The Faith of Paul Kingsnorth
I still haven't found what I'm looking for
1
I only learned of Paul Kingsnorth recently. My producer Colin gave me his book, Savage Gods, saying “I think you’ll like the parts on language.” He was right about that. I’ve always been fascinated with language and how it gives access to — and limits access to — reality. Kingsnorth says:
Words, language, symbolic thought itself: is this the gauze which hangs between me and the world, the gauze which occasionally rips in part or sways in the wind, offering me a glimpse of unity between the picture and myself, but which never fully falls away? (p. 53)
That’s a really nice image. There are all kinds of ideas to probe about language as a thin sheet hanging between us and reality. We who write, or otherwise attempt to press words into the service of our work, are conscious of the limitations of words — particularly when we hope to show a glimpse of Ultimate Reality behind (or through) the gauze. That doesn’t keep us from trying.
Just the other day I was looking up Kingsnorth on Twitter to tag him in a tweet where I was quoting him… which is kind of funny if you know his story. He moved from London to a small farm in Ireland, looking to establish a sense of place outside the buzz of contemporary life. I couldn’t find him on Twitter but then made it to his personal webpage where he says graphically, “My only concession to the giant communal toilet that is ‘social’ media is this Facebook page.” So, no Twitter handle.
However, while looking for him on Twitter, I found a link to a surprising and very interesting essay he recently wrote for First Things — a Catholic intellectual periodical. The Cross and the Machine tells the story of his coming to embrace Christian faith. I wouldn’t have guessed that was the trajectory he was on from my first reading of Savage Gods. But now going back through it again, it might be read as a kind of prequel to a religious conversion. He went to the farm looking for a sense of place to ground himself in this world, and found instead a faith that had been growing and pointing to another world.
2
Savage Gods begins with the claim, “Writers are lost people. Nobody would write a book if they weren’t lost” (SG, 3). And then, “I write to reorder the world” (SG, 4). It was that second line that got me writing again, trying to reorder what I think about Kingsnorth’s experience… and my own.
Kingsnorth meanders in his book through recounting the writer’s block he experienced and his resulting disordered world. The only thing in life he felt he was equipped to do was write. But the words would not come. And then when they did, they were the “savage gods” that “in the end, however well you serve them, they will eat you alive” (SG, 38).
He grew up irreligious, but gods kept popping up. And in his 40s, something went to work on him. “What could be calling me? I don’t know” (SG, 84). In his essay, he tells about the various isms he tried before Christianity in answer to that calling: environmental activism, Zen Buddhism, Wiccanism (maybe it’s just Wicca… but this list calls for an ism!). The book ended with: “I suspect that all the paths out of the wood lead to the same place and all of the questions are the same question” (SG, 125). Now the more recent article ends with, “The gate is strait and the way is narrow and maybe we will always fail to walk it. But is there any other road that leads home?”
To those of us who grew up in Christian faith, this is the classic story we’ve heard over and over: the sinner tries everything except God, until finally finding what he’d been looking for all along. It often works to quote Augustine in the narrative: “Our heart is restless until it rests in you;” or maybe we refer to Pascal and the God-shaped hole in each of us (he didn’t actually use the phrase, but the idea is there in the Pensées). People in my own religious tradition like to use the trope of the “hound of heaven” in these stories, which comes from a poem by Francis Thompson in which God pursues us sinners (like a hound chasing a hare) until we finally relent and are captured.
To use Kingsnorth’s own metaphor for language, he’d been searching for Ultimate Reality, but had only seen it through a distorting gauze curtain. Or if I can transpose the metaphor from eyes to ears: he heard the call, but it was filtered through all kinds of cultural ideas and constructs. Finally, though, he set aside his pre-conceived ideas and sophisticated words, and was able to peel back the curtain. There he found it was the Christian God who had been calling him all along.
I didn’t become a Christian because I could argue myself into it. I became a Christian because I knew, suddenly, that it was true. The Angelus that was chiming in the abyss is silent now, for the abyss is gone. Someone else inhabits me. (The Cross and the Machine)
These stories are powerful, and they help to confirm to those of us who haven’t sampled all the isms that we don’t need to. We were born into the right one, or at least came to it without all the wandering. Kingsnorth wandered for us, arrived at the truth, and now will live happily ever after.
3
That’s what I know I’m supposed to say. But if I’m honest, I actually resonate more with the statement in his pre-conversion book:
Every time I find a place, I don’t fit into it… I am lost, and is that what life is, what modernity or post-modernity is, a rolling sense of being out of place, of being tangled up in the gauze… I don’t suppose this place will ever contain me or satisfy me, because who can ever be contained or satisfied? (SG, 120-121)
The cynical side of me (which often feels like it’s most of me) would like to see a longitudinal study of people who have wandered from place to place, and then say they finally made it home. Have we only heard part of the story? Have they only found their place for a time? How long does that feeling last before they become restless again?
Don’t get me wrong: I too have felt that my Christian faith is true. It’s just that I also feel sometimes like I’m not satisfied. I hope these two impulses aren’t contradictory. I wonder if they’re more like the point and counterpoint of a complex harmony. Maybe it’s OK that there is dissonance held in tension which doesn’t quite ever resolve in the here and now of our conflicted existence.
I think this kind of sentiment is beautifully captured in U2’s song, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” — particularly as they performed it on Jimmy Kimmel Live a few years ago. Bono introduced it as “a gospel song with a restless spirit” and the band was joined by a choir who had been sitting inconspicuously in the audience. We hear a longing for something more, which doesn’t deny what we’ve seen so far. I’ve watched this performance at least 10 times, and every time it brings tears to my eyes.
I’ve never really wandered away from the faith I was raised in, and I’ve had spiritual experiences I believe to be veridical. But when I attempt to capture what I believe — and why I believe it — in words, those words are insufficient. Doubters could easily find fault with them as literal descriptions. I suspect that even the classic creeds should be taken merely as our best attempts of pointing toward Ultimate Reality. They too are composed of words and so throw a sheet of gauze over what we experience. That means we might affirm the essentials of our faith, and yet still feel restless.
“I believe in the Kingdom come, when all the colors will bleed into one; but yes I’m still running” (U2).
That doesn’t mean what we have found isn’t true — just that it’s incomplete. There’s more to be found. The Apostle Paul himself said something similar: Now we see as through a glass dimly (1 Cor. 13:12). Their glass wasn’t very good back then. I suspect it was a lot like looking through a gauze curtain.
At least that’s the most well-ordered conclusion I could come to by writing my way through the disorder I was presented with in Kingsnorth’s book and subsequent essay. I’m anxious to see how the faith he found grows and develops over time. I hope he continues to hear a call and that he can’t ever fully get rid of the feeling that there is still more to find.