The Monthly Salon: October
Plus, a reader asks about making connections
Hello readers. Apologies first of all for the slowness in offering up the first of my tales of the wild saints. It was supposed to be with you by now, but the business of life has intervened. We’re nearly there, though. Ewan, our in-house artist, has put together a beautiful carving for the story which surpasses even his usual standards, so I hope it will be worth waiting for. On my return, we will begin the journey.
In the meantime, here is your monthly opportunity to take the floor and talk about anything you like.
While I’m here, I’m going to pass on a thought from a reader. Last week we held one of our regular online Founders’ Gatherings, where Founder Members of this little Substack gather to talk with me four times a year about whatever’s on their minds. One reader brought up a familiar issue: how to find, and connect with, like-minded people. Sometimes, when we see the world in a certain way, it can be hard to find others who share the understanding. Despite my general e-phobia, I recognise that this is one area where the Internet can come in handy.
I suggested on that call that it might be worth putting this quandary out to all of you here. It seems to me that there might be a few of you who would like to talk to each other about building networks, communicating with each other outside of this Substack, and working out how to build spaces for your jellyfish tribe, either online or in actual reality.
Perhaps this is something you’d like to bring up below. It’s up to you. What I have also done is to fire up Substack’s ‘chat’ facility in case this proves useful for this discussion. You can access this via a laptop or a phone, I’m told, and it’s open to all subscribers, who can either join in an existing chat, or begin their own.
If you want to know how to set it up, please look here rather than asking little old Luddite me. I have just started up a chat thread on this topic, which you should hopefully be able to see here. Or, as I say, feel free to start your own.
With all that said, the floor is open as usual, to talk about anything you want.
I was talking with someone about universal salvation, or the view that all souls will be saved in the very end. There are three arguments for it in particular that I appreciate. 1) The concept of "eternal Hell" is an oxymoron. Only God is eternal, and Hell is the utter absence of God, which means that there can be no eternal place that is Hell. 2) Our deepest human nature is the image of God; and if freedom means the capacity to perfectly realize our nature, then that means that any decision in favor of evil is an expression of unfreedom. When we are in perfect freedom, we will paradoxically have no choice but to choose Him. 3) The basic logic of love will not be at peace with some souls being condemned to Hell forever. Aquinas' view, which is that the saints in Heaven will derive pleasure from watching the torments of the wicked in Hell, is morally depraved. Much more Christian is the vow of the bodhisattvas, who refuse personal salvation until all creatures on this earth are also saved.
Many seem to believe that universal salvation is a heresy, but the formal stance of the Orthodox Church is that it is a permissible belief, with no dogma or doctrine requiring believers to feel one way or another about it.
The metaphysical implications are somewhat open. Assuming that not all people are going to become saints in this earthly life, universal salvation would seem to require either 1) ongoing purification of the soul in other realms in the next life, or 2) a type of reincarnation, so that people have further opportunity to become holy in this realm. I'm somewhat agnostic about the nuts and bolts of how it works, but I'm convinced that it does. And naturally, universal salvation should never be taken as an excuse to waste the gift of life that we have now. Whatever comes next, this life is of consequence—but it would be better to act out of the actual love of God rather than the fear of Hell.
One vision I have is that when it's time for us to depart from this realm, we will all be obliged to pass through a wall of purifying fire, and our egos are highly flammable. If we have spent our lives here drawing closer to God, then we may experience the fire as fulfilling our deepest desire; whereas if we have spent them clinging to the stuff that will burn, then the fire could seem like a sort of torture and loss of self. In other words, hellfire and holy fire might be one and the same fire, subjectively experienced by two different sorts of people.
Related to universal salvation may be Christian perennialism, or the view that the Logos who is Jesus Christ speaks through all wisdom in all cultures and places and times. It thus becomes possible to consider a distinction between "Christians of the heart" and "heathens of the heart", looking past tribal labels of what people merely profess with their tongues. In Matthew 7:21, Jesus says, "Not all who say My name will be saved"—and I think that the converse must be true as well, and that many who don't say His name will be saved, since it is the state of the heart that matters. I expect that God is more concerned with whether our hearts are aligned with His will than with whether we formally declare faith in His name. If some professing Christians are in for a rather rude shock, then why not also imagine that some self-declared Buddhists are set up for a pleasant surprise? That's how I see it, anyway.
It would interest me if Paul could write (maybe monthly) on navigating the reality of life in contemporary Ireland. I seriously wonder if “his hermit” days may be numbered. This country I believe is in the midst of self-destruction — as one person has put it, “we’ve genocided ourselves.” I think Paul’s outsider Christian-inflected perspective would be fascinating.