None Of This Is Real
Culture & Christianity
Hello friends: new interview just out - includes mutters that I’m coming to western Canada mid-May: I’ll be leading an intensive of the epic of Parzival, a men’s day on Gawain & the Green Knight and an evening of Saint stories, fairy tales and ideas for all. I’ll have more on this SOON. I’m just finishing a Grail weekend as you read this, with my guest and friend Malcolm Guite. I’ll try and get a tape recorder between us for some conversation.
“On the whole, the New Testament seemed, if not hostile, yet unmistakably cold to culture. I think we can still believe culture to be innocent after we have read the New Testament; I cannot see that we are encouraged to think it is important.”
C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections
Amazingly, this month marks three years of The House of Beast & Vines. If ever there was a creative act I’ve been grateful for, it’s been the weekly writing of these essays. Coming into Christian experience as I was when this began, it’s been the most extraordinary focus for all sorts of thoughts that would never have seen the light of day without it. I’ve loved our Sunday conversations, and the friendships, general good humour and collective encouragement that has bounded between us all. Long may it continue.
Learning How To Dig
I am remembering that we began with the story of Brendan, the seafaring saint, over our initial episodes. Some of you may dimly remember the triad of educations that Brendan and the monks are exposed to on their way west, to the Hidden Country. Firstly they encounter Jasconius the Whale who exposes them to the profound depths of Christian experience (to my way of thinking at least), then the tree of angelic birds that sing of its ecstasies, and the deep, human silence of the monks that have elected not to speak but sit in companionable listening with all of creation. Only after having circled between these three disciplines repeatedly that the sailors are finally ready – both leathered and sensitised – to encounter that which they set out to find.
That triadic process would be a culture-making worth its salt. That would be a tempering that brought us into the divine template of becoming a true human being. Culture is a wonderful word to me, not to be skeptical of. The potential problem is when we all have different associations with a word. What Roland Barthes means by myth is entirely different to any understanding I may have. We aren’t talking about the same thing.