Getting Found

A Three-Year Anniversary

The Caves of Kesh Corran, Sligo, Ireland

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What I learnt in the last three years: people love you when you’re searching, they hate you when you find something.

Current company excluded, this rather pithy statement does have truth in it. We all respond to the quickening of riding out, can all feel the majesty of the quest. Myths, movies, plays and books all attest to this. It will never go away, this love of the adventurous spirit, nor should it. We get old quick without it. But it can’t be the whole thing. That way we may not get old, but we may not get wise either.

To search can be a wonderful thing, to not settle for the status quo, to push yourself. You may search for love, or home, or treasure, or God, and we can’t help but nod along to the aspiration. We understand. Pith helmet and smoke-stained map in place, we launch our kayak out from the shore and hope for the best. I love this kind of romance and at the very least we should get a story out of such pluck.

I certainly got a story out of searching. Hundreds of them. Big ones, small ones, funny ones, deep ones. I unexpectedly got a good living out of those stories and their exploration, the search took me from a black tent to working in one of the finest Universities in the world. I cheer the search, endorse the search, celebrate the search.

But then, almost three years to this day, I had to admit something to myself.

I had found something.

Or more accurately, something had found me.

My little boat had struck a shore, no longing gliding endlessly on shimmering and rather elegant waves.

You likely have half an idea of what happened. I visited an ancient English forest for 101 dusks, and on the last night – an all-night vigil – I had an experience of the profoundly marvellous. Even so, it took another eighteen months of ungainly wrestling to really sift to consciousness quite who I’d met out there under the oaks.

It was no longer an unknown God. He had made himself known and now I had to live with the intensity of that disclosure. The consequence. If we keep searching we may actually locate – not, as Moriarty reminds us, marvels, but actual, proper healing. I didn’t even know I needed such a thing. I would have regarded that as a rather overblown statement. But I was wrong. I needed it. I was wounded, I was fallen in my way. I was hurting others.

Many folks I know are growingly more receptive to the beauty, mystery and civic-upstandingness of Christianity, but they cool their boots at the thought that they themselves may need a hand. That there may be something of the shipwreck to them. That it’s not God on their own carefully curated terms. That a little small-engine-repair (the heart) is in order, over at – as Dylan Thomas writes – love’s immortal hospital. We are rarely heroic, rarely enlightened, when the Encounter truly finds us.

So what to do what once you’ve got found?

Well, I must admit. It’s not as razzle-dazzle as being only a quester. Life’s significantly humbler. That God was questing for you just as you were questing for him. Suddenly faith is not so a la carte, maybe not so groovy, but so profound it has you stammering and teary if you even attempt to give words to quite what’s happening. There’s an old idea that God is changed by every new soul he meets.

It’s not a question of sticking one’s flag in this new ground. We’ve had a ton of flag-sticking already and we see what it’s done. It’s a question of beholding. Of wondering, of looking around and bearing witness. It’s an issue of being true to the disclosure.

And then, funnily enough, the questing begins again.

But this time the quest is not for growth but for depth.

In the demarcation of this new Christology, there’s a deepening that I never could have got to without it. You can’t be stretched on the rack of comparative mythology without risking the plague of complete generalisation. As I have frequently wittered about, limit has its elegance, its maturity and most importantly its opportunity. It involves discernment. It’s failure of imagination to assume that finding something is the end of searching. It isn’t. It’s that the search changes direction, gains a bolder shape, starts to build into rock and stops fetishising sand.

I’m a strange old Christian following a strange old God. He gets me crashing through the night-timey bushes, paddling about in moon-pale lakes, renders me utterly silent in the depths of myself. This completely unknowable presence makes himself known, here and there, and I’m Job-Eyed in response. I’m a weepy old bugger these days.

Sometimes I feel close to The Presence, sometimes I don’t. That hasn’t been a surprise, I think I was prepared for it. There’d be nothing to work on if I felt entirely wired up to the spiritual mainframe day and night. It all feels natural, the tidal ebb and flow of contact. If I was in the full glare all day long my leaves would shrivel.

So here at the eve of the third anniversary I’m grateful. It’s clear as day I’m still a pirate, but, I hope, a more kindly pirate. People go to such great lengths to explain that Christianity is far more than ethical teachings, but quite honestly, those very ethics are the kind of formation, the kind of discipline I actually respond to. They aren’t hoary and boring, they're gallant. I am trying to be better. (and oddly I feel freer, not boxed in.)

So I searched and I found, just like the Old Book said would happen. The finding is kind of terrifying, because really it’s a founding. You take a step, he takes two. It’s not anything I could ever really do justice to in writing. I know there’s many of us out there, furtively wandering further into the marvellous, hearing those distant drums. This time, this time we won’t refuse the call.

It’s such a wonderful thing to have friends, to have allies.

Last weekend was the second Skinboat weekend. We gathered for mythtellings of Joseph in the Underworld of Egypt, The Woman at the Well, The Casting of the First Stone, The Journey of Ruth & Naomi. Our philosopher-in-residence Mark Vernon enthralled us with stories of Blake’s Christian imagination, and everywhere I looked there were sparks of lively thought emerging in Skinboaters’ conversations, rapid-fire. It was beautiful to see. I went home lighter rather than heavier, then slept and slept and slept. Oh yes, there WAS another Mummers Play.

Mark in his flow

One of our guest teachers a few weeks before was Iain McGilchrist, who had us all spellbound by talking poetry and the sacred (not a dry eye in the proverbial house). Towards the end of our time together, he leant into the notion that we are tuned for theosis, to lean towards the divine, that it was as natural as sunlight and sleep. He said this:

A plant knows it has within it the knowledge of what it wants to do, how tall it wants to grow, the flowers it wants to make. I can't make it do anything different. But what I can do is very important. I clear ground for it, so that it can flourish and give it some water, that's about it. After that the thing will do its own thing. But if I try doing too much I will stunt it, and anything else.

I could conflate a very, very long story into the simple saying, This is what we were born for. This is why evolution has done the extraordinary thing it has done, which is very counterintuitive: of producing these exotic beings that are not long lived, that use a lot of energy, that suffer a great deal, but it all, in the end, is towards the incubation of love in eternity.

That extraordinary statement came from something I’d muttered just beforehand:

In every experience of beauty we are being prepared for eternity.

And I wish such experience to fall on all of us, here today. That’s my birthday wish.

Maybe in a moment we don’t expect. That in all the ordinary stuff of time the luminous seeps through. And that in itself is a glimpse of something even more extraordinary to come. It’s a great privilege to write these things to you, to sit here quietly until the thoughts arrive.

I’ll finish with a poem Iain read for us, Thomas Hardy’s At Castle Boterel. It’s terribly poignant – Hardy’s remembering his late wife – but also so very precious. Like our lives. I’m lucky, I have a lot of joy, but it’s also good to feel Hardy’s earned grief.

Good cheer my friends, wherever you may be. I wish you nothing but the best. I raise my glass to you.

Saucy Jack Rides Again!

photos: Lucy Cooper

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At Castle Boterel

As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
 And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
 And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
     Distinctly yet


Myself and a girlish form benighted
 In dry March weather. We climb the road
Beside a chaise. We had just alighted
 To ease the sturdy pony's load
     When he sighed and slowed.


What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of
 Matters not much, nor to what it led, —
Something that life will not be balked of
 Without rude reason till hope is dead,
     And feeling fled.


It filled but a minute. But was there ever
 A time of such quality, since or before,
In that hill's story? To one mind never,
 Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,
     By thousands more.


Primaeval rocks form the road's steep border,
 And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth's long order;
 But what they record in colour and cast
     Is — that we two passed.


And to me, though Time's unflinching rigour,
 In mindless rote, has ruled from sight
The substance now, one phantom figure
 Remains on the slope, as when that night
     Saw us alight.


I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
 I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
 And I shall traverse old love's domain
     Never again.

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SMOKE HOLE, LONDON

Final London tickets: Smoke Hole: Ancient Myths for Modern Times

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