Many blessings on your initiation into the Christian path. I am the rector of a St John the Baptist church and how I wish all the Baptisms I do in the shadow of the mighty John were all like yours. I love to bless the babies but surely all true Baptisms should be taken as an adult in the depth of the river in the deep woods after a vigil. The confirmation service for adults in the C of E just doesn’t begin to cut it.
Baptism IS the Initiation into the Christian Path and should be done consciously and bravely in anticipation of the incredible adventure to come. Every blessing upon you.
I thank you for all the richnesses you share. After living for half of my life in wild Northern California and eastern Ontario, I have returned a year ago to my home land of Northern Italy where still somewhere the memories, unattended mess, tales and relics of pagan days of the Celts, Ligurians, Luni and Etruscans remain, are intertwined and live right besides Christianity and it’s tales. It’s wonderful to have a sense of being accompanied in this confusing return by your deep wonderings. Compelling and confusing and deeply mysterious this nearing to Christianity, I find, yet timely.
Would that the good mercies whispering to you continue to grant such richness that help many to wonder and live more deeply. All the best from the Appennini mountains of Northern Italy , Grazie Martin, Giulia
Working on the idea of a liturgy of place. Christianity is a wilderness religion but it is also a farmers religion. Its imperial, capitalist and world denying roots have taken over like kudzu. I have a hard time convincing people there there exists a beauty in christianity when all they see is the tangle our ancestors have left.
I finished Stag Cult last night before I turned the light out to sleep and I woke this morning to read Seeking a Liturgy of the wild. I am inside your writing. It is deep, poetic, sensual, loving, vulnerable and visceral and I feel tender, moved and close to tears.....
Powerful as always Martin. Thank you. In an amazing piece of synchronicity or perhaps a message that I need to get in these times of separation and impending divorce, as the 'fulsome score' of my life lurches suddenly and the Music of What Is takes on a more challenging, disorienting tone. This same morning as your words arrived in my inbox I was also reading something from Rebecca Solnit, drawing on the words of various sources, addressing the anguish of the butterfly whose body 'must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life'. Cut open the chrysalis and you will find a rotting caterpillar; you will never find the mythical creature: half butterfly, half caterpillar. No 'the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay'. She also talks about 'the violence of metamorphosis'. This is another aspect of God 'webbed in shadows', the God who 'wept on the hill of the skull'. As you have said a number of times before, we have to go into the Underworld, into the dark - we have to go through this so the old skin can be shed before the new one comes. And I don't think it is just skin, it's our very innards and that is the kicker, that's what really hurts - that's the fire not the water. As Joseph Campbell said 'Destruction before Creation'. How many of us are ready for that? This is the ground I'm inhabiting personally and professionally. For 20 plus years I have been a coach (yes I know you don't have much time for coaches Martin!) working with individuals and businesses. When I was in Kerry earlier on this summer the question that came to me like a hand-grenade from beyond was 'What does coach as shaman mean in action?' I'm still getting my heart, my being, around that but I have a suspicion it is very much to do with living the Music of What Is in 'much less charitable waters'. Thank you Martin.
Both the wilderness and the church are two places I have, for most of my life, felt extraordinarily wistful, disoriented and sad. (For 101 reasons, but nothing personal, just the usual sticky existential plaque.)
Do not stop, dear Martin, holding our shivering hands, praying over the fire, formulating sensible entertainment to ease us through the night. I am a bee resting on Merlin’s shoulder when I get, like, really GET, your books, talks, stories and Sunday sermons.
guts stirring and tears moving. listening in the dark just before 6am in america, mount beacon behind me and the hudson river in front; here i am two weeks or so past my thirty-sixth birthday. a gestation for 9 months back in nyc after returning from england, living back in my childhood home. it was no-song i told for school of myth that night. it was danny and coyote i felt on the road in the moonlight the night before, while i wept and wept. the stories have continued to lead me, and my joy has led me here, an Allowance of that joy, that living toward the edge-- coming out here from the city to the hudson valley to commune with, to be close to, That Stuff i need to continue downwards and onwards, And to Still. scribbling in the black your words about prayer as the hermitage, that it can't all be roller coaster learning. there are times like today i know the forest holds back because i am holding back. because sometimes introducing myself means an honest offering up of my grief. thank you for weaving no-song and yeshua's fur and the crying on the hill of skulls and the intimacy of your baptism and the bell that rings where you least expect it and saint mary of egypt whose story made me suddenly choke with tears when i first heard it over a table at lunch some years ago .. thank you for an affirmation of the reminder i received going up the mountain, of Who I Serve. the echoes of parsifal and the slight turn of the grand question-- whom does the grail serve? whom does your Soul serve? the earth and the stories. the earth and the stories ... some months ago you commented back on your ted hughes post to me, 'the wind.' i marveled at the strange facets of the dark jewel of it, the house moving its roots. i am Out Here now in my own country, letting myself explore new homes, new life, beyond my lifelong city. the Movement of Energy. i have been noticing the wind even more, ever since. noticing the physical manifestation of spirit, of What Moves Me. the wind is what blew out the candles on my birthday cake in the catskills, held outdoors with a tribe of new friends i had only just met the night before.. thank you for being a Voice i can always recognize, somehow especially when you are honest and searching. i am glad to be in the dark, Here, with you.
Thank-you for sharing the tender power of your wild locust and honey baptism. Some thoughts that arise… our family has been walking old footpaths on the Isle of Wight this week… walking them feels like connecting our voices to ancient liturgy. The real corporate power. We also spent the day by Compton Bay yesterday… a profound reminder that erosion of oceanic proportions is part of the deal, and out of our control. And what if we saw it as a lifting of the mystery veil … or a compression for revelation … using this utterly raw material as one of the “dropped keys” that might unleash an ancient/new pantheon. This has historically been “found difficult and left untried”.
This is not directly related to your post but I offer it for what it is worth ...
My church is dedicated to John the Baptist and there is a legend that a feather from the Archangel Gabriel is buried beneath the high altar. I realised recently that this must be linked to the story that when John the Baptist's father, Zechariah, was visited by the Archangel and told his aged wife Elizabeth would become pregnant with John, he reached and plucked a feather from the archangel as it flew up to leave. He was lucky all that was taken from him was his voice!
To me this has a strong resonance with the stories of plucking the tailfeather of the Firebird... Just a deep feeling. No idea what that means!
Go raibh míle maith agat a Máirtín! This resonates with me deeply; like a donkey kick to the gut, having just spent a sleepless night in what seemed like the deepest pits of hell and near madness; having just received Sunday Eucharist in my neighborhood Parish for the first time in months; and having been shaken and challenged to my core by Luke’s harrowing gospel for today, that following the Wild Man from Gallillee is an all or nothing all in undertaking. Blessings and gratitude to you a chara... 👊☘️❤️🔥🔥
Ahh your words ever and always light such a blaze in my soul. Thank you and deep gratitude for all the beautiful reflections here. I cannot quite believe it but I have only just logged into read this on Substack and not in the email alone. What beauty and the word you used before Martin that stays with me communitas.
Christianity IS a wilderness religion, oh yes! I am so grateful for your writing and stories bringing as you say the fur of Yeshua and reigniting the thirst in the soul for the sacred. The stamina to stand in the integrity of truth when you open the door to humility and fall to your knees enflamed in prayer. Prayer that has absolutely nothing to do with this hopscotch, pick n'mix, mantra of my and I want, spiritual capitalism that infringes upon society. The 'plastic and packaged' as you put it. I lost a whole group of friends earlier this year arguing why prayer matters. In a swift moment I saw how black magicked so much of 'spiritual' communities had become. Prayer one person said, it's just to make people feel good about themselves, people throw a line 'you are in my prayers' so glibly no one really prays anymore and if they do it's 5minutes tops. Why fall to your knees and prayer when you can do something more if you learn some 'magical practice'. That was it. Without malice but with passion I explained why the invisible embrace as John O'Donahue calls it is engaged to eternity that creates transformation far far beyond the intellect experience of God. Why bending your head IS what is needed. It's been on the threshing floor for me really ever since. I am moving back to my root, praying for guidance to move deeper into grace and the clarity to understand as Guilia beautifully put it what compels and confuses. What blocks the radial radiance of grace entering? What voices am I listening to? What choices compete with me moving from an intellectual to a full embodied engagement with the divine? Things are shifting and wilderness is calling.
The thing that has troubled me with the church I used to be involved with before some wandering time was it seemed to be brilliant on the theological but very sparse on the pastoral care. Perhaps it's time I put in suggestions instead of just remaining in the shadows. I will see where the path leads me as I follow the angel ahead and grab tight to to Yeshua's fur.
Whenever I read your stories I always have such a wild ache to read about the lives of the saints. I have begun the journey with Saint Teresa of Avila. She's showing me there is no place for a hybrid spirituality. Soul not self. Perhaps the cross at the crossroads can also be the change and exchange to cross through the 'I' with graceful disintegration. While I am there perhaps move beyond the why and how too. Prayers upon the lips that ripple like flickering flames down to the feet that pummel deep into the unknown path ahead. Like St. Seraphim shake off fear and follow...
The vulnerability and tenderness of this took my breath away. I could feel my heart opening and expanding through uncertainty as I read. It was terrifying, still is, but what relief! Once I stood at the bottom of Waipi'o Valley on Moku o Keawe and watched spiders leap off the edge. A boy pointed them out to me. He was from that place and knew, at a certain time of day, if we looked up we would see them. I didn't actually see the spiders-I saw the silk threads they spun inside themselves and unfurled as they leaped. How did they know they had enough silk inside them to carry them down 1,000 feet? The air could have torn them to pieces, rain could have snapped the silk cords attached to the valley lip. It could have been a free fall, but it wasn't. This is what a surrender to uncertainty, even an ungraceful one burdened with fear, feels like to me. In Hawaiian, Waipi'o means "the land of curving water." Waterfalls flowing down the valley's gulches split into a serpentine nest of meandering rivers and streams that complete in the same place-the ocean where the shark god Kamohoali'i waits just past the edge of the reef in the deep water. Thank you, Martin. I feel blessed by reading your words.
This I know. All of this I know. Yet reading it, it is new again. Meeting myself in your words as I meet your words in that place where mere days ago we sat. Thank you for all of it. Thank you for the words. Thank you for the holding. Thank you for tending that inexhaustible fire.
Thank you Martin, for this writing, and praying, and being with something so vast and uncertain. Breathtaking writing. Yeshua's fur had me close to tears. And the Galahadian procession moving through the Devon woods. The one who is praying in me (what a powerful reminder that first line was) has been very present these days too; she has been leading me to unexpected and precious ground. Thank you for lighting the way for all of us, in the manner only you can, and with such courage. Looking forward to part 2 :)
Many blessings on your initiation into the Christian path. I am the rector of a St John the Baptist church and how I wish all the Baptisms I do in the shadow of the mighty John were all like yours. I love to bless the babies but surely all true Baptisms should be taken as an adult in the depth of the river in the deep woods after a vigil. The confirmation service for adults in the C of E just doesn’t begin to cut it.
Baptism IS the Initiation into the Christian Path and should be done consciously and bravely in anticipation of the incredible adventure to come. Every blessing upon you.
I thank you for all the richnesses you share. After living for half of my life in wild Northern California and eastern Ontario, I have returned a year ago to my home land of Northern Italy where still somewhere the memories, unattended mess, tales and relics of pagan days of the Celts, Ligurians, Luni and Etruscans remain, are intertwined and live right besides Christianity and it’s tales. It’s wonderful to have a sense of being accompanied in this confusing return by your deep wonderings. Compelling and confusing and deeply mysterious this nearing to Christianity, I find, yet timely.
Would that the good mercies whispering to you continue to grant such richness that help many to wonder and live more deeply. All the best from the Appennini mountains of Northern Italy , Grazie Martin, Giulia
Working on the idea of a liturgy of place. Christianity is a wilderness religion but it is also a farmers religion. Its imperial, capitalist and world denying roots have taken over like kudzu. I have a hard time convincing people there there exists a beauty in christianity when all they see is the tangle our ancestors have left.
I finished Stag Cult last night before I turned the light out to sleep and I woke this morning to read Seeking a Liturgy of the wild. I am inside your writing. It is deep, poetic, sensual, loving, vulnerable and visceral and I feel tender, moved and close to tears.....
Powerful as always Martin. Thank you. In an amazing piece of synchronicity or perhaps a message that I need to get in these times of separation and impending divorce, as the 'fulsome score' of my life lurches suddenly and the Music of What Is takes on a more challenging, disorienting tone. This same morning as your words arrived in my inbox I was also reading something from Rebecca Solnit, drawing on the words of various sources, addressing the anguish of the butterfly whose body 'must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life'. Cut open the chrysalis and you will find a rotting caterpillar; you will never find the mythical creature: half butterfly, half caterpillar. No 'the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay'. She also talks about 'the violence of metamorphosis'. This is another aspect of God 'webbed in shadows', the God who 'wept on the hill of the skull'. As you have said a number of times before, we have to go into the Underworld, into the dark - we have to go through this so the old skin can be shed before the new one comes. And I don't think it is just skin, it's our very innards and that is the kicker, that's what really hurts - that's the fire not the water. As Joseph Campbell said 'Destruction before Creation'. How many of us are ready for that? This is the ground I'm inhabiting personally and professionally. For 20 plus years I have been a coach (yes I know you don't have much time for coaches Martin!) working with individuals and businesses. When I was in Kerry earlier on this summer the question that came to me like a hand-grenade from beyond was 'What does coach as shaman mean in action?' I'm still getting my heart, my being, around that but I have a suspicion it is very much to do with living the Music of What Is in 'much less charitable waters'. Thank you Martin.
Both the wilderness and the church are two places I have, for most of my life, felt extraordinarily wistful, disoriented and sad. (For 101 reasons, but nothing personal, just the usual sticky existential plaque.)
Do not stop, dear Martin, holding our shivering hands, praying over the fire, formulating sensible entertainment to ease us through the night. I am a bee resting on Merlin’s shoulder when I get, like, really GET, your books, talks, stories and Sunday sermons.
Now, back to the flowers …
guts stirring and tears moving. listening in the dark just before 6am in america, mount beacon behind me and the hudson river in front; here i am two weeks or so past my thirty-sixth birthday. a gestation for 9 months back in nyc after returning from england, living back in my childhood home. it was no-song i told for school of myth that night. it was danny and coyote i felt on the road in the moonlight the night before, while i wept and wept. the stories have continued to lead me, and my joy has led me here, an Allowance of that joy, that living toward the edge-- coming out here from the city to the hudson valley to commune with, to be close to, That Stuff i need to continue downwards and onwards, And to Still. scribbling in the black your words about prayer as the hermitage, that it can't all be roller coaster learning. there are times like today i know the forest holds back because i am holding back. because sometimes introducing myself means an honest offering up of my grief. thank you for weaving no-song and yeshua's fur and the crying on the hill of skulls and the intimacy of your baptism and the bell that rings where you least expect it and saint mary of egypt whose story made me suddenly choke with tears when i first heard it over a table at lunch some years ago .. thank you for an affirmation of the reminder i received going up the mountain, of Who I Serve. the echoes of parsifal and the slight turn of the grand question-- whom does the grail serve? whom does your Soul serve? the earth and the stories. the earth and the stories ... some months ago you commented back on your ted hughes post to me, 'the wind.' i marveled at the strange facets of the dark jewel of it, the house moving its roots. i am Out Here now in my own country, letting myself explore new homes, new life, beyond my lifelong city. the Movement of Energy. i have been noticing the wind even more, ever since. noticing the physical manifestation of spirit, of What Moves Me. the wind is what blew out the candles on my birthday cake in the catskills, held outdoors with a tribe of new friends i had only just met the night before.. thank you for being a Voice i can always recognize, somehow especially when you are honest and searching. i am glad to be in the dark, Here, with you.
Thank-you for sharing the tender power of your wild locust and honey baptism. Some thoughts that arise… our family has been walking old footpaths on the Isle of Wight this week… walking them feels like connecting our voices to ancient liturgy. The real corporate power. We also spent the day by Compton Bay yesterday… a profound reminder that erosion of oceanic proportions is part of the deal, and out of our control. And what if we saw it as a lifting of the mystery veil … or a compression for revelation … using this utterly raw material as one of the “dropped keys” that might unleash an ancient/new pantheon. This has historically been “found difficult and left untried”.
This is not directly related to your post but I offer it for what it is worth ...
My church is dedicated to John the Baptist and there is a legend that a feather from the Archangel Gabriel is buried beneath the high altar. I realised recently that this must be linked to the story that when John the Baptist's father, Zechariah, was visited by the Archangel and told his aged wife Elizabeth would become pregnant with John, he reached and plucked a feather from the archangel as it flew up to leave. He was lucky all that was taken from him was his voice!
To me this has a strong resonance with the stories of plucking the tailfeather of the Firebird... Just a deep feeling. No idea what that means!
Go raibh míle maith agat a Máirtín! This resonates with me deeply; like a donkey kick to the gut, having just spent a sleepless night in what seemed like the deepest pits of hell and near madness; having just received Sunday Eucharist in my neighborhood Parish for the first time in months; and having been shaken and challenged to my core by Luke’s harrowing gospel for today, that following the Wild Man from Gallillee is an all or nothing all in undertaking. Blessings and gratitude to you a chara... 👊☘️❤️🔥🔥
Ahh your words ever and always light such a blaze in my soul. Thank you and deep gratitude for all the beautiful reflections here. I cannot quite believe it but I have only just logged into read this on Substack and not in the email alone. What beauty and the word you used before Martin that stays with me communitas.
Christianity IS a wilderness religion, oh yes! I am so grateful for your writing and stories bringing as you say the fur of Yeshua and reigniting the thirst in the soul for the sacred. The stamina to stand in the integrity of truth when you open the door to humility and fall to your knees enflamed in prayer. Prayer that has absolutely nothing to do with this hopscotch, pick n'mix, mantra of my and I want, spiritual capitalism that infringes upon society. The 'plastic and packaged' as you put it. I lost a whole group of friends earlier this year arguing why prayer matters. In a swift moment I saw how black magicked so much of 'spiritual' communities had become. Prayer one person said, it's just to make people feel good about themselves, people throw a line 'you are in my prayers' so glibly no one really prays anymore and if they do it's 5minutes tops. Why fall to your knees and prayer when you can do something more if you learn some 'magical practice'. That was it. Without malice but with passion I explained why the invisible embrace as John O'Donahue calls it is engaged to eternity that creates transformation far far beyond the intellect experience of God. Why bending your head IS what is needed. It's been on the threshing floor for me really ever since. I am moving back to my root, praying for guidance to move deeper into grace and the clarity to understand as Guilia beautifully put it what compels and confuses. What blocks the radial radiance of grace entering? What voices am I listening to? What choices compete with me moving from an intellectual to a full embodied engagement with the divine? Things are shifting and wilderness is calling.
The thing that has troubled me with the church I used to be involved with before some wandering time was it seemed to be brilliant on the theological but very sparse on the pastoral care. Perhaps it's time I put in suggestions instead of just remaining in the shadows. I will see where the path leads me as I follow the angel ahead and grab tight to to Yeshua's fur.
Whenever I read your stories I always have such a wild ache to read about the lives of the saints. I have begun the journey with Saint Teresa of Avila. She's showing me there is no place for a hybrid spirituality. Soul not self. Perhaps the cross at the crossroads can also be the change and exchange to cross through the 'I' with graceful disintegration. While I am there perhaps move beyond the why and how too. Prayers upon the lips that ripple like flickering flames down to the feet that pummel deep into the unknown path ahead. Like St. Seraphim shake off fear and follow...
The vulnerability and tenderness of this took my breath away. I could feel my heart opening and expanding through uncertainty as I read. It was terrifying, still is, but what relief! Once I stood at the bottom of Waipi'o Valley on Moku o Keawe and watched spiders leap off the edge. A boy pointed them out to me. He was from that place and knew, at a certain time of day, if we looked up we would see them. I didn't actually see the spiders-I saw the silk threads they spun inside themselves and unfurled as they leaped. How did they know they had enough silk inside them to carry them down 1,000 feet? The air could have torn them to pieces, rain could have snapped the silk cords attached to the valley lip. It could have been a free fall, but it wasn't. This is what a surrender to uncertainty, even an ungraceful one burdened with fear, feels like to me. In Hawaiian, Waipi'o means "the land of curving water." Waterfalls flowing down the valley's gulches split into a serpentine nest of meandering rivers and streams that complete in the same place-the ocean where the shark god Kamohoali'i waits just past the edge of the reef in the deep water. Thank you, Martin. I feel blessed by reading your words.
There may be miracles, but it is the bread of prayer that sustains us.
This I know. All of this I know. Yet reading it, it is new again. Meeting myself in your words as I meet your words in that place where mere days ago we sat. Thank you for all of it. Thank you for the words. Thank you for the holding. Thank you for tending that inexhaustible fire.
Thank you Martin, for this writing, and praying, and being with something so vast and uncertain. Breathtaking writing. Yeshua's fur had me close to tears. And the Galahadian procession moving through the Devon woods. The one who is praying in me (what a powerful reminder that first line was) has been very present these days too; she has been leading me to unexpected and precious ground. Thank you for lighting the way for all of us, in the manner only you can, and with such courage. Looking forward to part 2 :)
You lift the lantern for us—your observations, so poetically expressed are both balm and delight. Thank you