Speaking of tired and boozy tongues, I just returned from eating and drinking my way across Italy. Given all of the churches, holy nooks hiding in alleys, fields, and roadsides; and the overwhelming, non-stop parade of sacred art, I was hoping to carve out a few moments with God away from the bustle of this inter-generational family vacation. I found a small prayer nook attached to the back of our villa in the Chianti region. I went there on my own one afternoon and attempted a prayer. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I lingered in some churches, especially St. Paul in Chains, but also some out of the way churches that are not tourist destinations, which are, of course, best. The overwhelming Catholic art didn’t seem to bring me any closer to the divine, but served to get my solidly American hackles up when I considered the blood and treasure extracted from the faithful—and unfaithful—in order to build these grand gestures which I wanted to believe were built to the glory of God, but I could not see how Jesus would agree. The moment I felt most connected to the place was when a fox visited our villa. When everyone believed it was gone, I proceeded down the back yard steps with my daughter. There it was, looking up at us from a clearing. We locked eyes for a while. It was a great moment, and it seemed to connect us most to that place. Ultimately, I am still struggling to grok this death cult that broke away from Judaism and reshaped the world. Despite my neuroses and unsuccessful desire to wrestle with the divine, it continues to draw me in. What was lost when Constantine made it a state religion? What was lost in the opulence that subsequently spread? What was lost as this opulence was gutted by the Reformation? Well, I suppose that’s what we’re all searching for, but I seemed to find it more in the gaze of that fox rather than the rooves of all those basilicas.
Sorry we missed the JM Festival Martin. We’ve just arrived in Kerry. On the narrow lane up to the house on the side of a mountain where we are staying Sat a large hare. It gave us a stare and then loped away. My wife’s Grandfather was born on this mountain
Sorry. Hit the wrong button! He used to tell a story about three sisters who were walking on the mountain who were “swept” and ended up on three different mountains magically transformed into white hares. Powerful energies round here!
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. —Martin Shaw
I believe St. Patrick agrees…
Let us return to the merrie. Church is allowed a little craic you know. —Martin Shaw
And I am reminded of such week long parties at Mission Springs, away from the institutional and into life itself in Christ.
To be frozen is a rite of passage these days. To be cool. Frozen is deadly and not to be mistaken for the steadfast. —MS
The rite of institution is death itself me thinks.
Uriel sprinkled Christ blood and the forest churches of Ethiopia appeared, like abbeys of Black Moses, where dancing is foremost.
Christ does indeed “play,” make merrie, “in ten thousand places.” And how often have we been visited by Corvids and mistaken them for mere birds.
As someone who in what feels like a past life played the part of pastor, church planter, worship leader, and everything in between by role and duty and yes, even vocation. I was searching for something. The gatherings of 15 or even 15,000 had the language of Christ and maybe even the impression of him but no wildness. So I moved onto Pentecostal and charismatic expressions that were filled with the external vibrancy I longed for, but lacked the five fathoms depth that you have mentioned so often.
I love Jesus, not just as a man, but the very image of he who was and is and is to come. Which is the very essence of all things and holds all things together.
And with so many Christian leaders being exposed in this hour for what is truly happening behind the scenes in their life and legacy, I struggle to keep my disappointment from turning into despair. Yes, innovation, but is reformation the language of innovation in the church, the systems and institutions, or is it just another excuse to remove the Eucharist and replace it with a pulpit? The blood and body substituted for man’s opinions on the subject. I don’t know. I guess this is my way of saying thank you for giving me language I longed to hear alongside the Christ I have so have so desperately attempted to worship with my life and serve with my gifts
May this language renew something in all of for the beauty and centrality of Christ.
Today, my green chapel is the bank of Crooked Creek with its arched bridge, its bluff shelters, just down the hill from my mother’s house. My mother is home from hospital, on the mend and I’ve been tending with company, food, reminders to drink water and take the medicine. Each morning as she sleeps, the black dog and I walk down to the water’s edge for a leg stretch, bird song, the freshness of living water. I’ve been working my way through your Seeking a Liturgy of the Wild, reading them in order, back to back, and of course this morning’s essay is a sort of capstone. It also resonates nicely with Graham Pardun’s latest essay on the visionary importance of the poetic as a balance to the rigid received, how even the irreligious help us keep the chapel green.
Very glad for news of your dear ma. Yes, this most recent essay was written as a response to some eureka moments drawing from the Wild Liturgy series. The John elements flowed in nicely to the wider thing that was already happening.
Where does the average human now find the wild and exposing version of Christ? Where are you all finding it? Or is the journey to the Green Chapel as much a part of it as the sitting in it? Love to hear some responses 🙏🏻
Yesterday I copied Rumi’s “Birdsong bring relief from my longing”. The birds do love these midsummer mornings as today I wake within Martin’s Merrie. Go outside! as dawn light strikes heavy dew, to rejoice with a writer, an artist who gives wordsong to this certain deepest truth.
My chapel truly is a garden. Greeting this fine morning from Tresco Abbey Gardens in the Scillies. And a wonderful setting to walk through such fertile, sub tropical lusciousness and listen to this twice around. And on Friday dancing the merrie serpent dance with the Penglaz in the streets of Penzance. The Cornish ancestors stirring along with me.
Sometimes when the desire to pay attention can break through the surface, I will answer the click-cluck of a raven in a nearby tree, or sitting on a wire across the street. And sometimes the raven will answer back, and we will have a little conversation, though only the bird knows what I'm saying. And for a moment, it's merrie for the child in my heart.
This section at the end of trilogy The Lord of the Rings comes to my mind.
“Then Treebeard said farewell to each of them in turn, and he bowed three times slowly and with great reverence to Celeborn and Galadriel. ‘It is long, long since we met by stock or by stone, A vanimar, vanimálion nostari!’ he said. ‘It is sad that we should meet only thus at the ending. For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air. I do not think we shall meet again.’” Galadriel replies by sharing what is in Tolkien’s mythology is the elven equivalent of the New Heaven and New Earth promised us at the end of the Bible - “Not in Middle-earth, nor until the lands that lie under the wave are lifted up again. Then in the willow-meads of Tasarinan we may meet in the Spring. Farewell”
Yes, “the world is changing” The effort to make an effort to make an earthly Christendom starting in 301 in Armenia (the first formally Christian nation) and continued soon after in the Roman Empire has ended. For me the funeral of Queen Elizabeth 2 symbolically was the funeral of Christendom. We Christians are being put back in the low position we held in the first centuries of the faith, a good thing for it speaks in Acts of the some of the first Christians converted by Paul and Barnabas - “the disciples were filled with joy and the Holy Spirit” Acts 13:52
And beyond that we may be in what transpires before the return of Christ and the making new of all things. Our merriment is of the Holy Spirit and I also love to dance upon every possible occasion. Including when shopping in stores if the background music is right. I keep an electronic dance party button device in office at my school job and occasionally children come to my office and ask me to dance. I press the button and do a 15 second exuberant dance before them in the hallway. I limit it to two requests a day.
Well I am tech challenged so I will not be able to send you a 15 second video of exuberance, but you could do your own performance at the next seminar!
I think John Moriarty definitely had his nose right inside the seal skin from where he offered up a wild telling of Christianity. I think he felt that people needed to be held by a robust story…..still holding to Christ at the very centre on the ‘life tree’
I like the sound of ‘merrie’….sounds like it could hold every variety of human in this wild, mysterious and massive story.
The raven in your story reminds me again of 'Grief is the Thing with Feathers' by Max Porter. An astonishingly written novella/poem/transgressional act.
Crow as trickster grief doula dishing it out in ways only a Crow could to a father and two young boys recently bereaved and in the sorrows and furrows of their mums death.
It's disturbing exhilarating and messy, as Crow shifts and disrupts the process of what society says should happen to the boys and father with offerings of visceral dark meat and embodied sinewed screech.
I think of John Moriarty as this Crow, provoking life from a carcass of Christianity by poking and hoking in the life marrow of the bones and whispering at the wind within feathers.
There are seagulls nesting on the roof of our little arts school. Every spring they arrive and build nests and not everyone on the street appreciates their presence.
A few days ago one of the fledglings fell off the roof and got stuck on our patio. It would come to the door and stare at us and we weren’t sure what to do. We put out water and crackers and waited. It didn’t eat and it didn’t drink. It simply cried and walked from window to window, looking in. I tried to google what to do. I asked the neighbors.
“They’re like cockroaches these birds”
Someone says, “this is nature.”
Meanwhile, the kids are arriving for their piano lessons and I have to stop the youngest of them from wanting to hug it.
“What’s its name?” they ask me…
Finally, just yesterday, one of the parents came by with a ladder and a friend named Nacho who researches seabirds in the Arctic. He inspected the bird and we made a plan to return it to its nest.
As he climbed up the ladder with the small terrified bird in his hands, the parent gulls swooped and called from above. I couldn’t tell if they were flapping their wings in thanks or about to attack. When Nacho and the small bird reached the top a cheering applause suddenly broke out. I turned and saw a crowd had gathered on the sidewalk to witness the rescue mission. And their joyous clapping was like a hymn of praise!
In that moment it felt like we were all in a green chapel together. A place where chivalry and prayer and kindness meet. Like Saint Kevin holding his palm out for the blackbird. Like when Seamus Heaney writes “finding himself linked into the network of eternal life” by this feathered service.
There was a merriment there that I feel in your words and images. A rural place of worship where we are all reminded of our “creatureliness”
Where even that loathed, darkmeat kind of seabird is also worthy of our love.
That story is fascinating and touching - thank you! I grew up with their cry in a seasidey town. They swoop down & nick pasties from my hand sometimes, so they even keep an eye on my weight too. Dagnabit.
What a lovely story. Thank you so much for sharing it, Natasha. I join you all in your worship, merriment and celebration. It's a joy to be on the journey together. Once again, I am so grateful for this platform that brings us together through story every Sunday morning. Communion.
How is it Sunday already?! Time flies - love the feather over the door, thanks for sharing that. Listening to the fisherman story I inadvertently imagined myself smelling seal-skin and for a second got a whiff of salty sea air. In disbelief I sniffed a salt cellar on the table to see if it came from there! Who knew my imagination was so wild and is what I've taken from this today.
Every prayer is heard - funny too that John Moriarty's face, since I first saw a pic of him has stayed in my minds eye - the shock of wild grey hair. Hope he felt the love you all honoured him with last weekend - like to think he did.🪶
I told myself last week maybe a break from Moriarty was needed. Felt like I was circling the “scenic photo opportunity” loop of Bright Angel Trail. Looking out but never leaving the car. Guess a week is all I get. Hahah the universe is funny. Stay off the trail to long you lose the reason you came in the first place. Much appreciated as always.
"Now if you are overcome, you may go to sleep and get power. Something will come to you in your dream, and that will help you. Whatever those animals who appear to you in your sleep tell you to do, you must obey the. Be guided by them. If you want help, are alone and travelling, and cry aloud for aid, your prayer will be answered - perhaps by the eagles, or by the buffalo, or by the bears. Whatever animal answers your prayers you must listen." - Old Man (Turtle Was Gone A Long Time Vol 2.)
Speaking of tired and boozy tongues, I just returned from eating and drinking my way across Italy. Given all of the churches, holy nooks hiding in alleys, fields, and roadsides; and the overwhelming, non-stop parade of sacred art, I was hoping to carve out a few moments with God away from the bustle of this inter-generational family vacation. I found a small prayer nook attached to the back of our villa in the Chianti region. I went there on my own one afternoon and attempted a prayer. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I lingered in some churches, especially St. Paul in Chains, but also some out of the way churches that are not tourist destinations, which are, of course, best. The overwhelming Catholic art didn’t seem to bring me any closer to the divine, but served to get my solidly American hackles up when I considered the blood and treasure extracted from the faithful—and unfaithful—in order to build these grand gestures which I wanted to believe were built to the glory of God, but I could not see how Jesus would agree. The moment I felt most connected to the place was when a fox visited our villa. When everyone believed it was gone, I proceeded down the back yard steps with my daughter. There it was, looking up at us from a clearing. We locked eyes for a while. It was a great moment, and it seemed to connect us most to that place. Ultimately, I am still struggling to grok this death cult that broke away from Judaism and reshaped the world. Despite my neuroses and unsuccessful desire to wrestle with the divine, it continues to draw me in. What was lost when Constantine made it a state religion? What was lost in the opulence that subsequently spread? What was lost as this opulence was gutted by the Reformation? Well, I suppose that’s what we’re all searching for, but I seemed to find it more in the gaze of that fox rather than the rooves of all those basilicas.
These are good questions Jared - have you read The Thought-Fox by Ted Hughes?
No, but I’m on ABE looking for a copy now. Thank you.
Sorry we missed the JM Festival Martin. We’ve just arrived in Kerry. On the narrow lane up to the house on the side of a mountain where we are staying Sat a large hare. It gave us a stare and then loped away. My wife’s Grandfather was born on this mountain
Sorry. Hit the wrong button! He used to tell a story about three sisters who were walking on the mountain who were “swept” and ended up on three different mountains magically transformed into white hares. Powerful energies round here!
there's a pungent little tale.
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. —Martin Shaw
I believe St. Patrick agrees…
Let us return to the merrie. Church is allowed a little craic you know. —Martin Shaw
And I am reminded of such week long parties at Mission Springs, away from the institutional and into life itself in Christ.
To be frozen is a rite of passage these days. To be cool. Frozen is deadly and not to be mistaken for the steadfast. —MS
The rite of institution is death itself me thinks.
Uriel sprinkled Christ blood and the forest churches of Ethiopia appeared, like abbeys of Black Moses, where dancing is foremost.
Christ does indeed “play,” make merrie, “in ten thousand places.” And how often have we been visited by Corvids and mistaken them for mere birds.
}:- a.m.
I love your words, Patrick. They heal.
I am yet again undone.
As someone who in what feels like a past life played the part of pastor, church planter, worship leader, and everything in between by role and duty and yes, even vocation. I was searching for something. The gatherings of 15 or even 15,000 had the language of Christ and maybe even the impression of him but no wildness. So I moved onto Pentecostal and charismatic expressions that were filled with the external vibrancy I longed for, but lacked the five fathoms depth that you have mentioned so often.
I love Jesus, not just as a man, but the very image of he who was and is and is to come. Which is the very essence of all things and holds all things together.
And with so many Christian leaders being exposed in this hour for what is truly happening behind the scenes in their life and legacy, I struggle to keep my disappointment from turning into despair. Yes, innovation, but is reformation the language of innovation in the church, the systems and institutions, or is it just another excuse to remove the Eucharist and replace it with a pulpit? The blood and body substituted for man’s opinions on the subject. I don’t know. I guess this is my way of saying thank you for giving me language I longed to hear alongside the Christ I have so have so desperately attempted to worship with my life and serve with my gifts
May this language renew something in all of for the beauty and centrality of Christ.
Keep going Jake. You're needed.
Today, my green chapel is the bank of Crooked Creek with its arched bridge, its bluff shelters, just down the hill from my mother’s house. My mother is home from hospital, on the mend and I’ve been tending with company, food, reminders to drink water and take the medicine. Each morning as she sleeps, the black dog and I walk down to the water’s edge for a leg stretch, bird song, the freshness of living water. I’ve been working my way through your Seeking a Liturgy of the Wild, reading them in order, back to back, and of course this morning’s essay is a sort of capstone. It also resonates nicely with Graham Pardun’s latest essay on the visionary importance of the poetic as a balance to the rigid received, how even the irreligious help us keep the chapel green.
Very glad for news of your dear ma. Yes, this most recent essay was written as a response to some eureka moments drawing from the Wild Liturgy series. The John elements flowed in nicely to the wider thing that was already happening.
Where does the average human now find the wild and exposing version of Christ? Where are you all finding it? Or is the journey to the Green Chapel as much a part of it as the sitting in it? Love to hear some responses 🙏🏻
Yesterday I copied Rumi’s “Birdsong bring relief from my longing”. The birds do love these midsummer mornings as today I wake within Martin’s Merrie. Go outside! as dawn light strikes heavy dew, to rejoice with a writer, an artist who gives wordsong to this certain deepest truth.
My chapel truly is a garden. Greeting this fine morning from Tresco Abbey Gardens in the Scillies. And a wonderful setting to walk through such fertile, sub tropical lusciousness and listen to this twice around. And on Friday dancing the merrie serpent dance with the Penglaz in the streets of Penzance. The Cornish ancestors stirring along with me.
Sometimes when the desire to pay attention can break through the surface, I will answer the click-cluck of a raven in a nearby tree, or sitting on a wire across the street. And sometimes the raven will answer back, and we will have a little conversation, though only the bird knows what I'm saying. And for a moment, it's merrie for the child in my heart.
Dana
Thank's Dana - it's a great joy to caw across species isn't it?
This section at the end of trilogy The Lord of the Rings comes to my mind.
“Then Treebeard said farewell to each of them in turn, and he bowed three times slowly and with great reverence to Celeborn and Galadriel. ‘It is long, long since we met by stock or by stone, A vanimar, vanimálion nostari!’ he said. ‘It is sad that we should meet only thus at the ending. For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air. I do not think we shall meet again.’” Galadriel replies by sharing what is in Tolkien’s mythology is the elven equivalent of the New Heaven and New Earth promised us at the end of the Bible - “Not in Middle-earth, nor until the lands that lie under the wave are lifted up again. Then in the willow-meads of Tasarinan we may meet in the Spring. Farewell”
Yes, “the world is changing” The effort to make an effort to make an earthly Christendom starting in 301 in Armenia (the first formally Christian nation) and continued soon after in the Roman Empire has ended. For me the funeral of Queen Elizabeth 2 symbolically was the funeral of Christendom. We Christians are being put back in the low position we held in the first centuries of the faith, a good thing for it speaks in Acts of the some of the first Christians converted by Paul and Barnabas - “the disciples were filled with joy and the Holy Spirit” Acts 13:52
And beyond that we may be in what transpires before the return of Christ and the making new of all things. Our merriment is of the Holy Spirit and I also love to dance upon every possible occasion. Including when shopping in stores if the background music is right. I keep an electronic dance party button device in office at my school job and occasionally children come to my office and ask me to dance. I press the button and do a 15 second exuberant dance before them in the hallway. I limit it to two requests a day.
wonders never cease! who knew of Tree Beardian exuberant 15 second dance? Consider me schooled.
Well I am tech challenged so I will not be able to send you a 15 second video of exuberance, but you could do your own performance at the next seminar!
Can’t capture God, but he can capture you.
Yes, indeed. He's got me :) Thanks for the reminder.
I think John Moriarty definitely had his nose right inside the seal skin from where he offered up a wild telling of Christianity. I think he felt that people needed to be held by a robust story…..still holding to Christ at the very centre on the ‘life tree’
I like the sound of ‘merrie’….sounds like it could hold every variety of human in this wild, mysterious and massive story.
The raven in your story reminds me again of 'Grief is the Thing with Feathers' by Max Porter. An astonishingly written novella/poem/transgressional act.
Crow as trickster grief doula dishing it out in ways only a Crow could to a father and two young boys recently bereaved and in the sorrows and furrows of their mums death.
It's disturbing exhilarating and messy, as Crow shifts and disrupts the process of what society says should happen to the boys and father with offerings of visceral dark meat and embodied sinewed screech.
I think of John Moriarty as this Crow, provoking life from a carcass of Christianity by poking and hoking in the life marrow of the bones and whispering at the wind within feathers.
I thought of Max Porters book too! Incredible book, and 'Lanny' too, really magical writing.
There are seagulls nesting on the roof of our little arts school. Every spring they arrive and build nests and not everyone on the street appreciates their presence.
A few days ago one of the fledglings fell off the roof and got stuck on our patio. It would come to the door and stare at us and we weren’t sure what to do. We put out water and crackers and waited. It didn’t eat and it didn’t drink. It simply cried and walked from window to window, looking in. I tried to google what to do. I asked the neighbors.
“They’re like cockroaches these birds”
Someone says, “this is nature.”
Meanwhile, the kids are arriving for their piano lessons and I have to stop the youngest of them from wanting to hug it.
“What’s its name?” they ask me…
Finally, just yesterday, one of the parents came by with a ladder and a friend named Nacho who researches seabirds in the Arctic. He inspected the bird and we made a plan to return it to its nest.
As he climbed up the ladder with the small terrified bird in his hands, the parent gulls swooped and called from above. I couldn’t tell if they were flapping their wings in thanks or about to attack. When Nacho and the small bird reached the top a cheering applause suddenly broke out. I turned and saw a crowd had gathered on the sidewalk to witness the rescue mission. And their joyous clapping was like a hymn of praise!
In that moment it felt like we were all in a green chapel together. A place where chivalry and prayer and kindness meet. Like Saint Kevin holding his palm out for the blackbird. Like when Seamus Heaney writes “finding himself linked into the network of eternal life” by this feathered service.
There was a merriment there that I feel in your words and images. A rural place of worship where we are all reminded of our “creatureliness”
Where even that loathed, darkmeat kind of seabird is also worthy of our love.
That story is fascinating and touching - thank you! I grew up with their cry in a seasidey town. They swoop down & nick pasties from my hand sometimes, so they even keep an eye on my weight too. Dagnabit.
What a lovely story. Thank you so much for sharing it, Natasha. I join you all in your worship, merriment and celebration. It's a joy to be on the journey together. Once again, I am so grateful for this platform that brings us together through story every Sunday morning. Communion.
How is it Sunday already?! Time flies - love the feather over the door, thanks for sharing that. Listening to the fisherman story I inadvertently imagined myself smelling seal-skin and for a second got a whiff of salty sea air. In disbelief I sniffed a salt cellar on the table to see if it came from there! Who knew my imagination was so wild and is what I've taken from this today.
Every prayer is heard - funny too that John Moriarty's face, since I first saw a pic of him has stayed in my minds eye - the shock of wild grey hair. Hope he felt the love you all honoured him with last weekend - like to think he did.🪶
I told myself last week maybe a break from Moriarty was needed. Felt like I was circling the “scenic photo opportunity” loop of Bright Angel Trail. Looking out but never leaving the car. Guess a week is all I get. Hahah the universe is funny. Stay off the trail to long you lose the reason you came in the first place. Much appreciated as always.
the Moriartian is out there in safari, roaming with the antelope, sore amazed he is, deep snuffling down into the bush soul.
"Now if you are overcome, you may go to sleep and get power. Something will come to you in your dream, and that will help you. Whatever those animals who appear to you in your sleep tell you to do, you must obey the. Be guided by them. If you want help, are alone and travelling, and cry aloud for aid, your prayer will be answered - perhaps by the eagles, or by the buffalo, or by the bears. Whatever animal answers your prayers you must listen." - Old Man (Turtle Was Gone A Long Time Vol 2.)
To watch a corvid strut yet another day is worth all the words written.