Seeking a Liturgy of the Wild

(Part One)

        

(Hello friends - the audio for the essay is above. Good news: expect mythic audio stories and commentaries from Lapland, the Caucasus, Ireland and Eastern Europe in the next few weeks, interspersed somewhat with the below investigations.)

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If you dig deep enough inside yourself, you will find someone who is praying.

I was baptised just down the hill from where I write, at the end of last winter. The night before a priest came and sat by my fire. His coat was frayed and he seemed somehow free. He was silent for a long time. Then he spoke:

“Christianity,” he stated, “is a wilderness religion.”

Whilst that may not be the beginning and end of the matter, such words are a wonderful palate cleanser. The priest called something strange into the room that evening. What I thought I knew about the old-time religion maybe I didn’t know. Something untamed announced itself.

So many of us are hungry for the real. Sick of the plastic, the packaged, the breathlessly franchised, the app. I mean cannot stand another second.

First light next morning I am on vigil by the green freezing waters of the Dart. I have a tiny fire on the sandy bank – we’d call it a poacher’s fire on Dartmoor – and my belly is empty. After several hours, (seemingly out of nowhere) the priest is beside me, rocking slightly and praying in a language that is not English. By midday, a small procession of friends snake down through the woods to form a crescent circle by the water’s edge. It is time and I am crying. He, my dad, and myself slowly process out into the depths of the river.

When the priest puts my head under I am in another world. And again. When the third dip comes I am overwhelmed, out manoeuvred, outplayed. There is a roaring sound as I go under, and I feel myself enter something like the mouth of a gigantic pike. The moment is not gentle.

Later, rather stupefied, I sit by my fire getting warm, and the lean power of the words of John the Baptist come to mind:

There’s one coming

With a winnowing fork

And clear intention.

The good wheat he will

Gather in his radiant barn,

But the chaff he will burn

In inexhaustible fire.

I deal in water, but he deals in flames.

These are desert words, no seduction in them. They stay with me. Sometimes I imagine John is watching. I peer back at the shaggy man, the man of field honey and locusts, a being so uncompromising, so utterly affiliated with his message we barely have a choice but to splash into the waters and cry for baptism. Belt round waist, a drift of camel fur from shoulder to knee, this is the lightning man of tough, deep places. Like the Green Knight he picks his head back from the plate it was later laid on and walks the centuries.

John the Baptist wants me out of the house. He doesn’t approve of central heating. It’s almost six months later, and I’m doing a sit, out in the wild woods. Paying attention to my chaff, calling up some flames. It takes a while to settle in. I’ve got somewhat softened in the last few years. There would have been a time I would have gone into the forest in little more than a coat, at fifty I have the luxury of a tent I can stand up in.

First few nights I don’t sleep much, but linger in some hinterland. Strange sensations that barely hold up in the daylight. It always takes a moment, shifting from the village to the forest. The night doesn’t behave properly. Your dreams open like odd, dark flowers. I don’t cling to them. They just let me know things are starting to move, down in the clanging forge of my secret soul.

Daytime now. I’ve had grumpy clusters of sleep, then wake – cold - bladder pressed against belly. Soon I’m by the fire, guzzling good coffee. One of my very last treats at this age. I scrape the omens and gloomy foreshadowings from my eyes and blink out at the foliage.

I realise I feel burdened. This last bit of drought-heavy summer has also bought its darkness. There’s a look in many of my friends’ eyes at the moment. We seem harrowed. There’s been death, illness, depression, divorce. Hospital visits, suicide, uncertainty. Quite honestly, the great, stalking companion on the early days of this sit is not spiritual euphoria but uncertainty. How much I dislike it. But no uncertainty, no mystery.

And how true the sensation is, that we live never quite knowing what’s going to happen next. Remember Finn MacColl’s favourite sound? The Music of What Is. We all agree on such music if it involves good news, orgasms, full bellies, beach scenes and ever-filling bank accounts. But we know - as changeable as the moods of this forest - that the fulsome score of our lives can lurch suddenly. And into much less charitable waters. Prayer – often without any words or prescribed images – is one of the energies I’m calling on up here in the woods. The mystery (the necessity I would venture) of prayer is the crafting of a hermitage in the midst of such changeability. It can’t all be rollercoaster learning. We need some holy ground. Prayer returns us to an awfully appropriate shape. And the smallest, oddest prayer can be a wild thing. To say it out loud can affect the rest of the day, week, month, year or life.

If a spell gets aimed at you, lob a prayer back.

In the open-ended abyss of a long sit in the wild, everyone invents little rituals to stop themselves going completely nuts. I would imagine the deepest contemplatives still work to a daily pattern to somehow anchor all the deep sea diving. Simple prayers for those in your charge particularly really help, and build out from there. Send out some protein!

I look around. Two lamps hang from an orange cord from an old-growth oak. There’s a tobacco-coloured tarp hanging above me. Resolutely patched, always ready to swell with the waters a Dartmoor sky so generously deposits. At some point I will take my walking staff and gingerly tip the awaiting ponds off the tarp and onto the soil.

It is deep night now, and the mood is utterly different. I am thinking it’s not always the Devil that Robert Johnson meets at the crossroads. I say it again, out loud this time: it’s not always the Devil that Robert Johnson meets at the crossroads. Like Rilke, I can’t follow a God not webbed in shadows. I can’t follow a God who didn’t weep on the Hill of the Skull. I will meet you in the dark Yeshua, and I am scared and I am small. And I ask you Lord of Elements, make of me a joyful noise. I am scrunched up in my dark-night-terrors, my Cross of John teeth gnashing and I will reach out for your fur in the black. My joyful noise is not for coin in hat. I will remember the conditions of the arrangement.

Once there was a boy who couldn’t sing in a village when they prized song most of all. So terrible was his croak they called him No Song. One night on the edge of the settlement he met Coyote. In exchange for a pot of stew, Coyote gave him a song so beautiful when he sang it the women thought of love and the men thought of God. But there were stipulations. He must only sing it at sacred times – marriages, funerals, births, deep religious moments. But as the years went by the boy – who the villagers now called Sings Beautifully – forgot he’d ever not been able to sing like that. He sang for his supper, sang for approval, sang for coin. Coyote watched from the treeline and said, Indeed, Indeed, Indeed. And one night, when the boy was sleeping, Coyote came and he took the song away.

We’ve all been that boy. It’s amazing that the door of mercy remains open to us, but it does.

Yeshua, I reach for your fur in the darkness.  

I don’t think of heaven much. Not in the punishment and reward scheme sense of it, anyway. As for what happens when we die, well, I’m not dead yet. Not for a long time I would hope. Ages. Maybe heaven starts out as consciousness. At least the kind we glimpse this end. Maybe the heavenly consciousness we build up on earth whirls and deepens and dances and hopefully becomes the currach in which we sail out from the flesh-body at the time of death. Heavenly planks, heavenly paddle, heavenly tar, heavenly hide. Help me with heaven dear Yeshua, I’m so crude with all this. My currach goes in circles.

Diminishment not excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom, I say, contradicting Blake, albeit reluctantly. I think of Mary of Egypt or St Seraphim the Friend of Bears. Dear Mary loved excess, loved partying, loved the wild-whoop of desire till she no longer could control it. She danced to its incessant demands. Some energy blocked her entrance to a church one day, and she found a longing that was greater than her regular desires. It would be a tough but beautiful road for her. Over decades of solitude, sand and prayer, she became as deep as the desert itself, and as wise. Wise as a serpent, innocent as a dove. The red shoes no longer controlled her dancing. Mary of Egypt is often depicted as a skinny old woman, brown as a berry with wild silver hair, sometimes naked.

One day a nun came to visit St Seraphim, way out in the bush and was terrified to see him keeping company with a bear. Seraphim gradually calmed her and she learnt to shake off her fear. Though he had given up so much - or maybe because of - he had gained an across-species solidarity with all animals. Neither Mary nor Seraphim had coin, but they cared not a jot for it, but did their deepening out on the elemental edge. As you have heard me say before, when the centre is in crisis it is to the edges that we must attend. As William Stafford says,“Winter is towards knowing.”

Christian or Pagan or anything else you want to call yourself we need to re-literate the old trackways. Being a simple Christian is complicated enough, whatever else you may daub on the title. It’s the spade placed in your hand as the impossible dig begins.

It was in a deep, dark wood that the Celtic saint St Ciaran’s bell first rang, telling him this was the spot to build his church. Steely Eyed Patrick of the Many Conversions gave him such a gift. Ciaran – strangely gifted as he was – first began his ministry to animals of the forest, not humans at all.

I wonder if I’ve really had the stuff to honour Paddy’s bell. Or have I wandered more clement meadows, hoping for it to ring there?  A woodpecker raps on a tree, just over where the red deer nest. Occasionally my friend Barry, a hunter, has left a haunch by my cottage door when managing the herd. I gather it in quickly, cook it slowly, with reverence.

The Black Dog I walked into the forest with recedes. I fall into appreciative consciousness. I like the Donegal tweed I am wearing. I like the fire I am tending. My dreams are exhausting, but the rest is alright. I like the rich scent of the fire, in fact I glory in it. It’s wonderful. I like watching the squirrel locate itself on a hundred different branches and levels of perceiving the forest. I love it when the robin shows up. It’s amazing how little you can need to feel good. I love thinking about my friends. It just creeps up on you, happiness, with the outdoor life. I find this out several times a year, then forget. I almost never feel like this in a house, not quite.

I will make a little cross in this Dartmoor forest. I will dig a hole in the soil at dusk, place my hand in and cover it with leaves. In the morning I will pull it out. I cannot tell you what I find in my night-wise hand.

How much of your story first got told in these woods Yeshua? The remains of this Iron Age hill fort I sit in are older than those tellings. What was its structure? Did it have the shape of the gospels, a Pauline curvature, or was it more like a wild, excitable storytelling? The inexhaustible news? Maybe there was a competition of stories yours had to go up against. Maybe the weirdest story won. Or maybe you were understood as the next chapter of a tale that had been dropping, slow and magnificent through the bows of an English beech for thousands of years. There is an Arthurian Christianity, a Marian Christianity, a procession that brings with it all the little beasties, and the hedge-birds, and the heavy horses. I long for such a tapestry to move through these here Devon woods, the Galahadian event.

Part two soon.

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