The Mossy Face Of Christ
Getting Found In The Forest
Hello friends, first up, just in – Beauty Prepares Us for Eternity, my talk last week at the King’s School of Traditional Arts, and a fairytale in the latest episode of Jawbone…
(Part Two is just out over at Jawbone on YouTube)
It’s been a lively ten days or so: lecturing over at the Divinity Department at Cambridge, then London for the King’s School of Traditional Arts, then Galway with Paul Kingsnorth, Paul VanderKlay and other good souls, then briefly to see friends in London and finally back to Devon having picked up some kind of fever along the way. I’m sleeping a great deal, then ragingly hot, then asleep, then I have a migraine. Right now is a cooler moment (helped by a bucket of ice), so I get to scrawl a few lines.
So in this visionary state I’m trying to avoid the news. I’m fatigued by politics at the moment – I have to be careful with attempting punditry in this state – as Gary Snyder said, “Don’t be a slave to your lesser talents”. But at some point a story rather than a polemic will appear that speaks to the moment we are in and I will proceed from there. Nobody needs more clever arguments. I miss the woods, the sea, the swooping buzzard, I don’t miss any more retina-blitzing bit of adrenal-wrecking rhetoric. These things I’m missing are the reason for the last part of today’s essay.
Last Sunday in Galway I was in Divine Liturgy with a very lovely Romanian congregation when in the midst of the experience the door to the building was briefly opened, there was a gust of wind and caw of sea gulls filled the room. Odd as it may sound I somehow heard the birds differently because of the ceremony we were all part of. It made me remember I most profoundly encountered God in a Dartmoor forest in the middle of the night. Mercifully we don’t have to choose between a mountain top and a temple. Like the sudden ecstasies of the sea gull breaking happily into the depths of our prayer, it’s good to be able to catch these tiny moments of immensity.
All my life it’s been easy to love badgers, dusk, the barley in the field. It would seem God wanted me as something of a loner up to fifty. He disclosed something quite wonderful by keeping me often on the edge of the human community. Humans, well, they could be harder to love couldn’t they? But at that moment in Liturgy, there was no hard choice to be made between nature and ceremony, none at all. As I looked around at the intense and humble faces of the congregation, I felt home in the weave of both gull and chant, as the early Irish missionaries must have experienced over and over again.
Some people are very kind
Paul Kingsnorth graciously brought/ doggedly dragged along a suitcase of books which were a gift from our mutual friend Deacon Markos. The Deacon’s generosity has been sustained these last couple of years, and invoked a tremendous rehydration of my mind – many books have arrived and are suitably cherished. I hope you are reading this Dcn. Markos: it’s very moving to me, what you’ve done for both me and Paul.
You probably know that Paul and I have been knocking around together for years. We met one misty night in the Cornish town of Lostwithiel (what a name) and have ended up in all sorts of places ever since: both coasts of the States, Dartmoor forests, NY bars, even a conference on an old air field if memory serves. We’ll soon be by a Devon fire listening to former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams tell tales of the bard Taliesin – if you can imagine anything so wonderful. Just writing that sentence is a healing experience.
The gathering is the last weekend of The Skinboat & The Star, my five-weekend programme on mythopoetic Christianity. What I mean by the phrase ‘mythopoetic Christianity’ is to dig back into the stories as living things, filled with gumption, mystery and spirit. It’s been an amazing experience. If you could see yourself having the adventure, we will be taking bookings for our next voyage soon – starting September.
The Mossy Face of Christ
In my current feverish state, I can’t remember how much I have or haven’t written here about the conditions that led to all this happening. It was five years ago now – the autumn of 2019 into the spring of 2020. So, here’s something of what happened, when I met the Mossy Face of Christ.
I decided to do something a bit mad.
For 101 days I would walk into a Dartmoor forest and tell it a story. I called these offerings Calling Songs. What I was calling to I didn’t quite know. After the telling I would sit, often at dusk, and just listen to the wood. I can slip into that kind of frequency easily because of my many years of doing such a practice. The 101 days was taxing, repetitive, sometimes marvellous. I learnt an awful lot about fidelity, of simply showing up, again and again.
Come one very chill January evening I had finally come to the end of this ritual. The last night was a journey to the very centre of the forest, to an Iron Age hill fort, where I would sit up all night in prayer.