Walking Palsh to Bethlehem

Wilder Edges of Christianity

I am in the yellowed tipi with the old man. He sits and I sit. Just a wee bit of smoke from the fire. He looks at me and says this:

–You should use the fire and the rock, the water and the green in a good way because it was given to use free of charge, it was a gift to us. We were warned by creator, Tunkashila, “I give you this, but don’t take the fire in your own hand or else you might get burned.” So man took up the fire and they make the Atomic bomb.

I’m twenty-six years old and Wallace Black Elk is telling me the story of the Knowing Tree, in the way he understands it. He has told me the story of the Fall in three sentences. He is now looking off deep into the Elsewhere, then finally returns to me.

- Your people have a long, long walk to take. Slow walk, filled with ghosts.

*

Shick-Shack entered the nave, and smelt the forest of the church.

Alan Garner, Strandloper

It’s getting on three years since I realised I was a Christian. Eighteen months before I had emerged from a 101-day vigil in the forest with a barrage of experiences that didn’t fit neatly into any negotiated category. Finally I figured out what must have happened.

This ‘emerging’ wasn’t deriving from wry Lewisian apologetics, or church attendance or some kind of crack up in my personal life. I’d been doing fine, thank you very much. It came from the realm of the unruly, the irrational, even the miraculous. It came from the wild.

What on earth could I contribute to the old-time religion? Well first and foremost, I can attend to the teachings. The sermon on the mount is still suitably compelling and radically eccentric enough to have me labouring in its fields for the rest of my life.

The gap between what Christ was on about and how we humans generally behave is so Grand Canyon huge it was surely always going to be an unwieldy and often terrifying ride trying to keep up with him. It would require a kind of nervous breakdown of conventional behaviour.

We were – and often are – light years away from the kind of religious maturity he required. It’s too much. And I think it’s meant to be too much. But the challenge itself is not stale, not at all. Especially when it’s Christ reaching down to drag this old degenerate to his feet again. This is the chivalric invitation. To expect more from ourselves.

Out here in the bush there are two areas that feel neglected in the Christian adventure: the wild and the merrie. I’m going to briefly address both, and how they are part of a wider weave. It’s this weave I see my own work taking place, and mercifully that of quite a few companions.

WILD

Let’s begin with the wild.

For us that are curious, exhausted, or a little spiritually over domesticated we have the contemplative descent that’s called the Wilderness Vigil. This gets us in touch with the unruly essential.

Fasting in wild and lonely places has been a powerful spiritual tool since the days of antiquity. It works: the Lakota understand this, the Evenk understand this, the Desert Mothers and Fathers certainly did. There is no dimension to it that should be off-putting to a Christian. You will be walking with your maker from one end of it to the other.

I think this is part of Black Elk’s prophecy about a slow walk coming.

There’s an old Devon word, palsh, that means going for a dreamlike wander. To re-behold a landscape. To witness afresh.

As Christians we could go on a profound walkabout, a profound palsh, into the mynde of Chryst.