Return to the Merrie

A Green Chapel For Our Times

Killarney, June 2024

Hello friends: this is the full-length version of my talk at the John Moriarty Festival in Kerry, Ireland last week. Due to time restraints it had a few cuts – and you’ll also notice a few lines from recent posts. Proof, as ever, of how wonderfully useful it is to write every week for you. I love what we’re up to.

Listen to Return to the Merrie:

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RETURN TO THE MERRIE: A GREEN CHAPEL FOR OUR TIMES

Christ is the eccentricity of our conscience

John Moriarty is a shaker of the pelt of Christian convention, and suddenly there’s not a pelt at all, but something unpredictable, five fathoms deep. A shaggy bestiary of Christianity prowling and snorting around him. A word I always think of when reading John is exposure. You ask for a sip of water and the ocean arrives.

Somewhere in the New Testament gospel of John, as things start to get heavy and Yeshua has switched from trim Galilee teachings to seemingly megalomaniac and death-wish Jerusalem statements about just who he really is, he basically says this: you can’t handle the light I offer because it makes you so exposed. If you don’t feel exposed by Christianity, I’m not sure it’s anywhere near Christ.  

You may remember the Green Knight arriving at Camelot after fifteen days straight of feasting. Arthur has asked for a story so that the tribe could remember itself but none of the assembled have the gumption to respond. A deeper story was required. Perfectly on time, the Green Knight bursts through the door. In the act of being beheaded but then continuing to live, the Green Knight brings a terrible but familiar, biblical question:

Who will lose their life to find it?

The Green Knight carries an energy that is Shamanically Christian: A therianthropic gathering in of much that has been chucked under the bus in the gradual bleeding out of much Western Christianity. The Green Knight, and I would hazard John beside him, brings back the wild old saints, the exuberant pilgrimages, the icon making, the mummers plays, the relics, rosary beads, and votive offerings that daub the ancient highways of Yorkshire and Norfolk, the familial prayers and litanies of the faithful – the wyrd is returned: these aren’t indulgences, but rather indicative of a creaturely and exuberant culture of prayer. I think a lot of John’s work is a form of prayer. Prayer is never one thing, it is as varied as a weather pattern.

And we are creatures, our soul all tied up with our senses. So that prayer-culture is going to arise from a body filled with blood and imagination. We are not just brains on sticks.

When I say Shamanically Christian, it’s not to do with dream catchers or tarot cards or visionary vegetables or ‘Christianity-with-water’ as C.S. Lewis put it.

It’s the Christianity the Green Knight brings: that bursts through Camelot’s door one winter’s night and beckons us outside: untamed, playful, terrible, wonderful, and most of all, mysterious. Not a mystery of smoke and mirrors but a mystery of a sky freighted with a billion stars, the mystery that makes our curls singe and twist, and gets a Pentecost energy happening on our tired and boozy tongues.

The Green Knight is doing something a bit like Christ. He offers his life and then returns from death. Us-as-Gawain he invites to do something similar. This should scare us and thrill us in equal measure.

Moriarty spoke of himself as a singing Christian. I would also suggest we may need to be grieving Christians, earthy Christians, happy Christians, and yes, on occasion, troublesome Christians. How did this Middle-Eastern mystery religion get so corralled?

I am wondering how we could worship in a sane way.

There’s an old story about Uriel, the angel that stands with a burning sword, keeping us out of Eden. In olde Ethiopia the Christians told the tale that he had dipped his wing in the blood and water that flowed from Yeshua’s side, filling a chalice as he did. They say that he flew Ethiopia, sprinkling Christ’s blood here and there on the soil. He magic-dusted Cain-dirt to a sacred mud again, and from each place sprang a church.

So many early churches in Ireland were born where animals lay their bodies in the long grasses. Deer body, wolf body, fox body. We curl in their warm imprint like John and Yeats and Brigid before us. Sink into that when you can’t bear the thought of another megachurch. Animals were often the first disciples of the Irish saints. They chew the sandals of our wheezy thinking, loosen us, broaden us, wilden us. They get us barefoot again.

So I petition on our behalf today:

Would you keep a drop back for us, Uriel?

Would you take wing in our time?

Would the darkened draft yet fall on concrete

And dale, on skyscraper and spinney?

Would the fundamental poetic event

Of the Crucifixion

Root its animal reality in us again?

The savages live indoors now,

The civilised in the scrub,

Tilted heads, looking for a drifting feather.

Drop your darkened draft

Between the ears of a Dartmoor hare,

Stiffen the fur as we listen

for her canticles.

A chapel could be very, very small. Like drop of water is small, or the shell of a snail. A gospel could be very, very small. Like a darkened pebble or the hoofprint of a Cornish boar. A green chapel would be a way of beholding the earth, it would be consciousness itself. We walk within it, best as we can.

Gawain’s chapel was his shield for some Underworldian dollop of time. Mary and child one side, the five-pointed star of Solomon on the other. The star facing the world, the Theotokos and cherub all tucked in. Come twilight, with frozen bollocks in his armour and no rabbit for the pot, that shield resting on a tree was his chapel, his holy of holies, his place-set-apart.

A Green Chapel for our time would be a place Un-Babeled, blessedly coherent for the Pentecost mind. Has the babbling reached the pitch of a fever-dream in us? No longer altar-wise but static-addled.

And I think we would be eating meat sent by ravens. Do you remember the old story?

And Maker told Elijah the prophet that a drought was coming.

To go east of the Jordan and get hid in the Kerith Ravine. Maker could have sent anything in this entire universe to bring Elijah food. Something grand maybe, like an eagle, or just dropped it from the centre of the storm. No significance is wasted in Maker’s symbolic moves. He instructs the carrions to bring Elijah meat.

Would the meat not have the Christ blood in it? Would the ravens not be perched at the Death Tree at Skull Hill? They would be centuries ahead of Elijah, but that would be little problem for God. Would they not let their charred wings swoop through the high time and the low time, through Greater Light and Lesser Light, through all collisions of reality to bring such meat to Elijah. What else would do?

It may be time to call Elijah Raven Man. That would be a Moriartian way of saying it. And in poetic and not-at-all reasoned or theological ways, I ask the Ravens to come bring such Eucharist to us. That would be a church right there, whether Uriel sprinkled or Raven carried. Carrion with splinters of the Sorrowed Tree tucked in their feathers, carrion with splinters of the Life Tree tucked in their feathers. Christ as crow drinks the slurry of the world.

So much of the Bible lives on in fairy tales. It is carrion meat that feeds us in the Underworld of Russia. When lost in the boreal forest, half mad and almost outrun, it is the dark meat that will lead us home. The integrity of consuming its darkness is the only thing that can bring back the light to the chapels of the west. Thin little plastic wafers brought by doves are convincing nobody.

When the Green Knight appeared at Camelot, it was the Christ-blood inside his holly berries that made them so red. He bristled with the outside energy of the Desert God, of the Forest God, of the Storm God, of the Maker of Temple-Mountain. And he is looking at us and our fumbled excuses for not venturing out. No pluck in us, peril-adverse, having chloroformed the character of our own God. He asks our slumbered circle, our round table of so many empty seats:

Who will lose their life to find it?

In the old Jewish myth there is a tree we shouldn’t be gobbling from. We could call it the Knowing Tree. It’s the only taboo in the Garden, the Tricksterish instruction. We all know what happens when we are told absolutely not to do something. And when we inevitably do we are denied access to the acupuncture point of highest holy contact in the garden, the Life Tree.

If we cannot get to the Life Tree we are now walking to the Death Tree. Since then most of us wander in the Lesser Light. In lesser light and over lifetimes we walk to Skull Hill, our pockets full of nasty nails, loftily waving our sprigs of hyssop. We will walk as far as we conceivably can from the Life Tree and lo, finally at Death Tree will find our Shaman-God already waiting for us, skewered and luminous. He makes the Death Tree the Life Tree.

John’s attempts to move Christianity into new ground is new for almost all of us. Even with his love of other traditions, his deepest unfolding is into the luminosity of Christ, the coal-black darkness of Christ. He repeatedly circles a key thought: that we remain awake with Christ, rather than fall into the disciples’ slumber in Gethsemane, and promotes the assistance of two rituals––Ephphatha and Tenebrae––to assist with our fidelity of presence. Ephphatha translates as “be opened”, which John encourages not with anguished vigilance but with wu-wei, a kind of effortless flow. I think he’s sensitive to our neurotic tendencies.

John’s Christ is inconveniently alive. He’s all over the place. You’ll meet him five times an hour if you keep your nose to the scent.

Christ is the eccentricity of our conscience. When we pull ourselves to account regardless of anyone else thinking it necessary.

I like Moriarty’s ideas and I think all sorts of other ones will arise from them. I think he would clap his hands at that; he’s relentlessly generous, and a joiner-of-such-hands.

A Green Chapel is forming as I sup porter in a bar in Kerry, and I would want to add a word to John’s thoughts: the merrie, this medieval word that used to be at the centre of pre-reformation Christian worship.

Images that come to mind: the corn in the field is swaying to the bell of the chapel, flakes of snow are melting in the curls of the midnight choir. Flickering yellowed candles attend our dead, Orkney prayers bind us to our yarning, our writing, our growing, our herding. Smoke the incense on spade and quill, soften and spark the severity of our hours. Return I petition, return – or maybe it is we that need to return to you.

Let us return to the merrie. Church is allowed a little craic you know. I could write on this thought till my hand fell off. These are rural images I give because I’m a rural kind of man. Someone else could dream something entirely different.

I’ve written a lot about saints, and we can spin out on a very hair-shirt tangent if we’re not careful. The merrie is the intricate set of traditions, rituals and community nuance that binds the wildest edges to the robust centre. The hermit still leaves her hut every now and then to come dance in the Christing harvest. The merrie is a thing of wing and root, the discipline of the fast and the gleam of the feast. The merrie feels like something wonderful returning, something we’d almost forgotten.

The merrie brings warmth and conviviality. Tolkien didn’t like C.S. Lewis squeezing in Father Christmas to Narnia, it rather muddied mythologies to his alert and elfin eyes. Low hanging fruit perhaps. But as a kid I didn’t experience it like that: I got a lovely, almost tearful rush of gladness at the return of the joyous old man. Something warm and abundant rushing into the terrain of the frozen. To be frozen is a rite of passage these days. To be cool. Frozen is deadly and not to be mistaken for the steadfast.

So what is the difference between something of permanence and something that is just frozen or stuck? This is a chapel-wise question. This would keep many far away from the notion of the Christian.

I attend an ancient and mystical church, Byzantine deep, that has no interest in overhaul. Despite this, spirit keeps it perennially refreshed. I witness this over and over in my tiny church. In the west we have a rhizomic fertility of churches, denominations within denominations, breaking apart, flowering up, mega-churching and cultifying. It’s a bit much, though I understand the impulse.

We are often trying to whittle away to something essential, not realising that our floral accoutrements of ritual and display are deeper than we think.

Of course, things can grow corrupted – no indulgences for me thank you very much – but we can swing too madly the other way. We are sensual creatures, God created us like this: our nostrils long to be involved in the perfume of our worship, our hands reach to make, our tongues twitch to shape, our soul to sit ever deeper in companionable silence.

Here’s the tension: within permeance has to be innovation, otherwise it would eventually become so unbearable humans couldn’t survive without it. It’s just that innovation is not fetishized to the pitch of violence-to-the-holy. Innovation isn’t the thing, rather an occasional result of attendance to the thing. We don’t have much of a sense of something till we’ve done it ten thousand times. The deep freeze in Church terms comes with a deficit of wonder, a snoot of the nose, a neglecting of Yeshua’s terms. It comes from protocol entirely over spirit. These energies will always be a volatile dance, but they keep a parish interesting.

A poetic overview: the solitudenous merrie is the deeper joying; it has a rooting not exclusive to the feasting hall or summered bunting and is likely a slow, incremental thing. A tuning here and there through generations, wizened folks shaped by the yearly turning. A merrie without the nervy crank of hysterical gaiety, open to the Christly silence and the happy roar of a water turned to wine. A Christianity with an eye still for the Magi’s star, and the soft walk through the woods and the hard sit in a hungered world.

It’s mad to be a Christian, but I ask you: consider your options.

There was once a fisherman that came across a seal-skin lying across a rock. He placed his face into the glimmering rind of that abandoned skin and inhaled its wonder. His head got wrecked with nautical wonderment: dream after sealing dream filled him. He was down in coal-black, indigo-deep currents, the Celt currents, the Viking currents, the First Nation currents. He bumped the side of killer whales, got snarled in the arms of the octopus, swam with a silvering gaggle of herring. Innumerable stretches of time in the soft element was revealed to him. He kept his snout in the skin and he finally, wonderfully, on the deepest gasp, he beheld Maker down amongst it, felt the original rush of delight as he created. He was back at the beginning.

The Merrie Chapel is big enough to hold our longing for the temple-mountain, for Eden, for the sigh-magic of nostos, for the unutterable oomph of hiraeth. It’s not a merrie to cancel out such deep feelings, but a merrie vast enough to hold them in such a way that makes them sacred. It has the fast in the wilderness in one hand and the glee of gathered pilgrims in another.

Sometimes our prayers are a face pressed in the sealskin.

Sometimes our prayers are light as goose feather.

Sometimes our prayers are a lump of coal in our terrified hand.

Towards the end of his time, riven with chemo, John threw fistfuls of his hair out his window, hoping they would commingle with the sheep wool floating about in his neighbour Tim Conner’s field. A few months later that hair was the lining of a chaffinch’s nest where she laid her eggs and reared her young. Let us all have a nest with a lock or two of John’s hair in it. God knows what could grow from it.

Note: The day after this talk, Mary McGillicuddy called me to the front door of the lecture hall. After all the incantatory talk of corvid feathers and green chapels and eucharist, this feather had appeared over the entrance to the Moriarty Festival and - seemingly held by almost nothing - refused to budge.

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You can find a collection of John Moriarty’s writings, edited by Martin, here:

A Hut at the Edge of the Village: John Moriarty, edited by Martin Shaw

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Upcoming Event: To Fall Beautifully from the Edge of the World

For any folks in the Devon area, this event will take place at St Mary’s Church, Totnes.

Thursday 15th August, 7.00-9.30pm

Tickets: To Fall Beautifully from the Edge of the World – An evening with Martin Shaw

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Acclaimed storyteller and author Martin Shaw brings an evening of stories and ideas to St Mary’s. Drawing extensively from both poetic and biblical sources, Shaw addresses the fatigue and indifference many feel towards Christianity.

There seems to be a deficit of imagination often present in its messaging. A God that is born a fugitive and dies an outlaw - then possessing the Tricksterish capacity to return – is worthy of a greater attention than we may be giving.

Dr Martin Shaw is the author of seventeen books, including Bardskull, Book of the Day in The Guardian and described as “rich and transgressive” by the Sunday Times. An Eastern Orthodox Christian, he has introduced thousands of modern people to the mysteries of ancient myths. He publishes weekly his popular Substack, The House of Beasts & Vines.

All proceeds from this evening will go to the restoration and renewal project at St. Mary's.

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