Why ‘At the Ends of the Earth’?
In this newsletter, my desire is to write about the peripheries: both geographical…
…the highlighted spot is Exmoor… At the south-west tip of the UK, it’s beautiful, rural and remote…
…and existential: Jesus calls us to proclaim the Gospel to the “ends of the earth” and in western post-secularisation, this is no longer the global south: it is on our doorstep and in our homes. Our British neighbourhoods - individuals fragmented, isolated and insulated by digital revolutions; religious ‘nones’ spiritually seeking or living a desperate anxiety that dare not even seek; those unknowingly and quietly suffocating in an airless culture that blocks out transcendence.
“At the ends of the earth” is a recognition that something is happening in history and culture that we have seen before. As I contemplated leaving the intensely fast-paced, densely populated and eyewateringly expensive south-east England, another period in history was resonating in my mind. As the Roman Empire crumbled, certain Christians fled the cities where immorality and system collapse were endemic, to live and foster Christian culture in the deserts, and eventually monasteries. St Benedict, at the turn of the sixth century, left the prosperous life that awaited him in Rome to pray in a cave for three years.1
I don’t believe there is quite the same structural collapse or corruption as in the last days of the Roman Empire. But I think there is perhaps a growing recognition in society that cultural and economic decline are upon us, and that the promises of a prosperous liberal society are no longer delivering.
The Covid pandemic has seen people leaving London and its commuter belts in droves. In one sense, I know I’m part of the statistics, but in another sense, there is a deeper motivation as I’ve been pulled to the peripheries. Alisdair MacIntyre, in his After Virtue, makes the following comment:
A crucial turning point in that earlier history [of the Roman Empire collapse] occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead…was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. … What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. …This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless quite different — St. Benedict.
As I spend my weekends now - no longer sitting in the traffic of the M25 - but breathing the fresh air of the moors, I ponder how moving to the peripheries can make a difference. I think it probably can make a difference in two ways:
Ourselves: Living in a place where transcendence is more tangible means that we can breathe easier, live more humanly, and more readily respond to grace;
Others: Those around us, too, are living in a more human way than the fast-paced unreality of the hamster-wheel, and therefore the soil of their hearts is more ready to receive the Word of God.
In these early days, this is an hypothesis which I may later discover is complete wishful thinking! But please do join me as I discover how my evangelistic journey “at the ends of the earth” might unfold…
This is the premise of Rod Dreher’s book, The Benedict Option.