Paul Kingsnorth - Entering Into Orthodoxy

and and something else i hadn't thought about really or understood until i became sort of religious myself was that the notion of religion is is a fairly modern invention right this is another enlightenment idea that there's a thing called religion which you do outside of the secular space and the secular space gives you permission to do that and that's fine as long as it isn't too radical or fundamentalist but it's it's sort of an add-on really you can do it if you like it's like going for a walk or painting or something it's a hobby almost whereas actually what we're talking about here is a fundamentally radically different world view yeah but the different the radically different worldview is is secular materialism which is it is a strange new thing [Music] [Music] hello and welcome to why are we talking about rabbits that's this podcast rabbits jump around on the internet and reproduce and then go down rabbit holes and sometimes they're interesting but we're not going to talk about them that way we're going to talk about them using theology philosophy i don't know anthropology i don't know and deeply immersive experiences and first things foundation that's our work that's what you're joining up to listen to in some ways that's this podcast supporting first things foundation people today paul kingsnorth a writer from the uk lives in ireland recently converted to orthodoxy if you're into this idea of what the heck is a conversion how does it happen paul and i talk about all kinds of things including how do modern people graft onto something like a tradition and then we get into all kinds of um well implications regarding this grafting paul king's north on water let's do this paul let me start with this question on uh our show and it's let me just say like this you are about to go into this space in america that i don't know that you're aware of and you're in it in some ways which is hey that guy did what we're doing and what we are in many ways is young there's a lot of young men but young women who are becoming traditional or orthodox and i'd like to say traditional because i've got a lot of people who listen that aren't orthodox but orthodoxy has taken a place marker and then of course there's the concept of christ in the resurrected christ so you're one of these cats that did this thing out there in in europe and you're a great writer and people want to hear about this at least i do and so here's my question to start things for you can your transition toward this traditional christian faith is it for everybody or is it just the you thing how do you deal with the question of universality because i think in the modern age it's hard for people to imagine there is such a thing what are you doing in your own life with this you mean in terms of christianity specifically yeah like if someone says you became orthodox in the romanian tradition is that for everyone because it's funny isn't it because christianity is interesting like this um i mean you know there's part of me that i come from a background as a political activist really um and i've cycled through a lot of stuff in my life um in in the usual kind of quest for truth that we're all on right um and so when i was younger i was an environmentalist i've written a lot about this i've been an actress for a long time and often you get this question in activism especially in green activism people will say oh well how can everybody do this you know how can everybody grow vegetables how can everybody live off the land how can we come up with a solution to climate change that's good for everybody and somehow encompasses everyone in the world you know and it's almost like it's a it's sort of a trick question because you can't right because the world's got eight billion people in it and an enormous diversity of people and cultures and we're different enough at individual levels even from our people next door right so so in one sense you'd have to say well look there isn't a universal answer and in material terms whenever politically we try and create a universal system it always ends in gulags and mass death yeah but then on the other hand what is the promise of christianity what's the promise of christ if it isn't universal i mean that's the interesting paradox to me because christianity in one sense is completely universal and completely down he's open to everybody otherwise it's nothing right it doesn't matter where you're from what race you are what culture you are man woman whatever you can you can walk towards christ in the faith that's the point of it it's not you know it's not an ethnic faith it's not a cultural it goes everywhere it's in so many manifestations but i suppose the form that you would find it in is going to be is going to be the form that you find it in you know um and i don't know what to say beyond that i mean if you told me five years ago that i was going to be a christian at all let alone a romanian orthodox christian if you've been i've said what are you talking about why would i do that i'm not romanian i have no background in that country right um why am i an orthodox christian rather than saying anglican i'm english so why aren't i anglican there's all these questions to answer and i can only say that there's you know lots of sort of our intellectual answers i could give you but it's also where i was taken you know well maybe that's the thing maybe these aren't intellect the paradox is that it's the particular for you romanian orthodoxy but it's also the universal at the same time and then i really like about orthodoxy and actually about christianity but orthodoxy in particular is interesting because it from the outside it can look very ethnic right so you've got romanian orthodox a greek orthodox russian orthodox and it can be that and you've got people who are kind of culturally christian in orthodoxy just as you have in any other tradition and for them it's almost sometimes more of an expression of their cultural heritage than it is necessarily at wanting to live a christian life although it could be both um but although for example if i go to the liturgy in a romanian church most of it is in romanian not all of it some of it's in english here in ireland some of it's an irish actually but you know mostly it's romanian yeah i could go to the same liturgy in a greek church or a russian church or a georgian church and i would be hearing the same liturgy in a different language right in a different language and yes you'd have some local saints in the pantheon and you'd have particular local or national positions which i like i think that's a good thing but fundamentally it's the same faith everyone's worshipping in the same way at the same time according to their cultural tradition and i really like that because to me there's a you know particularity really matters you know we're living in this globalized world in which we're trying to abolish culture everywhere the whole machine system is really about creating this universal consumer monster so particularity matters national culture matters local culture matters as long as it's not an idol but there's the interesting thing about this to me is that it's both universal and particular yeah you know which seems really important because christianity like i say it's an offer for absolutely everyone but that doesn't mean that you abandon your your sort of sense of culture and place right and it's not a project right it doesn't feel like the goal is to make everybody orthodox it seems insane almost actually well i know god god makes you i suppose the spirit makes you what what you what you what you need and what you're looking for so you know if if everybody everybody becomes orthodox it's not my job right it's not yours i mean i have it's interesting actually because i have a real another thing i sort of like about orthodoxy as i have a personal problem with some some missionary work you know i mean some missionary work just because of the way it's been done in the past just the kind of heritage of western missionaries and all of the stuff that they took over to different places which was so much so much tied up with kind of colonialism and cultural degradation of people you know it was it wasn't taking the word of christ to particular cultures it was going right you better become bourgeois americans and wear a suit on a sunday and all of this and chuck your ancestors oh and western education was a major major thrust of all that there's really appalling things been done in the name of missionary work but then again broadly in in orthodoxy the missionary work has been quite positive um and you can go to a place and you know saint herman of alaska is always a great example that's great great you know you go there and you build your monastery and then you see who comes you know when they come then you show them the faith rather than you rolling over to them and saying right here's the truth well it's epiphanic right it's like i'm not really sure what's out there but i know what's in here so if you want to come see what's in here now the trick is is you know the byzantines did some classic colonial religious extension the russians have done it it's a it's a temptation i think in history for i think putin is in some ways taking the temptation and yeah definitely yeah but i agree done properly see so what happened to you that you saw the this alternative narrative of orthodox christianity what what did you bump into a romanian or well not really um it was well it's sort of a long story i mean i as i say i've been i've i've cycled around i i suppose you know i'm just a dissatisfied person with the world you know so i look out at my my culture my so-called culture in britain where i came from and i live and i just thought that's this is all really um i mean i don't mean my kind of cultural heritage as an english person much of which is very beautiful but i mean you know the modern consumer monster is just which is eating everything and it's virtually eaten everything about my country i look around me and i was brought up to kind of go out into this world and be a good little middle middle-class boy and become a banker or a lawyer or something yes but you know from the age of five i could see this was born it wasn't a political objection it was just this is something this is wrong there's something really wrong with this culture something missing there's something so broken about it you know what is this and i'm listening to all these stories about how terrific western modernity is and how technologically advanced we are and how we're we're we're developed and everyone else is developing and all of this stuff and i just thought that bollocks this is this there's something missing here do you know where my irritation was manifest in the notion of the lawn i do you have lawn culture yeah we invented lawns i couldn't and the americans made them bigger this is what americans make it 10 times as big that's how it works i'll take we'll take credit for that or we'll be we'll be condemned for that because the lawn idea i was like 10 years old and just thinking why are so many why are we spending so much time on these i the lawn was the beginning of my what you call unsatisfied life i just couldn't i didn't like it i know what you mean in terms of rejecting but then what happened so yeah you know my dad was very into lawns i remember him trying to find the perfect lawn mower so he could get one of those stripy lawns that yeah yeah because so it looked proper from the right angle it's a class thing in england right everything's always a class thing so if you've got a stripy lawn it looks really proper you know proper semi-auto anyway yeah i agree lawns are good for playing on that's it so yes there's dissatisfaction and um for me it manifested as a i had this real love of nature from a very young age and then i could see this society destroying it and so that became a political issue for me when i became a student and i became an environmental activist and that was the means of now that i look back i can think okay there's there's a dissatisfaction and effectively i channel that through politics that so many people do and we say look we've got to fix this world because it's a mess right the values are wrong systems are wrong everything's unfair there's loads of injustice we're destroying the forests we've got to fix this so i spent a long time on that and then you get to the point where you think okay this isn't really fixable right i mean there are things you can do there are improvements you can make but you know basically we're this is a very big problem that we have globally and i can't i'm funnily enough i'm not powerful or important enough to be able to fix it and i'm pretty sure that if we come up with another revolutionary plan and try and unfold it it's going to lead to tyranny again yeah yeah and so then you get to the point and you where you think that there's an underlying problem and it's one of a better word it's a spiritual problem and so i spent 10 years cycling through zen buddhism and sort of neo-paganism and studying mythology and then becoming a a wiccan you know a modern witch sure over here in ireland and doing all of this and there's there's shards of truth in all of those traditions but there was something missing again and then i uncomfortably sort of thought maybe it's god and then i ignored that for ten years because i i didn't want to face the implications having grown up very materialistic i had a lot of experiences which were were fundamentally obviously christian i kept meeting christians i kept having dreams i kept and and by christians all types protestants no obvious you know i mean it was it was interesting i was running a kind of writing school for people and people would come to me with their writing and i would help them with it and all of a sudden i had this flood of kind of vicars and christian writers and priests all coming at me and saying could you help me with this book it was very weird first of all you just said a flood of vicars that we in america would like that phrase it's a phrase i've never used before you're the first one to hear it on this podcast well done a flood of vickers because it's quite an image actually isn't it it is yeah but anyway it's short the long story short is i i thought okay look i'm becoming a christian and then after a few months of believing that i could do this on my own i realized that no you can't do it on your own you need a church you need to go and then then the question becomes well what's the right chur what is the church there are there are thousands of them i mean i'm english so i suppose my tradition is anglican but i live in ireland which is mostly catholic um anglicanism just seemed so broken by the world and it still does you know it's the particular story in england i don't know if you came across this a few years back the one of the great old medieval cathedrals i think it was norwich cathedral the uh the the authorities there decided in their wisdom that the way to get more people to come to this cathedral was to put a helter skelter in it you know from a fairground i have heard this story please keep going this is nice see it on the bbc they put this they got this fairground helter skelter built in the nave of the cathedral right and and they said things like oh you know this will attract people in and when when they come in we can teach them about christ and then they said oh you know if you climb up to the top of the the helter skelter you can see the medieval roofs which are very interesting for you you know and it was just like and there was another one there was another cathedral where they put a crazy golf course right down the the transect the cathedral and you could come in and play crazy dolphin and yeah exactly what so and i thought to myself would you get this in a mosque right no you would never get this in a mosque would you i want to go to a church where this is not going to happen oh yeah this is just and i can see that it's brought and there are good people in the church of england right okay right right there's some very good christians in in the anglican tradition and i'm not judging anyone's christianity but the the kind of the authorities of that church have lost it and i thought this is not i don't know what this is but it's not it's not a faith that kind of believes in itself actually no this is not a church that believes in itself this is not a church that is giving me an alternative to the world which is what i wanted and what i thought christianity was right i thought christianity is an alternative to the world not politically in a sense that it's an activist religion or something but it's you know it's so plainly you can read the gospels you can see it everywhere it's so plainly like the world goes that way and we go this way right sometimes we intersect obviously and we live in the world but well the way of god is not the way of the world i had uh a monk a spiritual father once argued but he didn't argue but he was making a claim that in some ways the anglican church is the modern world if you look at their attack on monasticism you know with king henry and that whole movement what they're trying to do is clean out that that alternate space that space that we're all called to the the the prayer space i'm talking about you know i always joke with people the michael jordan prayer space so michael jordan is known to everyone as the greatest basketball player i think what our monastics are trying to do is go into that space of pure excellence now can they do it no but but the church has to call us in there and i would just say any true faith islam did that to me in africa when i was living with muslims in africa there was something about the calling right like no you no i know your life's fine but you have to come over here and this prayer five times a day i know you don't want to do it come over here and when you're called to something it's something like a a deep s a protected space and that space i don't want to stay in because i like the world but i like a hot bath but i think a tradition has to have the call maybe not everyone can fundamentally and i think that almost answers your questions all about how is this for everyone and it's like yeah exactly that it's like you know what we're gonna do here we're gonna we are going to hold open this deep radical religious space that was given to us right at the beginning by christ and we're going to do that and you can do what you want with that right yeah yeah yeah for it for most of your life right it's but if you if you want it if you choose it it's there right because at the heart of this this faith is the choice the free will that we have choose to embrace god or we choose to ignore god or whatever we want to do but if there isn't an institution which is supposed to be the church of christ which says okay this is where we take this 100 seriously right and we are not worldly people here this is what we do we do christian faith you don't like it that's fine you can go to the pub and if you do like it we're here and we're not going to let the pub into the church in order to attract you right because that's what that's what the anglicans have done largely they've allowed the world to come into the church in the hope that that will bring people back and all it's done is corrupted and broken the church it's the oldest it's the oldest problem catholicism i think has obviously done it to some degree since vatican 2 and there's lots of division about that but but you know i don't know it's funny because i thought to myself i should probably be a catholic because it's the western church yeah i was gonna say yeah here i am in ireland but there was just something it's funny there was something about catholicism that didn't quite sit with me but i'll tell you what i did right i i basically said to i started praying and i said right i i accept that my massive ego is going to have to be deflated here i need to find a church right and i can't do this on my own i can't be a heroic christian i need a chest so i prayed and i said please find me a church send me to a church and send me a i particularly said please send me a priest right i was looking for otherwise so that was a spoken word prayer and i did it quite a lot and i said send me a please send me a priest send me what show me where i should go um and i literally there were months and months where i couldn't drive past the church without wanting to just go in and sit there and it was just a call it wasn't a rational thing where i was specifically looking for a priest to turn up but i just i was just desperate really i just kept going into churches all the time and i just sit in churches and i would be thinking i wonder if a priest will just walk in and start talking to me because if he doesn't i've got my answer but it never really happened and then i found that the first orthodox monastery in ireland just opened about 40 minutes from me right and there's the first orthodox monastery in ireland i would say for a thousand years right since the schism right right right two romanian nuns run this monastery but it's not i mean it's a romanian monastery but it's it's pan-orthodox lots of people and it's very uh welcoming and the liturgy is in romanian but also in english a little bit of it irish they do such a good job of just exactly holding open that space right it's a really serious orthodox place there's no compromise there's no you know let's do a bit of orthodoxy and see if we can make it a bit western it's very much a really serious orthodox place but it's also tied into the history of ireland it's the monastery of saint kirin who's one of the great old irish saints because of course the vast majority of saints from this land were what we would call orthodox because they're pre-schism right so they're absolutely named patrick for obviously saying saint bridget all of the great saints of ireland including saint kieran um who's the who's the the patron of the monastery so they've brought in orthodoxy from romania which is a very you know foreign place in many ways very eastern very not irish and they've they've just slotted it right back into the early christian tradition which it has come from and so i i sort of plucked up the courage to ask if i could go to a liturgy and i did and i'd never been to an orthodox literature before and it was immensely powerful just the experience of going to a liturgy right it's nothing like you would see the catholic mass or certainly for any protestant service at all it was just it's just a you know it's a full immersion and i thought wow what is this this is this is not what i thought christianity was give me one second paul take a break for one second first things foundation is scouring the world and you are a part of the world for excellent sponsors folks who want to get the word out about what they do for a very fair price become a sponsor of water and in fact in so doing you'll be assisting first things foundation and developing small projects around the world to serve local communities check out our website www.firstdashthings.org and give us a call or write us an email if you'd like to be a sponsor your ad appears here and that ad helps us help others and it's not retrofitted for you it's the it's the living expression of all that was but it's it's stayed in the world which is nutty right because if you trace it you see all the egyptian monks in the early 200s anthony and all those cats all that liturgy makes its way up through france and then into into into england and and basically it's alive and well but then it dies in the west and so in the east they're not really this is what's happening in america look i don't know how many millions but it's happening you feel people searching for this traditional moment but they feel it new and when i felt it knew i was the same and it overwhelmed me i think like you but then you start to realize wait a minute this is new to me but this has been around and then it gets really wild almost mystical in that could this be the place that's been telling us the world about the culture of christ for the whole time that's that's when i got that's that's when i was all in and this has been creeping up on me for such a long time but you know this is not orthodoxy in the west is not a strange foreign religion that's coming that we're embracing because it's trad whatever that even right right right right it's it's the ancient form of christianity and like you said it died here it broke here it broke after the schism it broke through the reformation it shattered and it splintered and and but but it kept going there it kept going in the east and interestingly in orthodox countries you know they've been so persecuted for so long so many orthodox countries were kind of destroyed and occupied by the ottomans by by the turks people don't know that yeah and you know massive occupation by islam for like 1000 years or 500 years anyway and then you have obviously what happened in russia the mass destruction of the church by communism so it's a kind of a church that knows how to be strong under persecution as well and it's managed to survive all of that i mean the systematic destruction of the religion by by say stalin and lenin deliberate attempt just you know slaughter thousands of priests dynamite the cathedral in moscow film it show it to everybody at the party which by the way filming it's incredible right like we we did that and also we'd like you to see us do that yeah yeah here we are burning the thousand-year-old icons because it's all superstition you know but it's come back now you know as you say there's plenty of problems with the kind of politicization of the church in russia today but i'm talking about the faith of the people you know at that level and it's come orthodoxy has come to the west now seems to me at a time when we needed it so i went to this liturgy and as you say it's very very old but it's not it's not there's nothing being put on for you it's not like here's a show of some old tradition it's not like going to a folk festival you know it's like these old things right look at this old tradition that you could bring back it's like no this is alive right right it's a living tradition and that was at the monastery and i i then then the the priest i met the priest after the liturgy he started to talk to me gave me a few things to do we talked and interestingly one of the first things he said was you know don't rush he didn't try and he didn't try and bring me into the church he's going okay so you're a western guy you're interested in orthodox you know take your time you know take your time it's you know it's a big thing it's a serious thing here are some frustrations you can do here some prayers you can say keep coming to the liturgy keep reading the ancients would they would they would wait three years i don't know how long did he make you wake up a year he didn't have a he didn't have a time scale but he you know he was keeping an eye on me and he yeah he was kind of calming me down because i'm very excitable you know i wanted to go i wanted to become a saint within a week right and he was going he was like no it doesn't work like that mate it does not work funnily enough you're you will have to calm down at this point because this is not a process i like that calm down calm down come back and contact that i always need to calm down but you know it's not a process you can control so so i was kind of hooked and i kept going and the depth of it was there and i'd been sent a priest and in the end i thought to myself this is it's plainly where i am supposed to be yeah yeah and so i'm going to be here and um there's something to it that is really serious i mean i've said this to a few other people that on this kind of spiritual search i was on all of the other paths i found you know buddhism and wicca and sort of various sort of pagani sort of things i went looking for them because i thought they'd meet a need i had right whereas with christianity it came for me i i would never have gone looking for romanian orthodox christianity or christianity at all because i thought that it was a you know irrelevant old thing that had nothing to do with truth and all the propaganda that were given in the west about the failures of the faith some of which is based on truth but a lot of isn't yeah so it came for me so that was that was the story really but you you know what i like is sometimes poetry is so that's a poetic idea i found in orthodoxy i was taught that sometimes poetry is the evidence so in the west it's always material atomistic evidence that it's supposed to convince me but like dostoyevsky is always talking about sometimes the evidence is in the beauty if you stop that's enough evidence that maybe that's the place you're supposed to go i don't know we believe that in the modern world so much anymore no we don't and that's that's the thing this is what you know i was reading renee guy on recently and he talks endlessly about this thing he calls the western deviation he likes this phrase or sometimes he calls it the modern deviation and he says look the west is just is a part of the world which is deviated from its connection to the sacred center to the truth and it's gone down pure materialism instead into what you call the reign of quantity and what that's done is it's allowed us in the west to have this incredible material abundance and these technological achievements which are unparalleled at the cost of basically selling selling our souls right where yeah spangler called us a faustian culture and that's what we are by the way you got me i went and i went and bought that book spengler's book uh yeah that decline oh well i i dug down on that whole notion of i don't know if we want to get into it here but the whole faustian notion and the the the the the ear of the magi and i tried to use it in one of my uh pod courses and it was quite a hit but rejected but the western people on the course were like this guy's negative i'm like well he or just telling you something but at the heart of the heart you know this is i think also this kind of got got to the heart of my problem with my culture as i was growing up which is i'm very very conflicted about this whole notion of the west right because i come from the west culture and i don't i don't want to be you know we're going through a cultural moment at the moment where there's a huge political assault on all things western um and i you know that offends me that feels like an attack on my ancestors and so i there's part of me that wants to be reactionary in that sense and just go you know screw you i'm defending the west but then i look at it and i think well you know actually there's something really flawed about this thing we call the west at the heart of it you know it's there's something wrong with it and it is it does feel like a deviation that we've gone wrong at some point and it's we have walked away from this sacred sense that we had this sense of what walked away from god essentially i i feel like it's a cast so the my daughters are in their 20s woke people you guys have woke people in ireland oh yes we do have them yet right so that i always have a sympathy for the woke they are waking up to something but i feel like it's a cascading awakening i i went through that too but if you keep going you start to realize that you're actually awakening to a deeper problem which is this enlightenment problem on some level and then that is the west that is the heritage i don't like to attack either because i mean i'm that guy i like to read a good thesis and try to make a good argument i like to do all those western things with my mind but man in liturgy you have to put them down yeah and that's the thing isn't it it's the the other thing that's attractive about orthodoxy to me is that the willingness of a priest if you ask him a question to say that's a mystery you know it's which is such a refreshing thing to hear well you know that's we don't really know that we're not sure and it's it's very interesting because it seems to me that you know you can look at other faiths um i mean my wife comes from an indian family so she's a sikh and sikhism is very interesting faith um and at the heart of sikhism and i believe this is true of islam as well but i don't know much about islam is you know the basic reality that god is a mystery right we can't actually we can never know god we can never know god and that's right at the heart of the orthodox faith as well right you know christ although even he's pretty mysterious um but you can have that connection but you can't you can't know god you can't look on god's face without going blind right it's a great great metaphor you look on god you're dead basically because you can't you you can't possibly understand that thing but you don't you don't want i mean this is the other thing some things aren't meant for you this is another get ready for the hierarchy not in the west you see this is the weapon deviation we think everything is meant for us we are we are pure will we are pure will and so we say now well why isn't it meant for us why can't we know this why can't we split the atom why can't we uh put why can't we plant wounds in men why can't we why can't we live forever why can't we upload our minds there's no reason not to do this because once you reject any sense of sacredness or anything transcendent or any god then you can do what the hell you want as long as you've got the ten nuts and it's your will it's triumph of will all the way down all the way where it's going it's just eating the apple every day right yes and this yeah well sarah from rose who i don't know do you know sarah from rose yeah yeah i love social media yeah i mean he talks about just mistaking the creature for the creator and that at the core i think i was raised by good parents again i love my parents but i was raised in a culture that kept trying to make me the creator like you can do whatever you want i was like really though can't it this is it right so i mean i i i'm haunted at the moment by the uncomfortable reality that the offer we get in the garden of eden right from the snake from the serpent from the adversary is you know you don't need to follow the will of god which is also the pattern of creation you can go out and create your own don't wait for the wisdom just take the power um and that's what we do that's the west right this is our culture now this is like we don't we don't believe in any of that superstitious rubbish obviously but why can't we just remake reality at the cellular level the way we want it to be and if we want to we'll set that up as a kind of solution to the world's problems right the only way to stop the environment from collapsing is to i don't know build make meat in laboratories and and rewire the landscape that's happening ready and why can't why can't men have babies because of quality and all of this kind of stuff and there's always a reason you can always justify this self stuff to you but it's like we are we are eating that apple every day and that's our story now and we're saying yeah this is good this is what we want but paul go back go back for a second so you've written about um the sort of the machine and the harvesting and boy man the images are brilliant and i you know we work in west africa and east africa in the georgia republic and guatemala we see the machine you describe in your writing if you guys haven't read it go read it on his sub stack the machine is so real it's almost it's palpable when you're out there in these places and it's tearing stuff up so that it not necessarily replant so we can take right but here's the thing this is my real question for i think this is why i wanted you to come on so here's little paul king's north and ireland or john heers or whoever these people are out here we're trying to sort of graft onto something that didn't get torn up right in some way but the grafting itself like becoming orthodox or you know my brother doesn't want to hear me say this but becoming something old world muslim or whatever becoming something other than orthodox but something where you're trying to grab back on but let's do orthodoxy me and you to graft how do does one graft because you're a writer and if you like this is going to come out paul people are going to see this and a lot of your readers are going to want to dismiss you now as some orthodox guy you see what do you do with that like is it just the middle finger do you just keep going and then you don't care or well for me that's already happened really um because i wrote an essay a year or two ago first things about becoming a christian that's right that's right and so i had i had i had some pushback from readers and i had people saying i was they were never going to read me again and all this stuff so i'm sure i had a drop off of readers and people who take me seriously and then there were other people who came on board especially a lot of christians who now like reading me so i expect i've probably replaced my audience with a new one or some of them and then there are other people who've actually interested me the most interesting response i've had from people who are much more perceptive than i am has been people who said well i've been reading you for years and it's been obvious you were on this path oh okay you're a spiritual seeker i'm not very surprised to see you because when i when i it's interesting somebody said to me they said you know all the all the authors you've been referencing for years from even illiteracy to wendell berry to various others didn't you notice that and i said no i didn't really because i'm very slow um but it's you know it's true so there have been some people as i say more perceptive than me who said i'm not surprised to see this progression so but you know i don't know if you think it's true you have to do it don't you i mean what else can i think i think so yeah christianity is maybe this is something else in the west because christianity until a few decades ago was certainly till half a century ago was was the kind of establishment thing that you did if you wanted to be part of society we'd sort of forgotten what it's like to be persecuted and to be outsiders but that is what christianity is that's what happened to christ and that's what happened to the church for centuries and it was never supposed to be a comfortable establishment faith really all right can i even go further in the weeds because i have this issue sometimes so now you get invited to i don't know i'm just making stuff up the cool writers of ireland association association dot conference and you're a speaker how do you parse what what let's just go for it the thing driving you which is something like the orthodox faith it's it's a part of your writing now how do you parse when to say the language you use the language and when not to i find this fascinating this is really interesting um i was actually talking to another writer about this yesterday young american writer i met the first time he's living in ireland who's he's a novelist um and he's become orthodox even more recently than me and so he wanted to ask me this question you know and i i don't really know the answer i mean i think i think that um since i've become a christian i've really sort of um i've sort of retreated from that literary world a bit and it's basically it retreated from me a bit because i don't think it's not that you can't be a christian right i'm sure you can but i think that this the the culture now is so not just anti-christian although it is quite anti-christian but it's more sort of so aggressively secular and materialist and individualist and technological that it's very difficult even to speak the same language i think that is the problem it's like you're saying that how do you even how do you cross this golf and i don't really know i mean uh the sub stack stuff i'm doing at the moment is i started that a year or two ago year 18 months ago the process of writing it has seen me become well more christian as i've gone on down the path but also just i i've just i think i've i've got deeper into this vein of understanding what's wrong and the kind of the spiritual crisis and so i am trying to sort of have a foot on both stools in that in that project i'm trying to speak to a lot of people which is it's my natural instinct it's what i do you know i like to try and speak to as broad a gang of people as possible i don't like being sectarian but it does get harder and harder actually i don't know if you find that but it gets harder and harder to speak outside yeah there's good kind of place even the construct of the term the way we construct the term sectarian so so i think we spoke about this last time i can't remember it was a while ago when we spoke but uh the word religion the latin really coming out there is that it's just that which binds and holds a body together or i like the idea it holds the world view so it's the ligaments of the of the world view that you hold and so there we all have this so to be a sectarian is something like you don't have my same world view but why would i this is the all the weird part about free speech in in the west is why would i ever hold your exact same world view the whole point is to allow me to tell you about it and then you tell me about it and the whole point is is of the premise should be we don't i am a sectarian by nature and so are you and so where do we overlap where's the venn diagram so i look at it when i do we do this dinner paul and it's it's the georgian supra which is a type of dinner that comes out of the georgian liturgy they've been orthodox since the 300s okay maybe the third oldest christian country in the world and they've developed a very they did it during soviet period it's a type of toasting dinner that takes you through the themes of life and you go you go through this with a toastmaster automata and so when you're in georgia the theme you know the first toast is often to the theotokos to the mother of god and then there's always a toast to your the ancestors they may be resurrected there's all these overtures everything's about the liturgy and everyone knows it in georgia but we do it as a community dinner here in south carolina so you and your wife could come and you would join 18 others and we would start the process and so i ask you that question because as tamada i'm trying to thread this weird needle here where i've got 18 people at the table with all these various lig religions that hold their world together what i'm trying to do is is go right down the venn diagram middle where all of life overlaps and a good tommendal leads you right down the middle where we all understand one another and we get rid of the parts that don't now we get it wrong all the time but i guess it's something like seeing the table and seeing people and asking what they need not what i need to tell them maybe something like that maybe that's how we approach it that's what i'm practicing but how can i know you know what everybody wants to hear it's brutal yeah well you can never tell anyone what they want to hear can you that's always a bad plan um well it's a terrible plan but there's something universal in our relationships that what you're talking about seems to me is trying to maybe not find common ground exactly in the sense that you'd have to agree with people but just yeah finding that the thread finding the thread that ties people together because there's always something i mean it's interesting to me you know i think that um c.s lewis said something once because he said something about everything so you can always quote him yeah always quote cs lewis if you haven't got an idea about what to say next um but cs lewis you know he talked once about how difficult it was to try and convert people to christianity or just tell them about it in in the modern world of course he's writing like 50 60 years ago um or more actually um and he said look you know in the ancient world say you were a christian in ancient rome and you wanted to try and teach people about christ and convince them they should be christian instead of worshiping their pagan gods what you're trying to do is convince them their conception of god is wrong and yours is right so you can have a conversation there you might disagree you might argue what you're trying to do in the modern world is trying to convince people that there's the the notion of god who believe that the notion of god is absurd we believe that the whole of the spiritual realm the transcendent realm anything beyond the materialism so to become christian or just to take the notion seriously so you've got a whole different mountain to climb there because you know it seems to me that for most of history and still probably in most of the world people have a sense that the material realm is just part of the picture yeah whereas in in the modern west we say no this is all there is right so we're immediately in a position anyone who comes from any so-called traditional sort of background spiritually whether they're muslim or christian or sikh or anything else jewish you're already in a position of immediately being relegated to a kind of slightly weird thing that you do at the weekend right and and something else i hadn't thought about really or understood until i became sort of religious myself was that the notion of religion is is a fairly modern invention right this is another enlightenment idea that there's a thing called religion which you do outside of the secular space and the secular space gives you permission to do that and that's fine as long as it isn't too radical or fundamentalist but it's it's sort of an add-on really you can do it if you like it's like going for a walk or painting or something it's a hobby almost whereas actually what we're talking about here is a fundamentally radically different worldview yeah but the different the radically different worldview is is secular materialism which is it is a strange new thing and it's very i find it you know i would find it much harder i'm much easier to sit down at the table and have a chat with a traditionalist muslim or a jew or someone with a very different religion to me or or you know someone with an indigenous cosmology someone from native american culture than i would with a kind of secular modern liberal who thought richard dawkins was great you know it's it's the world the golf is so big well you say it really well is the presupposition is the above or the spiritual the invisible isn't even there and so wow i gotta build the whole i have to build the whole picture and it's not something you can convince anybody about yeah that's right rationalist framework because you can't do it because it's not there's no proving it right i mean this i'm not going to even attempt to prove a great point it's it's the point yeah that's the point is and this is the thing when you get you get the sort of richard dawkins types coming at you with with kind of reason and science and saying well how do you prove this stuff well you just have to be honest and say well i can't i mean i could sit here and try and give you a ton of theological cleverness about how god has to exist or whatever but it doesn't mean anything it doesn't prove anything no even even aquinas at the very end didn't he say it's all just straw just i yes that's an amazing thing he had that great vision didn't he and he said all of his work has been like straw that's terrifying though well it's terrifying but it's also kind of wonderful because it seems to me when i at least see that story apparently he was serving mass and he had this great vision and he never told anyone what it was but he said everything i've written has been like straw compared to what i've just seen but that looks like anything else but his work became his work became prolific i mean people used the work before the straw yeah but what is the straw completely negated the work you know and it's like um that's it it reminds me of the story of the buddha when the buddha became enlightened the buddha said but the story of the buddha is that he's a prince and he's he lives in great luxury and his father shields him from the world but then he gets out and he sees death and misery and poverty and decides life is meaningless wants to know the truth explores every tradition it basically gets to the point where he says i'm going to sit under this tree and i'm not getting up until i've seen the truth and i don't care if i die in the quest and then he becomes enlightened and the story that um the story that you hear then is that he had this great vision of reality a bit like aquinas perhaps and he realized he couldn't explain it to anybody because it was so profound and the gods are looking down right the gods are looking down at the buddha and they say he has to teach people this because if he doesn't the human race is lost we need him we've got this human he's finally become enlightened and the gods come down to him i can't remember which god it is and they plead with him to teach humanity and they say to him if you don't tell people what you've seen and how to get there themselves then the whole of the human race is screwed yeah so eventually he agrees to do it and he sits down and he tries to work out the method and he does that through what's now called the dharma but it's the similar thing you know he he realizes that even everything he teaches is just a tiny little notion towards what he's actually experienced and that's so then they're going to experience that but they're kind of the profundity of what's what's out there you hear this from the saints all the time you know yeah that's right they say look if you could see what if you could see what reality actually is you know you'd realize how trivial most of this stuff is right so then to to teach is to become right like antos ontology to become that's why the prayer see a prayer never made sense to me then it made sense within the tradition of the orthodox church which is it's not for god it's for you that you might become the expression of what you're learning what your what you're availed of in the liturgy you now are becoming that thing like an ember you're now sent out warm and so you don't have to teach anything you have to be something but um i don't know if that is resonant with westerners but it was resonant with me well i think you know this is the thing about it you have to you have to go out and seek it because again prayer when i was young i didn't understand what prayer was i just thought it was sort of asking god for stuff right and then you do that and then most of the time you don't get it you're like wait a minute clearly clearly there's no god because this is rubbish i asked him for you know i asked him if i could win the lottery it didn't happen so it's all cool but again it's like if if if a church um and again we're talking orthodoxy but this could be true of any you know any traditional faith if you if you believe it's the truth um if the if the space is there and the people are saying to you look here's how you do it here's the truth so in orthodoxy for example i always think of mount athos and i think as long as mount athos is there and those monks are there and they're doing what they've been doing for a thousand years there then we're okay because we can always go there and they can say you know that's amazing here's what you need to do guys and you know the monasteries in orthodoxy there are little athoses everywhere including our monastery here in ireland they probably wouldn't accept that description but it is what they're doing actually it's something so for sure they're holding that they're holding that truth and they're not going to put a helter skelter in their church anytime soon so we're okay and so we can go and find it and it seems to me also just i don't know talking about my experience i wouldn't have been ready to have this stuff told to me 20 years ago or even 10 years ago if someone had come and told me about orthodoxy i probably pushed the way i had to be ready almost i had to be desperate enough actually you know i had to have tried absolutely everything else and thought this still isn't it what is what am i missing it i had to get to the point where i was i would say okay well maybe maybe it's this surely it can't be christianity but you know okay i'll try it right you know you have to get to the point and there are some people who get to that point when they're like 12 or 5 like the buddha and there are some people who are slow learners like me and they take till the nearly 50. well i accept it yeah well i accept it i think fundamentally i was in africa i've told this story before uh and you and i may have talked about it off camera but it was the muslims of mali that showed me this really love of obedience or at least if not love they were obedient to the rule the prayer rules and the rules of juma friday and just basically i saw people who seemed to change their lives according to their faith and when i was an angry episcopalian nothing really changed i did whatever i wanted and sort of justified it through through my experiences in the church and so i just kind of reversed engineered what they were doing and i liked their obedience but i didn't fully understand it until i became orthodox and i had a spiritual father so i'll tell you a story i don't know if you want to hear this story but can i do a quick one basically it was like the second or third posca uh it was great lent my wife and i were very thankful to be orthodox but whatever i didn't really get it that much and my spiritual father i was talking to him and he said well don't forget the fast during the fast during the fast and i was like yeah no meat no dairy and he'll say well no the fast in the orthodox tradition is no meat no dairy and it's a marital fast so you you and your wife should not be you know having conjugal love and and i'm like whoa whoa whoa i'm married hang on a minute no no i i didn't sign up that's for monks and stuff he was like no it's not he's like no that's for you during the fast and every wednesday and every friday and i was like hell i told my wife i was like wait a minute wait a minute she said we should do that i said well so here's what happened she was pregnant with our third child and so all before that pasca she had been pregnant so not a lot of loving going on then then after she's she's done not a lot of loving for six weeks or whatever and then guess what happened paul the fast kicked in 40 days yeah well really like 52 if you look at it and so i went to him and i said father come on like economia hook me up like let me i'm young and he said listen you do whatever you want to do he was like don't do it you do whatever you want to do but i don't give a blessing why i give blessing for this i was like because like i'm weak and he's like no i'm not doing that so then i told my wife she'd be like man don't worry about it no she enforced the rules and guess what happened i understood what pasca is on a very base level because i'm possible i broke the fast in all its facets and what i understood is the feast properly orchestrated after the fast and i had never had that experience as a christian and so yeah my little animal self my little dog self was able to see something bigger because i constrained the dog in me and i'm telling you that's what i meant that's what i was seeing in islam but this through the christian or through the christ resurrected lens was just so powerful man so powerful yeah no it's really interesting i mean for me i'm coming from a kind of secular atheist not religious at all background so i haven't been one sort of christian and become another i've suddenly become the the kind of the strict the strictest kind of christian my priest likes to say that the orthodox are the special forces of christianity he enjoys he enjoys saying that because he he aspired to be in the army when he was younger so he says this a lot but it's you know it's quite a good comparison actually um and it's it's absolutely true and that's that's the thing right when you get to the point where you get made to do something you don't want that's really the big deal because i don't really have much of a problem being vegan for 40 days i can kind of manage that i like cheese i miss the cheese but i can live without cheese i get used to it after a while but as you say when it comes to something like you know yeah sex with your wife or something that's really fundamental to you or whatever it is to you that you're being denied you see that and it kind of brings me back to this kind of western idea as well that the thing we really hate is obedience you know we hate it we hate institutions we hate rules we hate hierarchies but you and i hate it let's be honest and there's a reason there's a reason that we we've rebelled against some of those things right it's not as if these things haven't been abused and horrific throughout history for sure it's not as if you know hierarchy and rules are always great i mean there's a reason there's also a reason a lot of people want to come to the west you know and adopt western lifestyles because they think they can liberate themselves from some of the worst aspects of this stuff because we're human and so hierarchy and rules always get abused for powerful yeah the rest of it so so yeah of course there's an appeal so i'm a western individualist you know i'm a liberal guy in many ways grew up in a liberal culture so i don't really want to do that either um but i got to the point where i knew i had to and that i think probably again is part of the reason i went to orthodoxy is i wanted something really serious i wanted to have my life changed right yeah and i knew that if i became an anglican or something i wasn't really gonna change anything look at your face your face was like yeah i could go to church and then i could go and help the sculpture afterwards and it would be fine and you know i actually wanted to be forced into a different shape because i knew i had to because i kind of felt like this is my last chance i'm nearly 50 right i don't do this now right right the shape is interesting but you know america has an obesity just epidemic which is really interesting that it manifests in obesity shape and i'm not picking on anybody who's obese i i myself battle with this all the time the question though is is that's not by chance it's not by chance that our problem looks that way i think shape that's an interesting concept i think what shape are we taking and yeah what shape is this is the culture taking i mean it's it isn't possible to look around say my country britain and go well this place is really functioning very well you know these these are happy people this is a content society there's a great sense of meaning here there really isn't you know i mean there's a ton of different reasons you could pinpoint for that but you know it's not as if pursuing this this so-called secular modern path whatever it is of technology and radical independence has actually worked so what do you think happens does it burn it's got to burn it's got it well i think it's going to burn out i mean look i don't know this machine this this word i like to use which isn't my word i stole it from better writers like d.h lawrence rs thomas and george orwell and people who've been using this word for a long time because they can sense this kind of big technological monstrosity that's grown up around us and there isn't really a good definition for it in a way it's got to burn itself out because it's literally unsustainable in every way right i mean it's the resources it's consuming spiritual and cultural and ecological can't be sustained you're not going to get eight million eight billion people living like that so it's all you can already see it coming down the climate is changing for god's sake i mean what's that of what that's not a warning bell i don't know what it is yeah so it has to come down we're not going to retreat from it we can't really now we're all stuck in it so there's going to be a sort of messy staggered collapse of some kind which is happening but i think i think we're kind of already there you know we're kind of already there and i think maybe this search that people and i'm i'm sensing it over here as well the search that some people anyway i've got for a really serious faith tradition is is a response to that you know and i think that the only thing i would cause about that is you know you get a lot of this sort of so-called trad stuff going on especially online where a lot of what's happening is people want the outward forms of being kind of traditional and old-fashioned and not woken not liberal but they don't want to do the fasting right they don't they don't they want the exoteric form but not the esoteric form if you do sort of cultural christianity or being trad or larping orthodoxy or something without really wanting to do it properly then it doesn't mean anything um well it becomes another form of power it just becomes another way to get what you actually really want which is control over your life it's politics as well it's just uh this looks like a good way to fight the cultural war so i'll go and be orthodox that is a danger to danger yeah oh it is a danger and i think you could see that happening in some places i think maybe especially in america it's not happening here where i am but it seems to be happening seems to be happening on the internet in places where i don't basically go too very much well you're smart yeah well i don't i don't get involved at all in online orthodox stuff it's just i don't want oh good for you man i just because you know i follow the path i don't want to i don't want to do this sort of nonsense whatever it is but it's a blessing because you you as a writer you can do that we're running this non-profit and so we we we by nature reach out i got to raise money you know and and we reach out but i will say i really want to avoid some of those um those land mines that that you're talking about on both sides of both sides of the equation because some some woke person going gonna get pissed at this like let's be honest and so at some point i like what you said at some point you're not gonna make anybody happy if you try to make everybody happy it's not happening on the other hand there is something about being attentive to the soul in front of you some i learned this as a teacher of of high school kids 17 18 year olds they want what you want because they're made in god's image so you can just start with that process okay they want joy and happiness just like i do the question is which vocabulary or which diet can they handle what what it's your job as the teacher or at least a position of authority to figure out what diet they can eat you are all moving toward the same rich beautiful bountiful feast i get it but not everybody can eat the same food including me man i can't i can't say it from the sarah or or elder afram i can't eat that that food i can't handle it man it breaks me so where are we each in this journey and i find if you are attentive to others in that way you have a shot but the danger is is you then end up you end up breaking yourself in order to try to figure out everybody else's sort of reality in other words you're becoming a humanist you become somebody who has no center you know that's the line to walk isn't it there's a really nice way of looking at it though isn't it not being able to eat some food yeah i like that because that's exactly right we're all just um and also like i said earlier you know you can eat different foods at different stages of your life as well yeah i might be able to eat different food in five years and so might you you know yeah my dairy days are over probably be clearly to eat less and less in five years you'll be subsisting on just seeds like one of the greatest saints you know red water that might be that might be a good place to end maybe can we we got to keep talking though don't you think at some point yeah no i'm enjoying this these are these are the big questions aren't they you know it's um uh i suppose i you know where i'd end is by saying that one of the things i've loved about finding orthodoxy is that you answer the questions by walking the path you know and i'm i'm a writer so i like to intellectualize things and talk about them and come up with solutions in my head sometimes can be an excuse to avoid actually living it right so actually in orthodoxy you have to live it and that's true of any faith tradition that's serious you've got to live it um and so that's i always keep coming back to that it's like talking is easy well maybe part of that we would be remiss you honest and the orthodox arts festival folks are putting together this radio station i think that's a type of living is creating creating outlets right don't you oh yeah completely i mean and actually the the the power of art and creativity within a tradition is so important i think and that's to me that's one of the things that can really speak to people yeah beyond beyond the kind of debating thing that it can be dry sometimes it's like look at this beauty you know look at this beauty look at what this is pointing towards it that's the most powerful thing for sure i mean i i don't think it's you know it's not cliche to say beauty will save the world it's not cliche it's just not i love people are like oh here we go again but it's real it's just the question is is you know can we talk about it coherently the term beauty and i i think that's the subculture that you're a part of whether you want to be or not this sort of jonathan pagio subculture and really there's a lot of people involved we always should try to talk about what the beauty is you know without being demanding of others and and you know pedantic but i think you can just present it you know that's what i would aspire to i'm not doing it at all but i think that's what the literature did for me in this world for me i just went there and it presented itself to me and i thought there's beauty here there's also truth there's also love i mean orthodoxy can look quite rigid from the outside but it really isn't you know no if it hasn't got love at the heart of it then you're in some dangerous territory but it had my experience of it has always been that that's right at the center and actually all of this stuff on that might seem like it's on the outside whether it's the incense or the icons actually it directs you all the time to the the loving heart that you haven't got properly you've got to break yourself open to find that that's the center the love and the beauty you know if you can keep circling around that every time you lose track of it which i do regularly then that's that's a big deal how's your family doing with uh your orthodox insides you're changing insides yeah very surprisingly well my daughter actually who's 14 has just been baptized herself actually she's just all right so um i think that's really yeah that's been quite we've been very proud of that and like i say my wife is not a christian she's a sikh but um we talk a lot about it's actually brought us closer together sure sure we can sit and talk about god from our different traditions and we can find an astonishing amount of common ground actually i mean in sikhism and christianity it's quite frightening in some ways how similar the teachings are as she says that would be the case if they were both pointing to the truth um right so you know these these conversations can actually it's like you said different food actually different food tastes and again i don't want to be an ecumenist and say hey everything's a valid man but actually you know there's there's there's truth in a lot of different places and just it has to be that way otherwise it gets it gets odd it's also you constrain god you make god into something kind of a joke jokey right like he he it's too big but i just like the idea of fulfillment right there's variations on fulfillment but there's an ultimate end and i think i think the church is something like the expression of christ in the world like christ's body so i just go with that but the cool part is i don't have to convince any i love what you said earlier we don't really have to convince anybody of that it's kind of a dead end the other thing that's interesting it's just um sorry i know you said we should stop but um but let's talk for another out but no just i'll just say one last thing just reading about the early church it's very interesting because the the church for the first couple hundred years right it's persecuted and it's kind of underground and it's not sending any missionaries out uh after some pool there aren't really any missionaries maybe until some patrick and it hasn't got any power and the authorities are not spreading the word they're persecuting the christians who they think are just weirdos and yet the thing keeps growing so why does it keep growing well one of the reasons it seems to have kept going is people were just living a certain way that was attractive so christians were like feeding the poor and helping their neighbors and dying with a smile on their face and this kind of people look at them and say well that must be something to that because look at what look at how these people have been transformed and that spreads the word so rather than going out and making some argument which is just depressing or futile that you just live a certain way and if you you know you you probably had this you know and you know if you if you ever meet anybody really that you that you know is a wise person right and you think oh you know this person's got something about them i'm really going to pay attention to them how have they got here what's got them here whether they're a christian or not i always judge a religion actually on whether it has wise elders yeah one of the one of the things that convinced me that something like wicker or any of the neo-pagan stuff was false was that there are no wise elders in those movements there's lots of slightly broken people but there's no wise elders whereas you will find them obviously in orthodoxy find them in sikhism you'll find them in islam you know yeah so there's something going on there that allows people to achieve that status so if if you can if you can get to that point where i you know we can look at those people and go well there's something there's something about this no i want this i would like to be a wise elder that's my my aspiration one day maybe i can be a wise elk and this path clearly leads there so there must be truth in it yeah that's that's the kind of that's a way of demonstrating it and that's it's you know you don't need to talk to you you can just be gosh that's beautiful and i'm precisely in the opposite place to that i just talk all the time but that's the challenge you know that's what i think if i ever achieve any kind of level of wisdom at all it will come with me shutting up at last you know does that scare you that to be better at what you're aspiring to it may take something from you uh your voice does it no it doesn't really it doesn't i'd like it in a way you know i've done a lot of talking i've done a lot of writing in my life and it's fine it's how i work things out and people find it useful and they enjoy it and i appreciate that and it's amazing to have an audience you know to be able to make a living off it i never take that for granted um but at the same time it feels like you know something else the buddha said which i really liked about the dharma which is his teachings he said look you could see this dharma as a raft that gets you across the river right once you get to the other side you don't walk around with the raft on your shoulders you just let it go you walk off into the new land you don't need the raft anymore you don't need the dharma anymore and the same would be true i've heard the same thing said about the liturgy in orthodoxy as well you know all of these things that we do with the icons with the incense with the liturgy it's to get you to the place that we're taking you that's right you know and it's like it's not like you don't go anymore when you get there but you don't need it in the same way my spiritual father always said you don't you john you don't need to fast if you don't sin so don't worry about it [Laughter] oh okay that's a good way of putting it yes it's the same right let it go if it's not a problem you you got where you had to go now you don't have to and i said oh okay i'll be fasting fasting forever yes [Laughter] oh this is great so all right we'll plan on another time in the future won't we i think we got to meet up too uh somehow yeah that would be great yeah come to our restaurant and if i'm in ireland i'm trying to talk to some interesting people in london uh who really like our work i could use a board member overseas because we work overseas so i'm always looking at that but we'll see each other with orthodox arts festival in the heavenly path hopefully that that shakes out and we'll talk about that more on our podcast as we're going forward but reach out anytime paul you're the best it's really great to talk to you john yeah it's a joy it's just a joy okay brother um i thank you man yeah really enjoyed it stay in touch thank you for your time paul yeah thanks again cheers well shiny scotty marjos to you paul thanks for coming on andrew that was pretty good no andrew like thumbs up if that was good what's the thumbs up sound that was fun yeah kagi marjos to you paul that means to you the victory all of you out there that means to you the victory that said it a georgian capy table that's our pod for today thanks for coming along water is produced by andrew schwork and daniel paternos it's brought to you by first things foundation hey you should go on right now take 250 pennies or is it 2 500 pennies no 250 pennies and dedicate those pennies each month to first things foundation we support impresarios around the world who have a beautiful vision for a better life right in their own backyard that's right first things foundation doing quote humanitarian work but really doing work for humans primarily for ourselves so that we can become better people first things foundation support us go to www.firstdashthings.org this is water hasta luego nach vandis these are all ways of saying goodbye oh revoir combufo that's bombara what else hasta luego i gotta get my chiche down my mayan language until then bye bye

Channel: Heavy Things Lightly

Views: 10,060

Keywords: paul kingsnorth, wawtar, orthodoxy

Id: nbvLzoZj5bc

Length: 71min 48sec (4308 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 07 2022