Podcast: ‘This is not a memorandum!’

‘If everybody’s thinking the same, the chances are that no one is thinking at all. . . If everybody else is doing it, them maybe you shouldn’t be doing it.’

‘We can’t go on. We must go on. We’ll go on.’

‘You said that Ireland was “The Island of Saints and Scholars”? Well, now it is the island of noncery and nonsense. I’m sorry, but that’s the best I can do by way of description.’

On the Good Life Podcast, with Matthew Carpenter, Pastor at Bethlehem Lutheran Church, Okolona Defiance, Ohio, United States. We speak of many things relating to the spiritual war in which we are now embroiled against our wills: the widespread denial of humanity’s transcendent imagination; the rejection of beauty, the degradation of art and writing; the possibility of connecting to the true meaning of religion underneath the moralistic topsoil. And also some old themes: My country, Ireland, as petri-dish for the world and the New World Order, having made a Faustian pact with modernism, sacrificing its freedom for a bogus prosperity, surrendering its autonomy and claims to self-sufficiency, thus inviting the largely unacknowledged calamity that has descended on it in recent times, and is about to move into its terminal stage.

‘Because the world is rejecting Christ it is rejecting beauty, and so there is nothing left except ugliness.’

‘All the voices of wisdom have been stilled in our culture. They’re no longer heard, because either they’re afraid to speak, or they’re cancelled, banished from the public sphere.’

‘We live in the era of the internet, where words and sentences have begun to take on a different form. I find that some people who read what I write are irritated by the length of the articles, or the length of the sentences. I say, “Hang on! This is not a memorandum! We are not working for a corporation! I am not on the 14th floor and you are not on the 7th! We are not sending each other bullet-points about the world or about our corporation; we are speaking in multiple layers about the meaning of existence.” And that’s what I try to do in my writing: It’s not just information. It’s also feeling, It’s also memory, and irony, paradox, all these things are layered, I would hope [in what I write] — at least this is what I aspire to. And of course any writer worth his or her salt, that’s what they try to do, to convey almost in a musical way, rhythmically, with euphony and harmony — all these devices to create something that is a thing in itself, so that the writing becomes not just a description, but a representation of what you are talking about.’

‘In Ireland we have one of the most vicious governments in the world, the nastiest people. And these are our own people! It’s almost impossible to describe it. I’ve spent 40 months now trying to coin sentences to describe what is happening and my feelings about it, how it relates to what we might describe as the truth, if we can any longer articulate that. And I fail most of the time. I try from different directions, sometimes a spiritual perspective, somethings a philosophical perspective, sometimes even what you might call a postmodern perspective — to try and find a way that people will be able to obtain a resonance that will harmonise with their experience.’

‘Always, growing up, we had a sense that we strive for excellence. We strive to make things better. We get up in the morning to work, to do good things. We don’t get up to destroy the happiness of other people. But that’s all politicians do now. They destroy the happiness of their own people — deliberately, maliciously.’

‘It’s really a post-God world. In the sense that, culturally, we no longer have the capacity to believe in the idea of creation, or in the idea of a Supreme Being. And therefore there is a sense that there are no consequences for anything, that anything is possible, and everything is permissible.’

‘The strangest things, standing here, is that you are standing here. And when you think of it like that, anything else is possible. The idea that nothing else is possible is such an absurdity — the nihilistic, atheistic, ‘this is all there is, extinction, extinction, extinction’ [thing] . . . it’s so absurd when you think of your own existence in this moment. How did this happen? How DOES it happen? What am I? How can I possibly not believe in something greater if I believe I am here now? What’s actually happening when you hear people decrying religion, or dismissing religion, is that what they’re dismissing is a caricature of religion. They’re dismissing something that they never really got to understand, or even attempted to understand. They see that moralistic, forbidding God, and they just don’t want any part of it. It’s a big, big mistake, because ultimately the sole sufferer is the person themselves, because they lose that capacity to walk lightly through reality, with the head held high, moving towards the horizon, full of hope, full of expectation, and noticing that the horizon moves ahead all the time, but nevertheless progressing . . . progressing . . . progressing . . . moving forward. This for me is what faith is, what religion is, what spirituality is.’

‘I do not believe that it is simply a factor of chronological time that atheism seems to be a rational position. But at the moment, that’s what you would think, certainly in Ireland, listening to most young people talking, [and] listening — if you did listen — to the radio or TV, that’s what you would gather. Or, if you were talking to artists now — who are supposed to be the founts of spirituality — they don’t believe in anything, it seems.’

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https://mattcarpenter.podbean.com/