Fire in the Ark
Dispatches from the wilds of Wyoming
I’ve gradually been collecting my thoughts from a weekend with friends and creative co-conspirators in a northern enclave of the Bighorn Mountains, a forest sanctum where each morning starts with the violent encounter of glacial runoff water and each night ends in the still frozenness of the pines.
At this fraternal locus, our conversations jump from Aldo Leopold to liturgy to Agalloch. (It’s not a Secret Society, but hey, if the shoe fits...). The theme this time was “Pilgrim Mindset.” Everyone in our group offered a presentation to riff on this concept.
Below I’ll share the idea behind my own offering plus notes I took while listening to others. I’m avoiding names not for anonymity but because I may have conflated some presentations. Any misinterpretations or omissions are inadvertent and my fault alone.
Interior Pilgrimages and Rebooting Failed Societies
My own pilgrimage is interior.
I’ve been plotting an exodus from the troubled city of Portland, Oregon for five years. But after contemplating a job offer recently — which brought me to St. Louis — I realized my place is on the West Coast, particularly in the spiritually hot confines of Portland.
Portland, you may have heard, has gotten so extreme in its descent that even the author of Fight Club (and other genuinely transgressive and hyper-masculine sorts) have simply left.
But I’ve become more “extreme” too, and I want to act in a manner that pleases God. God wants me here, where I’ve lived since 2000, where lots of people have bought into a crazed unreality fueled by terrible ideas and bad governance.
My pilgrimage involves the continuing pursuit of family and church life, in a place that is hostile to both, and maybe helping my priest clean pentagrams off the priory doors (sprayed on by local Reddit witches). It’s dirty work, in a failing city that is my home.
Which leads to the other part of my brief presentation: how do you reform failing societies? Perhaps not Portland, whose downward spiral may last several generations, but failing places in general? A year ago I met an expert on this subject and he pointed to three major historical examples of where pathological societies were successfully rehabilitated:
Singapore in the 1960s;
Sparta circa 700 BC.; and
Arabia circa 600 Common Era.
But to be clear: these places were re-normed, not “reformed.” Comprehensive change came downstream from charismatic individuals and mass, internalized value shifts. The charismatic individuals were Lee Kuan Yew, Lycurgus, and Muhammed, with the latter placing civic work entirely within the realm of God.
And whether through charismatic leadership or through interior pilgrimage, a key insight is: re-norming requires placing all work (civic, familial, ecclesial) within God’s economy and not inside human ambition.
Pilgrimage as Risk and Frontier
God is the operative word.
The Pilgrim Mindset stretches from Abraham to the American Pilgrims, people who were spiritually serious, physically tough, and half-dying in the process of settlement. They forged the backbone of the American story. They were not romantics, they were hard-edged believers whose legacy complicates New England’s later cultural decline. Modern-day pilgrims face the same problem as their predecessors: divine calling vs. civilizational consequence.
Ecological Cycles and Surfing Collapse
Civilizational consequence implies a profound alteration of systems. Every system moves through growth, maturity, collapse, and reorganization, with collapse serving not as an ending but as a release of stored capital. The crucial moment — the “back loop” from collapse to reorganization — is where the telos of the next system is forged and where spirit is infused into matter.
The Pilgrims lived precisely in this back-loop moment, leaving a rigid, declining system and participating in the spiritual re-creation of a new one. Today, many civilizational systems are entering release, and new structures are rapidly forming, with some animated by adversarial spiritual forces. (Disembodied spirits are all around us — undying, though not eternal).
The modern pilgrim must consciously infuse divine spirit and righteous purpose into the emerging systems before they harden into mature forms. Pilgrimage means assuming a metaphysical responsibility to shape the coming world while the reorganization window remains open.
The Economy Above the Market
The infusion of spirit into emerging systems demands structures that can carry transcendent purpose. An overlooked tool in this regard is patronage. Whereas the modern liberal order depends on self-interest and the “invisible hand,” a deeper, pre-economic order is governed by understanding, wisdom, and patronage, with the latter being the ultimate prestige good that makes honest teaching, religion, and governance possible. Market activity is downstream of these higher goods, not vice versa, and modern digital platforms distort the very conditions needed for such understanding to flourish.
An upper realm is the Christian economy of salvation, the divine ordering of persons within the Mystical Body of Christ. A pilgrim seeks participation in that higher economy, where suffering is meaningful and all goods find their orientation toward the sacred end.
The Lifecycle of Spiritual Development
Arriving at the sacred end requires three stages:
Discernment — learning to hear vocation (see Kierkegaard and Simone Weil);
Obedience — acting on divine direction despite uncertainty; and
Revolutionary continuity — a true revolutionary honors the past by negating the present in a way that preserves historical memory and births a new world (see Kojeve).
Pilgrims didn’t simply rebel, they created a new existence, one based on a faithful negation.
A Nation of Runaway Children
There is a contrarian view to all this, though. In the psychology of the parent–child relationship, the Pilgrims rejected the Church of England without ever rediscovering the possibility of legitimate authority, thereby condemning their project to eventual dissipation. Their descendants’ slide into Unitarianism exemplifies this failure of reintegration.
All this was precipitated by a Luciferian refusal to submit, a rebellion that would not trust authority as benevolence. Extended more broadly to America: the United States is a nation of runaway children who keep fleeing home rather than completing the cycle of reconciliation.
True pilgrimage requires not only leaving but returning — coming home to legitimate authority, roots, and maturity.
Building an Ark and Reorienting Our Sensorium in a Turbulent Age
But what if return is no longer an option?
The most visceral metaphor of the weekend was an ark.1 The pilgrim’s travels are a form of ark building. Our enclave in the woods is an ark project too: a mobile brotherhood afloat in strange and volatile times, built for buoyancy, not abandonment.
Per Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan, we must reorient our sensorium to the present technological reality. In Edgar Allan Poe’s maelstrom tale,2 survival is not realized by clinging to familiar structures but by discerning the “barrel”: the still, small shape that keeps its head above a vortex. Poe’s fisherman, dragged into the Moskstra-öm, found that same buoyancy — he noticed that cylindrical objects like barrels descended more slowly down the vortex, and he adjusted accordingly.
The current moment calls for a similar maneuver: a perceptual reset, and engagement with a reality that is rapidly mutating, all of which attunes to the Second Power ethos of surfing turbulent forces rather than attempting to control them.
Contra something Karl Rove once said, we can’t invent our own realities (God is reality), but we can act in holy mirroring, and ask Him to bring the light that illumines: an “invading” grace.
RELATED MEDIA
Christ and Nothing: “The great Indo-European mythos, from which Western culture sprang, was chiefly one of sacrifice: it understood the cosmos as a closed system, a finite totality, within which gods and mortals alike occupied places determined by fate. And this totality was, of necessity, an economy, a cycle of creation and destruction, oscillating between order and chaos, form and indeterminacy: a great circle of feeding, preserving life through a system of transactions with death. This is the myth of ‘cosmos’—of the universe as a precarious equilibrium of contrary forces—which undergirded a sacral practice whose aim was to contain nature’s promiscuous violence within religion’s orderly violence. The terrible dynamism of nature had to be both resisted and controlled by rites at once apotropaic—appeasing chaos and rationalizing it within the stability of cult—and economic—recuperating its sacrificial expenditures in the form of divine favor, a numinous power reinforcing the regime that sacrifice served.”
Do Not Mistake Negative One for Zero: “In New Atheist thought, it is often repeated that the man who makes a negative claim bears no burden of proof, since he does not really bring forth a challenge or project. This is called the null hypothesis – and I propose that this concept is substanceless and only a rhetorical trick…Ultimately, the man who finds God is he who makes no claim at all, for God makes himself known in silence. Whether he is a ‘theist’ or an ‘atheist,’ a man will not find God until he approaches Him with fear and trembling, recognizing God’s awesomeness in comparison to man’s utter inaccuracy. Prayer sought in earnest leads to silence – to listening, as opposed to speaking – and, thus, to hearing God’s voice. We must allow God to find us.”
Restoring the Moral Economy: “It is these economies where human culture, tradition, and livelihoods can flourish, and it is up to us to establish a toe-hold in the current global economy. I know many Amish folks in the surrounding settlements and they have perhaps the most robust example of a functioning moral economy in the twenty first century. But is it possible to recreate our own version of a moral economy and community without strict personal and behavioral restrictions?”
The Economy Above the Market: “…patronage is radically undervalued today, compared with all prior times in history. As it is the only area of the economy that works without the motive of narrow self-interest and without expectation of economic return. And yet patronage indirectly generates all economic return. It forms the only condition in which economic return can come about. In this way, patronage is always already a distributed form of checks and balances on the profit motive and self-interest that operates legitimately in the rest of the economy.”
Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström” describes a fisherman swept into the Norwegian whirlpool known as the Moskstraumen. As his boat spirals downward, he notices that objects fall at different rates (larger ones plunge the fastest, cylindrical or hollow ones linger near the rim). The fisherman latches on to a barrel and survives as the vortex collapses.
I've been to Portland recently. It's a deeply troubled city, as you note, but there is still potential for redemption. God bless you sir.
Very nice summary