Reading back over various articles published here, in our own glorious echo chamber, I am struck by the intellectual fertility of those early, lockdown-gripped years of the project. Perhaps it was because, at some mass societal level, the West itself was undergoing a shift – what later historians will identify as an inflection point – intensified by the madness of the Covid-19 pandemic and the curious shrillness of its political responses. Such times are always pregnant with intellectual and literary possibility: I’m sure the vibrant lyrics of Ovid took on an extra charm when Visigoth spears were sharpened in sight of Rome’s walls, and in our own Rome-will-burn moment there does seem to have been a particular flourishing of, inter alia, meaningful reflection on the great and the good in our cultural heritage that was lacking in the heady utopianism and globalised liberalism of the 1990s and early 2000s. More probably, though – if I may apply a dose of self-realism to my escaping thoughts – we were final-year students on the cusp of stepping out into the world, jaded by the status quo but giddy with the lockdown-fuelled discovery of completely different ways of seeing the world and our place in it.
Those were good days. And it does feel that the pace, and perhaps the vibrancy, of our work has cooled. Perhaps it is because the ideas that fed that creativity were so new to us, filling our minds with the gleam of fresh possibilities, the glint and glamour of a future that suddenly seemed rich with the possibility of difference, of escaping the corporate drudgery that university careers services assured us we were destined for. But I’m still excited by the hope of daily family psalm singing, of binding my own books and clearing out the log-burner after a week of homeschooling mayhem in late-November dreariness; I’m still gripped by the thought that the bread and the wine of the Eucharist is not merely a sign but a seal, to me, in the spirit of Christ, of covenant promises; I still find the thought of theological catholicity, liturgical order, and downright ecclesiastical sanity more than just compelling. So what is lacking now?
The answer, I think, is that I – and perhaps my fellow discoursemen – have become, albeit gladly, too settled in my thoughts. I write to call forth order in the chaos, to assert against a whirring brain, startled with the sheer possibility of theological conclusions, the tangible, settled realities of ideas given linguistic form. It is a kind of therapy. I write in frustration, in hope, in angst and in sheer neurosis: but rarely out of the settled, quiescent weightyness of real peace and real rest. The rest of God, the true sabbath, is, I think, both a pre- and post-linguistic reality: best captured by the scriptural picture (and promise) of the beatific vision, of beholding, as one would a friend, the very essence of God. What questions we shall have when at last we see him! But that would be a mistake. That which, again and again, accompanies theophany in the course of the scriptures is rather the humble stance of silent beholding.
I have lost sight of where I was going with this, except to say that, in the spiritual peace that I enjoy, Lord’s day by Lord’s day, I find myself with less to write about. And my beliefs, if novel enough to a world around me to warrant (at least in my own estimation) some form of broadcasting, have now become so deeply engrained that the work of excavating them that all true self-expression requires would have to be of a truly psychoanalytical scale. I’m overstating the point, but you get the gist. I’ve been a bit too happy to write.
No more! Not because I am at last miserable again. Far from it. But I have decided – if this post wasn’t enough to go by already – that the scattered musings of my own semi-neurosis will, from now on, form the basic building blocks of my writing. Here, in my new column, I shall endeavour to entertain with a window into my passing observations as I see out this earthly pilgrimage. And I shall hope, and pray, that they shall more than entertain: that they might, indeed, point to the one who gives us all true thoughts, and all our breath.
Welcome to Scatterland, then.
The Fourth Discourseman
The Four Discoursemen 