Hello readers. Yesterday was the first day of Lent in the Orthodox calendar, and I found myself recording another little film for you to mark the occasion. It’s a freeform musing on the ongoing collapse of the West, and how this might be mirrored by the period of collapse which in some way Lent represents. Lent, of course, leads up to a catastrophe which turns out to be a triumph. I wonder if this might be telling us something.
These little films are not substitutes for my writing, but they seem to have begun popping up now and then as accompaniments to it. I’m quite enjoying making them at the moment. Maybe I’ll record another one at the end of Lent and see what happens.
This film is up on my Youtube channel, which you can find here. Also hot off the press there is this interview, which was recorded last year while I was in Romania. It explores my journey to Orthodox Christianity, and a few of my scattered thoughts on what it means.
While I’m here, I have some news about something else that might interest my readers. Many of you will be familiar with my old friend Martin Shaw, mythologist, wilderness guide and, like me, surprise(d) Orthodox convert. You can watch Martin and I talking about our respective journeys from the woods to the Church at this recent event in London.
Martin has now retooled his storytelling academy, the Westcountry School of Myth, to focus on what he calls ‘Christian mythopoetics.’ He’s just launched a five-weekend programme, which will take place in the moors and woods of Devon in the southwest of England. Guest teachers will include Rowan Williams, Malcolm Guite, Frederica Matthewes-Green, Iain McGilchrist, Jonathan Pageau and yours truly. I’ll be spending a weekend with Martin and Rowan Williams next March, gathered around the fire in the woods, working with some combination of fairy tales and Biblical stories and whatever the land brings up.
This is quite the unique thing that Martin is up to, and it’s needed. Maybe it is just another example of the Christian story re-emerging in a new way, from the undergrowth, as it were, in these shattering times. I’m seeing that a lot lately. If you’re interested in this, you can find out more, and apply for a place, here.
Blessings to you all. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and find something vegan to eat that will actually fill me up …
Thought of The Abbey -and The Machine- yesterday when Lex Fridman concluded his new interview (https://youtu.be/jvqFAi7vkBc?feature=shared) with Sam Altman of OpenAI with a quote from Arthur C. Clarke:
“It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God--but to create him.”
Paul likes to quote Ray Kurzweil's quip about God not existing *yet*, but the above made me wonder if Kurzweil in effect stole it from Clarke.
It also occurred to me there is a more generous and less ominous way to look at some of those involved in the Silicon Valley project than they are all witting or unwitting Satanists: not all are trying to be God, Many are in effect trying to salvage/reassemble a God they can actually believe in and worship from the shattered wreckage left by Enlightenment thinking and what Carl Sagan called "the great demotions" (from our former certainty of humanity as cosmically central, beginning with having to let go of heliocentrism).
I know most won't be in any mood to forgive those enabling AI tech, these high priests of The Machine, but -asking as a non-Christian- would it not be the more charitable way of understanding these lost souls, that they are bereft, and have been spiritually degraded and reduced to hoping for Machine salvation?
Our flesh may be torn, our minds mangled, but our faith in Christ the saviour keeps our heart and soul indestructible.
Your courage to speak openly is greatly admired Paul.
Thankyou.