Where We’ve Been: A Look Back
Before we head onto the main dish I wanted to have a rummage around in this Wild Liturgy Odyssey of the last sixteen months. Appropriately there was no plan for it, save a cleaving to spirit and a following of my nose. There seem to be moments of sharp focus and others that are gossamer thin, ephemeral. That seems right bearing in mind it was an atmosphere, not a bullet-pointed mission statement, that got me started. I’d been up in the Bardskull of Dartmoor forest and felt something like a quest fall upon me. I could use some other word, less whimsical, but that was what it’s continued to feel like. And, like Gawain thrashing and bashing about in the Otherworld trying to find the Green Knight, I knew a straight road wouldn’t do it.
So thank you for journeying with me, so clearly in explorations of your own. Many of you have been out in the bush and misty crags some long stretch. There’s been two kinds of wild at play here: one is the wildness of bee, mountain top, blackberry bush; and the other the counter-cultural plea for spiritual resistance in a time of great forgetting by Yeshua. Wild because it pushes against the dictates of a world often led by Old Scratch himself. Wild because it seems so counter-intuitive to a society of advantage and me-first.
I think the ground for the series began in a trip to Ireland I’d taken to start a learning of the language, up in Donegal. It was in Ireland that I started to feel the first coolings and wind rustles that hint of autumn. That’s always thrilling for me and is good for my head. It has a ‘back to school’ quality that always positions interesting thoughts after the anarchic, heat-hazed kind of approach I often take in the summer months. I stood at the window of my lodgings at Roarty’s bar and wondered if something interesting was coming.
There was the trip to Patmos and the glimpse of apocalyptic language, the calming sight of the attendant monk at John’s cave and the wishing for a slow theosis. After that was the first heralding of a theme that seems to surface almost monthly, making a covenant with limit. To say that this is enough seems so out of pace with modernity. I remember looking at the wrestling of Jacob and the Angel, and Rilke’s notion that a religious life is one where you are being constantly defeated by greater spiritual beings. This is something I’d glimpsed through the wilderness vigils over the decades, that defeat could have a sacredness to it.
Throughout it all was the frequent bedding in of the stories of early saints; curious, bright-eyed women and men happy to stand for a hundred and fifty years to absorb the song of a blackbird. I think of Brendan and how we need to look at things as-they-are, not what we think they are – sometimes we all need to light a disastrous fire to realise we are actually on the back of an immense whale, taking us deeper than we ever imagined. The plea for a Jasconius Christianity has stayed with me throughout. Sometimes I wake and it feels like the whole bed is wild with sea spray.
Then came a sickness, and the dreams that led to the exploration of Gawain & the Green Knight. After limit came another antique theme, noblesse oblige. Though it makes some groan, there’s something chivalric in Christianity. Of course there is, it’s forged from that spiritual crucible. I’m not suggesting that many of the knights weren’t both likely brutish and boorish at times, but the aspiration has some clear note to it. Though I think until you’ve tasted Lorca’s duende, there’ll be something unconvincing about taking up such themes.
And all along, in my round-about way, I am learning about being a Christian. On the outside it may not seem so, but in my ever-greening interior, yes-so. On my spring Canadian tour on two occasions I was told that with things like Liturgy of the Wild I was colouring ‘outside the lines’ of Christianity and I was to put such things down until they’ve been screened by older, wiser figures.
And where would be the usefulness in that I wonder? Where would be the reverence for Jesus The Imagination and craic and actually locating a few fresh deer tracks in the dew? Second guess my every move and that’s a sun that burns all creative evidence the deer were ever even here.
When I sloshed into that freezing river with the Goat-Priest and my dad almost two years ago, I committed to the Galilee Druid moulding me. Life was to be on his terms, not mine. Surrender again. Much has changed, and some of it takes getting used to.
After Christmas there was a holding of Brigid close, and an enquiry into what I call Red Bead Language, and a telling of the Siberian tale, The Red Bead Woman. It’s a story that begins on the edge not the centre of things, that is fuelled initially by an old woman’s longing not a young man’s desire. That alone is interesting, a needed change of gear in these times. What could it mean to speak words that brought the edge and the centre into dynamic conversation again? The story is a gem, a ruby I guess, for all of us.
Something about the seemingly never-ending Dartmoor winter brought me to a three- essay glimpse of the figure of Old Scratch, the Devil. An element that’s stayed with me was what I was banging on about in the play Equus: the devilment of the God of Normal (related to the banality of evil noted by Hannah Arendt). That wickedness can have us in a pincer move; the techniques used to cure the boy of his pagan butchery also cut him free from something imaginative and un-corralled within himself. That tacit evil is used to replace explicit evil. A horrifying but useful dream of hell not as a place of pitchforks and firey-theatre but a domain utterly devoid of God was enough to bring that exploration to a close.
And I realised that Christianity was the big Shamanism I’d sought for over a quarter of a century, that the crucifixion for me was the fundamental poetic event (that needs some unpacking - I’m not referring to Shamanism as kind of shorthand for New Age occultism). After a lifetime of really not getting it, suddenly, through all these twists and turns, the crucifixion was suddenly writ agonisingly and sublimely large. I wrote this:
I went into the woods to be wedded to the wild and I came out wedded to Christ. That’s what happened. And this is what I realised:
These realities face each other, not away from each other.
I kiss the hem I was lucky enough to realise this.
This knocked me over for a few weeks, but there was more on limit, and then a feeding in some of the wider themes I’d learnt from myth over the years: the idea of a Sacred Story, the phases of severance, threshold, return, the power of the fairy tale colours; red, black and white. Somewhere in all of this I was queried for not being a ‘realist’ and not engaging in social commentary. Which was funny, because I thought everything I did was social commentary. For living in these times my response is:
It would have been around this time that we also had a good dive into Job and the opening of what I called the wonder-eye.
August had a group of us in the woods for the Peregrini Sit, one of the most energising experiences I’ve been part of for years. A four-day-and-night vigil deep within the crucible of Christian experience. There’ll be nine places this time. A few more details:
Peregrini Sit: August 21st - 28th
In high summer, Dr Martin Shaw will lead a small group into a Dartmoor forest to ponder what it means to be a Christian in these times, and to perhaps find something of their bush soul. This is the Peregrini Sit, and like some old desert sister or brother, you'll find a brooding vigil spot out in the woods to sleep, dream, think and pray. This experience is very much for Christians interested in a relationship to trees, night, wind, owls, dreams and more. Martin will be assisted by Lucy Cooper and Michael Martin.
For application and details on remaining places email: tina@schoolofmyth.com
The wilderness vigil will span eight days in total and includes four days and nights fasting alone on private land on Dartmoor – no tent, no fire, no food. Just a tarp, sleeping bag and water.
The first few days are spent orienting to the area and finding your spot. There will be a one-to-one session, and on-going sessions with the wider participants (groups will usually be six).
Then you leave base camp and head for your alone spot. For the next four days you will be completely alone fasting in a wild place, while the guides keep watch at base camp.
On the fifth morning you will return to base camp for a gentle re-orientation to a new world. When fed, watered and rested, you will tell your story which will be mirrored back to you by the guides.
Peregerinis
For those wanting to study with me in a wider, less peckish context, the 21st year of my flagship programme Stalking The Rebel Soul begins this September. There’s somewhat more than nine places at the School. Details here:
Stalking The Rebel Soul: Five-weekend journey
The 2023/23 cohort
I continued on into autumn with essays on a wild Christ not a feral Christ, turning a dream into a vision, the problem with peace, and all sorts of other things. I’ve loved it, every minute. That’s not to say it’s easy - I’m way out at sea past any shore I’ve seen before – but my God, the rewards. And that there’s fellow sea-folk in the boat – you dear reader – how wonderful is that? Again, thank you for sticking with it, and for your own fulsome investigations I receive so much from.
Onwards!
STAYING AWAKE: The UnDeceiving (Part 2)
Cell
To love something deeply you have to betray something else.