Over the last few weeks I’ve had conversations with a range of people who have not grown up in any organised faith community, but are clearly on a spiritual quest. For some it has been one result of the pandemic and the questions it has provoked about meaning, transcendence, connectedness, community and love. Then I came across the story of well-known British writer Paul Kingsnorth on ‘Honey and Hemlock’, the blog of John Sanidopoulos. Kingsnorth says that his ‘increasing determined search for Truth’ led him to embrace Christian Orthodoxy. Last month he was baptised in the Romanian Orthodox Church. Sanidopoulos writes:
A few weeks ago I was sent a link to the OAQ page on author Paul Kingsnorth’s website, where he writes the following:
'I have never been a scientific materialist. My suspicion that there is more to the world than modernity will allow for has informed my sensibility since I was a child, and was the backdrop to all my environmental activism and writing.
'Over the last decade, I have been on an increasing determined search for Truth which – as for so many lost Western people – has taken me to all quarters. For five years I studied and practiced Zen Buddhism; I’m still grateful for the insights that accorded me, but there was something missing. In search of what that something might be, I explored Daoism, mythology, Sufism, traditionalism, Alexandrian Wicca and all sorts of other bits and pieces. They all taught me something, but not enough.
'Then, in 2020, as the world was turned upside down, so was I. Unexpectedly, and initially against my will, I found myself being pulled determinedly towards Christianity. It’s a long story, which I might tell one day. Suffice it to say that I started the year as an eclectic ecopagan with a long-held, unformed ache in my heart, and ended it a practicing Christian, the ache gone and replaced by the thing that, all along, I turned out to have been looking for. In January 2021 I was baptised and received into the Eastern Orthodox Church. I don’t know where the path leads from here, but at last I know how to walk it.'
Here is a little bit more about Kingsnorth’s baptism from the website of the Romanian Orthodox Church:
‘I first discovered Christian Orthodoxy four years ago when I walked into a small church in Bucharest. That powerful experience stayed with me, but I could not have known that it would lead me on a journey that would lead to me becoming a member of the Romanian church,’ Paul Kingsnorth told Basilica.ro.
He was baptized on the feast of Theophany on January 6th by his spiritual advisor, Father Tudor Ghiţă, the parish priest of the Romanian community in Galway.
‘I felt both joyful and peaceful afterwards… and cold! But a stronger sense that I had arrived somewhere I was meant to be. My receipt into the church has been a great privilege, and the [Romanian] community here in Ireland has been so welcoming to me and my family,’ confessed the writer.
Father Tudor Ghiţă said he never tried to convert the writer. They met at the Romanian Orthodox Monastery of Shannonbridge, Ireland, and had some long talks.
‘He was determined to enter Orthodoxy, but I advised him to moderate his enthusiasm and not to expect to see angels flying through the church,’ said the Romanian parish priest of Galway. He wanted to make the writer understand that being a Christian is permanent work and the joy you feel is supposed to be one of a spiritual nature.
‘He is an obedient spiritual son,’ Father Tudor Ghiţă added. ‘He observes the fasting days, reads the recommended prayers and makes full prostrations.’
MORE ABOUT PAUL KINGSNORTH
He is 49 and has lived for several years in the rural parts of Galway, Ireland. He runs a family farm which he works by using traditional methods, such as cutting hay with a scythe, just like Romanian peasants did formerly.
He wrote visionary fiction books and essays on the environment. Between 2009 and 2017, he established an environmental activism project entitled Dark Mountain. But he says he has never been a Marxist materialist, like many other members of this movement.
'I have never been a scientific materialist. My suspicion that there is more to the world than modernity will allow for has informed my sensibility since I was a child, and was the backdrop to all my environmental activism and writing,' he wrote.
Conservative writer Rod Dreher describes him as ‘one of the most talented and visionary writers of our time.’
Journalist Aris Roussinos calls him a ‘profoundly religious’ author and ‘England’s greatest living writer.’
Go HERE to the website of the Romanian Orthodox Church in Galway
'As a Western newcomer to Orthodoxy, I have a lifetime’s learning journey ahead of me, but I already feel like I have arrived home.'