Seeking a Liturgy of the Wild

(Part Two)

In an English Wood

And it is quieter now, and my back is rested against a broad old oak.

The first time I ever remember crying was at a picture of Robin Hood on his deathbed, firing his very last arrow to land thwump into a Sherwood Oak. It broke my little heart. The primordial conscience of England, that was Robin for me. When the centre could not hold, it was Robin and Marion that reminded us how to behave. Theirs was a mischievous Greenwood Christianity – bugger the rich, feed the poor – and it made me dizzy.

I’ve been in the woods off and on for seven days now, firstly guiding a vigil, now alone. At night strange winds come through basecamp, owls hoot and in my half-asleep state I think the sound is coming from an ancient race of people processing past the tent. But they’ve gone now, and it’s just me and the tree. My Christian sit.

It was a grand old dame that showed me the picture of Robin. Christine Gibson, my gran. Gran with the Fox’s Glacier Mints and the box of farm animals. Whiskery gran of the amazing hats. Gran would read to me from the green book with the magical pictures and my vagabond spirit would soar. I wrote a little tribute to the women in my family once:

I like women, always have.

My mother, aunts, granny, sister.

When we lived in the same town,

I would meet them by chance at market.

This would delight me, even when I was

Trying hard to be a teenager.

We’d circle round the charity shops,

Holding up bargains, marvelling at books.

It’s a different century now, some dead

And I’m in another town,

But still I peer through the stalls hopefully.

It was the women that did the heavy lifting on the Hill of the Skull, when all but John had buggered off. Seeing your child nailed to a piece of wood, that’s hell. And Mary went through hell bearing witness to her son. He may have gone to hell on the Saturday, but in some way she was already there. There is such feminine force in the Beatitudes, I think it’s what scared me off. The bar was simply so high. Hardly just swinging a sword around. So much Sophia (Wisdom), so much nuance on display. If we pay attention, we find that Sophia was around at the very beginning of things:

I was there when he set the heavens in place,

when he marked out the horizon on

the face of the deep,

when he established the clouds above,

and fixed securely the fountains of the deep,

when he gave the sea its boundary 

so that the waters would not overstep his command,

and when he marked out the foundations of the earth. 

Then I was the craftsman at his side.

I was filled with delight, day after day,

rejoicing always in his presence,

rejoicing in his whole world

and delighting in mankind. 

Proverbs 8: 27-31.

I come down from the woods on Sunday for Divine Liturgy. I stay standing for the best part of two hours - reeking of woodsmoke - as this antiquated and timeless ceremony unfolds around me. My legs totter a little as communion approaches. I kiss the cross and the hand of the priest, then turn and make my way back into the forest.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.

The bracken is starting to turn brown and disintegrate, the sun is rarely breaking the canopy now, and in the old folkloric wisdom of Britain, soon the Oak King will give way to the Holly King. It is the end of summer. It will be time to collect kindling and stack wood, light the wick, push our currachs out into the deep interior of winter. Bring down a musical instrument, call for the old stories, settle by the fire. That kind of comfort feels a long way away. But I do have this tree to lean on.

I am looking for a Christianity as huge as this forest. As magnificent as the stars that swirl over it every night. As endless as the River Dart I hear rushing past. I submit to this immense proposition, I submit. Lord of the Elements have at me. I remember my time with the priest at baptism - he seemed as much goat as man - as the three of us sloshed into the freezing waters. To this day he will turn up unexpectedly at my door, never tells me he’s coming. He listens to anything I have to say, completely still, rubs his berry brown face, smiles and says:

Jesus loves an outlaw.

And I love the stag bark as dusk comes. I am here in the wood gathering energy. I am opening my jaw wide and chewing on bones and bracken and long slivers of exquisite pale light that drops through the bough. I need this unruly nutrition for in a few days I will tell a story that lasts three days. That is old as old is. That starts with a war in heaven and lives right here with us today. A story of millions of years. A story like that wallops the teller.

I dreamt once, and in the dream something spoke up and stated plainly that the Grail was the earth. The voice grew grief-touched: Did I not give you rivers filled with fish and animals and rain and corn? You have poisoned your own chalice. The Grail was the Edenic arrangement: the Pishon, the Gihon, the Hiddekel, the Euphrates poured from it, now sluiced with poisons.

And I think about the Grail that women carry about in them. The only way into this experience called life comes through the feminine gate. The belly of the castle, the most mysterious chapel, the place of mother-nourishment. It’s so colossal, what goes on in a woman during pregnancy. I’m not able to say much about it, just bear loyal witness from a distance. And of course, I then get to thinking about the womb that bore Yeshua. That treasury, that alchemical hut of huts. It stirs stuff up, when I get to thinking about it.

Sometimes I’m not sure that human Mary can bear all the weight we lob at her. Behind this seems a longing for the Goddess of Infinite Being, or endless Great Mothers. Our tremendous, Lascaux-ancient yearning for a massive, nurturing feminine energy. I’m not being critical, I’m just wondering. It’ll never be banished, that longing. Maybe it’s partially a trace-memory from the womb we all grew in. I’m maybe thinking about the wrong dimension of Mary. Maybe I need to pay more attention to the Cosmic Mary, the Mythological Mary.

The Grail is on my mind. The earth, the womb, the mystic heart. In only a few days people will gather from all over the world and I will tell them the epic of Parzival. And I will speak of the great Grail Defender Cundrie: not a knight on horseback or a pale mysterious maiden, but a woman with tusks, snout, animal ears, eyebrows so long they are plaited and tucked behind her ears. It is this ferocious, devoted animal-woman, that is the most ardent defender of the Christian secrets of the Grail. She is the deep wyrd Christian, what C.S. Lewis calls one from ‘the old magic’. In my imagination Cundrie stands, snorting and trembling, with the Marys on the Hill of Skulls as Christ eats the crow-black karma of the world. In my Green Chapel, there’s a stained glass window for her.

Cundrie is a skald, a great rememberer, a healer, and in the round table of my soul I implore her to tarry. She is not to be ‘transformed’: to be made domestic or pretty, rather we are to rise from our inertia and follow her out into the rain and the desert and the night. She leads and we follow. Would in these coming years, we see her saintly insistent shape working down in the furnace of our conscience, having at the bellows. Every time we make the right choice not the easy choice, she is present.

It was big words I just said: the round table of my soul. The round table is as near to a kind of heaven on earth as my mind can hold. A place of last suppers, of Pentecosts, of feasting and praise and riding out, of setting a quest in motion. A place robust in design yet open to a good blast of Holy Spirit. A place unforgettable for an educated heart. Such a place that could birth a liturgy of the wild. Every generation has to locate such a thing, over and over again. Too many wild women and wild men I know headed off into the woods and never came back. Too hurt by the travesties done supposedly in the name of Yeshua. Shy ones, hurt ones, bashed up ones, curious ones. Let enchantments fall away and grace prevail.

So I lean against this old oak and realise it is Sophia I have been leaning back against all this time: ‘a tree of life for those who hold her fast’ Proverbs 3:18. I get up and shake myself down. I place my hands on the bark of the oak and thank her. I remember the kindness of Cundrie at the end of Parzival: she’s not just the one weather pattern, but many-seasoned. She roars to rouse conscience, then praises when we labour for the good. That seems fair to me.

I remember your praise words, not just your dressing downs Cundrie. And I will follow your horse sixteen paces ahead, up the thin holy track to Wild Mountain and the Castle of Light. My eyes wide for the Galilee Druid. Is that Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila you would be riding with? I will dare to quest, even as a bleary old guy, not some boy-knight who needs to see the world and never lost his cherry.

I start to pack up my tiny camp. My mouth is dry from lack of water, belly tight and hungry, but still in no hurry to leave, not really. To dare to quest. To sail to Byzantium, that’s what Yeats said. Old men should be explorers. He said that too. The leaves are starting to fall steadily and the forest seems to be saying, Shoo - off with you. Go find Wild Mountain.

These words of mine have placed me in my own Perilous Seat. I have no idea what will happen next.

*

Martin’s telling of Parzival available here:

Snowy Tower