Bells & Birds

Seeking a Liturgy of the Wild, (Part Five)

In the far west of England it’s rumoured that Arthur, King of the Britons, lives on within a jackdaw. The Bird-Spirit king roams – a being of the air – from the rugged cliffs of Tintagel to the cabbage fields of Lincolnshire, but we do not see him. One true gaze would release him to his rightful shape. We could all spend an hour a day, late afternoon maybe, keeping an eye out. Don’t be afraid to praise a jackdaw, just in case. Look out over the fields, try to spot him, searching for you.

And there’s another story, of a Dartmoor shepherd that wanders into a Devon hill and finds Arthur and his knights sleeping by a vast bell. A bell whose sound holds the deep conscience of Britain. It wakes the good. Awestruck he gazes at the knights and as he turns to leave his shepherd’s smock brushes the bell. The tiniest touch. In the half dark Arthur’s eyes open, “Is it time?” The shepherd gathers himself and speaks:

Not yet my lord,

but soon.

Soon. It’s so deeply affecting that story. Down in the deep heart’s core as Yeats would say. That the myth-world returns. That good returns in a time of darkness and great peril. I will never, ever, be too old for a story like that. I need to be renewed in it, soaked in it, baptised in it. Yes, there’s all sorts of grey areas and complexity in life, but sometimes we need to remember what we stand for. And I would hope to live a life thoughtful enough to lead me into the hill where Arthur sleeps. I would long to ring the bell, but I would tremble in the doing of it. But by God, does the world not dearly need it?

A Liturgy of the Wild would have such a bell in it. And it would be a bell of the forest not the village.

I am remembering the summer just passed. I am sitting in Saint Kevin’s cell at Glendalough in Ireland. It’s a breathless couple of minutes as you climb steep, knee-rattling steps to his circular eyrie. An old guy like me wheezes on completion. I peer (breathlessly) out at the green-glass surface of the lake and a merry eruption of oak trees on all sides. Kevin’s famed for his connection to a blackbird, but it’s a robin I see today. Hopping around from the carpark all the way up to the cell. There’s only a boulder or two left to indicate that there was ever a hermitage.

But the peace, oh the peace. It drops around you, as the poets say. That’s the identifier. If you take a moment you’ll catch it. You will wish to tarry a moment, an hour, a month, a year, a life. It really is a blessed place, the postcards are right.

The story goes that it was Lent. Kevin was keeping away from people and filling himself deep and sweet with contemplation, the breath of prayer. He allowed his small circled world to expand out a little into the nearby waters, forest and grasses. He kept getting bigger, truer, wilder. He stretched his arms out of his cell window in the praise shape that Christians use and settled into his devotions. When you enter that consciousness, animals start to trust you. You have a little of the scent of your creator. Somewhere in the bliss of it a blackbird landed on Kevin’s outstretched hand. So content it was, it constructed a nest there and then to keep its eggs.

There’s now an issue for Kevin, as you have no doubt detected.

The world’s pragmatism says, Shrug the bird off, the earth’s mysticism says, Excellent! Don’t let a chance like this go by!

In the man, two consciousnesses have at each other. Battling. As they do in all of us.

Kevin took on the huge commitment that a religious life offers. Something Other was nesting, getting born, something that was going to require both discomfort and patience.

He not once snapped his hand shut, cursed the bird or otherwise complained. Till the bird was hatched and ready to leave, Kevin kept his hand outstretched.

What have I kept my hand outstretched for? How many times have I snapped it shut? Withdrawn? Never once in my life have I felt saintly. You can draw this story with only a few words, but the depth and endurance of it keeps unfolding. Let’s hold the story in our palm like Kevin holds the blackbird, the simplicity and challenge of it. The blackbird was maybe God saying hello. The deep mind accepts it.

*

There is a bell in us, that rings at the most inconvenient times.

I’ve tried to smother the thing many times, muffle the ringer, chucked it in the pond, but it’s persistent. To honour the bell is so often to work counter-intuitively to our seeming gain. But it’s also that honouring that creates the most memorable leadership, with diligent listening crafting that rarest of beasts, an Elder.

The bell often rings loudest for me when I have a fair bit of silence around. Maybe on a walk or rising from a dream. In the midst of life’s clatter I’m afraid it can still be the more low-end part of my character that slouches up to respond, usually by the pond-chucking.

At times when I hardly have the puff to believe in much anymore, when all cosmologies are lying in bits around me, I fall back on one simple idea. That my conscience is the divine world speaking to me. That straightforward. I don’t build great effigies or concepts around it, I just decide that it’s what I have to pay attention to. What I have to respond to. What I have to obey.

I know how to be on the right side of it and the wrong side. I really do know about the wrong side. It depletes us, muffling the bell.

Where I live, I hear church bells in the middle of the night. They curl up and around my drowsy night-timey bed. When I hear them I ask myself, what is trying to announce itself? What needs to step forward in this darkness? If I’m lucky I remember, so often I drift off and that’s the end of the matter.

As I say, a Liturgy of the Wild would have a bell that rung. Not to alarm, not to scare off spirits, not to rouse the village to frantic activity, but to contemplation. We could gather by a fire and ask each other what the bell is saying to each of us.

Here’s another profound bell. As deep as Arthur’s. Likely the same one from my way of thinking.

I want to tell you a story about a man that once would have been a druid, but in the moment we locate him he’s a Christian. Grandson of an Ollamph – a high Bard. So we know he has a little of the magic dust floating around in his bloodstream.

*

Saint Ciaran was just a little lad at the time, the day it happened. He was ambling around an island, admiring a small bird sitting happily in its nest. Of a sudden, a hawk swooped it up and started off with it. A thought of grief shot from Ciaran’s head and connected with the vast predatorial mind of the hawk. Like a dream you long for, his thought broke the expected outcome. The hawk circled in the sky and came and quietly dropped the bird at Ciaran’s feet. The boy sweetly cradled the dazzled fellow and murmured strength words to it, Christ words to it, and though a little torn and bruised it started to gingerly sing and hop from branch to branch back to its original perch. Ciaran had some kind of access to the mind of an animal, a bird, even a river or sapling. It was a pure, clear energy he had in him.

Years later Patrick gave him a bell and instruction to walk to a well in the middle of Ireland where north meets south. “Not a sound will the bell make with its bright voice till you are in the right spot.” Sure enough it rang a great song when, in the middle of a forest they finally came to the well. Sweet though the well was, the woods were ancient and rough in their magic. It was in the shadows of the great oaks that Ciaran was to build his cell. A tricky, practical task and surrounded by watching animal presences. Long he laboured over his place, singing under his breath, ignoring weird screeches and sudden fogs.

One morning when leaning on a tree a huge boar rose up suddenly out of the scrub. This was no piglet but something vigorous and deadly, clear out of pagan legend. Surely some relative of the boar that tusked Dermot, that tusked Tristan, that tusked Arthur. When it saw Ciaran it was startled and started to move back into the woods, but a thought of welcome shot from Ciaran’s mind and connected with the immense soul of the boar. It stopped, shook its tusks, almost bemusedly, and came and sat next to him. Still wild, still dangerous, but listening to the words moving like music, like butterflies from Ciaran’s jaw.

The boar was the first of the scholars to serve with Ciaran.

He helped Ciaran by plucking hazel rods between its teeth and bringing them back for the walls of the hut, and tusking up thatch for the roof. And end of day Ciaran would make a small fire and the two would sit together, dozens of eyes looking in at them.

And their church began to grow.

One day wolf ambled in from the tree line to lend a hand, then a badger, and a fox and a doe. Fox did have a little mischief in him at first, and made off with Ciaran’s sandals to eat. He was wrangling with the leather when badger found him and took him to Ciaran:

You are my brother, my fellow monk, and you gobble on my sandals? Well, we all have our off days.

Fox went on a fast till Ciaran suggested he eat and was straight in his dealings from then on.

Some say the animal monks and Ciaran are camped out by the well to this day, others that they are tucked in some sliver of dreaming Ireland, some that they are feasting with Yeshua, I suggest all three are occurring naturally and easily at once.

*

Strength of boar, grow in me. Intelligence of wolf, grow in me. Resilience of badger, grow in me. Wit of fox, grow in me. Beauty of doe, grow in me. All God’s delight they are. Snug within the hazel and thatch of the Mother-House.

• Though I don’t know the names of the artists, the fabulous woodcuts and prints of St Kevin can be found at:

  https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/781099752/nurture-celtic-saint-kevin-of

  * The distinction made between earth and world was first made (to my hearing) by my friend Paul Kingsnorth. I like it, and reference it above.