A truth I would surrender to. I put the book down. I didn’t know quite why, but Moriarty’s story had shaken me. I realized that I had been searching for years for a truth like that. “How strange!” he had written. “Christianity making sense to me!” Somehow, the way he was telling the story—interweaving the Gospels with the Book of Job, the ­Mahabharata, the Pali Canon of the Buddha, the folk tales of ­Ireland, the poems of Wallace Stevens—was making sense to me too. What was going on?

“The story of Christianity,” wrote Moriarty, “is the story of humanity’s rebellion against God.” I had never thought of that ancient, tired religion in this way before, never had reason to, but as I did now I could feel something happening—some inner shift, some coming together of previously scattered parts designed to fit, though I had never known it, into a quiet, unbreakable whole.

A truth I would surrender to. What was this abyss inside me, this space that had been empty for years, that I had tried to fill with everything from sex to fame to politics to kensho, and why was something chiming in it now like a distant Angelus across the western sea?

[The story of the world is humanity’s desired to master God rather than worship or even acknowledge Him. Christianity merely explains it as thus. That seems especially applicable to this age, when people are trying to distance themselves from their own biology as somehow ‘fluid’ while at the same time insisting that ethnicity is entirely determinative. We are careening toward the “materialist magician” that CS Lewis posed as Satan’s attempt to triumph against the Creator through His own creation. Kingsnorth’s essay is brilliant, and his path to Orthodox Christianity is fascinating. — Ed]