The Merrie

A Reliquary For Saints Yet To Come

Apr 27, 2025

The Merrie by Heather Pollington

A Lamp Is Getting Lifted

Hello my friends. The following thoughts have dropped slowly, and with effort. Some of these words will have an echo from previous posts over the last three years. The artist Heather Pollington is someone I admire, and whom I’ve invited to respond with both images and text (her writing will be next week.) If you like it, please consider sharing this. Maybe some element of it could grow in your life. It’s where I want to focus my work. I just know I have to get these words in one place and stand back.

This is the passion of a wayward Orthodox Christian in the western wilds of England. I’m attending to the relationship between my crumpled, leafy home and this extraordinary Middle Eastern mystery religion that arrived the best part of two thousand years ago. The dynamic interplay of that encounter is closer than we think. Five years ago I staggered out of a Dartmoor forest at dawn having met someone I really did not want to face. The Ancient Good. After a good deal of time sitting, listening, repenting, laughing, this is what I’d wish to communicate. This is the joyful labour arising from the experience. The invitation of it, not, I hope, an imposition. Something with more imagination, more reality, and ultimately more freedom under its wing. The fruit that could grow will take far more than just myself tending it. Something is stirring. A lamp is getting lifted.

You can listen to this post as audio (below), or read on for the full essay…

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The slow revolution of the months sufficed them. Their year was made up of seasons and festivals and holy days, Storm Jameson

God’s Outlaws

So, the Merrie. What is it?

These are mad times. Disorientating. Madder than usual, and that’s saying something. With religion so frequently politicised, with our screens issuing peril and deadening opportunities for distraction the Merrie could be easily dismissed as a dream, but it’s one with a spade attached. And it’s not a solo slog, it bangs along with others. It reaches out towards the textures of God’s earth. I think of Gerard Manley Hopkins: It’s not only prayer that gives God glory but work. Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall, driving horses…to lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but the man with a dung fork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, give him glory too.

I recall the description of bold Robin Hood’s gang described as ‘merrie’. I’ve always thought of Marian’s lot as God’s outlaws. I wouldn’t mind being an outlaw for God. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, Romans 12:2. We could renew our jaded heads by encountering the Ancient Good. A creaturely culture of prayer, a capacity to both recognise and make beauty.

This Is Not A Re-Enactment Fair

Merrie has elements of pre-reformation Christianity. The creativity of a ceremonial life that wove forest and church together. But importantly it’s not something to be fixating about in history books. This is much a future imagining than nostalgia for something passed. True though, it’s a word with the bells of a village ringing deep within it. It values one or two gathered together likely more than a megachurch. It has joying in it. A lively spark of storytelling, of vigils in the forest, of understanding that Christianity has a profound initiatory core, of a circling liturgical year which involves the revival of old saints, pilgrimages, mystery plays and ceremony, of being a priest-gardener to the land you live on.

It's not a cult, it could be something of a learning community. It may just be this essay. It may end up a battered little book to carry in your pocket. That would be a fine ambition. But as was recently said to me: You aren’t going to stumble upon this, you have to make it. It’s a listening: to scripture, liturgy, nature and a lively Christian baptism of the imagination. Tonally my description is English, but the essentials would work anywhere. With a bit of pluck this should land wherever you live. We take great inspiration from the First Nations Orthodox of Alaska as we do the plucky saints of Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales. This isn’t nationalism.

The Fertile & Generous Open

The Merrie is about how to absorb the impossible mandates of Christ. I think we need more space. To abide in the glorious nervous breakdown of what he’s saying. To be under the oaks for days at a time, belly tight to the shamanic drum-thump of Mark’s gospel, at others to feel the mammal warmth of the lit candles and the canticled chant of the gathered parish. There’s pale bones of consciousness stretched between such locations and Jesus says: perfect, keep stretching. I can’t draw him with one line, he goes where the Pharisee in me disapproves.

David Benjamin Blower says, and says truly: This figure whose greatness became immediately mythical was continually giving out tools with which to unmake whatever towers may be erected in his name. Within every saying there is a trapdoor that empties out all the power, leaving a fertile and generous open.

Amen the fertile and generous open. That’s our God there, the strangest of the lot.

Let’s Make A Joyful Noise

This isn’t really about ‘a long time ago’. None of this is. It never was.

Like the Arthurian tale of Gawain, it’s an invitation to the green chapel: we lose our head to find our head.

The Merrie has two very particular elements talking to each other: the archaic Christian attention to the fast and wilderness solitude, and the everywhere notion of the feast, the village and conviviality. As an old desert story states, silence and honey cakes can both be friends. They are different teachers at different times.

Some of us may have a leaning for tradition, but also longing for the intimate communication with God the post-reformation world encouraged. To hear the gospels in your own language. Most of us are children of that aspiration and it has its health. I’m a descendant of John Porter, martyred for reading a Bible in St Paul’s Cathedral in his native language. So radical an activity he was tortured unto death. (You can read more on John Porter’s story here.) I’m proud he used the voice God gave him. He made a joyful noise.

Walking barefoot through Walsingham a couple of years ago, this image appeared:

Suddenly I can see all of England from above, almost like a map. I can see all the old pilgrim roads lit up like capillaries, and emanating a bright gold glow. The night shape of Albion is braided with these warming criss-crosses of light. Mossy crosses are repaired again, saints named, candle-bright to encourage all apostles of the road.

The little beasties of the hedgerows dig deeper into their dens, the winged ones up in the majestic beeches settle into their nests. All is a hymnal, at least for a moonlit moment. I need to walk more lanes barefoot. Kiss more icons. I need to take refuge in more old churches. A theology of the body. I’m tired of the sensible. I want to say yes to the universe, and the one that made it. I need to know my Bible better, I need to know my compassion better, I need to know my joy better. I need to know my grief better,

I need to feel more like a Christian.

A World Immune To Grace

The Merrie is a lived Signum Crusis, the Sign of the Cross. But not as a warding off, an act against evil, but an opening out to the ecology of the good. An unfolding of wingspan. It’s not a closing down, it’s an opening up to Blake’s Jesus of Imagination.

You touch the tip of high blue stars, and down to the belly of Palaeolithic Christ, the Turtle Island of the far west, the Hermit’s hut of the far east. The dust of Ethiopia under our feet. The innumerable churn of herring and snort of the black bear within it. The Signum Crusis is gestural expansion, the Merrie is a delighted reaching out towards God’s universe. It’s praxis. Like Saint Kevin, we extend our hand for the blackbird, like St Gobnait we are following nine white deer home. That’s a Christendom actually worthy of the name, not blankly fetishising the hallucination of empire.

I don’t apologise for the poetic hugeness of this. I think we may need it. A bishop once told me if you have a strong centre you can have fuzzy edges. You can talk across the hedge lovingly to your neighbour. We’re all just trying to get home.

Because you don’t need to keep hearing that everything is broken. Maybe everything’s always felt broken. Maybe that’s the low, depressed note required for green shoots to counter. But in testing the spirits of our age we discern what we choose to listen to and what choose to put down. A peaceful heart is not an indulgence, it’s a requirement. Attend to your shy dreams, take them seriously. A greater energy may have placed them within you. This is a Romantic position, which in turn is a mythological position, which at its best is ultimately a religious position.

Ivan Illich once claimed, We live in a world immune to grace. That kind of immunity is nothing less than enchantment, and I’d have a few small ideas about what to do with that. The full, emaciated betrayal of the Enlightenment to the soul has never been more visible. It has something to do with empire, something to do with the enclosures, and a prolonged encounter with despair which is the inevitable inheritance of all this ‘seeing’. The way of Yeshua is not seeing, it is beholding. You make different decisions when you behold. Ones of great price. Ones of consequence.

Initiatory Christianity: Four Cornerstones

In my own getting behind Illich’s thought – as an ecclesiastical counter-magic – I’d offer four cornerstones to The Merrie. These are four elements for attention and wonder.

Myth: A space to let the stories be the stories again. To be open to the mythological depth of the Christian tradition. A robust practice of storytelling and exploration. I think much modern Christianity has lost touch with its stories as living energies, and often seem trapped under glass. They can speak to us as dynamically as they did when they arrived .- frequently as an oral tradition – two thousand years ago. They are about the eternal now and we could be more imaginative about how we tell them, and the depths of how we experience them.

There has been significant abdication on writings into Christian mythopoetics. Anywhere but there. Biblical stories, so heavy with imagery that speaks directly to the interior have often had their creative disturbances thinned out to a more cerebral interpretation. A younger generation is exhausted by this. They are ok with mystery, long for it, and yearn for a more apophatic experience. These stories are not just patterns, they are allies. They are maybe angels of a kind.

We could make a prayer rope of images from the old myths:

I walk through the desert with Naomi and Ruth to a home both old and new.
Like Samson I eat honey from the scene of my jeopardy.
In mid-day heat I contemplate eternity with the Woman from the Well.
Like Jonah seaweed is wrapped around my head.
Like Elijah I squint in amazement at the large black birds and quite what it is they are bringing.

Our God speaks to us in stories, are we letting our side of that opportunity down?

Nature: An invitation to abide in wild places. To experience the gospel of a hawk on the wing or a chilly night in a Dartmoor forest. To encounter an undomestic, mossy face of Christ. Get in touch with what John Moriarty calls ‘your bush soul’. Christianity is frequently divorced from what goes on outside the church building or human community. I think God is asking us to have a far more receptive ear to a bustling, receptive ecology. Stop being a tourist within the living world. Come take your place. It’s good for all our health. But ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who amongst all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? Job 12:7-10.

Liturgy: To integrate such an experience into a bustling liturgical year that weaves pilgrimages, saint stories, mystery plays and prayer in the land and community you live amongst. Importantly, a revival of the lively and oft obscured saints of these or your islands. Why do the saints and their stories matter? They are teaching tales, mythically expansive and they instruct us about both limit and delight. They are an inheritance many of us are barely aware we have. To celebrate and anchor the turning year with their lives and deeds brings us closer to a more beautiful way of being in the world. The saints are often specificity attached to a particular art or skill. They have a totemistic quality to our own developing acts of service. The saints are the best of our grandparents. We don’t worship them but we thrive in their company. The kind of year the Merrie suggests is a way to bring the prophetic energy of the wild back into the business of the parish. In the end we ourselves are a walking liturgy, serving the wisdoms that God’s seasons dictate.

Tempering: To track the rite-of-passage that is the core of Initiatory Christianity. The life, death and resurrection that underpins Yeshua’s life and can be found in myths and stories all over the world. That Christianity is a profound initiation experience. Christianity doesn’t shy away from grief: In his anguish he (Jesus) prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like large drops of blood falling on the ground, Luke 22:44. Our own lives will see betrayal, triumph, wrong paths and unexpected blessings throughout, and we do ourselves a disservice when we don’t bring these stories as close as our own breath, because they are our own breath. They are the stuff of life, even holding clues towards what the Anglo-Saxons called the Heofonlic – heaven.

Christ is a God who doesn’t wander Olympus munching grapes; he’s down in the filth and camaraderie of it all, and drinks the sorrowing of the world as a sublime demonstration of love. The tempering is not just to have Christ as pal to lean on, but to gradually behold the world from exactly where he stands. That’s overwhelming and we have to work up to it. The Merrie takes the Jonah road, the Jasconius road, down into the depths for the sacred mastication that ultimately leads to renewal. No dark night, no sublime dawn.

Like Elijah Let’s Eat The Raven’s Meat

Christianity often wants to skip to the nice part. The comfortable part. If Christianity refuses to descend, to ignore the meat the raven offers Elijah, then it remains hypnotised by a secular society that does not have its best interests at heart. If it is thinned to ethical teachings, civic good and not much more, it has entirely lost its teeth. And something as wild as Christianity needs its teeth. Not to randomly snarl, but to stay vital. Snarling is tedious. The Merrie is interested in Christendom but only when it includes all four quarters of the earth that God shows his hand in. A remake of the crusades is hardly the thing, it’s the opposite of the thing.

Raven meat is not sugary milk. It’s not baby food. It’s the difficulty of staying with the trouble of Jesus’s teachings. It’s not entirely interpretive, a la carte, or Christianity-with-water as C.S. Lewis wrote. A Raven is not doing cartwheels for the applause of the market square. It has eaten darkness and located its dark-night sustenance. It understands the margins, exposure to the fallen, the sobriety of consequence. And as the Bible shows us, Raven is a messenger of God. In this time of renewal, I would suggest we walked a mile with Raven. They help us both to grieve and to get real about our blindspots. We can’t be talking about doves the whole time.

These Cornerstones do not a complete church make, and that’s not what this is. I’m not a priest. I attend an Orthodox tradition. This is simply an offering of some much-neglected materials for the continued deepening of the Christian experience. This is still early days for followers of The Way after all. The first step is to keep wondering and teaching, keep meeting like-minded souls, and most importantly, see what God wants from this. It’s not lost on me that in times like these, a settled heart and merrie nature is a radical proposition. Music will help us, art will help us, silence will help us, worship will help us. Old ideas in new expressions. Story, ceremony, nature, maturity.

A Saint Not A Magician

And the Merrie’s ambition? Well, the loveliest, most eccentric, most urgent:

Become a saint.

A reliquary is a shrine, and I’m suggesting the Merrie contains a shrine for saints-yet to-come. That is gloriously optimistic under the circumstances, but entirely proper. I am writing this for a better me, or perhaps a better you.

We may have to change our lives.

We live in a time of abrupt uncoverings: the gloves are off and naked greed is everywhere. Christianity is weaponised and becomes a Trojan horse filled with bad fellows with big swords sneaking into camp. All in the name of God. Any veneer of decency seems pulled away in the political spheres. Our relationship to tech has turned a tool into a temple. To anyone even vaguely paying attention this can create a feeling of overwhelming hopelessness. As always, one way of claiming a fraction of sovereignty is to do something in real time, and in the local. The Merrie is a way in which we could do that, even when its ambitions to some may seem rather Otherworldly. They aren’t, not really. They are about becoming a real human being.

Most saints go through something of an alchemical process, the intensity of the journey from lead to gold. To dig into the prima materia of our own lives and aim for what, in Orthodoxy we call theosis, union with God. We can’t get there without him.

This world is filled with magicians – many of whom have only succeeded in hypnotising themselves – but not enough saints. Saints can be the unlikeliest folk but they have a wonderful habit of making you feel rather different when you leave their presence. Reality is maybe more sobering, but the possibilities of beauty far more acute. Saints are eye-openers. They take the dream that began this short essay, and they turn it into a vision. And we remember from Proverbs – Without vision, the people perish.

Good cheer, godspeed to you.

Martin

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope, Jeremiah 29:11