In the time since I have disappeared from our television screens, I have spent more time back here in this valley, in the land of my ancestors.
An excerpt (not a summary):
Maybe I never respected the craft. There is something shallow, ultimately un-serious about it all. Journalists think events determine our world, yet events tell us nothing.
If we follow events we miss what the French call questions d’existence. We miss the meaning of it all.
My yearning has led me to physics, philosophy, theology, accumulating a library of books, completing a PhD, writing books of my own and all of it maybe amounts to less than a falling leaf.
Saint Thomas Aquinas after experiencing the presence of God late in life, said that all he had written was straw.
We do not derive the truth from knowledge or news, we feel it. We participate in God — what Aquinas called ipsum esse, the act of existence — in our repose, in the quiet, in nature and in our mortality, the finality of our existence.
No one reads yesterday’s headlines. But we return to the poets. A line of poetry is greater than a mountain of newsprint.
I think the fact that you’re actually capable of introspection and working out why you feel these things means you’ll be alright. Particularly that point about the communal benefits of organised religion - few atheists are willing to acknowledge that and so they never identify it as something missing and don’t replace it with a non-religious alternative.