre, an alleged goddess who is attested only in the writings of the Christian monk Bede and nowhere else. At any rate, it is difficult to see how the cultus of St. Brigid could have developed out of a pagan deity that is not attested until four centuries after her own life.

As for the other stories about Brigid - that her saint’s day falls on the same day as the ‘pagan festival of Imbolc’, for example, thus demonstrating that it is a Christian appropriation of a pagan celebration - there is a lack of supporting evidence here too. Imbolc is a word that means ‘the time of the milking.’ It certainly corresponds to the coming of spring, but there is no evidence of the existence of any ‘Imbolc festival’ on what is now St Brigid’s day, as historian of paganism Ronald Hutton explains:

The festival must be pre-Christian in origin, but there is absolutely no direct testimony as to its early nature, or concerning any rites which might have been employed then. There is, in fact, no sign that any of the medieval Irish writers who referred to it preserved a memory of them, and some evidence that they no longer understood the meaning of the name itself.

Here you can watch a short lecture by Hutton - the pre-eminent British expert on this topic, who is certainly no Christian apologist - demonstrating the lack of historical evidence for the existence of any pre-Christian goddess called Brigid at all.

Where, then, did the story that St Brigid was a Christianised version of a ‘pagan goddess’ come from? The answer seems to be: ‘from the nineteenth century.’ As the Christian tide receded, to the sound of Matthew Arnold’s ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,’ there was a surge of Victorian interest in magic, mystery and non-Christian religions, be they the mysteriously enticing religions of the ‘Orient’ or the equally enticing, and mostly imagined, religions of the pre-Christian ‘Druids’ and ‘Celts’, who were typically re-invented as nature-loving pacifists. The notion that ‘pagan survivals’ lie behind almost every Christian tradition, from Christmas trees to Easter eggs, as well as being the origins of folk customs from Maypole dancing to the ‘Obby ‘Oss, was part of this Victorian legacy.

I remember being entranced by this Romantic notion when I was a teenager: I was a true believer in it for quite a while. It has had a long shelf life, which is why you will still find it all over the Internet. The neo-pagan tradition that I briefly followed some years back, Wicca, is a good example of a faith constructed on the basis of this ‘pagan survival’ myth. Wiccans for a long time told a story that their ‘old religion’ was a long-suppressed, pre-Christian mother goddess cult, forced underground for two thousand years by the patriarchal Church. It turned out, disappointingly, that this was a complete fiction; one that was sympathetically demolished by Ronald Hutton in his 1999 book on modern witchcraft The Triumph of the Moon. Wicca had in fact been patched together in the 1950s by its splendidly eccentric founder Gerald Gardner, from a bundle of rags made up of Thelema, Freemasonry, Theosophy, bits and bobs from the Western mystery tradition, and the ideas of Margaret Murray, James Frazer and Robert Graves.

Today’s ‘triple goddess Brigid’ story seems to be equally patched together from a rag bundle of medieval history, contemporary political and social stances and the need to fill the God-shaped hole left by the collapse of the Christian story in the West. For these reasons, perhaps we should not be too harsh on those who twist the saint’s story, even unknowingly, for their own ends. The growing cult of Brigid, I think, is interesting in its own right, as a sign of the times.

It’s notable, for example, that Brigid rather than Patrick is the Irish saint whose story is being bent into this post-modern shape. Why might this be? It may be partly that she was a woman, and partly because her story is less well attested (Patrick wrote his own autobiography, while Brigid’s life was written 150 years after her death.) The fact that Patrick’s life was explicitly a missionary one may be part of the answer too: it is impossible to separate Patrick from his life’s work of explicitly spreading the Christian faith to non-Christian peoples.

Still, I think there is more to the rising Brigid cult than this. The life of St Brigid of Kildare manifests a particular flavour of saintliness that still resonates in a post-Christian society, which remains marinated in Christian values even though it doesn’t know it. Her work for the poor and the marginalised; her close relationship to animals and the natural world; her status as a woman of significance in a very male society; her pioneering strength. All of these are popular contemporary values. On their own they can easily be slotted into the contemporary left-progressive worldview; indeed, they are the source from which that worldview originates. But secular progressivism, the dominant ideology in the age of the Machine, has no spiritual core. It is lacking in saints and prophets. Are we witnessing an attempt to create one?

What is stripped out of the story, of course, is the reason that Brigid did any of this in the first place: Christ. This was the motivation for her life’s work, and it is the reason we still remember her now, but it is a major stumbling block in the new world that is dawning - hence the transmogrification of saint into goddess. Ironically, the rewriting of St Brigid’s history, even as it seeks to highlight a Strong Woman from the country’s past, ends up erasing the actual life of one of the most remarkable female saints of early Europe. Her nineteenth-century biographer, Alice Curtayne, saw Brigid as a pioneer on her own terms. The female community of ‘Brigidines’ she gathered around her in Kildare, said Curtayne, was centuries ahead of its time:

Nine hundred years were to elapse before anything resembling the Brigidine group was to appear on the continent of Europe … In France there was nothing remotely resembling such feminine initiative until the seventeenth century; and in England nothing that at least recalled it until the nineteenth century … very astonishing indeed is the discovery that the feminine inspiration which delighted Europe in later centuries down to modern times was already an accepted feature of the early Irish church.

In a country which has, throughout history, very often silenced female voices, St Brigid’s story could be genuinely inspiring. But it offers a very specific kind of inspiration: a Christian one. What is happening at present is that some of those who want to champion the role of women in Irish society are sanding the awkward edges off of historical figures who don’t fit their mould. St Brigid, as her biographies attest, was a very Christian kind of Strong Woman, and her ‘values’ were those of the strict and often intolerant monastic ascetics of her time and ours. She would have had no time for the worldview currently being imposed on her by neo-pagan Oneness-seekers who just want to be their best self. After all, she had no tolerance for their spiritual ancestors. One story from the Vita tells of what happened when a Druid sent his corn to be ground in the mill at Brigid’s monastery:

And when that grain was spread between the millstones, nothing could budge them - not the power of the water, and no exercise of strength or skill. When the people who observed this sought its cause, they were quite perplexed. Then, when they learned that the grain belonged to a druid, they had no doubt at all that millstone upon which St Brigid had performed the divine miracle had refused to grind the pagan man’s grain into flour.

This was the kind of Brigid that her monastic biographers wanted to tell us about. Today, though, Brigid the fantasy goddess is rapidly eclipsing Brigid the Christian nun, whose distant voice is being smothered by a neo-pagan myth; one which is much more in tune with the mores of an individualistic, progressive Machine society. But though we have largely left the Christian faith behind in the West, it is so deeply embedded in our landscapes and psyches that it cannot be fully uprooted. Our supposedly secular contemporary culture runs on the fumes of its past Christian fuel, which is why all those neo-pagans have values derived from the Beatitudes. If you can’t abolish a saint, then, what do you do? Why, you remake her, in the shape of the new world you are building.

Whatever age of the West we are currently living through - whether it is the dawn of a new paganism or an example of the Christian virtues run amok, untethered from their source - we have long left the Christian age in Western Europe, and its memories are fading fast. It’s triple goddesses all the way down from here. The temptation for Christians is to either mourn this fact, or to react against it, but I think we should refuse both. The new cult of Brigid may be woolly, ridiculous, harmless - or even, to some, helpful - but it is happening for a reason. A saintless age hungers for saints, though it doesn’t know it. A Godless age needs God, though it denies it daily.

What can Christians learn from this? Maybe that instead of longing for a RETVRN to some fantasy Christendom we should learn to be actual Christians in today’s world. Living in a world dominated by people who think you are mad or weird, who sometimes persecute you but mostly ignore you, is how most Christians at most times have lived. Personally, I think the faith flourishes in these circumstances, and is quickly corrupted when it is in power or culturally dominant. I think that history bears me out here, and so do the Gospels.

There is plenty for us to learn from St Brigid today. The Vita tells us that even the wolves of the forest loved her, and the wild ducks ‘flew on feathered wings to her, without any fear’, after which ‘she praised highly the Creator of all things, to whom all life is subject, and for whose service … all life is given.’ So in tune with Creation was Brigid, in fact, that she could hang her cloak on a sunbeam and cause trees to move through prayer. Anything she ever found herself in possession of was given away to the poorest of the poor.

The story that Cogitosus seems eager to tell us throughout his life of this saint is, in fact, a beautifully simple one, and beautifully Christian. It is of this woman’s deep love for the neediest people and for the vulnerable creatures of the wild, all of it springing from a love of God Himself - and of how she put this love into action. Do we put this love into action, we so-called Christians? Do I? If not, why not? Maybe some prayers to St Brigid on this first day of spring can help us answer these questions.

Hello everyone. I am continuing to convalesce in the Irish January rain - or rather, by the fire inside, while the rain barrels against the windows. I am feeling more human than when I last wrote, so I’m optimistic that I am heading towards feeling fully human again one of these days, though I’m not rushing anything.

I’d like to thank everyone who became a paid subscriber to the Abbey after my last post. As I explained there, I’ve decided to offer all my writing here for free, and to ask any readers who can afford it (and think it’s worth reading) to take out a paid sub to support those who can’t afford to pay, and allow me to keep at it. Over ninety of you did so. Thanks to each and every one of you.

Speaking of subscribers, the Abbey now has over 80,000 of them and rising, so let’s consider this month’s salon a celebration of our growing numbers. Most of those are unpaid, of course, or I’d be the Peter Thiel of Substack, which would be bad news for everyone. Thiel, by the way, is a man I regard with more and more alarm every day. If and when my brain is working properly again I would like to dive into his past and present, and write about what his version of heretical techno-‘Christianity’ represents. Let’s see.

One more quick note about subscriptions. Some readers have asked if there is a way to make an occasional donation to support my work without having to subscribe to a newsletter or buy a book. There wasn’t, but now there is: I have just set up one of those ‘buy me a coffee’ pages for anyone who thinks I need more caffeine rather than less. You can find it here.

Fun book things

Against The Machine is getting around: it’s in its fourth printing in the US, and has sold almost 40,000 copies there, while in the UK it’s also been reprinted several times, and I believe is hovering around 10,000 sold. It has just appeared in Australia, and will be popping up in some other languages soon: more news on that when I have it.

In worldly terms, this makes ATM probably the most successful book I’ve ever published (though not my favourite one; see if you can guess what that is.) One interesting result is that readers are sending me little stories about its more unexpected appearances.

The video at the top of this post, for example, shows the English folk group The Hedge Band interrupting their Christmas carolling to read from the book. Whether this got them any seasonal donations I can’t say, but it made me smile. The best English folk songs - as with folk songs everywhere - have always been anti-Machine. You can probably think of your own examples: feel free to recommend them below.

Another great story involves a family Christmas. American readers Ransom, Gabriel and Craig Silliman - a father and sons - each thought that the others might enjoy the book for Christmas. So they all gave each other copies without knowing. Here they are on Christmas morning after unwrapping their presents, in a photo sent to me by Ransom. They all seem quite happy about it:

In other news …

My Wendell Berry Lecture, delivered this year at Port Royal Baptist Church, can now be viewed on YouTube. It’s introduced by Mary Berry, Wendell’s daughter, who is also Director of the Berry Center. This was the last event on my 2025 US book tour, and you can already hear the beginnings of the chest infection that was coming for me. But it was the highlight of my tour, and also perhaps one of my most useful talks in terms of thinking about how to live in the age of the Machine.

Other talks from that tour are up on YouTube now as well.

Finally: all being well (ie, me being well), I will be teaching again this year on the St Basil Writers Workshop, an online academy for creative writers. I’m one of a collection of teachers which includes Jonathan Pageau, Nicholas Kotar, Katharine Bolger Hyde, Nicole Roccas and Samara Kawash, and together we’re trying to foster a new generation of Inklings for the 21st century. If you think that might include you, applications are now open for this year’s intake.

That’s all I have to say for now - but how about you? the Monthly Salon is supposed to be the chance for readers to set the agenda, begin conversations and raise things they want to talk about, but I’ve been dominating the conversation. So I’ll shut up and leave you to it.

Please talk about anything you like, dear reader. The floor is yours!

Five years ago today, I was baptised. It was an icy cold day, the ground covered in hoar frost, and I was due to walk in to the River Shannon to be reborn. The covid pandemic was raging, and officially we probably shouldn’t even have been outside, but one reason I chose to enter the Orthodox church is that they have their priorities right. Christ comes first: everything else then falls into place.

So I went under the water three times, and when I came out I was an Orthodox Christian, swimming in a stream of wisdom and truth that is two millennia old. I came out unable to speak, for reasons both spiritual and physical. A dip in the Shannon in January will generally do that to you.

I could say a lot about what has happened since then - I have said a lot on this Substack - but I could also say nothing and it would perhaps mean as much. Words have their uses and their limits. God is not heard in whirlwind or thunder, but as a still, small voice. The Father does not shout, and neither did the Son. I am sure sometimes that God is light and silence, of a quality that down here we can only intuit, or sometimes barely touch, and even that renders us silent as well, if not blind and astounded for years.

In fact, this is how Orthodox tradition has long understood the experience of God. St Sophrony of Essex wrote about how he had been granted a vision of what the Eastern Church calls the ‘Uncreated Light’ of God in his final book, We Shall See Him As He Is. ‘The soul feels apprehensive at approaching the subject of the Light which visits the man who craves to behold the Face of the Eternal’, he wrote. ‘Quiet and gentle, it draws heart and mind to itself, until the earth is forgotten, one’s spirit caught up into another sphere ... your attention is drawn deep within the inner man, into the heart burning with a love now compassionate, now grateful ... Aches and pains disappear. Earthly cares fade away. Anxieties are absorbed into a sweet peace.’

When you are knocked into silence, everything begins anew. This happened to me five years ago, and it will be working its way through me for the rest of my life. When you invite Christ into your heart and ask him to get to work, he begins steadily and at his own pace, and you find that you are not a family home which needs a few superficial bits of work done - a bit of paint here, a new bath there - but a creaking old mansion whose very foundations need stabilising before the rest of the job can even be contemplated. A complete overhaul is required. This old thing doesn’t even have a damp course, and it turns out it was built on sand.

More recently, as regular readers will know, I have been knocked into silence by something else: illness. Long-term overwork has led to a season of deep fatigue and burnout which, in retrospect, has been coming for years. Since mid-October I have been dealing with brain fog, physical exhaustion and any number of physical and mental symptoms of a brutalised nervous system. I haven’t worked, or done much at all, for three months. How long this will last, I don’t know. I have been dosing myself up with herbs and somatic exercises and the Jesus Prayer and the healing oil of St Nektarios of Aegina, and it has all been doing me good. I am still not well, but I am better than I was. It has taken me days to write this essay, but I couldn’t even have written the words six weeks ago. This currently counts as progress.

Chronic illness is the story of the Machine age, and so much of it seems to be related to the way we twist our bodies and minds out of shape to keep up with the demands of a deeply unnatural system. This is what has happened to me, and I can see now that when I come out of the other side of this, however long that takes, I will not be the same person who went in.

To which I can only say: Hallelujah.

Long-term illness, like baptism, is a form of rebirth. All of the saints in the Christian tradition speak to this reality, again and again. ‘It is absurd’, declared St Anthony the Great, ‘to be grateful to doctors who give us bitter and unpleasant medicines to cure our bodies, and yet to be ungrateful to God for what appears to us to be harsh, not grasping that all we encounter is for our benefit and in accordance with His providence.’

How could sickness be ‘providential’? It is hard to think of a notion that is likely to meet with more mockery or confusion in today’s world. But the Christian understanding has always been that illness can serve a purpose. Suffering changes you. Sickness knocks you down. Pride becomes harder when you’re largely useless to the world. I have been a Christian for years now, but I have never felt closer to Christ than I have these past three months. One thing that this faith teaches, again and again, is that everything comes from God, that we are dependent upon Him for everything. We do not make the world, or change it, independently of the force which created and guides it in some fashion we cannot ever really understand.

We know this, but probably we don’t really believe it. Not, at any rate, until we are knocked onto our arses. Only then do we understand what all this talk is about. Some of us - the really obtuse ones - seem to need more of a knock than others. I used to think that people who receive powerful spiritual visions do so as a result of their great holiness. Sometimes this is clearly true, but the opposite is often the case too. My name saint, Paul the apostle, was knocked onto his arse on the Road to Damascus, blinded and humiliated, his whole world turned upside down. Was he a holy man? Not at that point. He was a prideful man, persecuting Christ and his disciples, and refusing to see any of the signs that had been scattered about him. His stiff-necked refusal to listen obviously required a more direct approach. God had plans for Saul the persecutor, but first he needed to be knocked down and opened up. Some of us are like that - maybe most of us. We’re not really paying attention, because we’re too wrapped up in ourselves.

Sometimes, prayer can be dangerous. St Paisios the Athonite taught that you should only ever ask for one thing in prayer: to be taught how to repent. On occasion, maybe foolishly, I have asked something else. I have said: change me, make me any shape you like, make me an actual Christian. But if you give permission in this way, the response can be unanticipated. God’s wisdom is foolishness to the world, after all. The supposedly wise scoff at Him, while only children seem to really understand. The Kingdom of Heaven is probably populated with people who giggle easily, who are fascinated with the precise metallic colour of beetle shells, and who never read any theology.

Illness, then, is a rebirth, and perhaps sometimes the answer to a prayer that you didn’t quite know you had sent up. You ask to be remade - and you get remade. Maybe some of us need to be remade in a way that forces us to become childlike again. I have been reading and thinking too much for too long. I have been overtaxing my left hemisphere in order to make my case about a left-hemisphere dominated society. I have been trying to trust God while worrying overly about the state of His creation. Now I find that I can barely read anything at all, or not for long, and nothing too heavy. I am allergic to ideas, and my brain furiously resists abstractions. I can manage Frog and Toad, but I couldn’t go near the Philokalia. Mind you, both are works of great wisdom in their own way.

Change me, you say, and God says: Well, you asked for it. Then He begins to peel the layers away. You are not being made into something new. Rather, you are being stripped of all the layers of false self that cover up who you once were when you were a child, in spirit and perhaps in body. You can’t be Important in the world if you are sitting in the garden in your pyjamas drinking herbal tea after sleeping for twelve hours. You don’t have the energy to appear on a podcast or to express your Very Important Opinions on the Internet, and nobody really loses out at all.

Speaking of the Internet: since I got ill I have withdrawn further and further from it, and it feels very good. I spent much of the last year on the Internet complaining about technology. One of my readers told me that I had made the mistake of trying to fight the Machine head on. This, he said, is like trying to go to war with the Devil. It will never end well. The best tactic is rather to fight the Machine in ways the Machine does not notice. My friend Martin Shaw tells me that the old myths always recommend this. You don’t look at the Gorgon head on. You need a polished shield before you can deal with her.

I haven’t watched the news, anyway, for months. I have no idea what is ‘going on in the world’ now. Sometimes I glimpse a headline about Keir Starmer or Donald Trump and they seem like dispatches from Mars. I know more these days about the mottled brown cat that keep turning up on my back porch and stalking my favourite robin. The robin is much too smart for the cat. This is the kind of knowledge I had neglected. You should see the combs in my beehive. I’m anticipating my first honey collection if the swarm survives the winter.

No ‘news’ then, and no opinion either. Even coming here to write this feels a bit alien now. We live in a world which has moved almost entirely ‘online’. You realise when you are outside it how, to all intents and purposes, you have resigned from ‘society.’ I have spent the last three months writing prose poems in a little blue notebook; not for publication, just for fun. When your ‘writing career’ is brought to a forcible halt, you find that you can rediscover what made you a writer in the first place: the sheer joy of words. Their use not as tools or an income source, but as lamps to explore the mystery, or toys to play with in the sand. I wish I could do all my future writing in hand-printed chapbooks and give them out on street corners, but my children would quickly starve. Or maybe I’m still not trusting God enough. Jesus instructed us to think like a raven, after all, and I don’t see many ravens wasting their time on Substack.

Half a decade on from my baptism, I sit in the garden under a cold, late-rising winter sun and I can sometimes feel, as I did five years ago today, that my real life is just beginning. I can find myself quite excited to see where all of this is going. I don’t think God will allow me to heal until I have been changed. We’ll see what that means.

For now, though, I need to stop. My head is growing fuzzy again. There are only so many words it can manage in one sitting. Like my namesake, I have a thorn in my flesh now - or perhaps in my brain - and I am learning to give thanks for it. I am waiting to see how it works itself out, and what it leaves behind.

The Future of the Abbey, pt 1: Words

What does all this mean for the future of this Substack, you may be asking? Well, I’ll tell you.

My book Against the Machine, and all of its associated events, podcasts and the like, were the work of many years, and they were also a culmination of the work of decades. I now see that book as the final entry in what I have taken to calling The Machine Quartet. I’m very happy that it’s out there, and that it is connecting with people. But now it’s time to move on.

Even if I was in full health, I would be taking a step back from the limelight this year. Last year was very public for me; this year will be much less so. I will be doing few public events, and even fewer (if any) podcasts and the like. I want to become a writer again, not a public performer. I need to go inwards for a while.

Despite my current state, I have things I want - and need - to do. For a start, I have to finish writing my Book of Wild Saints, which will be published in 2027 by SPCK and Penguin. This is my priority until the summer, and I’ll be taking it steadily. Those stories will also continue appearing here. I would also like to return to writing my Sunday Pilgrimage series: it won’t appear weekly, but will pop up when I can write it. The Monthly Salons will continue, and I have some ideas to spice them up a bit. And when I am able to read properly again, I would also like to resurrect the Scriptorium.

Pilgrimage and story: this is where I expect my writing to go in 2026. Less time looking into screens and spouting, and more entering the woods and inviting the words in. If I have the energy, I would like to make some short pilgrim journeys myself this year, and write about them. Pilgrimage is a very ancient Christian response to sickness; along with nature, it is the great healer. I have things I’d like to say, too, about the great works of Western Christian mysticism, as well as my own continuing explorations of the Eastern Christian tradition. Oh, and I have one final skirmish booked with the Machine before I do anything else. You’ll be hearing about that as soon as I can write it up.

Beyond the Abbey, there are other things brewing. My novel The Wake, which was first published in 2014, is being republished this year by a new publisher in a spanking new edition, so I shall be showing off about that when it happens. And I have a new publishing venture of my own coming up, which I had planned to begin in the second half of the year. I’ll be talking about that as and when it emerges.

The Future of the Abbey, pt 2: Money

All of this, though, is dependent on my state of health, and at the moment that is unpredictable. I am taking things from day to day. I will certainly be continuing to write here - writing is what I do, I am lost without it, and as you can see I am already making (probably too many) plans. What I can’t promise for a while is writing to a regular schedule.

While I continue to recover, I don’t want to give myself the pressure of providing ‘content’ according to some pre-ordained calendar. I’m not an AI, after all. At the same time, neither do I want anyone who has paid for a subscription to feel unhappy about not receiving regular bulletins. With this in mind, I am going to experiment with a new funding model for the Abbey. This is something I was thinking of doing even before I got ill. I have been feeling more and more uncomfortable charging for any Christian content here, and I am also very aware that some people are unable to pay for a subscription at all.

So it’s time for a change. From this point onwards, everything I write here will be free to read for everyone. There will be no paywalls on any of my offerings. However, as I still need to eat and feed my children, I am asking those of you who value what I do here, and who can afford to do so, to consider taking out (or continuing) a paid subscription. This will allow me to continue my work at this uncertain time. It will also mean that your subscription supports those who can’t afford one, and makes my writing free for all.

From now on, there will be three tiers of membership here at the Abbey:

• READER. Anyone who wants to read my words here can do so with no payment required, starting today.

• MEMBER. Take out a monthly or annual subscription, and you can comment and engage in conversation with the Abbey’s community. You also have access to paywalled content in the archives. Your subscription supports me and my work, and ensures that everyone can read it for free, whatever their means.

• FOUNDER. For the very generous or very able, a Founder Member’s subscription gets you all of the above. It also allows you to join in a live conversation with me and other Founders four times a year, and gets you a steep discount on my online writing course. You will also get priority access to any future events I run.

Let’s see how this works out for all of us.

Do have a blessed Theophany (or, for you Orthodox Old Calendarists, a Happy Christmas!) and a hopeful and happy beginning to 2026. I’m profoundly grateful to my thoughtful and engaging community here (with a special shout-out going to all those who have written to me about my illness, offering advice and even sending me gifts - including that healing oil.) I look forward to travelling on with you all in 2026, at whatever speed. Thank you for bearing with me.

Hello readers. I hope you’re all well. It’s the winter solstice today, and it’s four days before Christmas, so it’s time for my annual ritual of sharing this song with you. These are the nuns at our little Orthodox Monastery here in Ireland, singing a beautiful carol to the tune of Greensleeves. If you’d like to hear some of their other singing, they have a YouTube channel of their own. Of course, the best way to hear their songs is to come along to a liturgy some time.

I’m writing this at the beginning of the month. It will be appearing automatically, with the help of the Machine, because I am ‘going dark’ for the whole of December, and not using the Internet at all. I am still in the process of, I hope, recovering from my exhaustion and burnout. It’s been a challenging exercise in allowing my body to heal at its own pace, whatever my impatient mind (which caused all this trouble to begin with) wants to happen. I’m having my ups and downs, but for now at least I’m in a better state when I was when I last wrote here. I’d like to say thanks to those readers who got in touch with ideas and remedies. I’ve really appreciated it, and many of them have been helpful.

For the first six weeks or so of my convalescence, I was literally unable to read. It felt as if my mind was rebelling: it didn’t want any more words crammed into it. It still doesn’t want many. Because I couldn’t read, I spent some time listening to the audiobook of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. Maybe one day I will write about Julian. She has a lot to say about illness and its spiritual benefits. Her ‘showings’ - visions of Christ - happened as she lay on what she thought was her deathbed, and she seems to have suffered serious illness for many years, so she knows of what she speaks. What she speaks is this:

All this life of distress which we have here is only a moment, and when we are suddenly taken from suffering into bliss, then it will be nothing … therefore if a man is suffering so much pain, so much woe and so much distress that it seems he can think of nothing but the state he is in and what he is feeling, he should pass over it lightly and set it at nought as soon as he can.

It’s always good to get a medieval perspective.

Anyway: this is the monthly salon and it’s open to you all, so please do jump in below and start a conversation, ask a question, make a statement, tell a story, about anything at all. Don’t be shy. The last salon was very lively. I won’t be responding myself, because I am not here. But if you are, please enjoy the chance to meet each other and talk.

A very happy Christmas to you all. I will see you again in 2026.

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Monday Morning Wellness Clinic, with Dr Charles Bukowski:

Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you’re gonna lose everything. Whether you’re an actor, anything, a housewife - there has to be great pauses between highs where you do nothing at all. You just lay on the bed and stare at the ceiling. This is very, very important. And how many people do this in modern society? Very few. That’s why they’re all totally mad, frustrated, angry and hateful.

So, yeah, leisure. And I don’t mean having profound thoughts. I mean having no thoughts of progress, without any self-thoughts of trying to further yourself. Just like a slug. It’s beautiful.

There will be times in your life when the collected wisdom of the Very Serious Philosophers, all the great books you have read and meant to read, and all the delicately-constructed intellectual Babels you have piled up for decades will avail you precisely bugger all. At such times, an alcoholic bum genius may be the man you need to listen to.

At such times, you just need to stop.

This is one of those times.

My friends, I am officially burnt out, and I am hereby publicly admitting it.

Regular readers may know that my health has been very on-and-off for a year or so. Having gone nineteen-to-the-dozen with every aspect of my life for four decades, I have in the last year been knocked flat on my back several times. The last and final time occurred during my recent tour of America, and I have not recovered. I kept thinking I had, or would. After all, I still had things to do. A book tour of the UK, for starters. I had to keep going at least until this was done. And I have another book to write, with a looming deadline. And a family to feed. And a workshop roof to repair, and logs to cut and split, and and ….

Then, last Thursday, I was booked to do a very low-key event at a bookshop in Galway. My head was a balloon of fog and my body was wobbling all over the place, but I still went along. You have to do your duty, see?

This was a mistake from which I have still not recovered. It knocked me on my back again for three days, and I am still operating like an almost entirely-drained battery. I have been forced to finally accept what has been creeping up on my, louder and louder, for months and months:

It’s time to stop. Right now.

I have no choice in the matter. My head and body have gone on strike. They are all over the place. They are simply refusing to work when I tell them to. Even writing these sentences is taking it out of them. Like exhausted mules, they are sitting down in the middle of the track, and they won’t get up however much I whip them.

The mules will survive, I think. They’re not at death’s door quite yet. They can be rejuvenated, but they are going to need plenty of hay and water and, most of all, rest to get them back into shape. They will need to sit in the garden and stare vacantly at the shrouded winter sun, with no thought for anything at all.

I’m writing this to explain that I need this period now. And so I have decided (or rather, my body has decided for me) to take a sabbatical until the new year. I am taking two months off from all and any work, to allow my body, mind and soul to recuperate. This means that I have had to cancel my forthcoming speaking tour of the UK. I apologise if you had been planning to come along, but it’s simply not an option for me right now.

What does this mean for the Abbey of Misrule? It means that there will be no new writing appearing here until 2026. The one exception will be our monthly salons, which I will continue to open up. I enjoy reading these, and hearing from you all, and they don’t take great effort. But nothing else will appear here until next year.

If you are a paid subscriber, and quite reasonably don’t want to pay for nothing for months, your options are simple. Monthly paid subscribers can simply unsubscribe now. If you stay on the free list, you will hear from me again when I am up and running. Annual paid subscribers, if they feel their sub is no longer worth what they paid, can simply reply to this email with a request for a pro rata refund. Just write ‘refund’ in the subject line, and I will make that happen with no questions asked.

In the new year I’ll see how I am feeling, and will update all my readers as to my plans. There is plenty I still want to write about on the Abbey. More wild saints. A return to our Sunday Pilgrimages, and a return, too, for the Scriptorium book club. Other things, too, are brewing away under the dark soil. But there is no point in me attempting any of them until the energy and the inspiration return. I have drained myself over a long period, and now I need to be refilled. This is not something I can do on my own. The world needs to refill me at its own pace; to put me back into whatever shape it needs me to be. Maybe the shape will be different: we’ll see. But whatever comes, it requires me to lie fallow for a while.

Illness is no fun, but it is a lesson. I feel I have been smacked down to teach me a few things, and I think I already have an idea what some of them might be. St Porphyrios, the modern Orthodox saint with whom I have perhaps the closest relationship, spoke often about this kind of thing. In later life, he was struck down with a series of terrible maladies, from cancer to blindness to kidney disease, but each for him was an opportunity to deepen his spiritual life. ‘I thank God for granting me many illnesses,’ he once said. ‘I often say to Him, “my Christ, your love knows no limits!”’

This kind of talk makes little sense to most of us in this culture, obsessed as we are with our health and longevity, but there is an ancient Christian rationale to it. To suffer bodily sickness, the saint explained, simply provided more opportunity to ‘pray, taking up the cross of Christ with repentance.’ The aim of the Christian, after all, is to practice humility. This sounds nice on the surface, but in order to be humble, you first have to be humiliated, and none of us wants that part. Illness, though, is humiliating, especially if you are used to being in control, to striding the world making statements, to being able to do all the things you want. Suddenly, instead of all that, you are lying about unable to do anything at all. You have been made weak and small.

What do you do then? ‘My illness,’ said the saint, ‘is a special favour from God, who is inviting me to enter into the mystery of His love, and to try to respond with His own grace.’ Not, he was clear, that this made him anything special: quite the opposite, he said. It made him very small and unworthy of much at all. Nothing could happen to him at all without God’s grace. St Porphyrios didn’t believe himself worthy even of the terrible illnesses he had been afflicted with, but he did his best with what they gave him an opportunity to do. ‘I do not pray for God to make me well,’ he said. ‘I pray for Him to make me good.’

Not that I’m comparing myself to St Porphyrios, you understand. I haven’t even learned how to be a slug, let alone a saint. But these are the ways in which we learn, aren’t they? From setbacks and from saints.

Blessings to you all for the coming season. I’ll see you on the other side.

Paul

Hello everyone. I am slowly climbing out of the hole of sickness in which I have been ensconced for a good few weeks now. A combination of a hectic travel schedule, a chest infection and - more significantly - a longer-term exhaustion caused by overwork just came and knocked me onto my back. This is not the first time this has happened this year, and the message is increasingly obvious: do less. A wise Orthodox friend of mine recently explained this instruction to me more simply. ‘If you don’t give God His Sabbath’, she said, ‘he’ll take it from you.’

The Sabbath is an interesting and, for me, under-explored concept. It is mainly under-explored because I have ignored it, despite it being a commandment. Regular rest - demanded by God Himself of His people, mind - combined with regular cycles of debt forgiveness every seven years, which chimes too with the need to keep fields fallow, let their edges run wild … all of this speaks to the need for a cycle of rest, recuperation and work in all of our lives.

Me, I have mainly spent my life focused on the work part. This is a mindset and a pathology: one that is quite deep in Machine culture. Even fasting, even retreating, can become work if you have that mindset: targets to be achieved and ticked off! But life is not a target to be ticked off. At the age of 53, both God and my body appear to be bringing this fact home to me in the only way that makes me listen: by forcing me to finally shut up and stop.

Not that I am can quite stop, of course. Tomorrow night I’m talking in Galway about my new book (come along if you’re around), and in a few weeks I’ll be visiting the UK to do the same in a few places. After that though, I’ll be back here, and my winter will be spent finishing my Book of Wild Saints - steadily, though, and with those Sabbaths properly observed. The Machine will be behind me, and the Abbey will also return more fully. The hope is that my regular Sunday Pilgrimages will get up and running again, amongst other things I would like to do here in the next phase of the Abbey’s life.

One of those other things is the return of our Monthly Salons. Those of you who are new here may not have come across our Salons before, but they are monthly open house posts, in which I invite all and any of my paid subscribers to start a conversation about anything at all. It can be about anything that concerns you. Express an opinion, share a thought, ask a question. Meet other people, have a conversation about anything you like. Don’t mind me: I just open the door.

I retired the salon back in the spring, because the conversations seemed to be waning. I’m giving it another go now, though. Let’s see if enough of you fancy a chat this Halloween week. There’s much in the world to talk about, and you can range as freely as you like. Don’t be shy. The more the merrier, and we’re a friendly bunch here.

Blessings to you all, and don’t forget the Sabbath …

Paul

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Hello all. I’m back home in Ireland, having got over my jetlag but not quite got over the chest infection that knocked me out during the last couple of days of my recent US tour. I apologise to any readers who had hoped to come and see me in Washington DC. I had to cancel the event, and spend the evening in bed with some antibiotics instead. Less fun, but more sensible.

Still, it was a successful trip, and I met many Abbey-ites along the way, which helped confirm my suspicions that I have an exceptionally high quality of reader. This was exemplified by some of the gifts that people brought me after my talks, which included home-made sourdough bread, hand-carved wooden spoons, signed chapbooks of poetry, icons, T-shirts, drawings, cards, bottles of tincture to keep me alive (it worked), and plenty more. What a nice bunch you are.

People bought books too, in quantities sufficient to nudge Against The Machine onto the New York Times bestseller list, much to my surprise, where it sat for a week above Steven Pinker but below Kamala Harris. A week is probably long enough in that company.

Anyway: it couldn’t have happened without you. Thank you to everyone who came along. Soon enough I hope to be up and running here again, but for now, here’s a roundup of news from the US, plus a foretaste of my forthcoming events on this side of the pond, in Britain and Ireland.

Subscribers’ online Q&A

Before I get started though - this coming Saturday I will be holding court at an online event for paid subscribers who pre-ordered the book. I’ll be answering as many questions about the book as I can manage. If you are coming to this, you will already have been notified about it. If you’d like to submit a question in advance, you can fill in this form to do so.

Upcoming events

This month I’ll be doing a final round of Against The Machine-themed events, this time on this side of the Atlantic. The schedule looks like this:

• Thursday 30th October - that’s next week, folks - sees me in one of Ireland’s best bookshops, Charlie Byrne’s in Galway. I’ll be talking about the book with my friend and fellow writer Mark Boyle, as well as signing copies. If that wasn’t enough incentive, the event is free and there will be cake and wine.

• On the weekend of 15th-16th November I’ll be in Walsingham, Norfolk, with Martin Shaw on his ‘Merrie Pilgrimage.’ I’ll be talking with Martin about the Machine, as well as selling and signing books.

• On Tuesday 18th November I’ll be in Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford. This event is sold out but there might be a waiting list.

• On Thursday 20th November I’m in Cambridge, in conversation with Mary Harrington and Dr James Orr. This event is free but you need to get a ticket in advance.

• Finally, on Saturday 22nd November, I’ll be speaking at the ‘Responding to the Rebirth’ conference in London, in which various speakers will be tackling the sudden and suprising upsurge of interest in Christianity.

Talks and podcasts

A number of talks and book-related podcasts from my recent Stateside trip are popping up across the Interweb. Paid subscribers already have access to my talk about reactionary radicalism at the Wendell Berry Center in Kentucky, as well as my talk at Grove City college about how to refuse the Machine. Both of these can be found in the Chantry.

In addition, there are lots of new conversations on my YouTube channel. I’m never entirely happy with this stuff, if I’m honest. I’m a writer, not a public speaker, which means that I like to take about half an hour over a sentence to make my meaning clear, or to create a certain sound or feeling. You can’t do this on a stage or a podcast, and so the quality of my output varies. There are plenty of questions I’d like to go back and answer again better, or differently, in retrospect.

Still, maybe there are enough interesting thoughts in this mix to make it worth somebody’s time:

• My talk to this year’s Touchstone conference in Chicago about the birth of AI and its relation to the Christian story.

• A conversation with Freddie Sayers of UnHerd, about the themes of the book.

• A conversation with Eric Metaxas of Socrates In The City, in which I wonder what advice Screwtape would be giving to his nephew in the age of the Internet.

• A conversation with my friend Nicholas Kotar, writer and Deacon, at Jordanville Monastery in New York state, about my journey, the work of the Christian writer and … well, AI again, and what it means.

• A conversation with Demetri Kofinas on the Hidden Forces podcast about my journey, covid, the apocalypse, and how to survive the Machine.

• An appearance on Christianity Today’s Russell Moore Show. More AI. It’s all everyone wants to talk about right now.

Media and Reviews

Reviews of the book have been popping up all over the place, some more interesting than others. Some of my favourites are:

• A profile of me that appeared in the New York Times. I mainly like this because it’s surprisingly good considering it was in the New York Times, although the headline writer should clearly be fired.

• John Gray has some smart things to say in the New Statesman, though he mistakenly believes that I think a post-collapse world would look like News From Nowhere rather than Mad Max, when in fact the opposite is true.

• The Spectator sets me up against Peter Thiel as two ends of the tech-spectrum. I get to be the Hermit, while Thiel is the Magician (hint: he’s Saruman.) I also get called ‘a mix between Frodo Baggins and Ted Kaczynski’ which is not entirely wrong.

• First Things digs deep beneath the bonnet/hood, in a thoughtful review by Michael Hanby, who wonders whether I am a dentist or an electrician.

• In Compact magazine, Leighton Woodhouse writes a better summary of the book than I could manage. This is well worth a read, though it is paywalled.

• Finally, a special mention to Ben Christenson’s review at Living As Creatures, mainly for the illustration and the comparison to Brad Pitt, which is a first. He thinks I’m in my ‘Tyler Durden era’, but he’s a bit late: that was when I was running Dark Mountain, about ten years ago. I like to think I’m entering my Tom Bombadil era now.

Best wishes to you all.

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On my recent American speaking tour to promote my new book Against The Machine, I was invited to address an audience at Grove City College, near Pittsburgh. I spoke to a large crowd in a beautiful neo-Gothic chapel about the similarities between the emerging Machine civilisation of the digital age and the prophecies made in Aldous Huxley’s 1931 novel Brave New World.

My particular focus was not just the shape of the Machine, but the potential for escaping it. I offered six possible exits, all drawn from ideas in my book. An alternative title for this talk, now that I think about it, might have been ‘How to be a Savage.’

Free subscribers can listen to the audio of the talk at the top of this page, which I hope is not too fuzzy. Paid subscribers also have access, below, to a video version and the full written transcript.

Here’s to us all all becoming Savages …

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Last week, on the final leg of my American speaking tour to promote Against The Machine, I was honoured to deliver the 2025 Wendell Berry Lecture in Port Royal, Kentucky. The night before, I had been even more honoured to have dinner with Wendell, his wife Tanya and their daughter Mary. I’ve been re…

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