Inis Cealtra

On words and the Word

Yesterday was the Nativity of the Theotokos (usually translated as ‘birthgiver of God’ or ‘God-bearer’) and it was a hot day. Too hot, by the end, though if you live in the west of Ireland you should probably never complain about the rare experience of heat. At my local holy well, which is dedicated to Mary, chairs had been laid out for a patron day mass. If I had been a Catholic I would have gone along. Instead I was on a boat with my wife, heading out to Holy Island.

This plan wasn’t based on what day it was. To be honest, important days in the church calendar often creep up on me. The Orthodox calendar is literally Byzantine, and sometimes I forget to check what is coming up. But here we were, on this significant day, heading out across the startlingly still surface of Lough Derg towards what was once one of the most important pilgrimage sites in the country.

If I’m honest, I have been struggling with words for a while. I have been becalmed here all week and I haven’t known why. My summer break has probably not helped, but what I want to write about here has been blocking, or perhaps intimidating, me.

Always in my life I have written about the world. I’m good at that. I am especially good at writing about what is wrong with it (there is always something wrong) and what, in my Terribly Important Opinion, should be done about the wrongness. I’ve been at this game for a long time and I can do it with my eyes shut now. I can organise an argument over two whole years, and make a case and back it up. For a certain type of writer, this can make a good career. I was one of them once. But it seems like a long time ago now.

Now here I am, called to do something else. Here I am, surprisingly and yet not suprisingly, a Christian. It is on the one hand not surprising, because I have never been a materialist; I have always had some intuition of God or gods or spirits, usuually experienced for me through the natural world, and I have always been searching for the truth of that, always scanning the horizon for the true harbour. Yet it is surprising too, because I never imagined that, in the words of Seraphim Rose, patron saint of Lost Western People, the truth was ‘a person, not an idea.'

But I find myself wrestling today with that truth, and being a writer it is impossible for me not to write about the wrestling. The vast challenge, the fearful one, is how to do that well. I would quite like, if I am honest, to be released from the call. I am an old seeker and a weathered writer, but a new Christian. A new Christian with a platform who wants to write about his Christian journey is sailing on a sea which could sink him any time. I have prayed about this consistently, of course, and I’ve asked advice of everyone I know. Friends, family, teachers, my spiritual father, wise heads both Christian and not. I’ve even sought - and been given - answers from monks on Mount Athos. Should I really be writing about this? I have asked, over and over. I don’t know anything.

The answer has always been the same, and it has always been: yes, you should. Sometimes that has excited me, and at other times it has felt like a millstone around my neck. Of course, the ‘yes’ always comes with important caveats. If I start writing as if I were a teacher or a leader or some kind of wise or accomplished Public Christian, or somebody who knows much at all of any depth, I will fall on my face. Probably some people would enjoy that, and perhaps it would be a good lesson in humility, but still, I am going to try and avoid it.

I have noticed in the last few years a constant temptation to systematise Christianity; to bend it into a shape that fits a pre-existing pattern in people’s heads. This is hardly just a Christian problem, of course: it is universal. We want our faith to justify our worldview. We want a me-shaped God. We see this especially when it comes to politics in divided times like these, as ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ Christians cherry-pick from the Bible to support whatever they imagine Jesus can help them justify, be it abortion on demand or the death penalty.

My version of this temptation is to view the deep mystery of creation and creator through the prism of my attitudes to the Machine, and then to bend the former to suit the latter, rather than the other way around. I think that I have been stuck for words all week because I was struggling with this tendency. I found, when I stood outside myself and looked in, that I was almost unconsciously seeking a grand theory big enough to accommodate Christ. The old habit of constructing some thesis or other was refusing to die. It was as if I couldn’t write about this journey at all without knowing the destination in advance. As if this ancient spiritual pathway were not an exploration or an unfolding, but a thesis or an argument.

Out in the real world, away from the screens, things always become clearer.

Holy Island - Inis Cealtra in the Irish - has been a Christian site since at least the sixth century. Nobody lives there: it is now an island of ruins, but over the centuries, and especially during the ‘dark ages’ when paganism flooded through the ruins of the Roman empire, it was home to a flourishing monastic community. The first recorded inhabitant was a Saint Mac Creiche, who appears to have lived in a hermit’s cell made up of just four stones, in the sixth century. It’s possible that these stones are still to be found on the island, today incorporated into a tiny building whose purpose is unknown:

Inis Cealtra is home to six churches, a round tower, a holy well, a saints’ graveyard, a pilgrim path, a ‘marriage stone’ and a lot of relaxed sheep. Once it attracted up to 15,000 pilgrims on the ‘pattern day’ (patron day) of the island’s saint, but like many of these events in old Ireland, the pilgrimage was suppressed, not by the English protestant authorities but by the Catholic church, due to the event’s tendency to deteriorate from a holy pilgrimage into a vast drunken brawl.

There are no drunken brawls on Inis Cealtra these days, and most visitors are tourists, though pilgrims still come. I thought I was a tourist yesterday, but it turned out I was a pilgrim too. On the feast day of the Theotokos, we found ourselves at the Lady Well dedicated to Her, on the shores of the island in the unseasonal sun:

My current obsession with holy wells, and indeed remote islands once populated by hermits, will be getting a good airing here in coming months. On Inis Cealtra, I think that the cell and the well broke the word-dam inside me and helped the river to flow again. With my wife’s help (women are often wiser than men; I have lived long enough to notice this) I started to see what the blockage was.

Last summer, on Mount Athos, I spent several hours with a monk, talking about writing, iconography and Orthodoxy in the West. The monk was an icon painter and had offered me a tour of the monastery’s studio, but we spent most of the time talking about my Orthodoxy, and my writing, instead. Neither of us had sought this conversation. ‘I don’t know why I said any of that’, he told me afterwards. ‘I just felt I had to.’ Everybody knows what that kind of thing means on the Holy Mountain.

The monk told me that there were two traps that newly Orthodox (and presumably newly Christian) people can fall into: excessize zeal and excessive correctness. The first, he said, manifests as a desire to ‘use Orthodoxy like a spear’ to attack everyone (including fellow Orthodox people) who is not in the ‘right’ place. The excessive correctness, meanwhile, comes when we ‘try to do everything by the book’ in order to fulfill our desire to use our spear on the right people. ‘Words and arguments can alienate people’, said the monk. ‘Silence and the way you live: these are the things that will show people the truth of Orthodoxy. Not arguments.’

That was an obvious truth. Before I was a Christian I wrote about whole book about that tension. Now I come back to it again. Where does it leave me?

Wells and caves; monks and hermits. Remote places. Green martyrs. These things have carried me along with increasing speed since I became a Christian. Of course, they also carry over from my life before; they are a flowering of something I have loved inexplicably, and written about for a long time. Now I am perhaps starting to see why. The silence of the hermit, the reality of the well: the faith that is rooted in the rocks, and which bubbles up from the ground. Maybe I need these things to counter my heady tendencies. Maybe I am not the only one. There is no theory that can accommodate the truth. ‘Ideas create idols’, said St Gregory of Nyssa. ‘Only wonder leads to knowing.’ St Augustine agreed. ‘If you understand,’ he said, ‘it is not God you understand.’

There is something here that I need to look at. I can hear it calling.

Once I thought that I should stop writing forever. Almost weekly I keep wondering if that is still a good plan. But everyone I ask, including that Athonite monk, tells me the opposite. He was not the only monk I met on Athos who advised me, without me really asking, to use my writing to point people back to our Christian roots in my own land. ‘You are in the Romanian church’, said one Romanian monk to me, ‘but you are not Romanian. You are from the West. You could use your words to bring people home.’

Home. Really, that has been the subject of everything I have written for thirty years. The true harbour, I think now, is intimated in these old churches and hermit cells, in the caves and towers and wells. They point the way. If you are Orthodox - or Catholic - you know that the saints still live. They are still in the places they once made thrum with the word of God. I am English, and I live in Ireland. There is something in the early Christian landscape here that wants to show itself to us again. Something that offers us an alternative to the world of the Machine.

Something is calling us back home.

How to write about any of this without falling into the traps laid on all sides of the path, including those I have unwittingly laid myself? How to use my words from my position of weakness and ignorance, but still make them worthwhile? The monk had an answer for me. ‘Put God at the centre of your writing’, he said. ‘Ask him to guide your words.’ This is the sort of simple advice that monks will give to people like me, and when we receive it it we will see that it was obvious all along, and that we were too pointlessly complicated, too noisy and frantic, to have heard the still, small voice.

So much of the Christian path - maybe all of it - is not about gaining anything, but is rather about stripping everything away so that the truth can be seen. Once I thought I had to strip away all my words to follow a path like this. Now I think that it is not my words I need to lose - not yet, anyway - so much as my ideas. My concepts. My structures. I had a whole series of structures I was going to build up for this Substack. Without thinking, I was developing a project; a thesis. That, I can see now, is what blocked me from beginning. I was already bricking myself in, like some kind of over-ambitious anchorite.

I can see now that I have to start this journey without a map.

I am currently reading The Lives of the Desert Fathers, and this morning I came across a sentence that helped me to demolish the dam. The authors talked of the monks of the desert as being ‘intensely concerned to discover that freedom of heart that enables a man to see God.’

Freedom of heart. This, I thought, is what I need, but I am very bad at allowing it to approach. I always want to know the destination before I begin the journey. But that freedom of heart is the pearl of great price. Systems get in the way of it; so do ideas, opinions, wealth, attachments, passions. If I am to write about this path without becoming stupid or arrogant or conceited or evil, I am going to have to keep away from all of them as much as I can. I am going to have to be aware minute by minute of how little I know about anything. I am going to have to be prepared to stop this any day if it shades out the sun.

I am going to have to go out walking, without knowing where I will end up.

On Inis Cealtra I suddenly thought: maybe I can do this, if I write not about what I think, but about what I find.

So that’s what I’m going to do.

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If you look around this Substack you will see the results of its autumn revamp. There are new descriptions of what I’m up to, and there is much new artwork produced by our new in-house artist, Ewan Craig, who I’m excited to be working with. Next week, Ewan will be writing a post here to introduce himself and his work.

As for me: I am going to tell those stories, and I am going to see where they lead me. This Substack will not be a map but the account of a journey: not a schema, but a pilgrimage.

There are a few things you can expect on the journey:

• Lives of the Wild Saints.
  This will be the mainstay of my work. I am going to tell the stories of saints from across the world who left that world behind to enter the woods or the deserts. I have written about this before, but now I am going to do so in more depth and at more length. Each saint’s story will be illustrated by Ewan.

• Fifty Holy Wells
  On my fiftieth birthday last year, I decided I would spend the year on a personal pilgrimage, visiting fifty holy wells around Ireland and further afield, photographing them and telling their stories. Starting soon, I am going to tell those stories weekly.

• Occasional Essays and Thoughts
  I have some things I would like to say, and explore, and offer, about my experience of the Orthodox path so far, and the direction of the world as the Machine envelops it. More things will doubtless arise, and I will offer them when they do.

• The Monthly Salon
  Our monthly open house for all paid subscribers, where readers set the agenda, will continue.

• The Scriptorium
  Finally, at some point soon, I hope to begin an experiment with an Abbey Book Club. Each month or two, we will hone in on a book to read together, I will write a review of it, and then anyone can pitch in. Who knows if this will work, but it will interesting to try it out.

That, I think, is enough for now. I hope I have made some sense here. Sometimes, you can only see where you were headed when you arrive.