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Yet one night, I dreamed of Jesus. The image and the message reminded me of something strange that had happened a few months before: My wife and I were out to dinner when suddenly she said to me, “You’re going to become a Christian.”

The Cross and the Machine

Excerpt from an essay by Paul Kingsnorth in the June/July 2021 issue.

One day, walking in the mountains, philosopher John Moriarty had a mystical vision that broke his world apart. For years, he had been engaged in “a genuine search for the truth, not merely a speakable truth, but a truth I would surrender to.” With a terrible inevitability, he realized that there was only one story that could hold what he had seen, only “one prayer that was big enough.” Moriarty’s story shook me. I had been searching for years for a truth like that. “The story of Christianity,” wrote Moriarty, “is the story of humanity’s rebellion against God.”

Having spent years as an environmental activist, I realized that the rebellion against God manifested itself in a rebellion against creation, against all nature. We would remake Earth, down to the last nanoparticle, to suit our desires, which we now called “needs.” We were building a machine to replace God. I realized that a crisis of limits is a crisis of culture, and a crisis of culture is a crisis of spirit. Every culture that lasts understands that living within limits—limits set by natural law, by cultural tradition, by ecological boundaries—is a cultural necessity and a spiritual imperative. There seems to be only one culture in history that has held none of this to be true, and it happens to be the one we’re living in.

On my fortieth birthday I treated myself to a weeklong Zen retreat in the mountains. The effect of seven days of disciplined meditation with no electricity was astonishing. Something in me flipped open. And yet, as the years went on, Zen was not enough. It lacked something vital: I wanted to worship.

Something was calling me. So, I ended up a priest of the witch gods, a Wiccan. Yet one night, I dreamed of Jesus. The image and the message reminded me

of something strange that had happened a few months before: My wife and I were out to dinner when suddenly she said to me, “You’re going to become a Christian.”

Suddenly, I started meeting Christians everywhere: strangers emailing me out of the blue, priests coming to me for help with their writing, friends I’d never known were Christian who suddenly seemed to want to talk about it. One evening, I was sitting outside our coven’s temple, waiting to conduct an important ritual. As we got up, I felt violently ill. I had an overpowering feeling that I should not go in, and I felt I was being physically prevented from doing it. Someone had staged an intervention. After that, there was no escape. Like C. S. Lewis, I could not ignore “the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.” I was at a concert, and as I was walking to my chair I was overcome entirely. Suddenly, I could see how everyone in the room was connected to everyone else, and I could see what was going on inside them and inside myself. I was overcome with a huge and inexplicable love for everyone and everything. It kept coming until I had to stagger out of the room and sit down. I had just become a Christian.

None of this is rationally explicable, and there is no point in arguing with me about it. This is not to say that my faith is irrational. In fact, the more I learned, the more Christianity’s story about the world and human nature chimed better with my experience than did the shaky claims of secular materialism. In the end, though, 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.

This January, I was baptized into the Romanian Orthodox Church. Out in the world, the rebellion against God has become a rebellion against everything: roots, culture, community, families, biology itself. Machine progress—the triumph of the Nietzschean will—dissolves the glue that once held us.

In the Kingdom of Man, the seas are ribboned with plastic, the forests are burning, the cities bulge with billionaires and tented camps, and still we kneel before the idol of the great god Economy. What if this ancient faith is not an obstacle after all, but a way through? As we see the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit, of choosing power over humility, separation over communion, the stakes become clearer each day. Surrender or rebellion; sacrifice or conquest; death of the self or triumph of the will; the Cross or the machine. We have always been offered the same choice. 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?

Paul Kingsnorth is a novelist, essayist, and poet living in Ireland.

Surrender or rebellion; sacrifice or conquest; death of the self or triumph of the will; the Cross or the machine. We have always been offered the same choice.