Modernity is three days deep. (In more ways than one.)
I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.
.
Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.
.
Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.
.
After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.
Wendell Berry, This Day (Sabbath Poems) 1979 I
“….I’ve always written for those at a crossroads, and I now find we’re all at one.
No more business as usual.
It’s a time of great paradox: we want to live forever but seem intent on executing the earth. We are technicians of unimaginable advances but are growingly less literate to interpret a way the earth always spoke to us: through myth. I’m wondering if it’s time for us to dig up a little chutzpah and send a voice.
The mess out there is because of a mess in here.
Inner and outer talk to each other.
That’s the truth of things.
Let’s get to work.
The reality is that many of us are lonely, disorientated, sometimes afraid. There was no ceremonial announcement for the initiation we were falling into, but I want to offer us three navigational tools for moving forward.
Growing Your Hands Back – we’ve been encouraged to touch nothing this last period of time. How do we move back out into the world in a new way?
Breaking Enchantments – many of us have spent far too long in our own head, stewing in fantasy not imagination. This has to stop. And finally,
Kicking the Robbers Out of the House – apprehending social media and the internet not as an influencer or saviour but as a tool. Three roads, three strands, three stories…
Whilst fairy tales and the wider myths are far more than metaphors, if we don’t really grasp metaphor at all, then our current way of life seems all the more unsettling, diminishing, existential. A good metaphor is something you can hang your heart on. It can be the difference between life and death…”
Martin Shaw, from his introduction to a 2021 collection of stories, Smokehole.
O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
…
William Butler Yeats, Among School Children
Martin Shaw recommends fasting and staying in the woods, sleeping under the stars, for three or so days. To be in the forest exposed to hunger and weather (which activates the ‘gratitude’ gene or a sacred appreciation of our creator in a specific place) can generate wonder and strip away much of our civilizational dross.
“Most of the time when you walk into the forest, you have to quietly lay down the story you’ve fantasized about having and submit to the experience you need to have.”
Martin Shaw
“To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.”
―Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz
“Seek the LORD while he may be found;
call upon him while he is near;
let the wicked forsake his way,
and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
let him return to the LORD, that he may have compassion on him,
and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
.
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
and do not return there but water the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
.
For you shall go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall break forth into singing,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress;
instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle;
and it shall make a name for the LORD,
an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.”
.
Isaiah 55:6-13
“Vital conversations in the hope that in the crackle of the thinking, the fire of the language, the visioning and wildness of the whole thing we may find breadcrumbs in the conversations to lead us out of the forest again…
…We are designed to quest, it’s just in us. It’s down in each swirling cell. Sperm meets egg against all possible odds. We began with the adventure of lovemaking, so of course we will continue to seek it out. These Odysseys, these Red Bead Women, these Camelot commissions, these Handless Maidens all involve setting out and navigating mystery. You know this, but somehow it bears regular reminding. Why? Because as I wrote previously we are surrounded by facsimiles of the questing spirit but really there’s no departure in it. It’s meant to be sated by a movie, or a hike, or a meme that pops up on social media as we ‘live our best life’.
To be fulfilled by that is unlikely to be anywhere remotely near our best life. Now, to be passing by a fiery island of ghoulish cries with a small group of compadres, exhausted and boggle-eyed but holding firm to a vision of The Hidden Country, that may be nearer the sweet spot. Zero risk, no danger, not much happens. We are still tuned in to what has been called the ego-drama not the Theo-drama. We still are calling the shots, dragged along by our endlessly fanned desires, pretending something is happening. We are surrounded by highly intoxicating non-events.
The questing impulse, inherently romantic in the best sense of the word, doesn’t go away. But not tended to appropriately latches on to…fanatical beliefs of one kind or another. And The Hidden Country stays resolutely hidden.”
“I was baptised just down the hill from where I write, at the end of last winter. The night before a priest came and sat by my fire. His coat was frayed and he seemed somehow free. He was silent for a long time. Then he spoke:
“Christianity,” he stated, “is a wilderness religion.”
Whilst that may not be the beginning and end of the matter, such words are a wonderful palate cleanser. The priest called something strange into the room that evening. What I thought I knew about the old-time religion maybe I didn’t know. Something untamed announced itself…
When the priest puts my head under I am in another world. And again. When the third dip comes I am overwhelmed, out manoeuvred, outplayed. There is a roaring sound as I go under, and I feel myself enter something like the mouth of a gigantic pike. The moment is not gentle.
Later, rather stupefied, I sit by my fire getting warm, and the lean power of the words of John the Baptist come to mind:
There’s one coming
With a winnowing fork
And clear intention.
The good wheat he will
Gather in his radiant barn,
But the chaff he will burn
In inexhaustible fire.
I deal in water, but he deals in flames.
These are desert words, no seduction in them. They stay with me. Sometimes I imagine John is watching. I peer back at the shaggy man, the man of field honey and locusts, a being so uncompromising, so utterly affiliated with his message we barely have a choice but to splash into the waters and cry for baptism. Belt round waist, a drift of camel fur from shoulder to knee, this is the lightning man of tough, deep places. Like the Green Knight he picks his head back from the plate it was later laid on and walks the centuries.”
Martin Shaw
“…there is a sense that Christianity has been quite tamed. Obviously it’s been tamed in the West for a long time by its alliance with power, and especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it became a very middle-class, respectable thing to be a Christian. You almost had to be a Christian really in Britain and America a century or so ago, or at least pretend to be, in order to get anywhere.
So it became a [comfortable] kind of faith, while actually at its heart it’s quite wild and challenging — well, very wild and challenging actually, and Christ is a wild and challenging figure. He really is; he’s very much a marginal character in every way, and his whole life and death is marginal deliberately. And the people he spends time with are marginal. And that’s how God acts in the world, it turns out. There’s a wildness to Christ, he never has any place to lay his head, and he does the things he’s not really supposed to do and talks to the people he’s not supposed to talk to, and he surrenders when he’s not supposed to and he fights when he’s not supposed to, and he tells you to turn against your own parents, but he also tells you to love everybody, and it’s full of paradoxes and strangeness. It’s disturbing, in a way, the things that Christ is talking about. He’s not a comfortable figure, and he’s not telling you to have 2.4 children and to go to church on Sunday. And he’s not telling you to become a nice well-behaved liberal social justice activist either. He’s kind of not telling anyone to operate in society at all. But at the same time, his is not a political challenge, it’s a spiritual challenge. It’s not even necessarily about what you’re doing in society, it’s almost like, You just leave society over there, leave Caesar what is Caesar’s, that’s what he does, that’s fine, that’s the world. I’m calling you out to something else, and there’s a wildness in that which we’ve lost. And it seems to me that we could find it again.”
Paul Kingsnorth from an interview in Mere Orthodoxy, Following Christ in the Machine Age.
Martin Shaw:
“There is an old Sufi story that says we are blindfolded hawks. That we are in prison, and that God wishes us out into the wind and the sun, beholding everything. But many of us get awfully attached to our prison cell, and the regular meals.
I don’t want to be blindfolded, I don’t want beeswax in my ears, I don’t want to be seduced by stuff and lose contact with the real. I want to be awake. And that means I’m going to experience loss and limit. That means I’m going to write letters just like the ones that end up on my desk. It means sometimes I’m going to howl like a love-lorn dog. And I am going to need a teacher that can see.
Yeshua wakes up before his disciples and goes to the wild, lonely places to pray. He is not blindfolded, he has no beeswax in his ears, he is un-seduced. That makes him terrifying. That makes him true. Somehow when I read him I feel the freshness of the night hanging off his words. His communion with the Everything of the universe. He is not blind, not at all. He is the Hawk-that-Sees.”
In Michael Martin’s book Sophia in Exile, he tells the story of Francis of Assisi petitioning for founding his order. When asked what his rule would be, Francis holds up the gospels. The cardinalate is shocked, wonders if Francis is thick in the head, such a thing ‘seemed a thing untried, and too hard for human strength’. Just too bloody difficult. Impractical at the very least. And, as Francis finds, once established, his own order does struggle terribly under the weight.
But not to try? I think of Rilke:
When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestler of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
Modernity often wants us to win with small things. Fixated with little victories that secretly demean us. Anything to stop us wrestling with the angel. Anything to stop us realising quite how sacred the right kind of defeat can be.
And Jacob was left alone. And a man {Jesus} wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day has broken.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.”
Genesis 32:24-28
“…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.”
Martin Shaw, Substack (The House of Beasts & Vines)
“I tell you of the Springtime of which all springtimes speak. I tell you of the world for which this world groans and toward which it strains. I tell you that beyond the awful borders imposed by time and space and contingency, there lies what you seek. I announce to you life instead of mere existence, freedom instead of frustration, justice instead of compensation. For I announce to you redemption. Behold I make all things new. Behold I do what cannot be done. I restore the years that the locusts and worms have eaten. I restore the years you have drooped away upon your crutches and in your wheelchair. I restore the symphonies and operas which your deaf ears have never heard, and the snowy massif your blind eyes have never seen, and the freedom lost to you through plunder and the identity lost to you because of calumny and the failure of justice; and I restore the good which your own foolish mistakes have cheated you of. And I bring you to the Love of which all other loves speak, the Love which is joy and beauty, and which you have sought in a thousand streets and for which you have wept and clawed your pillow.”
Thomas Howard, Christ the Tiger
“Through the Cross joy came into the whole world” - This joy is pure joy because it does not depend on anything in this world, and is not the reward of anything in us. It is totally and absolutely a gift, the “charis,” the grace. And being pure gift, this joy has a transforming power, the only really transforming power in this world. It is the “seal” of the Holy Spirit on the life of the Church—on its faith, hope and love.
…All that exists is God’s gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man’s life communion with God. It is divine love made food, made life for man. God blesses everything He creates, and, in biblical language, this means that He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation: “O taste and see that the Lord is good.”
…To be Christian, to believe in Christ, means and has always meant this: to know in a transrational and yet absolutely certain way called faith, that Christ is the Life of all life, that He is Life itself and, therefore, my life. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” All Christian doctrines—those of the incarnation, redemption, atonement—are explanations, consequences, but not the “cause” of that faith. Only when we believe in Christ do all these affirmations become “valid” and “consistent.” But faith itself is the acceptance not of this or that “proposition” about Christ, but of Christ Himself as the Life and the light of life. “For the life was manifested and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us” (1 Jn. 1:2). In this sense Christian faith is radically different from “religious belief.” Its starting point is not “belief” but love. In itself and by itself all belief is partial, fragmentary, fragile. “For we know in part, and we prophesy in part … whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.” Only love never faileth (1 Cor. 13). And if to love someone means that I have my life in him, or rather that he has become the “content” of my life, to love Christ is to know and to possess Him as the Life of my life.
Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World
On Time:
Fly envious Time, till thou run out thy race,
Call on the lazy leaden-stepping hours,
Whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace;
And glut thyself with what thy womb devours,
Which is no more than what is false and vain,
And merely mortal dross;
So little is our loss,
So little is thy gain.
For when as each thing bad thou hast entombed,
And last of all thy greedy self consumed,
Then long Eternity shall greet our bliss
With an individual kiss,
And Joy shall overtake us as a flood;
When every thing that is sincerely good
And perfectly divine,
With truth, and peace, and love, shall ever shine
About the supreme throne
Of Him, t' whose happy-making sight alone
When once our heav'nly-guided soul shall climb,
Then, all this earthly grossness quit,
Attired with stars, we shall for ever sit,
Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee, O Time.
John Milton