A Christian Is An Outlaw

A Story of Robin Hood

Do you still have a young one living in you?

A little unconvinced with your adult choices?

I do.

And I talk to him, usually through storytelling. He’s not entirely convinced by all the God-bothering that I’ve been up to. He looks up at the big beardy bloke I am now and sighs deeply. He can’t believe that I no longer walk around with a bow and arrow and face paint. Sell out. He’s done his little trick of taking me back in time. It’s 23 Pilmuir Ave, and I can hear David Essex on the radio. Summer, seagulls. All the old ones I love are still alive. He’s got me on his turf, this little Martin.

He asks some carefully prepared questions:

Will your faith not damage the animal that I am?

Will I have to trade wonder for belief?

What about when I see the Devil in the pulpit?

How can you follow a figure made entirely of light?

He hugs me for ages. I can feel the sorrow in him, it’s keeping him warm. This young me needs some convincing about what older me is up to. I tell him the truth. I tell him there’s no need to trade wonder for belief, that it’s not one over the other, though if we get too calcified, too encrusted with tradition it can look like that. Belief can help with discernment and wonder with the general curiosity required for living well. And the boy seems to accept that, so I give him a brief update.

That I live in a wilderness of happy defeat.

That theosis is a messy business.

That I couldn’t have been resurrected without this. I got Lazarused.

That I experience greater freedom, greater imagination, greater reality.

That I feel almost intolerably exposed.

He seems to accept this, looks me in the eye and does his mad stig-of-the-dump dance to make sure I haven’t quite forgotten what the wild rumpus looks like. He calls:

Witness me ye old buggeree.

Tell us a story.

When I couldn’t hold a Jesus in my head, Robin did a fair old job of holding up my conscience. I knew this world was run by a wicked prince John, but there was an absent king, a mighty one, who could return at any minute. He was the Lionheart, King Richard. This is to who the merry men were loyal. Robin was reviled and loathed by the rich because he kept taking their treasure and giving it to the poor. That he didn’t keep it made them in even madder than his stand-and-deliver bravado.

And it’s all right kiddo, I will always want to be part of Robin Hood’s gang. Always. He is, for me, a wild twin to King Arthur. They are in relation, and when false kings rule the isle, Robin maintains our conscience from its greening edge. He’s out there with Cundrie and Parzival, grail-true, delighted by the beauty of things, defending the weakened from the preying of the wicked.

It would be honour in modernity for a Christian to be called such an outlaw, for surely they do not conform to the laws of this world.

Bugger off ye borings! I love thee Creator’s wyld & jubilant earth