Twenty Twenty Four

What's going on here?

Terra Slavonica, by Nicholas Roerich

New Year greetings to you all. I had planned to write to you earlier in the new year, but the Stuff of Life will sometimes get in the way. For me, the Stuff has recently included the death of a close neighbour and our household’s adoption of a puppy in need. It turns out that both death and new life will slow things down in their own particular ways.

I’ve had a number of new subscribers migrating here over the festive season, many led by my recent essays on Unherd and in the Free Press. Welcome to you all. Since it is a new year, and since I have some new readers, I thought I would briefly introduce what I do here - and what I plan to do as 2024 unfolds.

The Abbey of Misrule began life in early 2021, as a place where I could explore the unfolding collapse of culture and nature, and the culture of what I call ‘The Machine’ which is replacing it. I wrote a symbolically useful total of 33 essays outlining my ideas on that score. You can read them all here, along with an introduction, if you’re a paid subscriber.

At the same time I was writing these essays, I was going through an intense process of - what shall we call it? Conversion? Spiritual Awakening? Shakeup? Well, anyway - as some of you have recently read in the essay which explains it all, I became an Orthodox Christian three years ago this month, and the more I have walked along this path the harder it has been to write about the world in the way I used to do. Put in stark terms, it is not possible for me to write anything anymore which does not orientate itself around God. So, when I had finished my Machine series I decided to retool the Abbey of Misrule, and use it to write about my journey to Orthodoxy, and the Christian path today. I announced what I was planning in this post last summer.

This, then, is what I do here now. I write about my own explorations, and I write about what the Orthodox Christian path has to say to those of us living in the age of the Machine. In particular, I explore our own Christian heritage here in the West through an Orthodox lens. I have a strong instinct that the Eastern Orthodox tradition into which I was led has something vital to teach those of us in the West who are living with crumbling, lost churches in a crumbling, lost anti-culture. 2024 is only going to deepen the sense of breakdown that is enveloping the West, and yet the breakdown of a culture is nothing new. Empires and nations rise and fall, as people are born and die. What lies beneath? Or who? This is what I write about here now: about the path that must be walked back towards the heart of the matter: towards the truth. Which means, towards Christ.

At present I am writing two regular, ongoing series here. The first I call Lives of the Wild Saints. Every month I tell the story of a historic Christian mystic who has stripped the world away to enter the desert without and within, in search of the ego death which makes way for the experience of God. This series is for paid subscribers.

Every Sunday, I also write a new installment in my series Fifty Holy Wells, which is an account of a pilgrimage I made for my fiftieth year, exploring the historic water shrines of Ireland and beyond. This series is free for all.

Every month I also open up a Salon for all of my readers, in which any paid subscriber can weigh in and set the topic of discussion. It’s a chance for my readers to talk to each other, and me, about anything on their mind.

In addition to these regular writings, you can also expect irregular essays and interventions - like this or this recent example - when you least expect them (and sometimes when I least expect them too.) I have one brewing at the moment. Most of these essays are for my paid subscribers, so you might consider taking out a subscription if you’d like to read them.

At present, I am labouring away - when my new puppy allows it - turning my Machine essays into a book, which, God willing, will be published by Penguin in 2025. This means I will have less time to write here than I would like for the next few months, though the saints, the wells and the salons will keep coming. Come the summer, though, I hope to be able to dedicate all my writing time to exploring here what I have discovered in the Orthodox tradition, and what it has to offer us today. The well is deep, and there is so much to draw on. I am impatient to start drinking, and sharing the cup around.

For now though, please accept again my new year’s welcome to you all. If you stick around for 2024, I think we’re in for an interesting ride.

---

And Now: A News Update

Here are a few things happening at the moment that might interest you:

• I am teaching later this year on a writing course run by the St Basil’s Writer’s Workshop in the US. This is a nine-month course, which includes an in-person writers’ retreat. It’s taught by myself, Jonathan Pageau, Katherine Bolger Hyde, Nicole Roccas, Nicholas Kotar and Samira Kawash, and it seeks to ‘prepare writers to respond to the acute cultural need for restorative stories.’ Restorative stories is a phrase I like. I’d like to help nurture a new generation of fiction writers who can tell them. Applications are now open for anyone interested in joining the course. Next Monday afternoon, I will be doing a live online interview with Nicholas Kotar, Dean of the school, about my classes. It’s free, and you can register for it here.

• Speaking of stories, here is a new podcast featuring myself and my friend Martin Shaw, mythologist and storyteller, in which we talk about our journeys to Christianity, and the state of the culture today.

• And speaking of America, I plan to be in the US in the ‘Fall’, as they say in those parts. I’ll be giving a few talks, including the 2024 Erasmus Lecture in the Big Apple. This will be in late October. There’ll be more news on that as it develops. I’m hoping I will meet some of you while I’m there. Maybe we’ll even try to arrange something. I will keep all of my subscribers updated.