Become a Saint

Seeking a Liturgy of the Wild, (Part 18)

St. Clare of Assisi Rescuing a Child Mauled by a Wolf by Giovanni di Paolo

It’s recently been suggested that I should engage in more social punditry than I do. As if little I write has much relevance to the ‘real world’. I dispute this but would add that the earth needs dreamers as much as thinkers. Dreaming is underground thinking perhaps, the night-time variant. I’m a night-owl natterer not a day-break bellower. That I am a dreamer has never been in much dispute, it was scrawled on more than one report as a child. ‘Thinking’ sounds much more worthy, more protestant, more active than something that suggests being zonked out under a duvet. Dreaming sounds almost decadent.

I guess a way past a dreamer-thinker standoff is to use the word imagination. Imagination straddles both of them, mocks neither, it accommodates. I’ve done plenty of thinking – I ‘thought’ myself through a PhD, I ‘thought’ myself to a position at Stanford University, but I wouldn’t hang my heart on that entirely. So bravo to imagination.

What am I getting at when I say we need dreamers?

Well they see the story as well as the facts. They see the weave as well as the pattern. Let’s have a look at 2023. I have friends with radically divergent impressions of modern life. Depending on who I’m talking with the world is either nefariously being ushered on to a kind of suicide bid by Luciferic forces, or we’ve never had it so good and all those bad diseases and bad attitudes that have so plagued humanity will be at an end by 2030.

It's not rocket science to suggest that both could likely be going on at the same time. That in the mosh pit of our era of stupefying choice and grotesque injustice, everything is tuned to a greater and more frantic pitch of showreel-ready drama. The Devil is trashing our retinas. It’s life but with the filters cranked to a migraine- inducing pitch of colour. We dwell, second by adrenal wrecking second, between the appalling and the miraculous. It’s exhausting. I don’t think it’s ever quite been like this before. A hundred years ago much of my information would be within a twenty-mile radius.

Back in 2016 I was writing about this kind of thing in my book Scatterlings. It was a section responding to Nicolas Bourriaurd’s idea of what he called the altermodern. That at the expense of multiculturalism and regional identity all was getting chucked into a kind of global stew which we could only consume with the aid of subtitles and computer over-dubbing, because no one had the time to learn a new language anymore. I wrote:

‘Whilst the turning from a Western-fixated centre to a wider culture should be celebrated, you can send back the clowns when we realise that the replacement is not rich diversity but globalization. This is the very opposite of a myth-line – something found by diligence, reaching out in history, myth and the slow thinking of a landscape…. we are receivers of a vast backdrop of information, but identical to the vastness is thinness of relationship.’

The last sentence still gives me the willies. That’s the sentence that cuts through all the nay-saying and utopian groovy-speak about our times and really gives me a dog in the race. Because that I know is happening. I don’t have to overthink it. There’s no subtlety to it. It’s arrived.

I think it’s the reason why quite a few of us have been banging on about saints and mystics and taking to the woods recently. Intuitively cutting back on the sheer overload of influence. A last line from Scatterlings: ‘We have in large part inherited the “belief in progress” and now stand in the debris of its consequence. Maybe we are on the verge of becoming a post-progress society. There’s enormous relief in that.’ Mary Harrington’s new book Feminism Against Progress is an accomplished work that lays out how the progress narrative has compromised the feminine in all sorts of ways that may not have seemed at all problematic at the time.

And I think I was wrong.

I don’t see much in evidence of us becoming a post-progress society. I think that Progress is the religion that will be clung to the longest. Trust me, I don’t bemoan the medical advances, I don’t ward off science with a hiss, I don’t slink around in a nettle-shirt, but if ever diligence was needed, discernment, a ‘testing the spirits of the age’ then it’s now.

So what to do? How to live in this kind of tension?

Here’s a clue.

I’ve been reading Elizabeth Rees’ book, Celtic Saints: Passionate Wanderers where she states, ‘the term ‘saint’ simply meant someone wise and holy, or any good Christian who had died.’

Well, I don’t know if you are holy, and hopefully not dead yet, but I bet somewhere knocking about there’s a bit of wisdom. Maybe start there. Saints weren’t a big part of my life growing up. When my uncle Bryan died, at the funeral he was described as a saint and I didn’t know what to think. I thought saints practically floated, not had an allotment and a fondness for tandems. Now, I wonder. Bryan made you feel differently about life when you were around him (which is a saintly thing to do), he endlessly taught by example, the last hours of his life were spent with family singing hymns around him. As John Moriarty says, Bryan was a ‘singing Christian’. Sinless no, saintly maybe. Rees reminds us that Bardsey Island (off Wales) was called the ‘Isle of two thousand saints’ after the amount of Christians buried there. I don’t think they could all have been levitating around the place living on holy words and wafers delivered by doves on Good Friday. But you never know.

So I wonder if we could very respectfully ‘scuff up’ the word saint again, plant a few flowers in it, occasionally reach in the darkness for it, rather than discounting it as something absolutely otherworldly. (For readers who really have no interest in such a thing, maybe consider instead my notes from today’s essay as an alternative.) Maybe we could have a crack at it like some kind of quest, or an eccentric turn to the light in the face of darkness.

Because, really, there’s nothing eccentric about it at all.

To cleave to grace, to not be battered by the hypnosis of so much social media, to get to know a patch of land, to get to know yourself, your animals, your people seems an eminently sensible thing to do. To get to know your God. When the Druids wanted to know something, they limited their views not expanded them. If they couldn’t read the moment through one square foot of earth then there wasn’t much to know. Blake would have understood.

In mid-August, six folks and myself will go to a forest and wait.

We will listen. We will fast. We will pray.

We will explore what the Holy Spirit feels like rolling through, around and inside the character of an ancient Dartmoor wood. And inside us too: our dreams and relatedness to all sorts of other things. We’ll find out how scripture lands by a smoky old fire, or when walking by the curves of the River Dart. There’s no special level of spiritual adeptness you need for this, no fancy title, that would be a deterrent. There’ll be little brooding spots in the bush to pray in, to be awake in, to dream in, to think in, to get dreamt in.  There’ll be tics to look out for, the occasional bellow of a stag, the flash of a dog fox at dusk. It’ll be quite something. God will be everywhere.

And, at the end, they will go back. Back to the wires and lights and hisses and threats and miracles, back to the end-is-nigh and we’re-goanna-live-forever of modern life. And they will have to hold their nerve. They will have to figure out how to let grow what they glimpsed out there. Saints are always having to deal with this kind of crapola.

Time in the bush is not abdication, or fantasia, or some bonkers fringe activity. It can be a moment to place your fingers in the wound of Christ and doubt no more. It can be a waking up, not an enchantment. As I’ve said till my voice is hoarse:

Reverie leads to participation.

Brigid knew this, Catherine of Egypt knew this, Petroc knew this, the two thousand saints of bloody Bardsey Island most likely knew this. You can be a saint in training: with your wellies and your sandwiches and your Marches of Witness and your Extinction Rebellions and your smallholdings and your storytelling and your alms giving and your food bank and your bag of apples for the freezing Dartmoor ponies in the middle of the night. Feel your way. Think your way. Dream your way. Try not to do it all on your own, that can get very muddling.

In the end, in the face of all the crap and all the miracles and all the terrors of modern life I would suggest becoming a saint.

This is what happens when you ask me for punditry.

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Note:

The Nomad in the Local

(If saints aren’t for you, you may enjoy something on the nomad)

When we grope back far enough, we hear the clinking bells and animal croon of a vast migratory journey—way back, through the blue smoke. Press your ear to the mud and you will hear them.

From Africa, the Caucasus, the steppes, we hear the creak of the great wagons, the lively yip of reindeer song, the crackle of the fire. Movement has been one key display of our temperament. And not always on the run, not always adrift in ghosts, bloodshed, and oppression, but frequently styled with tremendous, hip-sashaying elegance.

Only a few miles from the Buckfastleigh caves, in the remote burial cairns of high Dartmoor, beads originating from the Baltics have been found, a sign of great veneration. They have been determined to be four thousand years old and adorned the burial site of an adolescent girl. I’ve picked my way through treacherous, boot-sucking mire to offer libation there myself. But it was the degree of migration in those red beads that really caught me. I thought I had given myself entirely to the local!

Many nomads travel for pasture (the word comes from the Greek no-mas—meaning ‘the search for pasture’), beautifully rooted in the wealth of the word herd—the fed bellies of the animals in turn dictate happiness to the wanderers. The sustenance of the four-legged ones is a homing device for the tribe, a humbling incentive.

These ones-beyond-the-city-walls still amount to some forty million, some travelling to gather wild herbs, whilst others—like the Lobar blacksmiths of India—are craftworkers and travel to trade. It was nomads—the Mongols—who gave birth to the largest land empire we have ever seen. Under the unification of Genghis Khan, the land of these nomadic tribes stretched the great flank of Asia. It was nomads who carried the banner of Islam across North Africa, Spain, and Iran in the early seventh century. In early books of the Bible they are claimed as God’s children; it is the city folk who are outcasts. Nomads have made a substantial hoof print on what we perceive history to be. Pragmatism, intricate social networks, and an often dazzling degree of weaponry ride alongside.

It’s too loose a connection to claim them as hunter-gatherers: they are not. They have consciously entered the business of management, of proximity to and cultivation of herd. They clack with their staffs, directing the migrations, not just aimlessly following the chomping amble of the animals. There is an easy back-and-forth between the desires of both. Venkatesh Rao claims just part of their bounty as the invention of the wheel, falconry, leather craft, rope making, even sewing (from the construction of hide tents with needles of bone and gut strings). If mobility is the pressing issue, it’s likely a nomad designed it.

We could ask, what does local mean to a nomad? Proximity to a fireside or dwelling under a ragged canopy of stars, cradled in the soft fur of the desert grasses? Nomads seem to represent a modern aspiration—the wider earth itself as home. But still they resolutely maintain their specific song lines; their passage is still deliberate, often worn into an ancestral groove under their hooves, paws, and feet.

When nomads claim the rich soil of farmers, we usually locate a change in their thinking, what old George Monbiot calls ‘a belief in progress.’ Transformation and salvation become an unstoppable highway cutting through the previous hard-wrought perception of the cyclic, seasonal world—loss and gain, abundance and scarcity. So where once was the spiral, now exists the gleaming road of future security. The crops are dry-stored, and nature’s rough grip is to be overcome. We get to dictate some terms. The greater purchase we have over nature’s whimsy, the better.

Greg Retallack claims that differing soils dictate the religious emphasis of the people who work them. Whilst collecting samples from ancient Greek temples, he noticed that thinner soil existed where nomadic herders worshipped Artemis and Apollo, but as the soil becomes capable of supporting a robust farming life, the gods in the mix are Demeter and Dionysus, deities of harvest and the vine. The emphasis becomes less on hunting more on planting. The gods do not just exist in lofty Olympus but wander the fields in the evening light. The deities reflect the intricate concerns of the local; maybe they guide them.

The nineteenth-century writer Thorstein Veblen (1899) makes a resounding distinction between two different kinds of pastoral nomad: lower and higher barbarian stages (‘barbarian’ is high praise in Veblen’s eyes). The lower stick pretty much to the lifestyle I’ve described, whilst the high gradually become civilisations whilst maintaining an eyeball in the direction of their roots—an example being large herds of animals maintained for sport rather than sustenance. They in turn get deeply settled, forgetful, and comfortable, till nomads from the edges charge in, kick over the applecart, and claim dominion. Then over time they make exactly the same moves towards surety as did their predecessors.

Venkatesh claims that one on one, the nomad displays more innovation, street smarts, and flat-out aggression than any civilised person, but en masse, the porridge-thick, comfort-sucking horde will almost always win the battle. The mono trumps the feudal.

Traditional nomads rarely worshipped much local in the way we understand it; rather they hurled their praise up at the vast tent of the sky. The sky enclosed all. The Mongols loyally offered libation to vast Tengri, god of the air. Everything under its great sway was related. But, as we see, this old view is affected by the knowledge of life’s inherent fragility, the seasonal patterning of what is stripped away, and the green buds of spring’s recovery. We have in large part inherited ‘the belief in progress’ and now stand in the debris of its consequence. Maybe we are on the verge of becoming a post-progress society. There’s enormous relief in that.

The amble of the last few paragraphs has been a pen sketch of how a book like this might approach the word nomad. I meet many people for whom the word produces a visible glow; they wear it as a kind of sash round their waist or a rose in their hair. It’s become a phrase or get-out clause to describe the kind of floating busyness and continent hopping that makes up what many of us associate with a successful Western life. But let’s slow the wagons a little.

I think very, very few of us are nomads in this ancient sense, and to insist on the word for our cross-continental scurries is a slander, to my way of thinking. I would call this the condition not of the nomad but of the scatterling:

scatterling: One who has no fixed habitation or residence.

We hold the keys to the kingdom and the kingdom is everywhere and nowhere. But hey, we travel, we make connections, we trade; why can’t we claim the title nomad? What is the pasture we seek? Why is it different? I think we might begin with the word bonded.

Nomads do not travel over the land; they travel with the land. Their travel is not an abstraction, but an earthy pilgrimage deep with understanding of relationship to herd/place/person. These migrations root their hips and feet in the ordinary grandeur of ancestral walking. So—to use a recent phrase—they are bonded.

Many of us travel without that sense. We travel searching for something other than the trail itself. I think we are actually looking for bonding. So, bonded is the aboriginal ground, and if a nomad already possesses it, then for us to claim we are it while we seek it is rash and, as I say, a little slanderous. It’s like a kiddie walking around with a fedora and sporting a wolf-tooth earring. Charming, but not to be taken that seriously.

Malidoma Somé (1995) tells the story of a child being born with the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso. Gathered up outside the thin wall of the hut where the birth is taking place are all the local kids waiting for the first cry of the baby. The moment they hear it they wail out in response—to ensure that the newly arriving soul knows straight up that it is witnessed. Then the mother and child remain in the cozy dark of the hut for some days. The baby dictates its curious and woozy awakening—an Otherworld for this little being of the amniotic realm.

The circle of the tribe enables this slow-emerging sense of bonding. This bonding becomes an eye from which to apprehend the living world. Did you get that? I know I didn’t. So I lick my lips and spend forty years trying to get a need met that should have been catered for within twenty seconds of my leaving my mother’s womb.

Find Scatterlings:

Scatterlings, Cista Mystica Press