The Underworld is the place where you broke bread with Baba Yaga, made peace with limit, were fed small scraps of meat by crows when you needed it the most. It’s the deep dip in a myth, the katabasis, the descent, the mischievous, startling bewilderment of irrational energies. Logic has little traction at such a moment. Successful returnees of the Underworld are Blake, Anna Swir, Patti Smith, Elie Wiesel. Sometimes we make these journeys alone, sometimes as a culture.

My petition is that we accept the challenge of uncertainty. As a matter of personal style. It’s the right thing to do. It’s what the Anglo-Saxons called “living in the bone-house.” We get older, we find life is riven with weirdness. We should be weird too. To know, tell, and create stories is a wondrous skill that keeps faith with the traditional and beauteous techniques our ancestors used when faced with the sudden mists and tripwires of living. —Martin Shaw

Let’s begin with a question: Where are you?

That’s the question we all ask, isn’t it? Whether we know it or not, whether we want to admit it or not. Where are we? 

In 1968, a TV show called The Prisoner aired in the United States on CBS. The protagonist, known only as Number Six, wakes up one morning to find himself trapped in a place called The Village. The Village is a seemingly idyllic place, where every need is met and every comfort is provided. But every person is stripped of their true identity. They are nothing but numbers, caught in a system that controls their every move, their every thought, and their every word.

And the question that lingers throughout the show’s seventeen episodes is simple: Where am I?

“I am not a number,” says Number Six. “I am a free man.”

But in The Village, freedom is an illusion. The people who live there are told they’re free, but they are bound by the controlling forces around them. These controllers twist the truth, twist their very souls, to keep them in line, to break their will. And the most unsettling thing is that many of them don’t even know they’re trapped.

Of course, this sounds familiar to many of us. This is the world we now live in.

We are surrounded by forces that tell us what to say, how to think, and how to live. It’s all neatly packaged and branded, wrapped up with a bow of comfort and convenience. We have the internet, social media, endless streams of entertainment and distraction. We are constantly plugged in, our minds always occupied. But is it freedom? Or is it The Village in a different guise?

Like Number Six, we are told that we are free. But when we start asking questions, when we seek real truth, when we try to break free from the stories that are being fed to us, something strange happens. People tell us to settle down, to just go along, to stop fighting against the current. They tell us we’re being uncooperative, rebellious. 

But is it rebellion to ask why we are here? To seek out the truth? To want to know who is really pulling the strings?

Civil Disobedience

We’re taught that obedience is virtue.

But what happens when the laws no longer guard the land, the people, or the soul. What happens when they only serve profit, machines, and the men who write the rules to feed themselves?

They’ve built a world where you need permission to milk your own cow.

Where the law protects what poisons the field

and punishes the one who plants without asking.

Where your neighbor is a customer, a tree is just lumber,

and childhood is a market.

But there is an older law.

Deeper than decree.

Stronger than screen.

More lasting than the lines drawn by empire.

And there comes a time, and this is such a time,

when to obey is to betray the earth, neighbor, and God,

and to disobey is to keep faith and become fully human again.

Not by protest, but by planting.

Not by slogans, but by seed.

Not by outrage, but by orchard.

Not by winning, but by tilling and tending.

So stay put.

To feed your neighbor before the market.

To kneel in the soil and know your place.

To raise children who bear heroic names, holy names older than those of banks, law firms, and lobby groups.

To grow food that answers to season, not system.

To care for the old without handing them a billing code.

This is how we recover a holy remembering.

A waking from the spell of profit.

A return to the deep bonds of kinship, not to nostalgia.

This is civil disobedience.

A loaf passed from hand to hand

A lamb raised without barcode.

A fire lit for neighbors, not content.

A psalm prayed at the ditch where the wild mint grows.

Build the economy of gift.

Trade sourdough for firewood.

Trust more than they can tax.

Love more than they can regulate.

Sow more than they can surveil.

And let the record show:

we chose the soil over the screen,

the seed over the salary,

the neighbor over the algorithm.

We did not save the earth.

But we remembered it, and we prayed and we planted.

And that, God help us,

is how the garden begins to grow again

In this episode, I read about fishermen, ecology, and the question: where do we belong, and where do we choose to live?

In this episode, a poem about the first words and the story of Cormac mac Airt.

St Kevin and the Blackbird (1996)

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

*

And since the whole thing's imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love's deep river,
'To labour and not to seek reward,' he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river's name. —Seamus Heaney 

There’s a hunger in the world now, not just for bread, but for meaning. A hunger not of the belly, but of the bones. A thirst nothing sweet can quench. No flag can feed it. No slogan can soothe it. And if you’ve felt it, that ache behind the ribs, that long pull in the chest, you are not alone.

The world we’ve inherited is wired, clever, and slick with answers. It can mimic beauty. It can parrot truth. It can fake kindness with the grin of a fox. But it cannot bleed for you. It cannot carry your name in its breath. It cannot love with scars.

What we’re living through is not mere culture shift, it is soul drift.

The words we were given—mother, father, son, daughter—once thick as old oaks, now float like thistledown. Their roots have been hacked at. They drift loose in the wind of self-invention. The old ground has been traded for mirrors and wires. And while pundits clap and parliaments cheer, real sons and daughters are caught in the riptide. Told they must choose between truth and love. When in Christ, those two were never meant to be torn apart.

This is not about hate. It is not about picking fights or planting flags.

It’s about hunger. It’s about the longing that lives under the ribs. It’s about the want for belonging, for blessing, for a name spoken with warmth.

So let’s speak plainly.

You are not your wounds.

You are not a political symbol. You are not your shame, your pride, your confusion, your hashtags.

You are not the masks you've worn to feel safe. You are not the lies you’ve told yourself to feel whole.

You are a soul.

A living, aching, wondrous soul, woven by the hands of a God who doesn’t lie, doesn’t mock, doesn’t abandon.

A starving child is a judgment on the world.

Agus sin í an fhírinne ghlan—And that is the plain truth.

And that judgment begins with us.

As a man, I am sickened. The older I get, the more I understand what strength is for. And it is not for conquest. It is not for domination. It is for standing in the breach. For using your body and your words to protect the weak. To be silent now, when children are being choked slowly by hunger, is to surrender manhood itself.

As a father, I am undone. I’ve seen my children sick with fever, weak with flu, curled in sleep after a hard day. And I’ve thanked God every time there was food in the house, clean water to give, arms to hold them. I cannot imagine what it is to watch your child waste away because the trucks won’t come, the borders are shut, and the world has turned its face to something more palatable.

As a father—Mar athair—I say this: no cause on earth is worth the death of a hungry child.

As a priest, I say this plainly and without apology: To starve a child is to spit in the face of God. And if your gospel cannot name that plainly, if your faith bends in cowardly silence while this goes on, then your gospel is not worth preaching.

I do not care what side you’re on. I do not care what name you pray to. If you can justify the slow, mechanical murder of a child by hunger in the name of safety, in the name of strategy, in the name of national pride or religious war or economic leverage, then you have already lost your soul. Tá tú caillte—You are lost.

In this episode, I discuss sitting with sadness, conforming our lives to the big “T” truth, the importance of using story to cover our everyday experiences with higher meaning and purpose, and why it’s worthwhile to comtemplate the size of our souls.

The truth is, modern man — "scientific man,” as he likes to call himself — has disarmed himself. He traded his old strength, his old faith, his old stories, for a spreadsheet and a dopamine hit. He threw out the saints and the warriors and enthroned the technocrats. In doing so, he cast off not just God, but his own courage, his own soul.

He fashioned himself into a cold machine, a calculator with shoes. And now he wonders why he no longer knows how to love with fire or stand with honor. He’s forgotten what it means to weep for the right things, to feel the blood rise in his chest when the truth is mocked or the innocent are crushed.

Instead, he grazes like a herd animal, restless, obedient, anxious.

And in this vacuum, the managers come.

With policies. With dashboards. With endless “solutions” that strip the soul bare while telling you they’ve come to make your life easier.