Forward...

In 2021, Tina Arena released Church—a work that operates less as a song and more as a conceptual echo, drawing the listener back toward an interior focus of meaning.

Its gesture is not toward organised doctrine but toward an archetypal sanctuary: the self as its own site of return.

The period surrounding its emergence was marked by a pervasive psychic erosion. Collective exhaustion metastasised into a kind of cultural vertigo, as the velocity of information eclipsed the very substance it purported to deliver.  Amplification replaced clarity; intensity displaced intention.

Though positioned outside formal religiosity, I found myself implicated in the song’s central provocation:  that the human organism—mental, physical, spiritual—had reached an existential event horizon.  A quiet summons toward reckoning became impossible to ignore.  

As long-standing structures begin to unspool and inherited logics lose their persuasive force, the traditional symbols of value—acquisition, achievement, ornamental identity—reveal themselves as increasingly anaemic.

Their gravitational pull weakens.
Their function as narratives of purpose fails.

To “go to Church,” in this expanded framing, is not to seek refuge in architecture or theology, but to re-enter the innermost chamber of one’s own ontology.

It is an inward pivot, a recalibration, an act of attending to the strata of self that persist beneath the cultural noise-field.

This work situates itself precisely at that threshold—between rupture and return, exhaustion and renewal—offering not resolution, but an aperture.

It’s time to go to Church.