religion – Prof Jem Bendell

Living Purposefully within Metacrisis and Collapse

July 18, 2026 jembendell

Last year I was dancing in a field with hundreds of people from countries across Asia. We were singing, holding hands, and moving in the ways we had just been taught. Most of the songs used mantric phrases, taken from different religions. But a couple of songs were in English, and at one point, I found myself singing…

“Why have you come to Earth?

Why have you taken birth?

Why have you come?

To love, serve and remember…”

The melody and simple message stuck with me. Subsequently I discovered it was written by John Astin. He was inspired by the words of Maharaji, who had told one of his famous pupils to “love everyone, serve everyone, and remember God.”

The song offers an answer to something really deep. Like many people, at times I have struggled with the matter of the “meaning of life”, and its related rabbit holes on the nature and meaning (or many meanings), of the cosmos, Life, evolution, humanity, or my own life. How such meanings might inform my own life’s purpose, here onwards, can also be a confusing question. Clearly, our means to understand such matters through our senses, cognition, conceptualisation, and language, is fundamentally limited. But that doesn’t mean we either dismiss the matter altogether, or adopt a pre-packed story from our culture (and defensively dismiss curiosity as lacking humility). As our old assumptions and aspirations weaken in the face of metacrisis and collapse, many of us have been returning to these deeper questions of life. Many of us are doing that as part of finding a new direction in life after ditching the old. In this essay, I want to speak more fully to that issue than before, to help you reconsider, or reconfirm, your own sense of meaning and purpose in the midst of metacrisis, or whilst considering societal collapse. It’s also because currently I am doing the same.

Talking with people who have participated in the salons and peer mentoring of the Metacrisis Initiative, I am reminded of the range of views on how to live in response to our predicament. Some are primarily focused on emotional stability, inner peace, and learning how to cope, personally, with difficult realities. Others are focused on doing whatever remains possible to reduce harm and generate possibilities for the future, without any certainty that such efforts will succeed. Many of us have been trying to find some balance between these impulses.

These conversations led me to adopt the strapline “living purposefully within metacrisis and collapse” for both my website and the Metacrisis Initiative. I will come back to the concept of ‘purpose’ in a moment. When I use the term Metacrisis I am referring to the interacting worldwide crises of our time and their deeper causes and implications. Those include ecological overshoot, climate disruption, biodiversity loss, wealth inequality, economic fragility, political dysfunction, technological acceleration, and cultural fragmentation, and the deeper crisis of meaning that shapes our responses to such changes, while being implicated in their cause. When I speak of societal collapse, I mean a significant and enduring reduction in the complexity, capacity, and reliability of systems that people depend upon for everyday life.

Neither term is a prediction of imminent armageddon and human extinction. Rather, they are ways of describing a predicament that is unfolding and will shape our lives in unpredictable ways for years to come. In my book Breaking Together, I laid out the data that suggests we are already within a process of the creeping collapse of industrial consumer societies. In such circumstances, it is only normal, and right, that people question the meaning and purpose of their lives. That is a powerful implication of collapse-awareness, which is so often overlooked by people who want us to remain positive and hopeful.

The concept of ‘meaning’ concerns how we understand our lives and experiences. It involves ideas of coherence, significance, identity and belonging. I’ve been experiencing my own ‘meaning crisis’ since 2017, as my personal sense of self-worth before then was bound up with the idea of contributing boldly to a managed global transition to a sustainable way of life. Without that, I have recognised there’s meaning for me in being more present to life in all its dimensions, with an open heart and mind. That is associated with my realisation that the meaning of life could be to simply live it more fully. What does that mean? Currently, I see it means I don’t let my fears, wounds, culture, and egoic drives push me too far from the possibilities for love, wonder, gratitude, connection and creativity. I’ll return to that later, but for now, I want to look closer at the idea of ‘purpose’.

When the concept of life’s meaning has an application and direction, we are in the realm of life’s purpose. What do we orient ourselves towards, and seek to embody or contribute through our lives? That question of our purpose is asking us what we do about our sense of the meaningfulness of life (in general, and of our own lives).

Some collapse-aware people don’t like the concept of purpose, as it seems, for them, to involve both ego and attachment to outcome. The most resilient people in terrible situations have been observed to be those who can find meaning in the smallest of things, rather than retaining a story of their activities contributing to a wider purpose. However, I wonder if they also have a sense of purpose, or underlying orientation. To devote oneself to presence is a purpose. To cultivate non-attachment is a purpose. To embody compassion is a purpose. So the distinction between being and doing is often less clear than it first appears. People commit to, and practice, ways of being present and kind in the world. Thus, we are orienting towards something, even when that something is a deeper quality of being.

We orient ourselves in this life. So we tell stories, implicitly or explicitly, about what actions matter and why. That reflects a yearning for purpose that is a deep aspect of human nature, and such purpose can be found at many scales. It would be a mistake to consider the yearning for purpose as synonymous with setting external objectives on a large scale. For one person, purpose may involve raising children with love and integrity. For another, restoring a local river or forest. For others, it can be creating music, supporting neighbours, preserving wisdom, accompanying the dying, growing food regeneratively, strengthening community resilience, or helping future generations inherit something of value. Some purposes focus on collective outcomes. Others focus on ways of being. In my experience, most of us involve some combination of both, whether or not we are explicit about it.

Before I gave up my career in academia, I was regularly interacting with people who were discussing purposes on the largest possible scales. For instance, they wanted their lives to contribute to goals such as the salvation of humanity, the flourishing of all species, or the healing of the planet. Such visions and aspirations can be beautiful and inspiring. They can also motivate extraordinary dedication and sacrifice. I inhabited such stories for decades (or they inhabited me). But in that time I also became aware of a paradox. As purposes become grander, they can become less authentic. Because they can drift away from lived reality into abstraction. They can become performative identities rather than genuine callings. Grand visions and purposes can sometimes distract us from what is immediately present and possible. We may become attached to stories about changing the world while neglecting the people, places, and responsibilities directly before us. Maybe that’s why there are many examples in history of people who were principled leaders while negligent with their families.

Being aware of this paradox does not mean that large-scale visions and purposes are wrong. It means they require humility. The larger the scale of our aspirations, the greater the need to remain grounded in the reality of our own lives and relationships. We can also be vigilant about another risk of grand visions, that no matter how laudable, they can impose a way of thinking on other people and stimulate criticism of people who do not accept them. We see that in the field of religions, where people preach dogmatic interpretations of the future for us all, and how we should live. Similarly, in the field of environmental concern, some commentators tell us we must believe in a transition to an ecologically sustainable society, or that we would be partly to blame for future failure. This process is closely connected to policing of our emotions, which sadly serves authority not democratic dialogue.

Visions can be useful at personal and collective scales. They can help us choose what to do, and what not to do. They can also help us find motivation and inspire motivation in others. However, psychological research demonstrates that such visions do not need to be grand, such as those describing the future of large organisations, whole nations, or the planet, for there to be a positive effect on clarity and motivation. Depending on the person and situation, visions can become delusional, enabling denial of circumstances and delaying difficult choices.

My own positive vision is not primarily a vision of a future society. It is a vision of more people living purposefully within metacrisis and collapse. It is a vision of people becoming clearer about the importance of love and awareness, wonder and inquiry, and how they wish to live amidst uncertainty. Within that framework, it means my individual purpose can be found in helping more people to live like that, as well as orienting myself towards that. I’ve been summarising it to my friends as attempting to be well to help well.

When I mention love, I mean universal and unconditional love. That is the quality of engaged benevolence towards all life, including one’s own. It is not naive or idealistic for that to be the foundation of personal or collective purpose, as precisely when outcomes become uncertain that returning to deeper and universal understandings and feelings can be our guide. For if, instead, our purpose were to depend upon achieving a particular collective outcome, then it would be fragile. Instead, when our purpose is grounded in love (for people, places, creatures, communities, future generations), then it can endure regardless of what happens.

To arrive at this view, I have been helped by the mystical strands of various world religions, and the people involved in them. I have also been shaped by moments of tragedy and grief, where the primacy of love cut through my daily preoccupations and social conditioning. I have also benefitted from some non-ordinary states of consciousness, which dissolved my sense of separate self, so I felt as if the most fundamental reality is itself universal unconditional love. That perspective on fundamental reality, in a physical and metaphysical sense, also provides a potential answer to the ‘meaning of life’ question – for all life, or one’s own. As universal unconditional love is the fundamental nature of being, then the meaning of life is simply that love, however it is being expressed through matter, energy and information. That is why so many mystics, from Christians, to Hindus, to Sufis, to Animists, say that the meaning and purpose of our lives is to wake up to our true natures as an aspect of the universal unconditional love which cultures label differently as sacred, divine, soul, spirit or God.

With that in mind, the way ahead involves two dimensions. First, we must include in our normal lives whatever tunes us towards a more expansive consciousness. Second, we must notice whether it is from our moments of expansiveness or contractedness that we are assessing our options in life. Fully expansive, we can await guidance from beyond ourselves, whichever way we might conceive that which is ‘beyond’. That’s why many people feel like they have a ‘calling’ to do something in life. Just as long as we don’t get attached to that calling, as a new egoic identity, it can become a beautiful motivation in life. I believe the qualities or orientations for Deep Adaptation can be helpful for that, especially the ones I labelled ‘organic meaning’ and ‘numinous adaptability’ (outlined here).

Our era of metacrisis and collapse involves finding ways of interpreting and applying ancient ideas on meaning and purpose in a novel context. Important aspects of our situation are both the certainty of material decline for the majority of humanity in the foreseeable future, and uncertainty around what could be useful to do to produce a slower, kinder, and more generative collapse. It is a time that asks us to be able to care without illusions, to remain open-hearted without reward, to act without guarantees, to be well enough to help well, and, ultimately, to love without end.

I can’t say I have been living like this myself — but more so than before. I am currently struggling with what the core ideas I’ve described in this essay mean for my choices today, in new circumstances. Those include being older, living differently, earning less, and knowing different people. That’s why I am grateful to be part of a peer mentoring group within the Metacrisis Initiative, and to also have the benefit of guidance from spiritually reflective people, whether or not they have official roles. One teacher is Reverend Wright, who joins the August 2026 Metacrisis Salon. Information on that follows at the end of this essay, for members of initiative.

Rather than share with you more ideas on how myself and other people are finding meaning and purpose in an era of metacrisis and collapse, it could be more useful to ask you some questions to reflect on. They are not as punchy as the way you’d be asked about the purpose of your life at a Business School. So I won’t be asking what you’d die for: any useful intensification from such a question can paradoxically shrink personal reflection into what might sound right according to a peer group. Instead, I have composed the questions to unpack some assumptions and open up some possibilities. I recommend making notes on them, and then sharing this essay with a collapse-aware friend of yours with a request to discuss your respective answers. If it happens, I hope you have fun!

After publishing this, I’ll be learning ‘Love, Serve, Remember’ on guitar and how to teach the moves for us to sing it in our future circles of the Dances of Universal Peace.

Questions on the meanings and purposes of lives

So much of our thinking is influenced by deep stories of what is right and wrong, admirable or embarrassing, which we have learned from our culture, family and friends. So when you reflect on the following, try to sense whether there is any of that ‘social gaze’ on how you should think and feel; if it might be influencing your answers, try to answer them again as if that external judgement didn’t matter.

Could I live fully without any sense of meaning or purpose in my life?
Is finding the meaning or purpose of my life a basic need and/or central goal of my life?
Could meaning or purpose in my life be fixed and singular, or plural and changing?
Might any potential meanings and purposes of my life be discovered by me, chosen by me, given to me, or taught to me? Does that matter to their validity, in general, or to me?
Why might some meanings and purposes for my life be more valuable than others?
Do I think (or sense) that there is a universal meaning and purpose for any human life, or Life in general?
Is it important for me to understand such meaning and purpose? To be able to describe it myself? To be able to communicate it to others? If so, why?
How do the meanings and purposes of my own life relate to a broader sense of the meaning and purpose of Life in general, if at all?
With all these ideas on general and personal meaning and purpose in my heart and mind: what might collapse be asking of me?
What could be an additional question, or a better question, to guide your own inquiry on this matter?

If you answered any of these questions using the standard language of your (sub-)culture, such as “God teaches me…” or “Karma dictates that…” or “Being a responsible parent/child means…” or “The plant medicine revealed to me that…” then I’d ask you to reflect on these questions once more, without those words and concepts, to allow your insight into what might be underneath such labels for what is true and good.

I invite you to share your thoughts on this essay, these questions, and any answers, on the relevant thread of the Facebook page of the Metacrisis Initiative. If you are a member of the Initiative please share them in the community chat, and also join the salon on this topic on August 3rd/4th. These questions also comprise the reflection exercise ahead of Meeting 5 of the Peer Mentoring. If you want to join a future cohort of peer mentors, please join the initiative.

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The image represents some Indian spiritual figures from different religions and periods, all of whom understood the joy of awakening to the oneness of reality (however we choose to label it). Over the years I’ve appreciated learning what each of them said and/or did. So the image is my celebration of the wisdom from a land which I am excited to be returning to for the Dances of Universal Peace. Do you recognise any of the people depicted here? From left to right: Anandamayi Ma, Ambedkhar, Mirra Alfassa, Vinoba Bhave, Inayat Khan, Kasturba, Maharaji, Sri Sarada Devi, Anthony de Mello, Hazrat Babajan.

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They Weren’t 10 Commandments

June 18, 2026June 13, 2026 jembendell

by Jem Bendell

I went to a Catholic school. For boys. Run by monks. When I tell people that today, it draws some sniggers or even questions of concern. Despite some scandals which I learned of later, I have nothing salacious to report from my own time at St John’s College. The couple of friends I’m still in touch with from those school days have found their own faith, but not due to what we learned at school. Looking back, I realise we were being shown religious belief in a way that felt out-dated and restrictive. The importance of love, and of serving others, would sometimes get mentioned, but the culture didn’t feel that way. At times it was violently the opposite. Looking back, I sense we missed out on something important. As the true message in wisdom traditions is both kind and liberatory, including the message from a deeper Christianity. A recent example of my misunderstandings of Christianity from childhood, highlights the challenge and opportunity for a kinder and more emancipatory embrace of faith in today, as times become tough and worrying.

At school in the 1980s, the Ten Commandments seemed like the conceptual equivalents of our old desks with their unused holes for ink pots. We scrawled in biro across exercise books on top of those desk relics from an era that was alien to us. When we were taught about the commandments not to steal, lie, and murder, they seemed sensible — but the language around them was strange and pompous. “Thou shalt not bear false witness…” It was like being handed a tasty pasty in a rusty wooden chest. Welcome, but not with the dusty heaviness.

Only last year did I learn of a different way of hearing them. It was a beautiful summer’s day in England’s Lake District. My friend Stephen was taking me to somewhere he described as one his pilgrimage sites. When we parked just off the sternly busy A66 highway, I didn’t have high hopes. But after walking for half an hour, the rushing cars had faded into the distance and the birdsong, blue sky, fluffy clouds, green fields and friendly chatter were reassuring me this was a “nice thing to do” during my short visit to Cumbria. Walking around a hedge, we looked down into a meadow, dotted with sheep, heads down, munching away. In the distance was a building, lying low beneath a towering oak that curled over it like a protective arm. The red stone walls had been bleached into soft shades of rose by centuries of Cumbrian rain, and maybe the occasional sunny spell. The dark arched windows told me “Church,” while the grass growing around its weathered wooden gate told me “maybe abandoned.” Approaching closer, I saw its graveyard hosted waves of green grass with headstones leaning left and right, as if bobbing in between.

The Lake District is an epicentre for tourism, but visitors were not getting their lakeland kicks off this part of the A66. Although Stephen Wright is a Reverend, this Church-without-congregation was not our destination. We walked on, towards a river that curved at the back of the meadow. Its meander had created a pebbly beach from where you could walk into a transparent blackish-brown water to paddle or swim. Stephen stripped off and jumped into the river with a glee that made me wonder whether I could learn, one day, to enjoy cold water. Afterwards, we sat sunbathing and discussed the things that crop up with contemplatives like Stephen.

“Those ten sayings weren’t actually commandments – they were ten commentaries. They were describing how we mere mortals function, naturally, when we haven’t been wounded by our life or poisoned by society.” Stephen was explaining that this way of understanding the ten commandments is surprisingly old — and perhaps unsurprisingly ignored. Our conversation on the banks of the river prompted me to look deeper into this perspective on what I learned, as probably you did too, as the ‘10 commandments’. I found that there is even a clue in the New Testament. The apostle Paul wrote about gentiles who “do by nature what the law requires” because God’s law is “written on their hearts” (Romans 2:14-15). That’s partly why the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas argued that the commandments were not an arbitrary list but a restatement of ‘natural law’ i.e. a basic moral grammar we’re all born with. Perhaps they both knew something about the original texts, which is worth exploring for a moment.

The text we now call the “Ten Commandments” was originally written in Ancient Hebrew, which described them as “the Ten Words” (or ten phrases: Aseret HaDevarim). The verbs that Bibles translated as imperatives, such as “lo tignov”, on stealing, did not use an explicitly imperative tense. That would be “al”, which means “do not” (e.g., al tignov for “do not steal”). By using “lo” followed by the imperfect tense of a verb, it can be understood as describing a present or a past and continuing reality. As there is no “thou” or “you” stated in the phrases, they simply mean “non stealing,” “non lying,” and so on. As those phrases begin with, “and not” (v’lo), it connects them to the preceding sentence which describes the nature of the Sabbath rather than ordering it. Therefore, an Irish biblical scholar, A.D.H. Mayes observed these phrases are less commands than descriptions of a natural, unbroken way of being. More recently, philosopher J. Budziszewski wrote that the commandments are “what we can’t not know.” So, rather than being rules imposed from the outside, they are truths recalled from within.

Looking up at the sun drying his long salt and pepper hair, I remember it seemed like this was how the Reverend preferred to share; from a pebble beach, not a pulpit. “You know, it’s not just the commandments that were mistranslated,” he said, warming into mystic mode. “Any translation of ‘sin’ that makes us think it is something other than falling away from who we are, and ‘missing the mark’ of what we are aiming at, is not the message.” He was watching the current, as if gathering thoughts from its surface. “We are invited to remember and welcome into ourselves the sense that love is at the core of all-that-is, and that we are already immersed in it.”

“Like being in the river,” I thought, “if it was warmer.” Stephen’s voice dropped, as if sharing what the water already knew. “When we remember that reality, it shifts our relationships and behaviours towards everyone and everything. Afterall, real love isn’t lazy.” Moving up on his elbows, with a smile on his face and liveliness in his voice: “So what was translated as commandments can even be seen as promises, because they tell us how we will naturally behave once feeling the love of the Beloved.” Fortunately, I had my phone on me and recorded some voice notes about our riverside chat. His views on the commandments stayed with me for months, until I found time to read into the matter.

Looking back to that lovely lazy summer’s day, I also remembered that while Stephen was re-baptising himself in the water, I had noticed a crooked tree. From its base it had grown at a 45 degree angle, pushed sideways by a large rock, before twisting upwards to the sky. It must have been so close to the rock, when a sapling, that it had been obstructed. At the time I enjoyed looking at its unusual shape and gnarly strength. Looking back now, I also see that the tree was not in its uninjured form. It was coping with damage from the rock. I wonder if that’s like me, perhaps like you. Might we all be living in a cultural forest stunted and twisted by proverbial rocks of hurt, harm, and numbing? In that sense, the Ten Commentaries or Promises, can be heard like a tree surgeon calling into the forest, “hey guys, this is what normal and healthy looks like.”

I told Stephen it had taken a Christian youth camp when I was 15 years old for me to focus on, and be transformed by, the nature and centrality of Universal Love that was taught by Jesus. It wasn’t just my schooling that was lacking – I couldn’t find a group that focused on the true message of Jesus, and so I didn’t remain in Christian community. Instead, over the years, I explored the insights and methods of Buddhist, Taoist, Animist, Hindu and Sufi traditions. That meant what Stephen told me resonated with what I’d learned elsewhere. For instance, in Buddhism, the Brahma Viharas — loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity — are not presented as pious aspirations you try to force yourself to feel. Instead, they are regarded as the natural radiance of an uncorrupted heart and mind. When you remove the fetters of fear, tribal conditioning, and emotional injury, these four qualities, or virtues, arise within us on their own. Other religions, such as Taoism and Jainism, teach similar qualities are both aspirational and natural — a fact that is unattractively ignored by those scholars who wish to claim that Christianity civilised the world.

It is only decades after my childhood experiences, that I am rediscovering a mystical, gentle, just and joyous message within Christianity. My learnings and experiences from other spiritual traditions have helped me to see Christian texts with new eyes. It is why I am now able to hear what Reverend Wright shares as a contemplative Christian. Interestingly, then, that the other spiritual traditions are not temptations or ‘stony ground’ for the faithful to avoid. Rather, they can be a way to learn those deeper truths that have been suppressed by institutional religion, yet still smoulder underneath it, ready for our return. Considering some messages from the non-canonical Gospels can be a part of that journey, and why I believe existing Christian denominations should become more curious about them (such as that of Thomas and Mary Magdalene).

I’ve been keeping the deeper insights of wisdom traditions in mind as I design the peer mentoring within the Metacrisis Initiative. So that we know what we are encouraging in each other, it seems useful to identify some qualities or approaches to help us thrive in situations of disruption, confusion, and collapse. The challenge is that any personal quality, value, virtue, or trait, is somewhat intangible and contingent, so labelling them can give a false sense of certainty, and an unwise attachment to them as positive, whatever the context. Ultimately, there is no getting away from how our state of consciousness, with open hearts and minds, is key to how we show up positively for each other. It is why we will be centering the cultivation of what Stephen calls ‘heartfulness’ in the mentoring.

Although I am pleased to be developing that Initiative, I am aware that religions will remain far more impactful than any self-help networks in this tough age of the consequences from extractive and destructive systems of human organisation. It is important, therefore, to see the power in questioning our religious education. Reading the ‘ten commandments’ as commentaries or promises can turn the rather boring and distant Christianity that many of us learned at school completely ‘inside out’. The religion stops being a straight jacket you can choose to wear or, worse, demand others to wear. Instead, it becomes an invitation to return home to who you naturally are. Ideally, it also provides some tools and community to help. It’s why Stephen has built communities of learning and peer support, in the form of the Sacred Space Foundation, and St. Kentigern School.

With authentic religious invitations to return to our kind heartedness, we can look first at our own impediments. Where am I tight with fear? Where has culture taught me to acquire, defend and harden my heart? How can I help myself return to my true nature? Silence? Forgiveness? Dance? Collective song? A walk together with friends, or alone in nature? Helping someone in need? Perhaps making time to remember the love at and from the centre of everything?

And then we can look wider. What in our society keeps pressing rocks against so many saplings? Its speed, its status games, its lonely competitiveness, and its erosion of common wealth, all impair our ability to grow well with presence and care. A culture that wounds hearts will always produce people who seem to need commandments to behave. That means we can identify our own ways to resist, exclude, or transform those economic and political systems which steal us all away from our true natures.

Like you, I have also heard the argument that some people need rules and threats of punishment in order to avoid anti-social behaviour. That argument does not only appear in cultures with concepts of ‘original sin’ but also within those that explain how some of us are dominated by experiences of consciousness related to ‘lower chakras’. Certainly many of us are deeply wounded by our experiences and culture, and not feeling the open-hearted open-minded way of living that is our natural way. But even with this in mind, do rules and threats, derived directly from religion or through integration into law, provide a good basis for pro-social behaviour? I am not so sure. And I think there is a huge cost. Because one thing we see is a profusion of dogma-reciters with the power to finance, coerce and kill. Some of them take a line of scripture to justify or celebrate the murder of people they disagree with. Although they proclaim unquestioning allegiance to scripture, their belief that it included the commandment not to kill didn’t stop authorising the recent missile massacre of school girls or torpedoing unarmed sailors returning from an international ceremony. Instead, if we recognise “non-killing” as a commentary on how normal and whole human beings behave, then we immediately see how only a deeply damaged person would be delighting in their war crimes and citing scripture to help.

I have just cited an extreme example. But many institutional religions continue to include brazen declarations, with loud certainties, and an enthusiasm for naming who is out and who is in. Conversely, real courage requires us to become still enough to feel our own emotional and psychological injuries. Real bravery involves us living more in the uncertain space of inviting a direct relationship with the divine, so that loving action, right action, can emerge naturally within us. Universal love transcends our interpretations of scripture, our articulation of concepts, or our following of rules. So although we have grown up hearing about ‘ten commandments’, I now hear ten commentaries about you and I before we were hurt. We don’t need to wear a straight jacket of religious edicts. We only need to remember what standing rooted, tall, and expansive, already feels like. And part of that is to recognise that we are part of the wider flow of consciousness within and beyond nature, rather than merely a separate struggling entity.

With that idea settling in me as we rose to leave the river bank, my heart began to pound. It’s the feeling I get all too often, about the juggernaut of damage that continues around us. I turned to Stephen. “It’s crazy that nothing has really changed.” I said. “Right now, in the name of religion, so much nonsense is being taught, to both kids and adults. Why aren’t we demanding that officials within institutional religion admit the potential damage of misguided interpretations of ancient texts?” My old story of needing an impact began to bubble up. “Stephen, I noticed you stayed away from the strong current. Is it time to swim out of the eddy?” He smiled, raised his eyebrows, and scoffed “You didn’t even get into the eddy. Too much time in the tropics has made you a bit soft, lad.”

Returning past the Church-without-congregation, this time I gave more attention to its graveyard. In some cases it was not just grass but bushes that obscured the text on the grave stones. I pulled some branches back, to see names and years of passing. Mostly, they were people from the 1800s. I imagined someone standing where I was, in the past, cutting the grass, laying flowers, feeling sad, yet probably also grateful. Those mourners have also passed away. But now this headstone was being naturally adorned by cream-white blossoms, a kind of foam atop the grassy swells. Protruding above the meadowsweet flowers were some purple foxgloves. Could I see this as nature’s bouquet? When there is no one left to remember us, nature will lay flowers on our grave. It was then that a deeper calm settled my angst at the distortions of religion, and by religion. Despite our recurring folly, on some level, all will be well.

If there is a next time, maybe I’ll jump in that river.

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Reverend Stephen Wright will be joining us in the August metacrisis salon, to discuss the various issues arising from the spiritual and religious dimensions of collapse awareness. Registration info follows below the picture, for members who are logged in.

***“When there is no one left to remember us, nature will lay flowers on our grave.”***

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AI declaration: I used Deepseek to help me with research into where in the Bible it said about the commandments being in our hearts, as well as what the original Hebrew text said, and whether scholars had previously made the arguments I was developing for this essay. The writing is mine, so my apologies for it not being as polished as AI. Deepseek uses multiples less energy than other AIs.

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