Deepfake World
A video dispatch for the Summer Solstice
It’s the longest day of the year, and I am off on holiday for ten days. Before I got packing, though, I was inspired to sit down with my shiny new video camera and record a little film on a question I’ve been turning around in my head for a long time.
When I say ‘a long time’, I mean years and years and possibly forever. It’s a question that vexed me long before I became a Christian. It was the question which my novel, Beast, and my semi-memoir Savage Gods were both cored around. Perhaps it is the eternal question.
The question is: how far do we have to walk away from the human world in order to understand the nature of reality, and to connect to the creator beyond and beneath it? In the deepfake pseudo-reality of the Machine, the question is more piercing than ever - and the need for an answer more unavoidable. I’ve come to at least one small conclusion for myself. Maybe you’ll find my mutterings in some way useful. If not, you will at least get to enjoy the opening poem.
See you all in July. Many blessings.
Paul
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The following has helped me immensely as I struggle much like you, to the point where I was so frustrated after my perceived lack of progress in "becoming Orthodox" I had considered "taking a year off" of EVERYTHING and setting up shop in a tent somewhere (ha, my husband wasn't buying it). This passage from St Theophan the Recluse in a "Letter to a Young Girl" has given me a tremendous amount of peace and helped me to stop torturing myself in that I have come to realize that my cross to bear will be not one created in my own imagination.
"You ask, 'Must one do something?'. Of course one must! And do whatever comes along--in your circle of friends and in your surroundings--and believe that this is and will be your real work. More will not be demanded of you. It is a great misconception to think, whether for the sake of heaven or, as the modernists put it, to "make one's mark on humanity" that one must undertake great, reverberating tasks. Not at all. It is necessary only to do everything according to the commandments of God. Just what exactly? Nothing in particular--only those things which present themselves to everyone in the circumstances of life, those things which are required by the every day happensings we all encounter. This is how God is. God arranges the fate of each man, and the whole course of one's life is also the work of his most gracious foreknowledge, as is, therefore, every minute and every encounter. Let's take an example: a beggar comes up to you; it is God who has brought him. What should you do? You must help him. God has brough the beggar, of course, desiring you to act toward this beggar in a manner pleasing to Him, and He watches to see what you will actually do--If you do what is pleasing to God, you will be taking a step toward the ultimate goal, the inheritance of heaven. Generalize this occurrence, and you find that in every situation and at every encounter one must do what God wants him to do. And we know truly what He wants from the commandments He has given us. If someone seeks help, then help him. If someone has offended you, forgive him. If you yourself have offended someone, then hasten to ask forgiveness and to make peace."
I can't begin to describe what a RELIEF it was to come to understand that just living my own life is God's plan for us. It is plenty to struggle with the things directly in my path.
Are your writings and musings worthless? Goodness no.
Without them I doubt I'd ever never have become a Christian, let alone Orthodox!