On metamodernism, theopoetics, and the quiet reconfiguration of meaning
We live in an age increasingly suspicious of the sacred and yet strangely haunted by its absence. Not because the sacred has disappeared, but because our ways of perceiving it have thinned.
The fractures of our moment are difficult to ignore. Political polarisation deepens. Technological acceleration unsettles inherited certainties. Institutions that once promised stability appear fragile. Our thought systems are tired and no longer able to address the existential challenges of a world in rapid transition. What some thinkers now describe as the metacrisis – a convergence of cultural, ecological, political, and spiritual disruptions – has left many sensing that the frameworks which once organised meaning no longer hold in quite the same way.
More than a century ago, W. B. Yeats captured a similar atmosphere of disorientation in his poem The Second Coming. Written in the aftermath of war and upheaval, Yeats sensed a world in which existing structures were loosening and the future felt uncertain:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
These lines have returned with uncanny familiarity in our own unsettled moment, as our structural configurations and geopolitical alliances – abetted by narcissistic, nationalistic, and solipsistic interests – continue to crumble.
Perhaps this is why stories matter so deeply in moments of cultural uncertainty. Arguments jaundiced by ideologisation harden positions, but narrative opens space for reflection and re-imagination. Yeats himself recognised this in The Trembling of the Veil:
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric,
but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
It is often within that interior quarrel – between doubt and longing, irony and sincerity – that the sacred becomes perceptible again.
This tension is not merely personal. It reflects a deeper cultural movement that has shaped how we understand meaning itself. Modernity promised clarity. It trusted in reason’s ability to render the world intelligible, measurable, secure. Postmodernity dismantled that promise, exposing the instability and fragility beneath this confidence. What modernity had presented as stable ground was revealed to be contingent, constructed, provisional. Certainty fractured. Irony became a key means of protection against disappointment and alienation.
And yet, something remained: not naïve belief nor settled scepticism, but longing – and a renewed awareness of and attentiveness to what the future might still offer, even without guarantees.
It is within this unsettled terrain that the metamodern turn attempts to describe our present moment. Cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, in their 2010 paper Notes on Metamodernism, suggest that contemporary culture oscillates between modern conviction and postmodern disbelief. We no longer inhabit certainty, they argue, but neither can we live entirely without it.
Metamodernism (MM) names this tension.
Yet oscillation alone may not fully describe what this tension produces. The movement between belief and doubt is rarely a simple back-and-forth. More often it generates something new within the tension itself. Within my work, I have thought of this process less as oscillation than as an asymmetric-symmetric symbiosis – a dynamic and rhythmic interplay in which opposing forces do not cancel or reconcile one another but become co-generative.
Where oscillation describes the movement between poles, asymmetric-symmetric symbiosis describes what that tension creates.
Symmetry suggests relation, reciprocity, and recognition – how opposing perspectives mirror and illuminate one another. But encounter rarely occurs on equal terms. There is always an element of asymmetry: interruption, surprise, difference that cannot be absorbed or controlled. When these two dynamics interact, something new becomes possible. The tension does not dissolve; it becomes creative. Meaning is not stabilised through synthesis nor abandoned to fragmentation. It is recursively reconfigured through encounter.
Shakespeare captures such an encountered moment of reconfigured perception in King Lear. The storm on the heath shatters the apparent symmetry of political order and royal authority. Cast out into the elements, Lear confronts a world stripped of the structures that once secured his identity. For the first time he recognises the suffering of those he has long ignored: ‘Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,’ he urges himself. The disruption does not restore order; it reconfigures perception. Through the asymmetry of the storm, Lear is challenged to see differently.
In his text Metamodernism, Brendan Dempsey describes MM as an overarching worldview organised according to a recursive structure of meaning-making that absorbs the foundations of the past but allows meaning to transcend them through reiterative encounters with uncertainty. What recursion reveals is that tensions do not merely alternate; they reshape one another.
This creates a distinctive posture: neither belief secured nor disbelief triumphant, but an openness to transformation within the tension itself. Anthropologists describe such spaces as liminal – thresholds where our structures loosen for new configurations to form and expand.
It is within this liminal space that the sacred might become discernible once more. It is here that theopoetics might have impact.
If theology once sought to explain the sacred through doctrine and system, theopoetics does not define the divine so much as evoke encounters with it. Language becomes exploratory rather than declarative. Narrative, metaphor, image, myth, and story open imaginative spaces where the sacred may be glimpsed and experienced rather than captured and enshrined.
Amos Wilder (Theopoetic) argued that theology must recover its poetic imagination if it is to speak meaningfully in the modern world. Catherine Keller (Face of the Deep) similarly suggests that the sacred emerges relationally within the world – a depth discovered through entanglement rather than domination. John D. Caputo (The Weakness of God) pushes this insight further, describing the divine not as a controlling force but as an event, a call that insists without coercing. Richard Rohr (Falling Upward) describes this as the transrational space – a dimension that does not abandon reason but moves beyond its limits, where paradox is not eliminated but inhabited. And C. S. Lewis (The Weight of Glory), with characteristic simplicity, reminds us that the most personal experiences are often the most universal. The sacred appears in encounter – in moments that destabilise and reorient perception. In this sense, the sacred is an interruption – a summons that presses upon the present without guaranteeing resolution.
Liminality, then, is not emptiness. It is charged – a space where symmetry and asymmetry continually remake each other.
This is where our stories – shared with a fidelity to the liminal – become indispensable. Such stories do not resolve ambiguity; they hold it. Through narrative, we accompany characters who move through uncertainty, misrecognition, loss, and discovery. Recognition rarely arrives immediately. It ripens slowly. Narrative allows us to inhabit the complexity of experience without forcing premature resolution.
It is unsurprising, then, that theopoetics so often turns to story. The sacred cannot easily be reduced to propositions; it must be evoked through symbol, metaphor, and narrative – forms capable of holding the depth and ambiguity of human encounter with the divine. In this sense, it makes space for the sacred rather than seeking to affirm it.
In an age suspicious of grand claims, such spaces matter. It is for this reason that fiction continues to be deeply relevant in our moment. Stories allow us to explore the fragile territory and dark wilderness of our in-betweens. They permit a responsiveness that purely analytical discourse often struggles to sustain.
The novel Everything That Stands emerged from this same terrain of exposure. Set against the violence and memory of the Rhodesian Bush War, the story follows a protagonist whose search for meaning begins when the structures that once organised his world collapse. After surviving the downing of Flight AR825 and the subsequent murder of civilians in its aftermath, Baron moves through a landscape where certainty no longer holds. Like Lear upon the heath, he finds himself pummelled by forces he cannot control or explain. Yet within that disruption, perceptions change.
The narrative does not resolve the tensions of belief and doubt; it occupies them. Through re-remembering encounters that spiral, meaning gradually reconfigures itself. Baron’s journey is not merely a movement from ignorance to certainty. Instead, moments of disruption – memory, trauma, conversation, confrontation – repeatedly unsettle his understanding. Each interruption forces a reconsideration of what he thought he knew. Recognition unfolds slowly, often painfully.
Meaning emerges through recursive return. In this way, story becomes a mode of perception. It encourages us to recognise what might otherwise remain unseen.
When the sacred returns through story, it rarely does so in grand actions. Rather, it appears in small disturbances of the ordinary – moments of recognition, gestures of compassion, fragments of beauty and truth that interrupt the flow of the familiar. In these sequences, something in us pauses; something in us listens. And gradually, often almost imperceptibly, perception shifts.
The sacred does not return as old truths and certainties restored. It recurses as attunement – a renewed capacity to notice the depth within both the ordinary and the extraordinary.
And perhaps, because of this, stories that challenge how we perceive still matter so much.
In their unfolding, the sacred is not imposed nor restored. It is discovered again within the fragile drama of human experience and recursively reconfigured through the stories we dare to tell.
Not because the sacred was ever absent, but because we are learning, slowly, how to see anew.
There is more to notice than we think.