Photo: Maria Ródenas Sáinz de Baranda

Lamorna Ash’s 2020 debut, Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Village, won a Somerset Maugham award. Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, Ash’s next narrative non-fiction title, lives up to expectation, attracting high praise from Elle, New Statesman and all quarters. It’s courageous, compelling and beautiful. Her writing embodies best practice anthropology; she puts herself at the heart of her work. 

As Ash (pictured right) explains, its genus was writing an essay about two friends from university, a comedy double act, who converted to Christianity and trained as priests. Curious, Ash wants to understand why they follow the “Way”, as the first followers of Christ were known. 

She recounts disparate tales of conversion to faith. Some, from the Hebrew scriptures and Bible. Many more from others she meets across Britain. She surveys Christianity’s contemporary landscape; “varied” is an understatement. Part One explores conventional conservative, Orthodox and evangelical traditions. Part Two describes her journey with Quakers and monastic places of retreat. In Part Three, Ash offers personal stories of those who moved her and how the journey changed her.  

So, what does an anthropologist make of her own generation’s turn to religion? She describes “Generation Z” as experiencing reality to be a plurality refracted and distorted through screens. As seeking new forms of community and contact with older people. As searching for forms of religion uncoupled from Christian complicity in perpetuating genocidal violence. She cogently makes the case for not dismissing faith and not considering any religion to be a homogenous entity that can be rationalised away.

Depending on the reader’s own experiences and worldviews, the three parts take wholly expected or unexpected turns. 

Her uneasy encounters with conservative Christianity make for grim reading. She deserves a standing ovation for her courage as a queer woman at a Discovering Christianity course in the purity-culture heartland. And for her subsequent decision to stay open to possibility. She refers to the fall of Mike Pilavachi, the charismatic leader of “Soul Survivor”, a “Glastonbury-style” camp for kids. Pilavachi was once lauded, then exposed for his severe abuse of over a hundred boys – coercively, physically and spiritually. Ash astutely problematises the tradition of patriarchal authority, a problem now as at the time of the religion’s overtures. (Patriarchy unchallenged is the breeding ground for abuse, as the recent Makin report in John Smyth’s abuse states.)

In Part Two, Ash recounts her experiences of the Quakers. In its Quietism, seeking is privileged over certainty. She quotes Iris Murdoch on Love: “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than yourself is real”. Slowly, silence’s demand appeals to her. She turns up bursting with energy after bike rides to confront it. Ash candidly challenges her commodification of the meetings as fodder for writing. She wishes she could have witnessed early Quakerism before Quietism as a trembling, “fiercely heterodox expression of the Christian faith”. 

On the remote Scottish island of Iona Ash is moved by the Iona Community. This is an expression of “new monasticism”, located in a medieval Abbey initially founded by Irish monk Colum-cille (Columba) in the 6^th century. She writes of Iona, known as a “Thin Place” with its monastic rhythm of twice-daily services, and comes to long for these encounters “like a hunger”. She finds illumination “where none should have been”. 

Ash encounters the immanence of faith held by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a loved author of hers, after a silent retreat at St. Beuno’s in Wales. She finds her way to St Luke’s. She envisions a continually unfolding and challenging Borgesian bible that I, for one, would love to read. Ash shares her tumultuous experiences and conclusions as anthropologist and voyager: to reveal these here detract from your journey of reading her book. 

Her book concludes with the famous line from Julian of Norwich – the medieval female anchoress whose theological writing continues to have an impact today. (Julian’s intersections with trauma research is the basis of my PhD). She rightly critiques the modern understanding of Julian’s famous “all shall be well” saying, while recognising that it is all any of us really want to hear. She leaves it open and porous. An invitation to go deeper.  

Ash could have recognized that the “last stop” or exit points in Christianity, such as One Church in Brighton, are for many, points of re-entry and portals to more contemplative or “second half of life” Christian faith. 

Overall, Ash’s book is an important, nuanced account of what may be a generational turn back to Christianity against the expectations of their parents’ generation who, having widely lost faith, did not impose it on them. Perhaps that is part of the point. 

Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever is published by Bloomsbury

Blue: a lament for the sea by Liz MacWhirter, exploring Iona and ecological grief, will be published by Stewed Rhubarb Press in October

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